Is it any wonder that there’s a general labour shortage? Inflation is being blamed, in part, on this labour shortage and it is hitting the food business particularly hard.  Let’s take a moment to think about how this relates to climate change. 

[Read more →]

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. Experts with the waste electrical and electronic equipment forum estimate that in 2021 alone, the world will discard a mass of e-waste equivalent to that of the Great Wall of China, the world’s heaviest human made object.

[Read more →]

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.

[Read more →]

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.

[Read more →]

The era of prioritizing cars is long over and the city, (actually, the entire country), needs to catch up.

[Read more →]

Let’s not go back to unhealthy “normal” 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” […]

[Read more →]

When most urbanites think of food, they think of restaurants, grocery stores, markets and the incredible diversity of foods available in a place like Toronto. What fewer of us think of is where all that food comes from, how far it has travelled to get to us, and what it takes to produce it.

[Read more →]

You won’t find true happiness inside a box By Terri Chu As we leave behind one of the most collectively awful years in living memory, let’s hope we find some happiness in 2021. During my own, personal review of 2020, one life lost in particular stood out to me. Tony Hsieh’s death hit me in […]

[Read more →]

Pandemic shows we can live on so much less 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 […]

[Read more →]

There’s plenty of rumbling out there, among the corporate elites especially, that agree: saving the lives of 1-3% of the population is too high a price to pay for a shut-down in the economy.

[Read more →]

Annex Helps Group mounts massive outreach to assist By Nicole Stoffman The day Toronto announced a soft lockdown in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Terri Chu dropped 100 flyers in her neighbourhood. “If, for any reason and with no judgement, you need any help, be it running errands, picking up groceries, or childcare, please feel free […]

[Read more →]

“Canadians are kind and generous.” The Prime Minsister tells us this in his daily briefings on the COVID-19 crisis. In reality, this statement is part truth and part aspirational. Fortunately in the Annex, and in a great many other parts of our city, this is proving to be true. Many residents are acting as model […]

[Read more →]