Historicist: "The city that nobody loves"
Elsewhere in the Ist-a-Verse
MP Peggy Nash and MPP Cheri DiNovo protest the closing of Toronto's swimming pools.
At 8:30 this morning, hundreds of protesters gathered at the corner of Keele Street and Glenlake Avenue to save their community pool slated for closure next month. Extremely fit-looking senior citizens with youthful energy wore bathing suits, goggles, and swim caps. Young children, chanting “Save our pools! Save our pools!” waved signs which read, “Swim skills save children’s lives,” and “Keep our services in our neighbourhood!” Time-strapped parents made this all happen.
Members of the press from local, community papers to national news organizations were in full force. To hear stories and interviews, tune into CBC Radio One at noon today, and watch newscasts tonight on CityTV, Global, CTV, and the CBC (also check out Torontoist's coverage of a recent community meeting). The issue doesn’t seem to be about keeping just one local pool afloat anymore: it’s part of a portrait of our educational and health systems as drowning victims.
Parkdale-High Park MP Peggy Nash, MPP Cheri DiNovo, and TDSB Trustee Irene Atkinson called to fix the funding formula through microphones and megaphones. The Keele Pool is valued at seven million dollars, and requires $220,000 of urgent repair. Keele Pool Action Committee member Mark Walker compared closing the pool to “throwing out your car when a headlight doesn’t work.”
The City says it has no money, the province isn’t listening, and the federal government seems like it has abandoned Toronto. With reported surpluses making headlines, why can’t a community keep the pool they’ve shared since 1980?
It’s a jurisdictional conflict. The Action Committee will push for responses from the city, the TDSB, and various ministries of health and education. “The real problem is that you can’t get the Minister of Education, the Mayor, and the Health Minister all into the same room,” said Walker.
Maybe the real problem is that we live in a culture that doesn’t value its children or its senior citizens. After the kids followed the 9 a.m. school bell to their classes and the crowd dispersed, the parents were left wondering: is this what we want to be remembered for?
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Questions I would love to ask the politicians involved (and which I would love the media to ask):
Mayor Miller and Council
The City says it is broke but found $10.6M for a waterless "yuppi beach" in Queen's Quay and $3M for renovations to the peace garden. Is the city saying that there is nothing in its budget that is less important than the health and safety of our children?
If the pools close, will the City then invest to build new pools to ensure that residents receive a similar level of service to other neighbourhoods?
Have you considered reinstating nominal pool user fees to raise operating funds for pools?
TDSB
Can we have a detailed accounting of the maintenance costs? Are these real costs or projections?
Are you prepared to transfer the pools to the City since you cannot fund them?
Minister Of Education
As a Trustee you pledged never to close these pools. Why are you breaking that promise now?
To all three
When can we have a meeting with all levels of government to address various workable solutions to this problem?
The provincial government won't step in to fund Toronto's school pools because we're the only city that has them. It's a piss poor reason but the provincial government doesn't want to be seen by the rest of the province giving our city "preferential" treatment. This approach is indicative of a larger funding problem: Toronto is fundamentally different than other jurisdictions but the funding formula doesn't acknowledge it.
The City won't fund school pool repairs because it doesn't own them and they already pay fees to rent pools for City-run programs. Plus, the City is already struggling to keep their own assets in a state of good repair.
And, of course, the TDSB can't pay for it because they can barely keep the walls from crumbling around students and have to use capital dollars to balance their operating budget.
So it's clear to me that this is something the provincial government needs to take responsibility for. As part of his 2003 platform, McGuinty promised to implement the Rozanski report. That report called for education to receive $2 billion more than it did in 2002 each and every year. While there has been more funding for education since 2003, McGuinty has not kept that promise in full and when pools are forced to close that reality becomes painfully obvious.
How about brib... er... incentivising MLSE to take them over?
As for this pool - maybe Dalton McGuinty and Sylvia Watson will save the votes... er... pool.
Seems arts funding is in while sports and rec funding is out. This is the community centre where i play and would hate to see their swim programs go down the drain. In this part of Toronto we are already underserved. I was looking forward to more support for building Wabash Community Centre, meanwhile I had no idea currently established centres were at such risk.
This is what happens when a majority on council are focused on avoiding responsibility, trying to get more revenue, and give as much money to their union allies. No consideration has been given to the right size of staff and bureaucracy at City hall, salary and staff levels at the TTC, trying to roll back union wages. Instead council persecutes councillors who don't spend money and tries to blame other levels of government for why infrastructre is falling apart.
Every other community in the province has municipal pools, paid out of city budgets. They put the majority of the tax burden on residents, rather than businesses, and focus on value for money rather than caving in to unions whenever they look angry. Every MPP knows how dysfunctional Toronto Council is, their refusal to follow a budget or to try to live within their means. That's why council will and should always get a negative response from Queen's Park and Ottawa.
The best response would be for Queen's Park to abolish Toronto Council and have the city run by the Premier. Toronto's politics are dysfunctional and incapable opf running the city, so let adults run things.
Um, 'Hey', unless you have hit your head quite hard lately, perhaps you meant we should abolish the provinces, and give the cities more power.
Province of Toronto, anyone? Send Queen's Park to Kingston.
This spring childhood obesity and early onset of type II Diabetes has been in the media. The poor and first nations people are disproportionately represented in these unfortunate statistics. Does anyone else see the irony in closing established city and school pools in light of this news? Despite the city stats, the Keele Street PS pool is well used by the schools, by local residents and by Parks and Recreation programmes. I believe it is an unwise invetstment to plan and build large recreation centres in the weathier outskirts of the city when the less prvileged in the centre of the city are watching their pools being filled with sand (for an estimated cost of $1 mil!)