When it comes to picking a fight, taking on Toronto Public Library’s workers is about as dumb as it gets. Councillor Paul Ainslie, chair of the city’s Library Board, has decided to drop the gloves with 2,300 mostly female part-time workers who are known for the beloved service they provide at TPL’s 98 branches. Modest, innovative and willing to stretch a public dollar as far as it can go, library workers are everything citizens should hope for in a public service and are now on strike. When other municipal workers went on strike in 2009 over the elimination of the sick bank provision in their collective agreements, TPL’s union accepted the concession without a work stoppage. The union also gave management more flexibility to assign work (I was on the Library Board at that time). So when a group of workers who have made such reasonable requests of their employer for so many years stands up to say that the Library Board is making them an unreasonable offer, I find it impossible to dismiss their claim. At issue is the Library Board's demands to rollback job security provisions, increase the number of part-time workers, and make it more difficult for part-time workers to eventually get full-time work.

The Toronto Star released an Angus Reid poll last weekend indicating that while Torontonians are split on whether we want subways or LRT, we have little interest in paying for subways and we certainly don't trust Mayor Rob Ford with our transit future. Though these findings may surprise the Mayor, I found some of the numbers that went unreported in the Star's story more interesting. The Star released all of the aggregated data collected in their poll. This allows us to see broadly how personal traits like gender, income, education, as well as factors like 2010 political preferences and primary mode of transportation impact current political and policy preferences. Having pored over the data, some observations: ON TRANSIT Across all respondents, the poll found a statistical tie between Torontonians' preference for LRT (48%) and subways (52%). When correlated to factors like age, gender, income and employment status there was little deviation from the overall tie. However, other factors did seem to influence preferences for technology: 61% of automobile drivers want subways, as do 64% of people who obtained no post-secondary education. And while the poll suggests that Mayor Ford is right to say that those who voted for him want subways, it is still the case that one in four people who voted Ford in 2010 actually support LRT technology.

On Wednesday morning, Metro Morning's Matt Galloway made the claim that Toronto's city council is more divided than ever. While rhetorically council might be more polarized than ever, the truth of the matter is that council is increasingly united as an orange, red and blue rainbow majority. Early in this term of council, Mayor Ford won votes by impressively wide margins. The votes to slash city councillors' office budgets and end the Vehicle Registration Tax were 40-5 and 39-6 respectively. Even shutting the Urban Affairs Library, which was not part of the mayor's election mandate, passed easily with a 25-19 vote. But times have changed. In the course 15 months, centrists and moderate conservatives on council have increasingly lost faith in the mayor and have demonstrated their willingness to work with progressives where compromise can be found. While the controversy over plans for the waterfront ended in a compromise that allowed Mayor Ford and his supporters on council to save face, the 2012 budget was the first outright defeat of the mayor, bringing council to a point where it truly had never been more divided. Case in point: councillors Gloria Lindsay Luby, Josh Matlow and Mary-Margret McMahon all voted to close the Urban Affairs Library in the 2011 budget but against library hour reductions in 2012. Thanks to those councillors, the library hour reductions proposed by the Ford administration were reversed by a razor-thin 22-21 majority (Councillor James Pasternak, a conservative, was the 23rd vote for other budget amendments but cannot vote on the library budget due to a conflict of interest).

The editors of Spacing asked our long-time contributor Adam Chaleff-Freudenthaler to write a personal column on the motives and reasons why he and Toronto resident Max Reed petitioned the City of Toronto to audit the campaign finances of Mayor Rob Ford. Earlier this month, Max Reed and I successfully petitioned for an audit of Mayor Rob Ford’s election campaign finances. Repeatedly we were asked about our motives, and for good reason. It’s no secret that Rob Ford and I disagree on both the style and substance of his mayoralty to date so the motives may appear to be entirely political. Knowing the reality of word limits, in response to the media questioning our motives, I often responded with a line like, “We want a level playing field for all candidates.” So I’d like to now expand on what I mean by that and why there is a lot more on the line than whether Ford will be prosecuted for what we allege were violations of provincial and municipal election laws. As a starting point, among the general intentions of the Municipal Elections Act (MEA) is to facilitate fair elections that empower citizens to choose their leaders without undue influence by those with the deepest pockets. While it is far from perfect, the MEA largely accomplishes this by placing limits on how much an individual can donate, allowing Toronto to ban donations from corporations and unions, and, though candidates can donate as much as they like to their own campaign, placing a spending limit so no one can pull a Bloomberg. The province even sealed off backdoor contributions through loans by forcing them to be arranged only with recognized financial or lending institutions, and has taken care to ensure in-kind donations are subject to all the same rules as cash contributions. With that in mind, the most important issue we identified in our compliance audit request relates to the financial relationship between Doug Ford Holdings (DFH) and the Rob Ford Campaign (RFC).

Councillor Mike Del Grande broke the law when he arbitrarily shut down a budget consultation meeting that was attended by more than 100 people at the East York Civic Centre, says a report to City Council filed by the City of Toronto’s Closed Meetings Investigator, Lorne Sossin. Sossin’s investigation was triggered when I filed a complaint against Councillor Del Grande the day after the January 19, 2011 incident. Sossin, also the dean of York University’s Osgoode Hall law school, found that while the impact of Del Grande’s poor decision is nebulous it nonetheless violates the rules in place to protect the public’s right to openness, accountability and transparency in decision-making. I will comment on why I filed the complaint but first some background on what took place. A cold winter night brought a standing room-only crowd out to the East York Civic Centre to comment on Mayor Rob Ford’s proposed budget. It was a testy meeting from the get go as Councillor Del Grande grouchily argued with attendees over all sorts of apolitical issues including whether residents could hear the evening’s proceedings. It didn’t help that most people were there to plead for their city services to be saved.

Years from now, David Miller will be remembered for his broadest brush strokes. Transit funding, waterfront revitalization and the land transfer tax among them. These may well be the most important accomplishments for Toronto under Miller but what made Toronto a better place to live during his tenure were the finer brush strokes. Many – I’d even go so far as to say most – decisions a mayor makes are to some degree or another reactionary. For example, no matter who was mayor, Toronto was going to need a solution for its garbage. Miller’s choice was in deciding what the new plan would be. While Toronto’s new mayor is eager to look into incineration, Miller was more comfortable with purchasing a landfill. Either way, a decision had to be made because doing nothing wasn’t an option. Those are the broad strokes. The fine strokes of a mayoralty are about how a mayor chooses to spend their time and which initiatives, causes and people she or he elevates by choice.

I rarely blur the line between my role on the Toronto Public Library Board and my writing for Spacing but today is an exception. On February 25, I attended the Ontario Public Library Awards, which are exactly as billed. Among awards handed out is the Lifetime Achievement Award, this year bestowed upon the recently retired chief librarian of the Woodstock Public Library, Stephen Nelson. While succinct, Nelson beautifully captures the importance of public libraries and highlights the vital role women have played in shaping this particular institution in spite of being noticeably under represented in the ranks of library management. Save some timely off-the-cuff remarks about women's curling and hockey, here is Stephen Nelson's acceptance speech:

This is the second retrospective look at how the new billboard tax and sign by-law were recently won by the Beautiful City Alliance. For some context on my role, see the first post. Artists and public space activists might have put many years worth of work into the new billboard tax and signs by-law but it was the advocates for girls hockey that saved our hide. Heading into the first leg of the billboard debate at City Hall on December 1, Beautiful City thought we had our vote count nailed down tightly. Then Councillor Norm Kelly threw a wrench in our plans. Kelly, chair of the Planning and Growth Management Committee (PGM), moved a lengthy motion that would have permitted about 1,000 video billboards, allowed billboards five times closer to intersections than proposed by staff (and 12 times closer than was allowed in some parts of the city) and cut the tax rates by 40%. Using an incorrect interpretation of Solomon to suggest that 'cutting the baby in half' was the responsible thing for Council to do, Kelly sold his package of cuts and regulatory rollbacks as a "compromise" between the needs of the outdoor advertising industry and residents.

Having worked with the Beautiful City alliance to win the billboard tax and signs by-law [PDF] that was adopted by City Council yesterday, I've got a few stories from that experience that I want to share with Spacing readers in the coming days. To contextualize my vantage point in this process, I worked to bridge the interests of the artists and public space activists within the Beautiful City alliance, which included a variety of arts and public space advocates, as well as allies in the community and small business sectors (including Spacing). I also steered communication and the political-level work. My efforts would have meant nothing without the capability of the arts community to mobilize thousands of people and the public space activists' capacity to understand and manipulate the sign-related legal framework the City operates within. Though I suppose it's easy to say now, even if the vote hadn't gone our way yesterday, I would have been much better off for having had the opportunity to work with so many talented and passionate activists. Going through the campaign chronologically is probably best left to Devon Ostrom's inevitable doctoral thesis (disclaimer: some history is necessary for this article) so I wanted to start with something a bit more topical given today's coverage of yesterday's decision: the issues surrounding arts funding. The arts funding component of the Beautiful City campaign, while consistently popular [PDF] in the public opinion polls we commissioned, took a bit of a beating on the blogs and was used as a wedge by a few city councillors (the same few that don't see the merit in arts funding generally). Though you can be sure that Beautiful City will assert its voice during the operating budget process when it kicks off early next year, I'm not going to make the pitch here for the money; you can see that in the background information provided at BeautifulCity.ca. Instead, I'll tell the story of why and how the arts piece made it into the recommendations City staff made to Council and what was in fact recommended to Council, what Council's decision means and where it leaves the arts funding issue going forward.

Almost one month ago, Councillor Gord Perks commented on a Spacing Toronto article that speculated about which progressive candidates might run for mayor next year. Perks's insight was essentially: worry not about the candidate but about the issues; the right candidate will become clear when the issues have been defined. Today, Councillor Joe Mihevc launched Setting the Agenda 2010, a process to identify the policies that Torontonians want to see mayoral candidates adopt as part of their campaign. Mihevc's recipe for an agenda goes something like this: -Start with one pre-fab web ...