City
Morning Brew: December 3rd, 2008
Photo: "27 Shopping Days Left..." by chewie2008~, member of the blogTO Flickr pool.
What's happening in the GTA (and sometimes beyond):
The strike that has kept students out of the classroom for a month (and counting) at York University is wearing their patience thin. Student protests at Queen's Park yesterday aimed to put pressure on the government to force union members back to work, and also resulted in a news article that started with a cute poem.
If you live in Toronto's east end Beach neighbourhood, do yourselves a favour and lock your windows and doors - at least until the serial burglar (who has entered over 40 homes in less than a month) is apprehended. He might be the one who in the middle of the night helped himself to your neighbour's honey almond muesli and he might also be the one who stuck a knife in someone's abdomen.
While it likely has come far too late, the residents on the now narrower Lansdowne Avenue finally had their chance to have a public meeting with city councillor Adam Giambrone, who apparently was subjected to a virtual group spank down. People are still not happy about how the road work has changed their street, and apparently Giambrone still needed a police escort to the meeting, as precaution.
--
On Monday, tragedy struck a family in Woodstock, Ontario. A mother is clinging to her life, while the rest of her family have already succumb to the silent killer that is carbon monoxide. If you or your loved ones don't have a CO detector, perhaps one would make for a better Christmas present than anything else.
Research, student aid, and faculty posts took a hit at the University of Toronto. The message has now been delivered to its staff and students - the $62-million in endowment funds that were raised during good times are no longer available since bad times have now struck.
And it's official - plastic bags at retails store in Toronto will cost consumers 5 cents a pop come June 2009. I'm going to take the thousands of bags stored in the cupboard beneath my kitchen sink, and set up a shop on the street, selling them for 3 cents. Yeah, that'll show them! :P
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Adam Giambrone really does have good intentions, but I fear he's just not all "there."
Sharrows or not, the street is now MUCH better for cycling with the wider lanes and less crapped-up pavement / streetcar tracks poking through.
The sidewalks are wider and more pleasant to walk on. There are MANY new trees planted along there, and large new planter boxes at Bloor St.
Some parking has been lost, but it was under-used anyway. Any time I have been down that street, there have been plenty of free parking spaces. Of course, this still doesn't prevent jerks from parking on the sidewalk, even when there's an empty space a few metres away...
I don't doubt that traffic has slowed down a bit (that's good!) and there's a bit more congestion, but it has never been bad any time I've been through there. I think many of the claims are exaggerated.
I found and posted a <a href="http://www.bikingtoronto.com/2007/06/lansdowne-reconstruction-setting-record.html";>"setting the record straight" post</a> on this topic <a href="http://www.bikingtoronto.com/2007/06/lansdowne-reconstruction-setting-record.html";>back in June 2007</a> when this was initially controversial.
to quote:
Although no consultation is formally required in law or policy for such a project, Adam considered consultation appropriate and took it upon himself to:
1. Hold a public meeting at 3 p.m. on Sunday, May 28, 2006. Flyers were distributed in both English and Portuguese and the meeting was well-attended.
2. Canvass the street about the project in the lead-up to the November election. Subsequent declarations collected and provided by some community members confirm at the very least that this canvassing took place.
3. Distribute a flyer on Lansdowne in April of 2007, in English and Portuguese, advising residents of the project and inviting further input.
<a href="http://www.bikingtoronto.com/2007/06/lansdowne-reconstruction-setting-record.html";Read more</a>.
Paper will make more people switch to reuseable, they are akward to carry, no handles, etc. Justy putting a fee on plastic ones isnt gonna change a thing. If most go buy $100 in groceries they're not gonna care about another 80 cents...
Side note: Doesn't accumulating hundreds of plastic bags in your house encourage people to use reusable bags??? It's just annoying!
The 5 cent fee is insane, since it won't do anything to reduce plastic usage - one Starbucks latte will buy you 80 plastic bags, which should cover several months of shopping for even the largest families. It is nice to see Miller waste political capital on idiocies like this than on real programs. He and Giambrone have the worst instincts.
If we're talking about overall environmental impact, the order looks something like this:
Corrugated Shipping Cartons, No Frills style > Nothing > Reusable Bags > Plastic Bags > Paper Bags (there may a little bit of overlap between plastic and paper however in some situations)
Why are shipping boxes better than nothing and reusable bags?
Well, they already exist and are easily reused for something that would normally require another product (I use mine as recycle bins, for storage and for moving). Use nothing and they'll get tossed anyways. Sure, they're recycled, but paper can only be recycled so many times. If you can reuse it a few times before it gets recycled, the world will be slightly better off. Not to mention it eliminates the need to manufacture something that wouldn't normally exist (such as recycling containers, new shipping boxes for moving and storage, etc)
Same deal with reusable bags. It is an additional item that needs to be manufactured that really doesn't need to be. Sure there will be more of a finite number than standard plastic bags, but manufacturing will still have to exist to replenish the ones that wear out or get thrown out. That means pollution, waste, transportation, etc, etc. Meanwhile the corrugated box gets tossed when it could be utilized.
For a different perspective, I didn't use them much at home in Toronto (and had full drawer of useless plastic bags everywhere I lived, as many others), but since moving to Sydney, Aus a couple years ago, 'green bags' are our standard and I'll continue that back in Canada eventually. (In fact everyone that has come to visit Australia has actually taken a bag back from here.) People even use them for the beach, sports gear, drink transport for parties, etc. so they're a common site everywhere - even coming with rugby team logos or other promos.
They cost a $1 at most check-outs here and generally any grocery store will pack other company's bags for you as it's standard practice for most in the city.
Keep a couple in the car or backpack and you'll find you don't use paper or plastic ones much anymore, which can really add up over the years...
Did the
1. Yes, a "meeting" on this issue was held at the Councillor's constituentency office in May/06. Let me also add that there was no clear agenda and the small space was TOO small to accommodate those attending, so that people were outside on the street. In any case, those attending were clearly overwhelming against what they were hearing about the proposal. Another small detail, but one that speaks volumes about the level of respect that attendees were being accorded, was that there were NO CHAIRS for the attendees, even though many of them were seniors. I have NEVER been to any other community meeting in which no chairs were provided. I also know that when meetings in other parts of Ward 18 regarding complex changes are held, this same councillor knows better than to not have chairs available for attendees.
Yes, one meeting was held for this $2M project... but when similar changes are put through in other areas, significantly more meetings have been held. What has never been explained is why the Lansdowne reconstruction warranted 1 community meeting and the toilet in Dufferin Grove warranted 3.
2. Regarding Joe's comment that the Councillor canvassed the area, well "DUH", there was a municipal election in the fall of 2006. Yes, Councillor Giambrone clearly did election canvassing. Nobody denied that. What residents have said is that there is no indication that he "surveyed" people on this issue. There really is a distinction whether people want to acknowledge it or not. In fact, the residents we spoke to said that THEY not the Councillor were the ones who mentioned the street issue during his election canvassing. Others said they would have liked to raise the issue BUT were unable to because of language barrier issues. And even if one accepts that the Councillor did a bona fide survey (and there is NO evidence for this other than statements made by the Councillor's office) the question still remains why this should be considered an adequate method of consultation for Lansdowne when it is not considered adequate for other significant road changes. Community meetings would have allowed issues and concerns to be dealt with in an open and transparent manner. A door to door survey does not.
3. Yes the councillor sent a flyer to "inform" residents about the project in April 19/07. This was 2 WEEKS after residents who had already learned about the project (because it had gone to tender) had started calling his office for an explanation as to why no further community consultation meetings had been held since the Councillor's May/06 meeting. To be "informed" about something is not the same as being "consulted" about something. As for the "oppurtunities for further input on minor details of the project" that Councillor's letter referred to, suffice to say that most residents saw this as another slap in the face given that what they were expecting were consultation opportunities BEFORE the project was approved by City Council. When a project has gone out to tender, the opportunities for consultation are at most, very very minor. What Joe's "setting the record straight" post fails to mention is that the Councillor also sent residents a letter in Sept/06 (during the election campaign) stating that the project had been put on hold and referring to further opportunities for community consultation before the project was reviewed. The Councillor was also interviewed by a local paper, the Villager, in which he acknowledged residents were very unhappy with the proposed changes for the street and said that staff were coming up with other ideas. Without calling anyone a liar, I will say that the comments made by the Councillor in this Nov/06 story do not seem consistent with comments made the Councillor in April/07 that only a small percentage of people were unhappy about the changes.
What angers me most is not the changes that have been made to the street. (Some of the changes I actually like -- but that isn't the issue.) It is that residents' concerns and issues regarding this change were given some short shrift. This is a largely immigrant area and most of the people here were resigned to the change. What sent them over the edge (so that they came out in the hundreds to protest on Portugal Day/07) was to hear claims that a "survey" by the Councillor had taken place and not seeing any evidence of this. What also angers me is that some people continue to want to justify Councillor Giambrone's "consultation" on this issue, when they would likely be infuriated if a similar lack of consultation had taken place regarding a major change in their area. I think I've written way too much... but I do want to do my bit to help set the record straight in the face of the misinformation that continues to be circulated on this incident.