Re-discovering Toronto's lost bridge

Re-discovering Toronto's lost bridge

via Posted Toronto by Rob Roberts on 5/12/08

Ever wondered why central Toronto is so flat? Answer: because people flattened it!
At 4 p.m. tomorrow in Trinity-Bellwoods Park, Deputy Mayor Joe Pantalone will perform a long-overdue task: unveil a plaque to the Crawford Street Bridge, one of the seven lost wonders of Toronto.
The bridge, built in 1915, spans a ravine of the late, great Garrison Creek, so named because, from its headwaters north of St. Clair Avenue, it gurgled past the soldiers stationed at Fort York, en route to flowing into Lake Ontario.
According to the plaque, "by the 1880s, the creek was so polluted that it was gradually channeled underground into a brick sewer, built through here in 1885."
City fathers (and mothers) bricked in the creek but left the ravine, and in 1915 one R.C. Harris — yes, the famed Commissioner of Works who built the water filtration plant and Bloor Street Viaduct and was immortalized in the Michael Ondaatje book -- cut his teeth at this very spot, engineering a triple-span bridge to get Crawford Street up to Dundas Street (triple-span refers to the arches, resting on posts, which hold up the bridge deck.)
The bridge, though, received an indecent burial just 45 years later, when excavators digging out the Bloor Street subway line just filled the ravine up with dirt. Gary Miedema, who heads the plaque project at Heritage Toronto, notes, "Trinity-Bellwoods was an immigrant community that would have been relatively voiceless."
Lately, the area has been finding its voice.
"So dumb," Ed Dosman, a professor of international studies at York University, says of the bridge-burying.
Mr. Dosman in his spare time works with the Garrison Creek Linkage Project, which has already done marvelous work using copper letters sunk in cement to label Garrison Creek along much of its length. Here at the Crawford Bridge, they've stuck plaques in cement depicting the fish who once swam here: northern pike, bowfin, white sucker, largemouth bass, brown bullhead, pumpkinseed and rock bass.
But Mr. Dosman won't be content until backhoes undo the mistakes of the past, and unearth the bridge, our own local Téotihuacan.
"I have no doubt that in the next generation the bridge will be dug out," he says. "We could have potentially a water feature in Trinity-Bellwoods park along the lines of Lafontaine Park in Montreal. In Chicago or Seattle this would have been done a long time ago, but we're broke."
In his dream, a one kilometre stretch of restored creek flows from Dundas to Queen Street, passing under the bridge and through the remaining ravine in Trinity-Bellwoods park, which today is a popular toboganning spot in winter.
Mr. Pantalone, Toronto's "tree advocate," says, however, that it's not just about the money.
"We'd have to kill I don't know how many trees to ressurect the old bridge," he said. "Future generations may deem that a project worth doing."
Indeed, I'm fascinated walking here to see the dozens of 40-year-old maple and ash trees thriving in the 1960s fill around the bridge. You can see the former line of the ravine from the much older trees at the edges of the park.
On the plus side, the filled-in ravine around the bridge is now home, on Tuesdays, to the Trinity-Bellwoods farmer's market, which opens for the season tomorrow. I love that market, except that vendors and shoppers trample and kill the grass in the park. Here's my idea: close the bridge stretch of Crawford on Tuesday afternoons, let the vendors set up there, and call it the Crawford Bridge Market, which would celebrate the bridge's memory, and save the grass.

Crawford Street Bridge, West Side, November 16, 1915. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1231, Item 1615
Photo of Crawford Street this afternoon by Peter Redman, National Post

Gas Prices and Real Estate

Gas Prices and Real Estate

via Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed by pk on 5/12/08

Interesting piece picked up by The Oil Drum on the relationship between gas prices and real estate in Australia. It summarizes a study of the effect on commuting costs when considering various communities progressively further outside the urban/suburban/exurban horizon west of Sydney.

Here is the effect in the $2/litre scenario, with red representing the highest percentage of income going to fuel consumption, etc.:

Granted, this is based on a few assumptions, not least of which being that a commuter-centric culture will continue to prevail in a high-price oil world. That is a debatable point.Nevertheless, interesting stuff, as is the underlying paper. Can barely imagine what this would look like here in car-dependent, freeway-riddled southern California.

Irony of Toronto's planning dep't

Letter from Yonge-Dundas Square: Designing for the public

via Posted Toronto by Barry Hertz on 5/9/08

It seemed like a good idea: Take a picture of Gary Wright, Toronto's new chief planner, in Yonge-Dundas Square, a project he planned in 1996. But as soon as the National Post photographer began to work, a security guard appeared with Sara Peel, the square's "event co-ordinator," and told us to stop."Anybody who is doing anything needs a permit," the guard said, adding the folks from Dr. Oetker were soon to start handing out free pizza.Told the story, Councillor Adam Vaughan
(Trinity-Spadina), who sits on council's planning committee, jokes, "He is a victim of his own planning."

It wasn't supposed to be like this; Mr. Wright intended to create a new public square. As he told me, while sitting in the square, "We're not a city known for squares or public spaces. It's a very commercial downtown in Toronto. There's not a culture of public squares." What we have is a private square, run by a board of management that rents it for corporate events.

The planner chased from his own square; it's a perfect metaphor for the challenges facing fast-growing Toronto. While developers erect condo towers, some five times higher than zoning permits, where are the improvements in the public realm? Sidewalks are too narrow for all the new pedestrians, passengers squeeze into overcrowded buses, subways and streetcars, and new parks downtown are rare.

James McKellar, a professor of real property at York University's Schulich School of Business, argues that great cities are judged not by new private buildings but by public development, of such things as parks, transit, sidewalks and public schools. In building the public realm, he says, "Toronto has no idea of what it is doing."Of particular concern, in this context, is the announcement that Mr. Wright will only stay as chief planner for two years, until his retirement in 2010. "The man will have no power," Mr. McKellar says. "He's a lame duck."

On the plus side, Mr. Wright is a nice guy. A friendly, bearded father-figure, he has spent 33 years in Toronto's planning department. He takes over from Ted Tyndorf, the chief planner who died of cancer in February. Mr. Tyndorf held the job for four years.Mr. Wright, who lives in the Beach, notes that he has a busy job. The city gets 600 to 700 applications for rezonings, official plan amendments and site plan approvals each year, on top of about 3,200 applications to the committee of adjustment. To handle this, Mr. Wright has a staff of 346.It sounds like a lot of people, but according to Mr. Vaughan's count, Toronto today has fewer planning staff for a city of 2.6 million than it did before amalgamation for a city of about 650,000. "It's as if we jettisoned the whole planning departments of Scarborough, East York, York and Etobicoke," he says.

"Our planning sucks by all accounts. The planners are demoralized. Our reputation for great planning is something that we built in the 1970s, coasted on in the 1980s, and destroyed in the 1990s." Mr. Wright is more upbeat, citing community activists as inspiring him, including Active 18, a Queen Street West group wanting to control development across from the Drake Hotel. ''We didn't always have a successful working relationship, but it got better at the end. We look forward to working with communities like that." He is also keen on new design review panels that will review projects near St. Lawrence Market, at Humber Bay Shores, in North York and in Scarborough.

But Howard Cohen, a former Toronto planner who now builds condos with his firm, Context Developments, told a panel at the University of Toronto last week (according to a report in the city newsmagazine Novae Res Urbis): "We have a planning department that is dispirited, demoralized and totally intimidated by community groups and council."A number of people describe Toronto's planning department as a troubled place, whose senior planners, feeling disempowered, have left, leaving juniors who have little experience. Meanwhile, empowered councillors cut random deals with developers, forcing them to hand out transit passes with new condos or give money to local picnics. Mr. McKellar suggests that, to clean up the mess, Toronto needs a global search for a new head of plannning, someone on the scale of Vancouver's Larry Beasley, who became a household name while bringing planning innovation to that city. That's not what Toronto is going to get. "If we wish to maintain the status quo in the planning department," says Councillor Karen Stintz (Eglinton Lawrence), "then Gary Wright will be very good in that role."

Buried Under Bellwoods

...or why the houses near Krisi's old apartment look like they're drunk...

Historicist: Buried Under Bellwoods

via Torontoist by Kevin Plummer on 5/10/08

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

Crawford Street Bridge, West Side, November 16, 1915. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1231, Item 1615

This Tuesday, May 13, Heritage Toronto will unveil the latest plaque celebrating Toronto's history to commemorate the secret bridge buried beneath the north-west corner of Trinity Bellwoods Park. The unveiling will take place at 4 p.m. at the corner of Crawford and Dundas. The Crawford Street Bridge, an elegant triple-span structure, crossed the deep ravine cut by Garrison Creek where it entered the park. Garrison Creek's rambling path from north of St. Clair to the lake near Fort York—its route now preserved as a Discovery Walk [PDF]—was an "inconvenience" of landscape to be overcome by the city's orderly, militaristic street grid. Despite the polluted stream being systematically bricked up as a sewer and buried to hide the refuse and sewage of rapid and haphazard urban development, this part of the ravine remained a formidable obstacle until the Crawford Street Bridge. The bridge and ravine have both since become victims of a city pretending to be flat—but they aren't the only treasures hidden beneath Trinity Bellwoods.

Bellwoods Park, Dundas and Crawford streets, August 5, 1914. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1231, Item 667

At first the Garrison Creek ravine was overcome with a modest wooden bridge built in 1884. Then, Roland Caldwell Harris, the city's Commissioner of Works, replaced it with the cement bridge in 1914-15. Its railing, lamps, and stately character reflected, as Sarah Meehan put it in Spacing, "Harris's flair for dramatic public architecture." (His style can still be seen with the Prince Edward Viaduct.)

The Crawford Street Bridge initially fit the character of the neighbourhood of dignified Victorian homes and nearby Trinity College. With time, however, the houses deteriorated as the neighbourhood became more working class. When the city needed a place to dispose of the rubble from the Bloor-Danforth subway excavation in the 1960s, city officials took advantage of the neighbourhood's powerlessness; the north-west corner of the park became its dumping ground.

As the northern reaches of the park were flattened up to the level of Dundas Street, the modern-day bowl that is so popular for tobogganing and dog-walking became the only reminder of the ravine. The bridge was buried intact—minus the railings and lampposts—right up to its curbs. For years, its still-visible sidewalks bore the rusted scars of its previous life. Finally, in 2004, safety concerns over the deteriorating condition of the bridge forced the city to narrow the roadway and entirely rebuild the sidewalks, further obscuring this oddity of Toronto's heritage. Another bridge nearby, overlooking Bickford Park from Harbord between Grace and Crawford, was buried in 1930. Although it has yet to receive a plaque, the Harbord Street Bridge's crumbling balustrade is still visible on the north side of the street.

Trinity College, University of Toronto, 1929. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1231, Item 2

There are other remnants of Toronto's past beneath Trinity Bellwoods, which was Trinity College's original home. Seeking the establishment of an Anglican college, Bishop John Strachan purchased the land in 1851. With the support of the crown and funding from local Torontonians, the main building—designed by Kivas Tully—was soon constructed and students began attending in 1852. The symmetrical neo-Gothic building overlooked the rest of the park from atop a grassy mound, and was consciously intended to remind of the dreaming spires of Oxford and Cambridge. Upon its completion, Professor Goldwin Smith, a curmudgeon at the best of times, agreed that "no place in Canada so forcibly reminds me of Oxford as does Trinity."

As enrollment grew and college finances stabilized, Trinity added a new convocation hall (c. 1877), and college chapel (1884), as well as an expansion on the new west wing (1889-90), and a new east wing (1894). The newer buildings were simpler and more restrained designs by Frank Darling, the college's official architect. Darling's stone gates, built in 1904-5 to mark the broad approach from Queen Street, are one of the only visible reminders that the college was ever here. St. Hilda's College, the women's residence at Trinity, is the other, and has since been turned into John Gibson House, a retirement residence.

With Trinity's federation with the University of Toronto in the first decade of the twentieth century, it became inevitable that the college would relocate to the main campus. The City of Toronto bought the buildings and land in 1912 for $231,000, but allowed the college to remain until a new college building (an adapted copy of Tully's original) was built on Hoskin Avenue in 1925. Then, as has often happened before and since, city officials didn't know what to do next. According to historian William Dendy's book Lost Toronto, the council originally planned to sell 8 acres of the site for the construction of a baseball stadium. This would've required the demolition of the main college buildings, and the plan prompted strong public outcry. The council quickly backtracked. Public calls to turn the campus into a museum or soldiers's residence went unheeded. Its brief life as a Kiwanis-operated athletic club did not prevent further deterioration. The Trinity buildings needed new roofs, new heating, and new electrical. City officials, claiming the campus was beyond preservation, unceremoniously razed the site in 1956.

The buried foundations still lie just north of the Trinity Bellwood Park's circular walk (and the chapels are buried near the tennis courts). Perhaps these hidden treasures of Trinity Bellwoods will receive a plaque just as the Crawford Street Bridge will next week.

Map of Trinity Collge Grounds, January 25, 1913 from the City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1231, Item 57

Tis a Shame

I was sincerely hoping that the torch would fall into a crevasse.

Girls, Sports and Injuries

Michael Sokolove of the NY Times has written a fascinating article on Girls' Sports Injuries - why they happen, how they are different than boys and how things have changed. Some highlights (lowlights?):

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May 11, 2008

The A.C.L. is a small, rubber-band-like fiber, no bigger than a little finger, that attaches to the femur in the upper leg and the tibia in the lower leg and stabilizes the knee. When it ruptures, the reconstructive surgery is complicated and the rehabilitation painful and long. It usually takes six to nine months to return to competition, even for professional athletes.

This casualty rate was not due to some random spike in South Florida. It is part of a national trend in the wake of Title IX and the explosion of sports participation among girls and young women. From travel teams up through some of the signature programs in women’s college sports, women are suffering injuries that take them off the field for weeks or seasons at a time, or sometimes forever.

Girls and boys diverge in their physical abilities as they enter puberty and move through adolescence. Higher levels of testosterone allow boys to add muscle and, even without much effort on their part, get stronger. In turn, they become less flexible. Girls, as their estrogen levels increase, tend to add fat rather than muscle. They must train rigorously to get significantly stronger. The influence of estrogen makes girls’ ligaments lax, and they outperform boys in tests of overall body flexibility — a performance advantage in many sports, but also an injury risk when not accompanied by sufficient muscle to keep joints in stable, safe positions. Girls tend to run differently than boys — in a less-flexed, more-upright posture — which may put them at greater risk when changing directions and landing from jumps. Because of their wider hips, they are more likely to be knock-kneed — yet another suspected risk factor.

This divergence between the sexes occurs just at the moment when we increasingly ask more of young athletes, especially if they show talent: play longer, play harder, play faster, play for higher stakes. And we ask this of boys and girls equally — unmindful of physical differences. The pressure to concentrate on a “best” sport before even entering middle school — and to play it year-round — is bad for all kids. They wear down the same muscle groups day after day. They have no time to rejuvenate, let alone get stronger. By playing constantly, they multiply their risks and simply give themselves too many opportunities to get hurt.

Comprehensive statistics on total sports injuries are in short supply. The N.C.A.A. compiles the best numbers, but even these are based on just a sampling of colleges and universities. For younger athletes, the numbers are less specific and less reliable. Some studies have measured sports injuries by emergency-room visits, which usually follow traumatic events like broken bones. A.C.L. and other soft-tissue injuries often do not lead to an E.R. visit; the initial examination typically occurs at the office of a pediatrician or an orthopedic surgeon. Studies of U.S. high-school athletics indicate that, when it comes to raw numbers, boys suffer more sports injuries. But the picture is complicated by football and the fact that boys still represent a greater percentage of high-school athletes.

Girls are more likely to suffer chronic knee pain as well as shinsplints and stress fractures. Some research indicates that they are more prone to ankle sprains, as well as hip and back pain. And for all the justifiable attention paid to concussions among football players, females appear to be more prone to them in sports that the sexes play in common.

A study last year by researchers at Ohio State University and Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, reported that high-school girls who play basketball suffer concussions at three times the rate of boys, and that the rate for high-school girls who play soccer is about 1.5 percent greater than boys. According to the N.C.A.A. statistics, women who play soccer suffer concussions at nearly identical rates as male football players. (The research indicates that it takes less force to cause a concussion in girls and young women, perhaps because they have smaller heads and weaker necks.)

AN A.C.L. DOES NOT tear so much as it explodes, often during routine athletic maneuvers — landings from jumps, decelerations from sprints — that look innocuous until the athlete crumples to the ground. After the A.C.L. pulls off the femur, it turns into a viscous liquid. The ligament cannot be repaired; it has to be replaced with a graft, which the surgeon usually forms by taking a slice of the patellar tendon below the kneecap or from a hamstring tendon. One reason for the long rehabilitation is that the procedure is really two operations — one at the site of the injury and the other at the donor site, where the tendon is cut.

If girls and young women ruptured their A.C.L.’s at just twice the rate of boys and young men, it would be notable. Three times the rate would be astounding. But some researchers believe that in sports that both sexes play, and with similar rules — soccer, basketball, volleyball — female athletes rupture their A.C.L.’s at rates as high as five times that of males.

Men also tear their A.C.L.’s, most frequently in football and from direct blows to the leg. But even football players, according to N.C.A.A. statistics, do not rupture their A.C.L.’s during their fall seasons at the rates of women in soccer, basketball and gymnastics. The N.C.A.A.’s Injury Surveillance System tracks injuries suffered by athletes at its member schools, calculating the frequency of certain injuries by the number of occurrences per 1,000 “athletic exposures” — practices and games. The rate for women’s soccer is 0.25 per 1,000, or 1 in 4,000, compared with 0.10 for male soccer players. The rate for women’s basketball is 0.24, more than three times the rate of 0.07 for the men. The A.C.L. injury rate for girls may be higher — perhaps much higher — than it is for college-age women because of a spike that seems to occur as girls hit puberty.

The Injury Surveillance reports include commentary as well as data, and in 2007 the authors stated that an A.C.L. rupture is “a rare event” and advised against making too much of the tears sustained by male and female collegiate athletes across a range of sports. But a young woman playing college soccer can easily generate 200 exposures a year between her regular season in the fall, off-season training in the spring and club play in the summer. Plenty of younger players, girls in their early through late teens, will accrue well in excess of that number between their high-school seasons, their club seasons — which often run year-round — and multigame tournaments on weekends and soccer camps in the summer. (The same is true in other sports in which girls play school and club seasons, including basketball, lacrosse, volleyball and field hockey.)

So imagine a hypothetical high-school soccer team of 20 girls, a fairly typical roster size, and multiply it by the conservative estimate of 200 exposures a season. The result is 4,000 exposures. In a cohort of 20 soccer-playing girls, the statistics predict that 1 each year will experience an A.C.L. injury and go through reconstructive surgery, rehabilitation and the loss of a season — an eternity for a high schooler. Over the course of four years, 4 out of the 20 girls on that team will rupture an A.C.L.

Each of them will likely experience “a grief reaction,” says Dr. Jo Hannafin, orthopedic director of the Women’s Sports Medicine Center at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York. “They’ve lost their sport and they’ve lost the kinship of their friends, which is almost as bad as not being able to play.”

Silvers, along with a Santa Monica orthopedic surgeon, Bert Mandelbaum, designed an A.C.L.-injury-prevention program that has been instituted and studied in the vast Coast Soccer League, a youth program in Southern California. Teams in a control group did their usual warm-ups before practices and games, usually light running and some stretching, if that. The others were enrolled in the foundation’s “PEP program,” a customized warm-up of stretching, strengthening and balancing exercises. An entire team can complete its 19 exercises — including side-to-side shuttle runs, backward runs and walking lunges — in 20 minutes. One goal is to strengthen abdominal muscles, which help set the whole body in protective athletic positions, and to improve balance through a series of plyometric exercises — forward, backward and lateral hops over a cone. Girls are instructed to “land softly,” or “like a spring.”

There is nothing complicated about the program. And nothing really exciting about it either — which, as with many preventive routines, is one of its challenges. As essential as it may be, it’s not as interesting as kicking a soccer ball around.

The Santa Monica Orthopaedic and Sports Medicine Research Foundation published results of its trial in the American Journal of Sports Medicine. The research was nonrandomized and therefore not the highest order of scientific research. (The coaches of teams doing the exercises made a choice to participate; the control group consisted of those who declined.) Nevertheless, the results were attention-grabbing.

The subjects were all between 14 and 18. In the 2000 soccer season, researchers calculated 37,476 athletic exposures for the PEP-trained players and 68,580 for the control group. Two girls in the trained group suffered A.C.L. ruptures that season, a rate of 0.05 per 1,000 exposures. Thirty-two girls in the control group suffered the injury — a rate of 0.47. (That was almost twice the rate for women playing N.C.A.A. soccer.) The foundation compiled numbers in the same league the following season and came up with similar results — a 74 percent reduction in A.C.L. tears among girls doing the PEP exercises.

The program has direct parallels with the research taking place at the military academies. Both are focused on biomechanics — the way athletes move — in no small part because gait patterns can be modified, unlike anatomical characteristics like wider hips. Marshall has been encouraged by information taken from the sensors attached to his subjects as they jump. “Women tend to be more erect and upright when they land, and they land harder,” he said. “They bend less through the knees and hips and the rest of their bodies, and they don’t absorb the impact of the landing in the same way that males do. I don’t want to sound horrible about it, but we can make a woman athlete run and jump more like a man.”

Silvers stressed the importance of training girls as young as possible, by their early teens or even younger. “Once something is learned neurally, it is never unlearned,” she said. “It never leaves you. That’s mostly good. It’s why motor skills are retained even after serious injuries. But ways of moving are also ingrained, which makes retraining more difficult with the older athletes. The younger girls are more like blank slates. They’re easier to work with.”

The PEP program, and others like it around the country, are not without their skeptics, who ask how you can try to solve a problem before you are even confident of its cause. Donald Shelbourne, an Indianapolis orthopedic surgeon and researcher, is perhaps the most vehement of the critics. “It’s like me taking antioxidants,” he says. “I don’t have cancer yet, so it’s working, right? These retraining programs play on emotions without data. They’re unproven. Jumping and landing is something that everyone knows how to do, and now we’ve got people saying, ‘We can teach you to do it better.’ I don’t buy it.”

Coaches rarely like to give up precious practice time for injury prevention, and often have to be pushed by parents.

The club structure is the driving force behind the trend toward early specialization in one sport — and, by extension, a primary cause of injuries. To play multiple sports is, in the best sense, childlike. It’s fun. You move on from one good thing to the next. But to specialize conveys a seriousness of purpose. It seems to be leading somewhere — even if, in fact, the real destination is burnout or injury.

There is a fascinating parallel in research on injury rates in U.S. Army basic training, a two-month regimen that pushes recruits to their physical limits. In numerous studies going back more than two decades, women are shown to suffer injuries at substantially higher rates than men, with stress fractures to the lower legs a particular problem. But one large study also suggests that the women are both more frequently injured and tougher. It takes a bigger injury to knock them out of the service. The men, by comparison, are wimps; they leave with more minor ailments.

In sports, just as in the military, women are relative newcomers. In both venues, there may be an element of “toughing it out” to prove they belong. “From the earliest levels in girls’ sports, up through the elite and Olympic level, how one plays the sport, how one comports oneself, is talked about in specific ways that transcend technical or tactical expertise,” Colleen Hacker says. “It is more overt with the girls than the boys. Character counts. Physical toughness, mental toughness and handling adversity count.”

Michael Sokolove is a contributing writer for the magazine. This article is adapted from “Warrior Girls: Protecting Our Daughters Against the Injury Epidemic in Women’s Sports,” which will be published in June.

Farmers' Marketing

Farmers' Marketing

via Torontoist by Val Dodge on 5/6/08

For those who crave local food, the long winter of parsnip and rutabaga soup is coming to an end. The surest sign of spring is the sight of farmers pitching their market tents for the year ahead. You know what that means: you'll be able to add fresh local asparagus and radishes to that soup any day now.

Toronto supports a handful of year-round markets including the old reliable St. Lawrence and a relative newcomer in Dufferin Grove Park. But there's no need to travel very far for the variety and freshness; Farmers' Markets Ontario lists a dozen more neighbourhood markets that come to life in Toronto each spring. One of the first underway this year is the Friends of Riverdale Farm Farmers' Market, held in Riverdale Park West at the corner of Winchester and Sumach Streets. The Riverdale market launches next Tuesday, May 13 from 3–7 p.m. and runs every Tuesday through the end of October. It's best known for its mix of organic, transitional, and wild produce as well as sheep's milk yogourt, free range elk for carnivores, and other unexpected treats.

The East York Farmers' Market at the East York Civic Centre rouses from its winter slumber a week later on Tuesday May 20 from 9 a.m.–2 p.m. It usually starts a little small in May but is in full swing by mid-June. Pick up jars of elderberry jam and icicle pickles while you're there, and bring a front-end loader for all the Honeycrisp apples you can carry in September.

By early June, the markets at Nathan Phillips Square (Wednesdays), Mel Lastman Square (Thursdays), Birch Cliff (Fridays), Withrow Park (Saturdays), Liberty Village (Sundays), and elsewhere in the city will also be serving up local produce to eager residents. Arrive early on market day for the best selection, chat with the vendors for recipe and cooking tips, and remember what it's like to eat fresh local food that hasn't spent a week or three on trucks and ships to get to you.

Photo by Jen Chan from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

New Digital Map of Algonquin.

Hey people,
Found this online http://homepage.mac.com/canoecamping/Map/About_the_Map.html. There are a number of maps of Algonquin, but few online. In fact, the only one I can think of is a 4 Mb pdf scan of the old Canoe Routes map, which is now slightly dated in terms of open camp sites and portages. So, this guy (Jeffrey McMurtrie) has made a new map of the park, and superimposed a whack of new data on it from alternate sources, such as the logging roads, cut areas, etc. It's a big file, but I thought you might be interested in knowing about it for trip planning. If you a copy of the older version, let me know,

Cheers
n

How We're Wrecking Our Feet

How We're Wrecking Our Feet With Every Step We Take -- New York

"“Natural gait is biomechanically impossible for any shoe-wearing person,” wrote Dr. William A. Rossi in a 1999 article in Podiatry Management. “It took 4 million years to develop our unique human foot and our consequent distinctive form of gait, a remarkable feat of bioengineering. Yet, in only a few thousand years, and with one carelessly designed instrument, our shoes, we have warped the pure anatomical form of human gait, obstructing its engineering efficiency, afflicting it with strains and stresses and denying it its natural grace of form and ease of movement head to foot.” In other words: Feet good. Shoes bad."

I have to say that I like my Nike Free's, but I find it funny - each new release of them is bulkier than the last.

Ansel in Yosemite

Gorgeous, gorgeous shots.

Maybe I should get a medium format camera? Or maybe I should work out how to use my own SLR?

Free Mulch!

http://www.toronto.ca/compost/woodchip.htm

A Sports Ethics story that doesn't suck

A nice story.

Also the NYT version

Online music

Have to say that I still miss Pandora. Last.fm has some promise, but the social algorithm doesn't work quite as well as the music genome. Musicovery is a substitute, but sort of margarine instead of butter.

Free Deep Stuff

which is always a good idea.

Beach at Dawn

A great Ashbridges shot

Pandering Politics

Dumb as We Wanna Be.

It is great to see that we finally have some national unity on energy policy. Unfortunately, the unifying idea is so ridiculous, so unworthy of the people aspiring to lead our nation, it takes your breath away. Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer’s travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country. When the summer is over, we will have increased our debt to China, increased our transfer of wealth to Saudi Arabia and increased our contribution to global warming for our kids to inherit.

As much as I resent paying $1.22 for a litre of gas, it's hard to argue for much of a reduction. In fact, the sky-rocketing price of gas has been one of the few things capable of making me use the TTC on a regular basis. (The other is realizing how much $$ I've spent on parking tickets. Wow. That one seriously hurt).

Mmm, snow peas

Recipe.

Fun event

But I'll be in Boston.

What seafood can you eat?

Apparently, not much.

It gets pretty tricky what's ethical and what's not.
BBC guide
Sea Choice

St John River floods

Craziness. The equivalent in Toronto would be if Lake Ontario rose up and reclaimed the land from Queen's Quay to the ACC or the slight rise that is Front Street (the original lake front downtown) or Fort York.

See also

It would be cool to see Grand Falls at this point - presumably it's massive.

At least they're prepared-ish

How The Street Furniture Bids Stacked Up

How The Street Furniture Bids Stacked Up

via Torontoist by Jonathan Goldsbie on 4/30/08

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 experienceillegal billboards in defiance of City Council. with "street furniture" and maintains dozens of

Here's what the public portion of the staff report [PDF] said: "It is noted that [Astral's] proposal scored highest in all four evaluation categories. For the information of Committee and Council, the scores ranged from 47.75 to 85.54. In accordance with Council approved policy, proponents' scores, financial comparison and staff analysis of the evaluation results can be provided to Councillors in an in-camera presentation if requested by Committee members."

The Toronto Public Space Committee filed an Access to Information request for the scoring and, after an appeal to the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, just this week obtained the above document, being published in its full version for the first time. (The heavily-redacted, pre-appeal version previously appeared in mid-January on IllegalSigns.ca [PDF].)

Most interesting is the evaluation of the Financial Element, based entirely on the "Net Present Value of the Financial Proposal to the City." Astral offered an NPV of $252.2 million (meaning that's how much the money is worth in terms of 2007 dollars), earning itself a perfect 30 out of 30. CBS Outdoor, the incumbent for the bus shelters (which provide the bulk of the ad revenue) scored a paltry 3.50 out of 30.

This confirms what had been whispered around the outdoor advertising industry and what had been implied by Clear Channel Outdoor's deputation to the Executive: Astral won the contract, in large part, by wildly outbidding its competitors. Perhaps because they'd never done this before and overestimated how much the contract would be worth, they seem to have outbid CBS (experienced in the Toronto shelter market) by a factor of almost ten.

Some will certainly argue that this means the City got a great deal, and that may be true to a point: that point being the assumption that Astral will actually be able to pay what it's promised. There is a good chance that sometime within the first ten years of the contract, Astral will attempt to renegotiate for more advertising or less money; it's unlikely that the financial model with which they obtained the contract is a sustainable one.

That's exactly what happened with the OMG/Eucan/EcoMedia garbage bin contract. When Eucan found they couldn't pay the City what they owed, they tried to foist on us the MegaBins—seven-and-a-half-foot tall illuminated street-level billboards with trash receptacles on the sides. When Council eventually rejected those, the company was forced to admit that they couldn't pay the $2 million they were supposed to have given the City each year from 1999–2009. According to John Spears in the Star, the total amount paid to the City from 1999–2006 was $3.218 million, or about a half a million a year. The City had no choice but to agree to the renegotiated amount; it had absolutely no leverage in the deal. From that same Star article:

"We're being held over a garbage bin," [Councillor Minnan-Wong] said. Because the city no longer owns its street bins, it couldn't afford to have EcoMedia walk away with them. The street furniture deal's winning bidder will have to provide more than $100 million worth of items, but that means financial risk to the city, he said. "Companies can make all sorts of promises, and if they fall short of those promises the city can lose millions of dollars."

Jonathan Goldsbie is a campaigner with the Toronto Public Space Committee. Photo courtesy of Astral Media Outdoor.

Get Outta Town, GO By Bike

interesting idea

Get Outta Town, GO By Bike

via Torontoist by Val Dodge on 4/30/08

Have you ever cycled along the Pickering and Ajax waterfronts? You should. It's one of the best recreational bike rides in the GTA with beautiful scenery and mostly-flat trails, but presents Toronto cyclists with a big problem: how to get there. Because the Waterfront Trail all but disappears through most of Scarborough, you're stuck with either riding the long, miserable route along Kingston Road and Lawrence Avenue to get to Pickering or driving your car to Rouge Beach and riding into Pickering from there.

There is another option: GO Transit. Most cyclists are unaware that they can take their bikes on any GO train (except during weekday rush hours). That's where GO-by-Bike comes in. It's a project conceived by Donald Wiedman that encourages cyclists to take a Sunday GO train to Ajax and ride a leisurely 15 km back along the Waterfront Trail to the Rouge Hill station, where they can catch another train back into the city. Not only do you get to avoid the nasty ride along Kingston Road, but you get to leave the car at home too. And best of all, because GO-by-Bike is promoting an existing capability on all GO trains along the Lakeshore line, you aren't limited to travelling to or from any particular station, or on any particular train, or at any particular time. You're completely free to go at your own pace and can even roll your own custom tour instead of taking one of the pre-surveyed routes covering the waterfront, Highland Creek, Petticoat Creek, Duffins Creek, and more.

Wiedman saw an opportunity to promote both transit and cycling in the spaces around Toronto and approached GO Transit with "a handshake and a smile. I told them right up front that I wasn't looking for help, I was looking to help." Wiedman also says that he wants cyclists to have "do-it-themselves" experiences rather than provide guided or structured tours. "Trails are ultimately self-serve." In the end, it's up to cyclists to set their itineraries, buy their GO tickets, and make the journey. GO-by-Bike plants the seed and provides suggestions, but the form, structure, and timing of the trips are entirely up to the individual cyclists.

By raising awareness of bike-transit connections, Wiedman and GO are hoping that more people will take advantage of eco-friendly local tourism opportunities around Toronto. Taking the GO train provides cyclists with access to dozens of new routes without having to drive for an hour to get to them. Whether you want a simple ride along the waterfront, a more challenging pedal north through the Oak Ridges Moraine, or a new setting for a family picnic, be sure to go by bike and leave the car at home.

GO-by-Bike to Ajax runs on Sundays from June 1 through the end of August. RSVP to the GO-by-Bike Facebook group, get yourself to a Lakeshore GO station, buy your tickets, and hop on an eastbound train. A representative will be at the Ajax GO station on Sundays in the summer to direct cyclists to water, washrooms, food, and the sights of Ajax.

Photo courtesy of the Town of Ajax

The River Rises. Again.

Let's hope they moved the kayaks first...

notes

Hey,
I was cleaning up some of the paperwork that was threatening to bury me under a landslide at the office and came across something that you may, or may not want to keep around.

"Rules:
1. no smoking, please use the patio.
2. you can reach the washrooms through the main restaurant
3. In lieu of clinking glasses, and thereby breaking them, anyone wishing to make the new couple kiss need to use this hula hoop. I understand their kiss will last roughly as long as you perform...

As a sibling, you get tremendous insights into the personality of your brother. The only issue is that you always take the worst possible inference from those observations.
Now that I'm old and have the benefit of time and 2000 kilometres of distance, I see that there might be space for multiple interpretations.

One. We always thought he was stubborn. A typical anecdote about Kevin might relate how mom and dad told him that he was to stay at the kitchen table until he had finished some much-loathed meal, possibly involving Brussels sprouts. Hours later, as Roger and Margaret prepared to turn the lights out and lock up the doors, Kevin was still sitting on the yellow metal chairs Dad had 'borrowed' from work. My brother was not going to be the one to give in. He was stubborn.
That said, another way of looking at it is that Kevin's stubbornness is actually Persistence. Sylvia - you can look at this way - you know your husband won't give up or give in.

Two. We always thought Kevin was a pessimist. You'll often hear some grumbling around him. For instance, just recently we put thirty beers into his backpack before hiking up into the Bugaboo Mountains. Put into perspective, that's 30 beers at 350 milliliters or ten and a half litres of beer in his pack. Roughly an extra twenty-five pounds of beer, plus kahlua, plus rum, for five of us. For two days and one night. On top of his normal backpacking load of tent, sleeping bag, clothes and the like.
While he whined at the prospect, once the pack was in place, Kevin just got on with the job and moved uphill faster than the rest of us slowpokes.
My advice to Sylvia - just keep him busy and the pessimism turns into realism.

Three. Taciturn. Kevin, for years, has said little to us. Very little. In fact, we had years without many words between us. But, over time, we became better and better at interpreting the various intonations of Kevin's grunts, headshakes, nods, eyerolls and sighs.
We used to think that Kevin was, well, introverted. But what it really meant is that he was just waiting for the right person to share his thoughts with.

Sylvia, I would like to welcome not just you but your entire family to our side - the Wallis family. Hopefully, in time, you can add to the rules on how to interact with your newly acquired Kevin."

Cheers
Nigel

Tories' "In and Out" Scam in a Nutshell

CalgaryGrit: A Letter From The Nigerian Prince explains better than any Globe editorial...

Bisphenol A: We hardly knew you ...

Bisphenol A: We hardly knew you ...

via David Akin's On the Hill by DavidAkin on 4/27/08

The Washington Post today looks back at more than a 100 years of Bisphenol A, the chemical recently labelled as a a possible problem by Health Canada (a big victory for environmental activists; a bitter defeat for industry types).... My government, which, above all else seems to want to be prudent, says: "The scientists concluded in this assessment that bisphenol A exposure to newborns and infants is below levels that may pose a risk, however, the gap between exposure and effect is not large enough."

So You Wanna Be An Olympian, Part 10

Damn. Why didn't we all think of this? I have to think that in my prime I might have been the best badminton player in Turks & Caicos! Craig is clearly the best cross-country skier in Vanuatu, Sylvia & Kevin must be the top bikers in Bermuda, etc...

High Speed Pix

Some great high-speed frames here. The water balloon, etc.

Prosthetics and Sports

All sorts of examples and ethical quandaries here.

School closings

Well, this ought to change some electoral races next time around...

I started a map on it as well. That said, not having any kids, it's more a property tax issue for me, so I didn't finish it

About Dam Time

Seriously. It's a public good, but not treated as one. Same goes for a variety of resources, from timber onwards. If Ontario capped the total volume of spring/groundwater that could be withdrawn per year, and then auctioned it off - I suspect that the per million liter cost might exceed $3.71. In fact, if we just treated it as tap water, my bills inform me that it's higher (i know, not apples to apples - but I'm not profiting off my tap).
In fact, somewhere there's a really good article on hunting for groundwater sources...
tick, tick, tick. Here! Businessweek has a great report on McCloud, CA's struggle with itself and Nestle.

The Future of the West Donlands

Which used to be the "Future of Ataratiri" back when I cared more about urban planning.

Isiah was just a Psychological Test

"Ousted Knicks coach and president Isiah Thomas, who presided over the team during one of the least successful and most shameful periods in its history, held a press conference Wednesday to announce that his four-year legacy of abysmal team chemistry, bloated payrolls, sex scandals, and simple losing was actually a vast psychological experiment carried out on New York City as a whole."
"Thomas worked alongside behavioral psychologists with an extensive knowledge of domestic-abuse patterning, aversion dynamics, the works of B. F. Skinner, and long-term mass hysteria to assemble a comprehensive testing program. An experiment consisting of a regimen of slowly increasing stress levels and traumatic events was designed, refined, and eventually performed upon New York City and Knicks fans everywhere."

Jane's Walk in Toronto

http://www.janeswalk.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=50&Itemid=94

The (Ugly) Future of Etobicoke's Waterfront

The motels were kind of seedy, but the condos are too-tall, too tacky and too unfriendly to the passerbys. It's fascinating how Toronto can continue to butcher its waterfront. We manage to squander every opportunity from Huang and Danczkay onwards....

PS - why the beatdown on Huang and Danczkay?

Algonquin - Not Melted Yet

Ice from the air

via Algonquin Outfitters web log by Gordon Baker on 4/23/08

Current conditions, based on info from park staff:

• Streams and rivers are open. Water levels are very high and still rising.
• In general, all interior lakes are frozen solid up to the shore.
• Several access roads are impassable due to washouts and/or snow.
• Check the Algonquin Park spring ice update for more details and safety messages.
• Check the NOAA satellite images for big lake conditions

The good news?

• Conditions are changing VERY quickly and the warm weather is continuing. Many smaller lakes will open in the next few days. Mew and Brewer Lakes, for example, are almost ice-free and we expect Costello to open today. There is open water in front of the Opeongo Store.
• Park staff are planning another flight on Friday morning and will report on conditions by early afternoon that day.

Here are some images from yesterday's helicopter fight over Algonquin Park:

The East Arm of Opeongo Lake, looking west

The north end of Lake Lavielle

Happy Isle Lake, looking towards Merchant
(the dark area is cloud shadow, not black ice)

Pathfinder Island, on Source Lake

Crooked Chute, on the Petawawa River (yikes!)

The Natch. Nice place, if you could get there.

Duncan face

Bwahahahah

How Valid Are T.V. Weather Forecasts?

And this confirms what we were already pretty sure of.

I'd hate to think of doing the same in our line of work :)

Why Credit Agencies Are Responsible for the Crisis

I should create a tag cloud for this...

The not-so-hidden minefields of the TTC deal

And one day, someone really will find some cost savings from amalgamation. Of course, not in this electoral cycle.

The not-so-hidden minefields of the TTC deal

via Posted Toronto by Rob Roberts on 4/21/08

Councillor Michael Thompson of Scarborough, who sits on the Toronto Transit Commission, calls the deal the TTC struck with its unions yesterday "quicksand." He calls it "madness." He calls it "Pandora's box." And yet at a TTC meeting Wednesday he will ratify it, because "We have labour peace and the city is running."
Lost amid the relief as Toronto avoided a transit strike is a little clause in the tentative contract called the "GTA clause," which could end up costing the City of Toronto a lot of money. The clause ensures that, throughout the contract, TTC workers will be the highest-paid in greater Toronto.
Which means that as of now, the TTC has handed authority over its budget to Carolyn Parrish and other municipal politicians in Mississauga, Brampton and elsewhere in the 905, possibly creating a unfunded liability of an unknown size.
Mississauga bus drivers at the top of the scale earn $26.63 per hour, whereas Toronto drivers earn $26.58. That 5¢ difference offended the TTC drivers, who believe that, as our police and firefighters, they have the toughest job and should get the best pay.
With this new TTC deal, TTC drivers are tops, but when will this all end? Mississauga Transit is a small shop, with 900 unionized mechanics and drivers and 393 buses (a tenth the size of the TTC) but it could cause us big headaches. Mississauga drivers, grouped in Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1572, begin negotiation this summer ahead of their contract's expiry on Sept. 30.
What if Mississauga wins a 3.5% raise? The TTC apparently then has to top up its drivers, so they stay ahead. Today, Geoff Marinoff, director of Mississauga Transit, said, "We need to be competitive in the job market."
"The TTC is hiring 700 to 900 drivers, we're hiring 100 drivers, Brampton is hiring, GO is hiring," he said. Brampton drivers have a four-year deal that gives them a 3.5% raise in 2010.
Other councillors asked yesterday how this could affect the city's bargaining with other unions. Next up for a contract are Toronto's police.
"Is triple-three [3% per year over the three-year TTC deal] the benchmark or the plateau?" asked Councillor Brian Ashton.
"Part of the madness is that the city has set a precedent," Mr. Thompson said. "It's simply a case of, 'Me too! Me too!' If other organizations say 'We want to be the highest paid,' there's no end to it, unfortunately."
Mr. Thompson and fellow commissioners Peter Milczyn and Anthony Perruzza described conference calls on Saturday night and yesterday morning between the nine commissioners and the TTC negotiation team. All three said the deal was better than a strike.
"As much as we might like to hold the line and be tougher," said Mr. Milczyn, "if there was a strike and they got ordered back to work and there was binding arbitration, it would end up costing us more. At least today the residents of Toronto were spared a major inconvenience."
Mr. Perruzza said, "To some degree I don't think anybody is happy today. It's a very expensive deal for the city, and the union probably wishes it got more."
The union leader, Bob Kinnear, had suggested yesterday that Mayor David Miller intervened personally to cut this deal, but the three commissioners said that was not so.
Brad Ross, a TTC spokesman, said, "that's Mr. Kinnear's speculation." He refused to discuss details of the negotiation or the deal. Union spokespeople in Toronto, Mississauga and Brampton did not return calls. Mayor David Miller is resting up after a week in China and has no public events until Wednesday.
Meanwhile, Mr. Ashton said comparing public sector salaries across the GTA opens another interesting possibility.
"I wish councillors could get that," he said. "If I could get parity with Mississauga councillors, then I could afford to go to Mississauga."
Right now, Toronto councillors earn $95,000, compared to $104,800 for Brampton councillors and $115,000 for councillors in Mississauga.

That looks familiar

Conrad Black's old place at 10 Toronto St, two doors down from work. The infamous security camera has been cropped just offscreen.

Better Off Now Than Five Years Ago... Or Not

Better Off Now Than Five Years Ago

via Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed by pk on 4/18/08

I normally disregard these "Are you better off now than you were X years/months/minutes/seconds ago"? surveys. They are usually selective, small sample, tough to generalize, etc.

But that said, this Pew summary of 40 years of such surveys among the middle-class in America is remarkable:

We are at a 40-year low, with most of the emotional carnage having happened in the last six months. That is the sharpest decline in the poll's history.

So, are you better off than five years ago? Worse? Other? Indifferent? Bemused? Do tell.

Corporatization of Universities, Gone Berserk

This is an appalling development in post-secondary education.

Corporatization of Universities, Gone Berserk

via The Progressive Economics Forum by Jim Stanford on 4/18/08

All too often these days I open the newspaper and become quickly convinced that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. But this little snippet (April 14, a Bloomberg story) really got my goat:

The University of North Carolina (which was a reputable institution, the last I checked) has accepted a $1 million donation from BB&T Corporation (an investment bank), that came with one tiny strong attached:

The University must agree that Ayn Rand's libertarian novel, Atlas Shrugged, will be required reading for UNC business students. Apparently two other universities (Marshall University in WV and Johnson C. Smith University, also in NC) signed similar deals.Corporate funding of universities is lamentable and insidious, and always carries an implied sacrifice of true independence. But this is nauseating.

Worse yet, the Bloomberg story on this hardly even touched the tip of the ethical iceberg that this type of arrangement creates. The main debate is over whether or not Rand's writing is truly worthy of unversity-level inquiry ("Rand could not write her way out of a paper bag," scofs one English prof contacted by the reporter for comment). No-one even asks if it's appropriate for corporations to be dictating curriculum on the basis of their paltry, incomplete donations.What billionaire will endow a university to teach business students Marx, Keynes, Kalecki, or Minsky? (Some might actually want to learn about Minsky, I suppose — to guide their short trading strategies.)

Excuse me now while I go and throw up.

Way to go, Rami

(Test post by email)
Good for the illegalsigns.ca group and by extension, a much needed slap on the wrist for the city and for the City Clerk. What on earth were they thinking?

Bigger Than Billboards

via Torontoist by Robin Rix on 4/17/08

The province has ordered the City of Toronto to stop stonewalling in the face of freedom of information requests about allegedly illegal billboards. IllegalSigns.ca—"our hobby is destroying illegal billboards through the rule of law"—submitted a series of requests asking the City to release information about certain billboards.

The City's Corporate Access and Privacy Unit balked. After receiving over 600 requests from the group in 2006—12% of all requests filed in the City—and after processing over half of them, it decided that the latest batch of requests were "frivolous or vexatious" and could thus be disregarded.

Among the reasons for the City's decision? Illegal Signs was using the information in order to criticize the City for its lax enforcement of existing billboard laws. The City's argument, if accepted, would have set a disastrous precedent for journalists, bloggers, and ordinary citizens throughout Toronto: is criticism of public officials grounds for being deemed frivolous or vexatious? All of a sudden, this became much bigger than billboards.

Illegal Signs appealed the City's decision to Ontario's Information and Privacy Commissioner. It won—and deservedly so. Our point-by-point analysis of the ruling continues below the fold.

The law states that a public institution must grant a freedom of information request unless an exception can be shown. And, when you think about it, that's the way it should be: public information should generally be accessible to interested parties upon request unless there are compelling reasons to withhold it—personal privacy, national security, and so on.

The exception that the City tried to argue was that the requests were frivolous or vexatious. Again, it's a pretty reasonable exception. There are people out there who file nonsensical complaints about all sorts of things, and public institutions have to be able to focus on what's important while filtering out the stuff that's absurd.

Where it gets murky is where an institution deems a valid request to be frivolous or vexatious. The law states that a request is frivolous or vexatious if it:

(1) is part of a pattern of conduct that amounts to an abuse of the right of access;
(2) is part of a pattern of conduct that would interfere with the operations of the institution;
(3) is made in bad faith; or
(4) is made for a purpose other than to obtain access.

In its ruling [PDF], the IPC held that the City failed to demonstrate that any of these grounds existed with respect to the requests by Illegal Signs. Here's our point-by-point recap:

(1) Whether the request was part of a pattern of conduct that amounts to an abuse of the right of access

There are two legs to this test. The first leg wasn't really in question. Illegal Signs engages in a "pattern of conduct." That's what the group (like most activist groups) does—it requests information about billboards that it deems to be questionable, assesses it, and asks the City to investigate where appropriate.

The second leg was the key battlefield. To find that conduct rises to the level of "abuse," four factors need to be weighed: the number of requests; the nature and scope of the requests; the timing of the requests; and the purpose of the requests. Of these four factors, the only one where the City eked out a victory was in the number of requests. The IPC agreed with the City that Illegal Signs had filed a lot of requests (600+), although it acknowledged the viewpoint that there were over 4,000 billboards in the City and that approximately 2,000 might be illegal. The City lost on all three other factors.

With respect to the nature and scope of the requests, the IPC ruled that the requests were neither "broad and varied in nature" (i.e. Illegal Signs was not conducting a fishing expedition) nor "unusually detailed or comprehensive" (i.e. Illegal Signs was not asking the City to go into too much detail). In other words, like Goldilocks, the requests of Illegal Signs were just right.

With respect to the timing of the requests, the IPC heard no evidence that Illegal Signs had timed its requests in such a way as to abuse the access to information system. With respect to the purpose of the requests, the IPC accepted that Illegal Signs had reasonable and legitimate reasons for requesting the information that it was seeking to access, namely to assess the possible illegality of billboards in Toronto and to file complaints accordingly.

The IPC concluded its analysis of this part of its ruling by finding that only the number of requests might be just cause for deciding that Illegal Signs was acting a frivolous or vexatious way, by weighing that against the countervailing factors, and by concluding that, on balance, Illegal Signs was not acting in a frivolous or vexatious way.

(2) Whether the requests were part of a pattern of conduct that would interfere with the operations of the institution

Again, two legs to the test, and again, the first leg—that Illegal Signs engages in a "pattern of conduct"—isn't really in dispute. The second leg was considered but rejected. The IPC acknowledged that the number of requests was significant but doubted that they interfered with the City's operations, noting that Toronto was a large city with a large government (and thus was expected to be able to deal with a higher volume of requests than a small town) and that the City has been able to fulfill almost all requests to date promptly and within budget. The IPC also noted that the City could access various cost recovery mechanisms, as allowed under law, to help it mitigate or even avoid the administrative burden of fulfilling these requests.

(3) Whether the requests were made in bad faith

The IPC considered this argument because it thought that the City implicitly alleged bad faith on the part of Illegal Signs, even if the City did not say so outright. Accepting that "bad faith" means acting dishonestly, with furtive design, or with ill will, the IPC rejected any notion that Illegal Signs was acting in bad faith, noting that it had a genuine purpose in making the information requests. As for the suggestion that "bad faith" encompassed public criticism, the IPC completely rejected the link between the two. In a section of the ruling worth repeating:

In my view ... the requests made by the appellant [Rami Tabello on behalf of Illegal Signs] were made for a genuine purpose. The appellant is involved in an organization that investigates whether certain billboards posted in the City are illegal. Only by examining City records obtained through access to information procedures can the appellant determine whether or not a billboard is illegal and, if so, subsequently file a legitimate complaint. I cannot agree that the appellant's reasons for seeking access to the information he requests or the uses to which he puts that information once he receives it are either illegitimate or dishonest, however disadvantageous they may appear to the City.

(4) Whether the requests were made for a purpose other than to obtain access

Finally, the IPC turned its attention to whether Illegal Signs was making information requests for a purpose other than to obtain access. Here, it borrowed from earlier administrative rulings, which distinguished between, on the one hand, making a request for the purpose of obtaining access (e.g. "tell me about this possibly illegal sign") and, on the other hand, intending to assess the information so received for another purpose (e.g. "the existence of this illegal sign suggests that the City isn't enforcing its sign by-law").

A common-sense analysis suggests that this is distinction is correctly made: the ideal of government accountability would be frustrated if people could only ask for information that they promised to do nothing further with. Provided that your purpose in making an information request is reasonable and legitimate, what you do with it afterwards is not truly relevant to the legal analysis of "frivolous or vexatious."

Conclusion

In many ways, this ruling is less about billboards and more about freedom of information—and specifically, whether public criticism is grounds for rejecting someone who acts in good faith to request public information.

And so the victory of Illegal Signs over the City is a good one for those concerned about freedom of information and government accountability. Illegal Signs is free to continue its assessment of the illegality of some of Toronto's billboards, and we—all of us: journalists, bloggers, and ordinary citizens alike—are free to request information, secure in the knowledge that we won't be denied it on the basis that we might use it to criticize the powers that be.

With additional reporting from Jonathan Goldsbie.

Mobile in the Third World

Interesting article on the impact of mobile devices in the third world. Are they empowering? Create new business models? Anyway, very different from how we see the world of ICT.

Booo!!!

I just biked by this with Shawn the other day. On the upside, I guess it counts as intensification. But still, is this really the highest and best use of the land?

The Leslie Spit

Past and Future...

End of the Line

Interesting article about where NYC's subway cars end up

Street Food Options!

Not sure why it isn't an open-ended survey. Or used for push-polling - have examples (including pictures) of the fares available in other regions.

kiwitobes.com » Blog Archive » Walmart Growth Video

Tracking WalMart overtime

No Big Box in Leslieville

No Big Box in Leslieville

Questionable Developments at Earth Hour

I never did like those lakefront condos...

Google Virgins go to Mars!!

Oh wait. Just April Fool's...