Winter has allowed politicians to do nothing
Winter in Toronto isn’t a season — it’s a black hole, a vast empty space, a vacuum, a void into which the city disappears without a trace for months on end.
At the same time, Torontonians, overwhelmed by snow, cold, ice and darkness, grow disconnected from the places they live and then finally lose track of them as winter sucks up streets, sidewalks, bike lanes and, finally, our mobility. It buries gardens and garbage along with litter and dog poop. Winter also transforms some of Toronto’s most desirable real estate into a patchwork of abandoned lots, a wasteland where we leave stuff and walk away until warm weather returns.
As winter blankets the city with slush, our brains turn to mush. It makes us sluggish, selfish and stupid. Suddenly, we’re doing things that normally wouldn’t cross our mind. We park SUVs in the middle of roads lined with banks of snow even when that means blocking streetcars and holding up thousands of passengers who rely on them to get around.
Speaking of public transit, the street furniture installed for the King St. pilot project, which opened in late 2017, remains in situ. It was great during the summer when these interventions gave Torontonians new ways to inhabit the city. But as riders on the King St. line are aware, in winter, splattered with frozen crud, disfigured by dirt, buried in snow and ice and unusable, they become sad reminders of warmer times. They transform one of Toronto’s most important thoroughfares into a linear junkyard, a rubbish-blocked artery where every day looks like garbage day. The fact these installations were designed for our pleasure only makes it more painful.
But it’s winter; the civic brain has been put on hold. This year has been especially hard on city hall. Simply removing the snow is now more than we can handle. And let’s not forget the unshovelled stairwells and pathways that lead to parks, playgrounds and skating rinks. The city abandons them with the first snowflake, but remembers to erect signs warning us of the risk.
Places we love in spring, summer and fall turn invisible in winter to a city that won’t maintain these facilities.
The private sector isn’t much better. Come winter, when patios and sidewalk cafés close, dozens, if not hundreds, of them become outdoor storage units packed high with tables, chairs, umbrellas, portable heaters and the rest of the equipment found in such places. Proprietors who spend large sums of money tarting up their premises are suddenly quite content to turn them into something resembling a main street junkyard. Who cares? It’s winter.
Winter even manages to turn school boards into truants. Because kids can no longer walk to school, winter weather means they sometimes miss classes for days at a stretch. School buses have become the tail that wags the educational dog. When they’re cancelled, so is our kids’ tuition. In vehicledependent communities across the GTA, something as elementary as school cannot function when the buses aren’t running. What the combustion engine giveth, it also taketh away. Especially in the windswept steppes that surround the city.
Then there’s Toronto city council. Though the august body is susceptible to winter’s effects, it also uses them for its own advantage. Indeed, winter allows local leaders to indulge their preference for parsimony, passivity and political pettiness. For a government that enjoys power but would rather not have to exercise it, snow helps provide the cover it needs, literally and figuratively.
While the rest of the city is hunkered down, distracted and focused on little more than staying warm and getting from A to B, it’s easier to delay, defer and deflect.
As council’s most recent budget made clear, this is the time of year when the mayor can get away with most anything simply by responding to every question with the same answer — property tax increases are below the rate of inflation.
Perhaps the decision to reduce snow removal was actually part of a devious plot to implement its larger do-nothing agenda. Taking a cue from the populist regimes at every corner, council might have opted to leave mounds of the white stuff on the roads to divert Torontonians from noticing what’s happening at city hall.
Lucky for them, residents haven’t yet emerged from their annual winter hibernation.