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Heroes and Villains 2009: Superhero & Supervillain

By Torontoist

Torontoist ended last year by naming our Heroes and Villains of 2009—the very best and the very worst people, places, and things in and of Toronto over the past twelve months. Over four single-elimination rounds of voting, our readers have whittled our lists down to determine 2009′s big winners and big losers.

20090104superherosupervillainteaser.jpg
Illustration by Sasha Plotnikova/Torontoist.


Your votes—more than thirty thousand through four rounds of voting—are in.


The Toronto Public Library

Superhero: The Toronto Public Library

With 52% of the votes in the final round, the Toronto Public Library defeats Finalists Derek Forgie and Heterosexuals for Same-Sex Equality (37% of the final vote) and Wildlife (11% of the final vote).
Semi-Finalists: Waterfront Development, The Five-Cent Plastic Bag Fee, and The CBC.
Quarter-Finalists: Scramble Intersections, David Miller, The New Billboard Bylaw and Tax, The Citizen Lab, Jian Ghomeshi, and The Polaris Music Prize.
Honourable Mentions: Mark the Litter Guy, Martin Streek, The Lee’s Palace Mural, Fucked Up, Mats Sundin, AUX TV, Brian Burke, The Power Plant Gallery, Pages Books & Magazines, Roy Halladay, Jesse Brown, and Gary Wright.

Bell, Rogers, and Telus

Supervillains: Bell, Rogers, and Telus

With 56% of the votes in the final round, the unholy trinity of Canadian telecoms—Bell, Rogers, and Telus—defeats Finalists The Summer City Workers’ Strike (32% of the final vote) and Bed Bugs (12% of the final vote).
Semi-Finalists: Toronto a la Cart, Gary Bettman and the National Hockey League, and Prejudging the Michael Bryant–Darcy Allan Sheppard Collision.
Quarter-Finalists: MuchMusic, Joe Pantalone’s Ossington Bylaws, Media Layoffs, Michael Ignatieff, Yonge and Bloor’s Empty Lot, and the Yellow Pages,
Dishonourable Mentions: “The War on the Car”, The Book’s Impending Death, Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment, H1N1, The Beer Store, Richard Wengle, Earth Hour, Yann Martel, J. P. Ricciardi, The Weather, The Big Bop’s Demise, and Outrage.
All semi-finalists, quarter-finalists, and honourable and dishonourable mentions are sorted in descending order, by number of cumulative votes cast.

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Comments

  • http://undefined Matthew

    Moronic supervillian. Try living your life without the services they provide for a while. Convenience has a cost, and we’re willing to pay it.

  • http://undefined jaems33

    Exorbitant fees, terrible service, and an infrastructure that’s antiquated compared to such places as Japan and Sweden. The people have a right to be angry about paying for services that are a subpar.

  • http://undefined Michael

    I’d have to agree. Torontoist cited this story to make the case that cellular rates are horrible, but what is most pointed out to me is that the average American is paying over 20% more.
    Cell providers here have charged for incoming texts since forever, and if you do have a plan an incoming text deducts one from your plan, only the provider’s service announcements and spam is ever “Free.” Yet Canadians talk about how Rogers and Bellus are abusing some monopoly and a bunch of companies from next door coming in would create major competition. How?
    I’d actually *envy* the CanTel industry if it wasn’t for BitTorrent blockage, and let’s just be honest with ourselves and admit that 7 out of 10 people using it at any given time are doing things they shouldn’t be doing anyway.

  • http://undefined Matthew

    How much should it cost to have instant access to the collected sum of human knowledge or any of your friends and family in your pocket, and a lifeline to emergency services almost anywhere you may end up requiring them?
    Is there more value to be had in two ultra-densely populated countries? That doesn’t change the fact that these companies employ thousands of Torontonians who work very hard to provide services that are considered essential by most people.
    And do you really think they are plotting to keep customer service as terrible as you think it is? Most of the customer service employees you deal with probably have their own nightmare stories as customers of the companies they work for. It’s hard to get it right.
    But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Globalive really will crack the code and all of their customers will never have any complaints. I wouldn’t want to bet on that.

  • http://undefined McKingford

    So a big huzzah to the Toronto Public Library. I was worried that it might be overlooked, since it is so taken for granted. But, really, what a fabulous idea.
    I currently have checked out about $500 worth of books and movies (the TPL movies are a terribly underrated part of its service). In the course of a year I likely go through several thousand dollars worth of books and movies. If I had to buy these, well, I would do a lot less reading. This same scenario goes on on every block, in every neighbourhood, throughout Toronto. And lets also note that virtually any branch of the library is always very busy with people taking advantage of internet and WiFi access.
    In fact, the library is such an amazingly socialistic idea that if it didn’t already exist, you would likely be thrown into the cells at Guantanamo for suggesting it.

  • http://undefined Svend

    Libraries??
    That’s boring, same thing year in year out.
    I hope winning means they aren’t eligible next year.

  • http://undefined jem

    That library graphic (Gladstone branch) is fantastic. No name attached to it though!

  • http://www.torontoist.com David Topping

    The Toronto Public Library illustration was done by our Sasha Plotnikova; the Bell, Rogers, and Telus illustration was done by our Roxanne Ignatius! The full set of Heroes, Villains, and accompanying (explicitly credited) illustrations are here for Heroes and here for Villains.

  • http://undefined rek

    I’m meh about libraries, since I never use ‘em, but the Villain was right on.
    I don’t understand the situation here in Canada at all, wrt telecom. Korea is in a similar situation, where three or four native providers are the only options, yet the prices are incredibly low and service so much better. You don’t pay to receive texts, you don’t pay if you’re the one receiving the call, you can even have a phone that only receives texts/calls with no outgoing activity for something like 6 months. We have 2/3rds their population, so is the cause of such dramatic differences in service and pricing the length of copper?

  • http://paul.kishimoto.name Paul Kishimoto

    FUD all over the place, both of you.

    How much should it cost…

    Less. Whatever the rate would be in a market not so collusive. If you want to try your hand at calculating a hard number, by all means, go ahead. It’s beside the point.

    two ultra-densely populated countries

    There’s an order of magnitude between Canada and Sweden’s population densities—but there’s another order of magnitude between Sweden and Japan. I don’t think you have any hard evidence, either, on the density of urban Canada versus urban Sweden. Which two countries, exactly, are you talking about? Monaco and Bangladesh?

    do you really think they are plotting to keep customer service as terrible as you think it is

    No one suggested a conspiracy. The problem is a lack of market incentive to improve. You also imply exaggeration (“as you think it is”) and later suggest the telco employees “probably have their own nightmare stories as customers”. Which is it?

    Yet Canadians talk about how Rogers and Bellus are abusing some monopoly and a bunch of companies from next door coming in would create major competition. How?

    Who said anything about monopolies? It’s an oligopoly, or perhaps a set of provincial/regional duopolies. An operator starting a price war in one regional market faces retaliation in another from the same competitor; to avoid this, there is stasis.
    The Globalive CEO gave an entrepreneurship talk at the University of Toronto, during which he offered a concise, elegant and dispassionate summary of how new entrants would disturb this equilibrium.

    I’d actually *envy* the CanTel industry

    From Slovakia, maybe. We’re still leagues behind the state of the art, at least for broadband Internet.

    7 out of 10 people using it at any given time are doing things they shouldn’t be doing anyway.

    No one has yet figured out how to police the Internet, therefore we should be subject to predatory pricing and thank our lucky stars for it? No.

  • http://undefined Andrew

    Oh, snap! (or, if you’re over 30: Hear, hear.)

  • http://undefined Matthew

    The problem is a lack of market incentive to improve.

    Winning hundreds of millions of dollars a year’s worth of customers isn’t a market incentive? I’m sorry but in a world where every carrier is providing basically the same technology, there is nothing but incentive to improve customer service. But that process is always going to be two steps forward, three steps back as far as the aggrieved customer is concerned.

    The Globalive CEO gave an entrepreneurship talk at the University of Toronto, during which he offered a concise, elegant and dispassionate summary of how new entrants would disturb this equilibrium.

    Lacaverra doesn’t have what I would call an un-biased view of the industry.
    The term oligarchy gets thrown around a lot with respect to telcos, but people have to be realistic about how much it costs to run a network; and the barrier to entry that puts up against additional national carriers. It’s all well and good to compare the densities in the urban centres, but there are license requirements to provide coverage outside of those urban centres and building the backhaul infrastructure to less populated areas ain’t easy and it ain’t cheap.

  • antiboy

    it’s not as cheap as you’d think. i’m not sure if you’ve lived there or not, but i was paying $50 something for regular 1-year contract, no data plan.

  • http://undefined torontothegreat

    “Winning hundreds of millions of dollars a year’s worth of customers isn’t a market incentive?”
    You can’t win customers by forcing them to have 0 choice(s). So again, what is the incentive for the big 3? Their customer base is so cyclical (hate rogers move to bell, bell screws up your billing, move back to rogers) that there is no reason to give a rats ass on their part.

  • http://undefined rek

    I did live there. I was on pay-as-you-go, my first ₩30,000 lasted me three months easily, just calls and texting.

  • http://undefined McKingford

    I’d be the last one to defend Canada’s telcoms (and, in fact, did vote for them as Villain), but the argument for Canadians paying higher prices than a place like Korea is, in fact, premised on our lower population. To be more precise, it is our lower population spread over a land mass exponentially larger: to service even less people than Korea, the Canadian telcoms have to maintain cell towers on much, much larger scale.

  • http://paul.kishimoto.name Paul Kishimoto

    Compare these Virgin service coverage maps (Virgin uses the Bell network) and this Rogers map with this population density map. Canada may be very big, but the carriers omit a large majority of the land area from service coverage.
    As I suggested above, vague arguments based on density are suspect because they were first advanced by the carriers themselves and are reiterated without any evidence.
    If there were reliable numbers on the population density in the service coverage areas of Canada, and those numbers were significantly less than the equivalents in South Korea, then those arguments might carry some weight. If they exist, though, I haven’t seen them.

  • http://undefined rek

    Looking at Paul’s maps, it looks like Canada’s network is perhaps 4 times the size of Korea’s, at most. Bell didn’t pay for their backbone, and maintenance can’t be so costly as to explain the difference. This also doesn’t take into account how busy the networks are. Even if you excluded the network outside the 401 corridor and a few urban spots out west, there’s no way our network traffic rivals Korea’s.
    I have a minimal monthly pay-as-you-go plan here, and I figure I’m paying roughly 300% more a year than I did in Seoul (not including the second hand cell I bought, I spent under $75 in 6 months; here I’m lucky if 4 months comes in under $125). Bell would be completely in the red if network size was the sole reason for prices being so much higher here.

  • http://undefined torontothegreat

    But… You probably make a lot more phonecalls/texts in Toronto no? Of course I’m assuming you know more people here then the 3 mos you’re referring to in Seoul?

  • http://undefined Matthew

    You want some numbers Paul? Well, I don’t think we need a GIS database to figure this out. I’ve heard the statement that 90% of Canada’s population lives within 100km of the US border enough times that I think we can assume that it’s roughly accurate for our purposes.
    Based on that, 100km times a 6000 km border gives 0.9 * 33 Million people in a 600 000 sq km area, which equals about 50 people per square km in the area of the country where most of the people actually live.
    Wikipedia lists South Korea’s population density at 486 people per square kilometer, almost ten times the density of Canada’s populated area. You can draw your own conclusions.