AshtonPal

Dear Toronto,

I would like to take a moment today to say thanks.

I’ve spent most days this week in a sad state. At my job, I get a lot of news exposure, and as you can imagine, the world is often less than rosy. This particular week has been a hard test for my bounce-back personality. Between the underreported famine in Somalia, alarming information about income polarization in the US, and my new fascination with the revealing patterns of Google Trends, I’ve been walking around feeling somewhat bleak-eyed, as though someone painted everything greige.

Wednesday’s morning papers jolted the colour back into my world. As soon as I picked up the Globe and read the first headline, a little breeze kicked up, a little sun shone down, and I immediately felt better. Our mayor, Rob Ford, abandoned his alternate proposal for the local waterfront, and the Portlands revitalization project still belongs to Waterfront Toronto. (We can now breathe more easily knowing that the original, public space–friendly, triple-government-approved plan — nearly pushed aside by Rob and brother Doug Ford — will move forward without the ominous threat of waterfront megamalls, ferris wheels, or the “firesale” of public property to developers.) I gleefully snipped the article out of the paper, put a huge smiley face on a post-it note, and left both on my senior editor’s desk. I may have done a jig around the copy machine.  (more…)

Tags: development, Doug Ford, environment, Portlands, Rob Ford, toronto, waterfront
Posted in Cities  •  3 Comments