Photo by Georgie_grrl from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

Since long before he was elected mayor, Rob Ford has championed the idea that Toronto was spending its way towards fiscal disaster. Believe that or not (and many don’t), Ford swept into office on a wave of anti-gravy promises, so it’s no surprise that he’s launched a massive review of City-run services—via a series of roundtable discussions and an extensive online survey—with the aim of determining which are Torontonians’ greatest priorities, and which might be suitable for spending cuts. That is, after all, what people voted for.
However, despite a lot of noise about broad public consultation, the review is not likely to generate much meaningful public input. For one thing, the roundtables have been crammed into a whirlwind two-week schedule, with only limited participation available due to registration limits (there is one remaining session, taking place tomorrow night at 7 p.m. at the Scarborough Civic Centre). Moreover, City has chosen to purchase a DIY survey tool rather than commissioning a qualified polling firm to design its questions properly.

The massive survey asks people to weigh in on which services Toronto should drop or contract out to close a $774-million budget gap. City Hall could have handed this critical part of the review to any of Toronto’s numerous research firms with strong track records in public affairs—a shortlist would include Ipsos Reid, Harris/Decima, Polaris, Environics, and Vision Critical. Instead, they opted to purchase a simple tool which allowed them to design the survey themselves, from a company called Qualtrics.
The document resulted, according to Glenys A. Babcock, a former VP at Ipsos Reid who now works as a consultant, is poorly designed and suffers from inherent political biases.

You Can Say Anything We Want

Do you want to tell City Hall that public transit is an important issue for Toronto as a whole? Well, you can’t. The survey lists seven broad issues and asks respondents to rate them by importance; transit is not among them. Your only option is to tick of “infrastructure,” which includes everything from water to roadways. Are affordable daycare, support for the elderly, or universal accessibility important to you? We can’t even guess which category those fall under. “Meeting the basic needs of vulnerable people” seemed likely, but later on in the survey it becomes clear that “vulnerable people” is a code-word for “crime-prone youth in poor neighborhoods.” A blank space after the question allows for write-ins, but it doesn’t let you rate issues by importance, and provides little-to-no basis for comparison.
“We have to ask why [...] such an obviously lousy survey was sent out,” Babcock says. “This is about Rob Ford and accountability. Where is the accountability here?”
As she goes through the survey, Babcock’s frustration grows. She chalks up most of its flaws to inexperience, but some oddities make her suspicious. The online survey lets you click through almost every screen without ever answering a question, but you must provide your postal code. Already annoyed at the survey’s weak privacy policy, Babcock was less than thrilled by this. “I thought, ‘Isn’t that interesting—they want to know what ward I’m in.’”
Though it aims to sort respondents, to discern the different needs and opinions of various demographics, the survey’s categories seem illogical. You wouldn’t normally group 15-year-old high-schoolers with 24-year-old university grads who live and work on their own, would you? Or, to give another example, if you rode the TTC once over the past year, would you put yourself in the same ridership group as people who rely on it every day, or those who buy tickets for their children? If you were designing this survey, apparently, you would. “How are these the same people?” Babcock wants to know.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

When it offers more than a handful of possible responses, the survey goes overboard and sabotages itself. It asks for in-depth feedback on 35 different service categories, each of which is subdivided into “activities,” to create a laundry-list of decisions on what services the City should provide, farm out, cut, or improve. This single question from the online survey fills almost three printed pages. Included are such items as the police, the fire department, and Emergency Medical Services (all as separate entries), and a single entry encompassing all “arts, culture, and heritage programs” but another one for “city-run live theatres.” Garbage collection is there, and public health, and “funding and programs for vulnerable groups,” and the Toronto Zoo.
It’s a little surprising to see bedrock services like health and firefighting on this list at all—what would happen if everyone said that the City should drop them? Presumably, the City would ignore those responses and keep providing the services. So why are they padding out this list? With so many choices in front of them, many people would be reticent to rate every service highly, which means that on an overcrowded list, some entries will get bumped down arbitrarily.
In Babcock’s view, the main consequence of such overcrowding will be a tendency for respondents to answer randomly, seeing a wall of options to get through, instead of a set of core services that need case-by-case evaluation.
“The results are likely to have an enormous random element to them and not provide meaningful input,” she says. Or, as she also put it: “garbage in, garbage out.”

More = Less

After deciding which of the services should be City-run, respondents are asked to choose only three from the large list for further discussion. At that stage, it’s not hard to see how things that matter a little bit to a lot of people will overshadow those that are crucial to a few.
Asked to choose between police services and “community-run heritage programs,” how many will voice their opinions on the latter? The survey, in other words, can push respondents towards thinking in terms of the bare minimum level of acceptable service. Is the outcome of such an exercise likely to be something most Torontonians will be happy with?
One of the most striking features of the survey: respondents are asked, for any given service, whether “maintaining the quality is more important” or “lowering the cost to the City is more important.” Think the service should be improved? There’s no check-box for that. It provides another misleading set of choices when it asks respondents how they would choose to pay for any cost increases—via increased property taxes, higher user fees, or a combination thereof. Conspicuously absent: the array of other revenue-generating tools the City has at is disposal, such as the now-cancelled Vehicle Registration Tax or the Land Transfer Tax Ford has promised (but cannot afford) to cut. The survey simply chooses from among the full range of options the City could consider, and presents only some of these to the public for deliberation.
There are other issues. The survey ascertains respondents’ nationality, but never mentions settlement or newcomer services. It asks whether they have received a “university diploma” instead of a degree. Some of these things would be funny, if they didn’t point to an unsettling lack of attention to detail in such an important document. Overall, the whole thing is a toxic blend of incompetence and self-assurance, delivered with a populist spin and a political agenda.

Ford has enjoyed a honeymoon of sorts, with his popularity buoyed by hopes that he will steer Toronto’s economy towards the right without causing much damage. The structure of this review makes it clear that these are fantasies indeed. The survey, in the guise of speaking to the public, does little more than steamroll over Toronto’s diversity of perspectives.
Although Babcock filled out the survey, she did so with a deepening sense of futility. As that feeling spreads, it will poison future attempts to connect City Hall with Toronto residents. Rather than squeezing savings from the budget using faulty analysis, those behind the review should ask themselves whether the City, in the long run, can afford to burn so much public trust over a manufactured panic and some poorly chosen questions.

CORRECTION: June 8, 2011 When we originally published this post we attributed the poor design of the survey to Qualtrics, the firm the City chose to help facilitate this part of the consultation process. However, Qualtrics sells do-it-yourself survey tools and did not itself design the survey; the company is therefore not accountable for the survey’s poor design. We have amended this article to reflect this, and send our apologies ot Qualtrics.

Illustration by Matthew Daley/Torontoist.

Torontoist is ending the year by naming our Heroes and Villains—Toronto’s very best and very worst people, places, and things over the past twelve months. From December 13–17: the Villains! From December 20–24, the Heroes! And, from December 27–30, you can vote for Toronto’s Superhero and Supervillain of the year.

Let’s face it: Toronto has a well-deserved reputation for clique-ishness. Previously, nifty new cafés with fancy snacks were reserved for hipsters, bloggers, and left-wing pinkos in general. Board games and other socialized geekery were confined to comic shops—which, no pun intended, aren’t everyone’s cup of tea—or the games cabinet of that one friend willing to step up and be the designated dork when someone’s Catan needed Settlin’.
Enter Snakes & Lattes. We Torontonians may have never heard of a “board game café” before, but its appeal was instantly apparent even before it opened in August.
For one thing, Snakes & Lattes, on Bloor east of Palmerston, has an unswerving dedication to face-to-face, convivial, spontaneous, and public fun, a principle Torontonians have been known to stumble over. When customers are feeling outgoing, staff at Snakes & Lattes will even play match-maker to set them up with a table that has room for one or two more. It’s as good a way as any to meet new people, get to know them, and sink their battleships, all while softening the edges between social circles. For the strictly practical, It’s also the fastest way to a table on a busy night.
As another pillar of the café’s mission to make us all get along, Snakes & Lattes also makes us turn off our goddamned internet (for a little while); its no-Wi-Fi policy is a welcome, if mandatory, breath of fresh air. Broken only in cases of direst email emergency, it hammers home the owners’ commitment to getting customers out of their shells. If you need extra coaxing to abandon your laptop, Snakes & Lattes can ply you with everything you need to relax offline. Good coffee? Check. Quiche? They cook a mean one. A reasonably priced bottle of Fin du Monde never hurt an hour-long game of Pandemic, either.
At the end of the day, what counts most is that the innovative café is a huge hit. The day its doors opened, Snakes & Lattes was packed with excited people happy to pay the all-important $5 cover, and its popularity is undiminished. And what really sets it apart from this year’s other upstart restaurants is this: what draws the crowd isn’t a Pavlovian menu or snob appeal. It is the crowd. Co-founders Ben Castanie and Aurelia Peynet feel (and we agree) that Torontonians are better company than they give themselves credit for.
Besides, anything that chips away at the stereotype of the downtown, pampered, espresso-sippin’, Helvetica-recognizin’, art-installation-appreciatin’, elitist uberdouche is okay with us. We downtowners come in all sorts, and we’re not that bad, once you get to know us. But be warned: we will obliterate you at RoboRally.

Illustration by Matthew Daley/Torontoist.

Torontoist is ending the year by naming our Heroes and Villains—Toronto’s very best and very worst people, places, and things over the past twelve months. From December 13–17: the Villains! From December 20–24, the Heroes! And, from December 27–30, you can vote for Toronto’s Superhero and Supervillain of the year.

Like clockwork, every year, pedestrian injuries peak in winter and early summer. In fact, we’re likely just coming down from one such peak right now—the switch back from Daylight Savings Time has been blamed for triggering it. But January of this year saw a much worse rash of traffic collisions, which at one point killed ten pedestrians in eight days. The police response? A widely publicized “pedestrian blitz” that handed out tickets for jaywalking, which in many cases is not, in fact, an offense.
For one reason or another, pedestrians end up bearing the brunt of public scorn for collisions. In the typical absence of conclusive evidence of fault, it’s all too easy to write off collisions by deciding, as the Star’s Christopher Hume put it, that “pedestrians are naughty children who must be protected from themselves.”
What we’re not asking is why we tolerate so much danger on our city streets, and so little action to against it. Especially when everyone, from the Shawn Micallefs to the Don Cherrys of the world, is a pedestrian sometimes.
For three years in a row now—2008 [PDF], 2009 [PDF], and the first quarter of 2010 (no newer statistics were available) [PDF]—Toronto has had more traffic collisions per 100,000 people than any other city in Canada. On average, 2,220 pedestrians are struck in reported collisions every year, of which only one hundred escaped unharmed. Typically, twenty-eight victims die, but this year, fourteen died in January alone—a record-breaking number of fatalities clustered in central Toronto. The city’s latest official statistics [PDF] show that only twelve percent of injury victims were ruled to have been “inattentive” at the time of a collision, a percentage that has remained virtually unchanged since 2004 [PDF]. Vastly more often than not, pedestrian victims were in a normal, attentive state, had the right of way, and were crossing in good road conditions.
Unfortunately, pedestrian victims have few natural defenders. In discussions about traffic safety they tend to get lumped in with cyclists, which dooms things for several reasons. Being mentally filed alongside cyclists doesn’t actually give pedestrian victims any dedicated representation, for starters, and the two groups have different (though sometimes related) needs, and use different parts of the roadway altogether. Moreover, this puts pedestrians squarely in the crossfire of the so-called “War on the Car.” Furthermore, while Toronto police generally make great efforts to warn against rushing to lay blame (this year’s pedestrian blitz aside), this strategy can easily backfire. In a climate where conventional wisdom—not to mention mainstream media—hold that pedestrians struck in traffic weren’t adequately protecting themselves, a well-intentioned neutral stance enables commonplace biases towards assuming that dead or injured pedestrians were to blame for their own misfortune.
Ultimately, the situation is alarmingly counter-productive. Because pedestrian injuries and deaths seem to be translated instantly into anecdotal evidence of non-drivers’ carelessness, public attention is diverted from the need to address systemic road safety problems, glossing over the role of infrastructure in promoting or undermining pedestrian safety, and broadcasting an everyone-for-themselves mentality incompatible with the life of healthy communities. The sad results are dangerous roads that stay dangerous, year after year.

Illustration by Matt Daley/Torontoist.

We learn why Rob Ford was kicked out of that coaching job, police use bankers to scanalyze photos for Black Bloc members, and Toronto’s paddle-wheel ferry turns one hundred in today’s Newsstand.

Good morning! According to the teacher who “disinvited” Councillor Rob Ford (Ward 2, Etobicoke-North) from coaching his high school’s football team following an altercation between Ford and a player, there was no harm, no foul. In fact, John Giuga, the former head phys-ed teacher at Newtonbrook Secondary School, seems to admire Ford’s intensity. Giuga told the Star that he asked Ford to leave the team after hearing some “very heated language” in an exchange with a player, but stressed that no there was no contact and the young man’s feelings were most assuredly not hurt. Ford now coaches for the Catholic school board.
Meanwhile, the Globe has accused Ford, George Smitherman, and a pack of other candidates of breaking election rules by holding press conferences at Nathan Phillips Square. They also threw in a dry rundown of Ford’s electoral promises, wondering how Ford will pay for staffers to run his proposed spending accountability plans.
That joke we made about tagging Black Bloc suspects on Facebook? Well, apparently the Canadian Bankers Association has a computer program that does that, only better. And bankier? Anyway, well enough for the fifteen-person investigative team to farm out automated photo comparisons to the suspects. After receiving over fourteen thousand photographs of suspected violent protesters, police shipped them off to the CBA. Police are searching for ten people suspected of arson and mischief over five thousand dollars. So, what, have they dropped that assault charge?
Remember those other detainees? The ones Canada is accused of knowingly turning over to be tortured by Afghan authorities? It seems that after months of parliamentary wrangling, a blue-ribbon panel of supreme court judges has been appointed to sift through 40,000 documents pertaining to the alleged abuse. The Harper government had fought hard to keep the documents suppressed, citing national security concerns. The panel will now determine whether any of them should be made public, and what, if anything, must be censored.
A nineteen-year-old has been shot in the head and killed at a playground Wednesday. Multiple shots were fired in the shooting, and police are now trying to determine whether it was an ambush or a gunfight. The man appears to have been the only victim of the shooting.
And the Trillium, Toronto’s steam-powered island ferry, is turning one hundred! The paddle ferry was put into service on June 18, 1910, a date that equals today plus two days and minus one century, but was ditched by the ferry service for most of the ’60s and ’70s. It survived prolonged disuse and is now proudly tooling around the lake and looking way better than you would if you were a centenarian who had been used as a garbage scow. For the regular $6.50 fare, passengers on the noon cruise for the next three Fridays will be treated to the civic stylings of Sun columnist Mike Filey.

Illustration by Matt Daley/Torontoist.

The G20 taint continues to destroy everything it touches, our garbage smells so bad that it’s banned from London, and Toronto’s “world-class” beaches get nuked in today’s Newsstand.

Good morning! Has it only been two weeks since Toronto’s G20 weekend from hell? Thankfully, we’ve all moved on and now everything is forgiven, right guys? Well, at least Torontonians’ justified outrage isn’t being converted into Progressive Conservative attack screeds, which you might’ve been worried about. Aw, maaan. Well, at the bare minimum, thank secular Jesus that Ontario Ombudsbadass André Marin is on the case with regards to alleged police misconduct. That man may be a legendarily tough boss, but he’s nigh-on incorruptible and virtually immune to criticism. Oh, no frigging way!
This is the end, Toronto. It is now time to submit to the authority of Oakville, or York Region, or even to bow down to the visions of our future Etobicokean overFord. No, no, that’s just the crushing frustration talking. At any rate, the melange of dread, anger, and disappointment we’re currently feeling is nothing compared to what the families of the sixteen accused violent protesters are going through.
A man in his twenties, apparently an innocent bystander, was shot in the back while protecting a child from stray bullets fired at an anti-violence rally. Read that sentence again slowly, and then we’ll let you know that the man is in stable condition, and police are seeking two suspects who may have been caught on a home video made at the event.
Toronto’s compost stinks so much that we are losing our waste-processing privileges in London, Ontario. Waste collected in our green bin program is apparently suspected of letting off a smell so terrible that it’s caused a two-month shutdown of a major treatment company, “Orgaworld,” to let the horrifically nasty fumes disperse a little. During that time, the roughly 4.6 million kilograms of green bin goo Toronto would be sending to Orgaworld will have to find somewhere else to ripen. So far, we have a fall-back solution to deal with the problem for the next two weeks.
The spookily ramshackle gothic church-husk islanded by traffic lanes at 1 Spadina Crescent may be getting a little…what do you call it? Zazzle? Vim? Anyway, architecture of this caliber. U of T’s Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design has its eye on the building, which currently houses most of U of T’s visual arts program and a bunch of disembodied human eyeballs for organ donation. If approved by the university’s administration, the proposal could mean tens of millions of dollars of renovations and additions to the site, and a new “bridge to the city and this great artery of Spadina.”
It seems that although seven of Toronto’s beaches meet world-class safety standards, they can’t shake their bad reputation as dirty, infectious, film-developing devil-ponds. We sympathize, but it’s possible that plans to ship nuclear waste by Toronto’s shores isn’t speeding along our beaches’ image rehabilitation.

Illustration by Matt Daley/Torontoist.

Pride gets sort of defunded for anti-Israelism, Toronto police get commended for anti-protestering, and it’s finally time for a public execution at Casa Loma in today’s morning news.

Months after a middling bureaucrat once again turned Pride into a political football, it looks like City Council is ready to defund the parade over the involvement of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid. The tussle, stoked by an amateur documentary that branded QuAIA antisemitic, seemed like a dud after Pride was forced to repeal a ban targeting QuAIA. Now, City Council has chosen to withhold Pride Toronto’s funding for next year until after the parade is over, at which point Toronto will give them the necessary funds to have put on the parade, as long as they did not offend anyone Martin Gladstone.
But City Council has a sunny side, too. They were quite happy to fund retiring councillor Kyle Rae’s (Ward 27, Toronto Centre-Rosedale) $12,000 party. Council speaker Sandra Bussin (Ward 32, Beaches-East York) ruled that Rae acted in line with city policy. Councillor Rob Ford (Ward 2, Etobicoke Central) responded that “when I become mayor on October 25, the party will be over.” And then he chewed through a phonebook.
Meanwhile, City Council voted 36–0 to commend Toronto Police for their “outstanding work” at the G20 summit. Subsequent amendments, praising Chief of Police Bill Blair and the Toronto Police Services Board, also passed, opposed only by Ford, who may have blamed Blair and the TPSB for making cops act “too nice” to dangerous potential firebombers like this guy. Those frustrated over the summit’s indiscriminate mass arrests, bluster, and contempt bordering on or crossing into violence may find all this political support perplexing. Let’s explore it with a simple thought experiment. Imagine, if you will, that you are shutting right the fuck up. Continue.
Anyway, for their part, police are banking on the massive public goodwill they have obviously earned by asking people to turn over any potentially incriminating videos or photos to a team of “extremely aggressive officers.” Does that include this one?
Ontario has learned that hosting the G20 just isn’t worth the pain, according to the McGuinty government, which just realized it for the first time yesterday. For its part, the Conservative Opposition knows exactly what needs to be done: we need to hold an inquiry into the Liberal government’s mismanagement of its now infamous Public Works regulation, but police forces, who willfully perpetuated the sham that the regulation gave police extraordinary powers within five metres of an imaginary line, are more than capable of conducting their own review. Also, the security fence cost one million dollars per kilometre, and that’s only twice the estimate.
For the first time in history, heads may actually (figuratively) roll at Casa Loma. The city has issued an ultimatum to the Kiwanis Club of Casa Loma, who have managed the castle for the last seventy-three years. By municipal decree, the Kiwanis branch has twenty-three days to behead replace current president Richard Wozenilek, or we shall seize the castle, possibly using ballistas, but probably by just hiring someone else to run the place. At issue is roughly $1.6 million worth of restorations and improvements that Kiwanis has been slow in delivering.
Chris Bosh, as reported earlier, has decided to leave Toronto for Florida. The Raptors power forward announced that he wants to join his Olympic basketball teammate Dwayne Wade in the Miami Heat. Bosh and Wade were both being closely watched, along with Cleveland’s LeBron James, who hasn’t made his plans known yet.
Finally, have you heard of the new “ECO FEE” you’re now paying for the recycling costs of certain consumer goods? If you said yes, then why didn’t you tell anyone else? It seems the provincial agency overseeing the fee has decided that they “would rather spend the money to educate people than to spend the money months ahead to say, ‘Hey, there’s a new eco fee coming.’” So we assume that they are educating the public about something else, perhaps astrology, or shipbuilding, because this website doesn’t seem to justify $2.5 million in “education” funding, even if it has a Twitter tie-in.

Illustration by Matt Daley/Torontoist.

In today’s Newsstand, Pride queens and Queen Elizabeth II in Toronto, Mammoliti not for mayor, and two major fires in the city.

Rejoice, Toronto, for you are healed! Surely nothing soothes G20-related wounds like a “group hug for a million people” à la Pride. Police Chief Bill Blair avoided the parade, however, after being booed and flipped off at a Pride/police cocktail party last Tuesday. Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, the group whose (temporary) banishment from this year’s parade sparked widespread protests, was present and marched.
And so did Brian Burke. The Leafs’ GM joined this year’s parade, keeping a promise to his late son, Brendan. It’s really not the kind of story you can sum up in a paragraph, so just do yourself a favor and read the National Post‘s beautiful piece on it.
You may not have noticed, but the queen toured Toronto yesterday, and while her schedule mostly stuck to the usual church-going and racetrack-gambling stuff, Elizabeth II was surprised when an eighty-seven-year-old woman “broke free of the waiting throng outside a church service and ambled right up” to the say hi and give the Queen a commemorative tea towel. As you’d expect, the Toronto woman was immediately hauled off by screaming riot police, subjected to an unwarranted strip-searches, detained in unsafe conditions without sufficient food or water for thirty-six hours, and then released without charge greeted by the monarch, who smiled and chatted amicably. What a crazy idea! For those of you keeping score at home, that’s -900 for democracy, but +2 for nice old ladies.
The dream is all but over for Giorgio Mammoliti (mayoral candidate, and councillor for Ward 7, York West). Mammoliti, who hates kids, loves casinos, and wanted to abolish property taxes for seniors but establish a Toronto red light district (perhaps on the advice of his contacts within the industry), is almost certainly announcing today that he is dropping out of the race for mayor in the hopes of keeping his old council seat. Virtually all of Mammoliti’s supporters are expected to go to Crazy Rival Rob Ford (Ward 2, Etobicoke North, and yes, that’s his official title). Ford, shown sleeping with his eyes open in the Star‘s photo, famously called Mammoliti a “Gino boy,” grievously insulting the long-serving councillor’s tight-pantsed heritage and frosted-tipped culture.
Musa, the popular restaurant that Martiniboys.com called “contemporary without being trendy,” was largely destroyed in a fire yesterday. Although staff and customers were in the building when the blaze began, no one was injured by the fire, which appears to have started on the roof or a nearby balcony. Photos of the building speak for themselves, showing a caved-in roof and blown-out windows. The fire spread to three adjacent houses before being extinguished. The Globe is reporting that firefighters say Musa may need to be structurally reinforced or demolished.
And the death of a twenty-three-year-old Ryerson student in a separate fire in the Annex last Friday is being treated as a homicide by police. The woman’s twenty-seven-year-old boyfriend, who was also caught in the fire, is in an induced coma.

Illustration by Matt Daley/Torontoist.

Upheaval. Anger. Confusion. Vivid welts. American Apparels with actual shit on the walls. But surely we must weigh these costs against what was accomplished this weekend. So, what’s that? We bade farewell to some police cruisers, of course, and the G20 security forces got such a good workout that we might make this fun run an annual event, if not bimonthly.
And speaking of vigorous constitutionals, the first person arrested under the unannounced regulation that empowered police to conduct warrantless searches and interrogations of anyone within five metres of the G20 security fence intends to file a constitutional challenge. And we say bravo! Technically a regulation, the so-called “secret law” that was passed by provincial cabinet without debate in the legislature, at the “extraordinary request” of police chief Bill Blair, can be summarized as follows: papers or jail time, now.
And throughout all the mayhem, we wish we had the patience of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who gave an unusual interview this weekend amidst the festivities to discuss one of the G8 summit’s most important, and more neglected, decisions. Speaking of Stephen Harper’s maternal health initiative, Moon said that “it’s encouraging that the G8 committed five billion dollars for the next five years. I welcome it. But my (action plan) asks fifteen billion dollars immediately.” Toronto police, take note: that is what we call restraint.
And while we’re speaking of Stephen Harper, he really drove home the point that the state has advanced far beyond needing agents provocateurs to justify security measures that any honest observer would admit went beyond insane and bordered on obscene, particularly in light of all the good that might have been done had our government been willing to spend the money on something constructive.
Which brings us to the so-called “Black Bloc” tactics deployed to such devastating effect against incidental targets and crowds of innocent protesters. It’s unfortunate that one of the major coups of the summit and protests was scored by a group of balaclava’d dorks bent on causing collateral damage and nothing else.
Oh, and we finally got rid of that unsightly Eternal Flame of Hope. The new Plywood Blunt Pyramid of Authority looks much nicer.
There are precisely two genuinely silver linings. Least but not last: the nearly naked guy who balanced on the war monument on University Avenue survived his puzzling stunt, and looked kind of cool (and assuredly pretty dumb—but we say that with love) all the while. And secondly: the fact that the next summit, just five months from now, is happening almost as far from Toronto as is geographically possible. How much is that one going to cost? Seriously, is the G20 really some sort of low-level stimulus program?
That about rounds out summit news, and leaves us a little time to talk about Toronto’s latest export. If rumors and an anonymous NBA executive are to be trusted, Chris Bosh is headed to Chicago. The Texas-born power forward may be headed moving south soon. LeBron James could join him, too.
Man, that was a pile of good news! But for those of you who require a chaser, Torontoist is all too pleased to provide the Little Sedan That Could. Happy Monday, everyone!