By Jamie Swift. This article is published in the October 2005 issue of the Independent Voice.
While living in Toronto some years back, some friends and I ordered a big rubber stamp. A two word tonic for the twaddle on subway ads and most everywhere else. You pressed it carefully onto some absurd advertising claim and passers-by suddenly saw the truth: “Utter nonsense.”
The nonsense level has peaked in the intervening years, to the point that a Cape Breton woman has just written a book called Your Call is Important to Us: The Truth About Bullshit.
Take the word “frankly,” frequently used by politicians. Listen to the clips. Scan the paper for quotes. Over and over and over again, elected officials claim that they’re somehow being frank when – to put it politely – they’re not being quite as forthcoming as they might be.
Consider Kingston Mayor Harvey “Bulldozer” Rosen, who has been repeatedly accused of bullying Councillors who oppose his Big Rink scheme.
“Frankly,” said Rosen a couple of days before the Big Vote on the Big Rink in September, “I think a lot of times when someone says I’m not listening to people, what they mean is I’m not listening to them.”
The Mayor certainly seems to listen to a coalition of his realtor and developer pals who, along with a sprinkling of the local elite, somehow became convinced that putting yet another oversized building on the waterfront was a good idea.
This is the well-heeled lobby whose website photo of the Big Rink had been doctored to make the structure seem smaller. Rosen hireling Don Gedge, retained to push the Rink, professed outrage at the suggestion that this had somehow been deliberate. Why? Well, because these are “quality” people, said Mr. Gedge.
But it seems as if the Quality People who comprised the Mayor’s task force that chose the waterfront site have had another of their Big Rink proposals shot down. The Task Force’s original idea to fund the Rink by selling off the Memorial Centre and building houses there – the realtors and developers smiling all the way -- had already wilted in the face of massive public resistance. (Note, however, that the plan is still theoretically on the table.)
Then on September 20 City Council apparently killed their idea of putting the hulking structure beside the water on Anglin Bay.
Councillor Beth Pater has played a controversial role in the entire Big Rink affair. The longtime NDP activist had blotted her copybook with the left back in May when she decided not to side with those who wanted to stop wasting any more public money on the doomed scheme. Her amendment to (finally!) conduct a market study kept the Rink alive until the autumn. The night before the Anglin Bay site met its demise, there was much talk at the Kingston and District Labour Council meeting about urging Ms. Pater to listen to her traditional allies.
In the event, Counsellors Pater and George Sutherland engineered yet another last minute reprieve for the Rink. By that time it was clear that the Anglin Bay site for the project, known officially as the Large Venue Entertainment Centre, was poised to expire once and for all if Council voted down waterfront site.
The Pater/Sutherland amendment – with which the Mayor was obviously familiar in advance – kept the patient alive by requiring city staff to assess the suitability of considering the downtown North Block. This parcel of land includes the Barrack Street Food Basics, parking lots, the downtown LCBO and land owned by Kincore Holdings. Kincore partner Kim Donovan is a backer of the waterfront LVEC.
But this site raises huge urban planning and design issues. Fortunately, some have just been studied – at city expense – by University of Toronto Dean of Architecture George Baird and a team of associates. The Baird study (Urban Design Guidelines for the North Block Central Business District) appeared in March, 2004 just as the Rosen task force opted for the waterfront site.
Interestingly, the Big Rink boosters on the task force were open to the North Block, calling it “viable” while saying it “would require the closure of either/or a one or two block section of King Street and/or Barrack Street.”
The Baird study does not really address the notion of a Big Rink on the North Block, a 4.5 block parcel of land owned by Kincore, the City, the LCBO and 771375 Ontario Limited (owner of the Food Basics property). It does, however, recommend a “major new public open space” (ie a park) at Place D’Armes and Ontario Street, orienting traffic onto Wellington and Queen Streets and narrowing King Street into attractive pedestrian/retail thoroughfare.
The urban design specialists proposed dense retail/residential development for the North Block. Such thinking jives with the notion that downtown success is intimately connected to design and development that encourage people to live and shop in the city centre. Their ideas include turning the historic PUC substation at Queen and King into an indoor farmers’ market.
George Baird is one of Canada’s leading urban designers. The winner of numerous awards, he’s intrigued by the social and political aspects of the design of public space. He recalls that he was “relieved” to learn that the LVEC was not slated for the North Block.
“Though it was conceivable it could go there, it wasn’t easy to make it fit.”
Prof. Baird explains that big arenas tend to have a few big doors in a few locations and otherwise have rather blank facades. He was in the thick of the controversy when the University of Toronto was considering rebuilding Varsity Stadium to accomodate the Toronto Argonauts football team.
“Exactly how big something like that is, that’s a crucial question.”
As far as putting the Big Rink on the North Block is concerned, Prof. Baird has concerns about how it would be done and how long it would take to do it right.
“It would be reckless to decide where the thing is going to go before you have studied its impacts very carefully,” he said. “I strongly believe that. Because it is only close examination that enables you to come to a reasonable decision. That takes time.”
Time has always been a crucial issue in the Big Rink controversy.
The scheme has been promoted by a let’s-get-on-with-it mayor and a go-go elite. Even as the waterfront site apparently faded, Harvey Rosen warned about “the trap of inactivity.” Martin Skolnick, the commercial realtor on the Mayor’s original Big Rink task force, is fond of talking about “paralysis by analysis.” The September Council meeting that dealt a body blow to the Anglin Bay site featured boosters who had been handed t-shirts that said “Build it. Now.”
Which brings to mind my old “utter nonsense” stamp. The project’s boosters have always attempted to tar the opponents of the scheme with the nay-sayer brush. A more accurate label would be to call them the “take-your-time-and-do-it-right” crowd.
The latest deadline, according to the recent Council vote, is for a final decision on a project capped at $37.5 million by November 15. According to the Baird report, some of the land is still contaminated. And then there are a whole new set of questions involving land acquisition, design, traffic and so on.
The clock is ticking. But if you believe there's really a big rush, you might also be convinced that the Mayor and his pals are selfless stewards of the public interest.