CITY HALL
• David Miller’s long goodbye hits rough water [ Toronto Star ]
• Lindsay Luby quits Miller’s executive committee [ Toronto Star ]
• Councillors clash over city, suburbs [ National Post ]
• Gloria Lindsay Luby jumps ship, resigns from Mayor’s executive committee [ Globe & Mail ]
• Miller’s golden handshake a cool $166Gs [ Toronto Sun ]
MAYORIAL RACE
• Former Winnipeg mayor latest to eye Toronto’s top job [ Globe & Mail ]
• Next T.O. mayor from Winnipeg? [ Toronto Sun ]
• Swarm of interest in Miller’s job just the jolt T.O. needs [ Globe & Mail ]
OTHER NEWS
• Garden projects ‘a teaching tool’ [ Toronto Star ]
• Factory fire causes $150,000 damage [ Toronto Star ]
• Despite One Bloor’s misstep, luxury condo projects thrive [ National Post ]
• ‘Great cities are about the details,’ Miller says as he unveils street art initiative
[ National Post ]
• ‘It’s about helping others’ [ National Post ]
• A map of Toronto unlike any other [ National Post ]
• Koerner Hall: Gutsy vision, great vibrations [ Globe & Mail ]
• Lots of work left for the Transit City mayor [ Metro ]
• Power plant runs into friction [ Toronto Sun ]
4 comments
Re: councilors clash over city, suburbs
I for one am glad Miller is leaving. As someone who lives in North York, I’ve always felt alienated from the Mayor and it always seems that it’s the inner city pulling the strings and setting the tone for the outer city. I hope the next mayor will not only be a little more fiscally conservative but one that unites the city as a whole. The problem is that this city is very fractured as this article states.
Last time I checked Staten Island does not set the tone for New York, nor does Chicago’s Jefferson Park set the agenda for policies in the Loop. I’m just being factual in stating that Toronto is a classic hub-and-spoke city, and you have to take care of the hub to make things work. If you want to see what happens when the inner burbs dominate, feel free to visit any number of doughnut-cities in the US (and I’m not talking Tim Hortons).
North York is a wonderful place – I grew up there – but it is in everyone’s best interests for the central part of Toronto to be successful and strong, much as it is in Canada’s best interests for the GTA to prosper.
No one’s disputing the fact that we need a strong central core and I’m not advocating that the outer city “dominate” over the inner city. It would be nice if things were a little more balanced, that’s all.
A US style donut city is more of a rarity here in Canada primarily because our tax dollars go into general coffers(generally speaking). In the US, there are a lot of individual towns that have greater powers to dictate where their tax dollars go. A classic donut city is Detroit where upper and middle class citizens moved out of the inner city in droves and took their tax dollars with them investing solely in their own backyard, leaving the inner city and consequently the poorer citizens to rot.
For the record, I grew up SOB (South of Bloor) and lived there for the first 19 years of my life before moving to North York 19 years ago(Darn, just admitted my age) I love the vibrancy of the downtown area and frequent it as often as I can. In fact, my family still owns property down there so I would hate to see it rot.
It would be nice however to see a mayoral candidate who can bring together all types of citizens together (or at least as much as possible) and close the fracture.
V v P:
As a born-and-bred North Yorker myself, I actually thought Miller did a pretty good job with the inner burbs. His biggest transit project, Transit City, is burb-directed, as is the Tower Renewal strategy. I think you might find not a few SOBs (hehe) who think he was *too* donut-focussed, in fact (whether they’re right is another matter).