Preville on Politics

January 2008 Archive

Segregation Schmegregation

Posted on January 30, 2008 by

I hate to bring it up, but… Continue...

Remember the toilet (or, Changing the budget tune)

Posted on January 28, 2008 by

Mayor David Miller and Budget Chief Shelley Carroll—whose name is increasingly whispered whenever talk turns to the issue of potential Miller successors—today announced what they called the first balanced budget since amalgamation. The truth is that every budget since amalgamation has been balanced; what sets this one apart is that Queen’s Park delivered the bailout in advance, so there was no squabbling over the shortfall. Follow this link to see the city’s platitude-filled, stock-photography-laden budget propaganda: updates on all the same pie charts and bar graphs they issue every year, now unfolding in real-time Technicolor, yet still failing to provide any year-over-year comparisons or, subsequently, any detailed indication of how they managed to pull it off.

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Rating Toronto’s Daycares

Posted on January 25, 2008 by

Earlier this week, the city posted quality ratings on their Web site for 650 daycare centres across the city. The ratings are based not on user reviews, but on inspections by city staff. Every centre is graded on a scale of one to four, with three being the city’s acceptable minimum—and nearly everyone’s acceptable: 96 per cent of all centres scored at least a three. Alas, the ratings are actually quite difficult to find: programmers have buried the scores deep in the site’s architecture (here’s an alphabetical list, but you still have to click through a profile to get to the number), and they haven’t made it easy to compare scores. Which kind of defeats the purpose, doesn’t it?

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Urbanism 101

Posted on January 23, 2008 by

A StatsCan report confirms the obvious this morning: the lower your neighbourhood’s population density, the more likely you are to travel by car. This does not come as news to the suburbs, which were invented by cars. The real burning question left behind in the report’s wake is this: who are the 43% of Torontonians who live within five kilometers of the city centre yet who drive their cars for all their daily trips? And, more to the point, what do they have to say for themselves? They could be reverse commuters; they could also be Rosedale residents who, despite having a subway line to shuttle them to and from work in minutes, drive anyway. Either way, they got some ’splainin’ to do. Continue...

Transportopia! (or, For whom the road tolls)

Posted on January 21, 2008 by

You can skip tomorrow’s Toronto Star, because here’s what will surely be its front page story: a report recommending every possible road and vehicle tax you can think of—an additional fuel tax of six cents a litre, a vehicle registration fee (which Toronto already has, but which the report says other municipalities should charge too), a $25 annual tax on non-residential parking spaces, and tolls of seven cents per kilometre on all the 400-series highways, as well as the Gardiner, the DVP, and the Red Hill Creek and Lincoln Alexander Parkways.

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Dr. Positive responds again

Posted on January 17, 2008 by

His is the last word.

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Scarlem Scarlem nyah nyah nyah

Posted on January 17, 2008 by

I missed Tuesday’s meeting of the Scarborough Community Council, which means I also missed the tongue lashing they gave Toronto Life over this. Thankfully, the Star was there to cover it for me, though they neglected to mention that the article’s author, Don Gillmor, was in attendance to take his licks. Anyway, Norm Kelly can give me a shin-kicking ‘til my legs turn blue, for all the good it’ll do for his home town. The media is hardly his borough’s biggest problem.

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Dr. Florida and me

Posted on January 16, 2008 by

Have a look at Richard Florida’s take on my Monday post. He provides some context that was sorely missing from Saturday’s Globe article. Note also the discord between his quote of my bio and the real version. If it’s not a typo but a shot from the hip, it’s a clever one. Zing.

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Toronto’s shit smells of roses, says Dr. Florida

Posted on January 14, 2008 by

In case you missed it, the weekend Globe featured the latest in its series titled “Richard Florida Ingratiates Himself.” In each installment, Florida heaps his brainy-sounding flattery upon a different area of Toronto while appearing photographed in its midst with a shit-eating grin.

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Author Bio Pic

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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