Monthly Archive: May 2024

As mistakes go, it was a small one, but the resulting cost did hit hard. I was headed this week to see my eye doctor at Toronto Western Hospital. I usually park at an asphalt lot run by Canada Wide Parking on Bathurst Street opposite the hospital. There were about thirty cars already there and just two slots left, so I was happy to get one. There’s no attendant, just a pay machine where you use a credit card. It’s a bit of a complicated setup. First, you have to enter your licence plate info so it appears on the...

I live in an apartment building at Bay and Bloor Streets in downtown Toronto. You know, where the shops are. Or should be, except they’re fast disappearing, soon to be replaced by condos. As if we don’t have enough already. Let me paint a picture for you. Walk with me one block east to Yonge and Bloor. On the southwest corner is The One, an eighty-one floor condo that’s been under construction for about four years. I don’t go too close anymore because work on the upper floors seems to require build-outs that reach over the sidewalk below. Who knows...

Look around you and the symptoms of a society in decay are everywhere. Parliament has become a mockery of its former self. It’s no longer a place where ideas are debated, it’s a schoolyard where epithets are thrown. Traffic has become an angry nightmare. On a downtown Toronto street this week I watched as one car chased another, horn constantly honking, around a corner and down the next street as if the driver was avenging some sin, real or imagined. Said a woman on the sidewalk beside me; “That’s my definition of a moron.” I agreed but my heart went...