JAIMIE VERNON – Toronto the Good?

I am a Torontonian. I was born in East York at East General Hospital 50 years ago this coming Tuesday and raised in Scarborough – both originally neighbouring boroughs of Toronto. I’ve always considered these places suburbs of Toronto anyway and it was made official when they were amalgamated into the new City of Toronto in 1998. I worked for the City of Scarborough for 12 years leading up to the annexing of all the Metropolitan Toronto territories (which also included North York, York, and Etobicoke). 44 out of my 50 years have been spent living here. I’ve lived in the shadows both Yorkdale and Cedarbrae malls, on the eastern leg of The Danforth, and in the belly of Malvern when it was still radioactive but before it became a hideout for drug gangs and a haven for grow-ops. I’ve communed at the wolf den on the outskirts of the Metro Toronto Zoo and gone swimming in Lake Ontario at the foot of the Rouge River.

I love my city. Hogtown. The Big Smoke. Not just the Toronto of my youth – when the Canadian National Exhibition and Ontario Place flourished – but the one that exists right now with its crowded skyline, crowded roads, crowded malls, crowded streetcars and buses and subways. Because it is alive. It has achieved the promise of its inviting arms. It has risen above its conservative beginnings where you couldn’t shop or buy booze after 11PM or drag a dead horse down Yonge Street on Sundays.

Toronto is not Detroit or London or Shanghai. I’m sure the people who grew up in those places love them just as madly (well, maybe not Detroit…), but a rot has set into the place I love and it’s fueled by greed and corruption and a win-at-all-costs mentality. You would have had to live under a bridge (down by the Don River in a van) to have missed the Cirque du Robeé this week; A 400lb manchild, who keeps acting out publicly, has assumed the guise of our mayor where a jocular bumpkin had once been; A bully whose fortunes have turned against him at the hands of his own foibles; An enfant terrible lashing out at a City that he once tried to save but will ride out on a rail of the subway system he insists we keep pumping money into.

The villagers have grabbed their pitchforks. The monster’s days are numbered. And all the while, a world outside of our metropolis follows along in wide-eyed wonder at what this mild-mannered (and previously unknown) city will entertain them with next. We are the punchline on late night talk shows. We occupy space in newspapers and news feeds around the world. All for the wrong reasons.

The City has suffered more public humiliation since amalgamation than it has in all the years since the first surveyors staked out this territory in 1791. We had a mayor (Mel Lastman) that was a furniture store huckster http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7XpCYgJq9k who called in the Canadian army after a large snowstorm crippled the city in 1999 and then publicly announced his fear of being boiled in a cauldron on a junket to Africa; We had a mayor  (David Miller) that let the unions hold Toronto hostage not once but twice on back-to-back garbage strikes which left us smelling like all of Manhattan on a Friday afternoon in the summer. He also had the misfortune of being mayor when the SARS epidemic nailed our tourism doors shut and during the North American east-coast blackout.

Now we’re dealing with a rampaging intoxicated bull that allegedly ingests all manner of illicit substances and women’s private parts on his own time/dime and then heads to work to make decisions on City policy. He’s apparently saved us millions as taxpayers. He’s now cost us our dignity as citizens.

The international media has put Ford’s visage and Toronto’s on the map simultaneously. It’s an unwanted beacon of notoriety. Though, the tourist trade might just rebound from people wanting to get their pictures taken at the sites of Mayor Rob Ford‘s various adventures: the parking lot where he took paperbags of drugs from a consort, the tree where he urinated after the handoff, the sidewalk where a woman allegedly threw a glass of a disputed substance at him, the foyer where a cameraman smacked him in the head with a TV camera, the Pride Parade Route where he refused to appear, the Santa Clause Parade Route where he was barred from participating this week, and of course, his home in Etobicoke where ‘This Hour Has 22 Minutes’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5t-r2OHoWU punked him and a Toronto Star reporter peeped at him over a backyard fence. And the highlight of the tour – staggering in the drunken footsteps along Danforth Avenue following the path of righteousness of His Worship during the ‘Taste of the Danforth’ Festival. You’ll be able to see it all in a brand new automobile called The Ford Fiasco^TM. [Prostitute, crack cocaine, breathalyzer and 24 of vodka not included].

I am embarrassed to be a Torontonian today. And it takes a lot to humiliate me more than the true losers of our town, The Toronto Maple Leafs, ever have. We’re so much better than what the world is now seeing on the Ford Follies Insta-Cam every night on the 6 and 11PM news cycles.  NSFW –http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgci_JRRUWc

We’ve got a world-reknowned theatre culture driven by the visionary patron saints of the city, The Mirvish’s, a film festival (TIFF) rivaled only by Cannes and Sundance, three major league sports franchises (in various states of winning/losing), phenomenal restaurants, high-end fashion and shopping districts, hotels, museums (‘David Bowie Is…’ currently occupies the AGO), a brand spanking new Aquarium courtesy of Ripley’s, a space needle that kicks the crap out of Seattle’s called the CN Tower, and one of the greatest music scenes in the world – intertwined around College, Spadina and Queen Streets respectively.

On any given night you can walk from Union Station to Bloor Street along Yonge Street and see a musical at the Panasonic or Ed Mirvish Theatres, shop at the Eaton’s Centre, stop at the Hard Rock Café (where Toronto’s own Greg Godovitz of Goddo has a leopard skin jacket on display next to Prince’s ‘Purple Rain’ frock), catch a concert at Massey Hall or Dundas Square, and eat at any number of restaurants – my kids love the 1950s throwback diner Johnny Rocket’s in Dundas Square.

The rest of Canada hates us because we think we’re the centre of the universe. Right now, we are…and I don’t blame them for laughing at us. We deserve this mayor. He represents our apathy, our greed and our hubris. It’s too soon to tell if we’ll be humbled by this. The mayor may not smarten up but we better – and vote in someone with moxy, savvy, and smarts enough to rebuild not only our aging infrastructure (we have a highway on the lakefront that is about to collapse) but our reputation on the world stage.

For purely nostalgic reasons or not, I long for the Toronto I was raised in. It worked – for good and bad (I could do without the homophobia that was latent in the 1960s and 1970s, f’rinstance, and the rampant erasure of our architectural heritage). But I don’t have rose-coloured glasses. I can see we are not that city anymore. And we won’t get fooled again. We promise.

I highly recommend the Vintage Toronto page on Facebook for those interested in the Toronto of old. It’s an ongoing visual history of what has changed in our great city dating back to the 1800s. https://www.facebook.com/VintageToronto

Send your CDs for review to this NEW address: Jaimie Vernon, 4003 Ellesmere Road, Toronto, ON M1C 1J3 CANADA

=JV=

Jaimie’s column appears every Saturday.

Contact us at: dbawis@rogers.com

Jaimie “Captain CanCon” Vernon has been president of the on again/off-again Bullseye Records of Canada since 1985. He wrote and published Great White Noise magazine in the ‘90s, has been a musician for 35 years, and recently discovered he’s been happily married for 17 of those years. He is also the author of the Canadian Pop Music Encyclopedia and a collection of his most popular ‘Don’t Believe A Word I Say’ columns called ‘Life’s A Canadian…BLOG’ both of which are available at Amazon.com or http://www.bullseyecanada.com