CITY HALL
• Watchdog initiative mustn’t fail [ Toronto Star ]
• Council opposes suits used to silence critics [ National Post ]
• A new blueprint; an old debate [ Globe and Mail ]
• City snatched signs with no warning, say ticked off small business owners [ Toronto Star ]
• Toronto struggles with prosperity gap [ Toronto Star ]
TTC
• Selling off the TTC is back on the table. Is it time? [ Globe and Mail ]
• The wheels on Kinnear’s TTC bus are still on [ Toronto Star ]
ENVIRONMENT
• Who’ll buy York’s waste pellets? [ Toronto Star ]
• The monster (blue bin) that ate downtown [ Globe and Mail ]
• Portlands power could hit grids this weekend [ Toronto Star ]
WALKING
• In praise of the lost art of strolling [ Toronto Star ]
• To honour an urban icon, expand your horizons [ Globe and Mail ]
• Jane’s Walk: Exploring Toronto on foot [ Globe and Mail ]
• Take a walk on the Danforth, east of Woodbine [ Toronto Star ]
DEVELOPMENT
• Now on sale in aisle one: Class warfare [ Globe and Mail ]
• New high-rise war heats up in Yonge-Eglinton area [ Globe and Mail ]
MISCELLANEOUS
• A tour through our literary, and civic, heart of darkness [ Toronto Star ]
• Wellesley incoherent but thriving [ Toronto Star ]
• Uploading personality to a city of hidden gems [ Globe and Mail ]
8 comments
“City snatched signs with no warning, say ticked off small business owners”
So they needed to clear the sidewalk of signs for all the mom ‘n pop owner stores, but felt no obligation to take the ugly yellow Real Estate News box in the middle of the sidewalk at Dundas West and Quebec. Just who is the city protecting?
The Star interview with Kinnear is pretty disappointing.
My friend has his business sign taken by someone from the city. When he saw the truck come by again he took it out of the back. The response from the city worker when he did it? “Hey, that’s mine!”
The sad thing is, the same politicians who rubber-stamped this will also commiserate about incoming ‘big-box’ stores and wonder where a real downtown went.
I thought the subway station corporate sponsorship idea was the worst idea the TTC could float in a long time. I was wrong.
well lets just say this isn’t a very small business friendly city.
I once went to court for a small business owner who had one of those illegal search and seizure of a garbage bag evidence.Well not only did the justice throw the case out he threw the bylaw out and declared it to be “invalid”.It was fun to see the court rooms cleared as the city staff scrambled back to city hall to draft a new bylaw.Of course they are back at it again with new draconian by-laws that don’t make sense.You can’t fight city hall?Why should tax paying citizens be fighting them in the first place?
Maybe its time that the city start revealing to the citizens information that even “freedom of information” requests can’t seem to open up.
“It’s called the chill factor,” said Mr. Walker. “You can’t have a democracy if the citizens haven’t got forums where they can speak their minds without fear of retribution — and most particularly retribution that is supported by the institutions of the state, such as quasi-judicial bodies like the Ontario Municipal Board.”
legal threats to silence critics….hmmm where have I heard that before?!?!?!
The garbage bag checking they mention later in the sign-snatching article is really weird. I live on Queen in Parkdale, and it seems like several times this year they have ordered the garbage to not be collected overnight, and then they send a team of city workers to knife open all the bags in the morning and root through them to make sure it’s residential garbage.
I understand why they do it, but I keep finding it vaguely violating to step out my door to go to work and find a city worker rooting through my garbage.
Moving to Toronto from Vancouver in 2000, a city with a punitive approach to city government, I was really excited at Toronto’s “don’t bug us, we won’t bug you” attitude. In Vancouver, special liquor permits, parades, and sandwich boards were unheard of, the thinking being, “nothing will go wrong if no one has these”. I ran a small gallery for a couple of years and was really impressed by the city’s willingness to let me get on with it. Eight years later, it seems Toronto is making all the mistakes Vancouver has been trying to undo since it was branded “No Fun City”.