By Terri Chu
There’s a lot to love about the Annex: cultural vibrancy, a wide variety of local independent businesses, walkability and trees.
Can you imagine this place without the big, beautiful maples? The streets would feel empty and dystopian.
Usually around Christmas I like to write about ways to lower our personal environmental footprints during the holidays, but none of that matters in the face of the complete political failure we are facing. This year, rather than buying gifts for kids or grandkids, they need you to get out there and fight for them.
By Terri Chu
We live in a sea of green, red, and orange signs here in University-Rosedale, and for all the things we might disagree on, our neighbours agree on a few key points: climate change is real, vaccines work, science can move us forward.
By Terri Chu
The richest among us earned record profits during another COVID-19 year while the poorest among us are risking their lives in understaffed service jobs.
Tags: Annex · Columns · Life · Opinion
By Terri Chu
As an environmentalist, few things make me cringe quite like Christmas does. We are heading into the season when Canadians will each discard a staggering 50 kg of trash over the holidays.
In 2009 the Annex Residents Association (ARA) took on the impressive task of cataloging over 10,000 trees in the Annex neighbourhood. A team of forestry students and numerous volunteers worked over the course of four summers logging the trees’ species, age, varieties and their ownership. Now, 12 years later, they’re looking to do it all over again.
Over 40 people were in virtual attendance at the Annex Residents’ Association’s (ARA) Annual General Meeting on April 22. Because of the pandemic, it was the first AGM in two years, but participation was up thanks to Zoom.
By Terri Chu
Steven’s Grocery is easily my favourite corner of our neighbourhood. Helen’s flowers are always a welcome sight as we walk by, but the one thing I HATE about that corner is the beg button.
By Terri Chu
While we all wait for vaccines to bring us back to some sense of “normal” (don’t hold your breath as the variants might beat us at this game), let’s take a moment to reflect on how much normal really sucked: for so many Torontonians, “normal” meant sitting in the car for hours just to get to work.
While many of us are enjoying cleaner air in the neighbourhood, undoubtably there are people up at night worried about what happens if the air never goes back to being as toxic as it once was. Trillions of dollars are at stake if we, as a society, decide we don’t really want to go back to the “before” times where people drove hours to get to work and mindlessly went shopping for entertainment.
By Terri Chu
India’s population of 1.3 billion people is in a state of “lockdown” until May 3. One of the initial impacts was a massive wave of migrants, suddenly jobless, walking hundreds of kilometres to their home-communities. In the country’s most populated state, Uttar Pradesh, state officials have instructed village councillors not to allow returning labourers in. In India and around the world, Coronavirus is laying bare a capitalistic hard-truth: the poor are expendable.