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Newsstand: February 9, 2015
The Grammys have come and gone, and we've got another slate of embarrassing wins to bemoan. Eminem? Beck? At least Prince showed up. In the news: bike-lane advocates are taking their fight to Riverdale, potential school closures threaten the programs housed in some old schools, and John Tory takes his seat among the country's mayors.
A neighbourhood advocacy group is working to have bike lanes installed in Riverdale. Ward 30 Bikes will have advice from fourth-year urban planning students at Ryerson after professor Don Verbanac made the issue an assignment. The class will present its final report at a community meeting today. “The number one reason people don’t cycle more in the city is because they don’t feel safe,” according to Ward 30 Bikes member Paul Young. Monday’s report will include a number of options for new lanes: bike paths on Leslie Street (which is under construction already, but with no bike-related plans), Cherry Street, and Carlaw Avenue. Ward 30 Bikes has already seen some success: the group lobbied for bike lanes on Dundas East.
As the Toronto District School Board prepares to close up to one-fifth of its schools in order to rid itself of “underutilized” buildings and make some money to complete its backlog of needed repairs, the people who are using those schools are growing concerned. Old Orchard Junior Public School is one such site. The school has been the site of the West End Parents’ Daycare since 1981, and two years ago a Montessori school opened in the building as well. Together, the two programs take in 120 kids a day. Parents gathered at the school on Sunday to discuss their concerns about finding nearby replacements for the services. Also in attendance were TDSB trustees Ausma Malik and Marit Stiles, as well as city councillor Mike Layton (Ward 19, Trinity-Spadina). Malik, Stiles, and Layton all said their hands, as municipal politicians, were more or less being forced by the provincial government. “We shouldn’t be put in this position,” Layton said. “The province is taking money out of our budget. We can’t bail them out of 60 schools.”
In many ways, John Tory is both different from and the same as his mayoral predecessor. But Tory has set himself apart from Rob Ford by embracing his colleagues, the mayors of other Canadian cities. The mayors had a gathering last week to lobby the federal government. It’s a meeting Ford had spurned for the most part, and sometimes overshadowed with the fog of controversy that followed him throughout much of his stint in Toronto’s top office. But Tory appears to be a team player, and that has the country’s other big-city mayors excited. Edmonton’s Don Iveson was especially exuberant, telling the Globe and Mail, “I can’t underscore enough the importance of having Toronto at the table, fully engaged again.”