The truth behind the tales people tell about Toronto.

In 1964, when Raymond Moriyama received the commission to design what was then known as the Centennial Museum of Science and Technology, the young architect told the Star, “I think it’s important to give every building the personal touch.”

When it came to the first big project of his fledgling career, he meant this literally. Rumour has it that he actually built his name into the museum’s roof.

At the time, Moriyama’s star was still rising. He had already created buzz with his design for the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre on Wynford Drive.

Prior to the cultural centre, Moriyama’s most recognized public commission had been the Garden Pavilion at Edwards Gardens. The Centennial Museum of Science and Technology—which we now know as the Ontario Science Centre—would turn out to be a milestone in his career. Soon the architect would be receiving accolades for the designs of many now-iconic structures around the city, the country, and, eventually, the globe.

Perched atop the Don Valley, the Science Centre consists of three linked structures. Moriyama’s design envisioned patrons entering a grand temple-like hall, crossing a 70-metre, glass-enclosed bridge connected to a trillium-inspired Tower Building. From there, patrons would descend to the Valley Building on a series of escalators.

In September 1969, after a delay of two years, the Science Centre opened to rave reviews. At the same time, word began to spread that Moriyama had surreptitiously imprinted his name on the roof of the Valley Building. At roof level, however, nothing was visible. Had Moriyama included his name in some inconspicuous location?

Nothing could have been further from the truth.

Moriyama had actually incorporated the four Hiragana characters of his surname into the roof surface itself. He accomplished this by using various hues of roofing aggregate.

Aerial photograph of Valley Building in 1970 showing Raymond Moriyama’s original roof design. Image courtesy of the City of Toronto Archives.

Like crop circles, the arrangement was only visible from the air, or from the rim of the valley. You can see it in the image above. (The characters are written abstractly, in the lighter areas.)

In an email to Torontoist, the self-effacing Moriyama said the goal of the clandestine undertaking was to prove it was possible to break up the monotony of a flat roof without additional spending. The design was reminiscent of Bonseki, the Japanese art of creating miniature landscapes using sand and rocks. The unique creation was also a nod to the ancient Tibetan art of sand painting.

Aside from enhancing the visual aspect of an otherwise plain roof, Moriyama told us he also wanted to rouse the curiosity of those who would eventually discover this enigma.

“My intention was to…provoke a question or two. What does it mean? Who was the culprit?”

Shown a Google Earth image of the rooftop today, the renowned architect was disappointed to discover alterations to his original design have erased all traces of the Hiragana characters.

Alterations to other parts of the Valley Building—including the addition of unsightly steel cladding—go a long way toward destroying Moriyama’s overall vision for the squat building.

“Some parts of the roof now look bland, even boring,” Moriyama wrote.

Aerial photos show the rooftop design lasting until around 1988. After this it fades considerably. Between 1990 and 1991 it vanished completely. Of the numerous buildings Moriyama later designed, the Science Centre rooftop was the only structure on which he accomplished this unique feat.

Asked about the one-of-a-kind detail, Science Centre director of communications Anna Relyea told Torontoist, “The markings…are long gone, having not been repeated when the roof was redone.”

Additional material from the November 26, 1964 edition of the Toronto Star.

Photo by Edward Brown/Torontoist.

Lost in the shuffle last week was some news about something that has been fraying nerves in Kensington Market for about two years: the prospect of a 12,000-square-metre shopping centre, right on the neighbourhood’s western border.

The mini mall—proposed for a plot of land that centres on the former location of Kromer Radio, at 420 Bathurst Street—is a project of Riotrin, which is a holding company majority-owned by RioCan, a huge commercial developer with properties all over the country.

The mall plan faced a setback last May, when Riotrin’s application was rejected by the City’s committee of adjustment. Now, after losing an appeal at the Ontario Municipal Board, Riotrin is doing what it probably should have done in the first place. It’s applying for a zoning amendment, which means its plans now have to be approved by city council. (The committee of adjustment is made up of residents, so Riotrin’s decision to apply there first was probably a bid to avoid a huge political fight.)

The immediate upshot of all of this is that drawings of the proposed building are now freely available online. The top image, above, is taken from a City staff report that will be considered by the Toronto and East York community council next week. The bottom image is taken from the website of Turner Fleischer Architects, who are designing the building. (Click here to see a larger version of the top image.)

Some Kensington Market residents and merchants fear that the presence of big retail—especially if it includes a supermarket—will damage the neighbourhood by driving all of its small grocers out of business. Another big retail development is already underway on College Street, just north of the market.

SPOTTED BY: Martin Reis

WHERE: Mostly in the Dovercourt Road area, around Queen Street West

WHEN: Over the past few weeks

WHAT: These handy, comic-book-style pothole warnings were spray-painted on west-end streets by the Urban Repair Squad, a group of pro-bicycle street-art vigilantes, whose work we’ve seen many times before. The idea here is to alert cyclists to dangerous road conditions, while also, presumably, letting City Hall know that its pothole crews have missed a few spots. The URS did this exact same thing at least once before, in 2010.

Spotted features interesting things our readers discover in their journeys across Toronto. If you spot something interesting, send a photo and pertinent details to tips@torontoist.com.

Jazz Bistro was filled to the rafters on its first two weekends, in early April. So why are we left wondering if the age of the upscale jazz club is over in Toronto?

For the last decade, the Toronto jazzerati have been lamenting the death of one upscale club after another. The glory days of the Montreal Bistro and Top o’ the Senator have been left behind in the dust of condominiums and a changing tourism landscape. There have been valiant attempts at reviving the scene over the years. Remember Opal, The Red Violin, and Live at the Courthouse? No one can blame you if you don’t. Each one failed more spectacularly than the last. While there are many possible reasons for those failures, you have to wonder if the one common denominator is simply that Toronto no longer has an appetite for jazz in a “white tablecloth and martini” kind of setting.

Colin Hunter would hope that’s not the case. He’s the CEO of Sunwing Vacations, a leisure tour company, and he’s also the guy who spent a lot of money transforming the old Top o’ the Senator, on Victoria Street, into Jazz Bistro. The entire space has been re-imagined, with a small stage on the main floor and a balcony looking down on it from the second floor. There are several monitors to accommodate those with obstructed views. On the surface, it would seem as though some really wonderful things are about to happen at the venue. Hunter was even smart enough to hire the old manager of Top o’ the Senator, Sybil Walker, to book the talent.

So what went wrong?

On the club’s second weekend, the sound was abysmal. You could barely hear charming vocalist George Evans and his trio over the audience. Would you really want to pay a cover charge to listen to a suburban real estate agent talk about his latest conquest?

The small stage on the main floor is difficult to see from many corners of the club. At Top o’ the Senator, the stage was front and centre. Here, it feels as though it could be removed and replaced with a couple of four tops, where customers could loudly order more wine. Putting a custom red Steinway piano in your club is great, but if the audience can’t see it, what’s the point?

Something about an evening at Jazz Bistro felt like dinner with an ex, where even though you aren’t a couple anymore, you hope that whatever it was that brought you together in the first place is still there. And you know, at Jazz Bistro, it just wasn’t. You can look rationally at the renovation of the space and know that it was necessary, but it just felt so hollow. The Top o’ the Senator felt upscale, but it also felt authentic. Jazz Bistro, with its plethora of chandeliers, Louboutin red-and-black colour palette, and chatty clientele, feels like a Bougie Botox Queen who has nothing to offer the conversation.

Hopefully, Sybil Walker can work her magic. Hopefully, great music from local talent and international jazz stars will make Jazz Bistro a venue worth supporting.

That said, even if Jazz Bistro fails, don’t ring the death knell for jazz in this city just yet. The Rex Hotel has been presenting 19 shows a week for years and has slowly evolved from a no-menu, potato-chips-behind-the-bar kind of joint into a still-casual but “grown-up” venue. It has a great menu and a full bar and a staff that doesn’t sneer at you. There’s no “quiet policy,” but if the musicians are holding the crowd’s attention, you can hear a pin drop. Great jazz is also happening at unlikely venues all over Toronto. Art galleries and brunch spots that book amazing local talent are omnipresent. International talent can be seen at all kinds of venues during the Jazz Festival and year-round at the Royal Conservatory of Music’s beautiful Koerner Hall.

Toronto is still a great jazz city, but those of us who care about that need to consider whether an upscale backdrop matters as much as we think it does.

Photo by Tracey Nolan.

CORRECTION: May 7, 10:30AM The credit for the above photo was previously given to Jazz Bistro, when, in fact, the photo was provided by the author. The correction has been made above.

Lifejackets fastened and paddles in hand, the canoe made a gentle splash and a graceful entrance into the Don River on Sunday morning. Bernie McIntyre steered and narrated every bend and ripple as we navigated the river as part of Paddle the Don, an annual fundraising event put on by the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority. This year, with 300 canoes and about 700 participants, the event had its largest turnout ever.

Paddle the Don is a once-a-year event during which the TRCA opens up the gate at the G. Lord Ross Dam, at Finch Avenue. This adds a crucial few centimetres of water to the river, so adventurers can enjoy a morning of paddling from Wilket Creek Park, at Eglinton Avenue and Leslie Street, to the mouth of the river. Paddle the Don is pretty much the only time the river is navigable by boat, so it always sells out quickly. This year, the fee for the general public was $100 per boat.

The TRCA kicked off the event with remarks from Premier Kathleen Wynne, who attended the event as both the premier and as the MPP for Don Valley West.

“We were expecting her to arrive in an SUV,” one of the event’s leaders said. “We were looking around, and and then all of a sudden, the premier ran up to us. She ran from home. She didn’t even break a sweat.”

Over the past 20 years, Wynne has seen a remarkable difference in the Don, a river that was once notoriously polluted. The TRCA uses Paddle the Don as a way of leading people to the water and showing them the importance of watershed management.

“The idea that the community is aware of this treasure is great, it’s important,” Wynne told Torontoist. “The Don was in bad shape and it has been restored.”

As we glided along the fairly tame waters, McIntyre, who is a manager at the TRCA, explained the history of the Don River and its trials and tribulations over the years, pointing out structural curiosities and foreign objects bobbing along. We lost count of how many half-buried shopping carts we passed. The glumness in McIntyre’s voice was apparent as he explained that the rocks and netting along the bank near the launch site are the remnants of an old erosion-control technique, now considered to be an unsightly and heavy-handed method of taming the river.

Urbanization has greatly damaged the Don. Excessive building along its flood plains, the use of impermeable pavement, and other man-made incursions have changed the river’s flow and its relationship with the city. During the suburbanization boom in the middle of the 20th century, quick and immediate ways of controlling the flow of water were often used. These days, the TRCA tries to employ more natural and holistic approaches.

Those efforts at control are helped by the fact that the river curves and meanders, which helps slow down its current and manage flooding. But this natural dynamic was disrupted when the Don was shortened to make way for the Don Valley Parkway in the 1950s and 1960s.

Several weirs, or small dams, were set up to keep the river under control, but McIntyre calls them “death traps.” If a canoeist were to try to go over a weir, he or she could drown in the forceful rapids below. Fish can’t pass the weirs either, and the TRCA has noticed an impact on marine life in nearby creeks. Around the Evergreen Brick Works, while we portaged to bypass a weir, McIntyre pointed out a pile of large, rounded boulders that have formed a low pyramid on the bank. This was a non-invasive method of slowing down the river’s energy while allowing fish to pass through.

As we made our way downstream, we saw some wildlife—a sunbathing turtle, Canada geese, plenty of mallards, and many red-winged blackbirds—but after we passed underneath Pottery Road, we noticed that the banks were teeming with people. While the water might not be open to the public just yet, it’s certainly a popular destination.

Despite the highway lamps peeking over the tree canopy and the traffic whizzing by on the Don Valley Parkway, it was relatively silent on the water. McIntyre took a moment to enjoy the birds chirping. At some points, the shrubbery along the banks was thick and lush. Slumping willow trees patted paddlers on the shoulders, and the architecturally stunning Bloor Viaduct is even more majestic from a fish’s eye view.

“Ribbons of these ravines thread through three million people,” McIntyre said. It’s a poetic notion, but it’s true.

Photo by kaeko, from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

For a few days each spring, an arguably ironic thing happens in High Park. Hemmed in by winter for months, what feels like Toronto’s entire population spills into the park, eager to breathe air that doesn’t freeze the lungs—and, presumably, to feel a little closer to nature. But the result isn’t exactly the long exhale of spring that many expect.

Instead, it’s as if the city comes to a halting critical mass in High Park’s 161 hectares of space, stopping to smell the flowers in numbers that can rival Yonge-Dundas Square. The day seems anything but pastoral or bucolic.

Traffic—cars, bikes, longboards, scooters—snarl the park’s entrances, with the intersection at High Park and Bloor nearly blocked by the density of arriving vehicles alone. Along West Road, the lawns and shaded groves near the Forest School fill quickly, as crowds of camera-wielding residents turn what was all but abandoned only two weeks ago into a festival scene. Even at the sweltering height of summer, High Park isn’t as overwhelmingly, blissfully popular as it is for this brief, fleeting sliver of spring.

Yes, it’s that time of year again, and it’s like a dream. As West Road plunges down the first in a series of hills into High Park, it veers toward a sharp, right-hand pedestrian turn—which then plunges even more steeply toward Grenadier Pond. This time of year, the path is bursting with cherry blossoms—and not just any cherry blossoms (or, in Japanese, sakura). These are examples of the most resplendent species of cherry blossom in the world.

In 1959, the citizens of Tokyo presented the citizens of Toronto with our city’s first Yoshino Cherry tree—what’s known in Japanese as somei yoshino. In Japan, these deciduous trees—relatively small in stature, growing to between five and 12 metres in height—are naturally occurring hybrids, believed to be descended from the Oshima cherry trees of Japan’s Izu Peninsula, near Tokyo. Because of their adaptability to a range of temperate environments, the trees have become globally renowned, and are perhaps one of the most widely cultivated types of sakura in the world.

But nowhere in the world are these trees more popular or numerous than they are in their native Japan, where they have had cultural importance since the late Edo period, which is the phase of Japanese history between 1603 and 1868. In Japan, sakura represent winter’s end, with the return of spring, new life, and a renewed growing season. And, looking at High Park’s Yoshino cherry blossoms, it’s plainly apparent what makes this particular species of sakura so appealing.

It’s as if the trees near Grenadier Pond have transformed, going from bare, featureless bark to an explosion of ethereal beauty overnight. When somei yoshino mature in spring, their five-petal blossoms burst. Later in the season, fresh leaves appear and begin competing for precious nutrients.

The result is the awe-inspiring floral supernova that drew Toronto to the west end in droves last week. Eventually, the somei yoshino will drop their petals like a warm, forgiving, post-winter snow, coating the asphalt of High Park in shades of pink that verge on white.

Of course, the numbers of Yoshino Cherry trees in the world could be explained in simple, happy terms. The somei yoshino donated in 1959 were complemented with another donation in 1984, and then with yet another in 2001 under the auspices of the Sakura project, an initiative of the Consulate General of Japan in Toronto. Until it came to an end in September 2012, the Sakura project continued the Japanese tradition of donating sakura as an international goodwill gesture. The earliest such instance was in Washington D.C. in 1911, when Jokichi Takamine, a Japanese physician, donated 3,020 sakura to be planted along the Potomac River and on the grounds of the White House.

In addition to High Park, sakura donated through the Sakura Project can also be found at York University, where 250 such trees were planted in 2003.

Photo by bigdaddyhame, from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

Many of us have felt it coming for a few weeks, but now it’s finally official. After a game against the Ottawa Senators on Saturday, the Toronto Maple Leafs clinched their first playoff berth in nearly a decade.

It’s been a long, long time since this city has seen playoff hockey. Ours is the only team in the NHL not to have made it to the postseason since the 2004-2005 lockout.

Toronto fans have had a tough time these past several years. Single-player roster moves and staff or management changes were too often touted as silver bullets that would somehow lead the team to salvation. For instance, now-former general manager Brian Burke arrived in 2008 with much fanfare. The media considered him to be the saviour of the Maple Leafs (he was certainly, at any rate, being paid a saviour’s salary). Sure enough, Burke landed some big names in his first year as GM. It practically made us forget that he was inheriting arguably the worst NHL team in the league.

No reasonable person should have expected major success from the Maple Leafs in the first few years of Burke’s tenure. It takes time to build up an NHL team from worse-than-nothing to a perennial playoff contender. Even so, both fans and sports writers became increasingly impatient with the Leafs’ failures year after year. Then, before this year’s lockout ended, Burke was shown the door, leaving assistant GM Dave Nonis at the helm.

Though Nonis is officially the GM as the Leafs head to the playoffs, there should be no doubt that this is the team Brian Burke built. The Leafs are winning on the backs of the players that Burke went after, all playing in a style Burke had championed since game one—a style characterized by, to use Burke’s thesaurus-abusing phrase, plenty of “pugnacity, testosterone, truculence, and belligerence.”

Here’s how Burke, despite being fired for his efforts, managed to build a winning team.

Big, Mean, and Tough

It has been a popular assumption that any teams using the old rough-and-tumble approach won’t be able to keep up as the game gets faster and officials continue to tighten up on obstruction-type calls. What’s particularly fascinating about the success of the Toronto Maple Leafs this year is that it proves that the bellicose Burke model is a viable strategy in the NHL of today.

The Toronto Maple Leafs are the only team currently averaging more than one fight per game. Toronto is also the only team in the NHL with more than one player among the top ten hitters this season. One of those brawlers is Burke’s addition: Leo Komarov (signed from Moscow Dynamo of the KHL), who will likely end up with around 175 hits before the end of the season. Frazer McLaren, acquired from Anaheim by Nonis, will probably end up with something like 155 hits.

Burke’s Beauties Are Just That

Burke’s imprint on this Leafs team goes beyond toughness. The players he believed in and went after throughout his tenure as GM now not only lead the team in scoring, but are among the league leaders in points this year.

Burke’s trades for forwards Phil Kessel, Joffrey Lupul, and James van Riemsdyk have absolutely panned out. Though Lupul missed the majority of the season because of an injury, all three of these Burke acquisitions are making huge impacts on the scoreboard. In fact, Kessel is currently one of the top ten point producers in the league.

Dave Nonis Will Replace Brian Burke as General Manager of the Toronto Maple Leafs

The Leafs are even getting it done from the point. Cody Franson (acquired by Burke from Nashville in 2011) and Dion Phaneuf (from Calgary in 2010) are tied for fifth in the league for points by a defenceman, with 27 each.

And there’s no way we can leave Nazem Kadri out of this discussion. Burke selected Kadri 7th overall in the 2009 entry draft. Kadri was nowhere near ready for NHL action in his first few rookie years. Now, with nearly a point per game to his credit and one of the best plus-minus ratings on the team, there should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that he’s ready for prime time.

As a quick aside, only because people keep comparing Kessel and Tyler Seguin (who the Leafs could have had if Burke hadn’t traded first-round draft picks for Kessel in 2009): Four of Burke’s additions to the Leafs—Kessel, Kadri, van Riemsdyk, and Lupul—are putting up more points per game than Seguin this season.

Goaltending Is Working

Remember when every Toronto media outlet was talking about how the Leafs desperately needed an elite goaltender and should go after Roberto Luongo? Thank god that didn’t happen, right? The 60/40 workload split between James Reimer and Ben Scrivens, both Burke-era additions, has resulted in some solid goaltending numbers throughout the season.

Penalty Kill

Perhaps the yin to the pugilist yang for the Leafs is the team’s impressively effective penalty killing this season. It’s the third-most effective in the league, as a matter of fact. That’s a huge improvement over the past three seasons, during which the Leafs were always either at the bottom of the league or close to it.

While Toronto is actually in the middle of the pack in terms of how many times it has been shorthanded throughout the season, The Leafs’ penalty-kill effectiveness has been a major component of their success so far.

Why Brian Burke Was Good for the Maple Leafs

The Future

No matter what happens to the Toronto Maple Leafs in the postseason and the off-season, this year should be seen as a success. We should keep our expectations in check and remember that it takes time to build a successful hockey franchise.

For the first time in a long time, the Leafs have a rather healthy depth of talent. Regardless of how the playoffs unfold for the team, its managers would be wise to keep from messing with the first winning formula they’ve had in a long time.

Though we wouldn’t bet on the Leafs making the Stanley cup finals, maybe they’ll prove us wrong and give us even more to cheer about. Until then, we’re more than happy to celebrate the return of playoff hockey to Toronto.

CORRECTION: April 24, 2013, 1:40 PM This post originally said that Frazer McLaren was acquired for the Toronto Maple Leafs by former general manager Brian Burke. In fact, McLaren was added to the team by Burke’s replacement, Dave Nonis.

We look at concepts and products that, for better and worse, were developed in Toronto.

Photo by Stephen Depolo, from Flickr.

You’re sitting down to enjoy a fine meal, or slumping comfortably into your favourite chair. Suddenly, a loud farting sound emerges from your posterior—and it isn’t due to excess bean consumption. Everyone around you laughs when you look down and see a deflated whoopee cushion. Depending on your disposition toward the bathroom-humour classic, you either laugh along or silently plot revenge.

While inflated air bladders had provided comedic opportunities for jesters and jokesters for centuries, the modern whoopee cushion appears to have been born just east of the Humber River, in York Township.

And yet, had it not been for a quick response by local volunteer firefighters, Jem Rubber might not have been in a position to invent anything. A blaze at the manufacturer’s plant at 3723 Dundas Street West in July 1928 nearly destroyed the facility. The situation wasn’t helped when the Toronto fire crew that received the alarm was stopped by officials, who refused to allow the firefighters to cross the western city limit at Jane Street, even though the blaze was only two blocks further.

Sometime after the fire, Jem developed an inflatable rubber bag that farted when deflated. While similar devices were available in gag catalogues, none delivered as vulgar a blast as this one. The company presented the item to New Jersey–based novelty giant S.S. Adams Company in 1930. To his eternal regret, Adams declined the product. “The whole idea seemed too indelicate,” Adams later noted. “I passed it up, and the first year I threw away about $50,000.” (Adams later marketed his own version, the “Razzberry Cushion.”)

Source: Johnson Smith & Company Catalogue #148, 1938.

Jem attracted the interest of the Johnson Smith & Company, which added the item to its giant novelty catalogue. The earliest versions were green and depicted what the New York Times described as “a drawing of a gun-toting boy wearing a devious smile and a kilt.” Originally bearing names like “Poo-Poo Cushion” and “Boop-Boop-a-Doop,” the item’s lasting name debuted around 1932. It has been suggested that “whoopee cushion” was inspired by Eddie Cantor’s hit song, “Makin’ Whoopee.” That year, Johnson Smith offered two versions: an economy plain rubber model for 25 cents, and a deluxe edition made from rubber-impregnated fabric for $1.25.

It’s unknown when Jem stopped manufacturing whoopee cushions. The company was bought by Dayton Rubber in 1944 and shifted its priorities to producing fan belts and other automotive products. The factory operated until production shifted to a new plant along Highway 400 in North York in 1964. The original plant was replaced by an apartment complex, after some opposition from nearby homeowners. During a fiery meeting of the Borough of York Council in February 1968, members of the Warren Park Ratepayers Association clashed with Mayor Jack Mould and councillors who supported rezoning the site from industrial to residential. The residents were concerned about subsidizing the infrastructure costs required to serve 420 new living units. As future York mayor Phil White noted, “there is no reason why single-family residential areas should have to subsidize school needs for apartment blocks.”

The development won by an 8 to 2 vote and stands today at the southwest corner of Dundas Street and Gooch Avenue. Statistics on how many residents there own whoopee cushions are unavailable.

Additional material from Blame It on the Dog by Jim Dawson (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2006), the July 15, 1928 edition of the Globe, the February 27, 1968 edition of the Globe and Mail, the March 29, 2008 edition of the National Post, the March 30, 2012 edition of the New York Times, and the March 31, 2008 edition of the Toronto Star.

Kathleen Wynne takes the future of transit—and crucially, transit funding—seriously. It’s why she’s given two major speeches about it this month so far, and it’s why she invited several reporters to her office last week for a series of one-on-one interviews on the subject. More seriously, her commitment is measured in the political risk she is taking: actively campaigning for new taxes and fees is difficult for anyone in elected office, harder for a provincial leader critics already think is too much a Torontonian to understand northern or rural Ontario, and harder still for someone leading a minority government many think won’t last a year. Perhaps most of all, it is difficult for someone who inherited a government weighed down with a series of spending and mismanagement scandals that have left the electorate skeptical it can oversee large public projects effectively.

The premier is tackling this predicament by going on the offensive, putting a direct spotlight on an issue many before her have avoided. In our interview Wynne reiterates that she’ll let her government fall over the matter, if it comes to it. She has warned municipal governments that while she very much wants their support, these new revenue tools are coming, like it or not. She has made this her issue, in particular, making a point of pitching residents herself rather than leaving it to Transportation Minister Glen Murray. In summary, Wynne is staking a fair bit of her government’s viability on the proposition that the Toronto region is ready to support a politician who asks them to pay more money, because we know it’s the only way to get the transit we so badly need.

All of which makes it that much more frustrating that when we ask her how exactly she’ll be approaching the issue, Wynne is consistently vague.

Wynne, as we’ve been told often since her selection as the Ontario Liberals’ new leader, is a trained mediator, and it shows when we sit down to talk with her. She doesn’t take potshots at her opponents, and when we ask for her thoughts on how we got to this point—decades behind in our infrastructure and with many cities outpacing us in construction—she doesn’t mention Mike Harris once. (The Progressive Conservative premier famously filled in the tunnel that was meant to be the start of an Eglinton subway line in 1995; his government also cut Queen’s Park’s contribution to the TTC’s annual operating budget.)

What she does talk about is growing up in York Region, and how her generation took the bus only until they turned 16 and got their licences—after that, it just wasn’t a question that you’d drive. There was, she says, a great sense of space, and no sense at all that it might run out one day. She attributes our many years of inaction to that culture, one she says was very slow to shift, as well as to the usual political complexities of supporting projects whose benefits won’t be visible for many years.

Full transcript of our conversation with the premier

But Wynne hedges often when we ask about specifics, about what she wants to do now to remedy matters: “I don’t want to pre-empt Metrolinx” is the sound bite of choice.

Metrolinx is the provincial agency responsible for transit planning in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area; it will unveil its proposed strategy for raising the $34 billion it estimates we need to complete a major round of transit projects, called The Big Move, on May 27, 2013. (The front-runners for those new revenue tools: a sales tax, a parking levy, and a fuel tax.)

It’s not just that she won’t issue her own list of preferred tools; Wynne won’t even articulate much by way of the principles she’ll rely on to guide this decision.

It’s crucial, she says, that we have a dedicated tool, but that doesn’t rule anything out—in theory we could even have a dedicated portion of the income tax set aside for transit projects. Is it important to her that whatever tools we come up with are progressive, that they are in some way scaled based on an individual’s capacity to pay? We get no straight answer. Is she prepared to go outside of Metrolinx’s list, if that’s what it takes to get one of the opposition parties to sign on? Maybe.

The premier hasn’t shied away from providing direction to government agencies before—most notably the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation, which is currently revising its formula for how municipalities and the province should share in new casino revenue, based on Wynne’s instructions. Her reluctance to pick two or three revenue tools right now is understandable; her refusal to articulate clearer decision-making principles in general doesn’t really wash.

To many though, the major breakthrough has already happened: we have a premier who is willing to stake her leadership on introducing new taxes and fees, whatever those end up being. And while there will be a tremendous amount of political wrangling to come, as the specifics of which revenue tools we end up with are worked out—between Wynne and NDP leader Andrea Horwath (PC leader Tim Hudak wants none of this), and between Wynne and all the GTHA mayors—it’s that initial step that may matter most. As one city councillor we spoke with recently put it: “Do I have preferences about which tools we pick? Sure. But that’s a fight I’m happy to lose. As long as we end up with something.”

Wynne hasn’t left herself much wiggle room, and she hasn’t left us with much, either: if the premier fails to deliver the transit funding she’s now advocating, it will make it much more difficult for the politicians (of any party) who come after her to tackle this anytime soon. Her commitment is laudable, and essential, but it isn’t enough—we need to know what framework and what values the premier will be bringing to bear as she weighs Metrolinx’s advice and enters into negotiations with the opposition. And we need to be given specific reason to believe that this time really will be different.

Image of the SR.N2 Hovercraft from Flight International (March 9, 1962).

Imagine skimming along Lake Ontario at 120 kilometres per hour, reading the newspaper on the way to work in the city. Inching along the congested (and increasingly dangerous) Queen Elizabeth Way or the Gardiner Expressway might’ve taken you up to an hour, but instead your commute aboard a massive passenger hovercraft makes the same journey in all weather in mere minutes—and with none of the stress traffic creates. Twenty-five minutes to get downtown from Hamilton, or 11 minutes from Oakville, and just four to travel from Mimico.

The spacious passenger cabin, where you’re strapped into your seats for safety (in case the vessel needs to skid through a turn at a high speed), is comfortable and protected from the spray and blasting wind of the propellers. Seconds after arriving downtown, the amphibious craft gliding up a concrete ramp at the ferry docks, you emerge through a side door and head to the office. Passengers bound for the suburbs board and, in minutes, the hovercraft is off again, blasting across Lake Ontario.

This might’ve been your commute, and the future of regional transportation in Metro Toronto, if Mimico Mayor Hugh McGregor Griggs had had his way in the early 1960s.

Metropolitan Toronto Council, 1962, with Hugh M. Griggs at bottom right. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1257, Series 1057, Item 5000.

Mimico had been a Toronto bedroom community since the first streetcar line was laid in the late 19th century. After the Second World War, as servicemen returned home to purchase homes and start families, it steadily grew, from 8,785 in 1945 to 10,410 in 1951. The booming growth was typical of Toronto’s suburbs at the time; along with Toronto proper they formed the Metropolitan Toronto regional government in 1954, to coordinate in areas of common concern.

Grey-haired and bespectacled, Griggs was elected in 1960, after campaigning on a promise “to give the town a sane, dignified administration” during this period of region-wide growth, as the Globe and Mail (November 28, 1962) put it. He would remain mayor until 1967 when, along with New Toronto and Long Branch, Mimico was absorbed into the Borough of Etobicoke. In office, Griggs played a key role in establishing Mimico’s Planning Board, and developing an official plan that altered the local landscape. The town of predominantly single-family homes saw large numbers of apartment high rises constructed along the waterfront at the behest of the local council. By 1962, the population had ballooned to 17,707—all crowded into an area one square mile in size. “It is now,” Harvey Currell stated in The Mimico Story (Town of Mimico and Library Board, 1967), “part-way through the 1960s, one of the most densely populated apartment areas on the continent.”

A former schoolteacher and editor of the Canadian School Journal before entering municipal politics, the new mayor became intrigued by an emerging technology making waves in the United Kingdom: the hovercraft, a vessel capable of travelling over sea or land on a cushion of high-pressure air. Although the technology had only progressed to the prototype stage, Griggs thought it had potential as a means of relieving his constituents’ daily commute to the city core.

Image of the SR.N2 (left) and SR.N1 (right) Hovercrafts from Flight International (March 9, 1962).

The modern hovercraft emerged from the backyard experiments of Sir Christopher Cockerell, who built several working models in the 1950s. When the British military showed no interest in the technology, Cockerell’s designs were declassified by the British government for development by the National Research Development Corporation (NRDC), the body tasked with turning promising inventions into viable commercial enterprises.

In October 1958, under contract to the NRDC, the Saunders-Roe Division of Westland Aircraft Ltd. began work on a full-scale hovercraft prototype. The SR.N1, as the small vessel was called, first flew in early June 1959, and just over a month later made a successful crossing of the English Channel. That well-publicized event, and a subsequent test piloted by Prince Philip, caught the public’s imagination, and further hovercraft developments were widely reported in the world press.

By 1961 it was no longer a question of whether the hovercraft’s ground effect principle worked. The challenge was now whether the companies could prove the hovercraft was more than a novelty—that it had the potential to carry large numbers of people or cargo at great speed over long distances, and at a reasonable operating cost. So when Saunders-Roe received correspondence from a small-town Canadian mayor, the company took the inquiry seriously, mailing him studies and research information. “On the face of it, it seems Air Cushion Vehicles could play an important part in the over-all transportation pattern in the Toronto area,” F.R. Drew of Saunders-Roe later told a Toronto reporter.

(Above right: Portrait of Hugh M. Griggs from Harvey Currell’s The Mimico Story; Town of Mimico and Library Board, 1967.)

Armed with this material and the company’s encouragement, Griggs made a presentation at a meeting of the Metro Roads and Traffic Committee in November 1961. “Let’s set up a committee,” he explained, “to take a serious look at this British Hovercraft—I think it could be the answer to all our problems.” Metro officials laughed, thinking his futuristic, “flying saucer” proposal to be nonsense.

Griggs refused to be discouraged. “I don’t mind that the Committee laughed at me,” he said after. “Bigger and more important people have laughed at me before for suggesting something different or unusual.”

Griggs found an ally in aviation reporter Kerry Gibbens. “[T]he major design problems have now been licked,” Gibbens argued in a profile of Griggs’ hovercraft scheme in Canadian Magazine (July 1962), “and within two years it could become the logical answer to commuter transport problems in Toronto—and in every other major Canadian city with urban areas spread along accessible waterfronts.” He suggested Vancouver, Montreal, and other cities with significant waterfronts might follow Toronto as early adopters of the hovercraft.

Griggs envisioned regular, year-round hovercraft commuter service along Greater Toronto’s lakeshore, carrying hundreds of commuters downtown and back to the suburbs several times daily—as well as to the islands. “It is easy to operate, runs forward, backwards, sideways, turns on a dime,” Gibbens noted enthusiastically. “It can hover like a helicopter, move forward at near-aircraft speeds. And if its motors fail, it will float like a boat—in fact, in extremely bad weather when it cannot skim over the waves, it can ride through them like a regular ferry.”

Because the hovercraft could land on any beach or strip of concrete protruding into the lake and didn’t require specially-constructed terminals, the capital cost to establish this service was expected to be a fraction of that for any other emerging commuter option like a subway, monorail, or even helicopter. If operating at full passenger capacity, Griggs and Gibbens estimated the hovercraft’s operating costs to be about eight cents per passenger mile (or 40 cents per trip). “In two years,” Gibbens echoed the view of Saunders-Roe officials, “it will be able to handle all of Toronto’s rush hour lakeshore traffic at a price little more than the present car fare.”

(Above: Toronto Star; May 7, 1963.)

Griggs and Gibbens were confident there’d be sufficient demand for a hovercraft service. “Toronto west-enders,” the reporter stressed, “would undoubtedly plump for ANY means of transport that could beat the nerve-wracking 60 minute crawl to and from work each day—let alone one that can do it for the price of car fare.”

At the time Griggs pitched the Metro Roads and Traffic Committee, Saunders-Roe’s prototype for a larger, faster hovercraft capable of carrying 50 or more passengers (the SR.N2) had not yet been tested at sea. But subsequent successful tests of the SR.N2 confirmed its commercial promise. Hovercraft companies also began solving the problems they’d faced in early designs. Flexible skirts to contain the compressed air and improve lift and stability over obstacles or rough waves, for instance, made passenger service more practical. Finally, in July 1962, the first hovercraft operating as a passenger ferry—the Vickers VA-3—entered regular service, carrying up to 25 passengers across a 27-kilometre route between Merseyside and Wales on the River Dee.

Suddenly, Griggs’ futuristic idea didn’t seem so far-fetched.

Toronto Star (April 30, 1963).

In late April 1963, the SR.N2 Mark 2 was unloaded in Montreal for two weeks of live demonstrations, the first held outside of the United Kingdom. Griggs and other Metro Toronto officials were among those in attendance at the trials on Lake St. Louis and along the St. Lawrence River—a crowd of 600 that included representatives of commercial firms and armed forces from across the Western Hemisphere, as well as from governments from as far away as Japan.

Toronto Star reporter George Bryant took a test run. “As one of the first in Canada to ride in one,” he said. “I can guarantee they’re as comfortable as they are speedy.” He described the passenger compartment, sealed to protect from the wind and spray, as spacious. The control room, he said, resembled an airplane’s cockpit.

“The first real surprise comes when the craft lifts,” Bryant wrote. “The sensation resembles that experienced when a helicopter goes up, or one that might be experienced by sitting on a large truck tube while it was suddenly inflated.” He added: “The feeling of speed only occurs when the driver makes a 75-mile-an-hour sliding turn and lets the skirt dig in the water.”

Others who travelled by hovercraft in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, however, would question whether the mode of transportation lived up to its billing, commenting on the loud engines and the need to be strapped into one’s seat.

Clarence Downey and H.E. Pettett, chairman and secretary of the TTC respectively, also had the opportunity to take a test flight. Their presence indicates how seriously Metro Toronto was contemplating acquiring one of the crafts, which came with a $1,351,000 price tag but could carry 150 passengers at a cruising speed of 130 kilometres per hour. Saunders-Roe, newspapers noted, could deliver an operational hovercraft in no more than a year.

But no hovercraft was ever ordered.

Toronto Star (May 4, 1963).

Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, hovercrafts became a regular feature of the transportation landscape. More and more of them entered regular passenger service, crossing The Solent to the Isle of Wight, connecting Weston-super-Mare and Penarth on opposite banks of the River Severn, and spanning the English Channel to France, among other routes. Ambitious designers introduced ever larger and more powerful designs throughout the 1960s, leading Cockerell to speculate that his invention might eventually take shape as a 10,000-ton ocean liner, zipping across the Atlantic in 30 hours. Late in the decade, Cockerell was at work on a “hovertrain,” a concept that aimed to apply the same air-cushion principles to the railway, but which petered out by the 1970s.

In Toronto, Griggs continued stumping for hovercrafts for years. In 1963, when construction of a subway line beneath Queen Street was being debated, Griggs predicted that the purchase of a hovercraft would make subway expansion unnecessary. Speculating with gathered journalists on the benefits of regular hovercraft service, Griggs confidently asserted that 15 hovercrafts could be ordered for $20,000,000—the cost of 1.6 kilometres of subway.

When Parks Commissioner T.W. Thompson, speaking off the cuff, told a group of Metro officials that hydrofoils might be an option to replace standard ferry service between the mainland and Toronto Island, Griggs took the opportunity to again redirect public discussion to the topic of hovercrafts. As late as 1966, speaking at the Lakeshore Kiwanis Club, he urged Metro Toronto to divert some of the funds being spent on regional expressways to the procurement of a giant commuter hovercraft.

Photo of the SR.N4 Hovercraft, October 2000, by Andrew Berridge from WikiMedia Commons.

Although Griggs’s efforts came to naught in the 1960s, hovercraft passenger service was eventually initiated on Lake Ontario in July 1974 with the Toryoung I and Toryoung II. The service quickly proved popular, carrying 14,000 passengers between Toronto, Niagara-on-the-Lake, and Youngstown, New York, in August 1974 alone. But the service was discontinued shortly afterward when, in mid-September, the Toryoung II hit a buoy and nearly sank.

The circumstances of another accident in February 1987—when several policemen and firefighters responding to an ice-boat accident on Burlington Bay became trapped in freezing water and were rescued by a Toronto man demonstrating his recreational hovercraft nearby—prompted numerous Ontario police and fire departments, including the Metro Police, to investigate the use of small-scale hovercraft as rescue vehicles. This, whether by police and fire services or the Canadian Coast Guard, has remained the most common use of hovercrafts in Canada today.

But the idea of passenger hovercraft service on Lake Ontario has never disappeared entirely. In February 1991, with the backing of the provincial Ministry of Transportation and the Toronto Harbour Commission, a group of private consultants undertook a study of the feasibility of a rush-hour ferry service using hovercrafts, hydrofoils, or catamarans, running year-round between Toronto and the Niagara Peninsula. The same year, another company in Burlington, Transportation Alternatives, hoped to operate a commuter hovercraft service from Port Weller to Toronto.

More recently, brothers Dale and Ryan Wilson of Hover Transit Services first sought to purchase two retired hovercraft ferries from a British museum in 2004 in order to establish commuter routes on Lake Ontario to the east and west of Toronto. Then, in the spring of 2008, Hover Transit Services next proposed using a second-hand passenger hovercraft to revive the fast ferry service linking Toronto and Rochester that had previously failed in 2004 and 2006—with hopes the venture might eventually lead to commuter service for Toronto.

None of these proposals were ever implemented.

Sources consulted: Kerry Gibbens, “A Flying Saucer for Toronto?…Why Not!” Canadian Magazine (July 1962); Bill Gunston, “Stepping Stone to the Economical Hovercraft,” Flight International (March 9, 1962); and articles from the Canadian Press (July 9, 1991; and July 15, 2008); Globe and Mail (November 28 & 29, July 24, September 29, 1962; and April 9, 2008); National Post (September 7, 2002); Toronto Star (July 20, September 5 & 29, 1962; April 23 & 30, May 4, 5 & 7, June 11, 1963; January 28, April 2, September 8, October 19, 1966; May 24, 1987; May 27, 1988; January 22, September 17, November 8, 1990; February 23, 1991; January 17, 2004; and January 1, 2007).

Every Saturday, Historicist looks back at the events, places, and characters that have shaped Toronto into the city we know today.

Our tour of the beer bottle recycling process started at a new Beer Store at Eglinton and Laird. The first stage happens in the back room, where clear bottles, coloured bottles, and proprietary bottles (meaning bottles designed for one particular brewer) are separated, placed in cases, and stacked on skids. When brewers arrive with new shipments of drinks, they carry away the skids of empties.

From there, the bottles go to one of two places: either a bottling plant, or to a third-party recycler who crushes them into small pellets called “cullet,” which are then sent to glass manufacturers to use in producing new bottles.

The brown bottle we all know and love is an industry-standard bottle, and many beer brands use it. These standard bottles are the ones that get sent to bottling plants. One-time use bottles, which include imports like Heineken and Corona, are unique in size and shape and can’t easily be reused, so they’re turned into cullet. Clear ones must be separated, because the smallest trace of coloured glass will contaminate a clear batch once it’s melted down.

Not only does the beer store recycle its bottles, it recycles packaging. “Anything we sell, we take it back and recycle it,” says Jeff Newton, President of Canada’s National Brewers, who was with us throughout the tour. Newton points out that the bottle return program is 100 per cent industry funded and diverts bottles from going in the trash. It’s a closed system, where any given bottle can go through the full cycle in under 120 days.

After the Beer Store, we pile into our cars and head off to the Molson Brewery near the airport. We’re made to wear safety glasses, toe caps, and ear plugs to counter the roaring sound of machinery. We start at the loading bay where the skids of empties are unloaded off trailers and put onto conveyer belts to be depalletized. A machine lifts them up to a second level and shifts off the cases one row at a time. Two workers stand by to make sure everything rolls along okay, but the machines do most of the work. “In the old days, when I was a youngster, we had to put them on the line by hand!” muses Bill Patterson, a veteran worker of the factory line.

The bottles roll down the line, clattering and clanging along the metal conveyor belts. Machines separate the broken ones and divert them down another line where they fall into a chute and are saved in a hopper.

The next stage on the line is cleaning. A humungous machine with a big rotating drum takes in 60 bottles at a time and washes them thoroughly with detergent, rinses them out, and removes the labels. The thousands of brown bottles file down the line to the filler stage. An electronic detector flashing like a strobe light scans each bottle looking for minute defects that could spell disaster later on. Rejects are spat onto a separate line and recycled. The good ones go through to the filling machine, which is like a whirling carousel that fills them, caps them, and spits them out into another scanner. Reject bottles are, again, spat down a separate line and dealt with in another factory process.

Next, the bottles are pasteurized. Molson does this by heating them up to 61C for ten minutes. This kills off any microbes that could make people sick, and increases the beer’s shelf life. The bottles come out of the pasteurization stage at around 28C.

The bottles, now filled with delicious beer, continue down the long steel conveyor belts to the labelling machine, which slaps on labels with astounding speed: first on the neck of each bottle, then on the body. The machine is sometimes blindingly fast, sometimes slow and steady. At top speed, it labels 1000 bottles a minute.

After that, the labelled bottles go down the line to be boxed—another job done by a machine in mesmerizing, rhythmic motions. When we were there, two-fours of Carling were being loaded in the blink of an eye, while another machine across from us continually unfolded the cases, glued the bottom flaps, and shot them onto a conveyor which fed them into the loading machine.

Everything in the plant happened with clockwork precision, and all with very few actual human beings involved. In another age, the place might have employed hundreds of people. Today, only 35 employees man the production line. The entire process, from start to finish, only takes two and a half hours.

As for the used aluminum cans that end up at the Molson plant, machines tear off the tops and crush them flat as pancakes. Molson sends them off to another company to process into sheets of aluminum, which are then turned into cans all over again.

The last stop on our tour was in Brampton, at the largest glass manufacturing company in the world, Owens-Illinois (OI). The factory is visible from Highway 410. It has a dirty, rusted exterior. A tall silo contains the raw materials used to make new bottles and is connected to the plant by catwalks high in the air. Down below, a worker drives a front-end loader through heaps of rejected bottles and cullet, dropping them into a bunker that can hold 1000 tonnes of glass. This may sound like a lot, but that’s only enough to last OI about a week. Railway spurs go into the facility so trains can drop off shipments of cullet from the U.S.

Inside the factory, 1000-square-foot furnaces powered by natural gas and electricity use 1500-degree heat to melt the cullet on the second floor. The molten glass drops down though a funnel and mechanical jaws chop it off at regular intervals. The glowing orange globs fall into machines on the first floor, which turn them into bottles by blowing compressed air into them. The glowing hot bottles shuttle down the line and are cooled, inspected, and, ultimately, shipped out. The plant runs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, only stopping when it’s necessary to change the bottle moulds and during power outages.

OI uses 50 per cent recycled materials in its bottles, but wants to increase that number. “I think that every glass company out there would like to get their hands on more recycled glass, because it’s just much more energy efficient,” says Walter Dovigo, manufacturing manager at OI. “The demand is high, and we just can’t get enough of it at times because of the demand. We’re making 500,000 bottles on that one line. If every consumer in the GTA brought in a bottle every once in a while we’d have enough to keep ‘er going.”

“It helps divert a lot of material from landfills, but in the process of doing that, and in the process of recycling and reusing the glass as cullet to make new bottles, the greenhouse gas savings and the energy savings associated with that are also huge,” said John Zanini, OI’s vice president of sales. “So it’s not just a recycling program. It’s a greenhouse gas and an energy reduction program.”

Public Works looks at public space, urban design, and city-building innovations from around the world, and considers what Toronto might learn from them.

Photo by tom cochrane from the Torontoist Flickr pool.

If you drive in Toronto, you already know the hassles: the perpetual gridlock, the widespread disregard for road etiquette, the unseemly interaction with lesser road users on bikes or in streetcars. And then, of course, there’s the always-looming question of where to park your two tonnes of chrome and hubris when you’re finally forced out of it.

Toronto doesn’t really lack pay parking, thanks in large part to the Toronto Parking Authority, which is responsible for around 17,500 on-street spaces, plus 160 parking lots under the Green P banner. What Toronto does lack is a more user-friendly way to manage all those spaces.

Geezers out there may remember when every on-street parking space had its own meter, and when parking garages had attendants who took your ticket and your money as you exited. This had the virtue of being relatively convenient for drivers, but less so for parking operators, who had to staff garages and drain change from thousands of parking meters.

Eventually garages started using technology that let them shed attendants by forcing drivers to walk to a ticket machine on exiting. For on-street parking, most individual meters have now been replaced with large machines—typically one every fifty metres or so—that dispense tickets to be left on dashboards.

This new system retains the inflexibility of being unable to change your parking time without returning to the vehicle, and it adds the indignity of having to walk up and down the street like a common pedestrian.

These days, however, technologies exist that dispense with that nuisance and also eliminate the need for motorists to race from hair appointments or heart surgery to top up their meters. These new systems allow people to purchase, add, or reduce parking time remotely, via their phones.

The technology isn’t even particularly new. The system most widely used in North America (including 13 Canadian cities) was originally developed by Verrus, a Vancouver-based company, back in 2001. (Verrus was acquired by U.K. internet payments provider PayPoint in 2010, and now operates as PayByPhone). Originally, registered users would call a number identifying the space where they were parked, and payment would be made with a credit card number on file.

With the advent of the smartphone, it’s now possible to do all this stuff online. Some cities will even send text messages to let users know when their time is almost up. (Remote-payment systems also provide parking enforcement officers with real-time lists of those who’ve paid online, which presumably allows them to ticket overdue vehicles with up-to-the-second accuracy. This is not advertised as a feature.)

Users pay a fee of 25 cents per transaction on top of the normal parking charge.

So why don’t we have this in Toronto? In fact, Impark, which operates some 60 lots, mostly in downtown Toronto, has the service available at some facilities. However, Green P, in spite of advertising campaigns that imply a puzzling belief that parking spot selection is based on brand loyalty rather than price and location, has yet to introduce anything similar.

It’s unclear why not. Back in September of 2011, Councillor and current TTC chair Karen Stintz came out in favour of adopting some kind of remote payment for parking. City council voted to have City staff look into the matter. Since then, there have been no public announcements on the topic. (Stintz and the Toronto Parking Authority had not yet responded to our questions about this by publication time.)

Remote parking payment is a good idea, and one that has been thoroughly tested elsewhere for more than a decade. Is it time to reopen the discussion?