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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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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Matter of Trust

Matter of trust
School safety tome shockingly calls for a narrowing of trustees’ role
By Andrew Cash

If you’re a mandarin at the Toronto District School Board, the temperature may be a bit too hot this week. Julian Falconer’s exhaustive report on school safety, dropped January 10, left no stone unturned. But among all the details about sexual harassment and intimidation, the tome goes somewhat silent on one striking fact: if you’re a concerned parent and want to talk to your elected school board rep, good luck.

Fact is, our harried and elusive crew of trustees are busy doing something else a lot of the time. Why wouldn’t they be? They’re earning a poverty-line wage to oversee a multi-billion-dollar public institution – one critical to your child’s future.

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Rocket’s Space Invaders

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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Build It, They Will Come

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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Saving The Males

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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Burma Calling

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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