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.
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 to reach out,” they read.
Tags: News
“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 citizens: staying home, sharing positive messages, and helping each other out.
By Terri Chu
There’s a China-sized hole in the world’s pollution map thanks to the coronavirus (COVID-19). Flights around the world have decreased, economic activity has gone down substantially, and our air has never been cleaner. Even Venice’s famous canals are running clean, and are once again home to swans and the odd dolphin.
By Terri Chu
Last year, Premier Ford and friends dropped $231 million of “taxpayer” money on killing wind energy projects. It’s one thing to not build any more but spending money to cancel projects? That’s next level “respecting” taxpayer money (as he likes to say). What this government has shown us is that it cares not one whit for being fiscally responsible and it cares not one whit for the best interests of the citizens.
By Terri Chu
I was mildly optimistic when Toronto City Council officially declared a “Climate Emergency”, in October, 2019. How naïve I was to think that an “emergency” meant that something might actually happen. The situation appears to me as though teenagers are dialing 911 and screaming in terror into the phone while the operator on the other end says: Please hold, your call is important to us.
By Khyrsten Mieras
The City of Toronto and the Annex Residents’ Association’s (ARA) Parks, Trees and Environment Committee held the latest TransformTO community consultation at the Bata Shoe Museum on November 4.
On November 11, Canadian leaders extolled the virtues of soldiers who lost their lives defending the ideals of democracy. On that day, we might have told the story of the nearly 2,000 Canadian soldiers who fought to defend Hong Kong against Japanese invasion in 1941. Five hundred of those soldiers did not come back, and many others returned deeply scarred after living as prisoners of war.
Tags: Annex · Columns · Opinion
Bling bling! Jaws dropped and the media was bedazzled by the newly unveiled Toronto Raptors championship rings on October 23. For the team’s opening game, each player was awarded a golf-ball of 10 karat gold covered in 14 carat diamonds, and the nearly 20,000 fans watching at Scotiabank Arena were given replicas. Instead of being star struck, I feel sick. Instead of celebrating the making and baring of those rings, we should be denouncing them and the culture that clouds the story they really tell.