Toronto Renters Forum
General => General Discussion => Topic started by: romank on March 28, 2023, 09:18:51 pm
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Monday night's “planning townhall” (sic) in Ward 16 was lively in terms of lots of people wanting to engage city and TDSB officials, but the issues were grim nonetheless. Just as an example besides inflation and the tight housing market, people who live near the C.P.R. were still quite concerned about the Mississauga train crash!
I posted a bit about the meeting on my 25 Problems (dot com) board. More to follow.
If you're not up to speed on the train crash and the current Office of Emergency Management see '1979_Mississauga_train_derailment' in Wikipedia English.
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Councillor Gord Perks (Ward 4, Parkdale-High Park) was on the CBC radio news at noon, perhaps echoing themes from the Ward 16 meeting - mental health crisis, housing etc.
And there was apparently a ruckus at Queen's Park on Wednesday morning re: mining and northern development - tempers running high re: Doug Ford's “legislative bulldozer”, and people ejected from the chamber.
My hat is always off to folks who take a stand when the ministers of the day spout rubbish :D ...attached, pic goes back several years and yes, that is an I.S.A.C. (the Income Security Advocacy Centre) staff member calling the honourable member a liar! She was promptly escorted out. (The staffer not the Minister.)
I love the guy who appears to be cleaning his glasses.
(https://25problems.com/images/dana.jpg)
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City planners held another virtual “community consultation” in Ward 16 last evening - this time it was regarding a revised plan by the Menkes group to build around the Foresters building on the SE corner of Don Mills and Eglinton. Lots more towers may be going up there, transforming the area and not always for the better.
Councillor Jaye Robinson has called the process that surrounds these things (virtual consultations) “daunting”... I think that's putting it mildly. Example screenshots... in the first one my participation in the meeting ended abruptly; note the "privacy statement" which - wait for it! - has more to do with Northern California than Toronto Canada. I think the second one is a reference to a proposed build on the golf course in Flemingdon Park... Marian Prejel is a skilled presenter but here she's working in the restrictive space of the planning office's AIC.
(https://25problems.com/images/bad-news.jpg)
(https://25problems.com/images/oops-aic.jpg)
It's hard to get a count but it looked like maybe 25 people participated in last night's session. Absolutely the #1 takeaways were public transit and the lack of any affordable housing in the Menkes plan. And Yo! Developers! Hands off our mature trees!
The bizarre Cisco "webinar" (sic) format also prevents you from networking with your fellow citizens. One participant strongly cautioned the planners against using A.I. techniques to convert audio from the meeting into text, suggesting a preference for manual transcription. I have never, ever seen one of these things transcribed or even summarized, on a councillor's or education trustee's web page.
(https://25problems.com/images/menkes-screenshot-rochefort-dr.jpg)
The March 27 “planning townhall” (sic) in Ward 16 was lively in terms of lots of people wanting to engage city and TDSB officials, but the issues were grim nonetheless. Just as an example besides inflation and the tight housing market, people who live near the C.P.R. were still quite concerned about the Mississauga train crash!
I posted a bit about the meeting on my 25 Problems (dot com) board. More to follow.
If you're not up to speed on the train crash and the current Office of Emergency Management see '1979_Mississauga_train_derailment' in Wikipedia English. You may also want to look up the relationship between former CPR boss E. Hunter Harrison and the big U.S. roads like Norfolk Southern. I am not making this up.