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Monday’s headlines

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• Now we’ll all be able to walk the walk on Bloor St. [ Toronto Star ]
• Plan grows for new Etobicoke courthouse [ Toronto Star ]
• Councillors take power trip to Etobicoke [ Globe and Mail ]
• Road tolls tax patience in city council [ Toronto Sun ]
• Fractured GTA a tough sell [ Toronto Star ]
• Mel housing meltdown [ Toronto Sun ]
• Rugged Rouge to be greener still [ Toronto Star ]

4 comments

  1. Too bad Mel didn’t do much when he actually was in office.

  2. Do we really have to get rid of 416 farmland? Seems to me that Rouge Park is not really in touch with future priorities. We need extra trees on avenues and orphaned areas, not mega-plantations to uproot local food.

    “Rouge Park has set aside 318 hectares of agricultural heritage land for farmers” sounds great but as far as I understand that is still a reduction from at least 700 now. Apparently there is a plan to expand the Park in York Region and add farmland there but that I suspect will just be acquiring York farmland and then “woohoo we have Rouge Park farmland”, not that there is actually a net gain.

    Pickering Airport hasn’t gone away and when that fiasco gets rammed through we’ll realise that farmland is precious and it’s bloody expensive to try and recoup it by remediating brownlands.

    As for Hume on Bloor Street, it really makes his rep as a Toronto guru take a hit when he writes an article that long without mention of the efforts to secure better bicycle space on Bloor, not just pedestrian space.

  3. Yup, I think Hume is phoning these articles/City-Of-Toronto-Propaganda-Pieces in from the cottage.

    Today’s article seems to rely on press releases for “research.” For a comparison of basic journalism skills, check out last week’s Globe article on the same subject: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080611.wbloor11/BNStory/National/.

    And last week’s strangely un-newsworthy piece on Jarvis St. seems to have involved even less “research”–if that’s possible. Although the city-initiated Jarvis Streetscape Improvement Project is currently underway, he makes no mention of it, even though it would at a bit of “newsworthiness” and relevancy to the piece. Even worse, he states that removing a lane of traffic is “unlikely,” seemingly unaware that the Streetscape Improvement project is focused on removing a lane of traffic.

    I’ve always thought Hume’s “guru” status was more than a tad undeserved (especially because it seemed to be largely self-proclaimed), and have disliked how this status has given such weight to his unsubstantiated editorializing. Hume can write good, thoughtful, and well-researched articles, but often (too often) doesn’t.

  4. City of Toronto propaganda from Hume? Maybe you forgot about all those bitter criticisms of the planning and transportation departments.