Preville on Politics

May 2008 Archive

Toronto: A nice place to live, but I wouldn’t want to visit

Posted on May 15, 2008 by

Excuse me, are you a tourist? Yes? Okay, then: Hi! My name is Toronto, and welcome to my city! We’ve Been Expecting You!™ Do you like my new slogan? Really? Because it’s important to me that you are Somewhat Satisfied, Satisfied or Very Satisfied with your visit, and I will be asking you about that before you leave. Want to know something funny? The new slogan isn’t new at all! It’s actually a retread of an old ’70s jingle for a hotel chain. It went like this: “We’ll be ex-PECK-ting YOUUUUUUU!” Nice, eh? Anyway, here’s your welcome candle. Let me show you around. No! Really! I insist. I’ve shunted the kids into the backyard, just like Tourism Toronto CEO David Whitaker told me to do. Let’s go. Continue...

The Eglinton Avenue East death trap

Posted on May 14, 2008 by

When I interviewed Councillor Adrian Heaps, who heads the city’s cycling committee, for my column in the current issue of Toronto Life, I asked him if there was anywhere in the city where he thought bike lanes would not work. His answer: Eglinton East, where the cars move so fast at such high volumes that the street might as well be a highway. “I would not put them there right now,” he told me. This morning’s news (“2 dead, 8 hurt”) shows us why. Incidentally, that’s the second median-jumping multi-vehicle crash along that stretch in less than a month (the first didn’t result in any deaths, despite involving multiple cars).

Continue...

Privatizing the TTC—how could it be any worse than what we’ve got?

Posted on May 5, 2008 by

I’m gone for the rest of this week, and when I come back we’ll have a brand-spanking-new, totally redesigned—and renamed!—blog to launch in this space. But before I go, I need to point out two items. First, go peek at the very funny separated-at-birth photos of Toronto Mayor David Miller and London Mayor Boris Johnson over on Doug Bell’s blog, Spectator. Second, read Dr. Gridlock’s column in this morning’s Globe, in which he examines the possibility of privatizing part of the TTC, and in which he gets a key component of the logic backwards. Continue...

Toronto incomes are on the decline (or, The Friday Pessimist, Thursday edition)

Posted on May 1, 2008 by

Given that I’ve been harping on the state of the declining economy for nearly a year now, you’d think I’d be happy to have my prognostications repeatedly proven correct. At this point, however, it feels like piling on. Today’s Statscan Daily provides the latest census data on incomes. Dig a little deeper and you discover that Toronto incomes are on the decline—not a relative decline, but a real decline. I can’t find those numbers myself, but here’s a snippet from the e-mail notice I just received from Jack Layton: “The 2006 census data reveals a significant downward trend for Toronto families of 2.4 per cent despite a national increase in income of 3.7 per cent and a provincial increase of 1.4 per cent.” Continue...

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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