The riding of Toronto Centre has been a turbulent one for the Conservatives. Mark Warner, an international trade lawyer, was rejected by the party as a candidate in 2007. Over the objections of the Toronto Centre riding association, Mr. Warner was removed by the Party’s National Campaign Manager, Doug Finley and Don Plett president of National Council of the Conservative Party. It appears that Mr. Warner’s support of local issues and those important to his constituients like education, affordable housing and HIV/AIDS issues were “off message”. Warner’s bid to fight for Bill Graham’s old seat came to a halt and Bob Rae easily won it.

Fast forward to today, Chris Reid was to be the Conservative party’s candidate in Toronto Centre, but has “voluntarily dropped out” of the election race today. Yesterday’s comments by a Liberal blog, BIGCITYLIB, could not have helped Chris Reid’s chances either way. BigCityLib pointed to Reid’s posts on “Political Thoughts From A Gay Conservative”. Reid criticized the passengers and bus driver of the Greyhound bus tragedy and Reid’s “answer” for their “inaction” was no handguns aboard. What?! Forget for a minute the bravery of those aboard that helped evacuate and then held the killer trapped inside the bus. How dangerous would a bus trip be if everyone had weapons? For Reid to say

“we need concealed-carry handgun legislation in this country, so we can defend one another and deter horrible events such as this” - from Chris Reid’s “Political Thoughts From A Gay Conservative” blog

is just plain ridiculous. Reid’s controversial blog is no longer available (but can be read in cache - the internet tends not to forget…)

Chris Reid - Conservative Blog

The Conservatives have reacted quickly, as they have with apologies to Jim Davis, related to jokes made by Gerry Ritz while working on the listeriosis crisis file, and to aboriginal peoples following comments to members of their community. So Chris Reid has been replaced, the new Conservative Candidate in Toronto is David Gentili. Gentili is reported to have worked recently in PM Harper’s office.

In Toronto Centre Riding your list of candidates (for NOW…)

Johan Boyden (Communist Party of Canada)
Philip Fernandez (Marxist-Leninist Party of Canada)
David Gentili (Conservative Party of Canada)
Ellen Michelson (Green Party of Canada)
Bob Rae (Liberal Party of Canada)
Liz White (Animal Alliance Environment Voters Party of Canada)

Damn! The TSX has been hard hit with the news that financial giant Lehman Brothers was becoming one the biggest bankruptcy stories in American history. Financial markets around the world are reeling with the news and some are calling the current situation the worst they have ever seen. Hard to believe that the TSX index has sunk into the 12,000 range after hitting highs around 15,000 in June. A 20% drop! OUCH!!!

With BCE, the world’s largest leverage buyout, a fading memory I shudder to think of what the index will do or look like under the Conservative plan to allow for more takeovers. This policy plan was shaped by findings made by a government appointed Competition Policy Review Panel.

The government appointed Lynton “Red” Wilson chair of the Competition Policy Review Panel and made the call for more foreign investment. Among the recommendations forwarded by Mr. Wilson, once a CEO of BCE, move the Industry Canada threshold from to investigate foreign investment from $295 Million to $1 Billion! The industries they would like to dissolve? Telecommunications, Airlines and Uranium mining. Hmmm! Considering Canada is one of the world’s largest sources and exporters of Uranium and Telecoms can basically print money in the age of the iPhone this hardly seems prudent. The airline industry has enough problems without further takeover talk. As a leader in at least one of these industries how does selling them off benefit Canadians or Canadian Markets?

The Conservatives, under massive public pressure, blocked the selling off of MDA but under the new proposed rules how many companies would disappear without the so-called watchdog looking? Remember that the MDA deal was the first ever blocked! Not calling for extreme protectionism here but the current trend in selling Canadian assets off doesn’t invoke scenes of sovereignty on the TSX, Alberta or the Arctic. Considering it’s been said that between 70 to 90% of mergers/takeovers fail it would be interesting to see whose lobbying dollars have been spent to push the sale of these industries. We’ll have to wait and see what happens to the TSX and what kind of government enters the fold after the upcoming election.

A lot has been said about the relationship between what we eat and our health. Recently emphasis has been placed on where and how far our food travels before it reaches our mouths. From the 100 Mile Diet to 50 Mile Diet people are increasingly trying to put this thinking to the test.

With plenty of amazing farm land in Ontario is crazy to see mega grocery stores still buying produce and fruit from the USA and Mexico when local produce is available. Shopping today at my local independent I came across Local Food Plus. Local Food Plus is a non-profit organization matching environmentally and socially responsible farmed goods to consumers. Local Food Plus have goods inspected by third parties and then label and certify goods. These goods arrive at your grocery store and can carry the LFP logo.

So far it seems that food price inflation has been lessened by Canadian grocery stores keeping prices down to fend off the likes of WalMart. Canadian stores may have some short term advantages especially when dealing with their neighbours (local farmers). Loblaws advertising campaign regarding Canadian produce appears to voice that. The Loblaws ads have the potential to pay off, if only in transport and fuel prices. In the end if local farmers benefit and so do the people that eat fresher locally grown food. After all farmers feed this city.

Facebook has a Toronto Argonauts group page (or two or a few) which I, as any self-respecting Torontonian would, belong to. Today, I received a Facebook message about a protest next week against sneaking an NFL franchise into the city that belongs to the oldest football club on the continent. Yes, that’s right, the Argos are the oldest club in North America! Why any old, geezer wannabe-American Canadian would want to bring in some boring NFL franchise into Argos territory is beyond me. But then so is how Rogers managed to get around the name-in-perpetuity-rule and rename the Skydome after themselves.

Without further ado, here is a copy of the Facebook message, with Chris’s blessing:

HELLO EVERYONE!

The first of eight Buffalo Bills games in Toronto is to be played 1 week from today.

Ticket sales for the Bills in Toronto are selling, by comparison, as poorly as the Toronto Phantoms of the Arena Football League did in Toronto.

With the sky high ticket prices for the Bills in Toronto it’s hard to say if they can sell the last 20,000 seats and if they do…GREAT…but that’s only because of the change in regulations to purchase these tickets. If the game doesn’t sell out, Rogers will give away the rest of the tickets to fill the stadium and then claim a sell out.

The Toronto Argonauts are the oldest professional football team in North America and part of the most exiting football league in the WORLD. Why would anyone want to replace the Argos with either the Bills or a Toronto NFL franchise? These NFL games in Toronto are guaranteed to be boring just the same as 90% of NFL games.

As Canadians, not only football fans but all Canadians need to be patriotic at this time and realize the CFL is just about the only All Canadian institution left in this wonderful country.

With the threat of losing the CFL to the NFL or the Argos and Ti-Cats to the Bills is like losing Much Music to MTV or CBC to CNN, I’m sure we can all agree we don’t want to turn on channel 6 or 26 and see CNN. We need to stand together to protect the CFL, one of the few institutions in Canada we can call our own and still be proud of. The Canadian football league has such a strong and lengthy history (Football in Canada is as old as Canada itself) that we can not lose to the power of the dollar, the Rogers dollar. Losing the CFL will go down in the most regretted Canadian decisions right next to the cancellation of the AVRO ARROW.

I am calling on all CFL fans, Argo fans, Canadians, Patriotic Canadians, NFL fans or not CFL fans or not, No to the Bills in Toronto supporters, absolutely EVERYONE to help Protest the Buffalo Bills in Toronto next Thursday at 6:00pm (meeting time)

If you do not already have a shirt please contact me and provide me with how many people you are coming with and I will supply the shirts for the protest.

PLEASE REPLY: e-mail me at chris-fischer [at] live [dot] com if you are interested in attending this historic Protest. Please leave me the number of people you wish to bring and if you are willing to car pool.

The meeting place will be sent to you after you have e-mailed me.

LET’S GO CANADA!
SUPPORT YOUR LEAGUE!
LET’S KEEP THE CFL ALIVE!
THIS IS OUR LEAGUE!

If you need further inspiration or convincing please watch this video, if this video makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up…it means you should be protesting with us!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BS1jCfg7Qxc

BE A PART OF SOMETHING!

Signed,
Chris Fischer

-If you think what you did yesterday is still great, then you haven’t done much today-
Michael “Pinball” Clemons

It’s Friday, the sun is shining, the roads are clear (!), the hotels are booked, and the long weekend beckons. There’s so much to do, starting tonight at 7:00 pm, one could party all weekend long and then blame the rain Tuesday morning for being unable to make it to work on time.

Simcoe Day holiday begins tonight with Caribana Festival’s Pan Alive at Lamport Stadium. Listen and dance to steelpan bands as they compete for best band. That’ll be your dancing feet warm up for tomorrow, for tomorrow is the all-day-long Caribana Parade where even police officers smile and chat and maybe even do a move or two — or they did in the years I went. Television news was singularly unhelpful in showing the parade route, and even the Caribana site isn’t very specific. So here it is: It starts at the west end of Exhibition Place, fairly close to the Dufferin street gates, and it ends at Sunnyside at approximately 6:00 pm. The old route down University Avenue was better as it was equidistant for those from both the east and the west, but I guess Lakeshore is bigger and less disruptive to downtown traffic. Oh well. Caribana festivities continue on Sunday on Olympic Island. For all the details, visit the CBC site.

Now if all that dancing has you hot and breathing hard, and you just want some peace for a bit, check out the Chinese Lantern Festival at Ontario Place. It runs nightly from 7:00 pm to 11:00 pm; it features acts, food, stuff, and movies; and of course it’s the largest lantern presentation in North America.

Then on Simcoe Day — the holiday Monday — as you’re chilling down, learn why we call it Simcoe Day at Fort York. Watch musketry, men and women drilling in period military costume, and the 1:00 pm parade. Fort York is an under-rated jewel of Toronto history, a haven from modern Toronto — if you can just ignore the Gardiner looming over to the south, which actually once you’re fully into what’s going on isn’t too hard to do.

So there you have it, a full weekend of being entertained and joining in the entertainment. Or you could just turn on the barbie, kick back, and put your feet up. This is the best of Toronto! Happy Simcoe Day!

[Play in high quality if you can. It's MUCH better.]

When I started my personal blog back in 2005, I was falling down the rabbit hole of frustration and turmoil. I had to find an outlet and I had to both practice my writing and discover if I could even write regularly again; but my lawyer was troubled by my idea. We agreed that I could blog if I kept it anonymous and if I didn’t blog on a whole bunch of topics he listed for me. As the movies say, anything you write will be used against you in a court of law. Well, that’s a bit of a twist on the old line, but it’s certainly true.

I thought at the time that this would be a temporary thing, that my made-up user name would soon be supplanted by my real name.

Ha!

As I blogged and practiced writing and joined Toronto Metblogs, the insurance companies dragged their heels, counter-sued my ex-spouse, and sent me to more medicals. As I returned to photography and an angel came into my life to help me finish my book interrupted, I waited for the mediation to happen, the mediation that was booked almost a year away. I think I also went for a repeat medical. As I published my book and created a website for it under my real name, we went to mediation. What a total waste of time. Time wastage continued as I watched the months crawl by towards my pre-trial in June. My lawyer had informed me nothing was going to happen between mediation and pre-trial as the insurance companies would just wait as is their wont. Finally the day came. The day went. No change. And then at last, the companies started negotiating in earnest with my lawyer, we struck a deal, I recovered from the shock of how the state, insurers, and judges shaft car crash claimants with the legal system’s blessing, and then I waited some more.

Today, it is done. Eight years, seven months, and three days after a couple of dickhead drivers smashed so hard into the back of the car in which I was a passenger that they pushed us into the car in front of us, causing me neck, shoulder, and closed head injuries, all the legal actions are over, and I can come out into the open.

Only thing is, it’s too weird. From finding it strange to write under a made-up name here  on Metblogs, to share my photographs under another made-up name, to getting used to being called Points or Pointsy (my Flickr handle), it is now utter strange to go back, to put my real identity on all my online activities, to amalgamate my blogs and websites under one moniker.

The next many days, I’ll be rejigging my Metblogs profile and making changes on my personal blog, as  I tie both into my website. And in the future, you can be pretty sure I’ll be writing about life as a car crash claimant, the hell of losing yourself through a closed head injury, the weirdness of growing a new personality and new hobby(ies?) out of that personality, and the legal system. I can now also talk about health care, insurance companies, and all sorts of interesting topics (Chinese curse: you lead an interesting life). But first I need to recover from this anti-climactic moment, anti-climactic because after the many times I thought we were finishing up only to find out not, that when it finally happened, I was too worn out to feel much excitement.

But I’m free! And to meditate on that is to touch excitement.

Opened the door to smog city and saw the air. It looked like dust floating, like particles rising from a room under construction or deconstruction. But no construction going on that I could see (probably one of the few places that’s c-free in Toronto). My lungs instantly rebelled. I’d forgotten my asthma meds, and boy was I reminded in a hurry.

I didn’t hear if it was a spare-the-air day, but it really should be a stay-inside day. I dream of a time when all cars emit just water and the Ohio coal plants are shut down, of a time when smog is relegated to the history books instead of blanketing Toronto and the whole of southwestern Ontario. Until then, I ain’t going outside on days like this if I can help it!

A Hamilton City Councillor is pushing for free public transit, a “no-brainer” move some Torontonians would like to see happen here, at the very least on smog days. It’s a no-brainer because as the Councillor points out, free equals more riders, and on smoggy days, when apparently 50% of Toronto’s smog comes from cars, that’s a good thing.

But “while cities like San Francisco and Montreal can offer free rides on
smog days,” Adam Giambrone, Chair of the TTC, says that “the concept doesn’t work with the TTC’s 1.5 million daily riders.” (Nick Kyonka, The Toronto Star, 8 July 2008)

He’s right. Free equals more riders which requires sufficient capacity. I don’t know much about public transit in San Francisco, but I do know that Montréal has more subway lines than Toronto, servicing a much smaller population than we have.* In other words, they can accommodate an influx of riders, the kind of influx that requires large-capacity carrying transit for the kind of riders who won’t tolerate packed, overheated buses and streetcars but will take the subway in lieu of their preferred cars. Toronto cannot.

Not on our buses, not on our streetcars, not on our subways. This is what the Art Eggleton-school-of-apathy established in 1980, the Ontario-Canada-school-of-hate-Toronto, and the learned-helplessness-of-Torontonians have begotten us. The one thing that may save us is the green movement, whereby even the most apathetic and most-Toronto-hating politician may find it beneficial to start building subways again, especially downtown where it would pay for itself. (I don’t know what’s happened to the subway to York U, but it seems to have transferred itself onto the slow track.)

———————–

* How much smaller is Montréal to Toronto: read this tourist post. For a person like me who remembers when the two cities were neck and neck in population, this is very funny. I’m glad she had a good time here! That’s what we like, happy tourists!!! Even if we natives have to put up with an inadequate TTC.

Been laying low as lately.  Must have been the extreme heat to cold thing.  Ah no matter, the party starts now (for me), but NXNE (North by North East) already started yesterday.  Even Mayor Miller rocked out and help launch the festivities!

Lots of great bands to check out as always at this year’s NXNE including LADYHAWK, Moneen, Julie Doiron, The Besnard Lakes, Peanut Butter Wolf, SWERVEDRIVER and Grand Analog are some excellent choices that come to mind.  There will be alternative venues from tents and outdoor music at Public Parks and Parkettes (Dundas Square, Metro Square, Trinity Bellwoods Park, College Park Parkette and more). to celebrity interviews this weekend.  If you’re ready for more check out some NXNE films at the National Film Board or The Royal.

So much rocking to do, so little time… Got to love NXNE!!!

Yesterday, CBC Toronto six o’clock news did a story on what happens to Toronto’s green bin waste. According to their report, the city collects 150 tonnes per day, 20 percent of which is not compostable or organic and contaminates the organic waste stream, impairing the ability of the city to sell the compost. The city says we’re doing three things wrong:

1. The plebes double or triple bag their waste. Wonder why? It couldn’t be because it’s collected at half the rate it used to be and thus has time to start to rot and smell, now could it? As the solid waste manager noted at the beginning of the piece, organics stink. The city uses a pulper to separate the plastic bags from the waste; the more bags, the longer the pulper runs, the more electricity is required to run the machine.
2. The mayonnaise effect: plebes throw out the whole jar of spoiled food, rather than scooping the food out (old mayo, for example) into the green bin and washing out the glass jar before tossing it into the recycling bin. I sympathize with the plebes; especially when you’re cleaning out the fridge, who wants to double the time you already don’t have to do this chore by separating each and every container into its component parts. The pulper and rest of the machinery doesn’t completely separate the glass from the food, and so the compost ends up with sharp shards in it.
3. Us plebes don’t have a clue what to put in each bin. We spend time reading the calendars, checking out what others have put in their boxes, asking others even the city, yet still we get it wrong, and the city blames us. We’re not educating ourselves well enough, and we have to do better, they claim. The only ones who will heed their accusation and feel guilty will be those who are already trying to educate themselves; the passive protesters couldn’t care less. They’re too overworked to spend time listening to a city that can’t deal with a garbage issue so throws responsibility for it onto the people.

The CBC report answered the question how do the organics get separated from the plastic, but it didn’t challenge the city at all. It didn’t ask why it’s not using better equipment, equipment other municipalities have tried out or are using that does a good job of separating all the various waste streams from each other and doesn’t require ordinary people to pre-sort their garbage. It didn’t ask why it’s relying on overworked, underpaid, don’t-speak-English citizenry to do its job and pay for the privilege. Toronto doesn’t seem to acknowledge that there’s a large segment of the population who don’t buy into the garbage-sorting-makes-us-better-citizens BS and never will and that though Toronto prides itself on being multicultural, many of those with poor English skills use that to avoid spending so much time on trying to figure out the convoluted garbage rules. They are in effect being passive protestors.

CBC also didn’t ask how much of the green bin waste is actually recycled into compost and how much ends up in the landfill. It mentioned creating methane from green waste, but CBC didn’t ask if it’s being done now and what’s taking so long; why old landfills’ methane are being vented into the air and not being used for energy creation; and why this form of gas creation is OK but not a high-tech incinerator or plasma arc plant.

In other words, as usual we got a regurgitated press release, just with pretty (or stinky if you will) pictures, telling us what we’re doing wrong instead of challenging the city on why it’s doing a half-assed job and pissing off the neighbours and its own citizens in the process.