December 20th, 2007 Andrew Cash
Rocket’s space invaders
Time for stroller-pushers and people with disabilities to take on TTC
By Andrew Cash
I’ve taken up the challenge of riding the subway with my young kids as if it were training for an urban iron man competition where strength, endurance and speed are tested in a gruelling and hostile environment.
I’m not, of course, the only sort of person experiencing the TTC as a formidable opponent. Physically disabled people are getting so pissed off that some of them have taken to direct action. On Friday, December 7, 40 members of the Disability Action Movement Now (DAMN) blocked all four entrances to the St. Patrick station at King and University for a few minutes during rush hour to make their point.
It’s one I get, even though transporting tots gives me but a mere taste of the transit rigours faced by the DAMN folks.
For example, it’s rush hour and I’m waiting for the eastbound subway at Bloor and Yonge with one kid in a stroller. Not one of those SUV models, mind you, but the sleekest of aluminum-framed umbrella strollers.
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Posted in All Blog Posts, Now Magazine, Transit | 1 Comment »
December 12th, 2007 Andrew Cash
Build it, they will come
That the board now has to ponder Africentric school is an indictment of its complacency
By ANDREW CASH
If faith-based funding is the third rail of Ontario politics, then this isn’t a good time for anyone to be planning a publicly funded separate school.
So perhaps it isn’t surprising that the Toronto District School Board’s ruminations on creating an Africentric alternative school are kicking up so much dust.
But here we are. Between 40 and 50 per cent of Caribbean-born students (most of them males) are in danger of not finishing school or have already dropped out.
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Posted in All Blog Posts, Education, Now Magazine, Politics, Race Relations, Toronto, Youth Issues | No Comments »
November 15th, 2007 Andrew Cash
Saving the males
Poverty piece of the puzzle gets lost amid tears in Alwy Al Nadhir shooting
By Andrew Cash
Standing with about 100 others at a vigil (November 7) at the very spot in Riverdale Park where teenager Alwy Al Nadhir was shot and killed by police Halloween night, I’m aware that I’m one of only a handful of white people.
That fact says a lot about the disconnect between the neighbourhoods clustered around the park, mostly middle-class and white, and those who knew Al Nadhir, mostly poor and black.
And yet, as I listen to a rep from the Black Action Defence Committee frame his death in racial terms, I’m thinking he’s got it only partly right. For here at this hastily organized vigil called Saved the Males, a Portuguese kid speaks up saying the cops are going after his community, too.
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Posted in All Blog Posts, Now Magazine, Race Relations, Youth Issues | 1 Comment »
October 11th, 2007 Andrew Cash
Burma calling
Should we boycott China for propping up brutal regime? Activists can’t decide.
By Andrew Cash
While peaceful buddhist monks are getting bludgeoned to death in the streets of Burma and an international cry for help has brought a thousand people out on the streets tonight, October 6, I’m sorry to confess I’m thinking more about whether I’ll be able to catch any of this evening’s Leafs game.
But in spite of my irrational preoccupation, I do notice on arriving in front of the Chinese Consulate on St. George that the red-T-shirted crowd is giving off a very different vibe than your average Toronto demo.
There is anger here, but it feels reluctant, like it doesn’t come easily. It’s the slogans, too: “Free The Monks,” “We Love Peace” and in particular “Use Your Liberty To Promote Ours,” coined by Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, that draw me out of my privileged mega-sport stupor and land me back on the concrete.
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Posted in All Blog Posts, Human Rights, Now Magazine | No Comments »
October 4th, 2007 Andrew Cash
To topple a leader
Tory’s faith flub makes Don Valley Wynne’s to lose
By Andrew Cash
Click on the icon to begin playback of the audio clip. The icon will then change. To pause the audio, click on the changed icon. Click again to resume play.
Kathleen Wynne is supposed to do a quick blitz for votes in this Thorncliffe Park high-rise, but instead, on the 15th floor, she stops at the door of a young construction worker.
“If your age group doesn’t vote, that means someone old will vote in your place,” she says as her handlers pry her away.
Wynne’s daughter rolls her eyes, amused. “Oh no, Mom, were you lecturing that guy?” Mother and daughter banter humorously back and forth as they sprint down the stairs.
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Posted in All Blog Posts, Education, Now Magazine, Ontario, Politics | No Comments »
September 27th, 2007 Andrew Cash
McGuinty’s taxing courage
Preem’s stirring defence of health tax shows tax rebellion has faded
By Andrew Cash
What’s worse, a government that breaks a dumb promise or a government that implements one? I would have been happy if Stephen Harper had broken his very dumb promise to cut 1 per cent of the GST. I’m okay with Dalton McGuinty breaking his promise not to raise taxes after the Mike Harris wrecking crew saddled the Libs with a $5 billion deficit.
Tax has always been the four-letter word politicians don’t use in polite company. But after last week’s leaders debate, that may be changing. During the televised showdown, we heard McGuinty not once but several times refuse to say that he would repeal a tax. That’s new.
Most pols are only too happy to out-slash the other guy, but it has always been a head-scratcher when political parties say they can both cut taxes and improve services. Neo-cons used this canard throughout the 90s, but today it’s only John Tory and the Canadian Taxpayers Federation who believe it. The rest of us aren’t buying.
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Posted in All Blog Posts, Now Magazine, Ontario, Politics | No Comments »
July 19th, 2007 Andrew Cash
PORTLANDS power play
Residents walk out of consulting committee charging Energy Centre kept them in the dark
By Andrew Cash
Laundry isn’t the only thing being hung out to dry this summer in Smogtown. Take Toronto’s east-end neighbourhoods, which have always been our industrial ashtray.
In the bad old 80s, residential backyards in south Riverdale had to have their lead-laced soil removed, and the Commissioner Street incinerator was blithely burning garbage.
And while we can’t be sure that the dust on Riverdalian stereo speakers isn’t still laced with lead, locals also have to deal with the Ashbridges Bay Wastewater Treatment Plant to the southeast, a grand contributor to the generally crappy local air quality.
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Posted in All Blog Posts, Environment, Now Magazine, Ontario, Politics, Toronto | No Comments »
July 5th, 2007 Andrew Cash
In knots over ribbons
Mayor’s decal flip-flop shows contempt for his backers
By Andrew Cash
Who knew the broom David Miller famously held aloft in 2003 as a symbol of his mayoral mission, would be made not of sturdy wood but of something much more pliable.
It’s an issue that urgently needs addressing, given the mayor’s shocking flip-flop June 20 in which he defended support-our-troops decals on emergency vehicles only 24 hours after urging their removal in September.
If Miller can crack so publicly on a symbolic issue like this, what kind of stuff does he bend to in the back rooms?
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Posted in All Blog Posts, Now Magazine, Politics, Toronto, War in Afghanistan | No Comments »
June 28th, 2007 Andrew Cash
Indian in us all
The elephant in the room of my family history is same one haunting the Canadian family
By Andrew Cash
There must be an aboriginal guy out there with the same name as me.
That’s my initial reaction to an invitation I receive in the mail to participate in a Statistics Canada survey on the living standards of native Canadians.
And in fact there is an Aboriginal guy with my name. Me. But it takes the disembodied voice of the StatsCan official to convince me of the fact. “Why are you sending this to me?” I ask the polished voice on the other end of the phone line.
After all, I’ve never identified myself as Aboriginal. Sure, my paternal grandmother was half Mohawk, born on Tyendinaga near Deseronto. But what am I doing on this list?
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Posted in All Blog Posts, Canadian, Human Rights, Now Magazine, Politics, Race Relations, Religion | 1 Comment »
June 21st, 2007 Andrew Cash
Anglican love knot
By Andrew Cash
Leaving his tiara at home, chris Ambidge is going to miss Pride this year for the first time in two decades. Instead, he’s going to parade in altogether different attire, working the floor of the Anglican Church of Canada’s general synod, meeting through Monday (June 25).
As president of the Toronto chapter of Integrity, an international org of gay and lesbian Anglicans, Ambidge will go to Winnipeg to persuade his fellow church people that the sky won’t fall if his Church allows the blessing of same-sex marriages.
“The Anglican Church baptized me, and they’re stuck with me just as I’m stuck with those the Church baptized whom I oppose,” he tells me. “But I am getting impatient, because I’ve worked on this for 20 years. We now have same-sex civil marriages in Canada, and civilization has not fallen apart.”
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