The Central Technical School Blues took on the football players of Sir John A. Macdonald Collegiate Institute on Nov. 7, 2013, before going on to win the citywide finals that year. The field was locked down shortly thereafter, following the discovery of contamination in the soil. The Central Tech students are keen to get their field back, and support the TDSB’s plan to install a championship field, which would include artificial turf and a seasonal dome, at the site. Photo Brian Burchell, Gleaner News

By Helen Zhou

There are a lot of things that could be said about Central Tech students. And, I accept that as human beings my fellow students are flawed and imperfect, just like all the rest of us. What I cannot accept is that we are being labelled as “pawns” by the Annex Gleaner newspaper simply because we support the TDSB’s plans to build a new state-of-the-art championship field at our school. The proposed plan for a public/private partnership between TDSB and Razor Management is a golden opportunity for us, which, if seized, will be immensely beneficial to our school and our students.

I would like to clear up some misunderstandings about the way our peaceful marches and protests have been portrayed in the December edition of the Annex Gleaner in the editorial entitled “Neither mobs nor pawns rule.” In calling us pawns, it was condescendingly implied that our protests are controlled by the TDSB and that we were only mindlessly following orders. Being a part of these protests myself, I can assure you that it was quite the contrary. The “mobs,” as our student march on October 6 and our protest demonstration at the Harbord Village Residents’ Association (HVRA) annual general meeting on November 3 have been unfairly branded, were organized and planned by students alone, and what we expressed during these protests was entirely justified and of our own free expression.

In fact, I feel very offended, as a student, that we would be labelled by the Annex Gleaner as pawns. This implies that we are haplessly being used, and that our efforts to send a valid message are being reduced, falsely, to an illustration of the TDSB’s “mounting desperation.” We are people, human beings with minds, visions, convictions, and aspirations that are completely our own, and which we are free to express. As a result of the protests that we planned and executed of our own volition last fall, the voices of the students are finally being heard and considered by the community, the media, and the broader public. We are very happy with the results of our actions, and I would point out that we live in a free and democratic country in which it is perfectly legitimate and acceptable for us to participate in the political process in this manner. At both the school march and the protest action against the HVRA, we were at all times peaceful, respectful, and civil in our conduct and in exercising our freedom of expression.

We truly do believe in what we are advocating for: a state-of-the-art sports facility that will enable us to practise sports through rain or shine, heatwave or blizzard. A facility that will boost our school pride and give us a multitude of opportunities that were never available to us before. A facility that will not only benefit the 1,800 students of Central Tech, but also the students of neighbouring schools, such as Harbord Collegiate, King Edward, and many others. And a facility that we will share with the downtown community, and that will also benefit thousands of non-students. This is not a game of political chess. There are no “ringleaders,” and we are not “pawns.” We are people fighting for what we need.

All we ask is to be taken seriously by the Annex Gleaner and the community. We may be students, younger with less experience in the world, but what we are working towards is a vision that will genuinely meet our own needs and desires. Not our teachers’. Not the school administration’s. Not the TDSB’s. Ours. And we would like to be treated with a little respect. And although we want to be good neighbours and share our facilities with the community, it is, after all, our field. And ultimately, the field is there primarily for us students, isn’t it?

—Helen Zhou

CTS Student Council President

Catherine Gildiner, in Future Bakery (483 Bloor St. W.), one of her favourite spots in the neighbourhood, which “to me is like a small town.” The local resident says she’s “very attached to the Annex, and never wants to leave.” Photo Neiland Brissenden, Gleaner News

Gildiner explores literature, memory, and the passage of time in final memoir

By Annemarie Brissenden,

With Coming Ashore, the third instalment of her memoirs about finding her own place in a tumultuous world, Catherine Gildiner brings her Bildungsroman trilogy to a close. On the surface, the narrative picks up Gildiner’s story as she departs her Ohioan university, and covers her time at Oxford, her student teaching days, and her eventual arrival in Toronto. Always unflinchingly honest, even when portraying her own ignorance and folly, Coming Ashore is at times laugh-out-loud funny, at times cringingly frank, and at times desperately tender.

It is also much more.

Underpinning the name-dropping (oh to have seen Jimi Hendrix perform live in a London basement, encounter Cecil Day-Lewis’s dishevelled appearance at high table in Oxford, or studied under Northrop Frye, all of which she recounts in her inimitable style) are meditations on memory, and philosophical treatises on the passage of time. Most enjoyable, though, are the passages that transform the stuff of life into a key that unlocks literature, particularly poetry.

Hearing Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill” for the first time, in a poetry class at Magdalen College, for example, “drove me right back to Lewiston and Niagara Falls, where I had ‘the pebbles of my holy stream’: the Niagara Escarpment with its rough cliffs of fossils layered one upon another; the joy of the Niagara River in the spring, bubbling its fury while I stood safely on the warm rocks along the bank; the lemonade on the summer nights when fireflies danced, the ones my dad said only came to the home of perfect girls that looked like peaches in August.”

Gildiner highlights Thomas’s “exuberant innocence” while exploring her own growth from innocence to experience, perhaps an inevitable consequence of the passage of time. As she writes, “what you once thought was life was really youth, and it was fading…. You don’t feel the steel cable of time. It tightens gradually, link by link, until one day you feel that shackle dig into your breast when you try to take a carefree breath.”

Experience tugs at the waves of innocence throughout Coming Ashore and even permeates Gildiner’s style.

She’ll lull the reader with a bucolic memory or comic tale, then conclude with a jarring sting that hits like the swipe of a scorpion’s tail. Such a narrative device doesn’t simply elevate the memoir from naïve reverie, it often foreshadows harrowing events that are yet to come.

In one passage, she describes the gowned men trooping across an Oxford quadrangle as looking “ominously mid-raven to me, especially when their capes and sleeves billowed in the wind. This was my first hint of how frightening these men could become.”

Indeed, these same men would prove decidedly unsupportive and much too couth when dealing with the aftermath of a brutal assault in the college’s female showers.

It’s something one doesn’t forget, and a key to understanding how this self-described Irish storyteller remembers everything with such accuracy.

“Everybody has stories that are locked in,” she points out, “moments in time that we all remember.”

“Some times of your life are so memorable that you can almost reach into your mind and touch them. The perfect memories get locked in with the horrific ones. It is the everyday tedium that gets wiped out, while the extremes go on file,” she writes, just before unpacking her discovery of “Fern Hill”.

Such moments, she says, are often “tied to psychological moments in time.”

And, as she writes, those “precious years between freedom from home and ‘settling down’ are so short in the fullness of time, yet vivid in memory.”

The poetics of transition—from innocence to experience—is the very stuff of this book.

New councillor states position on jets and Waterfront Toronto

By Joe Cressy

Toronto began as a waterfront city. It was our point of origin. Since then, our city has grown and developed in leaps and bounds, but along the way the waterfront seemed to have been lost. But in recent years we have found it again. As politicians, developers, community leaders, and business people, we’ve begun to reclaim and revitalize our waterfront.

What’s your vision afor Toronto’s waterfront? Mine is a simple but ambitious one. I believe Toronto should aspire to be a waterfront city. A city where the waterfront—from Mimico to Scarborough—is our collective front yard. Is this possible? Yes. Is it going to happen? It’s already under way, but the future is somewhat uncertain.

Let’s start with some facts. Toronto’s waterfront is home to tens of thousands of residents, 17 million annual visitors, eight blue flag certified beaches, more than 250 businesses (and that number is growing quickly), and thousands of recreational boaters and paddlers. In fact, the waterfront is the second largest destination in all of Toronto, behind only the Eaton Centre. Personally, I’d like to see that order reversed.

Thanks to renewed interest and political attention, waterfront revitalization in Toronto is under way and thriving.

This revitalization is not intended to be finished overnight—it is a long-term project that ­kicked into high gear in 2001 when all three levels of government came together, each contributing $500 million in seed funding, to form Waterfront Toronto. Waterfront Toronto was tasked with a 25-year mandate to revitalize 2,000 acres of waterfront. It is one of the world’s largest waterfront revitalization projects, far surpassing in size Darlington Harbour in Sydney, Battery Park in New York, or the Fan Pier in Boston.

The results to date have been significant. Waterfront Toronto has invested more than $1.3 billion in revitalization, resulting in $3.2 billion in economic output, 16,200 full-time years of employment, and $622 million in government revenues. The investments have also attracted $2.6 billion in private sector funding.

This is a comprehensive revitalization process, rather than simply a redevelopment. All along the waterfront this revitalization is helping to build sustainable communities and new affordable housing, such as in the West Don Lands Neighbourhood and the Pan Am Games Village. It is helping to build infrastructure and expand public transit, and increase economic competitiveness while building award-winning parks and public spaces such as Sugar Beach, Sherbourne Common, Corktown Common, Underpass Park, and the Central Waterfront wavedecks.

Amidst the remnants of twentieth century industrial buildings and aging infrastructure like the Gardiner Expressway, the waterfront is beginning to come to life again. However, it will be up to our current city council to ensure that it continues.

In the current term of council we will make decisions on two critical issues that will shape the future of the waterfront. In the coming years, council will make decisions on whether to allow expansion of the island airport, including jets, and on the future of Waterfront Toronto and how to fund it. These are not small issues and they will have long-reaching impacts on a vision for a waterfront city.

The debate over island airport expansion is one that seems to occur again and again, but should be straightforward. There are many valid concerns about expansion, ranging from health to environment, infrastructure, and traffic. But in my mind it all comes down to what our vision for the waterfront is: the waterfront is for people, not jets.

The future of Waterfront Toronto will also soon be before city council. Waterfront Toronto has a mandate and plan that runs until 2023, but its current capital projects will be largely completed by 2017 and its initial seed funding completely finished by 2019. Without a renewed commitment from all three levels of government, the important work of revitalizing our waterfront could stall.

We can be a waterfront city, if we choose to be. Let’s make it happen, again.

Joe Cressy is city councillor for Ward 20, Trinity-Spadina.

Woodward’s Redevelopment (shown above) in Vancouver’s West Hastings area is a comparable project in terms of importance, said Gregory Henriquez. It featured a homegrown department store that, very much like Honest Ed’s, shut down due to a paradigm shift, and was redeveloped into one of the most inclusive, mixed-use projects in the history of Vancouver.

Projects aim to redress balance of poetics and ethics

By Annemarie Brissenden

The redevelopment of a $100-million, 1.8-hectare parcel of real estate packed with history and nostalgia in the heart of the Annex will not only set the tone for future projects in the neighbourhood, but the very nature of the community itself.

Successfully transforming the site at Bathurst and Bloor streets that includes Honest Ed’s and Mirvish Village will necessitate balancing corporate interests, local expectations, and civic responsibility, yet it’s a challenge that Gregory Henriquez believes he can meet.

He also sees the project as an opportunity to model a new approach to city-building in Toronto.

“I bring fresh eyes, an idealistic sense of wanting to do something different than what’s been traditionally done in development communities,” said Henriquez. It will be the first Toronto-based project for the managing partner of Henriquez Partners Architects, the Vancouver-based architect that developer Westbank Projects Corp. tapped in September to oversee the site’s redesign.

Westbank and Henriquez have collaborated before, most notably on the Woodward’s Redevelopment, which the architect said is “a comparable project in terms of importance.”

Occupying approximately 11 hectares in the West Hastings area of Vancouver, the Woodward’s Redevelopment is one of the largest mixed-use projects in that city’s history, and one of the most inclusive. It includes a public plaza, urban green space, civic offices, retail space, a daycare, an extension of Simon Fraser University’s downtown campus, and non-profit community space, as well as 536 market and 200 non-market housing units.

Like Honest Ed’s, Woodward’s was once a department store, and fragments of the century-old building were incorporated into the redevelopment, along with homages to the store’s distinctive landmark sign. It took Henriquez Partners six years to complete, and included several rounds of community consultation aimed at developing a project that was sensitive to the needs of all of its stakeholders.

Such community-based development is at the heart of Henriquez’s methodology. The architect started his career in social housing, social-justice oriented, and grassroots projects, and that sensibility informs his aesthetic.

“In the old days, there was no distinction between ethics and poetics,” explained Henriquez. “In order for something to be beautiful, it also had to be ethical. Nowadays, something can be beautiful, but not necessarily good for the world.”

Making something beautiful that’s also “meaningful for the communities we’re involved in” is the architect’s way of redressing that balance. It’s also why he believes he’s the right architect to bring this project to fruition.

“I wouldn’t have taken on this project if I didn’t feel some sense of camaraderie,” he said. “The Annex has similar values to ours: left-leaning, social activism, environmental stewardship.”

He’s been thinking about how to incorporate what emerged from Westbank’s yearlong community consultation on the future of Markham Street and Honest Ed’s, the latter of which he views “as an extension of Mirvish Village.”

“It’s a unique site, with a unique history, and amazing potential. I really want to keep the history alive.”

Although nothing is cast in stone, Henriquez believes “the integration of Mirvish Village and Markham into the project will be essential in terms of the public realm.” He also notes that the “fine grain retail in the neighbourhood was something people want to keep,” and is considering establishing a St. Lawrence- or Granville-type market, as well as the tenability of doing purpose-built rental across different scales, including live/work and artist studios, in lieu of condominiums.

And, “I am still grappling with a way to tell the [area’s] story,” admitted Henriquez. “I want to find ways that, in terms of the program, bring back what the place is about in spirit.”

The architect said the people he has met with so far have been very positive.

“I am impressed with the entrepreneurial and non-profit spirit of the people I’ve met in conjunction with the project. I’m looking forward to making something really meaningful that will be there for the next hundred years.”

Henriquez is still working on the planning schedule with the City, but anticipates doing some public consultation on his initial ideas in February or March, and submitting a rezoning application later on in the spring.

Long in need of a rethink, the corner of Bathurst and Bloor streets is currently the focus of renewed scrutiny, as City of Toronto planners work to lay down guidelines in advance of a much-anticipated application to re-develop the Honest Ed’s site, and adjoining land.

This area is bounded by London, Lippincott, Lennox, and Markham streets, and includes the entire area marked for redevelopment, as well as the Bathurst Street subway station.

The planners are reviewing the possibility of designating parts of Mirvish Village and Honest Ed’s under the Ontario Heritage Act, and hope the developer, Westbank Projects Corp., will commemorate the store’s contributions to the neighbourhood somewhere within the new project.

The four corners study is part of a larger project that has been underway since 2013, and is aimed at developing a built form and land use vision for Bathurst Street from Dupont to Queen streets.

Public consultation has been a major part of the process, and the City has met with local business improvement areas, residents’ associations, and held open public meetings.

Issues under consideration have included pedestrian and cycling connections, heritage conservation, open and green space, residential unit size, affordability and diversity, as well as the relationship between the transit station and its surroundings.

Some consistent themes emerged from this process: sidewalks should be wider on Bathurst Street, which is particularly unfriendly to pedestrians; there should be more green space and public seating areas; big box retail is not popular; and, building heights and densities remain a concern, as does the lack of affordable housing.

The City has already approved a planning statute as a result of the study. Official Plan Amendment #246 limits retail in size and frontage at 3,500 square metres and 12 metres respectively.

Westbank has appealed the amendment to the Ontario Municipal Board.

For further information on the study, please visit http://toronto.ca/ planning/bathurst.htm.

—Brian Burchell/Gleaner News

Two universities are tied in the standings in the city’s inaugural BIA Cup tournament. Supported by the Toronto Association of Business Improvement Areas (TABIA), the Cup is a men’s and women’s varsity-level basketball tournament between the University of Toronto and Ryerson University.

The U of T women prevailed 74 to 71 over Ryerson, while the Varsity Blues lost 92 to 68 to the men of Ryerson in the first games of the series held Jan. 7 at U of T’s newly-built Goldring Centre for High Performance Sport.

The BIA Cup runs until Feb. 11, when the final games will be held at Ryerson’s Mattamy Athletic Centre. The women’s game will be held at 6 p.m., while the men’s will play at 8 p.m.

The TABIA initiative, which was championed by Neil Wright and the Harbord Street BIA, is not only aimed at supporting varsity sports, but also intended to introduce Toronto’s youth to the high-performance sports facilities and athletic programs available at these post-secondary institutions.

“Sports is an extremely powerful tool for building healthy communities, teams, and personal growth,” noted a TABIA news release. “For several years TABIA has promoted partnerships between BIAs and Toronto youth in the area of sport and physical activity. This initiative encourages senior high school students to aspire to higher education as well as varsity-level sport.”

Members of many youth organizations from across the city were invited to the games, which also featured half-time under-12s exhibition play, with the young athletes from East York playing in the impressive Goldring facility for the first time.

—Brian Burchell/Gleaner News

Lac-Mégantic derailment loom­­s large at community meeting on rail safety

By Madeline Smith

Nearly two hundred people gathered at the Church of the Messiah in the Annex in late November to voice their concerns about rail safety. Three Liberal members of parliament, Adam Vaughan, Chrystia Freeland, and Carolyn Bennett attended, along with Transport Action Ontario president Peter Miasek and Transport Action Canada board member Howard Levine.

It was a chilly night, but the room was packed to standing room only.

“The headcount here is an important message for us to take back to Ottawa,” St. Paul’s MP Bennett said.

In Toronto, the CP rail line runs along Dupont Street, which includes the northern edge of the Annex. The CN line runs along the city’s northern edge, parallel to Highway 407.

After a derailment led to a major disaster that killed 47 people in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, in 2013, many people who live along the rail lines in Toronto are concerned about their own safety. Complaints have been raised about DOT-111 railcars, an older model that CN and CP have said they will phase out over four years in favour of a more robust container. All the railcars that derailed in Lac-Mégantic were DOT-111s.

Meanwhile, transportation of volatile materials such as crude oil by rail has been on the rise. According to local action group Safe Rail Communities, an estimated 140,000 railcars carried hazardous materials across Canada in 2014, up from just 500 in 2009.

“[Rail] infrastructure is about to be subject to a lot more strain,” Vaughan said. “We need to get ahead of this train, so to speak.”

Vaughan, who became the MP for Trinity-Spadina in a summer by-election in 2014 after serving as Toronto’s Ward 20 councillor, is now in a position to tackle rail safety concerns. Although rail lines run through cities such as Toronto and affect residents on a local level, the system is regulated by the federal government, not municipalities.

“We need to figure out how to manage the movement of volatile goods in this country,” Vaughan said.

The horrifying impact of the derailment in Lac-Mégantic was on many residents’ minds at the meeting, but Miasek reminded the audience that derailments aren’t uncommon, underlining the need for investment in rail infrastructure.

“People forget that [Lac-Mégantic] was only one of many accidents,” Miasek said in an interview. CN derailments in Alberta and New Brunswick, among others, were also problems in 2014.

Miasek favours a public-private partnership, or P3, to invest in rail transport. The main issue with rail safety in Canada, he said, is the system’s lack of capital. Both CP and CN have been privately owned since CN was privatized in 1995, and Miasek said they are unable to invest in maintenance.

“We need to take a page out of the U.S. model, where government contributes money to the building of rail infrastructure,” he said. “They were at the place where we are about 20 years ago. Their solution was to put more government funding into rail, both federally and at the state level.”

Miasek said taking volatile materials off rail lines entirely is not a solution—while crude oil might be transported instead through pipelines, hazardous material like ammonia, chlorine, and acid is still moved by train, which he said is safer than transportation by truck.

In spring 2014, Helen Vassilakos and Patricia Lai started Safe Rail Communities as a way to raise awareness about what they say are inadequate safety standards for rail transport in Canada.

Since then, both have spent significant time researching the issue out of concern for their Runnymede-area neighbourhood, where some people have trains running right by their backyards.

“We’re arguing that the regulations aren’t enough,” Vassilakos said. “I think our government needs to take on more of a role. Every rail line should have the same requirements and it should be government that decides how things are done, not the rail lines.”

Toronto mayor John Tory and Mississauga mayor Bonnie Crombie, both elected in October 2014, recently voiced their support for trains with dangerous goods to be rerouted instead of passing through their cities. But that, Lai and Vassilakos argue, doesn’t adequately address the problem.

“To advocate for rerouting without having the safeguards put in place is not solving the problem,” Vassilakos said. “We’re concerned that if things get rerouted and it’s just forgotten, this could be a wasted opportunity.”

Vassilakos and Lai said it has been frustrating to bring public attention to rail safety, but said that the November meeting was encouraging. They hope their concerns, and the worries many other residents raised at the forum, mark a step towards better accountability and transparency for rail safety in Canada.

“We would like to have a voice,” Lai said. “We’re questioning the commitment to true safety.”

Funny business going on at Wiener’s Home Hardware

Howard Pressburger, a familiar face at Wiener’s Home Hardware, on Bloor Street, dispenses daily doses of fix-it yourself advice and is all the while quietly contemplating a comedic plot. photo Brian Burchell, Gleaner News

By Nicola Kivell

Howard Pressburger, a longtime Annex local, actor, and employee at Wiener’s Home Hardware, gets it.

Especially when it comes to the imminent struggle and conflict between who we are and what we do.

He also understands how to put an absurd and comedic twist on a otherwise overwhelming theme and find the humour in our day-to-day struggles. Through his comedy project, Nuts and Bolts, he explores the looming reality that we all face when it comes to how and what we identify ourselves with and how we do so. There’s no question that a large majority of us identify specifically with what we do, how much money we make, and whom we associate ourselves with. So what happens if we lose all that?

Howard found the answer with Nuts and Bolts. After consistent requests from the community for him to create a television comedy revolving around the everyday absurdity and craziness of working in a hardware store, he was finally able to do it. The opportunity came to life with the CBC ComedyCoup Contest. ComedyCoup provides comedy creators from all over Canada the framework to create hilarious videos and pieces and put them together to develop their comedic projects. It is a contest left in the hands of the viewers. It’s up to you to vote and advance your favourite projects closer to the $500,000 production financing prize to create a half-hour-long comedy special for CBC prime time. With this fabric, Howard, along with his co-writer and girlfriend Shana Sandler, producer and co-writer Josh Tizel, and producer and director of photography Peter Ivaskiv, started to develop the comedy.

Nuts and Bolts is about a man named Howard who essentially loses everything, from his money, his job, and his wife to his identity itself. Howard ends up back in his hometown where he takes up a job at a local hardware store. It is here where Howard tries to put back together the pieces of his life and, in doing so, discovers a whole new outlook on what really holds us together as people and the fact that sometimes you have to go right down to the simple framework of it all to find yourself again. The comedy depicts real-life, hilarious anecdotes and stories from Howard’s years of experience working at the hardware store, dealing with the day-to-day, sometimes bizarre and comical struggles we all face.

Having never written or developed a TV show, ComedyCoup gave Howard the platform and tools to create something really special, but the inspiration for the idea truly came from the community itself. “This was really a project fuelled and generated from the community at large,” notes Howard. “ComedyCoup gave us the framework and the opportunity but we’re in this for the long run, we’re in it for the experience, and we’re in it to do something with our community.” Not only does Nuts and Bolts portray the hardware store community and the realism of everyday obstacles, it also finds the humour and absurdity in the ordinary and mundane. Because seriously what’s more funny than real life? Nuts and Bolts is a comedic gem because it’s relatable, it’s unique, and it’s absurdly hilarious in all the right ways. So make sure you check it out! You can go to comedycoup.cbc.ca/nutsandboltstv to see videos and cast your vote.

City should emulate Guelph and Chicago

By Terri Chu

Coming off an election campaign, I was often asked why I decided to run for city council. When members of Adam Vaughan’s old campaign team asked me to put my name forward, I had to think long and hard about putting life on hold in the name of public service.

However, the more I thought about it, the easier the decision became. As an energy consultant, the biggest challenges we face are usually political, not technical. Municipalities have more impact on climate change than any other level of government. We’ve sadly reduced the role to pothole fixer but there’s a lot that can be done at the city level. I congratulate all the elected officials in our city and sincerely hope that, in the coming term, more attention will be paid to our crumbling infrastructure.

Municipalities can push above and beyond provincial building codes. We saw that when David Miller pushed Green Roofs on the city. Chicago was able to limit the amount of window area in a condominium to 40% of total wall space in order to force higher efficiency buildings. Waterfront Toronto lost a prime opportunity for District Energy mostly due to a political standoff, not a technical problem. Guelph, with a much lower population than Toronto, has been able to lead in energy efficiency while Toronto falls behind despite the influence we could have.

While doing my Masters in Civil Engineering, one of the course projects I did was retrofitting a century home to meet modern energy efficiency standards.

I used my own home as a base model, measuring the thermal insulation value (there wasn’t much) and coming up with strategies to make it less of an energy hog. I also calculated roughly a 30-year payback – far too long for any homeowner to invest in. This is the curse of artificially cheap energy in Canada. We have more incentive to use than save.

Years later when I finally did have the money to renovate my home, the only retrofit strategy we could realistically afford was spray foam insulation. The house is much more comfortable, but I don’t pretend that I did it for any kind of financial payback. If we are to maintain our stock of heritage homes, as a city, we have to make it realistic for homeowners to insulate and lower their energy consumption. The city has a vested interest in this since it takes demand off our already stressed electricity grids. I’d like to see the City of Toronto provide a home energy loan program that is attached to the property and paid back through property taxes as opposed to the homeowner. This way, if the homeowner must sell or move, the new owner who will benefit from the lower energy bills will also be the one paying back the cost of insulation through the property taxes.

The stressed electricity grid is another issue the city needs to address. As more and more condos are built, the stress on the distribution lines will become unbearable, prompting a third transmission line into the city.

Nobody wants to see homes bulldozed for transmission towers. Council should be forcing new developments to become the centre of a smart grid with onsite generation. This is much more efficient than electricity travelling hundreds of kilometres to us (line loss is big) and would reduce our exposure to catastrophic failure.

Speaking of electricity, I truly believe we have to stop this nonsense of burying our trash hundreds of kilometres away.

Europe, Asia, and now even Australia have very clean energy from waste technologies that make us look positively Neanderthal in how we deal with trash.

It’s time we recovered both electricity and waste heat from our trash bin rather than leave our bits of plastic to ocean birds thousands of kilometres away (where it inevitably ends up).

Terri Chu is an engineer committed to practical environmentalism. This column is dedicated to helping the community reduce energy use, and help distinguish environmental truths from myths. Send questions, comments, and ideas for future columns to Terri at terri.chu@whyshouldicare.ca.

Designed by congregant Dianne Saxe and embroidered by Israeli-Canadian artist Tova Raz, the synagogue’s ark curtain draws on traditional symbols of Jewish life to emphasize the high value the congregation places on gender egalitarianism. The Book of Psalms inspires the central imagery, in which a tree planted by flowing water symbolizes how a Torah-centred life gives a pious Jew the strength to flourish. In the curtain, the intertwining trunks of the tree represent the interwoven male and female aspects of the congregation.

History reflects growth and development of Toronto’s Jewish population

By Annemarie Brissenden

In May 1914, with the world on the brink of war, 13 men formed an association to provide social benefits such as medical care and religious customs to all those sharing a link to the same small village in Eastern Europe. Today, that association is a thriving 680-member congregation based out of a synagogue on Brunswick Avenue. And while it developed along a well-worn path that echoes the growth of the city it now calls home, the First Narayever Congregation has evolved into a unique model of traditional egalitarianism that meets the needs of both its religious and broader downtown communities.

“I could have predicted the story: the Jewish community’s moves around the city; its part in the post-war boom; the return of people to the Annex; and the revival of downtown Jewish life, anchored in part by the Narayever,” said Sharoni Sibony, the curator of Traditions and Transitions: 100 Years of the First Narayever Congregation, an exhibit that ran throughout October at the Miles Nadal Jewish Community Centre in conjunction with the synagogue’s centennial celebrations.

“First Narayever starts as a typical, immigrant working class synagogue,” explained Sibony, meeting in the homes of its members, before renting a space at Huron and Dundas streets for approximately 20 years.

By 1943, the congregation had raised enough money to purchase its current home, a building at 187-89 Brunswick Ave., previously a Foresters’ Hall and home to Bethel Church, the first English-speaking Mennonite congregation in Toronto.

Although “the downtown area was the original hub of Toronto’s Jewish community, many people left the neighbourhood [starting in the 1950s] and moved north,” said Harry Schacter, First Narayever’s president.

“There was a severe decline in the Jewish population in downtown Toronto,” added Rabbi Edward Elkin, the congregation’s spiritual leader since 2000. “Lots of little immigrant synagogues closed altogether. Ours was teetering, and hung on until the renaissance in the 1970s.”

That renaissance precipitated an ideological shift that made First Narayever into the congregation it is today: moving from an orthodox practice to a traditional-egalitarian one in which women would play an equal role in the service and running of the congregation.

“This made us unique at the time,” explained Elkin. “We were holding on to all of the traditional observances and trappings, while being egalitarian.”

Sibony said that one of the things that really struck her as she prepared the exhibit on the congregation’s history was “how much the early egalitarian activists seemed to value orthodoxy.”

And the question of how to make women’s participation full and inclusive in a traditional setting is “a conversation that is very much alive 35 years later,” she said.

“It was a very dramatic shift at the time,” said Schachter, adding that it also made the synagogue more participatory. “It did much to involve ordinary people in the running of the service.”

Sibony also suggested that the move to egalitarianism created a less hierarchical structure in the running of the congregation, and explained how the building itself facilitated this evolution.

“The closeness of the podium area and audience area feels rare to me. The smallness of the building facilitates that closeness, and really empowers the people,” she said.

The combination of traditionalism and egalitarianism has proven successful at attracting those people who are returning to the neighbourhood and choosing to live downtown.

“All of these people coming in, because of our ideological decision, we were ripe for some of those people,” said Elkin.

“We have become a home for newcomers looking for a new place for themselves,” added Schachter, noting, “the population is continuing to grow around us.”

Although it has shifted ideologically, it has remained true to its social justice roots, as it continues to evolve in its egalitarianism.

“In 2009 we voted to extend same-sex marriage as a principle of the synagogue, which is also a rarity,” said Sibony. The congregation also continues to serve its members and the surrounding community by participating in a local Out of the Cold program with other faith-based institutions, sponsoring refugees, and developing sustainable, local, and affordable food choices.

As the congregation contemplates the next one hundred years, said Schacter, “we have to think about where we are going. We have to continue to think about our place in the downtown Jewish community, and the broader community as a whole.”

“We feel quite rooted in the Annex,” said Elkin. “We have to continue to be good neighbours and citizens of a downtown community where a lot of diverse people continue to thrive and live.”