Green Buying Binge Doing Us In

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.

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Getting Past The Petty

Loath as I am to admit it, music alone won’t change our war-making ways.

That’s why the April 4 all-party (except the governing one) panel kicking off a conference the next day promoting the idea of a Canadian Department of Peace at Friends House on Lowther is such a tonic.

Not only do the 250 mostly veteran anti-war types in the pews at the Church of the Holy Trinity hear the Greens’ Elizabeth May, the NDP’s Olivia Chow and the Libs’ Borys Wrzesnewskyj sing from the same peace page, but the non-partisan collegiality of the event underscores the idea that, if peace-building is ever mainstreamed, humanity will make an evolutionary jump.

Speaking of neanderthals, politics is a blood sport. But when you see Wrzesnewskyj applauding Chow’s moving description of what NDPer Alexa McDonough could do if she were minister of peace, Chow praising May’s support for a federal conflict resolution department, and both May and Chow clearly sympathizing with Wrzesnewskyj as he guardedly describes tensions in the Liberal party over Afghanistan, it tends to stand out.

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Bell’s Web Choke

Okay, wag your finger at China all you want over Internet censorship in Tibet – then clench your fingers into a fist over how your very own Canadian service providers, Rogers and Bell, are limiting what you can access online.

It’s not the same as China’s blocking of YouTube and the BBC, but now that Bell and Rogers have admitted they are slowing online connections, it should make you very afraid.

Confirming what many had suspected for a year now, Bell last week was forced to admit that users of popular peer-to-peer software like BitTorrent, which facilitates quick, efficient sharing of large files, were having their connections slowed on its network during peak hours between 4 pm and 2 am. (Rogers engages in the same practice.)

Bell claims it’s necessary to “traffic-shape” because a small clutch of “bandwidth hogs” illegally sharing music and movies are clogging the pipeline for everyone else.

Bell’s decision plays into the popular spin promoted by Hollywood and the major record labels that everyone using BitTorrent is a thief.

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Taking On The New Empire

As I walk up St. George to the Chinese Consulate on Tuesday, March 25, a chill runs through me, and not because winter has made an unwelcome late-March comeback.

I’m thinking of something a friend of mine said recently: “Once China takes over the world as the dominant superpower, we’ll all be pining for the days of the American empire.”

Sitting on the frozen sidewalk across the road from the consulate, 40 supporters of the Tibetan freedom struggle are staging a week-long hunger strike (from 10 am until 4 pm). Such gatherings are becoming a common sight here.

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Posted in All Blog Posts, Human Rights, Now Magazine | 1 Comment »

Give A Little Bit… More

Songwriters are at the bottom of the music industry food chain. They don’t get asked for their autograph at airports and, aside from cashing the infrequent royalty cheque at which at least the bank manager raises an eyebrow, they trudge along in their craft largely unheralded and anonymous.

So it’s interesting that these lowly folks now caught in the crossfire between file-sharers and multinational labels may have tapped into one of the most promising solutions so far to the entire downloading dilemma.

That’s the intro to a possibly historic meeting, Thursday, February 21, at Ryerson where the Songwriters Association of Canada (SAC) – to much fanfare, not to mention gnashing of teeth – debuted its version of a plan to monetize the downloading and sharing of music files.

The problem the songwriters are dealing with, indeed, the one plaguing the entire industry at a time when voracious Internet appetites demand instant diversion, is how to get paid while still making the peer to peer experience feel free.

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Posted in All Blog Posts, Music and Digital Culture, Now Magazine | 2 Comments »

Rinkside Sellout

For local indie bands, postering in Toronto has never been more challenging. Sometimes the notices get torn down by the city’s vigilant poster squad before the paste is even dry.

But if you’re a mega-corp, the city doesn’t seem to mind when you slather ads all over public spaces – at least not on the pristine white boards of Withrow Park’s outdoor rink, where massive orange plastic Home Depot signs recently marred the landscape.

The background here is that the Depot and Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment ponied up about $80,000 to help refurbish five sad-sack rinks, including Withrow’s, in Riverdale this winter. An open-air Leafs practice at the rink honoured the donation a couple of weeks back.

But after the team bus pulled away, the community was left with a fresh paint job in the clubhouse, some new mats for the dressing rooms and a snow blower – and Home Depot and Leafs signage all over the boards. The Leafs insignias were one thing, but, residents asked, what’s with the orange takeover?

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Icy Stickhandling

It’s like a ufo landed in the park and out walked, or in this case skated, the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Scrambling up a huge snowbank at Withrow Park on Monday morning (February 11) to catch a glimpse of the Leafs, who are holding an outdoor practice in my neighbourhood rink, I squeeze into a standing-room-only spot. Sure, I’ve brought my kids, the two-year-old decked out in a Leafs jersey, but it’s me who’s really excited. There’s Mats Sundin actually on my home rink, where I play shinny in the winter and ball hockey in the summer, and Andrew Raycroft standing in the very net I so rarely score on.

This is the rink my Leafs-swagged toddler is learning to skate on. Wow.

A couple of hundred students from two local elementary schools are the luckiest kids in the city this bright and freezing morning.

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Mr. Premier, Butt Out

Local democracy is making a comeback, folks, and Big Daddy Dalton don’t like it much.

Nope, our paternalistic preem has wagged his finger at all those irresponsible trustees on the Toronto District School Board who had the audacity – after listening to their constituents and their conscience – to vote in favour of creating an Africentric alternative school.

In calling for residents to lobby their trustees and “put a stop to this,’’ Premier Dalton McGuinty is fanning the flames of an already heated debate that has, up until his meddling, been a model of public participation. There have been forums, committees struck, kilos of newsprint and stacks of reports going back over a decade.

The January 29 board meeting was a gleaming example of local control in action, and not just because trustees voted the right way. The chambers were packed to the rafters with parents, teachers and students, both for and against, sitting side by side.

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Posted in All Blog Posts, Education, Now Magazine, Ontario, Politics, Race Relations, Youth Issues | No Comments »

A Class Act, Finally

When the “s word,” segregation, gets uttered again, there’s an audible groan from those sitting around me.

I’ve ducked out to the overflow section at TDSB headquarters on north Yonge Tuesday night, and am watching the debate leading up to the board’s historic vote on creating the first Africentric school in Toronto on closed-circuit TV.

About 70 others are here, too, and the main chamber’s jammed to the rafters. They’re all black. I’m the only white, and I find myself wondering how many of those whacking this issue with the “s’’ word ever actually mix with those not of their own kind.

The folks here – young parents with little kids, students, elders, professionals, punks – have been waiting for three hours. They’re good at waiting. I’ve seen many of them before at different public meetings in the north end. Waiting. Waiting for the city, the province or in this case the school board to finally listen.

Their patience is humbling. What many (not all, for sure, but many) have been saying is that an Africentric school is part of what they desperately need if they have any hope of rescuing their mostly male at-risk youth.

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Harvesting The Heights

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.

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Posted in All Blog Posts, Education, Environment, Food Security, Now Magazine, Race Relations, Youth Issues | 1 Comment »