Dale Duncan at City Hall: April 5

Blowing off climate change

You’d think that Councillor Gloria Lindsay Luby has been around long enough to remember a time when society functioned quite happily without the use of leaf blowers. These noisy gas-powered tools are one little thing people could easily give up to help reduce emissions that contribute to climate change. But what are councillors for if not to fight for our right to clean our lawns as effortlessly as possible?

“Some forget that this city is very diverse and not all homeowners care for postage stamp-sized lawns,” Lindsay Luby wrote in a letter to the licensing and standards committee, which reviewed a proposal from Councillor Michael Walker to bring forward a full-blown ban on the gadgets March 29.

Our freedom to use leaf blowers now secured, at least for the time being (the committee voted to “note and file” the motion, which means, “let’s not deal with this now; if we ignore it long enough, maybe we’ll forget about it”), Lindsay Luby can continue to look out for other liberties that may be threatened by plans to radically cut Toronto’s greenhouse gas emissions. Sure, she supported Mayor David Miller’s recently released plans to combat climate change, but that doesn’t mean she buys into all the talk that the planet will face a drastic change for the worse if we don’t make significant changes.

“The weatherman can’t predict the weather for the weekend, yet we’re going to predict it for the next century,” she was quoted as saying in the Toronto Star. “It’s kind of interesting, when you think about it.”

Earth to Lindsay Luby: weather and climate are two different things.

The cost of free

The advertising companies vying for the contract to provide Toronto with garbage cans, bus shelters, benches, bike racks and other pieces of necessary street furniture released their renderings March 28, leaving design wonks to ogle the proposals as they made their way around the internet. Whoever wins the contract will provide the city with new infrastructure “free of charge.” In exchange, they will be allowed to sell ad space on the furniture for 20 years.

The city has sold this program to the public under the guise of beautifying public space. As the Toronto Star’s revered architecture critic Christopher Hume wrote, “The real task here is to help create an image of the city, to make a statement about who we are and how we view ourselves.”

Let’s be clear: this program came about because the city said it couldn’t pay for essentials. What they really want is to continue to let advertising companies fund infrastructure without the public putting up a big fuss. Even more infuriating is that every bidder has broken city bylaws in the past by erecting illegal billboards. How strange that we would allow people who show such little respect for the city to, as Hume wrote, help create a statement about who we are.

Visit Eye Weekly’s City Hall Blog to read regular updates and reports on municipal politics from Spacing’s Managing Editor Dale Duncan and Eye Weekly’s City Editor Edward Keenan.