PROPANE FIRE
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• Politicians to face the wrath [ Toronto Sun ]
• Public safety in private domain ties the hands of fire-safety experts [ Globe and Mail ]
• City may now have power over zoning [ National Post ]
• Zoning patchwork frustrates propane regulation [ Globe and Mail ]
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• Shopkeepers mind empty stores as wary residents return home [ Globe and Mail ]
• North York evacuees demand answers from local politicians [ National Post ]
• Residents recall panic, confusion over neighbourhood evacuation [ National Post ]
• More residents forced out by propane explosion allowed back home [ CBC.ca ]
• Homes hit by propane blast covered, insurers say [ CBC.ca ]
MISCELLANEOUS
• Put on your red coats and dancing shoes [ National Post ]
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19 comments
For all you Blue22 lovers, that lady from Ajax complaining about the bus route is actually the “worst kind of NIMBY”. Just so you know.
The “Route change request” story is pretty funny. Boasting to the Star that “we have more (influence) than the average person” is probably not the best way to win support.
I teach in a neighbourhood with idle mothers like this – am looking to transfer.
wah wah wah…complaining about a bus that runs every half hour during the AM and PM rush…..how rediculous.
Do they have “wahmbulances” in Ajax?
Every point she has makes me care less about her “cause.”
This is just another example of the most dispicable sort of self absorbed ignorance. This lady needs to realize that as ‘influential’ as her husband may be…she is not the only person in the development.
Furthermore, if she took a look at the Places to Grow act she would see that GO has planned the route according to the directives set out in said act, specifically, “INCREASED TRANSIT USAGE”.
Somebody get this woman something to do during the day as she is obviously bored and looking for something to occupy her time once her husband leaves for work, now that her kids have left home.
Some people… This is why we should make a drug for busybody housewives with nothing to do, like Soma.
DRT should remove their mufflers from this bus route just to grind her gears.
The lady in Ajax gives you some clue as to how far the culture still has to change. We have an entire generation of baby boomers about to become seniors who were raised with a sense of entitlement. They live in big homes, drive big vehicles, own lots of stuff and feel they should pay low taxes. The world revolves around them, or didn’t you get the memo?
Wayne Cassidy (“influential” husband of Sandra Cassidy):
*sigh* – shaking my head at my wife, and desperately hoping no one in my office reads this story
“I can’t even hear the TV when a bus goes by,†– ooh, sounds like she got crappy windows. Better call Mike Holmes to have them fixed!
Here’s the best part: her husband designed the subdivision. Now she knows who to blame for the poor design.
Perhaps the lady in Ajax contacted The Star hoping for one their “The Fixer” articles, not a feature. While I find her awful and her complaints trite, the majority of problems “The Fixer” seeks to right are equally pathetic. “The Fixer” is a corrosive feature, specializing in nitpicking and carping unworthy of a big city, while positioning The Star as a sort of crusader. Sometimes the complaints and advocacy actually unearth serious problems with the Toronto functions, but mostly it’s just “Hey, here’s another little thing about our city that sucks!”
Interesting how a Carola Vyhnak the Urban Affairs Reporter manages to distort something this badly. And it is equally interesting how almost all readers fall for it without ever bothering to check facts. But of course, this is the intention. One cannot bore the reader!
The fact that out of the few dozen houses making up the Community affected by the proposed route change 75 residents signed the petition should mean something. For the journalist, this has no bearing because that would establish a truer point of reference. That Mrs. Cassidy does not stand alone, and the majority of the households supports her, is completely hidden in the article. The simple fact is that the majority of the households opposes the bus coming into the particular loop being disputed. Why is this not mentioned?
That this Route 222 business is an experiment (gone wrong but never admitted) by the Durham Transit Commission because there is no other municipality in the GTA where regular buses actually enter the residential subdivisions does not seem to get noticed here. The bus was actually NOT supposed to be routed into the narrow loop that it runs on now. It was supposed to avoid this loop exactly because of the narrow streets and the close proximity of the houses to the curb. Also, there is no mention of the fact that in this particular (shallow-lot) subdivision the houses are set back much less from the street than normal. Who cares? The proposed new route (which was the originally planned one) would make those few people who actually use the service to walk at most 400 metres. The inconvenience would be that the riders would not be able to sit on their porches or stand behind their front doors waiting for the bus to stop in front of their houses but they would have to walk to the bus stop and wait a little, just like millions of other commuters do even in the great Canadian winter. I am certain Mrs. Cassidy mentioned these to the reporter who carefully avoided mentioning them in the article. But there is plenty else.
Between 5:30 and 8:00 nobody gets on or off the bus in the morning but the buses keep roaring down the narrow back street of the subdivision generating a noise level way above the allowable noise level set by municipal bylaw (even acknowledged as an issue by Durham Transit). The average 34 riders per hour that Phil Meagher is quoted as saying are not from this subdivision. The bus actually stops on average 5-6 times a day loading and unloading the impressive amount of 1 passenger (less in the Summer as the 2 students of the loop actually using the bus are not going to school) per stop in the loop that the petition proposes to cut from the bus route. These again were completely missed by the careful journalist. Why bother about such trivial things as accuracy or reflection of truth?
That the bus has barely missed two residents and a number of cars over the past couple of weeks, again, must be ignored according to the standards set by Carola Vyhnak. Newspapers are not supposed to be about informing people any longer according to this standard. They are about advertisements and anything reporters are willing to write and publish to make people buy and read the paper so the corporations keep paying for the ads. Simple as that.
Public transit should serve as much of the community as possible. As there are only a handful using the extension of Route 222, and at most would have to walk 400 metres to the nearest stop, I strongly believe there is better use of taxpayer money. There are areas of Durham region where the buses do not come within a kilometre of houses. I find my tax dollars better spent on bringing public transit to those less fortunate areas. Or perhaps add frequency to service to more populated areas of the region. At least upgrade the buses to make them to run quietly. None of us wants to stop bus service. We would want to promote more sense in the routing of the service.
How fantastic it would be if journalists who have the responsibility to inform the public did what they are supposed to be doing: not bring half truths, manipulated half quotations, and misrepresentations to their readers. And how fantastic it would be if the reader were not so eager to condemn someone who is willing to stand up to represent her community opposite a transit authority that shattered the piece and quiet of a community without any consultation whatsoever. How fantastic it would be…
Hell, if no one on the street wants it, I’m sure there are plenty of other areas Durham Transit could put it where people would be happy to have it.
Esch: You sound like you have a fair amount of information on this and probably know the lady in the story. You may want to inform her that telling a reporter, ANY reporter, that she has “more influence than the average person” when getting a story written about her plight is probably a bad move. There’s no amount of twisting a quote that could have distorted anything other than smugness and arrogance into what got in the paper…
Yes, Eastside, I am sure there are plenty of areas in Durham Region where the buses would serve the community much better.
You are right there were some unfortunate sentences in the interview. We were hoping that a paper would pick up on our story. But not this story.
It boggles the mind how our once great country has morphed into a bunch of whinney, priviledged self absorbed self centred,class conscious nazi’s bent on the preservation of their own diluded dreams of paradise. So they paid their lot premiums to be closer to the lake and it’s desired cache; so what. The street that they live on happens to be a major artery into their secluded paradise if not the main artery in the subdivision. More that just one or two people rely on the bus service taking this route, they’d know that if they weren’t so distracted on their cell phones while driving their euro luxo bardges out of the subdivision to their oh so important careers. While the rest of the indigant land owners that were not well heed enough to live closer to the cassidy monument to elitism must daily take a more prolitariate means of transport to their dreary workaday jobs. I have no sympathy for these ego-centric myopic dolts and have only the following comment; it must suck being the big fish in a little pond when the rest of the inhabitants don’t care to polish your sphincter. Too damn bad mrs cassidy didnt come out publicly in support of der furher’s (mayor stephen parish) project a few blocks south west of their estate, as I’m sure she would have had the same affect on that travisty of power drunk madness that has infiltrated the once idealic hamlet of Ajax.
This is such a silly matter that under normal circumstances, the DRT Executive Committee would have thrown it out. However Sandra Cassidy’s influence is obvious in the fact that, despite the recommendations from their own staff to keep the route intact, the Executive Committee actually asked for more information, presumably, to see if the new information could unearth some fuel that would aid them in helping out their good friend Sandra. Now that the Toronto Star has done an magnificent expose of the situation, and the Ajax News Advertiser has finally followed suit (after ignoring this issue for months now as a favour to their friends, the Cassidy’s) and that Sandra has gone public with the obvious influence she has with the DRT Executive Committee, it will make the Executive Committee Members thing twice on September 3rd, before they try to side with their friend Sandra, over the common folk who elected them. Under these circumstances, any Executive Committee Member that does side with the elitists will be crucified by the press and if they do so anyway, it will only reflect the extent of the influence that the Cassidy’s have over them.
This is in response to ESCH who, I suspect is a professional writer hired by the Cassidy’s for a handsome fee to spin this situation with lies and half truths to try and do some damage control. ESCH has posted this exact same post (August 14, 2008 @ 11:05 pm) in more than a dozen forums around the GTA.
Here are the facts:
I live in this neighbourhood. Many of the 70+ signatures were collected under coercion. The 70 signatures were not 70 households, so with an average of 5 per households, the petition represents around 14 households in a subdivision of around 1,400 households. That is just around 1% of all the households. Try walking 400 meters through howling winds and mostly black ice in this particular neighbourhood and you will change your tune before one can say “Defend the elite against the common folk”. If this route that is performing better than most routes in Ajax is re-routed then all the routes not performing as well as this route should also be cancelled or rerouted. Most of the people that signed the petition are now, conveniently, washing their hands off their dirty deed. Sandra’s willing and able second in command “Barb” told the reporter that she was acting merely as a messenger for Sandra, who is the driving force behind this initiative.
This lady is crazy. I feel very sorry for her husband. I think she needs to get a life. What people should do now is to always honk their horns when they drive by their house, I know I will be doing just that. I will try to get some truckers I know to swing their trucks by and let off the air horn too.