The David Topping Show

Never read the comments, except for maybe all of these

Fri, 24 May 2013 23:15:00 -0400

The comments on my now-month-old cover story for The Grid, “Spent,” about being young and getting by on not very much money in Toronto, were wonderful in a way only mostly anonymous comments on a subject like kids-these-days can be: mean, helpful, stupid, funny, thoughtful, outraged, everything. (That three of the article’s five main subjects—Josh, Julian, and Colin—couldn’t resist defending themselves and that their replies only constitute some of the highlights is what I mean when I say the comments were wonderful.) They’re all gone now, though, thanks to a server crash that wiped out a couple months worth of comments on every Grid article that had the misfortune of being published between mid-March and mid-May. But they really were too good to never be seen again, and it took only a few minutes of searching to find a cached version on Google that, for now, still had all of them preserved. If you haven’t yet, read my feature (or maybe don’t bother? many of those commenting didn’t!), and then, please, go on ahead:

(Josh’s third-of-the-way-down reply to “here’s a thought, don’t get an arts degree,” swallowed as parts of a few others were by wonky formatting, was “What about three of them?”)

Everyone's worse off, actually

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 11:32:00 -0400

You have heard that things are hard and getting harder for twenty- and thirty-somethings. This is true in Canada, as the Globe has spent much ink on showing lately, and especially true in Toronto, where, as I wrote in my cover story for The Grid last week, the cost of living keeps growing while wages don’t: in 2010, those between 25 and 34 years old living in the Toronto area pulled in a median income of $33,300. That’s 1,070 inflation-adjusted dollars less than they would have been making here at the same age in the 1990s, and $4,030 less than in the 1980s.

That’s not the end of the story, though. Those numbers come from Statistics Canada, which has tracked individual incomes across provinces and in the major “census metropolitan areas,” like Toronto’s, since 1976. (It’s CANSIM table 202-0407, and you can see it all here; it only goes up to 2010 at the moment and 2011’s information won’t appear till end of June, most likely.) The numbers jump around a bit year-to-year, but if you get their data for the Toronto area only, and calculate the average median income for each age group in the three complete decades for which that’s possible—the 1980s, the 1990s, and the 2000s—and keep it adjusted for inflation in 2010 dollars, this is what you get:

It looks kind of like things are getting smaller across the board, right? That’s maybe not so clear, though. Here’s a chart of just the differences, for each age group, between the decades:

And here’s that same chart, for each age group, between the decades, showing the percentage difference:

It’s pretty clear: median incomes are lower now than they were before for nearly every age group in the Toronto area—a bit lower than the ’90s, and a lot lower than the ’80s. That’s actually not the case for Canada as a whole. While the median incomes country-wide are a little less, they’ve held up better. Here’s that difference, for each age group, between the three decades again, but for the whole country this time:

Now, income’s only one measure—one of many—of prosperity, or the lack thereof, and there are no doubt plenty of explanations, good and bad, that partially account for why the graph for the Toronto area looks so dire. (Do more people being in school much longer help explain the big drop in earnings for 20–24 year olds? Almost certainly. Could 65-plus-year-olds be the only group making more now than in the ’80s because many of them aren’t retiring, and are still working? I wouldn’t be surprised. Could all the new immigrants this city’s seen over the last few decades who are taking low-wage jobs push the averages for adults lower? Maybe.) If you look at the data, though, it’s hard to feel encouraged about the way the lines are pointing—down, down, down.

You can read my story on getting by in Toronto when you’re young and living somewhere above the poverty line but at or below the median-income level for your age group here. Get ready, 55 to 64-year-olds, because I’m coming for you next.

In defence of Ataratiri

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 22:43:00 -0500

I think we might all owe John Steckley an apology.

In 1989, the Humber College professor was the one to suggest the name “Ataratiri” for the new neighbourhood that the provincial and municipal governments intended to build west of the Don River’s mouth. Ataratiri—prononced “a-tar-a-TEER-y”—had been a Huron village, located right around here, before the Iroquois destroyed it in 1649. It was a “natural choice for a name,” Steckley told the Star after a city committee okayed it, especially since the Huron once called the land the new development would be on home, too.

When it came to what the word “Ataratiri” translated to, though, the newspapers at the time couldn’t get their stories straight. The Star said it meant “soil, clan and strength” (March 22, 1989), “clay soil found near rivers in southern Ontario” (April 28, 1989), “clay soil by a river mouth” (July 14, 1989), and “supported by clay” (March 19, 1992). The Globe said no, actually, it meant “village by the river built on clay” (April 28, 1989 and May 19, 1989), “supported by clay” (March 7, 1990), “village by the water” (February 2, 1991), and “built on clay” (March 14, 1992 and December 22, 1995). Soon, after the millions-over-budget project was cancelled, the name became little more than a punchline: in an editorial titled “Boondoggle, in English,” the Globe mused that the translation should be “village by a major expressway in a derelict industrial area prone to flooding, built on contaminated soil” (March 13, 1992). Eye Weekly (April 30, 1992) wondered whether “it’s a PR person’s word for ‘confuse the hell out of the public.’” Later, the Financial Post (March 27, 2006) joked that it was “an old Indian word that roughly translates to ‘Swamp of the Taxpayer.’”

I had a hunch that what it really meant would matter, though.

I’d been researching the project, and the name Steckley gave it, for a short feature I was writing about the West Don Lands, the new name for the new master-planned neighbourhood that’s being built right now where Ataratiri was once supposed to go. (You can read more about what happened to Ataratiri there.) Across the southern and easternmost points of the neighbourhood, underneath Don River Park, there’s something called the Flood Protection Landform, or FPL. When a once-in-a-lifetime storm hits, the FPL is designed to deflect the water surging down the Don out towards the Port Lands and into Lake Ontario; otherwise, it could flow over and flood downtown as far east as York Street and as far north as Front Street. And it turns out that what’s doing the most to keep the Air Canada Centre from being underwater one day is layer after layer of strong, dense clay. It’s built in “lifts,” Waterfront Toronto’s Director of Parks, Design and Construction, James Roche, told me, meaning that “you place it, compact it, place it, compact it, place it, compact it,” until it settles, he said.

The more research I was doing, the further away I was getting from a single, definitive definition of “Ataratiri.” If it meant “village by the water,” or “clay soil found near rivers in southern Ontario,” then, yeah, sure, that’d be worth me knowing, but saying so in whatever I was writing wouldn’t have added much. But if it meant something closer to “built on clay”—if it meant that “Ataratiri” had, a quarter of a century later, become a truer name for the plan that was actually getting built than the one that never did, I wanted to find out, and say so.

John Steckley, fortunately, is pretty easy to track down. He’s still a professor at Humber, and seems to have spent the last twenty-four years growing a prodigious beard, racking up positive reviews on Rate My Professors, and writing books, including a Huron to English and English to Huron dictionary. When I called him at his office, we joked a bit about how out-of-the-blue this all must seem, and then he told me what I’d been hoping to hear: that atara “usually means ‘clay’” and tiri means “support.” A good English translation of “Ataratiri,” he said, is “supported by clay.” Perfect.

To the description of Don River Park and the Flood Protection Landform I’d written, I added one sentence about what Waterfront Toronto’s James Roche told me, and another about how, though you won’t catch anyone using it, Ataratiri might have been a fitting name for the neighbourhood after all. (Here, after all, was a neighbourhood—a city, even—supported in every sense of the word by clay.)

There are only so many things you can fit on two tabloid-sized sheets of paper, though, and little historical asides, neat as they may be, don’t always make it. In the course of editing, out both sentences came. It happens, but I can’t help but feel a little bad for a name that was understood little and respected less, a better name than anyone at the time even realized. I know that when Barbara Hall, soon to be elected mayor but then a councillor, was interviewed after Ataratiri was cancelled and told the Star, crestfallen, that “those people who came up with the idea had a dream, and it was a good one then and a good one today,” she meant Ataratiri, the plan. But I feel the same way now about Ataratiri, the name.

On the internet, and whether it sucks

Sat, 02 Mar 2013 17:35:00 -0500

There are, it seems to me, two ways of thinking about the merits of the internet when it comes to the writing—or, really, anything—on it: either it’s wonderful, because people who didn’t previously have access to a medium that gave them a chance to be creative suddenly do, or it’s awful, because, by letting pretty much anyone create pretty much anything they want, the vast majority of what ends up being created is crap.

That difference of opinion is not, in and of itself, the interesting thing. What’s interesting is that it’s not new at all.

Take Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” published in 1936. Benjamin writes:

For centuries a small number of writers were confronted by many thousands of readers. This changed toward the end of the last century. With the increasing extension of the press…an increasing number of readers became writers—at first, occasional ones. It began with the daily press opening to its readers space for ‘letters to the editor.’ And today there is hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary reports, or that sort of thing. Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character….at any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer.

Benjamin wrote those words with part of Aldous Huxley’s Beyond the Mexique Bay: A Traveller’s Journey, published two years before, in mind; he footnoted it in “Work of Art.” Huxley:

Process reproduction and the rotary press [those big cylindrical printing presses—think of how old movies show newspapers being made] have made possible the indefinite multiplication of writing and pictures. Universal education and relatively high wages have created an enormous public who know how to read and can afford to buy reading and pictorial matter. A great industry has been called into existence in order to supply these commodities. Now, artistic talent is a very rare phenomenon….the proportion of trash in the total artistic output is greater now that at any other period.

Now, the important thing here about “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (and skip ahead if you’re an English, Philosophy, or Art History major) is that it’s, in part, an argument about access. Benjamin argued that an original work of art—like the Mona Lisa hanging in the Louvre—had an “aura,” but that reproducing a piece by mechanical means (creating a more or less exact duplicate by making a print of a work of visual art, or having a phonograph of a recording of a symphony orchestra) diminished its aura. In doing so, the artwork was made more accessible and public, but also less holy and less special.

But this is worth it, for Benjamin: Rather than the Mona Lisa being off-limits to everyone save for those people who could afford not only a ticket to the Louvre, and were willing to see it under conditions such as the hours the museum was open, but also those who could pay for a plane (or what were they riding back then, zeppelins?) to get there if they were on another continent…instead of barrier after barrier putting greater and greater distance between you and the Mona Lisa, suddenly, you’ve got the Mona Lisa, too, and you can do whatever you want with it. Rather than needing to be wealthy to listen to the London Philharmonic play Mahler’s Symphony No. 5, there it was, playing in your bathroom while you showered.

All of which is to say that, boy, would Walter Benjamin like the internet, and boy, would Aldous Huxley hate it.

Huxley’s argument is about taste as much as it’s about access—he’s talking more about how created things are received than how they’re produced, but, as he sees it, increased access to the world’s printing presses leads to an ever-increasing quantity and proportion of crap. In other words, it’s not just that there’s more crap; it’s that the percentage of good stuff keeps dwindling compared to it. This is more or less correct: I think it’s fair to say that filters, in the form of things like editors or curators or even the market, typically do an okay job at filtering out what’s shitty to leave only what’s less shitty to be distributed.

Where Huxley makes his big mistake is confusing a decreasing proportion of “artistic talent” with a decreasing quantity of it. It’s not as if, for every dumb-as-nails letter to the editor, a T.S. Eliot poem was scrubbed from the earth. What really happens—and I think the internet makes this obvious in a way that print, in the 1930s, couldn’t—is that, whether we are talking about journalism, podcasting, blogging, music, film, art, whatever, there is more “artistic talent” on display now than ever before, thanks to the internet; that there is far more trash than anyone could have ever anticipated, thanks to the internet; that it’s the inherent accessibility of the internet that’s directly responsible for both of those things; and that we really can’t have it any other way. Huxley looked at a growing pile of trash and mistakenly concluded that there wasn’t something wonderful—much smaller, but wonderful—growing underneath it. Artistic talent remains a very rare phenomenon, yes, but there is much more of it on display now that “the distinction between author and public” is long gone, and it’s hard to see how we’re not better off for it.

Put another way: the internet is always getting worse, but it is also always getting better.

What OpenFile owes

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 22:16:00 -0500

$1,576.00
Last updated May 27, 2013 (-$4,717.00).

The number above is the total, up-to-date amount of money that OpenFile’s contributors (the ones I’ve spoken to so far) say they’re owed for work they did before the online publication went “on pause” in September, 2012; why I’m tracking that number is what’s below.

***

Good journalism costs money. Or, at least, good journalists deserve good money. That was one thing that OpenFile always got right, right from the beginning: here was an online publication, in cities across Canada, paying better-than-competitive rates—decent were they print rates, incredible given that they were online—to freelancers, all to write the kind of local news stories that other publications weren’t, or couldn’t. Being able to pay people decently for online journalism was one of the big reasons I took a job with OpenFile as their Toronto Editor at the beginning of 2011, and one of the big reasons why, after I left a few months later (it wasn’t right for me, and there were things in my life I needed to focus on that weren’t work), I remained a fan. I only have nice things to say about how I was treated, financially and otherwise.

Others, though, might not share my feelings.

OpenFile’s been “on pause” since September 28, 2012, when its founder, and my old boss, Wilf Dinnick announced that it was undergoing “a pretty big change over the next few weeks,” and was no longer publishing until “the next phase.”

It took a while before everyone realized that the money OpenFile owed but had yet to pay out to contributors was on pause, too. In an interview in early November with J-Source, Dinnick admitted that “things were a bit of a mess in the bookkeeping”; OpenFile’s bank accounts had been frozen, he said, and the company’s books were in the hands of Canada Revenue Agency auditors. But Dinnick sounded confident. “We hope to have that money released very soon, probably in the next few weeks, but again it is up to an auditor when that is done and when the accounts are loosened and I can write those checks.” Until then, nothing.

I got curious. I started emailing around, and put a call out for contributors to tell me if they were owed money, and, if so, how much. I promised them that if I published anything using their totals, which I wasn’t sure I was going to do, I’d keep their names out of it unless they asked otherwise, and I wouldn’t mention how much any one person was owed, two things I knew that, in their position, I’d probably want.

A few days after the J-Source article was published, on November 12, a small group of freelancers outed themselves and put their names to an open letter, demanding they be paid back. “When the organization closed,” it reads, “many of OpenFile’s freelancers were still waiting to be paid. Some of us had been waiting for months. In late October, several of us emailed company founder Wilf Dinnick, asking when we would be paid. We received no response.”

Later that November day, Dinnick sent an email to some freelancers, promising that “answers / resolution” would come when he’d always said they would, within thirty to sixty days of the announcement in September of OpenFile’s hiatus. (This seemed to be news to the freelancers I’d started talking to.) “So as we are approaching the end of November,” he explained, “we should have clarity on timing. At that point, I will be in touch to confirm the exact release date of your money and your personal invoice information to ensure no confusion.”

“To be clear,” he continued, “you will get paid for your work.”

I still wasn’t sure whether I wanted to write anything about this—and then, whether to write about it here, or for The Grid—and I spoke to Dinnick the next day on the phone and told him as much. He asked that much of the conversation be off the record, but I was left with the same impression that those owed money were: it was on its way, and sooner rather than later. I wanted OpenFile to come back, I wanted everyone to get paid, and, most of all, I wanted Dinnick to be right. He’d told J-Source that “running a start-up is like being punched in the face every day,” and from working with him and seeing how much hard work he put into OpenFile, I believed it. I gave him the benefit of the doubt and decided to wait.

That was three months ago. And here’s where it gets messy.

As December and January came and went, more and more contributors emailed me to get me to add what they were owed to my tally. For several, it was more than $1000. And they also shared messages they’d received from Dinnick that often seemed to contradict each other.

In early December, for instance, some freelancers got an email from Dinnick saying, without promising any exact date, that the audit would likely be finished within two weeks. Towards the end of December, Dinnick told another freelancer that they would receive a cheque within weeks. In early January, others were being told that the audit was now done, but that cheques would be sent out by the end of that month. On January 10, Wilf tweeted to two journalists that payments were “all being wrapped up now.” On January 17, he told Bethany Horne, a former OpenFile Toronto intern and freelancer (before my time) and an OpenFile Halifax curator (after that) in an email that “checks and letters are now being processed and being sent out over the next several weeks.” (Horne was the only person willing to let me quote directly from Dinnick’s emails to her and use her name.) In another email that day, he wrote back with a new deadline: “anywhere from 7 days to 4 weeks. I am obviously hoping for sooner, and since we have been in touch ongoing with the govt, I am sure it will be sooner. So I would guess end of the month or LATEST start of next.”

In another email sent to Horne later that day, Dinnick told her something he told others as well: “I am sending checks NOW so when the cash is released, I will ping you and you can cash, so there is no waiting time.”

By the end of the month, Horne says she still didn’t have a cheque, or her money. She emailed Dinnick again on January 30. “Your check will be delivered when the auditors clears everything and we can send them out, which I am sure has already happened or will happen shortly,” he wrote back.

In early February, Dinnick told another freelancer that cheques were being processed, and that he wasn’t sure how long it would take. Maybe days more, maybe weeks.

All the while, one freelancer tells me that Dinnick “never responded to my e-mails asking about payment,” and several others who say they’re owed money say they’ve been without any sort of update for months, or that they’ve emailed Dinnick but haven’t heard back. Some have given up. Others are weighing their legal options.

But, four and a half months later, none of those I’ve spoken to have been paid yet. None have received cheques. None have received information on the “exact release date of your money,” as Dinnick promised they would have by the end of November.

Enough’s enough. I’ve decided to stop waiting and publish the total amount of money they all say they’re owed, which as I write this in mid-February is $12,530. I’ll keep that number updated above if it shrinks (which I hope it does, soon) or grows (which it will if there are more people out there owed money by OpenFile who haven’t emailed me yet). Maybe everyone who’s owed money is actually just a few days away from getting it after all, but the number may well get bigger before it gets smaller: Kathy Vey, OpenFile’s editor-in-chief while I was there, told me recently that when she left the publication in February 2012, each of the six cities was paying between $4,500 and $6,500 a month just to freelancers.

Last Tuesday, February 5, I emailed Dinnick again. I told him I was writing this, and he agreed to answer, on the record, a list of questions that I sent him. But a week later he still hasn’t, even after three more emails on three different days over the last week from me asking for his replies, including one this morning in which I said I’d be publishing the total today. I’ve finally run out of good excuses to not write this, try as I might to find them. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised; after J-Source’s article was published in November, in the email he sent to freelancers, Dinnick wrote that he was “not going to be speaking with the media anymore on this issue, only because it has created confusion.” They’re not the only ones who’re confused.

***

THE LATEST
APRIL 17, 2013

The good news: for the first time, the tally above is going down, rather than up—as of April 9, it was $21,343.50, but as I write this, it’s now at $13,687.00, and it’s likely to keep going down over the next few days. That’s because, nearly seven months after OpenFile went “on pause,” and two months after I published this post, some contributors say they’re finally being paid. (Several got cheques earlier this month, postdated for mid-April, that they’re cashing now.)

The bad news: several of those owed money say they haven’t received a thing yet, several of those who have received cheques say they’re not for the full amount, and I keep hearing from more new people, asking me to add their numbers to the total. Dinnick still hasn’t answered the questions I sent back in February, though he told J-Source right after I published the initial total that everyone owed money would be repaid in “a matter of weeks, and that they were in the “final stretch.” But it’s not quite over yet.

Two more ways to look at Toronto's homeless deaths

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 16:17:00 -0500

In print in this week’s Grid, I’ve got a sad, sad chart of all of Toronto’s homeless deaths since 1985 that we know about—which is not all of them, as Doug Johnson Hatlem, a street pastor with Sanctuary Ministries and record-keeper for the Toronto Homeless Memorial Network, told me. The Toronto Homeless Memorial Network is now the only organization that rigorously documents the city’s homeless deaths, picking up on the work of groups like the now-folded Toronto Disaster Relief Committee.

Still, as Hatlem admitted to me, try as they might, “there’s a lot we don’t get on the list,” especially before 2000 (for a simple reason I’ll get to in a second). And if you look through their list of the dead, there are some obvious problems. There are plenty of John and Jane Does. There are some deaths for which there’s no precise date, and others for which there’s no precise month.

Because it’s tough to draw any clear conclusions when you’ve got data like that, what we ran in print wasn’t an argument (look at how bad this year or month of the year is, or look at how many more people of this age die, or look at how many people die from this cause) so much as a thing that was just supposed to give you pause.

But from what we do know, there are some surprises.

Here’s a graph of all of the recorded deaths, by month, excluding the three in January and one so far in February this year that Hatlem confirmed to me:

Even though the cold winter months are thought of as especially deadly for homeless people, the rest of the year isn’t really that much less so. The three worst months for recorded homeless deaths are February, December, and then…April. And the difference between the worst month of the year and the months in which there have been the fewest number of recorded deaths (May and July) is 55%.

But again, it’s difficult to be certain of any of this, because the other data this chart omits are the sixty-one deaths that the precise month isn’t even known for.

And then here’s a graph of all of the recorded deaths, by year, excluding the four so far this year:

As a friend asked, “What on earth happened in the mid-2000s??” Two things—one that likely affected the number of people dying, and the other that likely affected the number of deaths being recorded. The first was that support for people on welfare plummeted, as Scott Sørli’s “Common Sense Revolution” chart makes clear [PDF]. The second was that, in 2000, the people who were tracking the number of deaths at the time started meeting once a month to share and check information, rather than once a year.

If you’re comparing that yearly chart to the Toronto Homeless Memorial Network’s list, you’ll see that there are two years, 2000 and 2005, where my count of the names on the list gave me a figure one person lower than the group’s count in those years. That’s most likely because of an adding error unnoticed until know, according to Hatlem, though he’s investigating to see if a name that’s supposed to be on the list has been accidentally left off.

What’s more telling of just how difficult their task is are the three deaths that they know about but that aren’t in either the yearly chart above, or the chart in The Grid this week. That’s because there’s no place for them. We don’t know which year they died in—just that they did.

What dislocating your kneecap feels like

Sun, 20 Jan 2013 19:47:00 -0500

Being a ballet dancer messes up your body in a big way. For a short feature I wrote back in December for The Grid about the damage it can do, I spoke to some of the National Ballet of Canada’s dancers—one, Rebekah Rimsay, already had arthritis in her left ankle by her mid-30s; another, Jillian Vanstone, dislocated her kneecap in July last year. Rimsay ended up being the one of the two that my article focused more on, but Vanstone’s story wasn’t much less harrowing when she told me it from the top of a treatment table as we waited for her physiotherapy appointment that day to start.

Here it is, in full.

Me: What happened?

Jillian Vanstone: So, I was in rehearsal. I mean, it was really flukey. I was warm, first rehearsal of the day, had about five minutes left, and we were learning new material. The coach said, ‘Do you want to do that one more time before we end?’ And I said, ‘Sure, that would be great!”

DT: Famous mistakes.

JV: Right? Good idea. And I just took this one step with my partner that was meant to be kind of off-balance, but nothing really unusual, nothing I’d never done before, and then all of a sudden, the torque of it pulled my knee.

DT: Is it about how you land on it?

JV: Well, it was sort of twisted I suppose. Like, he had—my left hand was holding his right hand, and we were both kind of leaning one way. This knee that was supporting us kind of twisted as I was going forward into another step. It’s kind of hard to describe.

DT: And did you know right away? Were you like, “Oh, shit, that really hurts”?

JV: Well, I fell, and had a second where I just thought I fell. And then, just—the amount of pain was astronomical. I mean, I’d never felt something like that. It was—it was crazy. And then I saw my leg. It looked disgusting.

DT: Did the kneecap—it didn’t come out?

JV, pointing about two inches over from where her kneecap is now: It was here. I couldn’t tell what had happened, ‘cause it just looked so weird, and just the amount of pain—I found out later it’s one of the most painful things someone can experience. [Laughs.] I believe that, I think.

(By November, Vanstone was back on stage.)

The Gardiner's giant new repair bill, in context

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 13:19:00 -0500

One other thing you can find when you spend weeks researching how money’s been spent on trying to fix a problem, in addition to the moment that the problem came to a head, is some sense of context. For one thing, it turns out that the money spent annually in past years on keeping the Gardiner Expressway in good shape isn’t all that different from what’s been spent on it more recently, when you adjust for inflation. In 1984 [CORRECTION: No, wait—1987. Yeah, 1987. Can’t read my own damn chart.], $6.8 million was spent on repairs, which works out to about $12 million in today’s dollars; in 2012, $14 million was.

Here’s what’s actually been spent on repairing the Gardiner Expressway to date:

But all that, it turns out, wasn’t nearly enough—and, as the National Post has reported, was even, in some years, significantly less than was budgeted. (The Post’s 1999 spending figure happens to be $3 million less than mine, because I included the cost of tending to a section of the Gardiner that ended up being demolished over the following four years.) The money needed for continuing repairs to the Gardiner between 2013 and 2022, which was supposed to be $170 million, turned out to be $335 million more than that, a total of $505 million.

Here’s what happens to that graph when you include it:

(I made a larger version of the second chart that you can see here, if you’re curious.)

You can read more about where the money went over the last thirty years, and what it could have been spent on instead in my feature on the Gardiner for The Grid this week.

The Gardiner Expressway's falling-concrete woes aren't new at all

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 14:17:01 -0500

That article right there is from the January 9, 1978 Toronto Star, and it marks a dubious kind of first: the very first time pieces of concrete tumbled from the Gardiner Expressway—”some weighing 200 pounds,” even. Falling concrete’s been a big deal recently, but most reporting on how the expressway’s in worse shape than ever leave out that it’s been a problem for a lot longer than just the last year or two. In the course of researching this feature about the Gardiner last year, though, I stumbled across a 1986 Star article that mentioned that, at some distant time in the past, there had been “chunks of concrete…falling on to Lake Shore Blvd.” When I started work on this feature about the Gardiner for The Grid—about what the expressway could have been by now, and where the money went instead—I finally found it.

How to mostly fail at measuring a tall thing

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 03:06:00 -0500

Facts are hard. Even easy ones. Like: how tall—exactly how tall—is City Hall’s Christmas tree? I wrote about the big, beautiful white spruce tree parked in Nathan Phillips Square, and where it came from, for The Grid a few weeks back. At first, there really wasn’t a problem: the tree was 69 feet tall, because that’s what the owner of the tree company that’s been putting trees outside City Hall for half a century told me, again and again, on the rainy morning I watched them put it up. “We look for these all the time, and they have to be perfect,” he said. “This is 69 feet. It’s perfect right from the top to the ground.” Then, later, again: “This one this year, it’s 69 feet—it’s a really nice tree.”

But while my story was being fact-checked, two things happened. One, the tree was knocked down by a hurricane, and had to be put back up and back together. And two, no-one we spoke to to try to confirm the tree’s height agreed that it had ever been or was now 69 feet.

The secretary at the tree company said 63 feet. A City of Toronto marketing person said 36 feet, then corrected herself. No, she said, it was actually 50. When we called the secretary back, she said that, well, it was around 60, and she didn’t really know for sure, but if the owner, who had left on vacation, said it was 69 feet, it must’ve been 69 feet.

There are some facts you get to be imprecise about when you’re writing about them, like, maybe, the age of an old building there are no records on the construction of, or where one neighbourhood stops and another begins. The height of a tree that’s standing still a few kilometres away from your office, a tree that tens of thousands of people will see, a tall tree that is remarkable in large part because of its tallness, is not one of them.

So on Tuesday night, the evening before the paper always gets sent off to the printer, after much intrepid fact-checking work from one of our interns, Katie Flood, couldn’t determine a tree height anyone was especially confident about, I figured I should just go measure it.

I dragged Matthew Halliday along, and we bought twine and scissors from the Canadian Tire at Bay and Dundas, a block north of City Hall. The plan was to use this much-recommended trick, of holding up a stick the length of your arm and then measuring the distance along the ground from wherever you are standing when the top of the stick lines up with the top of the tall thing you’re measuring. In theory: sure, great. In practice: finding a perfectly straight stick in downtown Toronto is hard, and so is figuring out what could possibly be wrong when two people with different-length arms use different-length sticks and come up with results that suggest a single tree is two different heights.

What Matt and I ended up doing instead, after a while, was exactly the kind of thing that we hoped we wouldn’t have to.

Since the white spruce was installed in front of a ramp that slopes from the cement ground of Nathan Phillips Square up towards City Hall, I went to the point on the ramp that was directly behind the tree and unrolled the twine to Matt, who was standing directly below. He held the twine tight to the floor, I cut it, and then we each tried to estimate, from the opposite end of Nathan Phillips Square, how far up the spruce the point on the ramp was where I’d stood. No more than half, and probably a bit less than half, we figured, which meant that the one length I was really hoping the cut twine wouldn’t measure out to be was 25 feet, since that was the one length that couldn’t conclusively rule any of the possible heights out. (Less than 25 feet of twine, and the tree was probably 50 feet tall; more than that, and it was probably 63 or 69 feet.) At home, I measured out and cut one five-foot length of twine, then another, then another—five, before I ran out. Five times five. Fuck.

The next morning, back at my desk and barely better off than I’d been the afternoon before, I desperately tried to get someone on the phone at the City of Toronto who could tell me how they came up with 50 feet in the first place, and how sure they were that that height was right. If they’d admitted eyeballing it, the plan was to run my feature with the most impressive number, which also happened to be the one it’d have sucked the most to sub out only to have it proven right later, even if it was beginning to sound a bit too big: 69 feet.

Then, finally, as the story sat on the production supervisor’s desk, its final stop before landing at some faraway printer, a miracle—I hadn’t been the only one curious about how tall Toronto’s official Christmas tree was this year. Since I’d started asking around, a City of Toronto employee had taken a tape measure, climbed into a cherry picker in the northeast corner of Nathan Phillips Square, and measured the tree from top to bottom. It was 60 feet tall, exactly. They were sure.

“And you’re positive?” was all The Grid’s deputy editor, my boss, had to overhear from my phonecall to hurry out of the room towards the production supervisor to make sure it wasn’t too late. It wasn’t, and a half-second was all it took to change a simple fact it’d taken a day to get right.

Josh Matlow is weird

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 23:11:00 -0500

I don’t know Josh Matlow—never met him, never interviewed him, never shaken his hand—but the city councillor for Ward 22, St. Paul’s seems like an okay guy. If there’s one character trait of his that I’ve been able to glean from paying a cursory amount of attention to City Hall for the past few years, though, it’s that he’s aggressively centrist. I can’t recall a politician so nakedly devoted to keeping everyone happy all of the time, so steadfastly obsessed with compromise that it’s often difficult to determine what it is, other than compromise, that he really believes in. It’s pretty easy for someone like that to slip into meaninglessness.

If you’re not sure what I mean, well, look at this:

Matlow tweeted that on Monday night, and an hour or so later, I saw it, chuckled a little bit, then teased that it was “Possibly the Josh Matlow–iest thing Josh Matlow has ever said.” Someone joked that it was weapons-grade Matlow; someone else, that we’d hit Peak Matlow.

But by the next morning, it was gone, deleted by the councillor or someone on his staff. I managed to recover a screenshot of it, though (you’re looking at a cropped version of it above), and tweeted it out again, because deleting so inoffensive of a tweet is itself a bit funny, right? So I did that, and less than hour a later, Matlow tweeted this:

I had no idea what was happening. I guess it’s a joke, albeit one almost none of his 5,000+ followers would get? The joke is, I guess, that he’s part of the group of city councillors sometimes referred to as the “mushy middle” or “mighty middle,” and possibly he’s making fun of his own middle-ness? And lunch is the middle meal of the day? And he tweeted this at lunch time?

And then, within a few hours, that tweet of Matlow’s was gone, too. I tweeted my continuing bewilderement, then figured I should just ask the guy what was happening. Then, this:

Twenty what? What’s all this about a dill pickle, now? Has Josh Matlow confused me with someone else? My last name’s Topping, and you can put toppings on a sandwich, though it’d be a bit odd with grilled cheese—but maybe that’s a thing? All I know is this: those last two tweets of Matlow’s, the only two directed straight at me, have been deleted since, too, vaporized along with the rest of them. They’re all gone, and with them, the councillor who likes to brag that he is “Bringing a New Approach to City Hall” has proven that, yes, he is quite capable of that.

What else Toronto's port gets

Sun, 11 Nov 2012 18:34:00 -0500

Every year, somewhere between a million and a half and two million tonnes of cargo comes in to or leaves from the Port of Toronto. A lot of it, I found out a few weeks ago, when I went on board a massive cargo ship that had carried 21,000 tonnes of the stuff from Brazil for The Grid, is sugar—the equivalent weight, over the last four years, of 44,445 of the TTC’s new streetcars. But that’s not all.

The chart above uses Toronto Port Authority data (graciously compiled for me for the story; mouse over any of the points to see more information). There’s more than what’s charted brought in or shipped out each year—glass curtain-wall windows destined for condos, to give one example—but the big ones are easy to spot: sugar, salt, and cement.

Tonnes and tonnes and tonnes of them come into the Port of Toronto every year, using tonnes and tonnes of fuel to get here: the M/S Puffin, the ship I boarded, can burn 32 tonnes of oil a day at its top speed. It can, but it usually doesn’t: as the ship’s Polish engineer, Edward Cejko (“like King Edward,” he told me) explained in somewhat-broken English, “now that fuel is growing in price, every company starting saving money. Before, it was speed, uh? But now, it’s consumption.” Which means that they burn a mere 25 to 27 tonnes a day. Which, when you’re a two-football-field long cargo ship, even counts as fuel-efficient. As Redpath Sugar’s CEO Jonathan Bamberger explained to me, “most of the ships that come in are actually quite modern.” (The Puffin’s less than a decade old.) “Because fuel is a very significant part of their cost, it’s worth it to be a modern, fuel-efficient ship.”

In other words, oil is so damned expensive that it’s cheaper to build new ships from scratch than keep using old ones that burn through it faster. And sugar, and salt, and concrete are so damned valuable that they’re still worth the trip.

You know, it just occurred to me—I probably don’t need to keep putting the articles I write...

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 20:05:00 -0400

You know, it just occurred to me—I probably don’t need to keep putting the articles I write for The Grid on here, because you can find them pretty easily otherwise, right? And since the only place I’m probably going to be writing for, for a while, is The Grid, and since I’m going to be writing a lot, there are other, better ways anyway.

So: you can subscribe to an RSS feed of all my Grid articles here, or bookmark this page. Or, you can just follow me on Twitter here. (You can also get the RSS feed of that if you’re especially desperate.) There’s some stuff of mine that was meant to be seen in print, and soon, there might be more you can only see in print, so you should also just get a paper copy of The Grid and read it every week, scanning page after page for my name, as my mother does. But for now, I think I’m going to save this blog-thing for something other than links. [UPDATE, February 24: I’ve gone ahead and unpublished some of the older posts here that only link out to work elsewhere. Soon I imagine I’ll unpublish this, as well.]

Len has stolen neither sunshine nor Tourism Toronto B-roll, unfortunately

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 21:01:00 -0400

Len’s first new music video in nine long years is for “It’s My Neighbourhood” (at top) off their upcoming album, It’s Easy If You Try. And if said video—complete with dramatic helicopter pans of the financial district and footage of people buying fruit in Chinatown—kind of looks like a three-minute-long tourism ad posing as a Toronto anthem, that’s because it kind of is: many of the clips in “It’s My Neighbourhood” are from B-roll footage compiled by Tourism Toronto for 2010’s G20 conference (bottom).

I figured all that out earlier today. What I thought until about an hour ago, though, was that Len had taken Tourism Toronto’s clips and used them without permission, which would have made for a wonderful little story were it actually true. Which of course it turned out not to be.

What happened: earlier today, Tourism Toronto’s VP of Communications, Andrew Weir, confirmed, in a tweet to me, that much of the footage in the music video was Tourism Toronto’s. (“Yup,” he wrote to me, “that’s ours.”) When I called him, because why not, he told me that Len didn’t have permission to use the footage, but that it was hard to get mad about it. “We did not, to my knowledge, provide it in this case,” he said, but ”I’m not terribly bothered by [it] either. Our mandate is to promote the city, and promote the destination.…anywhere we can see more Toronto out there, the better.”

So I called Marc Costanzo, who’s one half of Len with his sister Sharon, and who laughed when I admitted that I was calling him on a Tuesday night for a totally goofy reason but asked if we would mind telling me what happened. Costanzo directed the video for “It’s My Neighbourhood” himself, and, he quickly told me, he totally got permission for all that B-roll. “Not only did we get it cleared,” he said, “we picked it up from ‘em. We actually got the hard drive from them, so we made sure that we had the best version possible.” That’s what happens with broadcast-quality super-high-resolution multi-gigabyte-sized B-roll. Absent a super-fast connection to a super-fast server, you go and pick it up.

And that’s what Costanzo did, a long time ago. Turned out that the person at Tourism Toronto who Costanzo said he got permission from and picked the footage up from isn’t the person “who usually sends out B-roll,” and also happened to not be at her desk earlier in the day when I’d started asking questions, explained Andrew Weir when I emailed him back. Weir didn’t think anything of it this afternoon, but Len was on the level all along.

There was really no story, in other words. And that’s why you’re reading this here.

Why to not be jerks to people who don't agree with you

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 19:12:20 -0400

A few weeks back, I wrote about Julius Suraski, whose office’s parking lot faces Highway 400, and who decided to take advantage of that by encouraging drivers on their way out of the city to show their support for Rob Ford. There’s a lot to say about what makes someone move towards one side of the political spectrum or another, but I wanted to know what moved Julius and his daughter, Claire, over far enough to want to spend a chunk of money and stick a big sign outside of their business that advertised something other than their business.

And the answer is, of course, the little things: Julius lobbied Metro Hall in the ’90s, and says he couldn’t find a left-leaning person on council who would listen to him, let alone help him; Claire got frustrated when, volunteering for Ford’s election campaign, campaign posters she was putting up kept getting vandalized and stolen. This is how, generally speaking, I think things work—if you’re nice and respectful to people, even if you can’t give them what they want or your fundamental views don’t align with theirs, they’ll respond to that; if you’re mean or dismissive, or hell, even if your supporters are mean or dismissive, people will push back—either in the direction of another political party, or in the direction of not giving a shit about politics at all. (Samara Canada published a great study last year on the latter problem, and it’s worth reading if you’re into that kind of thing [PDF].)

It’s doesn’t do much good, in other words, to be dicks to people you don’t agree with, especially when you’re a politician, but even if you’re not. I’m not Rob Ford’s biggest fan; Julius and Claire might be; we managed to not punch one-another when we got to talking about City Hall. Which is what I was thinking about when Julius sent me this in an email, after the article was published:

…while this was going on in the comments of the article:

This is not a great prediction

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 15:48:00 -0400

From page 4 of the November 22, 1962 edition of the Globe and Mail, for the feature Rob Duffy and I wrote for this week’s Grid about the Gardiner Expressway and how we are all going to get hit by falling pieces of it and die, here is Metro Toronto’s roads commissioner predicting, then, what the Toronto of today would look like. (You can see the feature Rob and I did in all its glory in the print edition of the paper, out tomorrow, but it’s online now, too.)

Well, this makes me happy: The Grid was named a finalist for seven Canadian Online Publishing Awards...

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 19:00:00 -0400

Well, this makes me happy: The Grid was named a finalist for seven Canadian Online Publishing Awards today, and stuff I worked on or helped with accounted for four of ‘em. (This got the nod for best data visualization; this and this are up for best cross-platform initiative; these are up for best use of social media; and this whole thing, the thing I can take only the teeniest amount of credit for, is up for best overall companion website.) I probably won’t win that NOW prize, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed for these.

For the record, I am in no way responsible for this, which is frankly a little odd. I would much...

Sun, 16 Sep 2012 19:35:08 -0400

For the record, I am in no way responsible for this, which is frankly a little odd. I would much rather win Best Tattoo Artist or Best Vitamin/Herbalist Store.

Toronto's biggest green roof is going to be pretty big

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 16:15:00 -0400

Some green roofs, by size. From top-left corner: U of T’s GRIT Lab (350 m²), City Hall (3,700 m²), the TTC’s Leslie Barns (9,250 m²), and Union Station’s train shed (23,000 m²).

I wrote an article in The Grid this week about green roofs, and, as part of it, tried to figure out what Toronto’s largest one was that was planned but wasn’t built yet. I thought—but wasn’t sure, and neither was anyone else I could find—that the TTC’s under-construction maintenance and storage facility for their new streetcars, at Lake Shore Boulevard and Leslie, was the runaway winner. That green roof’s planned to be 9,250 m², which makes it two and a half times bigger than City Hall’s green roof, which was the largest publicly accessible one in the whole country when it opened just two years ago. (It might have also been the biggest one in Toronto or Canada, publicly accessible or not, but no-one I spoke to was quite sure about that.)

Turns out, though, that the biggest green roof in Toronto that hasn’t been built yet is actually two and a half times bigger than that: it’s 23,000 m², and it’s going on top of Union Station’s new train shed. It’s “set to be completed in 2016,” Metrolinx’s Mark Ostler told me in an email after an architecture student at U of T, Neal Baj, read the Grid article and told me about it. No surprise why it’ll take so long: 23,000 m² is huge enough that Metrolinx is boasting that it’s currently slated to be Canada’s largest when it’s completed, and huge enough that you could fit Yonge-Dundas Square into it five times, give or take. Though I really don’t know why you’d ever want to.

Toronto’s greenest green roof. U of T researchers are trying to figure out how green...

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 16:49:00 -0400

Toronto’s greenest green roof. U of T researchers are trying to figure out how green Toronto’s green roofs can get, now that pretty much every new big building has to have one, and there’s only one way to do that: put a whole lot of different green roofs on top of one building, and see what works. (Do yourself a favour and see this one in print.)