Preville on Politics

November 2007 Archive

File Under Stintz, Karen

Posted on November 30, 2007 by

And also under apologies, demanded and not received.

Checking the Google News page today, I learned that Alanis Morrissette had been “tapped” for the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, meaning she is to be inducted. Similarly, Jake Gyllenhall has been “tapped” for the starring role in an upcoming Joe Namath biopic, and Jason Parker has been “tapped” as police chief in the town of Dalton, GA. In my mind’s eye, all three have had a spigot plunged into their thigh, the better to drain and capture their essential humours.

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Toronto, Antiseptic City

Posted on November 28, 2007 by

Yesterday’s post was an ode to cart food, and so is today’s. The humourless Royal Ontario Museum wants to shoo hot dog vendors away from its spiffy, angular new facade. Again I ask: why does a clean and beautiful city have to be a whitewashed, antiseptic city?

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The Street Food Furniture Program

Posted on November 27, 2007 by

Who knew Toronto’s hot dog carts were such an eyesore of non-conformity? Yesterday, Mayor Miller put the kibosh to councillor John Filion’s proposal to borrow $700,000 to build 35 new-fangled street-food carts. The carts are part of the Filion-led charge to diversify Toronto’s street eats: different foods need different gear, so the hot dog carts won’t do. Now that Filion has lost out on the $700,000 loan, he’s looking for alternative financing. He’s determined to maintain control over the 35 prototypes. As he told the Star’s Vanessa Lu: “We don’t want a repeat with what happened with hot dog carts. We want a uniform look. We want something that’s good for branding the city as a food destination.” Continue...

’Round and ’Round with Economic Indicators!

Posted on November 27, 2007 by

Apropos last Friday’s post about a Statscan report which noted that Canada’s rising incomes are being generated not by big cities but by hinterland resource extraction: I was cleaning out some files today and came across this tidbit, a July report from TD’s Don Drummond (a man whose words Candian politicians listen to carefully) about how Toronto’s standard of living has been plummeting. (You may remember reading about it. It was released last July 17, the day Miller lost his tax vote.) Anyway, put the two reports together and the picture isn’t pretty: the country as a whole is firing on all cylinders while jalopy Toronto sputters along.

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Another Inconvenient Truth

Posted on November 22, 2007 by

Cities are the engines of the national economy. This is the assertion that girds every call for more money for municipalities: cities are the source of the country’s wealth, and they need major repairs to keep churning out prosperity. Alas for cities, this morning’s Statscan Daily argues otherwise. Real income per capita has been growing far faster in Canada than in the United States in the past seven years, not because cities are such unstoppable juggernauts of economic growth but because commodity prices—oil and minerals—have gone through the roof. It turns out that the engines of the national economy are Sudbury, Fort McMurray and Prince George, not Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. Oops.

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A better reception than Stephen Harper would get

Posted on November 21, 2007 by

So there I was yesterday at city council, sitting at the back of the press gallery, caught up in conversation with councillor Adam Vaughan, when suddenly everyone around us stands up. The room goes quiet as council suspends its activities, but we continue our discussion—at least until the dulcet tones of the bagpipe start squealing in our ears. Must be serious. “I guess we better stand,” I say. Once on our feet, we realize there’s a bunch of burly guys in military fatigues. Vaughan gets annoyed. “What’s with the military presence in council chambers?” he asks. Then I spot the reason. “Oh, it’s the Grey Cup,” I say. Vaughan gets more annoyed. “Why are we standing?” he asks. “Why the bagpipes? And what’s with the military guys?” Why, because a football trophy has entered the room! Silly Adam! He just doesn’t get it, does he? Former Edmonton Oilers owner Peter Pocklington, paraphrasing his hero Karl Marx, put it best: “Religion is not the opiate of the masses. Sports is.”

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When a Paradigm Turns Smug

Posted on November 16, 2007 by

The blog entry you are about to read probably should have been posted one week ago, when its topic—diabetes in suburbia—was more prominent in the news. But reading the Toronto Star’s coverage of the issue had me so hot under the collar I thought I ought to cool off before I wrote anything.

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Condominium Connect-the-Dots

Posted on November 15, 2007 by

So here we are: condominium sales have overtaken home sales for the first time ever. But I will refrain from crowing about the ascendancy of downtown vibrancy over suburban isolation. If you didn’t read Ivor Tossell’s insightful article about condo life in the Labour Day weekend edition of the Globe and Mail, now would be a good time to check it out. Stacking boxes one atop the other might be more efficient and ecological than lining them in a row along a street, but it doesn’t necessarily create a stronger sense of community.

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I wouldn’t mind an increase in my water bill…

Posted on November 13, 2007 by

… such as the 9 per cent hike proposed by council’s executive committee yesterday, if Toronto Water was not in the habit of frittering the money away. Back in September, the city’s auditor general pointed out that, in addition to overtime scams of various kinds, Toronto Water’s emergency repair contracts were so badly managed that cost overruns had become the department’s new normal. Now comes another audit of Toronto Water, which goes before audit committee later this week. It doesn’t paint a pretty picture.

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Where’d that Star headline go?

Posted on November 9, 2007 by

Sorry for going AWOL on the blog. Long story. Anyway, the front-page headline in this morning’s Star—“PM to cities: Drop dead”—is one for the ages. Kinda makes you feel like you’re living in a parallel universe in which no one is passive aggressive, no one minces words and The Onion is the newspaper of record. But you’ll have to buy the print edition: by 11 a.m. the snarky headline had been erased from the on-line edition. Whatever words it chooses, the Star can crow all it wants: Stephen Harper will never collect a cent of sales tax and then hand it over to municipal governments because it’s bad policy. One Ottawa scribe I spoke to called it “appalling federalism.” Cities may yet succeed in wringing money from Ottawa, but it will not come—it was never going to come—in the form of a GST transfer.

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Philip Preville

Veteran freelance writer Philip Preville lived much of his life in Montreal and Edmonton before he was lured, like so many Torontonians before him, by the promise of more work and a better living. A National Magazine Award winner and former Canadian Journalism Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Massey College, Preville writes Toronto Life’s politics column. He lives with his wife and one-year-old son in Riverdale, just close enough to the Don Valley Parkway that he can hear it when he steps outside his house—but just far enough away that it doesn’t keep him awake at night. On his office wall hangs a 1938–39 press pass belonging to his grandfather, Elias Gannon, who wrote for the Montreal Star.

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