[Toronto Transit Commission chair Karen] Stintz said she will make a motion at this week’s council meeting requesting staff explore the idea.
“I absolutely see Bixi as being an integral part of public transit in the city,” the councillor for Eglinton-Lawrence told CP24 on Sunday.
It’s a natural fit, said Jared Kolb of Cycle Toronto.
“When you look at trips within our city, what public bike systems like Bixi do is they fill in the gaps for trips that are too short to take transit or too far to walk – that two-kilometre sweet spot,” he said.
Once the Presto fare card is launched across the TTC – something that’s supposed to happen by the Pan Am Games in 2015 – it could also be used to access Bixi bikes, suggested Kolb.
New analysis by the Conference Board of Canada finds that 21 of the 46 medium-sized cities it tracks haven’t yet seen employment return to pre-recession levels.
In some cases, the decline is dramatic. Labour markets in New Glasgow, N.S.; Miramichi, N.B.; Saint-Hyacinthe, Que.; Medicine Hat, Alta.; and Vernon, B.C., have suffered a marked drop in the past decade.
“This is a troubling turn of events, given that these mid-sized cities play an important role as economic engines in their respective regions,” said Mario Lefebvre, director of the Centre for Municipal Studies. While the country – at an aggregate level – may have regained the jobs lost in the recession, “the employment picture has been uneven among Canada’s mid-sized cities over the past decade or so.”
Six mid-sized cities posted average job gains of at least 3 per cent a year – which amounts to growth of more than 20 per cent in the past seven years. They are: Brockville and Leamington in Ontario; Lethbridge and Wood Buffalo in Alberta; and Chilliwack and Duncan in British Columbia.
Most of these cities had been bustling up until the 2008-2009 recession. But the ensuing downturn caused economies to contract in 29 of the cities tracked. The recession was “particularly painful” for medium-sized cities in Ontario, the report said, where economies shrank in all 11 of these urban centres. By contrast, seven of 10 mid-sized cities in Atlantic Canada posted growth even through this period.
[I]n Toronto, Jane’s Walk has special significance. In 1968, Jane Jacobs the great American author, urban observer and destroyer of mid-century planning pieties, left New York for this city, where she played a quiet yet influential role.
As much as anyone, Jacobs allowed Toronto to feel good about itself. Yes, she fought everything from amalgamation to the island airport, but more important than that, she chose to live here. In a city in constant need of approval, that counts for a lot. Little wonder that when she died in 2006 she was the unofficial patron saint of Toronto.
That’s not something anyone who knew Jacobs would have told her even in jest; she would have been aghast at such a thought. Still, one can’t help but wonder what she would make of a city that has changed so much since her death.
Although Jacobs was conservative in the non-ideological sense of the word, it goes without saying she would have been appalled by contemporary civic politics and Mayor Rob Ford, whose ignorance of the city stands in stark contrast to her lifelong attempt to understand how they work. It’s probably a safe guess she wouldn’t be convinced by Toronto’s desire to become the high-rise condo capital of the planet.
For a few days each spring, an arguably ironic thing happens in High Park. Hemmed in by winter for months, what feels like Toronto’s entire population spills into the park, eager to breathe air that doesn’t freeze the lungs—and, presumably, to feel a little closer to nature. But the result isn’t exactly the long exhale of spring that many expect.
Instead, it’s as if the city comes to a halting critical mass in High Park’s 161 hectares of space, stopping to smell the flowers in numbers that can rival Yonge-Dundas Square. The day seems anything but pastoral or bucolic.
Traffic—cars, bikes, longboards, scooters—snarl the park’s entrances, with the intersection at High Park and Bloor nearly blocked by the density of arriving vehicles alone. Along West Road, the lawns and shaded groves near the Forest School fill quickly, as crowds of camera-wielding residents turn what was all but abandoned only two weeks ago into a festival scene. Even at the sweltering height of summer, High Park isn’t as overwhelmingly, blissfully popular as it is for this brief, fleeting sliver of spring.
Yes, it’s that time of year again, and it’s like a dream. As West Road plunges down the first in a series of hills into High Park, it veers toward a sharp, right-hand pedestrian turn—which then plunges even more steeply toward Grenadier Pond. This time of year, the path is bursting with cherry blossoms—and not just any cherry blossoms (or, in Japanese, sakura). These are examples of the most resplendent species of cherry blossom in the world.
In 1959, the citizens of Tokyo presented the citizens of Toronto with our city’s first Yoshino Cherry tree—what’s known in Japanese as somei yoshino. In Japan, these deciduous trees—relatively small in stature, growing to between five and 12 metres in height—are naturally occurring hybrids, believed to be descended from the Oshima cherry trees of Japan’s Izu Peninsula, near Tokyo. Because of their adaptability to a range of temperate environments, the trees have become globally renowned, and are perhaps one of the most widely cultivated types of sakura in the world.
The house where Allan Lanteigne was killed in March 2011 sits on a busy stretch of Ossington Ave. a few blocks northwest of Christie Pits Park. Police have released few details since the University of Toronto accounting clerk was found dead, but it is believed he was beaten to death.
Lanteigne had been living in the house since 2006, two years after he married Demitry Papasotiriou, a Greece-born Toronto lawyer. Papasotiriou, 33, co-owns the property with his aunt and uncle, who live in Manitoba. At the time of the murder, Lanteigne was living alone at the house. Papasotiriou had moved to Europe. According to friends and police, they were estranged.
Last November, more than a year and a half after Lanteigne’s death, police charged Papasotiriou with first-degree murder. Soon after, his business associate, Mladen “Michael Ivezic, 52, was also charged with murder. Police have said Papasotiriou was in Europe at the time of the killing.
All of this came as a shock to Karin Horvath, a Toronto real estate agent who was the first to list the Ossington Ave. residence for sale in November 2011, eight months after the murder and a full year before her client, Papasotiriou, was charged.
Papasotiriou was still living in Europe when he and his aunt and uncle decided to list the property with Horvath. Before taking it on, Horvath did a Google search of the address to see if anything unusual came up. The murder was one of the first results. Horvath said Papasotiriou told her the victim was a tenant about whom he knew little. She said she had no idea he was actually married to Lanteigne.
Two years after a Toronto man was murdered in an Ossington Ave. luxury home that belonged to his estranged husband, the property has sold for $900,000.
The buyers, a professional couple in their mid-30s, were aware of the home’s gruesome history and went for it anyway.
“It’s a great conversation piece, says realtor Ali Ahmed, who represented them in the deal.
“No, I’m kidding, he adds after a pause. “They are aware about the history and they’re not the superstitious type.
After a four-month property hunt, the new owners of 934 Ossington Ave. snagged the three-storey, five-bedroom detached brick house for $50,000 shy of its most recent asking price and are set to take possession next month. Although they felt badly for the victim, the couple had no qualms about buying the place.
It took multiple listing agents, 16 months and a bit of a discount to sell the so-called “stigmatized property — a blanket term used to describe homes with unfortunate histories that could affect their market potential.
The assumption that Keynes only cared about the short run stems from Keynes’ too-often quoted line that “in the long-term we are all dead.” This is, obviously, true. But while it’s often taken to be something like a 1930s version of YOLO, that kind of carpe diem economics has nothing to do with what Keynes was actually writing about.
The line appears not in the General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money but in 1923’s Tract on Monetary Reform. Most countries, including Great Britain, had abandoned the gold standard during World War I. After the war, the major powers sought to return to gold and the British authorities wanted to return their currency to its pre-war peg, a step Keynes thought would be disastrous. The question of the long run arose in response to the claim that overvaluing a currency relative to the currencies of its trade partners can’t make a difference since in the long-run domestic prices will adjust to any exchange rate.
Keynes says that this is true. If after the conclusion of the American Civil War “the American dollar had been stabilized and defined by law at 10 percent below its present value” that would have had no implications for the world economy of the 1920s, 60 years later. Nominal prices would have adjusted. “But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs,” he wrote, “In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.”
To extend the metaphor, Keynes’ point wasn’t that the long-term is unimportant—it’s crucial that a ship eventually arrive at the correct port. But in the middle of the storm an expert sailor needs to be able to say something useful about how to weather what’s actually happening. Economics will not be a useful or interesting discipline if all it can say about exchange rates is that eventually things will work themselves out. In the short run, it makes quite a bit of difference what happens to exchange rates: It can make the difference between prosperity and recession. Policymakers and the public should demand that economists have something to say about it.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
branchandrootdancing_serpent