World-class UTSC athletic complex paves the way for Pan Am Games

By Thandiwe Vela

 

The profile of my soon-to-be alma mater just got a huge boost.

In a referendum held Wednesday through Friday, an overwhelming majority of University of Toronto Scarborough students voted yes to a levy clearing the way for a world-class sporting complex to be built on our campus in time for the 2015 Pan Am Games.

With no pool to call our own and a gym the object of running jokes (but great for dodgeball tournaments) it's hard to believe that in four years, the UTSC campus will be home to two competition-sized swimming pools, a dive tank, an 8-lane 200-metre running track, racquet courts, a sports medicine clinic and other fitness and training facilities.

Don't worry U of T Mississauga and St. George students, you're always welcome to head east for a dip in one of our brand spankin new Olympic pools.

 

Can't say the same about you, UTM, but no longer will UTSC be a sidelined sister of the U of T downtown campus (perhaps we could get UTM something nice too).

 

Along with its prestigious joint-journalism program that just never stops churning out excellent reporters that should be hired at once, UTSC will soon also be an international athletic hub.

  

This calls for celebration, UTSC students - where's the party? 

 

 

UTSC community members celebrate Toronto's winning 2015 Pan Am Games bid. Ken Jones. 
 

 

Thandiwe Vela is a Star radio room reporter, student-athlete and secretary of the Canadian Association of Black Journalists.

tvela24@hotmail.com

 

Calgary has a lesson for Toronto Transit: try pragmatism

By Adrian Morrow

When I lived in Calgary, fellow inner-city dwellers constantly complained about our rapid transit system, the C-Train. They admitted that the system worked fine as a commuter train, ferrying suburbanites to the downtown core, but did little to connect the various city centre communities to one another.

Why did the Beltline, Calgary's most densely-populated neighbourhood, have just one C-Train stop? Why did Inglewood-Ramsay, the city's historic district, have none? Why couldn't the city build a decent, downtown-focused subway system, like Toronto and Montreal?

I was always curious about this perceived oversight in public transit. So one day, at the end of an interview on a different topic with a member of the city's planning department, I asked him about it.

It turned out Calgary did seriously consider building a subway system in the late 1960s and early '70s. The plan called for several downtown stations to be built underground, with the train emerging to the surface for short jaunts into the suburbs. But planners ultimately decided the idea was impractical: the population wasn't dense enough to justify the high cost of putting a train underground.

Instead, the city opted to build a light rail network.

The system runs above ground, primarily in its own right-of-way, fenced off from traffic and pedestrians. Where it intersects with the street, the train has an automatic right-of-way, allowing it to reach subway-like speeds without having to pass underground. The network is laid out in a hub-and-spoke pattern with lines running from the central business district to suburbs in the south, northeast and northwest corners of the city. The suburban stations themselves act as hubs, with buses funnelling commuters to the train.

These strategies have paid off: in the nearly 30 years since it opened, the C-Train has built up a weekday ridership of about 270,000 -- more than any of the numerous American light rail systems that began cropping up around the same time. In the last eight years, under an infrastructure-obsessed mayor, the city has added about 15 kilometres of track and five new stations to the system; eight more are scheduled to open by 2012.

The lesson here is pragmatism. Calgary planners rejected a subway system because it didn't fit with the city. Subways are great for dense metros with a large inner-city populations. But in Calgary, a post-war-style city with the vast majority of the population spread out in sprawling suburbs, it wouldn't make any sense. Planners realized this and developed the C-Train accordingly, as a sort of light rail commuter train. The above-ground design was cheaper to build than a subway, allowing the city to extend the tracks to the city's most distant suburbs rather than blowing the capital budget on subterranean infrastructure.

It's important to keep this lesson in mind as Toronto develops its much larger rapid transit system. The current plan calls for an ambitious expansion of light rail over the next decade; one mayoral candidate is calling for the building of new subway lines instead, another is promising to put rapid transit on hold and a Toronto Life op-ed even suggests privatizing the system.

Toronto has an unusual, mid-western layout, somewhere between the European-style density of Montreal and the car-inspired sprawl of Calgary. Perhaps more than any other city, it needs a pragmatic transit system designed to fit its unique design. One-size-fits-all just doesn't work here.

It's a bad idea to build subways in low-density areas where the ridership doesn't make up for the high cost. It's an equally bad idea to save money by building LRTs in areas where high ridership and residential densities would justify a subway.

It's a lesson that Calgary's old rival to the north has learned first-hand. The Edmonton LRT, which pre-dates the C-Train by a few years, is roughly a third the length of its Calgary counterpart, has just 13 stops (compared to 37 in Calgary) and consequently does less than one-third the business, despite Edmonton's metro population being only slightly smaller than Calgary's. The reason? Alberta's capital built part of its LRT underground.

Adrian Morrow is a veteran of the Star's radio room who rides the TTC to work. He also worked as a summer reporter last year. amorrow@thestar.ca

Margaret Wente: Tempest in the twitterverse

By Chantal Braganza

This likely isn't news by now, though I'm not sure if it ever was: an incendiary columnist wrote something that got a lot of people really angry. As if this hasn't happened before . . .

Globe and Mail scribe Margaret Wente ticked a lot of people off Thursday with a thought piece on blogging, and and a half-baked theory that the practice "is more of a guy thing." Her reasoning?

"Men clearly have an urge to blog that women lack. Like extreme snowmobiling, the blogosphere is dominated by men. Not many women are interested enough in spitting out an opinion on current events every 20 minutes."

She goes on to back her ill-researched claim with the dubious support of a 24-year-old friend named Sarah, who in addition to knowing enough about this newfangled internet thing to assert most bloggers are male, is expert enough in gendered psychology to understand why: it's all a peeing contest! 

Just for this post, I'm going to assume (and hope) that the double-edged sexism in Ms Wente's sentiments needn't be plastered in red flags. It's too disappointingly obvious, and numerous sharp-minded bloggers have already beaten me to it.

The irony of a writer who makes a living "spitting out her opinions" penning such a column probably doesn't need too much pointing out, either. What interests me is motive.  

You've got to hand it to Wente. For a national columnist that professes to make little-to-no use of such toys as "blogs" and "social media," she's caused a pretty big stir in both pots. Countless bloggers, both male and female, have chewed her out for it. She's been Canada's top trending topic on Twitter since G&M dropped the web-bomb.

Which is funny. Her apparent Twitter account (it's not a verified one), @pwente, was created almost a year ago to date and used to mine and research for such difficult questions as why people tweet, and possibly score an online interview with Twitter co-creator Biz Stone. She tweeted a total of four times. She proudly asserts she doesn't run a blog.

And yet on Friday, at noon, she'll be playing the expert of who blogs (or doesn't), and why, in an online debate hosted by G&M online. To use reference to a recent tragedy as indelicately as Wente has done, it's sure to draw an avalanche of traffic, and eyeballs, to the site.

For a self-professed internet illiterate, it's a pretty good web strategy, wouldn't you say?

Chantal Braganza is a Star intern copy editor and recent graduate of the Ryerson Journalism program. cbraganza@thestar.ca

Memo to Margaret Wente: women DO blog

By Tamara Baluja

I got a real kick out of reading Margaret Wente's column in the Globe and Mail on Thursday. If you haven't already read it already, go ahead and read it now. It's hilarious!

She asks "Why are bloggers male?" Her answer: women don't like to blog because it's essentially a new type of p . . . ing match for men, and of course, women don't like doing that!

Lady, I have two words for you - Huffington Post.

Arianna Huffington's blog is one the most successful sites on the Internet and it all started because of one woman. 

And don't forget Julie Powell's blog, the Julie/Julia Project about cooking her way through Julia Child's cookbook Mastering The Art Of French Cooking. That blog became a book and later a motion picture, Julie and Julia, for which Meryl Streep got an Oscar nod.

My point is, women are out in a big way on the Internet and as bloggers. Perhaps someone should tell Wente that columnists are essentially bloggers. After all, she gets paid to toss off her opinion - isn't that what blogging is all about?

Frankly, I don't even see the point of this gender debate. Blogging has nothing to do with male or female egos. Blogging is way of celebrating opinions and diversity. It's a way of getting voices heard that wouldn't be otherwise heard.

And women should definitely take advantage of a forum that allows their views to reach millions of people. A good place to start would be the Globe and Mail event,"Margaret Wente chats with women bloggers." Date: Friday March 19, 2010 at 12 p.m.

Tamara Baluja is a radio room reporter, a journalism student and a former GA at CFRB News. tbaluja@thestar.ca.

Perdita's back

By Thandiwe Vela

Perdita Felicien is alive and well, in case anyone thought she crawled under a rock for good after her Athens Olympic Games disappointment.

And she's making a huge comeback.

I know, because I met her and felt her back Wednesday night at a media panel discussion facilitated by the lovely Mary Anne Chambers.

I was a little startled when I gently touched her back while giving her a Christian side hug  - that girl is deezed! Yes, she's been working out but that's not the only indication that this track star is back on the come-up. In fact, this past weekend the Pickering native won silver at the 2010 world indoor championships in Doha, Qatar.

Perdita's strong return could not come any sooner for the legions of young athletes that really look up to her. In her prime and poised to make a great comeback, the world is watching once again.

Don't trip!

Thandiwe Vela is a Star radio room reporter, student-athlete and secretary of the Canadian Association of Black Journalists. tvela24@hotmail.com

3 Toronto Star interns nominated for National Newspaper Awards

Three journalists from the 2008 - 2009 Toronto Star intern program have been nominated for National Newspaper Awards, one of the top honours in Canadian journalism.

Reporter Kenyon Wallace, 29, designer Jason Chiu, 26, and photographer Pawel Dwulit, 26, are among the 66 finalists in  22 categories announced on March 15, from the National Newspaper Awards office in Toronto.

The Star one-year intern program runs from September to September and is open to graduates under the age of 30 who have never held a full-time, permanent staff position at a Canadian daily newspaper.

There were 1,301 entries in this year's NNA competition for works that appeared in 2009.

In all, 20 news organizations have been nominated.

The Star has been nominated for 14 awards.

The awards will be handed out at a ceremony on May 14 in Toronto.

Wallace is nominated for his on-the-scene reporting of the crash of a helicopter off the coast of Newfoundland and the loss of 17 lives last March.

Dwulit is nominated for his photo of a child wiping tears from a father’s eyes after the man's son was killed outside a convenience store.

Chiu shares a nomination with David Pratt for their work on the Saturday, Dec. 26 Globe and Mail edition entitled “Decoding the Decade: The Future So Far".

We asked them what it was like to be in the company of some of the best journalists in the country.

Pawel Dwulit
How does it feel to be nominated for an NNA?
It's an honour to even be nominated for an award that has recognized many talented photographers over the years.

Why were you nominated?

I was nominated for a photo I took while on assignment last summer for the Star. Reporter Robyn Doolittle and I spent the afternoon going back to the scene where a day earlier a teenage Tamil man was attacked and killed outside of a convenience store. We spoke to some people at the scene including a young man who told us how young Tamils take the law into their own hands. We then went to the home of the boy and were invited in to speak with members of the family. The father sat on the couch and began talking about his son while other members of the family surrounded him for support. I had my camera ready and asked the family if I could take a photograph during the interview. A sister gave me the OK and that is when the father began to break down and a little girl wiped a tear from his eye. I clicked the button without really looking through the viewfinder. After the brief interview we left. I knew that I had the photo and it turned out that it ran front next day.

Did your time at the Star help you get to the nomination?

While I was at the Star I was on a year long photo department internship. The position allowed me to experience the same variety of assignments as a full-time staff member and I found myself more and more attracted to the variety of work. Other staff members were very encouraging and let me pick their brains on their experiences. It is because of these talented people that I managed to get nominated.

Kenyon Wallace                                                                                                                                         How does it feel to be nominated for an NNA?
It's a great honour to be recognized. We certainly don't do this job for the perks, but when your hard work is acknowledged, it's always a good feeling.

Why were you nominated?
You'd have to ask the judges about that. There is so much fantastic journalism out there that never gets recognized. One hopes that judges nominate work that not only answers the basic questions that make up the bare bones of a news story, but also work that tells the story well, casts forward, and provides context.

Did your time at the Star help you get to the nomination?
Of course. If I hadn't worked for the Star at the time, it's doubtful I would have been sent to Newfoundland in the first place. On top of that, the high-paced work environment at the Star helped prepare me for the kind of "hit-the-ground-running" journalism that is required for stories like the one I covered.

Jason Chiu                                                                                                                                                 How does it feel to be nominated for an NNA?
Pretty good. 

Why were you nominated?
I was nominated alongside my colleagues David Pratt for our joint effort on the December 26th Saturday Globe and Mail edition entitled “Decoding the Decade: The Future So Far”  The project was a colossal effort involving 32 pages, 11 sections, 70 contributors, 250 slugs, 243 photos and 18 graphics and illustrations. One of the primary goals of the project was to recap the last 10 years of history outside of a narrative form.  
While I can’t speak for the judges, I can only guess that they nominated the design for its innovation, for its size, and unique nature.  It also serves as an example to demonstrate how an elegant and functional design can go a long way to making hundreds of small items come together in concert, as one piece. 

Did your time at the Star help you get to the nomination?
Yes.  There’s a saying by Otto Von Bismarck that goes something like this: “Laws are like sausages – it is best not to see them being made”.  Well, the Star taught me more or less the same thing.  The news is like sausages — it is best not to see them being made, especially if you are a vegetarian (which I was for part of my time at the Star, but am no more).  My time at the Star taught me how to stomach the daily news file, the routine, the news desk, the 3:45 news meeting, and the idea (in that moment) that I played a small role in a larger wheel.  My time there taught me tact, cool, and most importantly, how not to take one’s work home at the end of the day. 

Wallace is a reporter at the National Post, Chiu is a design editor at the Globe and Mail, Dwulit is a freelance photographer in Ottawa.

Better UTSC sporting facilities hinge on student referendum

By Thandiwe Vela

The Canadian Inter-university Sport track and field season has officially come to an end and I must admit, I am quite offended by the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport.

It comes as a huge blow to my ego that in all five seasons of my varsity track and field career, I have never once been dope tested.

Time and time again I have seen teammates hurried off by anti-doping officials, who as hard as this is to believe, never grew suspicious of my performances - at least enough to warrant a doping investigation.

It's not that I am a sub-par athlete, in fact, I consider myself quite accomplished, with a spot on the University of Toronto women's 60m top 10 all-time performance list and a provincial gold medal in triple jump that just always seems to come up in conversations.

But perhaps I would have performed better throughout university if my campus - the U of T Scarborough campus - had better facilities.

The current gym pales in comparison to facilities at the downtown campus and those at universities across the country.

While I never had facilities to practice on my own campus between classes and had to train strictly downtown, I was very excited for future students when I heard that Toronto's winning Pan Am Games bid would change that for future students.

The winning bid came with the announcement of extensive transportation and athletic facility developments across the Greater Toronto Area, including a proposal for a world-class sporting complex to be built at U of T Scarborough with two Olympic-sized swimming pools, a 10-metre diving tank, a running track, multipurpose gymnasiums, racquet courts, and fitness and training areas.

This facility will no doubt bolster UTSC's athletic profile, drawing top student-athletes and providing top-notch training facilities to greatly improve the athletic performance of students and community members.

However, the realization of this dream sports complex hinges on student support of a levy that will contribute funds to the facility along with the planned government funding - a decision that will be determined in a student referendum this week.

Hopefully, students will overwhelmingly vote Yes Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, giving future UTSC student-athletes better chances of arousing performance-enhancing drug suspicion and equal opportunity to be subjected to CCES testing.

Thandiwe Vela is a Star radio room reporter, student-athlete and secretary of the Canadian Association of Black Journalists.

tvela24@hotmail.com

Mayor David Miller encourages University of Toronto Scarborough students to vote in favour of a levy supporting the construction of a world-class sporting facility at a UTSC townhall forum March 3 (thevarsity.ca).

Daylight saving time, tell the boss that's why you were late today

By Christine Dobby

Welcome to daylight saving time. Goodbye standard time, old friend.

One year when I was studying history at McGill, I refused to spring forward. I simply rescheduled all my classes and appointments in my head. When I asked friends for the time, I specified, “My time.” It didn’t last long. I eventually had to give into the intense societal pressure to use the same time as everyone else.

But clearly I was on to something. Daylight saving time has all sorts of deleterious effects (one being the use of words like deleterious because you’re so tired). For instance:

• It may increase traffic accidents by up to 17 per cent (CBC);
• It may increase your chance of having a heart attack (ABC); and
• It may have caused the Leafs to lose on Sunday (Toronto Sun).

Of course there’s always at least one optimistic person who will reassure you that you’ll enjoy the extra hour of sunlight. From where will I enjoy that extra hour I ask. My desk? The subway? A windowless classroom??

On the other hand, it is a great time to check the batteries in my smoke detectors. God knows if I don’t do that, I’ll be up all night worrying.

Christine Dobby is a former lawyer now studying journalism in Ryerson’s master of journalism program.

Bear hates daylight saving time...

... it makes him sleepy.

The newspaper that wouldn't cry wolf

By Adrian Morrow

On Thursday night, Kevin Garn, Majority Leader in Utah's House of Representatives admitted in front of the legislature that he once got naked in a hot tub with a 15-year-old girl who worked for him. He also told the House that he later paid the girl $150,000 when she threatened to go public with the incident.

When it reported the story a few hours later, the Deseret News (a Salt Lake City daily newspaper) revealed that it had uncovered the incident in 2002 but decided not to run with the story.

The News implied that it killed the story because it didn't want to influence the outcome of a primary election in which Garn was running at the time. It also suggests the incident isn't particularly important because it happened 25 years ago.

It's hard to know what to make of this argument. Maybe it's the effect of a small media market, where every news outlet has to carefully weigh the influence it has on public opinion. Perhaps it's a reflection of the paper's politics (the Deseret News, as it's name suggests, is a conservative paper owned by the LDS Church.) But whatever the case, killing a story about a powerful politician who paid hush money to cover up an inappropriate incident with a much younger employee (Garn was 28 at the time) is a bad journalistic decision.

Certainly, journalists have a duty to consider the effect their stories will have and to put everything into its appropriate context. But at the end of the day, it's not up to us to decide whether a particular scandal should affect a politician's career: we must report the truth as accurately as possible. The public will make up its own mind.

We don't have the right to decide what people should or shouldn't know.

Adrian Morrow is a veteran of the Star's radio room. He also worked as a summer reporter last year. amorrow@thestar.ca

The mayor who cried wolf?

By Ann Hui

As one local radio broadcaster put it, Mayor David Miller played the media like a violin Wedneday.

On Tuesday, Miller's spokespeople told local media that the mayor would make an "important announcement" at a Wednesday morning news conference. 

The last time he'd made an "important announcement," it was to say that he wouldn't be seeking re-election as mayor.

The mayor's staffers kept unusually mum on the details of the announcement, but told broadcasters to bring along their satellite trucks.

In the media world, it was akin to MIler's office having hired a circus promoter and monkey, promising bearded ladies with 17 toes and screaming "it's goin to be good, I promise!"

Even his fellow councillors seemed to be in the dark about what was going on. So of course, the rumours started circling. Was he going to run for re-election after all? Dismal numbers at the polls suggested this was unlikely. Was he stepping down immediately to accept another job? Maybe. Was it something to do with the TTC? Hopefully.

So journalists showed up, in droves, waiting to hear the news. And, as the minutes grew closer to the 9:30 a.m. announcement, the rumours flew stronger and reporters got antsier.

At 9:29 a.m. one local TV broadcaster began a second-by-second countdown. And, by the time Miller opened the door and stepped into that room, that same broadcaster was practically squealing.

Then Miller made his announcement. It was about the budget. A larger-than-expected surplus. A balanced budget.

 Huh.

You could practically hear reporters -- and citizens -- everywhere asking themselves "is that it?"

As one tweeter put it, it was like that episode of Simpsons where Bart and Lisa are promised a trip to Disneyland, only they're taken to the dentist instead.

So what of it?

From a PR front, Miller's office seemed to have played it well. The announcement got major attention. Much more attention than a budget announcement would probably normally receive. And Miller was able to attach himself -- and his right-hand man and mayoral hopeful, Joe Pantalone -- to the good news.

But he also angered a lot of media doing it. Media and politicians work hand in hand, and it's a relationship that rests on mutual respect. And misleading the media -- which is certainly what it seemed like Miller's camp was trying to do -- doesn't signal much respect.

Miller's response to all of this so far, has been to say that his budget announcement was an important one, and that he doesn't understand the media backlash.

"To some critics of the timing: announcement was important to people and business; substantive announcements have merit, not just personal," he tweeted.

But then why bring along Pantalone and maybe-mayoral hopeful Shelley Caroll (also, not-coincidentally another member of the Miller posse)? If that's not personal, I don't know what is.

It remains to be seen what the backlash, if any, of this will be. But as far as media are concerned, well, we all know what happened to the last guy who cried wolf.

Ann Hui is a Radio Room reporter at the Star. She is also completing her final year of the master of journalism program at Ryerson University. ahui@thestar.ca