Neville ParkThe BELLS have resumed. I should have been looking up what item the union is here for but I am fighting the urge to nap.
Perhaps of interest to fedi given all the Europeans and Brits talking about heat right now: Toronto inching its way towards a maximum indoor temperature bylaw. We have standards for how warm a building must be in the winter, but not how cool it must be kept in the summer.
Right, now back to speeches on the Development Charge Reduction Program $1.5 billion thing.
Perks is speaking about what he calls "the Great Download" (Toronto, and also Canadian municipalities in general, taking on increasing responsibilities for transit, social housing, etc.) He praises Chow, Conforti for "reversing" the trend (but falls short of pointing out that this is a one-time thing and doesn't address the unsustainable situation).
Now Holyday has several motions. Great. 🙄
(Look, I'm not getting paid enough to be nice to Holyday. I am not in fact being paid for this at all. If anyone sent me any money, I would spend it on stationery and keep being mean to Holyday.)
In addition to what @GraphicMatt says (https://mastodon.social/@GraphicMatt/116807104328769219), I also think Holyday is a bit put out that the $1.5 billion does not go directly into the pockets of developers. Like, he wants it to be a dollar-for-dollar rebate.
Nunziata thinks Council should be grovelling at the governments' feet to thank them for the money and get on with it instead of debating.
Carroll agrees heartily and says she isn't going to tell a cautionary tale about "what if the economy recovers" [and all of this, presumably, was for nothing]. "I have a different cautionary tale, the one where we mistakenly adopt Cllr Holyday's motions." BURN!
Carroll finishes by calling Holyday's motions "quite frankly goofy".
Cllr Alejandra Bravo points out that if the federal and provincial governments hadn't walked away from building and funding social housing, we wouldn't have the homelessness crisis we do today.
"When I was a young staffer around this Council chamber and we had a thing called Section 37…" Cllr Morley reminisces. Ah, Section 37, I knew ye well
typical city councillor: "finally, we can shower developers with money in exchange for all the good they have done our city. in fact we're not giving them ENOUGH money"
me: "you're lucky you developers aren't getting the guillotine"
And it's Cllr Colle with a pointless and cantankerous motion!!!
(He is aggrieved about land sitting vacant and people don't build on it and you can't make them hurry up.)
"You can pass all the legislation in the world, you can't get people to pay $600,000 for a shoebox," he says.
He also points out that residents in development meetings will be mad at everything no matter what you do (a complaint of Cllr Cheng's).
All this is quite true and relatable but unfortunately I fail to see how it is important to bring up right now in regard to this specific item, let's get you to bed Zeyde, etc.
Cllr Chow says she will have a motion recognizing union workers (but first, her speech). I choose to believe she didn't plan this ahead of time and this is just to make it up to the LiUNA members for making them wait so long and missing the soccer game.
Chow eventually segues into a speech about the dangers of construction work (doing all the building of developments we've all been talking about), and how many workers are poorly protected and poorly supervised. The LIUNA members clap and are told off by Nunziata (bingo). The next time, they appropriately wave their hands, with varying interpretations of "wave".
Oh no, Holyday has Questions. Good thing he's not here in the council chamber or he might get booed.
(Chow's motion would have the City Manager negotiate Voluntary Recognition Agreements with industrial-commercial-instututional construction unions for residential development.)
Holyday is like, but won't less housing be bulit?
Chow's like, I don't know how that'll affect it, we already have the Fair Wage Policy ("and I know you've never supported it," she adds in an aside). See, everyone likes being mean to Holyday!
Cllr Burnside is like, so you're saying non-unionized workers suck?! Does the Crosstown suck?!
Chow: I don't know if those workers were unionized, that was a Metrolinx project??
He wants to know if the motion can include all unions. Chow is like, no that is not a friendly amendment.
Alt text'd
Holyday says Chow's motion is out of order as it has nothing to do with the agreement. Speaker Nunziata is like, well, I think it's in order. Holyday CHALLENGES THE CHAIR! (Insert idk some anime battle fight music.)
Council now votes on whether to uphold the chair 22-4. Nunziata jokes ("jokes"?), "Now I know who my friends are." Everyone laughs. Burnside: "Come on Speaker, that's ridiculous."
Now Cheng is the next to be like, are you saying other unions suck??? They don't deserve recognition?? I'm just asking questions!!!
Chow (who will have worked out this whole thing with the exact unions involved and is not inclined to rewrite it on the fly) is annoyed and is like, well, this is about building homes, if you know other unions doing this stuff you want to add, go ahead and suggest an amendment.
Holyday has another point of order. Nunziata (not recognizing his voice): "Perruzza has a point of order?"
Cllr Perruzza, speaking about himself in the third person: "Perruzza does not have a point of order. Perruzza wants to vote."
"I hear these voices and I don't know who they're coming from," complains Nunziata. Admittedly, Cllr Holyday's mic is not of the best quality. Okay, now we're voting.
Ah, finally the motions are up on the item page.
- Holyday's motion 1 fails, 2-24.
- Holyday's motion 1b fails, 7-19.
- Holyday's motion 1c fails, 5-21.
- Holyday's motion 1d carries 20-6? Uh, OK.
- Colle's motion on time limit for approved yet not commenced developments carries 19-6. Perks complains, "Every property in Toronto is zoned for 4 storeys!" (Does that mean they're "vacant"?) Colle is like, you know what I mean! Perks is like, there's no "use it or lose it" rule. They are still bickering even after vote is done.
- Chow's motion re: unions carries 22-4.
- Perks and Colle are still arguing.
- Parts 1-3 of the item carry unanimously. The rest (the actual money bits) carries 25-1 (no guesses who's against).
"Now you can wave your hands," Nunziata advises the union members.
There is a ten-minute break while, I guess, press scrums and the LiUNA members leaving (note: it was LIUNA in the motion, I have mostly written it LiUNA, but taking a closer look at their vests it is "LiUNA!183"), which is not enough time to dash down for a cup of tea or anything, especially now that I would have to go through the metal detector again. Now straight through till 8:30 PM.
(Re: what @GraphicMatt says about procedure, Nunziata probably should have put some more thought into that…but, as it turn out, she really is just one of those councillors who generally goes along with what the mayor wants, regardless of who the mayor is. Like I thought she had a conservative bias but it turns out that's because the previous mayors were conservative.)
Back to business. Cllr Carroll answers Nunziata with her mouth full ("I found some chips in my desk, they've been there for years").
Cllr Malik's motion on whatever it is isn't ready yet. Carroll wanders to the back row of seating to offer a chip to Perks. "They're still edible! It says June 2, 2026!"
Perks, Matlow, and lobbyist Kim Wright are incredulous. "It's after June 2!"
On to RAIN BARRELS. They are about to pass it with a show of hands when Holyday wants to speak. I groan.
He thinks that because they're so heavily subsidized, and they were taken so fast, the City should "improve upon the program" by charging more for them.
All I have to say is that this year I got my building's rain barrel fixed up and in working order again, and it has been pretty fun. Free water, what's not to like?
Cllr Matlow held an item about the Dangerous Dog Tribunal. He recalls that by now there was supposed to be a report on improved enforcement of leash laws. Municipal Licensing & Standards is sheepish. "We just…didn't find an opportunity. We are always able to provide any data as requested."
Matlow, politely (paraphrased): Excuse me but what the fuck?
MLS: uhhhhh we'll do it next term.
Matlow: …okay fine I guess
Note: Did You Know? The Open Data Portal contains a log of Council-requested reports and progress thereon!
Cllr Crisanti is asking a bunch of questions about dog bylaws which are already answered by this T-shirt could be answered by reading the report or just, like, the City website
Matlow: "When Council decides that there's a priority that it is requesting staff to attend to, on behalf o the people of Toronto, it's not up to staff to decide whether or not it is a priority to be acted on. It's not how the system works, in a representative democracy. If it's something they don't want to act on, that's not good enough.
if the volume of work is overwhelming…it would be far better for them to just come and say that… (para.) There should be some tracker on reports and where they're supposed to be."
Me (wildly gesticulating and barely suppressing my cries) THERE IS!!!
He can't hear me, he has his AirPods in he has his back to me and also nobody looks at me ever
Cllr Bravo credits Cllr Fletcher's "dogged" leadership (I groan) for making progress enforcing dog safety bylaws.
"What are some of the new AI features in this 311 intake remodelling?" asks Cllr Myers.
Staff: "The first phase will be a simple chatbot—"
I am about to up and fucking leave when, to my surprise, I actually get Matlow's attention and tell him about the Report Request Log, and he is very nice when I cannot actually bring myself to say I am doing fine.
Oh boy, if I were a councillor I would have SO MANY FUCKING QUESTIONS about this chatbot. Like: exactly what model are you going to use? Is it using RAG or what? What giant American company are you paying for this? How does it use/augment traditional search results? Would it be cheaper to just fucking reorganize your fucking website so people can find stuff, which they complain they can't?
Meanwhile Cheng is like, starry-eyed, could AI eventually triage 311 requests directly??? GIRL—
Apparently they're not that far along yet, they're in the R&D stage, so there should be at least one more report on it. Will there be more answers? Probably not, but at least there is time for us to educate City Council about the matter so they ask the right questions.
Carroll mentions humans "teach[ing] the language model"/"training the bot", staff: "1700 hours in customer engagement"…
Aside from the technical stuff, I think the most crucial question to ask is, when the bot gets something wrong, which it absolutely fucking will, who is responsible?
Some city councillors are more tech-savvy than others, some quite tech-savvy, but I seriously doubt any of them know enough about LLMs and "AI" to be properly critical about this. Like at best they've seen a headline about the environmental costs of datacentres or whatever. (Prove me wrong, Council!) No shade to them, they don't really have time to learn this shit. That is why all of us have to reach out to them.
Holyday's question starts off very well, "do I understand it's a computer with natural language capabilities…" (me: okay, so far, so good…) "…that is very smart, and" (paraphrased) can search through all the data really fast and find stuff, and the quality of its responses depends on the accuracy of the stuff on the website.
Like I see where he's coming from but that is not at all how that works
I suddenly have the utterly perverse and disgusting idea that maybe Holyday could actually be receptive on this.
He's not unintelligent, he's just evil. He dislikes the City spending more money than it absolutely has to, and if he thinks, like, school lunches are too much, an unreliable and resource-hungry LLM that cannot replace humans, that must continually be checked by humans, could well be too much as well.
God it's such a filthy thought. Ughgh.
Cllr Carroll has a story about a potentially rabid raccoon "moosing around on [her] property" for a few days and then being informed the 311 ticket was closed.
"This is going to build trust in our democracy," rhapsodizes Cllr Cheng. kill me
Well thank fuck that one's done. I would feel like a coward if I had to flee screaming from the Council chamber less than an hour before the end.
Cllr Myers says everyone is "very excited" about the upcoming long-term care home on Finch East with culturally appropriate care for Black, Caribbean, African & diaspora seniors.
Cllr Myers says the community wants to name the new LTC home after Bernice Redmon, Canada's first Black nurse.
After an old campaign war story from Thompson involving an angry mob of Greek-Canadians, the item passes via show of hands. We have time for only a few more items!!
We are just whipping through quick releases. Okay, back tomorrow at 9:30 AM. Will I be back? Quite possibly as I may need to do some shopping in the area.
Thanks everyone for following along with my increasingly unhinged updates!
…Well I just walked out feeling my default "absolute rock bottom" to find Nathan Phillips Square full of victorious Brazilians, which instantly improved the day (sorry, uh hastily searches Scots)
The victorious Brazilians are giving way to optimistic Mexicans (vs. Czechia at 9).
Okay, I do have to admit World Cup time in Toronto is kind of fun. Because despite everything wrong with this place, we're still one of the most multicultural cities on the planet, dammit, and that means no matter who's playing, somewhere, there. Is. A. PARTY.
One year when Italy won, I was living near Little Italy, it was off the hook.
Welp, made it back to City Hall finally.
ONWARD
I know that many would consider the City Council chamber a den of snakes, but if you want to check out a literal den of snakes, you can watch Project Rattlecam's livestream of a prairie rattlesnake "rookery" in Colorado.
Colorado RattleCam Livestream
Cllr Cheng proudly announces the Willowdale Pigeon Impact Photo Contest, for residents of Willowdale and beyond to join the "pooparazzi" and document the impact of pigeon feeding.
Note: even pigeon advocates (they exist!) advise that people should not feed pigeons; there are plenty of other ways to improve urban pigeons' welfare. Here's where I would put a link but the wifi is ass.
Now lots of member motions, which mostly have to do with local affairs, or are non-binding symbolic kinds of things, so they typically pass with a show of hands.
See e.g. MM42.16 which is just a request for the Province to fund Toronto Public Health more and which will go nowhere.
Despite being entirely occupied by grown adults the Council floor frequently has the air of a high school classroom presided over by a bored and grumpy substitute teacher, complete with OAC/Grade 13s making wisecracks at the back.
(Children, back in the day there was a Grade 13.)
Members' motions first require a ⅔ majority vote to be put on the agenda, so when an MM is really unpopular or controversial (like this one on pedestrian streets), someone may want a recorded vote.
(If the vote fails the item gets put on the next agenda of the relevant committee.)
Perks: "I say close all the streets."
Holyday: "I think that's what they're trying to do."
Perks (I think): "I say we close all the streets around Stephen Holyday's house, so he can't drive home."
Carroll: "I say we all chip in to send Holyday to Germany for a couple of weeks."
Perks: "I'll chip in for a one-way ticket."
Nunziata scolds the area for chattering. They blame Burnside. She blames Burnside and Holyday.
(You don't pick up any of this off-mic banter on the livestream, which is why it's worth coming in in person, if you can.)
Now back to Vision Zero updates. Councillors are very mad about the Province's speed camera ban. (See the report (PDF) on the effects.)
Matlow "hopes the Premier comes back to his senses", though I'm sure he knows perfectly well this is the Premier's normal senses.
My informed opinion is that the most quintessentially Torontonian movie is not anything actually about Toronto, but David Cronenberg's Crash (1996), for capturing our self-destructive obsession with, apparently, creating conditions for as many, and as lethal, car crashes as possible.
We are "sacrificing our kids to the ideology of a premier who doesn't care about our city," says Cllr Saxe.
Cllr Colle proposes looking into installing rumble strips, which I actually think is a good idea. Why the fuck not, right?
(No one is really paying attention at this point.)
Former police officer Burnside notes that over a 10-year period, the number of traffic tickets went down 90%.
Some background: Since 2013, the number of traffic tickets has plunged. At the time, Cllr Thompson argued it was a low-key "work-to-rule" thing in retaliation for Council cutting the police budget. See also this 2017 report for the numbers.
While Burnside naturally thinks "funding the police" (which he thanks the mayor for) is the answer, hiring more police will obviously not help if the police refuse to enforce the traffic laws. (Note: Council also cannot tell the police how to operate.)
Chow has a motion to send the damning report to the provincial government. I can think of far more effective ways to get Doug Ford's attention, but I don't think they are the kind of thing you can do via Council motion, or are wise to discuss in advance, or are perhaps strictly legal.
Pasternak (I think) asked Colle to amend his motion to not have rumble strips in residential areas, which I think is counterproductive. Like yeah it'll make noise, yeah people will complain. Do it anyway! Explain this is what we have to do because of Doug Ford banning speed cameras! Maybe they'll complain to Doug Ford.
Holyday smarmily asks whether the Province, and people in general, will not just be like, "Just hire more officers?"
Chow repeats staff's estimates that it would take 3 police to replace 1 speed camera. They would have to hire hundreds of police, at least. She shoots Holyday's objection down as ridiculous.
Okay, now voting. "Let's rumble!" cheers Colle when his motion passes. Cllrs Fletcher and Perks begin loudly reminiscing about pro wrestling with him.
The item as amended passes 23 in favour. Yes, even Holyday.
Cllr Morley is speaking passionately about the long effort to transform Humber Bay Shores, which used to be "a motel strip", into a complete community. (No one is listening; they are chattering with people in the gallery, putting together stuff for other items, etc.) Nunziata admonishes her for making such a long speech, but Morley is adamant.
The item as a whole carries unanimously without a fuss. Nunziata says no more quick releases.
Now up: asking the Province to make a deposit-return program for all drink containers (like there is just for alcohol).
This is a pet cause of Cllr Perks, who did a lot of activism about recycling back in the day.
Ben Zanin
Shae M Puckett@nev why would Toronto cops write tickets for rich white speeders when they could instead be harassing the underhoused
Paul 夏央 Kishimoto@nev rumble strips + those microphone thingies they have in Paris to automate tickets when vehicles are too loud.
@paulnatsuo oh, that's clever. If you can't use vision, use sound.
Bee O'Problem 
@paulnatsuo @nev if it can catch both speeders and dipshits in brodozers I'd be a happy person
Ami Angelwings@nev I thought it was Tek War
🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ Brie 🌞🚴🪿🫰✨@nev Perks has announced he won't be running in the next election, and I'm so glad he intends to make that Holyday's problem
Stewart Russell
Sam Levine@nev So I should expect more fireworks this evening?
raphael@nev those vibes of football tournament euphoria are unlike anything else. i still remember when greece won the euro finals in 2004. my father and i were at the greek restaurant of our friend. the porch was packed, and it was a really pleasant july night. with a tv, of course.
the greek national team had always been nothing to write home about. but they got otto rehhagel as coach who managed to amalgamate them into a team that was punching well above the individual skills of its players.
the moment when the greeks got under more pressure by portugal in the second half, but then got a corner, header, and the only goal of the game – all shown from a camera angle that gave you that delay of ‘i think this is going in… is it…? is it?!? OMG IT’S IN!’ – was pure magic. the entire place erupted in cheers, and above it all you heard the hoarse voice of our friend just going AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH while running this way and that. finally he sprinted into the house, still screaming (mildly muffled, he was still louder than the porch full of guests)… in short order, the screaming got louder again and he sprinted out of the house carrying a wooden crate of sparkling wine. braking was achieved (still going AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH) by way of wooden crate on floor. i think at this point he stopped to draw breath for the first time.
just absolute magic when that single moment pulled together greek immigrants in germany who were hyped for their team’s amazing performance, friends who were there to root for their friend’s team, general unattached enjoyers of football, and the couple folks who weren’t into the game but were tagging along family members.
@nev dunno why the Brazilians are celebrating: it's not that hard to beat Scotland at football
@scruss lmao. They weren't, like, wildly celebrating, at least not when I got there. Just very happy
@nev no, it's fine: I'm okay that they're happy. Scotland fans are happy no matter what the result. My country tends to lose a lot, so the fans have developed the fine art of showing up.