Heather Mallick
I want planners, not developers, to have more of a say in rescuing Toronto,
We see the pattern Premier Doug Ford will follow for the next four years: an assembly line of spiteful cancellations. He will kill everything enacted by previous Liberal governments, not because they were bad, but because they were, I repeat, enacted by previous Liberal governments.
The list includes cancelling cap and trade, essential protections for precarious workers, the exploratory basic income project, a modern sex-ed curriculum in schools and a panel studying violence against women, suspending funding for local parent groups, replacing Liberal patronage appointees with Conservative ones at huge salary levels, and cancelling the Green Ontario Fund, which helped retrofit to save energy. On Monday, Ford will rub our faces in it by making us vote for a Toronto city council cut in half, lopsided in power and bewildering to all.
It’s like moving into a new house and smudging to remove the previous owner’s negative energies. Ford will just burn the place down.
It’s a childish way to spite one’s enemies, cancelling cap and trade particularly childish in the sense that deliberately hastening climate change will kill children.
Everything favoured by Liberals sets Ford aflame; he’s a lot like Stephen Harper that way. I imagine there will be some decisions by Ford that I will find sensible. If Ford finds out, he’ll cancel them, too. Ford copies Donald Trump in that they both call in airstrikes on everything done prior to their reaching power.
We live in madness. We are aghast.
Monday’s mayoral election will be a twist of the knife. Voters hate the emaciated new council but must choose a visionary mayor and a councillor who will do the least harm to the oversized huge ward she or he has been saddled with. It’s bad democracy but it works for Ford, making urban progressives run against each other and handing power to Ford’s conservative suburban tribe.
I talked to Brad Bradford, the city planner running for Ward 19 (Beaches—East York) against the NDP’s Matthew Kellway. (In the interests of fairness, I gave them both equal sign time on my lawn.) I wanted to hear Bradford’s views on council dysfunction, the Gardiner plan, voter response on talk radio and doorsteps, and the subject no one cares to discuss, urban architecture.
Former chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat, who hired Bradford, endorsed him before she decided to run for mayor, but John Tory has endorsed him too, designating him as lead campaigner for the subway downtown relief line, an expansion needed since the 1980s. Governments exist to plan for the future. City hall failed us. “In the ’90s, nobody thought we’d surpass Chicago in size,” Bradford says, but it happened. As I said, he’s a planner, which is ideal prep for city council.
Some voters may not like Bradford’s openness to hybrid options for the Gardiner Ex- pressway rather than tearing it down, but he doesn’t like the idea of an eight-lane boulevard. It’s an arguable point, difficult to explain on Twitter, so best not try.
A voter complained to me that two middle-aged white males are leading the Ward 19 race — Bradford is 32 — which seems lopsided. It’s part of the ideological tribalism that soaks modern debate. What group are you in? How ardent are you, ranging from “Sen. Ted Cruz is a Proud Canadian” to “Extreme Crokinole” to “I’m Eating Less Meat Now” to “Mao’s Red Guard”? Whatever you are, will you sit down with Mayor Keesmaat or Mayor Tory and try to find “a point of alignment,” as Bradford calls it?
There were some extremists, left and right, in the previous council who refuse to meet and talk. (Note: I urge Ward 7 to vote for Tiffany Ford or Anthony Perrruzza or, frankly, a big blue frog or my laundry basket, anyone but that clown Giorgio Mammoliti.) It’s as if Trump sent a test case over the border along with irrationality gas, now a fog over Toronto. It clouds our breathing, our brains.
Bradford says one of the biggest problems we face is apathy. He absolutely backs term limits, if only because voter inertia and name recognition will give any council seat winner a job for life.
Toronto is getting uglier. Not since the disastrous shoeboxes and concrete Brutalist fortresses of the 1960s has Toronto seen so many bad new buildings. Glass towers are ugly, with different tints revealing the year in which they were so cheaply built.
But the market wants floorto-ceiling windows, Bradford says, along with balconies that will never be used unless it’s for storage. It sells.
Downtown Toronto looks glassy, generic and ill-main- tained to me. Bradford disagrees. But he does want a design review panel for midrise buildings. Happily, they’re appearing in the Beaches but must be built in a particular way to attract shops, restaurants and foot traffic.
I want planners, more than developers, to have a say in rescuing Toronto. Otherwise we’re going to look like fractals of our ugliest intersection, Yonge and Bloor. Let’s hope we get that Monday vote right. Good luck to almost all.