Toronto library workers are on strike after failing to reach a deal with the library board.
No branches will be open and workers will hit the pickets lines on Monday.
The strike results in the closure of 98 branches and affects approximately 2,300 workers.
Maureen O’Reilly, president of Local 4948, the Toronto Library Workers Union made the announcement.
"Despite our best attempts...negotiations have stalled," O'Reilly said. "We find that we are left with little choice but to take job action."
[. . .]
The library is asking borrowers to not try and return books and materials for the duration of the strike, adding that no overdue fines will be charged.
CUPE Local 4948 represents more than 2,300 Toronto Public Library workers. About half of those workers are part-time, and about three-quarters are women.
The workers accuse the Library Board of making unfair and impractical promises to the city this year regarding budget cuts.
It couldn’t have been part of their strategy, but CUPE Local 4948, the union that represents Toronto Public Library’s 2300 workers, picked a great day to stage the first rally of the first strike in their history as an organization. The union—which formed in 2009 when members voted to separate from the city’s outdoor workers’ union, CUPE Local 416—was fortunate enough to have negotiations with the TPL board break down on the eve of an uncharacteristically balmy March morning. Call it beginner’s luck.
As a few hundred union members marched and chanted in Nathan Phillips Square, some turned their eyes from the sun to reflect on troubles ahead.
“I definitely think the union has the back of the part-timers,” said Melissa Kitazaki, who works in customer service at TPL. “I think it’s ridiculous that in August I will have been at Toronto Public Library for ten years, and I still can’t get a full-time job. That’s how few full-time jobs there actually are in the system.”
Kitazaki is the personification of one of the most contentious issues in the union’s negotiations with the TPL board. The union thinks TPL has too many part-time workers, and that those workers don’t have the same opportunities for advancement they may have had in better-funded days.
Maureen O’Reilly, the president of Local 4948, summarized her concerns for reporters when she arrived at Nathan Phillips Square around noon.
“We just want really, quite frankly, a decent living standard for our part-time workers,” she said. She added that since TPL shed the equivalent of 107 full-time positions last budget season (many of them belonging to workers made redundant by the rollout of new automated checkout systems), there are now more part-timers working at Toronto’s libraries than there are full-timers. A TPL spokesperson said that excluding part-time pages, many of whom are students, the current split is thirty percent part-timers to seventy percent full-timers.
Jack Layton’s former riding will remain NDP orange after rookie candidate Craig Scott captured the highest number of votes in Monday’s byelection in the federal riding of Toronto-Danforth.
Scott, a law professor, held off a challenge from Liberal Grant Gordon.
Monday’s result ends what was a muted race over which Layton’s name loomed large.
Leading the party in last May’s federal election, Layton hoisted the NDP to Official Opposition status for the first time in its history before falling ill to the cancer that claimed his life in August.
In his victory speech, Scott praised Layton and vowed to continue his push to hold the governing Conservatives to account.
"It looks like the orange crush is here to stay," said Scott. Echoing words from Layton's famous final letter, Scott said "we have chosen love, we've chosen hope, we've chosen optimism."
The Liberals conceded their loss in Monday's byelection at about 9:15 p.m., before the NDP win was official.
With some polls still to report, Scott had won about 59 per cent of the vote, while Gordon was running a distant second with about 29 per cent.
Organizations in Scarborough, one of Toronto's eastern inner suburbs, are jostling for the incipient city-wide light rail plan to be overturned in favor of extending a single subway line into Scarborough, a subway line that would cost billions and doesn't even meet subway ridership levels as it is. Sure, the construction of the subway would mean that underserved areas of the city would get nothing... but Toronto is a world-class city and deserves world-class transit.
That is, without exaggeration, the argument being made by the pro-subway group SAFE - a group which seems to be at odds with reality. They're even agitating for a Finch Avenue subway, something which never existed in any official plan and exists only because a particularly outspoken councillor had no grasp of what was being done[.]
There are some people in Toronto who desperately want to make sure that it's a "world-class" city, though strangely enough the "world-class" option generally seems to be the most expensive of all of them. Boosters use language like "building for the future" or argue that Toronto should be following the example of cities like New York and London - which really gives insight into the world-class mindset, because the only way I can see Toronto becoming equivalent to New York and London involves New York and London ceasing to exist.
Vancouver, it seems, has no such identity crisis. Vancouver knows what it is, and is satisfied with moving forward at its own pace, on its own merits. Like many other things, the ideology of city-building is more relaxed out here. In Toronto, it's maddening - many people there see themselves as living in a city that's just barely not world-class, that it's just too far away to grab, hanging there, tormenting them.
That's no way to build a city.
A female tiger and her cubs have been photographed roaming a north-Indian river valley by hidden camera traps.
The images were taken in the Kosi River corridor, part of remote India’s Terai Arc Landscape.
A photo taken in January shows the tiger mom carrying a one-month-old cub in her mouth[.]
“Knowing the tiger numbers and their movement routes in a corridor would provide a sound database in taking decisions on developmental activities within and around the corridor,” said World Wildlife Fund coordinator Joseph Vattakaven in a press release.
The Bengal tiger is an endangered Indian subspecies called Panthera tigris tigris. According to the latest population survey by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, no more than 2,500 Bengal tigers exist globally.
India harbors most of them with an estimated population of 1,706 tigers in 2011 — up from roughly 1,411 tigers in 2006. The boost to the population and its density (about 15 tigers per 39 square miles in the Kosi River corridor) can be deceiving, however, as the big cat’s habitats are shrinking.
I'm in Toronto this morning and I've seen something here I haven't seen in other cities -- young people, mostly men, sleeping on the sidewalk at busy intersections. They look comfortable in down sleeping bags -- as if they were camping out. But they aren't camping; they're sleeping in full daylight, with pedestrians and drivers passing in the hundreds every hour. Here is a specific guy sleeping on Bay St Sunday morning.
He looks to be in his twenties, lightly bearded. And, by the way, he's got a plastic St Patricks Day hat near his head. As pedestrians walk by they take a curious look and then pass on. No one stops. It doesn't look like a safe place to sleep -- cars are passing in the street on the turn from Queen St, and just a slight mistake takes them onto the curb and onto the guy.
Now here's an interesting development -- a real homeless guy, over sixty, heavily bearded, dressed warmly, happens by. He takes a close look, then walks around the sleeping guy to check him out; stands and thinks for a minute, then moves on.
Why are they here? There was an Occupy Toronto demonstration in City Hall Park nearby yesterday -- is this young guy an Occupy protester? The Old City Hall and green space is just across Queen St. Why hasn't this guy chosen to locate himself on the grass somewhere more secluded? Perhaps because the police would make him move on; perhaps because more secluded space is also more vulnerable space. And why not in a city shelter? They exist, so why has this young guy chosen the street?
This one sleeping guy is perplexing enough; but in the past few days I've seen several other similar instances within ten blocks of City Hall. So it's not an isolated example. Why does this take place here in Toronto but not Boston or Chicago? (I mean sleeping right in the middle of the sidewalk; of course there are homeless people in all those cities.)
But here is another interesting point to me: I'm observing this scene without any special background knowledge. What would a social worker, a street activist, or a policeman see that I don't notice in this scene? The policeman might quickly have registered the fact that the green spaces across Queen St aren't actually that attractive for sleeping because the police patrol them and evict sleepers. The activist might notice some features of the guy allowing her to identify the political statement he might be making. The social worker would have a much clearer idea about the shelter system.
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