Four other high schools are within walking distance, and the students at Borden come from such a wide area that it’s not considered anyone’s “neighbourhood” option.
Perhaps its specialty — training teens in the trades — wasn’t as big of a draw, as many parents want their kids to focus on university.
Or maybe it’s Borden’s reputation or its location, with gang activity in surrounding neighbourhoods and a horrible mass shooting back in the summer of 2012 on nearby Danzig St. — a crime that had nothing to do with the school, but led to a rapid drop in enrolment all the same.
There are many explanations as to why Sir Robert L. Borden Business and Technical Institute went from a thriving school of almost 1,000 to just 183 today, but in the end, it was low numbers that determined its fate.
So, just a couple of weeks after celebrating its 50th anniversary, staff and students are preparing to shut down the Scarborough school for good.
“When I got here, the school had about 950 kids — it was packed,” said visual arts teacher Caron Magill, who has been at Borden for 30 years. “All the classrooms were packed; the portables, too. I was hired to teach offset lithography (printing) . . . across the hall from me was dry-cleaning, a full-blown dry-cleaning shop. Drafting was down the hall, cosmetology around the corner — hairdressing. The food school taught the kids meat-cutting and butchery, and taught them quantity baking . . . there was plumbing, construction auto mechanics, too.
When they were last on Canadian soil, the Pusuma family took sanctuary in a Toronto church as they fought to avoid being sent back to their native Hungary.
On Thursday, 18 months after leaving Canada, Jozsef Pusuma, his wife, Timea Daroczi, and their daughter Viktoria (Lulu) were welcomed back by their loyal supporters who battled for the Roma family’s return.
“I’m happy to be here, back for a free life. I feel home,” said an exhausted Pusuma, as he and his family walked out from the Pearson Internation Airport customs area to the applause of more than a dozen supporters from the Windermere United Church and Romero House.
“Thank you, Canada for giving my family a new life. We have fought for so long and today I’m free.”
Barbara Sheffield, a member of the church, said she was thrilled to see the family back and justice having persevered.
As I watched UKIP leader Nigel Farage chortling in triumph, I was reminded of what the British humorist Peter Cook once said: that Britain was in danger of sinking giggling into the sea. In an act of unparalleled frivolity, a majority of the British public have just taken a giant step closer to that fate. They will enjoy their victory today, but they are going to wake up tomorrow with a massive hangover. British exports will probably fall off with key markets no longer freely accessible; a falling pound will make imports and foreign holidays expensive; and even more hospital beds are likely to disappear because there will be curbs on immigration even of nurses and doctors.
And the map of the British Isles is going to look different. A large majority of Scotland’s voters were for staying in the European Union. A new referendum on independence is almost certainly now on the cards and this time the Scots may vote to leave. Why after all would they want to stay in a Disunited Kingdom? There will have to be a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland because the latter is a member of the EU. As the triumphal Brexiters in the Leave camp will be quick to point out, the present open border would allow all sorts of migrants to flow northward and then into Britain.
History was called into the debate and, as so often, shamelessly misused. We got the obligatory references to Winston Churchill on both sides and the spirit of Dunkirk. The Leave camp painted a picture of a mythical golden age when jolly beef-eating Britons sat serenely in their island fortress.
Think of the Tudors, the Brexiters cried – they didn’t give a hoot for all those foreigners on the other side of the Channel.
The reality, of course, was something different. England was a minor power with a hostile Scotland to the north and an unruly Ireland in the West. It had few friends on the continent and lived in fear of invasion. The fallout of this referendum will leave an England about the same size as the one then. Will the English have to take up piracy again to help pay the bills?
The surge was a result (in part but not in whole) of EU rules allowing citizens of of EU countries to move and work freely in any other EU member country.
Pro-Leave campaigners, and sympathetic observers in the media, argued that this produced a reasonable skepticism of immigration’s effect on the economy — and Brexit was the result.
"The force that turned Britain away from the European Union was the greatest mass migration since perhaps the Anglo-Saxon invasion," Atlantic editor David Frum writes. "Migration stresses schools, hospitals, and above all, housing."
Yet there’s a problem with that theory: British hostility to immigrants long proceeds the recent spate of mass immigration.
Take a look at this chart, from University of Oxford’s Scott Blinder. Blinder put together historical data on one polling question — the percent of Brits saying there were too many immigrants in their country. It turns people believed this for decades before mass migration even began[.]
The CN Tower is one of the most important buildings ever constructed in Canada.
Like it or loathe it, the absurd, 553-metre concrete tower, which opened to the public 40 years ago this Sunday, is the defining structure of this city.
For outsiders, it’s the building that separates the Toronto skyline from those of other world cities; for people who live close to the core, it’s a constant presence, looming large in the background like a benevolent giant.
Despite its monumentality and popularity with tourists, the CN Tower isn’t really a building the people of Toronto think about much. For that reason, not many people know that the city’s most famous building is actually a relic of a much bigger development proposal.
The origins of the CN Tower lie in the abortive Metro Centre proposal for downtown Toronto.
One man has made it his life’s work to compile more of the stories of the 1,537 people who built the tower, from the bean counters to the guys pouring cement at 1,000 feet.
“The engineering history of the CN Tower has been overlooked, unlike London’s Tower Bridge, the Eiffel Tower or the World Trade Center,” says Robert Lansdale. “As for the people who built it, their history has been swept under the rug.”
A self-proclaimed “CN Tower kid” who was “always down there watching it go up” in the early 1970s, Lansdale says he has spent 5,000 to 6,000 hours compiling and recreating a visual history of the Tower’s design and construction “as if it’s being done today.”
By “today” he means the way so much of our world is documented from multiple angles by multiple people on various social media channels, often with high quality photographs. For Lansdale, it’s meant years of scouring both public and private archives for pictures, many of them rarely seen, behind the scenes views. Along the way, he collected many stories too for a project he calls “the impossible dream.”
“This is really about people, not the tower,” he says. “That’s just concrete.”
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