Author archive

First time I’ve met with Shadow Cabinet in person. A collegial and productive meeting, preparing for the convention, preparing to absorb policy changes and preparing for a possible upcoming election.

Last night, my daughter and I put on our salwar kameez and abandoned her father and his achy back to enjoy ourselves at the South Asia Festival on Gerrard Street between Greenwood and Coxwell.  As usual, it featured wonderful music and lively dancing in the background, delicious street food smells spreading all over the street and plenty of activities for families to enjoy.  My daughter spent a few minutes pawing through a bin full of bangles to select a dozen for fifty cents.  Mango shakes are wonderfully refreshing on a hot summer day.  The festival continues today if you still want to check it out.

South Asia Festival continues
Sunday, 2010 July 18, noon to 11pm
Gerrard Street, east of Greenwood to Coxwell
free

I’ve been spending a lot of time recently organizing the climate change conference to be held at Hart House next month.  We have a great lineup of speakers to lay out the challenges we face, discuss the range of possible solutions and promote the cooperation we will need.

Climate Change Conference 2010
Unflinching science.  No-spin solutions.
Friday – Sunday, 2010 August 13 – 15
Hart House, University of Toronto

Agenda, speakers, and registration: http://ccc-2010.ca
RSVPing on Facebook will help spread the word: http://facebook.com/event.php?eid=140438325981746

The conference is a non-profit, non-partisan event open to all.

Just wanted to wish everyone a Happy Canada Day today.  Between going out to meet people this morning and this evening, I hope to drop by on the action both on Gerrard Street and at Riverdale Park East and celebrate this great country we live in.

Come out and join the Green contingent marching in Pride this Sunday.  Celebrate the Green Party’s long support for gay rights.  We were the first party to support same-sex marriage and the first to have an openly gay leader.  We continue to advocate for gay rights and equal treatment.  Meet us by 12 noon at the latest on Bloor Street at Ted Rogers way.  We will have new campaign t-shirts available to wear or purchase.  Bring water, comfortable walking shoes, skimpy clothes, green body paint, water guns and noisemakers.  Be prepared to get wet.   Have fun!

Pride Parade 2010
Sunday, 2010 July 4, 11:45 am
Bloor Street at Ted Rogers Way

If you arrive late or cannot find us, call Rebecca at 905-999-5479

The main item on the G-20 agenda was whether to cut debts or invest in more financial stimulus, with Stephen Harper strongly advocating the need to cut debts.

We need to cut debts.  Large public debts leave governments at the mercy of interest rates.  Double the interest rates and suddenly the debt load becomes completely unmanageable and we’re worried about our credit rating, forcing us into all kinds of nasty measures like privatizing health care, education and even basic services like water.  So in the interest of securing high quality public services, we need to make sure we keep the debt down.   The problem is that Stephen Harper proposes to cut debts not by raising taxes or trimming perverse subsidies to favoured industries, but by attacking the very services I desperately want to protect.  I have no interest in cutting the debt to have more money to fork over to the oil industry while basic services get gutted.     Read more »

I was locked inside College Park for an hour this afternoon after rioters smashed the windows there.  There were about 200 frustrated and fearful people with me, including some cranky children and a tearful young teen who just wanted to get home.  What the perpetrators accomplished was to anger a lot of people and justify the massive police presence that until this point had just seemed like an embarrassing exaggeration.     Read more »

This evening I attended the launch of Canada’s climate calendar.  It’s an interactive tool you can see online which compares Canada’s per-capita emissions with those of other countries in the world.  It is horrifying.     Read more »

Last week, I attended a speech by former Governor General Ed Schreyer, who predicted that the moratorium on deep-sea drilling would be shortlived – embraced briefly while attention focused on the devastation of the gulf but enduring only to the time that fuel prices began increasing again.     Read more »

I have been watching in horror as events have been unfolding in Thailand.  The world should have insisted that the Thai government exercise restraint as tensions escalated over the weekend.  It is outrageous to respond to a largely peaceful protest by sending in the army to break it up.  Instead we stood by as dozens of civilians were gunned down.     Read more »

I’m off to meet people in the Pocket this morning, and I’ll have a family dinner tonight.  Be good to your moms today and I hope all the mothers out there have a wonderful day with their families.  Bundle up if you’re going out to the Spit because it’s a cold day.

It has been many years since I’ve had a moment of true pride in my government but yesterday I had such a moment.     Read more »

“Send forth your spirit,
And renew the face of the Earth.”

Missa Gaia
Sunday, 2010 May 2, 7:30 pm
Eastminster United Church
310 Danforth (at Jackman)

“Missa Gaia” is a contemporary ecumenical and ecological mass in celebration of Mother Earth.  This dynamic choral work sets traditional mass and biblical texts to lyrical melodies with vibrant rhythms from African, Brazilian and American gospel traditions and interweaves the voices of wolf, whale and harp seals.     Read more »

I’m being a sore loser today.  I helped Andrew James this morning at the Danforth clean-up event.  We didn’t win.     Read more »

I’ve knocked on (nearly) every door in the riding and I’m starting all over again with a new postcard (in May).

Here’s the new design for 2010:

Here’s the the text of the 2010 card:     Read more »

A few days ago, I attended the meeting about the new streetcar yards at Leslie and Lakeshore and the route the new cars are expected to take.  As with most public consultations these days, the format was pre-determined to minimize disruption, opposition and effective input.  It’s a veneer of public accountability masking a process that’s alienating and distant.     Read more »

On Thursday, March 11, WATERFRONToronto held an open house to discuss their proposed new soil recycling facility on the Portlands.  I’m cautiously supportive of this one, with some reservations.

The good news is that all the soil in question is already on the Portlands.  The other good news is that it’s being cleaned up from its current toxic state in order to enable more human uses of the Portlands area.  This includes making way for the Don Mouth revitalization project that’s really kind of inspired.     Read more »

Public Consultations into the New Streetcar Yards at Leslie/Lakeshore
Thursday, 2010 April 8, 6:30-9pm
Fire Academy, 895 Eastern Ave

On Tuesday, March 9, I was invited to help out and listen in to a meeting where Leslieville residents got together to begin forming an association.  The issue that galvanized the community into action was the proposed new streetcar yards at Leslie and Lakeshore on the Ashbridges Bay Treatment Plant site.  It was a packed hall and strong opinions were voiced from many angles.

The plan is to have almost 100 streetcars leave the new site every morning between 5 and 7 am and slowly spread throughout the city, way up to St. Clair, downtown to King Street, and all along Queen, College/Carlton/Gerrard, Dundas, Spadina and so on.  The Connaught and Roncesvalles yards will also be maintained, though the Connaught yards will have to be changed to accommodate the new design.  The streetcars will be four times the length of the current non-articulated models, or double the length of the articulated designs on the street today.     Read more »

I just attended the opening of the Green Party of Canada Economic Summit taking place this weekend at Ryerson University.  Peter Victor, who I greatly admire, gave an updated version of his talk about an economy not focused on growth.  As always, I left inspired.

An economic model that respects resource limits recognizes that once we have provided the fundamentals required to live comfortably, we should stop striving for more and more things and start putting our efforts into building relationships, and spending time with our families and friends.     Read more »

I attended the Canadian Organic Growers Toronto conference today, and could easily write a dozen posts.  I’ll write about just one speaker, Percy Schmeiser, who I had first listened to perhaps a decade ago or more at a Toronto Vegetarian Association event.  In those days I was not a food activist at all.  I just liked vegetables and wanted to be informed about what I was eating and feeding my family.  So I went to Mr. Schmeiser’s talk then not necessarily expecting to be convinced of the harm of genetically modified foods.

Mr. Schmeiser’s story is one of profound and infuriating wrong.  When I first heard him speak, he was embroiled in a legal battle with Monsanto, which had identified their genetically modified crop on his field, and demanded that he pay for using their patented product.  As a heritage seed developer, he certainly didn’t welcome Monsanto’s “contribution”, which had contaminated all his fields and destroyed 50 years worth of work.  All he did was refuse to pay.  And in retribution, Monsanto dragged him right up to the Supreme Court, counting on the fact that he would succumb to the immense pressure of overwhelming legal bills.     Read more »

Wishing you a happy and prosperous Valentine’s Day and a romantic and sexy Lunar New Year!

[Tiger Valentine image courtesy of Charlene Chua Illustration.]

Over a year ago, I was directed to a scientific paper by two scientists from NASA’s Goddard Institute, Pushker A. Kharecha and James Hansen, which compared our known reserves of fossil fuels with the carbon we can safely burn without undue risk of destabilizing our climate. This paper concluded that in order to contain atmospheric carbon dioxide below 450 ppm, which would raise global temperatures about 2 degrees above preindustrial levels, we would need to cut down on our use of coal and unconventional oil (like the tar sands), as well as emissions from deforestation.     Read more »

These are hard times for those of us working on climate change – scientists, environmentalists, policymakers and others.  The breathless rumours about the death of climate change science from denialists are not only premature, however, they are contrary to what anyone working in the field knows and understands.  The real question is whether we will embrace the science in time to prevent catastrophe.

I was studying Anthropology at the University of Toronto in the early 1980s.  At that time, Richard Leakey and Donald Johanson were embroiled in a bitter feud about the significance of Australopithecus afarensis.  Johanson had found remains of the 3.2 million year old hominid and was sure that it was a human ancestor.  Leakey was initially unwilling even to acknowledge that it deserved its own species name.  Johanson was still fighting off accusations of professional misconduct because he publicized his findings in a popular magazine and gave the specimen the catchy name “Lucy” before submitting his research to peer-review.  Some old textbooks that we used still referred to Piltdown Man, which had been revealed as a fraud four decades before.     Read more »

Just got the news.  Best wishes for a speedy recovery!