City
Morning Brew: April 29th, 2009
Photo: "St. George Station Eyesore" by HighPlainsDrifter Photography, member of the blogTO Flickr pool.
What's happening in the GTA (and sometimes beyond):
If this date and time stamped photo is any indication, it's time for a spring stroll in High Park with your favourite loved one(s). The cherry blossom trees, a treasured gift from Japan, are blooming - and as quickly as they bud and pop open, they begin to fall off. Make that stroll a priority this week, or you may have to wait until next year to enjoy them. See photos from last year.
In other equally welcome but totally unrelated news, the province is introducing legislation today aimed at stopping Ticketmaster and TicketsNow {G&M] from screwing us large on event ticket reselling. Don't mess with Ontario, and don't mess with The Boss, Ticketbastard!
The lights went out at 5:30am in a section of midtown [CityNews], and it's affecting the Spadina subway line. Trains are running, but expect delays.
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North York community council is starting to look like a bunch of Kindergarten kids out in the playground at recess, fighting over the last purple tricycle. Street names should not be used to poke fun or make political statements, people [NP]. Stop being such morons, and let's move on, before we vote to rename North York "friggin dumbass immature idiotland".
OMGWTFHEADLINE. There are some things we need to know, and there are some things we don't need to know. I'd would like to know why the Star thinks it's important that we know that an axe murder victim died quickly but not immediately [Star].
Regent Park, Canada's largest (and most notorious) community housing project, is seeing residents move into newly completed units, and is announcing phase 2 of redevelopment [Sun] - which will see market condos, and some well-known retailers set up shop in the community (I heard that it may be Sobey's, Rogers, and more).
Surveys don't always make sense. In this latest one, Toronto ranked 15th in livability out of 215 world cities [CityNews]. But we couldn't even crack the top 10 in Canada in another survey. Does this mean that Toronto is hated within Canada, and loved by the world?
Discussion
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All in all, Canada is a great place to live and that is reflected on the international rankings. However, while the major cities (Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver) are all great relative to global cities, they might not be as great to live as other, smaller Canadian cities which weren't includeded in International lists.
Yes. I've found people in Toronto don't realize just how much the Rest of Canada hates us, and how our politicians expolit this. When campaigning outside of Toronto, they slam us as being rich, spoiled and demanding of special treatment. The fact that Toronto may actually face different challenges than Thunder Bay or Halifax is ignored.
Its silly of course - most of the people who 'hate' Toronto have never even been here, but there you are.
I don't know about you but that's just the sort of gruesome detail that makes reading the news while eating breakfast a wonderful experience.
serve me this news on a plate with some fava beans.
Re Toronto hataz, I-swear-to-God actual loudspeaker announcement at Calgary Airport sometime last fall:
"Passengers travelling on Flight 305 to The Centre of the Universe, please report to Gate 4. If you must."
Outside of Ontario, the hate seems more aimed at our perceived 'attitude' - that we think we are better, smarter and more hip than anyone else. Of course, this is just silly, because everyone knows that people from Montreal are better and more hip than everyone else.
So the smaller town - say Victoria - is safer, less expensive, has shorter commutes, more recreation facilities per capita and might even have higher measures of arts accessibility and employment. The unquantifiable can't be ranked so the large city falls below its natural level. Toronto does have substantial failings (taxes, crime, etc) and the rankings do reflect those problems. It should probably be higher in the middle of Canadian cities, since most of the rest are much better managed. We're in our Lindsay era, where everything is falling apart but the real crisis hasn't hit yet and the city can rest on a decayed grandeur and built-in advantage.
Without aggressive moves Toronto will have 2 or more lost decades. Unfortunately there are no Giulianis or Bloombergs on our horizon, nor are they likely to appear. Our local Billionaires and entrepreneurs are a rather mediocre caste, and the only ones interested in politics are light years worse than Lindsay ever was - Galen Jr. can't even get a proper hair cut, little Lord Thomson is on his way to racking up a record to rival Liz Taylor, David Mirvish has yet to get a building to finish successfully (never mind getting a play launched), Rocco is running the Liberals in Ottawa, and Dave Pecault's an American tied into the failing edifice of our Liberal establishment and created a compromised googoo version of the Board of Trade that creates pretty reports that don't challenge anyone.
Toronto's high international rankings are thanks to the backward looking nature of rankings and the underweighting they give to dynamism. Slum cities are where the future lies, if they are freed from enfeebling central governments. Of course only a few will rise while the rest remain in the muck - Tokyo and Seoul didn't look very promising in the fifties, but their counterparts stayed the same while those two rose to become top tier global cities. Toronto didn't grow or succeed to nearly the same extent, and we'll be lucky to tread water without dramatic change.