Results tagged “billboards”

Late last night the City's proposed new billboard bylaw and tax [PDF] cleared a major hurdle, unanimously passing through the Planning and Growth Management Committee on its way to a hearing before the full City Council. The meeting ran 'til about 11 p.m. and had to be moved from one of the regular committee meeting rooms to the main Council Chamber in order to accommodate fifty-plus deputants and scores of other observers. It was a pitched battle, one that has lasted through several years of debate, consultation, and resistance leading up to this moment. A tremendous victory for public space advocates, progressive councillors, and Mayor Miller, the bylaw will provide harmonized regulation of the billboard industry (the rules haven't been updated since amalgamation) and the tax will create the revenue needed to enforce those regulations.

We've been at City Hall a fair number of times, but it wasn't until this week that we had the rather delightful experience of being met by a beatboxing duo at the front door or rocking out to OutKast in the Council Chamber. The occasion for this upending of formality? A town hall meeting, hosted by a network of organizations known collectively as the Beautiful City Alliance. The coalition is working to convince city council to direct revenue from the billboard tax it plans to introduce this summer towards art in the public sphere and is stepping up its campaign efforts as the vote on that tax approaches. The town hall, attended by some two or three hundred artists and activists, as well as several city councillors, was part informational meeting and part pep rally, with a bit of spontaneous art production thrown in for good measure.

In the heart of the city’s shopping district, heartfelt tributes to loved ones lost are being spoken in the language of this consumer venue, the video billboard. Overlooking Yonge-Dundas Square, personal messages of mourning, paired with artworks on the subject of loss, are appearing every five minutes until Sunday.

Last week, further to news reported on Illegal Signs, we briefly noted the Ontario Superior Court's refusal to grant Strategic Media a temporary exemption from certain provisions of the City of Toronto's sign bylaw. If granted, Strategic Media (and most likely all other advertisers) would have been allowed to suspend compliance with these provisions until a court resolved the ongoing claim [PDF] over whether these provisions are valid.

This is Jörg Cieslok. He runs Titan Outdoor Canada. He is six and a half feet tall and has a thick German accent. He has a low opinion of "grassroots groups" like residents associations. He regularly calls up Rami to yell at him. He is more responsible for illegal billboards in Toronto than almost any other individual. He claims, under oath, to have lost $1 million due to sign bylaw enforcement. He threatened to sue Rami and is currently suing the City. And last night I learned that he is also an amateur paparazzo.

Public consultations, as the City of Toronto currently conducts them, are at best formalities and at worst shams. The City has a Public Consultation Unit, and they tend to do a good job running consultations and then compiling the results into reports. The trouble is that the staff who run the projects on which consultations are being held already have a very clear idea how they'll be going ahead, having formed their opinions long before the initiative had come to the public consultation phase.

WORDS: Zoocheck Canada founder Rob Laidlaw wants your kids to be as jaded as possible from an early age. To implement this idea, he's releasing Wild Animals in Captivity, a new non-fiction kids book that examines animal life in decidedly un-Disney-like settings. Laidlaw will be speaking to elementary students this morning at the Yorkdale Indigo (3401 Dufferin Street, 10 a.m., FREE). Later tonight, he's giving a lecture at the George Ignatieff Theatre called "The Bond Between Us: Reflections on the Human-Animal Relationship." Polar bear expert Else Poulsen and author Elizabeth Abbott will also be speaking at the event. All proceeds and book sales will go towards Zoocheck Canada. George Ignatieff Theatre (15 Devonshire Place), 7 p.m., $8.

And Torontoist was there to make a video of it.

Believe it or not, there's a 10' x 20' Pattison ground sign behind there. Those trees' days are numbered.

Photo of a Koodo mobile ad by Marc Lostracco.

One year ago today, City Council's Executive Committee approved [PDF] the awarding of the street furniture contract—for the purposes of designing, building, owning, and maintaining bus shelters, garbage bins, ad pillars, and more for a period of twenty years in exchange for advertising rights—to Astral Media Outdoor, despite the fact that the company had absolutely no experience with "street furniture" and maintains dozens of illegal billboards in defiance of City Council.

The province has ordered the City of Toronto to stop stonewalling in the face of freedom of information requests about allegedly illegal billboards.

These pictures were not taken mid-transition.

"This advertising space and/or building for lease"

Photo by Lina Aristizabal.

The Globe and Illegal Signs report today that Titan Outdoor Canada Company has asked the courts to save its sixteen vinyl billboards from a City of Toronto removal order.

In this occasional feature, two Torontoist staffers face off to debate an issue that is important to our city. We invite our readers to join in the debate in the comments section after the post.

The Toronto Star. July 18, 2007. Joe Fiorito column: The other day I noticed a Red Rocket, defaced from stem to stern with a depiction of a bottle of vodka and the comely legs of a party girl whose dress was hiked up around her thighs. Let me count the ways this is wrong. But first, my bona fides. I grew up during the sexual revolution. I also learned a variety of useful lessons...