City Hall

Jane Pitfield, who represented the communities in Ward 26 for eight years before running an unsuccessful mayoral campaign against David Miller, is attempting a comeback this year - and this afternoon, she’ll make it official.

Pitfield said she’ll be filing her nomination papers to run in Ward 29 - the East York ward that will be left vacant when current councillor Case Ootes retires this year.

“In the past three years, I’ve had the ability to watch from the outside and although I have had the opportunity to participate in a variety of projects and a lot of volunteer work, I remain committed to the City of Toronto,” said Pitfield in an interview from her home in Leaside. “It is my great desire to return and serve the people of the city but also participate in a very exciting time of developing Toronto into a greater potential.”

Pitfield’s decision to run again wasn’t made in haste. She told Toronto Community News that she’s been considering it for some time – the only question being where she would run. When she ran for mayor, she endorsed John Parker, the current Ward 26 councillor.

“It was my intent to wait and see – I was considering a number of wards as options,” she said.

When Ootes announced he would be stepping down after this term, Pitfield said her mind was made up. When she was first elected in a by-election in 1998, she represented all of East York as one of three councillors at large – and she ran her campaign from Ward 29.

“I’m very pleased and feel very fortunate to have a chance to run in a part of the city that is familiar to me,” she said.

She also had high praise for Ootes.

“Case Ootes has been the most valuable member of council over all these years – certainly in the first two terms after amalgamation he held the city together,” she said. “He held council together. He has just in my opinion been a symbol of integrity.”

While nobody in Mayor David Miller’s office admits to caving to any pressure from Peter Milczyn and others, nonetheless, Miller did tell councillors just now that there will likely be a special council meeting to deal with a heap of issues now on hold because of the strike.

The letter went out around noon today, and reads, “As the cancellation of the July 6 and 7 City council meeting is holding up decisions on some outstanding important business, it may, as I have previously stated, be necessary to hold a meeting of City Council to consider those urgent items in the next week or two.”

When or even if that meeting can occur is still to be determined. According to Miller’s spokesperson Stuart Green, the mayor has to find out if there are even enough councillors in town to make quorum. Then it will be a question of determining what items can’t wait until August or December.

And it all may be moot, of course, if the city and unionized workers reach a settlement in the next day or two.

It just took a couple of days for CUPE Local 79 to respond to the city’s now-public offer on a proposed new sick-leave plan for its members. The union posted a complex fact sheet for its members, giving its side of the story, right here.

Here in week four of the municipal workers’ strike, there might be a glimmer of hope. At least according to Mayor David Miller, who told reporters today that negotiations are proceeding seriously for the first time in six months.

Miller credits the movement his decision Friday to unleash the details of the city’s latest offer to CUPE Local 416 and Local 79 – an offer that he maintains is a reasonable one, and to most eyes, seems a very reasonable deal for a recession-tangled town like this one.

Only trouble is, it’s hard to tell objectively if there is any movement. Union officials are locked in meetings (which is a good sign), so there’s no news – but really, in the case of a three-week-old municipal workers’ strike, no news is most definitely not good news.

And the most Miller would say is that there has been small movement.

The real reason for optimism that the strike might end is a little uglier. City workers who are walking the picket line are several days into the no-pay zone, or rather the strike pay zone, which at $200 a week won’t come close to paying bills for families trying to make a go of it in and around Toronto.

Faced with that reality – and an offer on the table that holds status quo in areas like pay, and offers compensation for major concessions – it’s hard to imagine resolve among rank and file carrying much longer.

One press gallery wag said his math indicated the strike would be settled by next Monday. I am bad at math. But I never underestimate the power of informed guess-work. And with the information that spilled out Friday, I’m willing to revise my early guess that this strike will be going on much longer.

Not since the Shuffle Demons took the Spadina Bus in the 1980s have musicians captured the gritty necessity of the Toronto Transit Commission as these two, Cyrus Watson and Randal Medford, with “I Get On.” Cyrus says he wrote the song because he was bored. Riding buses from Kennedy to Kipling and back again will do that to you. According to Cyrus: 90 minutes each way. That’s a lot of boredom. I’m not being mean when I say it translates to the screen.

The video’s gone a bit viral - to the point that the pair were honored today by the Toronto Transit Commission and Mayor David Miller with two Metropasses, valued at around a hundred bucks, good for the month of January.

Here’s the video.

Enjoy.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZnLjRi_g9o]

… comes from our mayor, David Miller, the day after the English language federal leaders’ debate - when asked what he thought about the prominence of urban issues in the Canadian election:

“I watched the debate last night and then I watched it again. I thought both times I watched it, Joe Biden won.”

… ten being the number of seats out of 45 on Toronto City Council that are occupied by women.

If you think about it, that paltry showing for a gender that makes up half the population in a city that likes to boast how cosmopolitan it is, is both astonishing and frankly pathetic.

It bears consideration these days, particularly as south of the border the gender of a vice-presidential candidate has become such an important political commodity.

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That question was top of my mind today when the city hall press corps caught up with Toronto’s silver-maned mayor at the ribbon cutting of the Spadina WaveDeck, a Dr. Seuss-inspired wooden deck at the foot of Spadina.

There was Miller, standing beside York-Simcoe Conservative MP Peter Van Loan  at the precarious crest of the deck, the only separating them from the water being a few feet of decking and a knee-height wooden bench.

Van Loan, the Conservative House Leader, may not have the ear of Prime Minister Stephen Harper - but you’d think that during the speeches and gladhanding, that Miller could take a moment to lean over and whisper: “Hey, Van Loan - we’re still waiting for that one cent of the GST and would it kill you to ban handgun ownership like we asked?”

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Don’t hit me - that was the only family-newspaper-acceptable headline I could think of for this heads-up, straight from Ward 15 (Eglinton-Lawrence) Councillor Howard Moscoe, who also chairs the city’s Licensing and Standards Committee.

Tomorrow (being Thursday July 3) Moscoe is planning on bringing a motion that will literally open doors at large retailers across Toronto.

Those doors being the ones leading to washrooms, that the Ontario Building Code demands that large retailers provide for their customers.

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… because you might get something that you didn’t ever really want.

Case in point for the Ward 29 (Toronto Danforth) councillor, right-of-centre opposition notable and former deputy mayor: Staff Report EX20.1 on the May 5, 2008 Executive Committee Agenda, “Enhancing Streets to Homes Service to Address the Needs of People who are Street Involved, Including Those Who Panhandle.”

This report is a direct answer to Ootes’ request, made at Executive Committee last year, that the city please do something about panhandlers asking for coin in the city’s downtown core.

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