Matthew James/Gleaner News

By Darko Milenkovic

Residents of a 22-storey building in the Annex found themselves with neither electricity nor water during a weekend-long power outage last month.

During a windy morning on May 8, a tree limb fell on top of a power fuse creating sparks and causing a partial power outage at 100 Spadina Rd, owned and managed by Park Property Management Inc.

The superintendent of the building, Eva Ostrihon, witnessed the event. “It was very windy that day,” Ostrihon said. “I saw it—I was showing an apartment—so I was right on the balcony in front of the tree. It just sparked, and then banged, and then the electricity went down.”

Elevators also lost power. A woman on the 16th floor was in one of the elevators at the time of the outage, and remained there for about an hour until elevator technicians arrived to help her out. “One of the assistant supers came running up the stairwells, knocking on the elevator doors,” said building resident Leslie MacNeil.

MacNeil, a tenant on the 22nd floor, had no power for essential home appliances including her refrigerator and her computer. Many others suffered a similar power loss.

“My neighbour across the hallway had her fridge working, but her stove wasn’t working, whereas I had my fridge not working and my stove was working.”

The residents used extension cords alongside the few working power outlets to keep their critical appliances operational.

Lights in apartments, hallways, and stairwells went out simultaneously, locking those without flashlights, or the ability to traverse up and down multiple floors, trapped within their homes. “We were held hostage by this,” MacNeil said adding that there are a lot of seniors in the building above the 14th floor.

One woman on the 17th floor was expecting her son and his family to visit her for Mother’s Day and take her out for lunch, but couldn’t get down the long flight of stairs due to her frail physique and broken hip.

While people below the 11th floor were lucky enough to still have running water, the upper floors didn’t even have flushing toilets. “The water comes without pumps to the 11th floor,”  Ostrihon explained.

The outage began around 11 a.m. Saturday morning, and initial calls were made to Toronto Hydro within the next two hours.

Tenants said they made over a hundred calls to Toronto Hydro over the weekend. Power was finally restored at around 5 p.m. on Sunday.

“People were in the hallways here, during the night, in their nightgowns wandering around,” MacNeil said. “Some were crying ‘Nobody’s paying attention, nobody’s coming.’ Time and time again we tried phoning Toronto Hydro.”

For every call, tenants were asked to identify their address and postal code before waiting for a representative. Tenants were told by representatives to go to sleep and that the issue would be resolved before morning. “At no time did they give us a time frame—they just said that they were on the way,” MacNeil said.

Offering possibilities about why the outage lasted as long as it did, Ostrihon said its partial nature may have placed the building in lower priority. “But this is still a high-rise building,” she said.

Toronto Hydro finally arrived to work on the building around 4:30 p.m. Sunday afternoon. The forestry crew was sent in first to ensure a safe work environment at the site. Within half an hour the power to the building was restored.

“When they were here and working on the lines I went out to speak to them.” MacNeil said. “I was very polite, I wasn’t blaming them. I said ‘I know you guys have worked very hard to get this done.’ I said, ‘Did you know how long we were out of power here?’ No, they did not. There was a breakdown in communication.”

Tanya Bruckmueller, public affairs consultant for Toronto Hydro, said that it was an unfortunate occurrence, and that the windstorms that weekend had caused outages in many areas of Toronto. “There were a number of factors,” she said, when asked why it took so long for Toronto Hydro to respond. “For instance, public safety calls are always dealt with first, and unfortunately incidents like this one will have longer outage times than others.”

She said Toronto Hydro attempted to deal with outages caused by the storms as quickly as possible, and successfully made sure that all outages were dealt with before the weekend was over.

Bruckmueller also made note that Toronto Hydro crews required permission from the property management in order to access the building, and failure to make swift contact with Park Property Management led to a further delay in solving the power outage.

MacNeil said she was not pleased with the way Toronto Hydro handled the situation. “It was negligent, very neglectful, and just terrible,” she said. “Should anyone have had an emergency, or a fire happened, or someone had a heart attack, or broke their leg going down the stairs, who would have been able to get here in a timely fashion?”

MacNeil said many tenants felt helpless and distraught, and she is looking for compensation and reassurance from Toronto Hydro that such an incident will not happen again.

Perry King/Gleaner News

By Perry King

Beverly Horii, owner of Jinja Ninja cookies, has been making her designer treats since September. Before that, she was moving up in the world of architecture, a place that she grew tired of.

“After 22 years, I was at the top of where I could go in my career. What ends up happening is that when you become more senior in this field, you end up becoming business development, which means you have to go out and look for work—which isn’t what I really love to do,” said Horii, an Annex resident of 15 years.

Horii did not buy into the idea of selling architecture. But, becoming the creator of “mookies”—designer cookies for special occasions—was not something she immediately jumped to. She had always loved to bake—particularly cookies—and her discovery of mookies came by coincidence. “I spelled out my friend’s name, ‘Farewell Pam’—it was a going away party—and I put stars, but I placed them individually and stuck them to a sheet,” she remembers.

“You know how you bake cookies, if you put them too close together, they stick together. I thought, ‘that’s interesting.’” Her cosy idea led her to create cookies with collage-like elements, and eventually she left her previous position to start her own company.

“I’m very hands-on. I do a lot of the work here. I hire people when I need the help and I design everything. I love the design part, and I love baking and cooking so that’s what got me going initially,” she said.

The Gleaner asked Horii to combine her design and baking skills by making a cookie replica of local landmark Bloor Street United Church. She agreed, as long as we kept her cookie-designing techniques and gingerbread recipe a secret.

Horii has a passion and desire to keep creating. She noted that she has dabbled in other pastries, like cupcakes and three-dimensional cookies. “When people see it, they’re just blown away. The kind of satisfaction you get from that is what keeps me going,” she said.

Her passion has not gone unnoticed. “I think it’s her passion that drives her courage,” said Edwina Low, who has worked with Horii in the kitchen, but has recently left to pursue interior design at Ryerson University. “She has been courageous enough to leave the safety of being employed to foray into a completely different field, and not only that, she’s set out to merge her passion for design and food. Her energy and excitement is contagious when she talks about her new ideas, and you see her courage when she’s persevering to make her ideas a reality.

“With all things great and worthwhile, making designer gourmet cookies isn’t cut and dry. She’s put in a lot of muscle and a lot of hours to get her business to where it is today,” said Low.

Horii’s favourite part of the challenge was the icing of the cookie. “This is where the mookie comes to life,” she said. “That’s because you give them life through colour and detail.”

She used two shades of a butter cream-based frosting, coloured brown, as the main colours for the church, and regular frosting to decorate the surrounding design. She used a royal white icing to add the finer window and building details to the church.

In the end, the Annex mookie took 90 minutes on the dot.

The challenge was a diificult one, but she persevered and produced a beautiful and yummy cookie.

To learn more about Jinja Ninja cookies, visit the Jinja Ninja Facebook page.

Correction: It is mentioned in the article that Edwina Low, Horii’s former assistant, is pursuing interior design at Ryerson University. In fact, Low graduated from Ryerson’s Interior Design program in 2006. She now works as a set dresser and designer in television production. The Gleaner regrets the error.

By Sandra Ferrari

A scantily defined Toronto bylaw has raised concerns in the local burlesque community after bylaw officers were called in to investigate an event held at Revival nightclub (783 College St.) last month.

Because of the vague wording, it is unclear whether the performances violated the law. Only verbal warnings were issued and no charges were laid.

Under article XXXII of the bylaw, a burlesque entertainer is defined as an attendant whose services appeal to, or are designed to appeal to, erotic or sexual appetites or inclinations.

According to long-time promoter in the burlesque community Chris Mysterion, the wording is extremely vague and could potentially apply to number of different performances and events held and supported by the City of Toronto.

“If the authorities were to follow this bylaw, they would also have to go after CHIN picnic organizers because of the bikini contest; Gay Pride because of dancers on any given float; or the number of theatre dance groups that use any form of seductive dance in their routines.”

The Ridiculesque event on April 11 went from salacious to solemn in tone as some performers left the venue out of fear that they may be fined under accordance with the bylaw.

“A lot of us have other jobs during the day,” said Sauci Calla Horra, who performed that evening and is also a mental heath worker in the city. “I don’t have a problem with what I do, but some performers have concerns around applying for work and having this show up in a background check.”

For some performers, it is not only a question of the protecting the rights of those involved in the community, but also about maintaining the integrity of the art form.

“Years ago erotic dancers were considered burlesque dancers. Fifty years later the word burlesque has a different meaning. The wording is outdated as it is used in the bylaw, just like the word ‘gay’ used to mean being happy,” said Mysterion.

Not only is the wording outdated, but the bylaw blurs the lines between definitions of adult entertainers and modern day burlesque performers.

“Burlesque often tries to challenge social mores and social codes. There is real confusion between what a stripper is and what burlesque is. There are still pasties and g-strings in burlesque, but more attention is paid to the theatrics,” said Calla Horra.

According to Bruce Robertson, director of Licensing Services for the city, there is no real cause for concern on the part of the burlesque community. However he does acknowledge that fines may be up to the discretion of the bylaw officers called in to investigate a particular event.

“It’s certainly possible that people could get charged. It’s not outside the realm of possibility, but if that happens it would be up to the courts to decide what to do.”

The prospect of potential arrests remains unsettling for some members of the burlesque community.

“What this does is raise a red flag. When there is a red flag you have to be aware of your rights,” said Mysterion.

Though some performers were worried, this is the first known bust of its kind according to both Calla Horra and Mysterion, leaving no real sense of panic among burlesque performers in the city.

Both of these prominent members of the burlesque community note that what the situation has done is opened the door to issues of fickle bylaw enforcement, threat to artistic license, and the potential for negative impact on the burlesque community of Toronto—especially in light of the upcoming Toronto Burlesque Festival, a high-profile event featuring international performers.

Brodie Merill, 2009 MLL Defensive Player of the Year. Courtesy: Tracy Johnson

By Perry King

When a sports team wins a league title in their inaugural season, they’re going to get some attention.

But somehow, the Toronto Nationals, an expansion franchise of Major League Lacrosse (MLL)—the National Lacrosse League’s (NLL) outdoor lacrosse counterpart—did the deed in the quietest way possible.

“We came together at the right time. We had been inconsistent throughout the regular season, but really, it came down to that last weekend and we felt like we gelled,” said Brodie Merrill, a Nationals defenseman. “We were able to keep a large corps of players that played together in Rochester the year before and won the championship. That helped, but Coach Huntley and his staff came in and established a new philosophy where the players bought into it.”

Successes aside, there was little appetite for the Nationals because they were relatively unknown last season. “It’s funny, living in Toronto, I think we’re the best kept secret: the best players in the world playing for the city and we were successful—especially in the landscape of Toronto sports. It’s really something the city can get behind,” said Merrill.

“The everyday, working class person can really identify with the game of lacrosse and lacrosse players. It’s a fun and inexpensive way to spend your entertainment dollars, and the fans are really recognizing that.”

The Toronto Nationals evolved out of the Rochester Rattlers, an MLL charter member, which decided to temporarily dissolve to better foster competitive lacrosse for the league. The team itself can be reactivated, but in the meantime, the Rattlers’ core members had to deal with Coach Dave Huntley’s system, a new stadium and city.

The transition was a rough one. “We had some stretches of good games and a few sub par games last season. I think when we were successful last season, we were playing as a team, and really moving the ball around offensively,” wrote Delby Powless of the team’s attack unit in an email.

Eventually, the team developed an identity on the field—an up-tempo, offensive identity. “Our defence and midfielders do a great job of pushing the ball up the field creating odd-man opportunities, which as a fan is much better to watch,” said Powless.

“I think our transition from defence to offence really caused problems for some of the teams who like to slow the game down.”

That identity certainly showed up on the stat sheet. The Nationals scored 184 goals in 12 games in 2009—about 15 goals a game.

2010 will be a challenging season for the well-tested squad. Defending a title is a lot to ask for, but for the first time, the Nationals will also be playing their home games at Lamport Stadium (1151 King St. W.), after a strong season at BMO Field.

BMO Field, after implementing natural grass on their pitch, became Canada’s largest soccer-specific facility last winter, forcing teams like the Nationals to make new plans.

Dan Dawson, an offensive stalwart of the NLL for nine years, says transitioning from the box-style lacrosse of the NLL to the outdoors of the MLL has been a challenge. “Field lacrosse has a lot more athleticism than the indoor game, a lot more stick skills. So there is a bit of transition, but at the end of the day, it’s still lacrosse and I’m still learning and trying to become a better player at this level,” said the offensive guru, who has averaged 32 goals in eight pro seasons in the NLL.

Dawson currently works as a fire fighter, but wants to play pro lacrosse for another five to 10 years. “I’m forever in debt to the sport of lacrosse, I have so many fond memories. I have friendships forever because of the game. I represented my country three times, won a world championship in Canada. You know, I get to play in my hometown in Toronto. There is so much I’m grateful for because of the sport,” he said.

As for this season, the players are ready to go. All the players said they would defend the title. “One of the toughest things in sports is to really have a good season after a championship, so we’re trying to avoid complacency, that kind of ‘championship hangover’ so to speak,” said Merrill.

“You try to avoid all the distractions and just focus on prep and the finer details of the game.”

Defence Talks

Brodie Merrill, the heart of the Nationals defence, is no novice when it comes to his job. In fact, since he began his career, he has been the MLL’s premier defenseman.

• Born in Orangeville, Merrill’s credentials include a rookie of the year award in 2006, and four consecutive Defensive Player of the Year awards, most recently last season.
• In the NLL, Merrill was named 2006 Rookie of the Year and Defensive Player of the Year in the same season. At Georgetown University, Merrill was a standout, winning the Schmeisser award for outstanding defence in his senior year.
• There’s more. At the inaugural World Lacrosse Championships in 2006, he was named Best Defender and earned All-World honours.
• He is currently the Dean of Students and head men’s lacrosse coach at The Hill Academy in Vaughan, Ontario.

For more information about the Toronto Nationals, visit http://nationalslacrosse.com/.

Neighbourhood residents have complained about The Social's crowded sidewalks. Beth Macdonell/Gleaner News

By Beth Macdonell

In what seems to be a response to the city issuing an increased number of fines last year, Richard Lambert, co-owner of The Social (1100 Queen St. W.), is asking the city to rezone the address to allow it to operate as a nightclub.

The Social previously operated under a restaurant license, as nearly all bars in the city do.

Between January 2009 and November 2009, The Social was ticketed for violating their operating licence eight times, Bruce Robertson, manager of Toronto’s Municipal Licensing and Standards Division (MLS). For their first offence, The Social received a $250 fine. Robertson said the other violations will be heard in court September 10.

In fact, Robertson said The Social has been operating without a valid license since November, “essentially” open illegally for business. He said The Social did not reapply for its yearly license. Robertson said the city was likely waiting for the accumulated violations to be processed before they took further action, adding that this sort of thing was not usual.

City Planning confirmed the applicant submitted a rezoning request January 13, 2010. Staff said apart from the Entertainment District, there are few addresses in the City of Toronto granted a license to operate as a club.

Lambert turned down several phone, email and in-person interview requests with the Gleaner. On one attempt, he bursted out, “Oh, it’s the Gleaner girl,” and instructed his staff not to speak with the newspaper. Phone calls to the applicant’s lawyer were not returned.

A big part of the problems stems from the fact that there is no such thing as a bar license in the city of Toronto. Businesses can apply for licenses as restaurants or entertainment facilities. Restaurants are obligated to have a certain number of tables and chairs, have limited “dance floor” space, and serve food.

If The Social were to be approved for the change in license and be allowed to operate as a night club, “they would face stricter requirements”, said Toronto city planner Jamaica Hewston. Among other things, Hewston said the new license would require The Social to set up a metal detector.

Residents fear if the re-zoning request is granted, a precedent for other clubs to open in the area will be set. Hewston confirmed that fear at a community meeting held April 19.  “Ultimately we do have to think of the use of the building, if Richard leaves in ten to twenty years, the use would still be the same,” said Hewston.

Similarly, she said if the city allowed The Social to be a club, other establishments could reference the decision as argument to also rezone as an entertainment establishment.

“The problem is that there are too many people partying in the neighbourhood”, said Misha Glouberman, founding member of the Queen Beaconsfield Residents Association. Glouberman said the group opposes the expansion of bars in general, so this is not just about The Social. “The biggest problem I have is trying to sleep.”

Hewston said the city wants to give licenses to new restaurants along the West Queen West strip to help diversity the neighbourhood, but said they never know when one of the ‘restaurants’ actually intend to run the business as a late night bar. “We don’t want to refuse restaurants from opening,” Hewston said.

“It’s not simple, unfortunately,” said Lambert at the meeting. When The Social opened, it operated as a restaurant, he said.  “You can’t always control people and the direction.”

Morgan Taylor, head of security for The Social, texts staff to turn music down and lights on at 2:45 a.m. Beth Macdonell/Gleaner News

Lambert said The Social was totally unaware they were violating their operating license until two years ago.  He said if The Social were to shut down, 30 people would lose their jobs, having a negative impact on the community.

When city staff asked at the meeting why The Social would not comply with the current rules until decision was reached, Lambert said he was “not at liberty to discuss the inner workings of my business.”

A lot of residents said they did not know if he would show up to the meeting, but he stayedfor the entire duration, cordially answering questions and addressing concerns. Many residents thanked Lambert for his openness during the meeting.

Several residents said the lack of enforcement by the city was the root of the wider problem along the Queen West strip, namely the level of noise at night and the number of what are in reality bars, but designated as restaurants operating.

“There is no overnight solution, said Joe Magalhaes, District Supervisor of MLS at the meeting.  He said the licensing department was bound by the courts and has to wait for violations to be heard, a process he pointed out which can take months, sometimes years. “But I don’t want people to think we are not actively investigating.”

“I know there is a lot of frustration”, said Councillor Adam Giambrone (Ward 18, Davenport), also present at the meeting. He was sympathetic to the length of the court process for establishments caught violating their licenses. He said he planned to support the refusal of The Social’s re-zoning request.

“We would like to see a variety of small businesses open up,” wrote Michelle Gay, an artist who has lived and worked in the West Queen West neighbourhood for 13 years in an email to the Gleaner. “It’s meaningless for us to have bars move into the neighbourhood and remain closed until 9 p.m. It doesn’t create an interesting and vibrant place to live.”

Hewston said the city planning department is writing a report which will be presented to community council May 25. City council will then vote on The Social’s request in early June. If the request is declined, Lambert can appeal the decision to the Ontario Municipal Board.

Perry King/ Gleaner News

By Jacob Arnfield

It’s no surprise that as the election year proceeds, the question of how best to improve our streetscapes is rearing its head.

Recently, the Board of Trade ranked Toronto’s long commutes worst among global cities of comparable size, the TTC is under heavy scrutiny, and bike lane proposals are being met with vehement support and vehement opposition.

While streetscapes include many different aspects, how and where to accommodate cycling on our streets has the greatest ability to turn animated debate into outright animosity—something many cycling advocates have come to lament.

Councillor Adam Vaughan (Ward 20, Trinity-Spadina) is a cyclist and a proponent of increase cycling infrastructure, but said he is not happy with how debate occurs. “I’m tired of this war on anything. It’s not a war on cars anymore than it’s a war on pedestrians, anymore than it’s a war on cyclists,” he said. “What it’s a war on is this unnecessary argument that one has to exclude the other. We can build complete streets, and balanced streets, and beautiful streets, but we have to be prepared to lead by design, and not simply create thoroughfares all the time giving priority to one form over another.”

Local cycling advocate Hamish Wilson, is one of the Annex’s loudest proponents of increased bike safety. He said he understands why the process can take time, but he says that regardless of the difficulties, it is crucial that critical pieces are built in the now, not ten years from now: first up is a safe route for cyclists travelling east/west through the Annex.

“I’m less dogmatic about ‘Must-have-bike-lanes-on-Bloor’ because obviously bike lanes can be contentious,” Wilson said. He added that because increased cycling infrastructure must necessarily disrupt either a traffic lane or street side parking so it can be accommodated, “a logical place to put it is parallel to the subway and it’ll help the subway as well.”

There are several new upgrades to cycling infrastructure planned for implementation this summer in the ward to be finalized at City Council this month.

The signed route on Harbord Street will be completed. Sharrows will be painted in the existing gaps and chevrons will be added through intersections.

Bike boxes—an intersection treatment that reduces conflict between cyclist and right-turning motor vehicles—will be installed on Harbord Street at the major intersections: Bathurst Street, Spadina Avenue, St. George Street, and Queen’s Park Avenue.

Regarding these improvements, Vaughan said, “We’re upgrading that facility to make it a strong cycling route and a safer one. It’s not perfect and you have to do these things in balance with competing interests.”

A potential lane on Bloor Street waits for the completion of a design proposal. As someone who has been involved in cycling advocacy for decades, Wilson is not confident these ongoing talks and plans will ever amount to significant upgrades. “Motorists tend to be pretty vocal and politicians tend to be on the craven side quite honestly for the most part. They’ll say good things about climate change and bike travel, but when it actually comes to putting facilities in where we need them it’s a different matter,” Wilson said.

Vaughan explained the lack of progress for a lane on Bloor Street during his first term. “The work wasn’t done between 2001 and 2006. We’ve started to get the work done. We’ve asked for the detailed plans to come forward. We’re acting on the recommendations, but when I took office in 2006 they hadn’t done the design work yet,” Vaughan said.

He emphasized the need for a strong design over “ad hoc white stripe painting” to accommodate all user groups on Bloor Street. As an example of the design challenges, he referenced the need to ensure the integrity of the pick-up and drop-off area for Senator D. Croll apartments (address), which complicates the design of the bike lane.

North-south trips have more minor upgrades heading to council this month. The proposal for a contra-flow lane on Brunswick Avenue has been deferred for 2010, due to local concerns over pedestrian safety and whether Brunswick Avenue is the best street for the proposed lane.

A new bike lane will be added to Spadina Crescent. The rest of Spadina Avenue from Bloor Street to Bremner Avenue will have the existing white lines, which are less than a metre from the curb, replaced with sharrows.

Additionally, there are bike lanes proposed for portions of Bay Street. The plan for Bay extends from Queen’s Quay West to Yorkville Avenue. Lanes will be included from Queen’s Quay to Front, from Dundas Street to College, and sharrows will be painted for the remainder of the route.

Bike lanes are not the only potential street improvements. The Harbord Village Residents’ Association (HVRA) spent four years working for wider sidewalks on College Street between Spadina Avenue and Bathurst Street and worked to create a trapping maze in the neighbourhood to slow down vehicle speeds along the long residential blocks between Harbord Street and College Street.

Gus Sinclair, who chaired HVRA while they worked for these improvements said, “We had a standing committee that basically fought with the city. The problem at that point was it took fourteen departments all not saying the same information … It was a byzantine Kafkaesque nightmare of trying to get something done, but in the end we got these really big sidewalks.”

Sinclair said the only way to accomplish their goals required “strong residents associations working in tandem with the councillor. Between the two of them you give the councillor political force to approach the individual city departments.”

Perry King/ Gleaner News

By Emina Gamulin

Snowdon Pharmacy (264 Bloor St. W.) has had many tough times in its 104-year history, but the changes the provincial government proposes to cut drug costs may be the biggest challenge the community institution has faced thus far.

The government announced its plans that as of May 15, pharmacies will no longer be able to receive “professional allowances” from generic drug makers, which amount to $800 million a year for Ontario pharmacies.

Contrary to the notion that the rebates are kickbacks, Anneke Allen of Snowdon Pharmacy says they go directly back to the consumer. Every three months, she sends a report to the government proving that the money goes to patient care.

“When some of the elderly get confused, rather than give them ten bottles and have them flush them down the toilet, or only take the pretty pink ones, we’ll make them a blister pack,” said Allen, describing one free service.

She offers other examples. “If you just came from Shoppers and say ‘The pharmacist didn’t have time to talk to me but I need a little more information,’ he [Snowdon] doesn’t kick you out, he pulls out the book hell make the photocopies for you because that’s what a pharmacist does—they care.”

The money has also gone towards things such as providing free deliveries, hiring students in the summer, holding customer appreciation days and flu shot days, amongst other things. “Are you getting the gist of what this money did for pharmacies?” she asked, adding that all these things will go out the window if this becomes law.

“If you want to speak to your pharmacist I’m going to have to say to you, ‘It will be 45 minutes and it will be $25.’”

Allen said that the government led pharmacies along to believe that there would be some sort of a negotiation process.

“We were about two weeks into our campaign saying, ‘Give pharmacists a chance, don’t take away our money’ when the McGuinty government threw their hands up and said. ‘Please call off the dogs we’ll negotiate with you.’”

Next thing they knew, a 16-page report outlining the changes was announced.

“They haven’t seen the full impact of how pharmacies, pharmacists, employees, patients and anyone associated with a pharmacy will react to this.”

MPP Rosario Marchese (Trinity-Spadina) says that while drug costs have been skyrocketing in Ontario and they need to be reduced, he believes the government went about it in an entirely inappropriate way. “I’m not sure they thought it through very well,” he said.

“The problem with this measure is that it is sort of buried in the budget bill, so there are no hearings. People have 30 days to comment on it, but it’s not a reasonable debate where you allow people to come and give their personal stories, and then legislatures on the basis of this say ‘That’s interesting, we never thought of that, how do we deal with some of those problems that we didn’t anticipate?’

“We are worried about how many pharmacies might be affected. Because when you take $800 million to a billion dollars out of the system someone is going to be affected by it. Clearly the dispensing fees are going to have to go up we know that. But will the dispensing fees first be enough for some pharmacists to recover those costs? We suspect in most cases it may not be.”

Snowdon Pharmacy invited Marchese to visit their store but he declined.

Allen says that the $1 increase to the current $6.99 that the government pays them will not be anywhere near enough to cover the difference, and in some cases doesn’t even cover their current drug costs, saying some products cost $10 that the government only gives them $8 for. “So we took a loss from the get go, that’s just one example.”

For now, Snowdon is going to try to keep all their staff but may have to cut hours. Allen is busy setting up a system to show customers exactly what they will have to pay extra for if the changes pass as planned.

Larger pharmacies like Shoppers Drug Mart have already started cutting pharmacy hours and introducing fees for deliveries.

On April 21, pharmacists in white lab coats came in droves to Queen’s Park to protest the proposed cuts. Health Critic Christine Elliott (Whitby-Ajax) brought forth a motion to protect seniors from the increased costs and reduced services that may result from the cuts that day. It was voted down.

When asked about the possibility of Snowdon having to close because of this, Allen replied, “That’s a hard one to say. We’re going to fight the fight.

“As a community pharmacy in this community they fought long and hard to keep it here, so we are going to fight to stay here for them.”

Snowdon Pharmacy has asked those with concerns with the cuts to contact Deputy Minster of Health Helen Stevenson or Premier Dalton McGuinty. Or contact the pharmacy at 416-922-2156

By Jacob Arnfield

The brainchild of original editor Deanne Fisher, The Annex Gleaner originally had a mandate to represent and foster our local community and we’ve stuck to our guns.

This month marks 15 years of the paper being published. Fisher recounted why she felt it necessary to start a local paper back in 1995. When it came to various local concerns she said there were, “Issues that seemed to interest all my neighbours and me and there wasn’t a place where these were being written about. I was also interested in holding our elected officials at the very local level accountable for what they were doing and knowing what they were doing.”

While at the time the Gleaner was the only game in town, competition from larger news conglomerates began in the Annex when they realized they could cash in on the lucrative local market.  But we remain the only independently owned community paper in the neighbourhood.

Brian Burchell, our publisher since the paper’s inception, said a large part of the Gleaner’s staying value could be attributed to being a paper that calls it like it sees it. “We’ve done that frequently and we’ve faced the consequences to the bottom line. It’s not a bottom line business. We’ve done it for all the right reasons. We firmly believe in the craft and we believe in the community we’re serving,” he said.

Another part of our success is a business model of giving people something they didn’t know they wanted, right at their doorstep. “In an iPod driven world, people know what they want to hear, they go get it, they put it on their iPod, they get on the subway,” said Burchell. “We’re providing information to people they don’t know they want to glean.”

Fisher said an early addition to the paper she made—our annual parks reports—is something she’s glad to see is still around. “I think that’s what local coverage is all about,” she said, adding that by focusing on small things like parks, communities can grow strong.

Burchell said he was proudest when the Gleaner was able to successfully champion the cause of local businesses. The most prominent example he mentioned was helping save Dooney’s Cafe (which sadly closed last year) from becoming a Starbucks in the Gleaner‘s early days. The response from the community to our article was so strong that Starbucks backed out and took a full-page ad in the paper “apologizing to the community for daring to try and take away their treasured café.”

“We saved the business and we got to champion community values, which are buy local and not being terrible thrilled about a big corporation pushing the little guy around,” he said.

And our relationship with local businesses is reciprocal. Fisher said one of the reasons the Gleaner was able to flourish is, “there’s a lot of local advertisers who don’t have anywhere else to showcase their mom-and-pop-type businesses and who really are catering to the local community.”

And what would a story trumpeting ourselves be without a little community response? We spoke to a few residents and they said such nice things we felt obligated to share them.

“If someone wants to make a statement or communicate to the community, the Gleaner‘s always been there,” said Neil Wright, a local real estate broker and advertiser since day one. “You have excellent reporting. You’ve always been unbiased. You’ve taken the stories and you’ve looked deeply into them. You’ve had excellent writers and at times you’ve even scooped the national newspapers on stories because of your research.”

Another advertiser, Larry Freedman, a dentist and resident of the Annex for the past 21 years said the Gleaner, “Echoes the neighbourhood and let’s us know what’s going on about some stuff because we’re all living way too busy lives.”

Freedman added, “There’s always an article that I actually read in the Gleaner. There’s a bunch that I glance over, but there’s always something that I read. So that’s cool. I think that’s a good thing, for a community paper. I think that’s actually pretty good.”

Gus Sinclair, former chair, and long time member of the Harbord Village Residents’ Association had equally wonderful things to say. “To have a paper… to tell people about what’s going on in the community with a strictly local interest, it’s incalculable how good it is.”

While the Internet has changed the media landscape irrevocably, it seems community papers like the Gleaner are still thriving where major metropolitans are suffering.

“Community newspapers have fared very well over the recession because they’re hyper local. They are the main communication source in their communities,” said Anne Lannan, executive director of the Ontario Community Newspapers Association.

Still, changes have been necessary over the years. The Gleaner has introduced a web page and has incorporated social media as a communication tool, although Burchell notes that these are still “adjuncts to the primary vehicle.”

“We’ll continue to evolve. We’re not so arrogant to think that we can be in a position to ignore changes going on around us,” he said.

Here’s to the next fifteen years.

Courtesy: Nick Snow

By Perry King

With U of T’s bittersweet playoff loss to against York University Feb. 24, Nick Snow capped a memorable university athletics career that almost did not happen.

The last five years were a maturing experience for Snow. The basketball program gave Snow the chance to see and compete in basketball games worldwide, and connect with other academically gifted athletes. “It’s been fantastic. It’s like I have 12 brothers to share all my experiences with,” said the six-foot-eight centre. “The program has supported me when I’ve been through health problems, and that’s very important to me. I’m not sure where I would be without Varsity Blues Basketball.”

In 2005, after high school, the London, Ont. native was diagnosed with auto-immune hepatitis—a condition where his immune system attacks the liver as if it were not his own. Because of those problems, Snow’s spleen became enlarged.

But it did not stop Snow.

“When I first came to U of T, the doctors said I would never be able to play any contact sport again because it was dangerous to do so with an enlarged—and thus unprotected by the ribs—spleen,” wrote Snow in an email.

After a rough summer, Coach Mike Katz, along with Dr. Doug Richards at U of T’s Sports Medicine Clinic (55 Harbord St.) and Nirtal Shah, the team’s physiotherapist, “helped put together the first ever documented ‘spleen protector,’” said Snow.

Developed from composite materials into a shell, made to fit around his left rib cage and midsection—to protect him and his opponents on the court—Snow was able to play for five seasons.

“He continued to soldier on that way, but that became a given, you know. It certainly didn’t hold him back physically or ability wise,” said Katz.

When Snow played, he was integral part of the offense and defence. This season alone, he was a stable defensive player, averaging 11 points a game and 4.4 rebounds in nine league games.

But this season was an odd one for both the Blues and Snow. Although the team went 9-1 against the CIS and was ranked in the CIS Top Ten for much of the early season, they almost crumbled. They sustained four tough losses to perennial opponents in University of Ottawa and Carleton University. After winning five of their last six OUA games, they let a poor 21–3 start dictate the rest of their playoff game against York, eventually losing 86–79.

“The loss to York was very tough to handle. We had high expectations of ourselves as a team, with lofty goals. Unfortunately, we didn’t attain those goals. I give York credit though, they really came out ready to play, and hit some really tough shots down the stretch that won them the game,” said Snow.

Snow’s season was about as unpredictable. “I first had someone land on my ankle in a pre-season tournament, then after one game back I got the H1N1 flu, and over Christmas I injured my knee, getting a bone bruise that would keep me out about six weeks,” said the resilient Snow.

“He’s been a starter for the last three years, he’s been an integral part of the team. Unfortunately, this year, he was chronically injured and that upset the dynamic of the team and it didn’t make for a good year for him,” said Katz. “It was very disconcerting for everybody.”

For Katz, Snow’s best basketball was about to bloom in his senior year on the team. “Leadership notwithstanding, it’s about the fact that he wasn’t able to play. And we missed his skill and experience; he’s a big guy. He’s our big man, and if we get him to play enough, that’s what this is really about.”

The Blues are losing four starters to graduation. For Katz, the summer is a crucial time to develop many of the returning and incoming players who have developed their skills and gained high performance experience.

As for Snow, he is opting for rest. “For now, I’m just lifting weights, swimming and cycling. I’ll get back into playing a bit more seriously later on, but for now, just healing and training.”

But his love for the game will always be strong, injuries or not. “I’ll always play basketball, to what extent I’m not sure. I would love to work around basketball and sports, in the sports administration side of things, so we’ll see if there are any jobs for me out there!”

[Read more →]

Courtesy: Sharon Weatherall

By Beth Macdonell

“All the skills I have, I use to protect mother earth,” said Danny Beaton as the early morning sun shines across our table at Future Bakery (483 Bloor St. W.).

The photographer, filmmaker, flautist, writer, and teacher has kept an office at the corner of Brunswick Avenue and Bloor Street for 20 years, and it’s obvious when we walk into the bakery that the staff know Beaton.

“I’m going to have my latte,” said Beaton to the smiling young man behind the counter.

Beaton said his office started off as a place for him keep his photo negatives and “was a good place for me to have a telephone.”

Two decades later, Beaton refers to his office as “the headquarters” of his environmental activities.

It’s stacked full, not just with negatives, but a lifetime of memories and work devoted to environmental justice. Pictures of Beaton and colleagues are pinned up on the door and walls from some of his most passionate projects.

On March 26, Beaton was awarded a National Aboriginal Achievement Award for Environment and Natural Resources. As a member of the Turtle Clan Mohawk of Grand River Six Nations Territory, he was one of 14 remarkable Aboriginal Canadians to receive this special distinction, presented on Global TV from Saskachewan.

This Earth Day, Beaton said action is the most important way to protect the environment. “Sacred Mother Earth needs to be protected if we and all species are to survive,” he said.

One of Beaton’s early accomplishments was in 1991, when he successfully organized a gathering of North and South American Natives in Toronto to share their concern for the environment and the need for society to return to spiritual values. With the support of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation, the Toronto Board of Education, and the United Nations Program for the Environment, Beaton and others were able to speak publically and directly to Toronto students about the environment and the need to protect it at a time when the threat of climate change was being scientifically validated, he said.

In 1992 he received the Governor General’s medal for outstanding contributions to his fellow Canadians.

Since then, Beaton hasn’t just worked locally. He’s helped successfully defend great caribou herds in Alaska, help save sacred remains in Florida, worked with the indigenous in the Amazon, and many aboriginal peoples across North America. He’s also given talks and played his flute for audiences as far the United Kingdom and Japan.

Over the past year, Beaton also worked diligently to stop the construction of a landfill site in Tiny Township, Ont., near the shores of Georgian Bay. It’s been a battle between the county, residents and activists for over 20 years and threatened contamination the Alliston Aquifer know for having some of the cleanest and purest fresh water in the world. Some say it was Beaton’s support that made all the difference. People “saw him as a leader. It was almost like he was in the background being very comforting,” said Gisela Benke, a real-estate agent and Tiny Township resident who was opposed to Site 41, on the phone from her home.

Courtesy: Sharon Weatherall

In the summer of 2008, Beaton organized a walk from the site to Queen’s Park to raise awareness. Months later, Danny was arrested at a protest outside the dump, and spent a weekend in jail. Benke said he was never aggressive and “just played his flute.”

“I believe it’s really long overdue,” she said on Beaton receiving the environmental award. “There isn’t anyone more deserving.”

Robertjohn Knapp, one of the elders that came to Toronto back in the 1990s, said he agreed that Beaton was totally deserving of the award. “What’s beautiful about Danny is there is no pretence about him. He just keeps going,” he said on the line from Claremont, California. Knapp said one of his best memories of Danny was two years ago when the two of them walked though the Chattahoochee river in Georgia, what is said to be one of the dirtiest rivers in the United States. He said Danny has an incredible energy, that despite severe heat and humidity, he was able to just “keep walking and talking,” focusing on the task. “That’s why I love him.”

But having this kind of success wasn’t always the case for Beaton. Until the 1980s, Beaton struggled with being addicted to alcohol and drugs. “I was stoned for 19 years… it’s something I’ve struggled with all my life.” Beaton said the turning point was when he “felt like dying.”

“My body couldn’t handle it anymore. I had to re-evaluate my life.”

Beaton said it was after a dream he had of an Orca whale in pain that he was able to follow a path devoted to protecting the planet. “It was a vision of pain and suffering and that’s when my life started.”

Beaton said receiving this award is going to help his work because it reinforces the work of environmentalists and helps spread his message about the environment.

“If society would focus on the positive instead of the negative, there would be more creativity and less destruction,” said Beaton. He said the most important thing now is advice he got from his wife. “We all know what’s going on. We all know the facts now. What we need now is action.”

Beaton said it’s time the Kyoto Protocol gets enforced, action is taken at the international earth summits and fossil fuels, such as the tar sands, are cut back.

But on a personal mission moving forward, Beaton said what’s next is making sure the waters of Georgian Bay are protected. “The great lakes are the largest fresh body of water in the world.”

He said he’s working with the Canadian Environmental Law Association to stop the certificate of approval on Site 41, which would prevent Simcoe council and the Ontario government from restarting construction for a landfill.

He will also continue to work out of his Annex office.

“I have stayed in the Annex because my office is in a respectable area and it is in the heart of Toronto, the people here are down to earth and I have always loved it here.”

By Emily Landau

To outside eyes, Lilly Barnes may be a woman of the world, but her world ends in the Annex.

“My kids tease me—they say I act as if I get a nosebleed north of Dupont,” she chuckles. Barnes has lived in the Annex for almost six decades, where she has thrived as an activist and writer in many forms. This past winter, she published her first novel, Mara, set in Toronto in 1964, a city on the cusp of a worldwide countercultural revolution.

The novel, at once a stylish thriller, historical fiction, and complex character study, tells the story of a young jazz musician’s obsession with Mara DeJong, an enigmatic Russian classical pianist. As the novel gets underway, Mara stands accused of a bizarre crime: cutting off her dead daughter’s earlobes. Some of the biographical details of the title character were based on Barnes’s mother, a graduate of the Leningrad Conservatory, but Barnes insists that Mara’s mysterious, slightly sinister personality bears little resemblance to her mother’s.

“I [didn’t] want to spend years in my mother’s head. Who does?” she muses. “What came to me was that I could write about her life without being in her head if I was using a different narrator.”

As told by Ted O’Sullivan, a jazz pianist struggling to understand Mara, the novel is a classically spun noir that immerses the reader in a vividly remembered Toronto. In addition to the whodunit element, the novel also looks at how history and circumstances were capable of trapping women in post-war Europe.

“To me, the entire trajectory of a very smart, very talented, very, in many ways, courageous woman, got curtailed, got chopped short by historical events,” suggested Barnes. “She goes where her choices are, and it becomes almost perverted.”

Barnes herself has been blessed with a plethora of choices—high achievement seems to run in the family’s female gene pool. “I have one aunt who was a partisan fighter against the Nazis in Germany during the Second World War and [was] decorated for it,” she said. Another aunt was Russia’s first female parachutist. “Isn’t that great? I love that,” she laughed.

Born in Russia to a German father and Russian mother, the family moved to Germany before World War II. “We lived in plain sight, but in hiding,” said Barnes, explaining that although her mother was Jewish, she was not raised as a Jew and didn’t speak German with a Jewish accent, which likely saved the family from detection.

While Barnes prefers not to identify herself in terms of ethnicity, she recognizes that this composite cultural background contributed to shaping the beliefs she has fought for as an activist.

“I’m half-German and half-Jewish. This is something like being half-black and half-white in South Africa during Apartheid days,” she comments. “I know that it’s my particular ethnic mix that … put me into the perfect place in this universe to fight prejudice and racism of any kind.”

After living on an Israeli kibbutz for three years, Barnes came to Canada and landed on Ulster Street. She married a Canadian and briefly studied in Europe, but soon planted her feet firmly in Annex soil with her husband and children, where she studied English literature and philosophy at the University of Toronto. “It was at university that I discovered I had a brain. Nobody had mentioned it to me before,” she said.

Courtesy Lily Barnes

Barnes says she always knew she would be a writer. For its entire run between 1967 and 1996, she was a senior scriptwriter for Mr. Dressup, a show that will make everyone from baby boomers to Gen-Yers nostalgic for the halcyon land of puppets and make-believe. For her body of work on the show, she won a Gemini award in 2007. She has also worked as an arts journalist for CBC Radio and has published a variety of poetry and short stories.

Despite her impressive resume, writing Mara was still brand new territory for Barnes. “I remember writing about a third of it in one summer in a big heat,” she said, adding that the novel went through many incarnations over a number of years. “I was basically learning to write the novel while I was writing the novel.”

In between lucrative writing gigs, Barnes has moonlighted as a strident activist, particularly for local issues affecting her community. For example, she was one of the strongest voices against the creation of the Spadina Expressway, which she argues would have “cut a community in half.” Some ventures were less successful. At one point, she was briefly jailed for protesting the development of a nuclear power plant just east of the city, which ultimately got built.

“It made no difference in the end.” she sighed. But, she said, “I [didn’t] want my grandchildren to ask me, ‘You knew this was happening. What did you do about it?’ You know? I don’t want to ever be in that position, which is why I’m still an activist.”

For Barnes, writing is an outlet for activism—Mr. Dressup, for example, was a conscious exercise in educating children about tolerance. “From the very beginning, we made sure that there was no racism, no sexism, no ageism,” she says proudly. “We basically worked against stereotype and against prejudice of any kind.”

Even Mara, while not an explicitly political text, speaks to causes that were just beginning to gain steam in the 1960s, like feminism, the civil rights movement, and art for art’s sake, as well as emerging issues of post-war culture-clash. “We were drawn to the [novel] because it pushes the social and cultural expectations of Canadians by bringing into question the assumptions we have of cultural backgrounds and social norms,” writes Sandra Huh, Barnes’s editor at Variety Crossing Press, in a statement.

In Barnes’s experience, Canada “is a great place to be any kind of writer,” and for her, no place embodies this spirit better than the Annex. She praises its greenspace, walk-able terrain, and communal atmosphere as creating a fertile breeding ground for the arts.

“The pace [here] is very different than if you’re working or living in the suburbs and do everything by car,” she argues. “And I think that it is a lot more conducive to creative thinking.”

When it came to releasing Mara, she was determined to publishing the novel in Canada. “I wanted to be published where my life is, where my people are,” she said. In a fortuitous turn of events, Barnes became friendly with the owner of a Harbord Street flower shop who was starting an independent press. After publishing some of her poetry, Variety Crossing Press took on Barnes’s novel.

For Barnes, the story of how her novel was published exemplifies the organic community and camaraderie she has experienced in the Annex, where she says she lives as she would in a village.

Mara is the first title in Variety Crossing Press’s Stories that Bind imprint, and Barnes will continue to write and live in her little corner of the Annex, where, she declares, “I can be exactly as I am without bending myself out of shape in any way whatsoever. In the Annex I am most completely me. It’s my turf.”

Courtesy Library and Archives Canada

By Leigh Beadon

Mutual friends arranged that we meet in a respectable downtown restaurant in Toronto. She wore a black, crushed velvet jump suit and a sultry pink tam over hair that was still thick and blonde nearing 70. She stole the wine glasses

That’s how Roy MacGregor described Elizabeth Smart in an Ottawa Citizen column published shortly after her death in 1986. Like many who had met her, he could not claim to know her well, but he found every glimpse of her personality captivating. This was Elizabeth Smart’s way —not just with people, but also with places. Though the Annex only knew her for a year near the end of her life, she made her mark on the neighbourhood as she did on all the places she visited in her extensive travels.

Elizabeth Smart is best known as the author of By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, a poetic story based on her affair with English poet George Barker, the father of her four children.

It was famously described by literary critic Brigid Brophy as one of the “half a dozen masterpieces of poetic prose in the world,” and has remained popular since it was first published in 1945. Smart published a handful of other poetry collections and prose pieces throughout her life, but none would achieve the same degree of fame. Smart’s true poem was her life, which she lived without reserve.

That life would take her from her birth in Ottawa in 1913, to countless places around the world, first as part of her job as a travelling secretary and later in pursuit of George Barker, with whom she fell in love after reading a book of his poems.

It wasn’t until 1983 that she moved to Toronto on a Canada Council writer’s grant and settled in the Annex.

Rosemary Sullivan is the Director of the M.A. Creative Writing Program at the University of Toronto, and wrote the 1991 Smart biography By Heart. A long-time author of fiction and non-fiction, she was part of the Toronto writing community that welcomed Smart with open arms in 1983.

Sullivan, who had met Smart in London a few years earlier, found her an apartment on Lowther Avenue that had recently been vacated by fellow Canadian author Ian Adams.

“She loved it,” Sullivan said, recalling the spacious attic apartment that would become both Smart’s writer’s getaway and her social venue. “It had a balcony that looked out on a tree in the back. She called it a “Tree of Heaven.””

Smart spent a lot of her time outside the apartment—she was an avid gardener, and had written a gardening column for Harper’s Bazaar in London, England, where she lived for most of her life. She also immediately fell in love with the Annex’s culture of yard sales, and would scour them for silverware and decorations and various odds and ends to add to her home. And these hobbies were put to good use, as she would regularly hold parties and invite the many locals she met and befriended every day.

Sullivan recalled the time Smart was courted by an 85-year-old man. Though she was rather charmed by him, Sullivan remembers her simple reason for turning him down: “I can’t imagine standing at the altar and saying ’til death do us part’ without laughing.”

During Smart’s year in Toronto, the Theatre Passe-Muraille on Ryerson Avenue held an evening in her honour. It was hosted by famed Canadian author Michael Ondaatje and attended by an array of Canadian literary greats. Among them was Leonard Cohen, who gave a speech for Smart in which he lovingly compared the pace and style of her prose to an escaped ski.

Smart felt perfectly at home in the community of Canadian authors, not only because of their warm welcome, but because of their writings, with which she felt a certain connection, though she had not lived in Canada for nearly 40 years. She once told Sullivan “they had a voice that was her voice.”

Smart returned to London in the spring of 1984, and died only two years later at the age of 72, but new generations can still get to know her through the vivid and honest prose that was her way of exposing herself to the world. She lived a life guided by passion and art. Whether she was chasing the love of a married man who would become the father of her children, or meticulously tending the flowers in her gardens, she stole many hearts and minds—and perhaps a few wine glasses —along the way.