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When civil war broke out in Uganda in 1979, Yuga Juma Onziga, his wife, and their five-year-old daughter fled to Sudan. Forced to abandon his uncompleted forestry degree in Kampala, Onziga and his family battled against a mountain of paperwork, finally arriving as landed immigrants in Toronto in January of 1984. Even after graduating in 1990 from the University of Guelph with an honours degree in agriculture, life was still an uphill battle. Onziga lacked the "Canadian-ness" that most employers demanded, and to this day he struggles to find paying work in his field of expertise and interest.
Onziga's experience is ...
We often hear about the benefits of growing food in the big city, and about the superior nutrition provided by doing so organically. But we don't often hear about the foods that grow wild in the city, completely free of any human intervention, relying only on whatever rain, sunshine, and soil nature provides.
And yet, right here in Toronto, we can enjoy a plethora of high-quality foods that are just waiting to be discovered. City green spaces, thickly forested areas, little back alleyways, front lawns, backyards, and even our own flower beds and pots all play host to a wide variety ...
One of the best things about living in Toronto is the food. The apartment I share with my partner in Riverdale is a two minute walk away from Toronto's second Chinatown, where pork, duck, and squid hang in restaurant windows, dim sum is offered daily, and vegetables, sold so cheap we wonder how the shop-keepers could possibly make a profit, spill out over the sidewalk and force pedestrians onto the street. Whenever we feel we haven't had enough greens in our diet, we head down the road to Simon's Wok, a Buddhist vegetarian restaurant, for broccoli, snow peas, and mushrooms. ...
Nobody likes a traffic jam. Cities around the world have struggled to alleviate gridlock, with varying degrees of success. London, England and Stockholm, Sweden are among the boldest examples. Both cities implemented a congestion charge to reduce heavy traffic and carbon dioxide emissions. In both cases the number of drivers on the road during peak hours decreased, air quality and public transportation improved measurably — and neither city saw its economy come to a grinding halt.
The idea itself is nothing new. Canadian Nobel Prize–winning economist William Vickrey first proposed congestion charges over 50 years ago. His idea, decades ahead of ...
