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We may not all agree on things like bike lanes and transit, but if there’s one thing that can generally unite a city it’s playoff sports.
I love the solidarity that it creates. You may have nothing else in common with the person sitting next to you at the bar, but suddenly you’re best friends because your team is winning.
As I write this post, #WeTheOther is currently breaking the internet after CBS Sports ran a cheeky online poll asking: Who will win the NBA title? The four options were:
Warriors
Thunder
Cavaliers
Other
For those of you who don’t follow basketball, there are only 4 teams left in the NBA playoffs right now! So in what was likely a deliberate snub to the Toronto Raptors, CBS conveniently obfuscated them in their poll.
Here’s how Mayor John Tory quickly responded:
What would sports be without the trash talking?
Jennifer Keesmaat is the Chief Planner of Toronto. She was hired for this job in 2012.
She has a Masters in Environmental Studies (Politics and Planning). She is a Registered Professional Planner with the Canadian Institute of Planners. And she was also the founder of 2 (city) planning firms prior to taking the position of Chief Planner for Toronto.
So presumably, she was hired for this job because she possesses some sort of expertise in the realm of planning. I also presume that she is expected to make her opinions known to other people so that informed planning discussions can occur and decisions can be made.
So I find it curious that in some circles, and in the media, Jennifer Keesmaat is being branded as a “troublemaker.”
A lot of the recent chatter stems from the fact that Keesmaat was at odds with Mayor Tory during the Gardiner Expressway East debate (quote via Toronto Life):
Eventually Tory had enough and pulled Keesmaat into a meeting where he basically told her to zip it. “The mayor has said it is perfectly appropriate for staff to make their opinions public, as Ms. Keesmaat has done,” wrote his communications chief, Amanda Galbraith, in a statement. “It is not appropriate for city staff to campaign against councillors or the mayor on social media or through other public platforms.” Keesmaat counters that she never campaigned. “I stated an opinion,” she says simply.
But the “troublemaking” didn’t just start with the Gardiner East. Pretty much since the moment she took the position of Chief Planner and launched her own blog (ownyourcity.ca), she was dubbed a shit disturber. (Those bloggers!)
But if you ask me, these criticisms stem from an old and outdated way of thinking.
The last thing we need from government is less transparency and more politicking. We should be working towards more, not less, information. Even if that information doesn’t butter our metaphorical bread.
What do you think?
I think this will make for a great discussion in the comment section below.
Tickets are free, but going fast. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, I would encourage you to sign up today. And if you do register or are already registered, drop me on a line so we can connect. I’m excited to see what kind of solutions we’re all able to come up with over the course of a weekend.
But as I was registering and reading through the website, I couldn’t help but think about some of the traffic problems that we won’t be solving over the hackathon weekend, namely the politicization of transportation planning in this city.
As an example of that check out a post by transit blogger Steve Munro called, The Vanishing Relevance of SmartTrack.
SmartTrack is the transit platform that Mayor John Tory ran on last year. And this post explains why it is unlikely to achieve its pitch promises.
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