Rod McQueen's Blog, page 21

The silence of the lambs

The Toronto International Film Festival officially opened last night with a Canadian documentary, Once Were Brothers, about Robbie Robertson and The Band. But the build-up to the annual affair has been going on for days with a media blitz and pop-up trucks trying out operations in locations around the city. One I saw was fitting, a jewellery company, another was not so welcome, a vaping firm with a backdoor on a enclosed van that you had to be nineteen to enter. I did not go inside but can imagine comfy tub chairs, trial intakes of some nicotine-laced concoction and a sales rep saying how vaping was so much better for you than smoking. Why are such companies allowed to peddle their addictive wares on the street?

The multiple trucks on a closed-to-vehicular-traffic King Street last night had better offerings that ranged from an Air France display where you could sit in a mock first-class lounge to gluten-free Venezualan offerings on corn bread. We saw the Robertson documentary by Daniel Roher, the 26-year-old Toronto-born wunderkind who has done a terrific job of capturing the essence of the group that changed music forever. The 90-minute doc contains powerful footage of guitarist and songwriter Robertson from his early days through his time with Ronnie Hawkins and Bob Dylan to the eventual breakup of The Band. Interviewees include George Harrison, Eric Clapton and Bruce Springsteen but the Hawk delivers the best three or four lines.

Politics briefly intruded when Finance Minister Bill Morneau was among the pre-show speakers at a packed Roy Thomson Hall. He spoke without notes, listed the members of The Band and their birthplaces and received applause on a couple of occasions for his commendations about the importance of the arts in Canada. With an election in the offing maybe it was no surprise that he talked about the contribution the Liberal government has made to the arts over the last four years and was looking forward to making in the next four years. He paused, waiting for more applause from the crowd, but there was an awkward silence. You’d think this particular audience would be eager to support such a promise but they were not. Such reticence may not bespeak a Liberal electoral loss, but it certainly suggests a Liberal victory is not assured.

Metro notebook

Saw the Blue Jays beat Texas 3-0 on a silky evening with a temperature of 22C even at 10:30. The team is finally competitive, winning two-thirds of their last fifteen games. Previously, they were losing two-thirds of the time. Fans wear their Jays shirts like memory markers since most of the players represented are long gone: Josh Donaldson, Roy Halladay, Jose Bautista, Robbie Alomar, and Russ Martin. At least the t-shirt quality lasts through multiple washings.

A Jays employee stationed near the dugout is great with the kids, helping them try for souvenir baseballs and allowing them to sneak up a few rows when they shouldn’t. In their tiny stadium studio, Sportsnet’s Jamie Campbell and analyst Joe Siddall appear to fall asleep between on-air appearances. The former curtain is gone; it was better when you couldn’t see them in real life. I miss Gregg Zaun who was fired for being too Zaunie. Outside, the eternal Elvis, who must take hours to get himself silvered, struts his stuff while passers-by shoot videos without putting the requisite coins in his collection box.

A couple of flight attendants get on the subway at Union, likely deposited at the Royal York Hotel by crew transport from the airport. Even after being cooped up together for who-knows-how-many hours on a flight from Frankfurt, there is still levity and laughter as they head to their respective homes. A young man, maybe nineteen, is high on drink or drugs or both. He is standing, eyes closed, each of his hands clutching a hanging strap, rotating on his toes in all directions like a Cirque du Soleil performer. Other patrons give him space. A police officer fifteen feet away carefully does not look.

A couple dances to the sound of a busker playing a guitar. A man stops to watch. He seems to be having more fun than they are. Six young people chatter and look at their phones thereby demonstrating that you can be two places at once. Another man peers at himself in a mirror and tries to re-arrange his hair despite the fact that it has been shorn down to almost nothing. A cleaner dusts the moving steps of an escalator. How does he know when he’s come to the end, the steps are all clean and his work is done? These are the questions that haunt us.

Roots and wings

While searching for a book on my shelves the other day, I realized I still owned some of the earliest books I ever bought or was given. That either makes me a hoarder, or someone who zealously keeps what’s always mattered. Among them was The Adventures of Danny Meadow Mouse, one of dozens of animal tales by Thornton W. Burgess. I was fascinated by the natural world and learned to read on this series with its subtle lessons about morals.

At twelve, I received the greatest gift of all from my father: The Concise Oxford Dictionary. I now own several dictionaries, but that first one remains my go-to volume for spelling and meaning despite much speedier online availability. It’s been repaired more times than I can count. There are a few keepsakes between the leaves that I stumble upon such as my guest ribbon to see Freddie Mercury and Queen at the Canadian National Exhibition in 1980.

I seem to have fallen heir to several bibles including one given to my family (complete with a photo of me at four in short pants and a beanie cap), another with my mother’s name written in her own hand, and a more ancient copy that has a piece of blank prescription paper inside so I guess it came from my druggist grandfather who retired around 1950.

Finally, there’s How the Great Religions Began, written by Joseph Gaer in 1929 and published as a paperback in 1963 when I bought it. As a Presbyterian, taken to church so often as a boy that I concluded I had attended sufficiently for a lifetime, maybe I was looking for new paths. Or maybe I was just curious. Still am. Like those old books, some things don’t change.

The unmaking of a city

Walk anywhere in downtown Toronto from Bloor Street south to Lake Ontario, from Spadina in the west to the Don Valley Parkway in the east, and all you can see are cranes building condominiums. In the few blocks around me, there must be ten condos at various stages of completion. The scariest is The One, an 85-storey behemoth at Yonge and Bloor. Two years along and they’re still digging. The footprint seems too small to have enough elevators. Two blocks north on Yorkville Avenue the recently laid roadway interlock is being ruined by cement trucks.

All of these monsters, stuffed into such a small area, have been approved by Toronto city council and whatever civil servants are behind the scenes making sure of – what? Has anyone done wind shear tests? Where’s the green space? Can the water and sewage services handle the onslaught? Did anybody think about parking? A multi-storey Green P lot has just been knocked down.

Toronto city planners don’t seem capable of anything other than rubber-stamping condo plans from developers. The only specific thing I can think of that shows any kind of moxie in recent years is The Bentway, the park under the Gardiner Expressway near Fort York. The last person who did anything really courageous was Mayor David Crombie who imposed a 45-foot height limit and fought for neighbourhood preservation. That was in the 1970s.

All of which is to say that I welcome the private-sector proposal called Sidewalk Labs that would put Google’s headquarters into a development embracing 190 acres of mostly derelict waterfront land. Sidewalk Labs includes numerous experimental concepts that might make city hall shudder but I like them all. Sidewalk will even share the cost of a light-rail line. It’s clear that city planners have neither the imagination nor the backbone to do something anywhere near as inventive. So, get out that rubber stamp and approve it.

Sic transit gloria mundi

When I joined the Bank of Nova Scotia in Toronto in 1976, my office on the executive floor must have measured 500 sq ft. I had a desk the size of a car, a credenza, several chairs, and some bookcases. Any noise in the area was muffled by thick carpets and heavy curtains. The room where visitors waited for their appointment was called the “slumber room” as if it were part of a funeral home. Men wore suit jackets and ties throughout the day.

Contrast that staid environment with the 200 or so Scotiabankers marching in Sunday’s Pride Parade. The circle in the centre of the bank logo on their t-shirts was in the LGBTQ rainbow colours. Imagine what William Nicks, Scotia’s austere Chairman and CEO in the 1960s, who designed an earlier version of that logo, would think. Most corporations have gone through similar transformations. That’s why the Pride Parade has many corporate sponsors ranging from CN to Nordstrom.

West along Bloor Street, past another bank-sponsored event – the TD Toronto Jazz Festival – is a place that reaches even further back in time than the slumber room, the Royal Ontario Museum. In its just-opened exhibition of 70 Dutch paintings, called In the Age of Rembrandt, there are only three Rembrandts, but there are also two fine works by Frans Hals, Hendrick Avercamp’s magical Winter Landscape replete with dozens of skaters enjoying an outing on a frozen river, and a dazzling painting by Carel Fabritius showing the moment immediately before Mercury turns Aglauros to stone.

One of the themes of the show is the brevity of life or vanitas, as the art historians would say. Various portraits and still lifes show some combination of a skull, an hour glass or a broken flower stem. In one work, two children blow bubbles, another representation that we are only here for a short while. Whether you marched in the parade, played saxophone in a jazz band, or looked at art, the message was the same: enjoy the moment, nothing lasts.

Prognosis negative

As if the current federal Conservative leader Andrew Scheer doesn’t have enough problems, he’s now being hobbled by the growing unpopularity of his Ontario counterpart, Doug Ford, the guy who has just taken the summer off. The Ontario Legislature rose last week and won’t return until October 28, four months from now. Somehow that all seems to fit a man who barely works a five-day week even when the Legislature is sitting.

Andrew Scheer’s major issue is his image. No one I talk to seems able to warm to him. He doesn’t have leadership qualities, say some. He’s weak, say others. As someone who worked for Robert Stanfield, I can commiserate about the focus on image. Stanfield’s backers would claim that if only every voter could meet him one-on-one, he’d sweep the country.

Scheer is also battling television ads sponsored by a furtive group called Engage Canada that appears to be union-financed. The ads focus on his “weakness” and how he’ll mimic Ford’s slash-and-burn policies. It’s not as if Ford’s going to campaign for Scheer; it’s not as if Scheer wants him. “I’m my own person,” Scheer told the Toronto Star. “I have my own style.”

Things used to be different in Ontario. Premier Bill Davis campaigned vigorously for Stanfield. During the 1972 federal election, Davis turned over his entire Big Blue Machine – everyone from top strategists to advance men and women who organized events. It almost worked. In 1972, the federal Tories won forty seats in Ontario, up from seventeen in 1968. In those days, a provincial premier like Davis was loyal, helpful and intelligent. Ford seems more vindictive than interested in any victory in Ottawa. Andrew Scheer will need a hugely successful election campaign to overcome all the negatives against him.

 

No reveries, please

Remember when, not so long ago, you went into a coffee shop, ordered your favourite brew, and sat down. Maybe you were at a common table with half a dozen others. Maybe a conversation was launched. Maybe there was a noisy fellow with whom a lively discussion ensued. Or maybe you just stared out the window and watched the passing parade, lost in your own thoughts.

If there were a discussion, maybe you learned something. Or you got riled. Perhaps an idea sprang into your head or a solution arrived to a problem that had been hounding you. Even bettter, you might have relaxed and let slip from your mind something that had been bugging you. Maybe you left after ten minutes, refreshed, abuzz with a new thought. Or nothing at all. Call it coffee bathing, like forest bathing, only conducted indoors and in the city.

No more. All of the patrons around you are hard wired to the outside world. I watched a woman the other day who pulled from her bag a tiny bracket device on which she carefully secured her laptop. Then she took a lengthy electrical cord, disrupting two others beside her who were immersed in their own laptops, by pushing the cord in front of her neighbours into the far-off outlet. No words were spoken. Only then did she go for coffee, the more important set-up accomplished.

Everyone in the place was engrossed in similar circumstances: tapping out texts, watching a Shawn Mendes video, or playing Candy Crush. No imaginations were being enlivened, no minds were being stretched, no contacts were made with other humans, no celebratory moments were enjoyed. We might as well all have been in an institution. Perhaps we were.

The favoured few

Usually, at this time of year, we go birding on the Toronto Islands. We take the ferry to Ward’s Island and spend the day walking to Hanlan’s Point for the return trip to the mainland. With a packed lunch along the way, there are glorious warbler sightings. During the week, we have the place pretty much to ourselves.

Not this year. Not last year. The water’s been too high. At times, the Islands have been closed to such meanderings. But not closed to residents. For them, there are sandbags and other protective measures for about 600 residents who usually live an idyllic life with year-round ferry service supplied by the city and ongoing aid from conservation authorities.

At one point, there was an opportunity to knock down all dwellings and create more public parkland. In 1981, following a Commission of Inquiry, Premier Bill Davis decided to renew all the leases on the Islands. And so residents have been ensconced ever since, in recent years whining about noise from Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport. (Despite such concerns islanders do accept assistance from the airport when their ferry’s not running or their water supply isn’t flowing.)

These spring floods are becoming annual affairs and tell us unequivocally that it would be better if there were no permanent residents on the Toronto Islands to worry about. Sailing clubs are fine, they are in keeping with the surroundings. So, too, with the children’s amusement part at Centreville. Now there’s talk of building berms and dykes. I say it’s long past time to keep protecting the favoured few when water laps against their foundations. Instead of any or all costly solutions, let the Islands return to nature.

Black and white and dying all over

Just when you thought a bad idea couldn’t get worse, it did. In the 2018 federal budget, $50 million was designated to hire professional journalists to buttress local news coverage. On its face, the concept might appeal to some; use public money to tell the public what’s going on around the corner. But, can you really have a free press if it’s bought and paid for by Ottawa? Not by my definition.

Now, how does Ottawa foul things up even more? Why by creating a sketchy committee to advise who should enjoy the tax measures proposed in the 2019 budget. Lo and behold, the names announced today by Pablo Rodriguez, minister of Canadian heritage and multiculturalism, include every unionized beseecher and lollygagging lobby group for journalists that asked for help in the first place.

Multiculturalism has been a honey pot since the days of Stanley Haidasz, the first minister of state for multiculturalism, appointed in 1972 by Trudeau the Elder. Among this latest group cutting up the cash are Unifor, the National Ethnic Press, and the Canadian Association of Journalists.

No one is more unhappy than I am with the current state of journalism. Newspapers of long-standing have been replaced by social media outbursts. Magazines of record have been subsumed by memes. I no longer advise young people to consider going into journalism. There is little possibility of working your way up from the Nelson (B.C.) Daily to the Vancouver Sun, or radio station CJOB in Winnipeg to an on-air role with CTV. Or being discovered, like a nineteen-year-old Peter Mansbridge, making flight announcements at an airport.

So, what’s a government to do? Leave the media alone. Some practitioners will last longer than others. But all are doomed. With or without largesse.

Fear of flying

Talk about déjà vu all over again. Pickering Airport is back in the news. It first became an issue during the 1972 federal election after the Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau planned to build a passenger airport east of Toronto. Toronto International Airport would soon be stretched to the limit, they claimed. (The Pearson name wasn’t adopted until 1984.) Plus, construction was under way on Mirabel Airport north of Montreal. Maybe the Liberals thought Torontonians might like a new airport, too.

I was working for Opposition Leader Robert Stanfield. He asked me to write a research paper and make a recommendation. I did so, and reported that the majority of people living in what was then called the Golden Horseshoe didn’t want a new airport. Construction would be disruptive, planes would buzz their houses, and excellent agricultural land would be forever lost.

I recommended Stanfield come out against Pickering. Once an election was called for October 30, we knew a decision was needed on the topic. Half-way through the two-month-long campaign, Stanfield happened to be staying overnight in Toronto so there was pressure to make a comment on Pickering. We announced a news conference for the next morning but did not specify the topic, just in case consensus could not be reached. Around 10 p.m., a small group gathered in someone’s hotel room to find a position and draft suitable words. They included staff speechwriter Bill Grogan; long-time advisor and wordsmith Dalton Camp; Geoff Molyneux from the research office; and me.

Some drink was taken; many hours passed. It was likely Dalton who finally came up with the phrase: “The case for a second airport has not been made.” Brilliant! Stanfield was neither saying he was in favour nor against; he was simply declaring that more study and/or persuasion were required. The news conference passed muster; the media used the soundbite. Today, as I hear about the desire to resurrect Pickering Airport, I can only say: “The case for a second airport still has not been made.”