Preville on Politics

March 2008 Archive

How I spent my Earth Hour

Posted on March 31, 2008 by

At eight o’clock every night, I sit in a rocking chair with my son on my lap and read him stories by the light of an electric lamp. Lights out comes around 8:15 p.m. This past Saturday was right on schedule. As Earth Hour approached, my son and I were upstairs while my wife was in the living room trying to get some work done on her laptop—unexpectedly so, since she was supposed to be at work. I had told her at suppertime that I thought we should observe Earth Hour. “Observe” somehow seemed more apropos than “celebrate” or “participate in,” given the event’s religious tint. In fact, the zeal of the daily propaganda in the Toronto Star had kinda put us both off, but we decided to do it anyway.

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Schadenford: The arrest of Rob Ford, city hall hoser

Posted on March 28, 2008 by

Poor Rob Ford. If only he’d slept beside a machine all his life like those Orientals from the Orient, he probably wouldn’t be in this pickle. As you surely know by now, Ford was arrested Wednesday on charges of assault and threatening death in a domestic dispute involving his wife. When you heard the news, did you have that weird paradoxical reaction of being simultaneously surprised and not surprised? Shocked and blasé? You know, the kind of vaguely self-aware reaction that would make for a passable media studies paper or maybe, if you’re Lynn Crosbie, another tortured column in the Globe? Because when you think about it, didn’t the latest circus seem inevitable?

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Richard Florida: from celebrity academic to budget highlight

Posted on March 26, 2008 by

Being Richard Florida comes with some nice perks. Your name really does turn up everywhere, including in government budget documents. Here are the two awkward paragraphs in which he is featured: Continue...

Flaherty vs. McGuinty: Top Five Theories

Posted on March 25, 2008 by

Why is Jim Flaherty going out of his way to pick a political fight with Dalton McGuinty over Ontario’s business tax rate? It’s anybody’s guess, and the guessing is getting good. Let’s run down the top five.

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Toronto, Canada’s new political orphan

Posted on March 19, 2008 by

Paul Wells was first out of the gate with the bull’s eye analysis of Monday’s by-election results, which is that Toronto is becoming Liberaler and Liberaler. It’s echoed this morning by the Star’s Chantal Hébert. In federal politics, Toronto increasingly agrees with itself yet is increasingly at odds with the rest of the country. And it is so convinced of its correctness that it is prone to dismissing other views for their obvious failure to see things the same way it does.

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Make the mayor accountable—give him a political party

Posted on March 19, 2008 by

The Globe scored an exclusive with Mayor David Miller, and the result is a headline plucked from a 2005 time capsule: the mayor wants more powers from the province. Nowhere does the story raise the issue of municipal political parties, even though it quotes one councillor—Brian Ashton—at length who supports them. Reading the Globe and Star on this issue is starting to feel awkward. You have to work hard to write around a growing blind spot.

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Toronto Centre, this is your wake-up call

Posted on March 17, 2008 by

Good morning to the riding of Toronto Centre. It’s Monday, the forecast calls for sunny skies and temperatures around O°C, and you are voting in a by-election today. Did you forget? That’s okay. So did the folks up in Willowdale, the other Toronto riding which also goes to the polls today. The people of Vancouver Quadra in B.C. and Desnethé–Missinippi–Churchill River in Saskatchewan also let it slip. So did the rest of us. We really ought to call these the Daylight Savings By-Elections: something you’d have completely forgotten if your morning paper didn’t remind you.

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I am battery recycling’s nemesis

Posted on March 13, 2008 by

Wednesday’s Globe and Mail was up in arms over a proposal by Councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker, chair of the public works committee, to create a deposit-return system for batteries in order to keep them out of landfills. In his column, John Barber explains the root of the proposal’s inanity: Queen’s Park will soon be establishing its own province-wide system to divert such materials. The provincial system will be voluntary and deposit-free and involve many drop-off locations. Alas, this is why it won’t work, and I present myself as Exhibit A to prove my point: I am in the habit of tossing used batteries into the trash, and I can’t be bothered to behave differently.

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The genius of Dwight Duncan

Posted on March 13, 2008 by

Mayor David Miller has, for years, repeated that cities need “revenues that grow with the economy.” The unfortunate reality is that the economy doesn’t always grow. A bad year can leave tax coffers dry, and an unexpectedly good year can leave them nice and flush. So Ontario Finance Minister Dwight Duncan’s announcement yesterday was a clever way of sharing both risk and reward: if Queen’s Park has a good year, the city will share in the surplus, but if it has a bad year or a just-OK year, the city gets nothing. Continue...

Pricing Toronto’s roads: Looks like I have some ’splainin’ to do

Posted on March 10, 2008 by

Toronto Life’s April issue is now on newsstands and includes a column by me that lays out the case for road tolls in the GTA—a surprise, perhaps, to anyone who’s been reading this blog long enough to remember when I used to rail against the idea. Among those smirking with satisfaction will be fellow Toronto freelancer John Lorinc, a long-time proponent of road pricing who once challenged me to a blogger’s debate on the issue. I said I’d take him up on it, then never did; I preferred to change my mind without being hectored into it. Except that I haven’t really been converted to the idea. I’ve just become resigned to it.

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Snow expected. Better put the army on alert

Posted on March 7, 2008 by

Winter brings not only snow, but snow-induced anarchy. Never was a Canadian city so ill prepared for that thing that happens every year between December and March. Martial law may be the only solution.

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Rob Ford insults while the rest of the council wastes time

Posted on March 7, 2008 by

City council met this week. The highlights: half a dozen members of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty stormed the council floor in support of the city’s homeless, and Rob Ford managed to insult the majority of the world’s population when he stepped back in time and announced that “Oriental people work like dogs.” He later stated that he never meant to offend “anybody from any community.” In other words: the highlights were the freaky circus sideshows. As far as the actual business of council is concerned, the only thing worth mentioning is how long it took to accomplish so little.

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Memo to John Tory: Unleash the asshole within

Posted on March 3, 2008 by

image for Memo to John Tory: Unleash the asshole within

I recently got turned on to a blog called Ottawa Watch and found this enjoyable little post about the “asshole factor” in politics. It mentions just about everyone except John Tory, who, judging by my discussions with him and every public display of behaviour, is a really nice guy. Maybe that’s the problem.

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A message from our political leaders: Don’t pay attention to politics

Posted on March 3, 2008 by

image for A message from our political leaders: Don’t pay attention to politics

I was away last week, but before I left, the big story was a WWE-style war of words between “Pencil Neck” McGuinty and Jimmy “Hell’s Elf” Flaherty. Upon my return I find the war has “escalated.” Continue...

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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