There’s an old Catholic saying: Christ called us to the Kingdom. We answered with … the Church!
Not every public project turns out quite the way that it is planned. It’s hard to understand—at a distance of half a century—just how optimistic and even joyous a cocoon of rhetoric encased the Don Valley Parkway at its birth. Telling that story illustrates how one day’s Utopia can devolve into another’s Waste Land. That telling can reveal how the thinking behind that devolution is with us still.
“[V]alleys like the Humber and Don are not spoiled by arterial highways but beautified.” Well according to former Metropolitan Toronto Chair Frederick G. Gardiner anyway. Robert Caro writes in his Pulitzer–prize winning biography of Gardiner’s American role model, Robert Moses, that his subject “wanted the parkways to be broader and more beautiful than any roads the world had ever seen, landscaped as private parks are landscaped so that they would be themselves parks, ‘ribbon parks,’ so that even as people drove to parks, they would be driving through parks.” This attitude was typical of the mid-20th century, as people were increasingly driving to get to work, but also for pleasure. Taking a road trip became a vacation. Driving without a destination was an introspective journey and symbolized freedom and hope. These days, driving crammed on to busy, crumbling roads in Toronto, it’s hard to imagine that back in the 1940s, people spoke glowingly of the beauty of parkways and wanted roads through natural areas—including the Don Valley.
Although Moses’s pro-parkway views are well known, the DVP came about through the result of a popular referendum. Call it a New Year’s Day hangover, call it being misinformed: the fact remains that on January 1, 1946, Toronto voters handily approved the Don Valley Traffic Artery. However bizarre the rhetoric of the time may seem to us today Parkway as beautification? Parkway as park?—that’s what Toronto voters so enthusiastically embraced. We can see now that the DVP marks the post-war automotive age’s high-water mark in Toronto, an era that would falter with the 1971 cancellation of the Spadina Expressway.The cultural and urban planning gurus of the earlier era that brought us the DVP proclaimed the virtues of automotive parkways and limited-access transportation corridors.
Nobody throws a big bash for their 41st birthday. When the Toronto International Film Festival hit the big four-oh last year, there was soul-searching and reflection, most of it positive. A year later, it’s merely another chapter in the life of one of the world’s most prominent fests.
“I was thinking about that the other day,” muses Cameron Bailey, TIFF’s artistic director and a festival programmer since 1990. “It feels like it’s the next chapter. We’ve been through four decades of building the festival and, buoyed on the enthusiasm of the audiences here in Toronto, have become what we are.
“And now we’re evolving into something new and something different.”
But evolution is a tricky process, full of dead ends and missed opportunities. In 2014, long-time festival goer and Time movie critic Richard Corliss decided to give TIFF a miss, citing competition from other fall festivals – notably Venice and Telluride – and sniffing that the opening weekend featured “upmarket but seemingly ordinary Hollywood movies … three of them starring Adam Sandler.” (To be fair, none of them was Grown Ups 2.)
TIFF has grown hugely – some say unmanageably – since its 1976 debut as the Festival of Festivals. In those days, it played second-run best-ofs from other global fests. This year, almost half its 296 features will be world premieres, beginning with the opening night gala, Antoine Fuqua’s The Magnificent Seven.
Those numbers hide the fact that Toronto is frequently in intense competition with Telluride (Sept. 2 to 5 this year), Venice (Aug. 31 – Sept. 10) and sometimes New York (Sept. 30 – Oct. 16) for world premiere bragging rights. Premieres of first features or African co-productions don’t carry the same cachet as, say, Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone in La La Land, Venice’s opening night film.
Author's update: the parliamentary debate and ultimate vote has been postponed to September 8th as the Aruban government considers including regulations addressing same-sex relationships in the country’s civil code.
Tomorrow, the Aruban parliament is expected to vote on a civil law amendment granting civil partnerships to same-sex couples. It was proposed by Desiree Sousa Croes, an openly-gay parliamentarian.
Legalizing civil partnerships will grant registered same-sex couples equal rights as married couples.
Although the Netherlands led the way in legalizing same-sex marriage in 2001, LGBT citizens living in its autonomous territories are still unable to marry. The Dutch Kingdom consists of the Netherlands proper and the Caribbean islands of Aruba, Curaçao, and Sint Maarten, as well as Bonaire, Sint Eustatius, and Saba, known as the BES islands.
The BES islands were incorporated into the Dutch mainland in 2010 and same-sex couples have been able to marry ever since.
However, in Aruba, Curaçao, and Sint Maarten, which remain autonomous territories in the Kingdom with their own laws, gay couples cannot marry or enter civil partnerships.
In those far-flung outposts of Britain’s influence where diplomats circle the Chesterfields of an evening and gossip over brandy, an old story is never far away. It is the story of a meeting – never recorded – that took place between officials of Britain and Norway to discuss the matter of how one might go about depopulating one’s islands. It is whispered that the government of Norway, restored once more following the Nazi occupation of the second world war, approached the UK seeking advice on a robust strategy towards its islands.
Happily for future generations of Norwegians, their postwar government ignored what Britain told them, which was to evacuate the islands on the grounds of cost and security and gradually cause them to run down. Norway’s island communities thrived and became a powerhouse, while Britain’s suffered from a policy that has since been described as one of “benign neglect”. In Scotland, which has 99 populated islands – two-thirds of the UK’s total – it wasn’t until the creation of the Highlands and Islands Development Board in 1965 that its islands began to thrive once more.
Still, the cost of public services in these areas, per head of population, is higher than anywhere else in the UK.
Islands are an economic and administrative nightmare for those countries who were bequeathed them in the Earth’s infant years. So much toil and trouble for so few people: why can’t folk just be sensible and live on the mainland where they can be reached much more cheaply? Don’t they realise how difficult it is to defend these places?
Earlier this month, the tiny Hebridean island of Muck (population: 30) sent out a global appeal via social media for a primary teacher for its seven children. The school’s popular teacher had quit and none of the initial six candidates followed up on their initial interest, as the reality of life on an island without a shop and cut off from the mainland for several months in the year began to dawn on them.
Yet following the Facebook appeal, Highland Council has been swamped with applications from all over the globe for the £35,000 a year post, which brings with it a three-bedroom flat and, in the opinion of the last teacher, Julie Baker, “a short commute and stunning views over the sea to Ardnamurchan Point”. These places might be remote and require small triumphs of human endurance, but people will always want to live in them.
Boughton Island is a little cleaner after the P.E.I. Nature Conservancy of Canada, along with volunteers, spent a day collecting more than 1.6 tonnes of garbage along the six kilometres of shoreline.
The group kayaked to the deserted Island off Cardigan in Georgetown Harbour, where they found mostly buoys and marine debris.
Julie Vasseur, program director for the P.E.I. Nature Conservancy of Canada, said this year was the most garbage they have collected since this tradition began.
They started the “kayak and clean up” in 2010 and have cleaned the shores of Boughton Island, Governors Island, Conway Sandhills and Murray Harbour (some of them more than once).
“We’ve had a lot of fun with it and we usually have a lot of success with it,” said Vasseur. “Our volunteers always seem to be really happy at the end of the day and we usually achieve quite remarkable results.”
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