Involvement - it was literally at the top of the list of my personal values 30 years ago and it’s still there now.

The pre-amalgamated City of Toronto of the 1990s was a terrific first employer. I arrived armed with a graduate degree, a sense of humour, and the enthusiasm from 23 years of living. And nothing else. It was luck and maybe that sense of humour that emerged in the interview that got me a job as a management trainee funded by the Ontario Municipal Management Training Program. It was a time when jobs were very scarce.* The door of City Hall locked behind me with a hiring freeze that lasted several years making me the youngest person in most meetings. With little competition and mentors like Barb Caplan (I blogged about her here), I got opportunities others might not have. It was also a time when the civic service recognized that to achieve excellence in service delivery, it had to invest in its human resources. That’s how I ended up the baby among a couple of dozen City managers at a three day residential retreat outside Orillia, exploring how to manage to best serve the City of Toronto. It was a formative experience, without which I would not have been promoted so quickly as a manager. It is astounding now to consider that any government could justify such an expenditure. But they should. Management is a skill that needs to be nurtured like any other.

I grew up on a farm. On farms, house pets are the exception. To be honest, I didn’t know anyone who actually had an animal living inside. Some had dogs - and we did at times - but they always lived outdoors or sometimes in the barn. No-one had cats other than barn cats whose job was to keep the rodent population down. 'Too much work,' was my mother’s response to my attempts to sway her. She already vac’ed the house daily to rid it of straw and dust, and worked very hard ensuring manure remained outside. I can’t blame her for wanting to avoid pet hair, scoot marks from a dog’s bottom, and the grains of litter that migrate through every cat owner’s house. 

That’s what I thought. And some of you are likely thinking it too. If you buy an electric car, you’re going to be constantly fretting over running out of power without a charging station handy. This is real: the range on electric vehicles (EVs) varies widely - 200-400 kms on a charge. Some are designed to go further than others but your range is also affected by factors like speeding, heavy acceleration, and heating or cooling the interior.

January 9, 2024. A day that dawned a new era for non-profit co-op housing* development. That was the day that Mayor Olivia Chow announced that Toronto, through its CreateTO arm, the Co-operative Housing Federation of Toronto (CHFT), together with two private sector development companies - Windmill and Civic - are partnering on the largest co-op construction project seen in Toronto for a very, very long time. Located in an underserved area of Scarborough in the east end of Toronto, this project will comprise 612 non-profit housing co-op units and 306 condo units on a parcel of surplus land across from a major transit hub: subway, GO Transit, bus, and the Eglinton LRT. The site will also include 3,580 square feet of community space and 12,770 square feet of retail space. This is a major development.

No secret, food bank use has increased so that one in 10 Torontonians relied on them in 2023, twice as many as 2022. The Daily Bread Food Bank* reports 31% of food bank respondents have gone an entire day without eating. At the same time, it seems like the number of food deliveries to people’s houses has spiked - a friend who lives next to St. Clair subway station sees an extraordinary daily line-up of DoorDash and UberEats deliverers at the in-station McDonalds to deliver breakfasts.

David Common, Piya Chattopadhyay, Matt Galloway, and Tom Power are just the latest generation of my roommates. It began, as much of my life did, in East Wawanosh, where I was the only kid on the 10th concession whose TV-less status meant I couldn't watch Saturday morning cartoons or Sesame Street. Instead, I had opinions about CBC Radio’s annoying “Fresh Air” hosts and I could hum the theme to Peter Gzowski’s “This Country in the Morning,” the program that held the coveted weekday morning spot where we now hear Q with Tom Power.

“Moules et frites,” I said, snapping the menu closed. It was Dec 30, 2023. I was in St. Veronus, a Belgian restaurant in Peterborough recalling my arrival in Brussels on the same day 20 years earlier.

I wasn’t a backpacking through Europe or Thailand kind of kid. Instead, I spent my 20s finding meaningful work that would pay the bills. So when I landed in law school in Victoria in my late 30s, I seized a chance to take a co-op work term as ‘stage’ or intern at the European Commission. While it seemed a bit reckless even then to be unpaid for four months, I also knew I was finally emotionally ready to live away from everyone and everything familiar.

“Drive faster,” I urged my father as I slunk further down in the back seat of the powder blue Ford Fiesta. There I was, decked out in my navy blue gingham bib fronted dress with the crinoline that shot the skirt directly horizontal from my waist when I was upright. When I spun, my white lace pettipants were on full display (no, I am not making this up). Prostrated on the back seat, that the bulk of the crinoline netting nearly blocked my view out the window. Because of this, the risk was low of anyone glimpsing me from the passing high school bus, but regardless, I exercised caution. Socially, I was lukewarm: being known as the 15 year old who square danced with her parents was not likely to turn the temperature down to cool where I longed to be. (Becoming hot was never in the cards). 

It’s Friday, February 9, and it’s 14 degrees Celsius. People are smiling and saying hello to one another, jubilant that winter is over. Indeed it nearly never was. I see flip-flops and my heart sinks. Flip-flops in Toronto should be three months away.

It’s as though the last 25 years of climate science is lost on people. It was April 1, 1997 when I first started working with a team who believed that humanity’s own activities were slowly changing the climate patterns of the globe. That was at the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives - ICLEI - a membership organization of municipalities around the world banding together to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adopt sustainable development practices that came out of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio. My eyes were opened to the fact the science was already clear - the way we were conducting ourselves was incrementally affecting the temperature of the globe. In the 90s, though, it seemed like experts were confident that with the right public policy measures to reduce the reliance on fossil fuels, changed commercial and industrial practices, and a tweak to citizens’ habits, we could change the trajectory that had been predicted.