copyright © Edward Keenan, 2013
first edition
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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Keenan, Edward, 1973-
Some great idea : good neighbourhoods, crazy politics and the invention of Toronto / Edward Keenan.
1. Toronto (Ont.)--Politics and government. 2. City planning-- Ontario--Toronto. 3. Ford, Rob, 1969-. 4. Toronto (Ont.)--History. I. Title.
eISBN 978-1-77056-326-1
I. Title.
FC3097.4.K44 2013——971.3’541——C2012-908120-5
Some Great Idea is available as a print book: ISBN 978-1-55245-266-0.
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‘A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents Conquest; Faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art. In modern ages, Commerce has created London; while Manners, in the most comprehensive sense of the word, have long found a supreme capital in the airy and bright-minded city of the Seine.’
– Benjamin Disraeli,
Coningsby, or The New Generation
For Rebecca, without whom my idea of Toronto – and most of my other ideas, too – would be a lot less great.
AN INTRODUCTION: WHAT DOES TORONTO MEAN?
1
Ihave this notion that cities are just a collection of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. At least in part. In a technical sense, a city is a location, a geographic area in which a lot of people live close to each other. And of course a city is also an administrative division that determines how those people manage to get along, or don’t. A city is the setting for stories, sure, millions of them, public and private histories, biographies, comedies, tragedies, manifestos. But the city is also a character in those same stories, endowed with a history of its own, personality attributes, motivations and inner conflicts. The city that exists as a living body in our imaginations is not a passive set constructed for its players to act upon, but an active participant in the events that occur within it – its mean streets and cold-hearted bureaucracy frustrate our hopes, its creative impulses and playful attitude entertain us, its generosity of spirit and inner resolve inspire us and offer us opportunities. And ultimately, a city is a story built from all the English 101 elements your teachers told you to expect: the narratives of New York, Paris, Detroit or Calgary each have an increasingly distinct arc – composed of triumphs and defeats, conflicts resolved and conflicts festering – that suggests to us what the city will do next, how we should interact with it, where it will take us and how it will define itself.
I’m writing here about Toronto, an interesting case and a city that’s sometimes defined as much by the brevity of its backstory and its hazy character traits as by its pre-eminence among Canadian urban areas or its agreeable nature. It’s a Gatsby among municipalities. And I’m writing about a time – the decade and a half following the 1998 creation of the Toronto ‘megacity’ – in which the stories Toronto tells itself, and the various subplots lived by the people in it, have refused to converge into a coherent narrative. Under mayors Mel Lastman, David Miller and Rob Ford, Toronto appears to have been several places simultaneously, living separate and often contradictory – even irreconcilable – storylines.
2
To give you an idea of the place as it appeared to me in the middle of the time period I’m talking about, here’s one Toronto story. After work on June 15, 2005, a few of us from Eye Weekly (a now-defunct alt-weekly that morphed into The Grid, where I now work) wandered up through the late-afternoon sunshine to the Ultra Supper Club on Queen Street West for a Tourism Toronto campaign launch party. The room was full of black leather and dark wood and the kind of consciously articulated chuckling and business-card trading you see at a board-of-trade luncheon. Everyone was given logoed baseball caps and umbrellas as, onstage, a series of multi-ethnic dancers unveiled a new branding campaign, a couple years and a couple million dollars in the making. ‘Toronto: Unlimited’ was the slogan, with the letters TO rolled into a single character that looked something like a stylized toilet seat.
My friends and I huddled near the bar, draining glasses of complimentary champagne and snatching tiger shrimp from the trays of passing servers. We cracked wise about the campaign. Maybe the logo looked like a spermatozoa? Was ‘Unlimited’ supposed to sound as stiff and corporate as it did? Or as generic? In retrospect, it wasn’t a half-bad campaign, based on neighbourhood profiles that highlighted Toronto’s ethnic enclaves, but it was the era of No Logo and anything as self-conscious as a branding campaign seemed worthy of disdain. I was already drafting a snarky editorial in my head as our crowd retired to the rooftop patio to discuss current events and watch the sun set. The federal government under Prime Minister Paul Martin was finally going to insist on passing legislation recognizing same-sex marriages, a gift just in time for the massive Toronto Pride festival coming up a week or so later, and one expected to result in thousands of Americans rushing into town to get hitched at city hall. Meanwhile, it looked like Mayor David Miller, at long last, would persuade the province to grant new powers to the city so it could become a grown-up government. We debated the merits of a ‘strong mayor’ system; Miller didn’t want extraordinary executive power, but I thought maybe he should.
Night was falling and the regular crowd of Bay Streeters started trickling into the bar. I wandered up Beverley Street with Matt Blackett, the publisher of the then-fledgling urbanist magazine Spacing, to a converted mansion where a literary magazine party was winding down. A couple of editors there had liberated a bottle of wine from the bar and invited us to enjoy it with them across the street. We sat on a picnic table in Grange Park – just a few hundred metres from where I’d taken piano lessons as a kid – and swigged from the bottle. We could see the new Ontario College of Art & Design building from there, Will Alsop’s weird and wonderful tabletop structure that looked like a shoebox floating in the air atop massive, brightly coloured crayons. And we could see the work underway on Frank Gehry’s addition to the Art Gallery of Ontario, where a new spiral staircase would face out onto the park. I invited Matt and our new friends to a dance party I was holding in a Queen West bar that week – a few pals and I had decided we’d like to be nightclub DJs and had started hosting monthly events that, to our surprise, had suddenly become popular. It turned out the literary magazine editors were already planning to attend, and it also turned out we were out of wine, so we all wandered up to Baldwin Street to meet more friends at an Italian restaurant.
On the patio, I ran into my friend David Balzer, an art critic, and we caught up briefly and shared stories of the dozen or more Fringe Festival plays we were each reviewing that week. Inside, a giant banquet table was surrounded by old and new friends, from Spacing and the literary magazine, and we drank more
wine and ate spaghetti and I spilled tomato sauce down the front of my white shirt and, in the boozy, giddy haze, gradually lost my capacity for creating memories. Eventually Matt and I walked home, heading up Spadina using our new Toronto Unlimited umbrellas as walking sticks, and plotting the ways in which Matt could take over Toronto politics with Spacing as a launching pad. We passed the domed glass structures of Dupont subway station and climbed a hill near the railroad tracks. There, Matt showed me how to shut off the lights illuminating the illegally installed billboards that overlooked the streets. If you knew where to look, all you had to do was flip a switch.
And there was a perfect illustration of the sudden influence we felt we could now exert in the city. We were in our early thirties and had magazines and newspapers that would publish our opinions, and friends in seemingly every bar in the city. We were known personally by the mayor and lobbied by activists. If we wanted to have a dance party, we just booked a bar and brought a crate of CDs. And if we saw something we didn’t like – like bright lights on a billboard – we’d just go right up and shut it off. Suddenly we knew where the city’s switches were.
We parted ways and I staggered another block to the giant loft apartment I shared with my wife, Rebecca. I’d been married for three years and would become a father less than a year later; after spending my twenties taking odd jobs and moving back and forth from my parents’ home in Scarborough, I had now spent a couple years earning a living as a professional writer. Rebecca and I were close to paying off her student loan, and my own adventures in collection-agency dodging were fading into the past. Gay rights were ascendant, marijuana looked as though it might be legalized, a ‘new deal for cities’ had just been announced, the mayor was about to be in the pages of Vanity Fair. The economy was booming, and new condo towers were beginning to sprout up all over the place. Toronto was growing higher, bigger, stronger. I was writing an essay about all the activity I saw happening among my loose circle of acquaintances, about this Toronto moment, for an anthology called uTOpia. A neat parallel was forming between my own personal narrative and that of my friends, and the narrative of the city’s development. Both seemed to be on an upward trajectory after the fog of the late 1990s and early 2000s.
At home I smoked a cigarette and tried to read for a few minutes before I climbed into bed. Rebecca came in a few hours before the sun rose, her pockets full of tips from her bartending job. She set the alarm and crawled into bed beside me, and as we lay together a train passed on the tracks just behind our building, and the way it gently rattled the floor of our room was comforting. We nodded off to dream big dreams.
Even though I was inclined to take the piss out of Tourism Toronto, it turned out they had it right. For me and Rebecca and our friends and the Toronto we knew and loved, there were no barriers we could see. Our options and our potential, the number of things we could do, be part of, achieve, the dreams we could dream together, the stories we could create, seemed, in a word, unlimited.
3
That’s one story. Here’s another, from a year later, and way out in the part of Etobicoke near the airport, a place some of us might think of as drive-through country, where a man was preaching about a more limited vision of Toronto. That man was a second-term city councillor named Rob Ford.
Just a few months earlier, Councillor Ford had stood in council chambers attacking the $1.5 million in grants the City of Toronto had given to AIDS awareness programs. His reasoning? ‘If you are not doing needles and you are not gay,’ he said, ‘you won’t get AIDS probably – that’s the bottom line.’ That was just the hum-along hook to an epic operetta dissecting Toronto’s $50 million in grant programs. In addition to the fat-cat AIDS establishment, Ford lambasted the cultural hogs at the city trough: the opera, the symphony, the ballet – ‘This is so embarrassing. I just wanted to bring it to the attention of the poor taxpayer who is getting screwed left, right and centre by these grants.’ Ford was just getting warmed up when his five minutes of speaking time expired, so he asked for an extension, a courtesy granted routinely in the hot-air-filled council chamber. Not this time. Council shut him up.
Later, Councillor Kyle Rae told Xtra magazine that he and his colleagues were fed up with Ford: ‘I think [we’re] embarrassed that we have a buffoon on council. I think he is fairly ostracized within council. It’s almost like we’re stuck with him.’
Rae was expressing a sentiment that was widespread among the people I talked to regularly. It seemed as if Ford was always baiting all the other councillors and downtown leftists with his politically incorrect speeches. He called people names: Giorgio Mammoliti was a ‘scammer’ and a ‘snake’; Gloria Lindsay Luby was a ‘waste of skin.’ He once mused about declaring Toronto a refugee-free zone. He drove his minivan to work on Car Free Day and considered laws banning pesticides and protecting trees to be symptoms of ‘communism’ and ‘dictatorship.’ He spent only between $2,000 and $8,000 annually on office expenses, shaming those who approached the $50,000 limit (with special venom reserved for expense-account king Mammoliti). He’d once arrived drunk at a Leafs game, shouting obscenities at those around him. He reportedly asked someone sitting nearby if he wanted his ‘little wife’ to ‘go to Iran and get raped and shot’ (and then handed some others his business card). When the press asked about the event immediately afterwards, he denied he’d even been at the game. and when proof emerged that he had been there and had been kicked out by security, he recanted, saying he’d been having a rough time personally and had had too much to drink. Back then, he seemed to be nothing but a clown. A bombastic talk-radio freakshow. A street-corner ranter whose demented howling about the demons lurking in the footnotes of expense budgets punctuated every city council meeting. He was an outcast with no political friends who routinely found himself on the losing side of 44–1 votes.
But back then, I did something very few people did: I took Rob Ford seriously. It was an election year, and Ford was running for re-election as councillor for Ward 2 with virtually no opposition. I wanted to understand how this retrograde ranter, who appeared to all the world (my world, anyway) to be an embarrassment, could have been elected twice and appeared certain to be re-elected again. What did voters in northwestern Etobicoke see in this guy that was invisible to me? I pitched the story to my editor as a personal profile that would ‘show everything that was wrong with Toronto city politics.’ That part, at least, I got right.
It was about 10:45 a.m. on a hot, periodically rainy July day when Rob Ford picked me up in his minivan. He was wearing a blue suit, his blond hair spiky and slick from the rain. I met him near a place on Golfwood Heights where he’d been dealing with a complaint from a guy whose backyard was being flooded by a city-owned drainage ditch. Almost as soon as we started talking, his phone rang, and he answered as he drove. ‘Hello. Yeah. Martin Grove and Humber is not today, buddy. Nope, that’s not today. Okay.’ He hung up and began speaking to me again.
‘You see, what I do, I go from house to house. Some people say it’s crazy, but I believe, you know, they’re the bosses, they’re the taxpayers.’ Earlier that day, he’d been at an apartment on Kipling. ‘I had an MLS [Municipal Licensing and Standards] person with me, and I said, “Come on, you’ve got to get these cockroaches.” You know, they had these cockroaches everywhere. So what we do is, the mls officer goes to the landlord, says, you know, “You’ve got thirty days to fix it, and if not, the city’s going to come in and get it done.” And then obviously it’s going to go on their property taxes.’
Then, he told me, referring to his agenda and reading as he drove, there was a tenant on Bergamot trying to get into a larger apartment for her growing family but worried about the price she was quoted. That Ford might be able to negotiate a $200 discount on rent seemed like a stretch. ‘All I can do is advocate on her behalf. That’s all I can do. These are the buildings here, see,’ he said, gesturing to concrete high-rises as we passed. ‘They’re old buildings. A lot of tenan
ts have been there pretty much their whole life. A lot of them came from Croatia and this is the first place they stayed. So, you know, a lot of them, English is their second language. Some of them, the kids are okay but the parents and grandparents have language barriers. But they’re, you know, they manage, and they’re hard-working people. I gotta go to bat for everyone, no matter what their income is. No matter what their race or religion is. I treat everyone the same.’
At another house on View Green, an Indian man answered the door. ‘Mr. Rob!’ he said. Gesturing to the photo of the man’s two-year-old daughter on the wall, Ford said he had a fifteen-month-old of his own at home. We had to wait for the appropriate city staff to deal with the man’s complaint – he was upset that buses drove up on the grass adjacent to the bus loop down the street – but Ford insisted on waiting outside. ‘I just wanted to let you know we were here,’ he said. The man offered an umbrella, but Ford refused.
As we stood outside on the man’s lawn, I noticed that Ford bore some resemblance to the late comedian Chris Farley, and that there was something pathetically charming about the sight of him there, soaking wet, red-faced in his wrinkled suit, getting drenched in the name of helping out those who elected him. This, he told me, was his favourite part of the job. ‘I love my constituents. They are second only to my family in my heart. What I try to do is relate to the average person. That’s all I try to be. I hate the word politician. People call me “councillor.” I don’t like that, I just like to be called Rob. I’m just like anyone else. I always tell the community, “You’re the boss. Tell me where you want me to be and I’m there. You say, ‘Jump,’ I’ll say, ‘How high?’”’
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