A Rain of Frogs

Yesterday we took a friend from the UK to the AGO. Every time I am there, I am reminded of exactly how amazing the architecture is. Unfortunately the winding staircase was not accessible because of the King Tut exhibition, but Italian hall was readily available, and breathtaking as usual.

Art Gallery of Ontario – Toronto (43° 39’ 15.6” N x 79° 23’ 33” W)

Simplicity

Remove the unnecessary.

Presence

Be present.

Space

Take up space.

Optimism

Perceive only opportunity. The glass is both half full and too small.

Creation

Create only that which enriches or improves the experience of others. This is the essence of value.

Perfection

Perfection is a goal, not a destination. Create something today. Improve it tomorrow.

On my usual morning walk to work today, I had a thought inspired by our recent trip to the UK.

Why doesn’t Toronto run a lottery like the UK Millennium Commission does? The proceeds could be earmarked for use in city-improving buildings, environmental projects, celebrations etc. in much the same way it’s done in the UK. Not to line the pockets of business, not for rebuilding the TTC, not for paying garbage men or running libraries, but for new improvements to the city.

The funds could be used in all sorts of non-infrastructure projects. For example, they could be used to turn the Hearn Generating Station – a decommissioned, 20th century dinosaur carcass of a coal-fired generation plant sitting on our waterfront – into an art gallery, like the Tate Modern in London. Imagine an AGO Modern! This would allow us keep Toronto’s industrial heritage and architecture, but put it to a greener, more responsible use.

Bridges could be built, former industrial lands turned into public spaces, refurbish our museums and galleries, and enhance and modernize the city, in much the same way that the Millennium Commission funds have been transforming London and the rest of the UK with projects like the Falkirk Wheel, the London Eye or the Millennium Bridge.

God knows Toronto will never get funding for such projects from the Federal or Provincial levels of government. They won’t even fund Toronto’s transit system, which moves the workforce of the largest economic engine in Canada. Killing the golden goose via starvation.

Toronto needs to be modernized. It is, in my opinion, uniquely positioned to become an influential, modern world-class city that is seen as a destination and model of the way things should be done. But getting there requires leadership and vision, and it requires a lot of money. I don’t know when we’ll get the leadership or vision, but this might be a way to get the money.

It’s probably a pipe dream, but at least it’s a happy one.

I won’t be riding transit on Friday. I won’t be alone in this, as organizers try to put together a ‘rider’s strike’ to protest… well, to protest something. But I won’t be doing it for the same reasons as everyone else.

Ostensibly this protest is aimed at planned transit fare hikes. I find this pretty funny, really. Canadians it seems can only be got off their sofas and out from behind their televisions when someone pinches their wallet. And barely, at that. Organizers of the strike are not very optimistic about participation.

In my opinion, protesting fare hikes is ridiculous. Sure, I don’t like the increase any more than anyone else, and I do recognize the extreme impact it can and will have on lower income families that rely on transit to get to work, take their kids to school, and put food on their tables.

Frankly, the fare increase is a major problem. The increase will reduce ridership, which will, domino-effect style, cause even more problems with TTC finances. I don’t think anyone disagrees with this.

The reason I won’t be taking transit this Friday, and the reason I think it’s ridiculous, is because I will be protesting the ridiculous knee-jerk response by the TTC to ‘token hoarding’ in the run-up to the fare increase. They are reducing the number of tokens people can buy in order to ensure that people won’t collect vast sums of tokens at the older, lower rate.

Seriously, how many tokens are the average person going to hoard? Hundreds? Thousands? I doubt it. Maybe twenty or maybe even fifty, hardly a reason to get the TTC’s collective panties in a bunch over. And it is this response, more than anything, that brought the fare increase home to most people, I’d wager.

So why are they doing it? Why are they taking all this hatred and vitriol on themselves when they should be out banging the drums and raising mobs of protesters against the real problem?

And lets face it, the real problem is the way funding from Provincial and Federal levels of government happens. Or fails to happen, in the case of the TTC. Sure, there’s lots of other problems, like payroll and decades of poor planning, but the fact remains that the TTC is one of the least, if not the least subsidized transit systems on the continent.

This protest completely fails to address the real problem. It’d be like the poll-tax protests in the UK in the 1980s targeting the Post Office because that’s who delivered the poll-tax bill, instead of targeting the government. I wonder how effective that would have been.

This protest would be better served if everyone bought a token (and that’s likely all they’d be able to buy, just one token), got on the subway to Queen’s Park station, and picketed Parliament to demand of our Provincial government fair and appropriate funding for Ontario’s largest transit system.

Or maybe everyone should be targeting Parliament Hill, and demanding of our Federal government fair and appropriate funding for Canada’s largest transit system.

Maybe that’d be a protest worth going to.

This past weekend was absolutely stunning in Toronto. The weather was almost summer-like it was so warm. The only thing that could have made the day better would have been if the fall colours were in full force. They weren’t but there was still some yellow to be seen in the trees.

High Park – Toronto (43° 39’ 55.8” N x 79° 23’ 55.2” W).