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Wednesday, July 29, 2009 03:05 PM
Farewell (I hope)
Hallelujah, let the heavens be praised. Assuming the messy business holding up a tentative deal is sorted out, I’m out of a regular writing job, and I couldn’t be any happier. I feel a bit like Sgt. Frank Drebin of Police Squad, who said that he’d be happy to be out of a job if it meant living in a world without crime. I might not be quite as altruistic or heroic as Sgt. Drebin, but I do share that same humble sentiment.
But before we move onto other things, I’d like to quickly touch on a few issues. Though I should be – and in many respects am – in a celebratory mood, I’m still quite perplexed. So, for a moment, I’d like to reflect on three things that I’ve learned in the last 38 days.
Link to this postFriday, July 24, 2009 02:27 PM
The scab, condo life and trashy conversation
Last week I took a practical approach to dealing with Saturday and Sunday, explaining how you should deal with specific problems on the weekend. This Friday I've decided to take a thematic approach. Since the weekend is a time for laziness and tying up loose ends, I will use three discarded ideas and lazily package them into a single blog entry. This is why I am a professional writer and you are not: I don’t have the shame to stop me from sinking so low.
The scab
In my column Thursday I neglected to mention that at some point – and I won’t give away where or when for fear of ruining the young man’s life – I met a scab. For the past week and a half he’s been working in violation of union regulations and has been making even more money than his union-approved wage.
He was a seasonal worker and said he saw no reason to be a part of a strike which served merely to protect 20-year veterans who've already banked over a hundred sick days. These aren’t my words (I don’t even completely agree.) They are his.
Thursday, July 23, 2009 02:10 PM
Butterflies and naked bathers on lonely island
Yesterday I crawled out of bed, finally recovered from my angry rant on Monday, and decided to head to the Toronto Islands.
I’d already been twice since the strike began: the first time to scout it out for my first article lo those many days; and the second to celebrate my friend’s birthday with too much beer on a Saturday afternoon a few weeks ago.
This was another fact-finding mission. I wanted to take a look at Centreville. I took a walk through the so-called amusement park. It is a ghost town now. There were no yawns from bored children. There were no cries from parents yelling, “Well, I wanted to take them to Wonderland.” Nothing. Just me and some peacocks, who I chased around until I realized that even if no one was watching I was still acting like a jackass.
Snide insults aside, Centreville is a popular destination and it’s a shame that CUPE 416 threatened to picket potential park customers. Still, there are at least five ways to have fun on the Toronto Islands during the strike (though perhaps not for six year olds).
Monday, July 20, 2009 03:24 PM
Monday Rant
I’ll begin this special Monday Rant with a simple observation: the strike was beyond belief a month ago, and now it’s just nonsensical. The unions and the city willingly jumped into quicksand four weeks ago and now they’re dumbstruck because they can’t just walk out of it.
Both sides are now past the point of victory. The unions have forfeited so much income over the course of the past month that it will take them years to make up the difference – even if they do ‘win’. And the mayor, who has insisted on finally being tough with a union, has seen his support erode to the point where his re-election in 2010 seems unlikely against a strong slate that might include Deputy Premier George Smitherman and illustrious failure John Tory.
Meanwhile, the citizenry isn’t taking sides, because we just hate everybody. Polls show that the majority is against the union AND against the mayor. And why not? For the past month it’s seemed as if Torontonians live in a neutral zone between two opposing factions shooting rockets at each other – only the targeting systems have malfunctioned and the bombs keep landing on us.
Friday, July 17, 2009 03:05 PM
The weekend in a stricken city
This weekend marks the beginning of the fourth weekend of the municipal workers strike. Remarkable.
Saturdays and Sundays are when the minor irritations of the strike become a bit more intense. During the week we can ignore most of the consequences, secure in our 9 to 5 routines, but on a sunny weekend when we just want to get out and have fun there are inconveniences, large and small, that besiege us on all sides. Here are a few very real problems that you might run into while trying to enjoy your weekend, accompanied by some not-always practical solutions.
Thursday, July 16, 2009 03:34 PM
Summer Camp Blues
I’m an expert about the strike at this point. Don’t argue with me. Why else would The Globe and Mail continue to let me blog about it? Because I have pictures of the editors? Oh sure, that helped, but the expertise is almost certainly the primary reason.
And after weeks of careful study, poring over nearly every detail of the situation, I’ve found that there are only THREE reasons to really, truly and honestly complain about this strike beyond a "Damn" followed by a "Well, let’s find an ingenious work-around provided by a handsome Internet writer."
The strike is only a serious problem if:
1) You live directly beside a temporary dumpsite (none of this nonsense NIMBYism because you walk your dog there);
2) Your business is suffering because you can’t get permits to allow you to open/build/do whatever it is that permits do, and;
3) Your kid was supposed to be in public daycare or in day camp.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009 03:38 PM
Ticket rage? Not so much
The highlight of my visit to the York Civic Centre yesterday was hearing a striker, lazing in the shade on a bench with a co-picketer, whine, “Where IS that guy with out donuts? What, did he FORGET today?” In addition to being hysterical in its own right, the comment sort of summed up my visit – I went in expecting something sweet, and came up relatively empty.
The York Civic Centre at 2700 Eglinton Ave. W. (just west of Keele St.) opened for business on July 9th as the second facility in Toronto where we can fight our parking tickets. As many of you have discovered, tickets are still being given out as usual, but now there are only two places where we can pay our fines and request a trial to fight them (the other is at 1530 Markham Rd.).
Tuesday, July 14, 2009 04:19 PM
At Moss Park, the sound and fury signify nothing
Yesterday I walked down to Moss Park, to the southwest corner of the park at Queen and Sherbourne Streets where the city several days ago erected yet another temporary dumpsite to deal with the garbage strike. The news was promising a protest at 5:00 p.m. that would express the neighborhood’s rage at the city’s gall at dumping the trash in their backyard. I went down expecting a scene. I got one – just not the kind that I was expecting.
Though the demonstration was called for 5, at that hour there were only six protesters present. It was quite a show, though; stalking each of them, looking for the absolute perfect shot and the perfect quote, were roughly 20 members of the news media. Trucks from CBC, CTV and CITY announced that something was going on here…but what was it?
It turned out that this protest was a media event, and at the same time not an event at all. At no point did the number of protesters outnumber the media; though one of the news websites indicated that there were ‘dozens’ of people there, there were no more than 18 protesters present at any given time. Amazing, especially since at the same time I counted over 20 cameramen and reporters.
And just who did these protesters represent? The neighbourhood? Surely not. The most out-front person was a woman who’d arranged a similar protest at Christie Pits. The most vocal was a thirty-year old man walking his dog who over the course of an hour and a half gave more interviews than Barack Obama throughout his lifetime.
This man said that he didn’t quite live in the area either, though he did use Moss Park to walk his dog. He complained that since the temporary facility went up nobody used the park anymore – I overheard him saying ‘it’s deserted’ at some point during his 600th interview. The irony of that statement was two-fold. First, the area where the protest was being held was indeed deserted, because nobody seemed to want to fight this dump, an annoying-as-hell but what-else-can-we-do solution to a very real problem. Second, the park WAS NOT deserted; west of the dump, on the soccer field, I at one point counted eleven people and six dogs – this didn’t count the smattering of people on the baseball field and tennis courts. There were more people playing than protesting. Heck – it didn’t even smell that bad! A brisk, easterly wind blew any pungent aroma away from us (we were about a hundred feet south of the dump), and though I’m sure that it’s bad on a lazy day I can honestly say that I’ve smelt worse from my back deck.
But what did the media cover? Sixteen people with signs. And how did they cover it? As if it represented something. I didn’t think so. I thought of the whole thing as a charade, and nobody quite liked me for it. Both factions – the media and the protesters - regarded me with some suspicion, because I was essentially pacing around and taking notes for two hours with a smirk on my face. Both had a representative approach me and ask me who I was and for whom I was working; I didn’t fit into the symbiotic relationship occurring on the field, and they didn’t trust me. And they shouldn’t have.
Really, I could go on for 15,000 words about those two hours, watching the protesters try to justify their presence and the media try to justify theirs. I have 35 pages of notes, nearly all gold, but I can’t turn this into an opus in one night, so I’ll let it alone for now.
I’ll just mention two funny moments, both of which occurred around 5:30. The first occurred when a reporter from CITY TV asked the 12-14 protesters to march around. He was trying to stage them in a certain way, but the protest leader said they’d only do it if someone tried to dump while they were out there. The thing was that somebody already had, about ten minutes earlier, and nobody did anything about it because they were too busy giving interviews. About thirty minutes later another man dumped garbage, and nobody stopped him because the newspeople were going ‘Live-to-Air’ and nobody wanted to leave the shot.
The second funny incident occurred at 5:40. There were more signs than people at this point, and one of the placards blew through the crowd and was swept away onto the sidewalk of Queens St.. Nobody seemed to budge or pay it any mind. They’d trashed their park, and didn’t notice because the media was around. But then a few minutes later a cameraman walked into the desultory crowd and gave it back to the woman who’d brought them all in the first place. It was a news event, after all. Two sides, working for one cause: creating news.
Look, it’s not that this strike is not a story. It’s that yesterday at Moss Park there was a very small minority that, through the media’s coverage, came to represent the majority. I think that for the most part we’re all feeling something like exasperated outrage. Polls show that Torontonians disapprove of the way that the mayor is handling the situation, they disapprove of the unions even more, and this outrage that roils and boils under the surface is expressed…with a shrug. We shrug and get on with our lives. Because coping quietly is easier, less stressful, than getting worked up. Sometimes it’s easier to step back from the scene and smirk, as I did yesterday, than to descend into the melee.
Thursday, July 9, 2009 12:25 PM
Litter bugs beware
After eating my first lunch yesterday at the Duke of York, I asked the manager what the biggest inconvenience of the strike was in his professional life. He said it was picking up the litter on the street and sidewalk outside of the establishment, a task usually performed by those golf cart-type vehicles with the large vacuums. He said that he was amazed – shocked, in fact – by how quickly Torontonians had gone to pieces and started to throw their trash on the ground. I nodded, pretended to be sympathetic, and left to go back to not caring about other people’s problems.
Wednesday, July 8, 2009 01:00 PM
Random strike survival ideas from MJ
On Tuesday, the world temporarily stopped functioning to mourn the passing of a phenomenally talented singer, songwriter and performer who hasn’t been artistically relevant since Brian Mulroney was prime minister. Well. I tried to think of some elaborate headlines for this piece that had something to do with Mr. Jackson (eg. "Beat It: How to Defeat the Strike", "It Smells BAD Outside", "Dirty Diana is Covered in Garbage" and "Black or White: How To Dispose of a Zebra’s Head During a Strike"), but all of my ideas were as terrible as the song that Eddie Murphy did with him in the early 90s.
Given the press coverage and general interest in the memorial (including by my own esteemed broadsheet), two things were clear: i) I’d have to work in the song titles somehow, and; 2) our society should reassess its priorities. Now, back to what’s really important: two pithy ideas about how to get around the minor inconveniences of a municipal strike.
The Strike Survivor Contributors
Jared Greenspan
Follow Jared Greenspan as he discovers first-hand the best ways to survive the Toronto workers strike