photo by arvin

It took three hours to get to work today.

Here was my route:
Steeles to Finch Station.
Finch Station to York Mills Station.
York Mills Station to Sheppard Station.
Sheppard Station to Bathurst.
Bathurst to St. Clair.

How did you get to work and how long did it take?

Toronto City Council has passed the budget and will be increasing our taxes by 3.8%. Tell you something you don’t know! Well, Pickering residents will pay 8.6% more.

Apparently it wasn’t an overwhelming pass. Either 12 or 15 Councillors voted against it. I’d like to know who they were. I suspect one of those was Rob Ford, who, according to one newscast, made 45 motions to amend the budget. That’s impressive. I’d liked to have seen what they were, especially as he claimed together the motions would save $100 million. The motions I did hear about were for things like eliminating free passes to the zoo and free golf. But the Councillors thought that kind of belt tightening was unnecessary, that they do not need to be seen as increasing their own “user fees.” After all they got a comfy 4 years before the next election, and no one will remember. Still, they did vote to raid the reserve fund yet again — showing incredible fiscal irresponsibility as that’s for true emergencies when all other measures have failed, and they haven’t tried every measure available to them — and been beating the bankruptcy drums for the last few days. When did we suddenly face bankruptcy? Why only now are we hearing that word “bankruptcy”? Why did Councillors, especially those opposed to Mayor David Miller, not bring this issue up loudly and repeatedly last fall during the election? And if we’re so near the bottom of the barrel, why has there been no pay cuts, layoffs, paring services to the bone, all measures other jurisdictions have taken when facing bankruptcy? If this city is truly in a fiscal crisis, we need a leader like David Gunn was for the TTC or Margaret Thatcher in the UK or Jean Chretien for Canada, who if nothing else at least stopped the red ink running. We need a leader willing to stare down the unions, stare down the electorate, and bring the city spending back to essentials as well as refusing to pay for Ontario’s services until such time as we’re on our feet and fiscally healthy. We need a Council willing to open their minds to all possiblities with one goal in mind: put Toronto in the black. Oh well. Maybe in 4 years, we really will be bankrupt, and Torontonians can elect Miller again, just to give him one more chance, as that would only be fair.

Parts of the TTC will likely be closed until Tuesday, so for those of you who had a long commute into work this morning, be prepared for more of the same heading home.

This morning’s tradegy on the tracks lead to one dead and two injured. See CityNews for details.

Photo by arvin.

What’s the building in the foreground?

seems like pakistan isn’t the only place where freedom of the press is an issue. the ugliness of it has come across to canadian borders where thugs and morons combine their brains to do stupid shit like this. it’s shameful to see this come over here. at times like this i don’t even blame people for stereotyping us pakistani’s, because admittedly such ignorance and idiocy is not helping us out.

Journalist Jawaad Faizi says he can still feel broken glass showering over him in his car as he fended off blows from a cricket bat in a surprise attack he blames on “religious fanatics.”

A writer for the Pakistan Post, Faizi said he was beaten by three men because he mocked a Pakistani cleric in a column.

Faizi said the men smashed the windshield and driver’s window of his car as he arrived at his editor’s home about 8:45 p.m. Tuesday. He said he was struck by the cricket bat and was cut on his forearm.

“They were smashing and smashing, hitting and hitting,” Faizi said. “I could not stop them.”

Faizi said both he and his editor, Amir Arain, recently received phone calls warning them to stop writing defamatory articles about the religious group Idara Minhaj-ul-Quran and its leader, Allama Tahir-Ul-Qadri.

Faizi said he wrote a column two weeks ago mocking the cleric, who he said told a gathering in Pakistan “that he could write the name of Mohammed on the moon with his finger.”

Keep reading. Thanks Hugh.

I see that David Miller let his NDP membership lapse at the end of 2006. He did it, he said, so that he can have more traction when he negotiates with the province and federal government for fiscal help. This is encouraging.

Whether or not he’s still an NDPer at heart, he has matured enough to understand that party politics has no place in the Mayor’s Chair — and in Council for that matter — and that his overt ideology and NDP membership has caused the city to suffer as senior governments are quite partisan. Now, I wouldn’t say it’s the sole reason — there’s the whole Canada hates Toronto and woe to the politician who shows they like it issue — Toronto has been falling into a pit and getting zippo assistance to climb out from Queen’s Park and the Commons, but it doesn’t help us any when the city asks the province to take back its responsibilities or asks the Feds for 1 cent of the gas tax.

I see this as a hopeful sign, a sign that Miller is willing to grow and thus to start serving Toronto’s needs as opposed to the party line.

So here we are 103 years later to the day, April 19, 2007. In a previous post I posted a “years ago today” post regarding the fire that struck Toronto (or York as it was known back then) in 1854. That fire was a big one for its time, but another fifty years later Toronto would ignite again in of the worst fires the country had ever seen, The Great Fire of 1904. What burned down? Basically the whole downtown core, mainly today’s Financial District, York Street over to Yonge and from Front up to Queen was ground zero. Mayor Thomas Urqhart was given warnings from the Fire Chief weeks before that a great fire is almost definite due to the lack of funding the fire department was receiving. Funding pleas were ignored and soon enough the city was in flames.

The fire started around 8pm on April 19th, 1904 and burned right through the night. Help was called in from Buffalo but it was too late. By the morning the heart of the was nothing more than rubble.

How did the city rebuild? Well, the area which burned to the ground is now the country’s economic engine. Amazing! When ever the Toronto seems fall it always gets back up.

More info regarding the Toronto’s Great Fire of 1904:

Toronto Archives, 1904 Fire
Ontario Archives, 1904 Fire
Wikipedia, 1904 Fire
Toronto Before, 1904 FireMap of effected area

Photo: Ontario Archives (I0006700), Reference Code: F 2178-1-0-22, S 5198

At 8pm last night the evacuation alarm sounded in the Technology Enhanced Learning Building (TEL), on the Southside of the York University campus, prompting everyone inside to evacuate the building. We were told to stand at a great distance from the building as the security conducted there investigation in the mater. Security had secured the building and was very tight lipped about what was happening inside. Surprisingly, there were no fire trucks or police cruisers at the scene before or after the alarm was disarmed.

False alarm and bomb threats are a regular on campus throughout the school year, the majority of them coming around the exam months of December and April. Exam time false alarms at YorkU have been down since 2005 according to Gragan Spasojevic, manager of security operations at YorkU, but are still playing the disruptive role to student, faculty and staff. In 2005 the university paid a bill of $162 189.62 to the Toronto Fire Services for responding to false fire alarms. In an April 6th YorkU News Wire Spasojevis stated,

“In responding to false fire alarms and bomb threats, emergency services such as the Toronto Fire Services and Toronto Police Service are tying up valuable resources which could be used to respond to real emergencies, thus placing other members of the wider community at risk.”

The question “What if…?” always remains in the minds of those who work and study at YorkU. What if there was a real bomb? What if it did go off? Would that now constitute a “real emergency?” In a post 9/11 and Virginia Tech world one can never be to certain. Just because these instances happen during a time were these threats are more common I don’t think they should be taken lightly. I understand that the cost of the false alarms may be taking away from the university’s lavish spending on new buildings, subways and archives, but the security on hand last night should at least have been able to tell us what was going on so we could take the proper precautions. Instead were instructed to stand over there and wait. Did I feel safe? Nope, not at all…

Photo: February 21, 2007 Exam false fire alarm
Courtesy: orbz on Flickr

Scarborough Town Centre is growing. Lululemon just opened a store there. And MAC has a bikini model. Okay, not the best segue ever.

At first I thought she was a mannequin, but then she moved and I did a classic double take as the escalator lifted me away from her orangey complexion.

Several questions came to mind: How long has MAC been doing this? How much is she getting paid? Don’t people find this odd and degrading? What’s she advertising? Full body make up? How long has she been sitting there? Are those 2-inch heels?

As myriad questions floated through my mind, I couldn’t help but replay the last image I saw of her as I walked up the escalator. She had a hugely fake smile on as a mall patron waved at her. It seemed kinda sad.