Category Archives: toronto

Three Women

toronto

The world has lost three incredible women this past week.

Anita Roddick, Body Shop founder, made the world a better place thanks to her vision and tenacity. A friend of mine who met her while working at a Body Shop in Toronto says “her sense of humour was exceeded only by her thoughtfulness,” and that he was “deeply affected by the intelligence, consideration and principled character she lived by…a character I have always regarded as an example.” Elizabeth May worked with her as well, and shares some nice reflections on her blog.

Madeleine L’Engle was one of the first authors I ever read, and remains one of my favourite. I took her flagship A Wrinkle In Time with me on a canoe trip to the French River in August 1996 and it got drenched in a rainstorm while we were staying at Five Finger Rapids. I still have the same copy sitting on my bookshelf, wrinkled indeed. A few years later my parents gave me a copy of Glimpses of Grace, a collection of L’Engle’s daily reflections on life and spirituality. Got me through some tough times in high school. James Bow remembers her wonderfully in this post.

Last night, my mom called to let me know that another storyteller and a personal friend of our family, Helen Porter, had died suddenly from a combination of an infection and leukemia. (I don’t mean “storyteller” in the general sense; that’s exactly what she did, professionally.) The first time I remember seeing her was as a child during Toronto’s First Night new year’s celebrations, entertaining kids in Roy Thompson Hall. Later, she agreed to come up to my summer camp and run storytelling workshops for the campers there. The last time I got to see her speak was about a year ago, again in Toronto, when she told true stories from her own life for the Impatient Theatre Company’s Munchausen improv show. Whether she was performing for children or adults, telling a story from ancient times, Shakespeare, or her own life, she was always captivating and moving.

Beyond her own amazing talents, she was also extremely generous and kind to others. At my campaign launch in December 2005, she pulled me aside and gave me such warm and genuine encouragement that I’m sure it contributed to my ability to maintain strength and confidence over the weeks that followed. She leaves a void, and will be missed.

Today’s AQHI Has Decreased From 3 To 4

air, toronto

Crossposted from Torontoist.

It’s been about a month now since Toronto (in conjunction with the province and the feds) launched the Air Quality Health Index (AQHI) pilot project. And yet, very few Torontonians seem to understand what the AQHI actually means for their health and behaviour on any given day. Given that, a closer look is in order.

Unfortunately, just like Toronto’s air, the closer one looks the less clear things become. Listening to the radio in the morning, it’s easy to get the impression that the AQHI replaces the old Air Quality Index (AQI), which is where we used to get the binary “smog alert/no smog alert” announcements. Not so, Toronto Health tells Torontoist, “The Air Quality Index (smog alert) is a scale that measures the quality of the air based on single highest pollutant, whereas the new Air Quality Health Index (AQHI) measures the combined health risks/effects of multiple pollutants. In other words, the two indices are not comparable and cannot and should not be linked.”

Don’t worry, that doesn’t make a tonne of carbon sense to us either, but basically it means that it’s impossible to say, for example, “a 5 under the new system is equivalent to a smog alert under the old system.” Add to the confusion that, as Mike Smith points out in NOW, a high Air Quality rating actually means we’re experiencing low air quality. “One wonders,” speculates Smith, “if the rather more obvious name, the Pollution Index, was avoided because of its effects on tourism.”

Or perhaps its effects on reelection. The federal government, which is spearheading this initiative, has promised to create “clean air” (which many critics have suggested is a deliberate attempt to try and distract the public from its inaction on the climate crisis). Of course, it’s very hard to convince people the air is clean when they’re experiencing a “smog alert” every other day. Hearing that Air Quality is at a 4 or a 5 makes everything sound much cleaner. On Wednesday last week, for example, the AQHI was at a 3, even though there was a smog alert in effect. The smog alert went unreported by at least one major Toronto radio station, which instead just informed their listeners of the AQHI.

If you’re interested in the specifics of the AQHI 1-10+ scale, there’s a table on the government’s site. Apparently last Wednesday’s smog day represented “ideal conditions for outdoor activities.”

A list of all AQHI numbers reported to date does not appear to be available, but our observation has been that it’s tended to stay around 3-5 so far. Again, that makes some political sense. Just as the American government’s terrorism risk index can never fall below “elevated” (not only is it in the Republican party’s interest to keep its citizens afraid of an attack, it would be a disaster for this administration if an attack took place while the alert level was low), it’s politically disadvantageous for the AQHI to ever rise too high. There’s therefore reason to be at least a bit suspicious of what levels of toxic and carcinogenic chemicals our government has decided are “safe” for us to breathe.

On the other hand, some individuals are actually more “at risk” of respiratory problems than others, and they’ll hopefully find this new system useful in predicting when they’ll experience the most difficulty breathing. If the system works as it’s supposed to, it could help save lives by giving asthmatics, for example, more warning of when it’s safe for them to go outside.

That being said, ultimately Toronto Public Health says, “it is our intention that the AQHI will replace the existing Air Quality Index (smog alert) once it is fully implemented in Ontario.” A few years after that and maybe we’ll stop using the word “smog” altogether. Is our tinfoil hat on a bit too tight, or is possible that at least one motivation behind the AQHI is to eliminate smog though Orwellian “newspeak” methods, rather than real ones?

Positive First Steps in Toronto

climate crisis, toronto,

Crossposted from Torontoist.

All of the controversy last week over city council’s non-decision regarding new taxes overshadowed another story with equal (if not more) importance. Just as a one-vote margin of defeat for a mayor is rare, so too is a unanimous vote for anything other than ceremonial or housekeeping motions. And yet, that’s exactly how Toronto’s climate change plan came to be adopted last Monday night, without a single dissenting voice. Given the importance of dealing with the climate crisis, the relative media-silence surrounding the city’s plan, and the fact that the wrong climate solutions can actually lead to even bigger problems, Toronto’s approach deserves a closer look.

First of all, it’s hard to find fault with the city’s objectives. The “Climate Change, Clean Air and Sustainable Energy Action Plan: Phase 1” [pdf highlights] sets emissions reduction targets from 1990 levels of 6% by 2012 (the Kyoto target), 30% by 2020 and 80% by 2050. Those are very ambitious targets (Toronto calls them the “most ambitious in North America”) and they will not be easy to meet. They’re also the same targets that most climatologists agree are necessary in order to avoid the worst of climate change. To put those numbers in context, in 1990—chosen as a base year because it was the founding year of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)—Toronto’s emissions were approximately 22 million tonnes of eCO2 (carbon dioxide equivalent) per year. Since then, Canada’s emissions have risen by 30%, which now puts Toronto’s emissions at around 28.6 million tonnes. In other words, what we’re really talking about is getting our emissions down to 20.7 million tonnes by 2012, 15.4 million tonnes by 2020, and 4.4 million tonnes by 2080.

The report’s many recommendations are broken down into twelve categories. Basically, here’s what the city hopes to accomplish.

The Live Green Toronto strategy is designed to provide incentives for individuals and communities, primarily to reduce their own energy consumption, but also to take other action to reduce their impact on our life support systems (sometimes referred to as “the environment”) such as installing green roofs and retrofitting old buildings. The details are vague and presumably yet to be worked out, but there’s a suggestion that the incentives would be in the form of loans to be repaid by the energy savings of new projects. This is also the section that contains the call to “investigate banning the use of two stroke engines” like the ones in some leaf blowers.

The most encouraging ideas in the Green Business Toronto section are the promotion of local food production and an eco-roofs program which would help businesses save money by reducing their air conditioning use, while also reducing the amount of unfiltered water that ends up in storm sewers (and, ultimately, our watershed). There’s also a call to “develop a business plan for a model green-industry business park,” which seems too ambiguous to get excited about just yet.

The city plans to Become the Renewable Energy Capital of Canada by installing small-scale renewable energy systems (including solar, wind, geothermal, and biogas) on 1500 city buildings and landfill sites. Other ideas include making it a legal right for homeowners to install renewable energy generation on their properties, and expanding deep lake water cooling capacity by 20%.

Given last week’s discouraging TTC news, it’s particularly hard to read the plan’s Sustainable Transportation strategy without rolling your eyes. The ideas are there (implement the bike plan, implement the transit city plan, create a new plan to make all the old plans work with each other), but we’ve heard it before. Some (slightly) newer ideas, on the other hand, include shifting taxis and limos to hybrids by 2015 (though you have to wonder why it would take that long) and investigating “a road pricing regime,” which we’re pretty sure is code for tolls.

At 17%, Toronto has a decent amount of tree canopy, but Doubling the Tree Canopy to 34% is still a neat idea that would pay real dividends. Remarkably, this section of the summary report uses 89 words to explain that this will be accomplished by planting more trees.

By the time we get to the Building Partnerships for Change section, things are starting to sound particularly fluffy. Build partnerships with business…invite stakeholders to participate…discuss forming research partnerships…you get the idea. Needs to be done, boring to read about.

Inspiring Action is the name of the plan’s public awareness strategy. The one idea here is to organize a charette to get Torontonians’ input on how to use the internets to spread the word.

Preparing for Climate Change deals with adaptation, which is where things necessarily get a bit more somber. In short, there is a certain level of climate change that we can no longer avoid, so even while we do everything we can to prevent things from getting even worse, we have to deal with the reality of what we’re already done. The city will plan for “response mechanisms [to] meet identified environmental changes, including health related impacts.”

All these ideas are well and good, but they’re pretty useless without Regular Monitoring and Reporting. The city will set benchmarks for progress and report on if they’re being met or not. (But who will report on the reporters?)

Filed under “lead by example” is the Greening City Operations strategy. Toronto will connect City Hall, Toronto Police Headquarters, and Union Station to the deep lake cooling system, phase out the use of incandescent heat light bulbs and improve on the existing Green Fleet Plan (which seeks to improve fuel efficiency in city vehicles).

Program Funding for all of this will add up to approximately $85 million, and be targeted towards a number of specific funds and projects.

Finally, Planning for a Sustainable Energy Future tackles community energy planning (as opposed to just renewable energy generation and individual building retrofits as mentioned above).

Ok, so there are a lot of words there. The big question, of course, is will these strategies and tactics accomplish the stated objectives? While we haven’t crunched the numbers, it seems clear that there are enough good ideas here, if properly executed, to meet and probably exceed the initial Kyoto target of 6% reductions by 2012. That’s a good start, and assuming we hold the feet of every single councilor who voted for this (i.e., all of them) to the fire to make sure it gets done, we can feel proud of this plan. In that case, our positive example—proof that emissions can be reduced in smart ways that don’t destroy the economy—will make it harder and harder for the federal government to ignore both the threat of the climate crisis and the great opportunity that its solutions present.

On the other hand, this is only the beginning. There will be many phases to go after “phase 1” is done. And just like any weight-loss program, the last pounds (er, tonnes) are the hardest to lose. We can’t buy into the marketing hype that tries to convince us that getting down to just 4.4 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions in the next 43 years will be easy, especially since Toronto’s population is projected to grow dramatically in that time. But it is possible, and it is necessary.

Earth To Toronto: Stop Driving So Much

climate crisis, toronto,

James Lovelock is a scientist famous for advancing the Gaia hypothesis, which basically states that the Earth is one giant self-regulating organism. Some (most notably Agent Smith in The Matrix) have looked at the destructive force we’ve chosen to inflict on the Earth through this lens and compared the human race to a virus. Of course, when our bodies become infected with a virus, we raise our core temperature in an effort to burn it off.

From today’s Globe and Mail:

The heat and humidity yesterday may have played a role in the collapse of an express lane on Highway 401 near Islington Avenue just after 3:30 p.m., police say. It remained closed last night.