September 9th, 2009 Andrew Cash
I’ve lost friends as “collateral damage” in a war that badly needs peace
By Andrew Cash
I didn’t know Darcy Allan Sheppard, but our household has mourned the death of two close friends in the last few years who were killed riding their bikes – one a gifted photographer, the other a budding musician, both unwitting “collateral damage” in a war that badly needs some peace.
But this war isn’t really just about competing modes of transportation. It’s a contest between top-down and bottom-up power, one that, as in the altercation between Sheppard and former provincial attorney general Michael Bryant, sometimes ends in tragedy.
The car is quintessentially top-down: it’s about status, speed, steel, ego, privacy, convenience, the individual and entitlement to space and resources. Not to mention it’s a brilliant example of human ingenuity.
Grassroots power has no better symbol than the humble two-wheeler, which is simple, accessible, communal, public, physical and a light touch on dwindling resources.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in All Blog Posts, Environment, Now Magazine, Transit | No Comments »
April 14th, 2009 Andrew Cash
Electric shock
Those dreams of the e-car refuelling our economy? Not if they’re China-made.
By Andrew Cash
I admit I’m not really a car guy. When I rent a car, the conversation at the rental desk goes like this: Clerk: “We’ve got a blah blah or a blah blah..,” to which I reply, “Oh, just give me the cheapest one.”
But this time, for a trip to Pennsylvania to visit relatives, I’m handed the keys – well, there are no keys really – to a Prius, Toyota’s smash hit hybrid. Wow, this car I know about, since it’s the kind of vehicle that’s carrying the hopes of the folks who make cars, the environment that chokes on them and the taxpayer who seems increasingly on the hook for producing them.
But are all those billions we’re lending Big Auto really going to produce enough of the pollution-?free wheels greens are dreaming of?
In Pennsylvania, in the belly of car culture, green cars, electric or otherwise, seem so far way. Still, at one point, our 80-year-old uncle saunters around behind the rental. I’m thinking, “Okay, I’m going to get it for renting an import.”
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in All Blog Posts, Environment, Now Magazine | No Comments »
April 2nd, 2009 Andrew Cash
Saving Ontario’s backbone means more than bailing out cars
By Andrew Cash
The hate-on for artists and cultural workers as whining pigs at the public trough is alive and well across Tory land.
The latest round of this particular blood sport occurred in the last few weeks, when the feds forced a crisis on the CBC by withholding bridge funding, necessitating the cutting of 800 broadcasting jobs.
The provincial Liberals, it’s true, have a more civilized take on the creative class, but they weren’t exactly going all out for culture in last week’s budget either. McGuintyites handed over 20 mil to the Ontario Media Development Corp, $77 mil to film and TV in tax credits and $17 mil per year in tax support for interactive digital media products.
Still, compared to the gnashing of teeth over the decline of manufacturing, forestry and steel and the consequent $26 bil increase in new provincial infrastructure spending, arts and culture seem like bit players. Building cars, making steel, chopping trees – now, that’s where the big boys play; that’s the economic backbone of the country, isn’t it?
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in All Blog Posts, Environment, General, Now Magazine | No Comments »
December 17th, 2008 Andrew Cash
NDP bill makes a beeline for heavy-handed developers chilling citizen dissent with pricey lawsuits
By Andrew Cash
While all eyes have been glued to the wild ride our parliamentary democracy has been taking of late, a real threat to citizens’ power is playing out in near obscurity on the 16th floor of the Bay Street hearing room of the Ontario Municipal Board.
Here, final arguments wrap up on whether a Lake Simcoe residents group should pay the legal costs of a large land developer.
Shortly after winning a several-? year fight at the OMB a year ago to plunk a resort and marina smack dab in the middle of the bucolic Lake Simcoe community of Big Bay Point, Markham-?based developer Geranium Corporation quickly turned around and asked the OMB to make those opposed to the project pay its legal costs.
On the hook for $3.2 million in costs are the Innisfil District Association, some individual members of the group and, surprisingly, their lawyer, David Donnelly.
Though the OMB rarely awards costs and rarely for this amount, the case is being watched carefully by countless residents groups across the province, as well as by Hamilton Centre NDP MPP Andrea Horwath. Last week she introduced a private member’s bill to give residents’ groups protection against what are known as SLAPPs, or strategic lawsuits against public participation.
Horwath says she first came face to face with the problem as a Hamilton city councillor working with a residents group opposing a development. “The threat of a SLAPP action makes it harder for regular people to participate if they are concerned about a project,” she says.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in All Blog Posts, Environment, Now Magazine, Ontario | No Comments »
November 25th, 2008 Andrew Cash
Sure, turbines are great, but eco-bullies could tone down the sermon
By Andrew Cash
Ah, there’s nothing quite like a public meeting in Scarborough to make me feel nostalgic for my childhood home – and for the merits of good old-fashioned political education.
The wind energy showdown, Monday, November 24, at Laurier Collegiate in Scarborough’s Guildwood Village seems, at first glance, like a classic NIMBY battle pitting local residents against downtown greenies and Toronto Hydro bureaucrats.
But it doesn’t really look that way to me, despite the fact that I’m blown away (excuse the pun) by the idea that wind fanning off the Bluffs could power the city’s first turbine operation.
I guess the problem here is that this isn’t an Ontario Municipal Board hearing where folks have to pack the hall because the process is unfair and rich lawyers are trying to take over neighbourhoods for rich developers.
This is a Q&A – one already cancelled once for lack of space – where residents have their sole chance to get Toronto Hydro to address their concerns.
Enviros, hyped and over-organized, don’t seem to get that this is their big opportunity to meet the community, find common ground and ultimately win them over.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in All Blog Posts, Environment, Now Magazine, Ontario, Politics, Toronto | No Comments »
November 12th, 2008 Andrew Cash
If new prez backs the eco sector, our green entrepreneurs will be left out of the loop
By Andrew Cash
Why, when those dudes in the Wall Street suits start losing coin, do governments magically seem to find consensus, time for hastily called meetings and, oh yeah, trillions of dollars to bolster the financial system using money no one could previously locate, to, well, save the planet?
What a mess. But there is a new guy at the helm to the south – and he actually did promise to reduce carbon emissions by 80 per cent by 2050 and create 5 million new green jobs. The problem for us here, though, is if Barack Obama actually does use the financial crisis to sink cash into eco industries, Canada will have squandered a golden opportunity to share the gains.
Shit, didn’t some geeky professor who once led the Liberals go on and on about this stuff recently?
Graham Saul of Climate Action Network Canada says it neatly: “If the Americans invest big time in the green economy, Canada is out of the game.” You can understand the magnitude of this, he says, if you imagine what it would have been like if Canada had decided to take a pass on the information technology sector.
That’s actually what our feds’ eco foot-dragging is costing us, he says. “There is no indication this government connects the dots between green jobs and economic stimulus.”
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in All Blog Posts, Environment, Now Magazine | No Comments »
April 17th, 2008 Andrew Cash
Green buying binge doing us in
Just because my blue bin’s half full doesn’t mean I’m not doing my part to beat back a recession
By Andrew Cash
Wow, I have a huge, honking new recycling bin. It seems like overkill, coming in just under the size of a Smart Car, and I really can’t tell if my household is up to the challenge of filling this baby on a regular basis.
After chucking in two weeks of recyclables, we’d barely reached the halfway mark at pickup time, a clear indication that we’ve been neglecting our role as citizens, er, I mean, consumers. Obviously, we need to start buying more.
Alas, what started all those years ago as a valiant effort to nudge residents to get with the three Rs (reduce, reuse and recycle) has morphed into a fervent consumer campaign that has vanquished “reduce.”
It’s not just evidenced by the new supersize bin, but also by the endless variety of ways we’re encouraged to be “green” while indulging unabated our addiction to shopping.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in All Blog Posts, Environment, General, Now Magazine | No Comments »
January 31st, 2008 Andrew Cash
Harvesting the heights
Garden guru revives ancestral African farming to seed ’hood hope
By Andrew Cash
The walk through the public housing project surrounding Lawrence Heights Community Centre is mid-winter bleak.
The four-storey apartments hug the barrier wall behind which the Allen Expressway’s white-noise roar blankets the sonic landscape. Orphaned patches of grass are squeezed like afterthoughts between sidewalks, concrete and asphalt.
But it is these scattered bits of green that excite Anan Lololi, former bass player for 80s reggae group Truth and Rights and founder of AfriCan Food Basket.
What he sees under this useless vestige of British outdoor aesthetics is not only untilled plots of organic farmland but a vehicle for black youth to reconnect with their roots.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in All Blog Posts, Education, Environment, Food Security, Now Magazine, Race Relations, Youth Issues | 1 Comment »
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.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in All Blog Posts, Environment, Now Magazine, Ontario, Politics, Toronto | No Comments »
May 31st, 2007 Andrew Cash
McGuinty’s Arnie act
Why is it easier for a Republican to be green than a Liberal premier?
By Andrew Cash
Who says coincidences like this only happen in novels? At the very moment when enviro orgs are putting the heat on the McGuinty Libs to pass a private member’s bill modelled after one in California that’ll let us know if the Shreddies we’re buying contain carcinogens, in pops the governor of said state.
Arnold Schwarzenegger reminds us that it may be easier for a Republican bodybuilder to be green than a Liberal premier. Despite the fact that Bill 164, the Community Right To Know Act, has passed second reading and an all-party committee, don’t assume it’s passage is a slam dunk.
Spearheaded by NDP enviro critic Peter Tabuns, the bill would force companies to list cancer-causing agents on product labels. It would also create a comprehensive and user-friendly online pollution inventory so Ontarians can find out which toxins are emitted in their communities and what risks are associated with them.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in All Blog Posts, Environment, Now Magazine, Ontario, Politics | No Comments »
