Year-end interview: Rob Ford has no intention of toning down in 2011

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Photo by Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail


Wednesday, December 22, 2010 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

Coming off successive victories at his first substantive council meeting, Mayor Rob Ford has reason to be pleased with himself: He has slain a personal vehicle tax and trimmed councillors’ budgets, has declared light-rail transit dead in its tracks and lacks only the province’s approval to remove transit workers’ right to strike.

And he made it clear in an interview with The Globe and Mail Tuesday that he has no intention of toning it down as he heads into a new year. In 2011, he’ll have to conjure budget efficiencies his opponents say are impossible, construct brand-new transit plans to replace projects years in the making and confront the city’s strongest unions.

Mr. Ford said an auditor’s report due in January will vindicate what he’s been saying for years about waste at city hall – waste he still can’t specify but which he has told city staff to find, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, over the next several weeks.

“There’s something coming from the auditor’s office that’s going to be pretty earthshaking. I can’t tell you what that is right now, but there’s a lot of waste,” he said. “I’m not happy with what he found but he did his job and I’ll have to deal with it.”

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Skyrocketing real estate in Toronto’s wealthy enclaves endangering economic diversity

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Photo by Deborah Baic/The Globe and Mail

Tuesday, December 21, 2010 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

Growing up the northwest end of Toronto, Irma Baldanza aspired to live in a place like Lawrence Park.

“I remember driving through areas like Forest Hill and Lawrence Park, where my Dad would point out and say, ‘Look at these beautiful houses,’ that sort of thing,” she said. “Once I got married and we started thinking about owning a home, this is one of the areas we looked at.”

The couple started out with a relatively affordable house on Yonge Street and Blythwood Road in the mid-1980s, moving in 1990 to a red-brick Georgian house they could add on to over the next several years, accommodating a growing family. In the past two decades, Ms. Baldanza has seen the treed neighbourhood become increasingly attractive for wealthy families – and, more recently, developers and investors – drawn to the larger lots and green spaces.

In a city where property is increasingly at a premium, the rarity of a neighbourhood of large lots just blocks away from a major transit artery makes for dramatically increasing property values. It helps to have good schools – both public and private – and engaged residents eager to pitch in for fundraising and beautifying initiatives.

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Toronto’s Three Cities: A metropole of extremes, losing middle ground

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Photo by Peter Power/The Globe and Mail

Wednesday, December 15, 2010 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

TORONTO — Toronto is becoming a city of stark economic extremes as its middle class is hollowed out and replaced by a bipolar city of the rich and poor – one whose lines are drawn neighbourhood by neighbourhood.

New numbers indicate a 35-year trend toward economic polarization is more pronounced: The country’s economic engine, which has long claimed to be one of the most diverse cities in the world, is increasingly comprised of downtown-centred high-income residents – most living near subway lines – and a concentration of low-income families in less dense, service- and transit-starved inner suburbs.

Three years ago, University of Toronto professor David Hulchanski published a paper on Toronto’s “Three Cities,” illustrating a growing socioeconomic disparity among the city’s census tracts.

But the three-way divide Prof. Hulchanski and his fellow Cities Centre researchers described is swiftly being reduced to two, according to a new paper they will release Wednesday. Toronto, a predominantly middle-class metropolis just three decades ago, is increasingly dominated by two opposite populations – one with an average income of $88,400, and another of $26,900.

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Bulldozed buildings, fatal shootings, uprooted residents: Is Regent Park revitalization crumbling?

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Fatima Animer, 16, and her brother Moubachar Animer, 14, in Regent Park.
(Photo by Kevin Van Paassen/The Globe and Mail)

Wednesday, November 17, 2010 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

TORONTO — It’s supposed to be an urban-planning model – an example of what millions of dollars and decades of prepping, razing and rebuilding can do to transform a 60-year-old poverty enclave into a mixed-income downtown neighbourhood.

But right now, Regent Park is reeling after a string of shootings left three dead in as many weeks. Parents say they are afraid to let their children out after dark, even for the area’s free tutoring programs. Police have set up a neighbourhood-specific unit, in which officers conduct around-the-clock patrols that are as much about community engagement as they are about stopping crime.

Regent Park’s re-imagining is far from finished, and it will be years before the verdict is in on its success. Right now, residents of the 2,083 social-housing units are in flux – some already in new units, some in old ones waiting for demolition to begin, and others temporary townhouses while construction is in progress.

In the meantime, some argue the fear inspired by the recent violence and uncertainty over how well the renewal will work raise questions about exporting this model to social-housing complexes in the city’s most troubled neighbourhoods.

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Eyes wide shut: Toronto Mayor David Miller’s exit interview

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Saturday, October 9, 2010 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

Seven years after he swept into office on a broom, Mayor David Miller still knows the value of a good prop.

He flips through a mini photo album with images of himself opening the city’s public pay toilet earlier this year (after 2,000 visits it has become, he notes with a degree of pride, a tourist attraction).

He pulls open the book of policy promises he ran on in 2006 – “I’ve done everything that’s in it.”

A book of elementary-school drawings of things students love about Toronto sits on the coffee table in his office, which overlooks a construction-ridden Nathan Phillips Square. Neighbourhoods, knights and “the ocean” figure prominently.

It’s kinder feedback than the outgoing mayor has gotten in a while. After months of an election in which candidates railed against a non-existent incumbent and a dysfunctional municipal government, all eyes are on an Etobicoke councillor leading the pack on promises he’ll clean up City Hall by doing the polar opposite of his left-leaning predecessor. And the electorate, if you believe every poll since June, loves the idea.

But barely 90 minutes before he formally endorses Joe Pantalone, the faithful deputy mayor polling in a distant third place – and on the same day the Canadian Club canned a speaking engagement featuring the departing mayor that had managed to lure only 19 attendees – David Miller insists we’ve got it all wrong.

Torontonians love the city, he says, and they love what he’s done with it. He wouldn’t change a thing. And although he refuses to summarize his legacy, he’s convinced that everyone – the premier he has slagged, the unions whose garbage strike cost him his popularity, the voters and his replacement – will figure out he was right all along.

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Recession hit hard, recovery came slow for immigrants

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Tuesday, October 5, 2010 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY and TAVIA GRANT

As employment grows with a reviving economy, so does the unemployment gap between the country’s highly educated newcomers and their Canadian counterparts.

Among university graduates, recent immigrants were hit hardest by the recession, and new research shows they’re still at a disadvantage compared to Canadian-born university grads as the job market picks up.

The employment gap between newcomers and people born in Canada is greatest among those with the highest credentials and educational backgrounds, according to a Community Foundations of Canada report to be released on Tuesday.

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Khadr’s lawyer out of hospital, fit to resume trial

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Lieutenant-Colonel Jon Jackson, Omar Khadr's military-appointed lawyer, is pictured speaking to the media in a hangar at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay.
(Photo by Anna Mehler Paperny/Globe and Mail)

Tuesday, August 24, 2010 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

Omar Khadr’s lawyer is out of hospital, is off painkillers and will be able to go to trial once the Canadian detainee’s Guantanamo Bay hearing resumes.

Dates for the trial, postponed for about a month after Lieutenant-Colonel Jon Jackson collapsed in pain during cross-examination, are still up in the air. But witnesses are being asked to clear their day books as part of the complex scheduling that goes into co-ordinating war-court proceedings at the U.S. naval base.

Stephen Xenakis, the retired brigadier-general and a defence-team physician in close contact with Mr. Khadr, is preparing to make his case before the war tribunal. He hopes to convince the seven-person military jury what military judge Colonel Patrick Parrish didn’t believe: that the now 23-year-old Mr. Khadr endured enough physical and psychological torment to traumatize him and render his testimony unusable.

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The Guantanamo detainee dilemma

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Monday, August 16, 2010 – Globe and Mail
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GUANTANAMO BAY — There have been calls to close Guantanamo Bay’s notorious detention centre since the first blindfolded, shackled detainees walked onto the base’s tarmac in January, 2002. But what do you do with the 176 people remaining behind the razor wire and green mesh?

As the camp’s population slowly dwindles and cases against those the U.S. government plans to prosecute inch forward, that question is becoming tricky to answer.

Who poses a risk – to the United States, or elsewhere? Who would be in danger if transported to their country of origin? What do you do if a detainee would rather stay, or if you can’t find a country willing to accept released prisoners?

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Khadr trial asks jury: Jihadist or scared teen?

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Friday, August 13, 2010 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

GUANTANAMO BAY — Omar Khadr was either an enthusiastic teen jihadist who happily planted explosive devices and comforted himself in times of loneliness with thoughts of killing U.S. soldiers.

Or he was a frightened, cowed 15-year-old, dragged by a zealous father to Afghanistan against his will, caught up with a bad crowd, taken captive while gravely wounded and tortured into submission and confession by his captors.

The 23-year-old Canadian’s military jury was presented two contrasting portraits of the young man. Duelling sides of his Guantanamo Bay war-crimes trial sought to trump each other in painting what happened during a protracted 2002 Afghan firefight that left a U.S. army sergeant dead and the then-15-year-old severely wounded in U.S. custody.

But the opening salvos in what promises to be a long battle of competing narratives were cut short Thursday when Mr. Khadr’s military-appointed lawyer passed out during cross-examination, apparently from pain related to gallbladder surgery six weeks ago.

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The jury who will decide Omar Khadr’s fate

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Thursday, August 12, 2010 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

GUANTANAMO BAY — Omar Khadr’s trial begins in earnest Thursday, with lawyers set to give opening arguments after days of grilling would-be jurors and settling on a seven-person panel to decide the fate of the first person tried in the Obama administration’s war-commissions process.

Next come witnesses for the prosecution and defence; the trial will likely go for weeks before a verdict is reached.

Eight of the original 15 members of Mr. Khadr’s jury pool were dismissed Wednesday, after lawyers made arguments to get rid of potential jurors they worry would not be sympathetic to their arguments.

Prosecution lawyer Jeff Groharing tried to convince military judge Colonel Patrick Parrish to jettison jurors who expressed reservations about Guantanamo Bay, detainee treatment and trying 15-year-olds as adults.

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