Protesters gather on University Avenue, across from the U.S. Consulate.

“It’s a beautiful day for a demonstration,” Amnesty International Toronto Chair Shanaaz Gokool said to an RCMP officer as a group of protesters gathered, Wednesday morning, across the street from the U.S. Consulate on University Avenue.

The protest, which was organized as part of an international solidarity movement by Amnesty International, marked a decade since the first prisoners were brought to Guantanamo Bay back in 2002. In addition to raising awareness of the anniversary, the protesters were there to demand that President Obama make good on his claim that he would close the detention centre.

“In 2009, Obama committed to closing Guantanamo Bay no later than January 22, 2010,” Gokool said. “We’re now in 2012, and we’re here to remind him of that promise.” The facility currently houses 171 prisoners, 11 of whom have been there for 10 years without charges.

Fifty-odd protesters stood with signs denouncing the centre and demanding that Prime Minister Harper put pressure on the U.S. government to release the remaining detainees. A group of women with signs calling for the release of Canadian citizen Omar Khadr included Khadr’s older sister Zaynab. “He should have been transferred [to Canada] at the end of October, but the U.S. says they need to make sure that Canada has enough security measures. We’ve been waiting for so long,” she said. The end of October, she added, was the last time she’d been able to speak to her brother. “The Canadian government has been pretty silent. Every other Western citizen [at Guantanamo] has been repatriated. He’s the first child soldier to be tried in a military tribunal since the war.”

Protesters nearby signed a poster that will be sent to the White House, while a handful of York University students put on orange detainee jumpsuits provided by Amnesty International’s head office. “We’re from the Middle East—from Lebanon,” said two students that were getting into the suits. “We wanted to come here today to represent the Middle Eastern people, as well as the detainees from the other 48 countries, that weren’t given a fair trial or the right to speak.”

Wednesday’s protest coincided with Amnesty International demonstrations in Ottawa, Vancouver, and Washington, D.C. A day-long event is being held in Montreal today, and will be broadcast live on Goodness TV.

While Toronto’s protest was small, Gokool attributed the modest turnout to timing. “It’s 11 a.m. on a weekday, so it’s kind of tough,” she said, adding that Amnesty International was banking on students being the main attendees. Several seniors and a few parents with small children filled out the group.

What the protesters lacked in numbers, though, they made up in determination. “We’re making the point that human rights must be respected,” said Andy, a demonstrator who waved an Amnesty International banner in the direction of the Consulate. “I think Obama got a free pass for the first year, but that’s ending. We’re a small group, but we’re a brave group.”

Artist Tobaron Waxman sings to the lunch-time audience.

For Toronto’s Starving Artists Collective, Monday was truly a red-letter day. The rainy afternoon marked the third installment of their weekly free lunch series, The Artists’ Soup Kitchen, which includes a themed meal and performance. This week’s theme, chosen by artist Tobaron Waxman, was “red,” resulting in an array of crimson culinary delights at the The Raging Spoon, on Queen West.

The place was appropriately tarted up. Everything from the tablecloths to the centrepieces was red. Amongst a group of tables, people of all ages lined up for bowls of steaming beet-red borscht, topped with sour cream, herbs, and edible gold flakes. Dark rye and butter accompanied the soup, and the tables were piled high with plates of fresh red fruits: strawberries, raspberries, cherries, apples, and grapes. Cheerful volunteers served coffee and tea, along with dyed-red water. It was easy to forget that all of this—along with the performance—were open to the public and totally free.

“This is about understanding artists as an under-served community in this city,” said organizer and artist Jess Dobkin, who runs the Starving Artists Collective along with Raging Spoon manager Catherine Clarke and OCAD instructor Stephanie Springgay. “When we talk about arts funding sometimes it feels kind of abstract. A lot of artists really are struggling with basic life issues.”

The Collective’s intentions, however, extend beyond just filling bellies. “We want to bring artists together, to eat and break bread,” Dobkin said. “It’s about giving an opportunity for artists to meet each other and create a community.”

With this in mind, The Collective selected a range of different Toronto artists to perform at the lunches. This week, Waxman began his performance by shaving all of the hair on his head before launching into a series of Jewish songs that he said focused on death and transformation. For the next hour Waxman made his way through the room, approaching diners and serenading their tables. “It’s been 10 years since I’ve performed in Toronto,” he said. “This is a chance to take these ideas for a test drive.”

As part of his performance, Waxman shaves his head before beginning to sing.

Waxman’s mournful voice and solemn songs filled the café, touching upon a sombre layer beneath cheeriness of the event. Back in September, The Raging Spoon’s location, a former church at 761 Queen West—which had belonged to the Toronto United Church Council for the past 100 years and is home to a number of non-profits—was sold to private developers, and the entire building will soon be closed. It may be demolished to make room for condos. “This is the last event that’s going to be happening in this space,” said Dobkin. “It’s a real loss for the strip. I feel like there aren’t enough public spaces like this where people can come together and socialize, and it’s free and open. To me, real estate is a real issue in this city, where spaces are being pushed out for corporate use.”

The Raging Spoon, a café and catering service staffed by survivors of mental illness, will continue on as a catering company, although their next location is still unknown. In the meantime, Clarke is happy to cook up the weekly Artists’ Soup Kitchen lunches, and works with each artist to develop the menu. Waxman had requested the day’s all-red menu (he said the colour relates most directly to the physical body). Two weeks before, the artists had planned a Dr. Seuss theme, so Clarke prepared green eggs (with spinach) and ham.

The bulk of the funding for the food comes from a Toronto Arts Council grant designed specifically for the project. Springgay, who is currently doing research on contemporary artists and public projects, added some SSHRC funding. Thanks to the grants and the hard work of the organizers, visitors can stop by The Raging Spoon from 12 to 3 p.m. and catch a free performance and meal for the next three Mondays.

As Dobkin observed the 25 or so attendees mingling in the café, she praised the arts community that is already present in the city. “There’s always greener grass, but I actually feel that Toronto has a lot going for it for artists,” she said. “There’s a pretty dynamic community. I feel really lucky to live here.”

The next Artists’ Soup Kitchen is on Monday, January 30, and features artist Naty Tremblay.

The University of Toronto's pedestrian-only area on Willcocks Street.

On Monday, city council will vote on a series of measures from the Toronto and East York Community Council, including a motion to permanently create two pedestrian-only areas at Ryerson University and the University of Toronto. The vote marks the final step in a project that has been, in Ryerson’s case, more than ten years in the making.

“It’s the last chapter in a very long but successful campaign by a great team of students led by the Ryerson Students’ Union and Ryerson staff,” said Chris James Drew, a former Ryerson student who was active in the Close Gould Street movement. After pressure from the student unions of both universities for more student space on campus, the City of Toronto implemented the closure of Willcocks Street between Huron and St. George and Gould Street between O’Keefe and Bond, along with a portion of Victoria Street, as part of its Toronto Walking Strategy. The plan called for a year-long pilot initiative to examine the effects of the street closures from September 2010 to September 2011. Last fall, the pedestrian areas were granted a six-month extension, and in January, the Community Council approved the motion to keep the areas.

Planner Alan Webb, who works at U of T’s Campus & Facilities Planning office, has witnessed the success of the closed area, now dubbed the “Willcocks Common.” “We’ve conducted a survey with the city to see student feedback, and it has all been very positive. When we first went in, people were pleasantly surprised, and started using it right away.” Among the uses to which the area’s been put: weekly farmer’s markets and the Field to Fork Festival, as well as pick-up basketball and hockey.

Ryerson’s pedestrian-only area has also been a success, hosting student group days and fashion shows. “Gould went from being a shortcut street to a student spirit space,” Drew told us.

Whether the progress at Gould and Willcocks will lead to the growth of pedestrian-only areas elsewhere in the city, however, remains unclear. But Webb is optimistic that Toronto residents can learn from the examples of the two streets. “Once the wider public sees them in action, they can understand the areas and see if there are opportunities for this elsewhere in the city,” he said.

As for Monday’s meeting, Drew isn’t concerned that any councillors will attempt to organize opposition to the pedestrian-only motion. “I haven’t heard or seen any indication that it’s not going to be successful,” he said. While it may be unusual for the mayor’s “War on the Car” rhetoric to jive with the closing of any street for pedestrian-only purposes, Gould and Willcocks present a special case. Because both streets are nestled within university campuses, restricting traffic had a lesser effect than on another road. Also, both Ryerson and U of T have agreed to foot the bill for the maintenance costs of each street. “There’s an economic benefit for the taxpayer and the city, because they can now deploy those resources elsewhere,” said Drew, adding that he’d be happy to give Rob Ford a personalized tour of the Gould area any time.

All that remains now is the go-head from council: if the vote passes, the effect will be to make the streets permanent car-free zones, pending renewal every five years. Drew, for one, thinks the motion will breeze right through: “City council has bigger things to worry about than a good news story.”

Crochet pasties from Sex on a Stitch.

It’s rare to see bondage gear and knitting yarn in the same place, displayed side by side. But such was the layout on Saturday at the sixth annual Erotic Arts and Crafts Fair, where vendors created their very own niche market by mixing crafts with kink.

Sponsored by Come As You Are, The Gladstone Hotel, and—oddly enough—Yelp, the day-long event featured a group of 15 or so crocheters, illustrators, and other DIY experts who presented their wares on a series of tables in the Gladstone Ballroom.

Up for grabs was the usual sex-show fare: chocolate-covered strawberries, penis cookies, and vintage erotic prints, along with craftier items like crochet pasties and XXX “adult” colouring books. While nude illustrations and erotic greeting cards comprised the majority of the items, there were a few more mystifying objects, such as breast-shaped pottery that bore an uncanny resemblance to a pair of fried eggs. When asked about the inspiration behind her work, the artist replied, simply, “Boobs are great!”

Fair enough.

“This is our subversive Valentine’s Day event,” said organizer Ananda DeSilva, an owner of Come As You Are. “People find a little shock value and amusement in the idea of exploring their sexuality through crafts, which are traditionally seen as adorable and innocent.”

The atmosphere was more cheeky than sexy, and the event felt closer to a regular craft fair than a sex show (plus the DJ blasting K’naan wasn’t really adding to the mood). But the vibe fit the clientele, who appeared to be more interested in the knitted “hickey hiders” than the few dildos lying around.

“Some of my clients are burlesque dancers, but it’s mostly people interested in knitting and crafting,” said the owner of Sex on a Stitch, who crafted the previously mentioned crotchet pasties. Also a professional copywriter, she launched the side business after teaching herself to crotchet through YouTube videos.

As for the rest of the vendors, their erotic crafting seemed to be more a labour of love than a moneymaker. “This is just a side thing,” said an artist exhibiting a series of nude drawings. Yet all the crafters appeared to take pride in their creations, including the founder of a “creative crap” business called Pretty Poopie (whatever that means). And although this stuff might not be for everyone, the buyers in the crowd certainly appreciated the strange blend of sex and craft.

“We’re into all this stuff. It’s so individualized!” exclaimed a chatty middle-aged man who had brought a small entourage of friends with him to the show. “It expands people’s imaginations and gives them a better idea of what’s usable in the bedroom!” Long live the creative class.

Laurence Lemieux in rehearsal.

The intersection of Dundas and Parliament has come a long way in the past few years. Situated at the base of Regent Park, the neighbourhood has evolved from one of the highest crime areas in Toronto to the site of a massive urban redesign. The corner is now home to pricey condos, a sparkling Sobey’s, and, as of today, The Citadel—a brand new public dance studio and community yoga space.

Dating back to 1912, The Citadel is housed in a three-storey building formerly owned by The Salvation Army, who gave the structure its name (all Salvation Army churches were called citadels, as indicated by the sign at the top of the building). The brainchild of husband-and-wife dance team Bill Coleman and Laurence Lemieux, the project was planned over two years ago, when the duo bought the building for their dance troupe, Coleman Lemieux & Compagnie. Having recently moved to Toronto from Montreal, Coleman and Lemieux were hoping to find a living and working space where their two children could grow up and their company could produce and perform contemporary dance.

“We’re a young family and we don’t have massive means financially, so we were looking for a space in Regent Park, which was the appropriate price range. We purchased this building, and then afterwards we found out that we were kitty-corner to a really big urban revitalization project,” says Coleman. “After living here, we’ve become involved with the community.”

The property was completely gutted, and Lemieux and Coleman began a massive renovation on the three-story brick structure. Now complete, the main floor features a state-of-the-art dance studio and performance space, which can seat up to 60 people and features the only complete grid of LED theatre lights in Canada. The building’s first floor houses a professional yoga studio, which will be home to pay-what-you-can yoga classes as part of an initiative between the CLC and The YogaBeat, a project organized by Felicia Ross of Moksha Yoga. The third floor serves as the family’s residence.

Coleman and Lemieux are committed to making the space as accessible to the local community as possible. “The yoga’s PWYC, and Laurence is offering a free Saturday morning dance class. Before, we were doing partnerships with the local schools—teaching classes and workshops out in the community,” says Coleman. “Now that the building is renovated, they can come here and use our space. The dance shows will be affordable, and the space is affordable to rent, so the dance community and the local community can use it.”

The building’s renovations, designed by Diamond Schmitt Architects, took two years to complete and cost $2 million. The project was partially funded through the City of Toronto, the Ontario Trillium Foundation, and the Canadian Cultural Spaces Fund, along with private donations. But according to Lemieux, their work isn’t done yet. “We still have lots and lots of money to raise to pay back what we borrowed to renovate the place,” she says. With this in mind, the couple has created a campaign called Brick by Brick, where contributors can donate anywhere from $25 (for a brick, to complete the building’s façade) to $80,000 (for the cost of the LED light system).

While the building may not yet be fully paid off, Coleman and Lemieux are eager to kick off their company’s season. The Coleman Lemieux & Compagnie’s first show of the year, a solo piece choreographed and performed by Lemieux entitled Les cheminements de l’Influence (Pathways of Influence), opens tomorrow at The Citadel and runs until February 25. The YogaBeat’s PWYC classes are slated to begin this Saturday.

For Jason Kandankery, a vice-principal at the neighbouring Regent Park/Duke of York Junior Public School, the opening couldn’t come soon enough. “This is a wonderful opportunity to fuse teaching and learning through art,” he says. Kandankery has been working with Coleman and Lemieux ever since Lemieux began teaching dance workshops for the Grade 3 students at his school. “I hope we can have both the student and parent community come into this space, and show them the power of dance and drama,” he says.

Coleman and Lemieux are confident that the community will take advantage of The Citadel. Coleman recalls that before construction began on the Regent Park Arts and Cultural Centre, studies showed that community residents requested more opportunities to see and learn dance in their neighbourhood. “Dance is a great thing, “ he says. “It’s healthy physically, it has the benefits of participating and interacting with people, and it’s something all cultures can share.”

DIRECTED BY FREIDA MOCK (U.S., World Premiere)

SCREENINGS:

Saturday, April 28, 9:30 p.m.
TIFF Bell Lightbox 1 (350 King Street West)

Sunday, April 30, 6:45 p.m.
Cumberland 2 (159 Cumberland Street)

Saturday, May 5, 4 p.m.
Isabel Bader Theatre (93 Charles Street West)

According to Jesuit priest Father Greg Boyle, “nothing stops a bullet like a job.” It’s a viewpoint that’s been adopted as the mission statement of Homeboy Industries, the Los Angeles organization Boyle founded in 1992 to help ex-gang members and felons re-integrate into society. G-Dog is an examination of the daily operations at Homeboy, which, in addition to providing everything from free career advice classes to AA meetings, includes a bakery, silk-screening shop, tattoo-removal clinic, and the Homegirl Cafe. Nearly everyone who works at Homeboy—with the exception of Father Boyle himself—has done time. Now they hold jobs, pay taxes, and share jokes and hugs with Boyle, who they affectionately call “G.”

It’s initially hard to tell why director Freida Mock wanted to make G-Dog, as a 2007 documentary about Boyle and Homeboy Industries already exists. (That one’s narrated by Martin Sheen.) But if her goal was simply to bring Boyle’s story to a larger audience, it’s certainly one worth re-telling. While no feat of documentary filmmaking in and of itself—the narrative lacks structure, the cinematography is amateurish, and the film fails to answer broader questions about charity and religion—G-Dog manages to convey the beauty of Boyle’s message of acceptance and the profound effect he has had on the lives of countless former gang members. For anyone who voted in favour of the Conservatives’ omnibus crime bill, G-Dog should be mandatory viewing.

Potter Kim Henderson shapes a clay planter on the wheel in her studio.

“Here’s a wonderful tool: an old credit card!” says Kim Henderson. Sure enough, she picks up a clay-covered TD Visa card and uses it to sculpt the edges of the planter that she is shaping on her pottery wheel. “Why purchase something when you can make use of something that you already have?”

This emphasis on functionality is evident in the pieces that Henderson makes and sells through her company, Clay Cauldron. “I like the things I make to have a use, or to solve a problem,” she says of her work, which ranges from table settings to containers that help garlic stay fresh longer. On her backyard deck are several patio planters, which she designed to fit around a patio-table umbrella pole. “Now you can have your flowers perfectly centered on the table!” she says. “It’s beautiful because it works.”

Henderson’s handiness at the wheel—she can finish a piece in mere minutes—has partly to do with over two decades of practice. “It never occurred to me that being an artist was a career option,” she says. She spent 12 years as a community support worker while experimenting with pottery as a hobby. It wasn’t until 2000 that she was ready to leave her job and become a full-time potter. “I threw a cylinder for years, working on learning how to throw,” she says. “When I finally had a product I was proud of, I was 38. I knew that if I didn’t make a change then, I never would.”

Henderson already had her own studio complete with a small kiln and wheel, but still found that the switch from full-time employee to small-business artisan required some adjustment “Not having a regular paycheck was hard to get used to,” she says. Also, there was some initial trouble navigating what she calls the “kiln dragon.”

The process of creating a piece of pottery is lengthy: Henderson first weighs the clay for continuity, kneads it to remove air bubbles and create consistency, puts it on the wheel and “throws” the piece, waits for it to achieve leather-hard firmness, trims the bottom and adds any additional pieces (such as handles for mugs), and then bisque fires it at 1,888 degrees Fahrenheit for 12 hours. And after all that, she has to deal with the temperamental nature of the kiln. “It still happens today—I can fill the kiln and open it and not have the pieces work,” she says. “One of the reasons I realized that I was right for this career was that when that happened, I would be so discouraged and sad that night, but by the next morning I would be enthusiastic and start right back at it.”

One of the first things Henderson did after starting Clay Cauldron was to set up a website and hire a web designer. She also began showing at art shows, and eventually formed relationships with retailers. Her pieces are now sold at over 20 shops in Ontario, Quebec, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia. “I love going out and doing shows, because I get to interact directly with the customer,” she says. “Also, I get to see all these people [in the artisan community] that I connect with. I have quite a few artist friends that do this for a living.” Henderson says she usually does around eight shows a year, but, because of her many responsibilities at the company, has had to focus on local events like the One of A Kind Show. “When you’re the only one, you do all the marketing, communicating, and packaging—it’s a lot,” she says. “When I first got into this, I don’t think I was fully aware of the magnitude of both making your own product and running your own business.”

There are also other, less apparent duties that Henderson has to tend to, such as as having her pieces tested for food safety. While she doesn’t use lead, barium, or cadmium, Henderson still needs to send her wares to the United States to have the glazes, which she creates herself, tested in a lab. Only when they return can she guarantee that the pieces are safe and ready to use in the oven, microwave, and dishwasher.

After 12 years of working as a full-time potter, though, Henderson is still appreciative of the perks of her work. “I love that I get to try new things,” she says. In the past year, she has begun creating glass fusion pieces in her kiln. “I can use the equipment that I already have, and work in a different medium.”

“In my previous work, success was very gradual,” she notes. “Sometimes you wouldn’t see it for years.”

“With this, I make something, set it, and it’s there. It’s almost immediate.”

Thanks to Moosehead for making this series possible.

Grant Heaps was 14 when his mother first taught him how to sew. “I was always obsessed with fabric, even as a child,” he says. Because of his penchant for creating outfits, Heaps initially pursued fashion design, but eventually he became frustrated with the demands of making clothing fit. “I decided to forget fashion and move on to working with flat things,” he says. For more than a decade, he has spent his free time constructing two-dimensional works of textile art, from hanging quilts to ornate, decorative chair coverings.

Heaps, who has a full-time gig as the assistant wardrobe coordinator at the National Ballet of Canada, began developing his pieces in the hours after work. “I just like working,” he says. “I work all day, and then I come home and work some more.” His art also requires dedication; there’s one piece made up of tiny, hand-sewn circles that he’s been working on for more than four years.

His efforts have paid off. Three years ago, he completed a residency in North Carolina, where he worked out of an old thrift store and made pieces using materials that were already there. “A friend of mine who owns WORN Fashion Journal told me about it,” he said. “The experience really boosted my confidence.”

Heaps has no formal art training, so he was caught off guard when the Textile Museum of Canada approached him and asked if he wanted to participate in their current exhibition, “Dreamland: Textiles and the Canadian Landscape.” “I always dreamed of someone finding me through my blog, and they did!” he says. “It’s an amazing show. It’s just through a bit of luck after another bit of luck that I got to be in it.”

When asked where he finds inspiration for his pieces, Heaps laughs. “My own emotional distress, really!” he says. “Well that, and pop music.” He often uses words and lyrics in his pieces, in an attempt to draw in viewers. “I want my pieces to provide an emotional impact, if not a necessarily a narrative,” he says. He’s currently working on a series of 60 quilts, which will tell the story of an audience member experiencing a theatrical production.

Thanks to the scraps he receives from the ballet, remnants from clothing factories and stuff he collects off the street, Heaps rarely has to buy fabric. When he does, he goes to thrift stores. He sees others in his age group (that is, in their 20s and 30s) experimenting with similar ways of reusing materials for crafts. “There are a lot of people trying to do something different themselves—trying to make something handmade,” he says. “You can see it in the emergence of crafting groups.”

Because of his day job and the low cost of his materials, Heaps isn’t particularly concerned with profit. While he has displayed his work in cafes, book stores and galleries, he doesn’t usually sell his pieces. “I think if I needed to sell my stuff, it would drive me insane,” he says. “I like that I don’t have to make money off of it. For me, the idea of just doing it for myself works really well.”

Thanks to Moosehead for making this series possible.

South Africa native Ross Stuart was standing on a rural mountaintop when he first discovered his calling. “We were travelling in the Transkei when I was about nine or 10 years old, and we stopped at one of the lookout points to look out over the countryside,” he remembers. “There was this boy up there playing this tin can guitar—a piece of wood nailed to the tin, and at the top of the wood were these six tuners made out of bent nails, and he was using fishing wire. And it sounded great.”

It wasn’t just the sweet sound, though, that caught Stuart’s attention. “He was playing local songs and people were giving him money. And what really got me was that this guy had made something that people were giving him money for,” he says. “I went right up and stared at him. Everybody thought it was because I wanted to play the guitar, but I never wanted to. What I wanted to do was make something that people would actually pay for.”

Thus began Stuart’s lifelong attempt to craft a tin can instrument that would have the right weight and tone. “I had no idea how to build them,” he recalls. “I didn’t know anything about bridges or frets or tuners or anything. All I had was a mental image of what that guy was holding in his hands.” Stuart eventually moved to Canada and spent several decades running his own carpentry business. As his career took off, the tin can dream was put aside.

It wasn’t until seven years ago, when he bought a ukelele for a Hawaiian-themed party, that Ross decided to modify his original guitar aspirations and focus on a banjo-ukulele hybrid. When he came upon a National Reso-Phonic ukulele, he knew that its sound was exactly what he had been looking for. “It had a big metal body, and an aluminum cone inside,” he says. “But it was $1,700! I thought, that’s outrageous; I can make that. I figured if I could make ones that sounded as good and sell them for under $200, then I’ve got a brand new career.”

Which is exactly what happened. In the past two years, Stuart has retired from carpentry and started building tin can banjo-ukeleles full-time, which he sells through his new venture, The Great Mush-Uke. Despite his initial trepidation, Stuart’s instruments have been a huge hit with the public. “I didn’t want to give up my carpentry business until I was certain that I had the right price point and that I could pay all the bills,” he says. At his first show, he cleared over $900. “And so I told all my contacts, ‘I’m no longer doing carpentry for a living. I now make tin can banjos and ukuleles.’ And they said, ‘That’s so weird…but good luck!’”

Stuart is now a regular fixture at events like the One of a Kind Show, the Queen West Art Crawl, and the Cabbagetown Art and Crafts Sale, where he received an award last year. This summer, he’s bought a block of weekends at the Distillery District, where he sells his instruments to the tourists that flock to the historic site. “These have gone out all over the world,” he says, gesturing to his instruments. “I have ones in Australia, in California, in Holland…even in Thailand.”

Stuart spends his days in his backyard workshop, where he can build and weld a new instrument in just two weeks. Sitting near his big apple tree, with his dog keeping watch over his tools, Stuart says he’s achieved what he’d always wanted to. “From the very first time I saw that boy standing on top of that big mountain with people giving him money for something that he had made, that was what I wanted to do with my life,” he says. “I wanted to find something that I could do with my hands that people would want and pay me for. And now I’m here.”

Thanks to Moosehead for making this series possible.

Walking into the Chocosol kitchen at Dufferin and Dupont streets is like stepping back in time. An old-fashioned-style grinder lines one wall, while canvas bags filled with raw cacao beans spill out onto the floor. Bustling around the space is Chocosol’s team of expert chocolate makers, who are busy handcrafting chocolate based on methods that date back hundreds of years.

Founder Michael Sacco got the idea for Chocosol while travelling through southern Mexico. He had brought a solar-powered roaster with him from his graduate school. After an Oaxacan medicine woman showed Sacco how to make traditional chocolate, he decided to bring the knowledge back to Ontario and create a social enterprise that partnered chocolate enthusiasts in Canada with cacao growers in southern Mexico.

Chocosol is built upon a traditional method of chocolate production—one that doesn’t involve computerized machines or genetically altered ingredients. “We like to build everything from the ground up,” says wholesale manager Mathieu McFadden. “Our stone grinders are spin-offs from Oaxacan-style grinders; we just make them so that they are safe by Canadian standards. They are tools, but they are not machines, the way you’d find machines in chocolate factories. What happens here is something very old, very rooted in tradition.”

The traditional method requires a number of time-consuming steps. The beans are first put in a roaster, and then cooled. The roasted beans are then hand-fed through a winnowing device, which crushes them and removes their shells. They move onto the Oaxacan-style volcanic stone grinder, from which they emerge as a thick sludge (because cacao beans have such a high fat content, grinding them creates a liquid substance) that’s mixed with organic cane sugar and one of Chocosol’s many flavourings (like vanilla pods, hemp, or chili, to name just a few).

The chocolate mush is then taken to the tempering device. “Tempering is done when you want to create a solid structure,” says head chocolate maker Crystal Porter. “Glass gets tempered, clay gets tempered, and so does chocolate.” Porter raises and lowers the heat as a wheel circulates air into the chocolate, creating a unified consistency. Finally, the chocolate is placed in trays and cooled before being separated into bars (for eating) or pucks (for Mexican drinking chocolate).

Each of these steps is handled with careful precision by Porter, a former pastry chef at Palais Royale. Porter and McFadden are quick to point out the difference between European-style chocolate, which is characterized by its super-smooth texture, and the more fibrous, tannin-rich Mexican kind. “The flavours really speak themselves—they’re totally complex,” says Porter. Adds McFadden, “In our chocolate, you taste all the different varieties of beans, and you get a sense of the soil and the people who grow it.”

The majority of the Chocosol staff have travelled to southern Mexico to meet the farmers whose beans they work with. Virtually every step of Chocosol’s process is designed with an intercultural, ecological perspective in mind. All farmers are paid above fair-trade organic wages, and offered annual contracts where they dictate their terms and conditions. The cacao is grown according to forest stewardship methods that preserve biodiversity, in keeping with Mayan tradition. In Toronto, the chocolate production creates minimal waste—all refuse from the kitchen is composted, and the finished product is wrapped in completely biodegradable packaging. Chocosol’s kitchen space also serves as a location for community meals, book readings, and food education sessions.

The chocolate makers at Chocosol are committed to fostering a community that values both chocolate and the people and processes that are involved in crafting it. “This isn’t just a product—it’s about discussion, dialogue, and education,” says McFadden. “What we do here represents a symbolic relationship between Southern Mexico and Southern Ontario, and is rooted in the soil of both locations.”

Thanks to Moosehead for making this series possible.

For Jill Graham, there’s a big difference between a copy and an original. “The posters you buy at IKEA or a gift shop are just reproductions of an image created by an artist,” she says. “What I do is all original art work. The printed piece exists solely as an original art work, conceived and executed in print—there isn’t a painting or a photo of it somewhere else.”

Still, she’s aware that the majority of folks don’t really get what it is that she does for a living. “Most people don’t understand what fine art printing even is—never mind lithography,” she says. As a master printer, Graham is hired by other artists to create lithographic prints of their work. It’s the printmaking process, though, that’s particularly confusing.

“It’s a difficult process to explain,” she says. “Lithography is a printmaking form that’s done on lithographic limestone slabs, which were originally quarried in Bavaria. The stones have a particular quality of being both water and grease-loving stones, meaning they will accept both. The artist will create their drawing on the stone using greasy, waxy drawing materials.”

The next steps are done by the master printer, and involve etching, sponging, and something Graham refers to as a “chemical de-sensitization of the stone.” After hours of physical labour and close observation of chemical reactions, the prints are finally ready to be made. “When you place your paper in and run it through the printing press, what is offset onto the paper should look exactly like the drawing on the stone,” she says. “Well, that’s the cheat-sheet way of explaining it!”

The work naturally requires a pretty significant set-up. “The stones are expensive,” Graham says. “Most people who work in print will join a shared studio that has the equipment.” Graham is the technical director of such a place: Open Studio in Toronto, which is self-defined as Canada’s leading printmaking centre. “Print isn’t dying by any stretch; it’s actually very active and alive,” says Graham. “But as universities have started to sell off their equipment, the facilities are harder to access. That’s why a place like Open Studio is such a huge asset to the art community.”

Graham first encountered lithography while completing her undergraduate degree at Concordia University. Since then, she has gone on to help open three different studios in Elliott Lake, Sarnia, and Toronto, and has spent over a decade as a master printer. While she’s quick to point out that printing requires an “endurance and stubbornness,” Graham notes that the structured approach of lithography was part of what drew her to the art form in the first place. “When I describe the steps, it can sound obsessive,” she says. “Sometimes it can take three to four hours just to prepare the stone. But that suits my nature.”

The detailed process of lithography allows Graham to blend physical exertion, science, and art, and wind up with a truly unique result. “The fact that a place like IKEA just stretches canvases and sells them as prints really bothers me. It’s like going to a supermarket to buy an oil painting. It shouldn’t exist,” she says. “We’re a disposable culture and people want beautiful products, and they want them fast and cheap. But if they looked at the quality of an original print and bought it because they loved the work, it would be an investment that they could hold on to for years, and it would grow in value. A reproduction, on the other hand, has no value at all.”

Thanks to Moosehead for making this series possible.

A sign spotted at Wednesday’s Occupy Gardens rally at Queen’s Park.

Occupy Gardens Toronto really likes puns. City Hall is known as “Seedy Hall,” “peas” is employed as a substitute for both “please” and “peace,” and before Wednesday’s event at Queen’s Park (titled SOILidarity City: Free Food For All Festival) the online invite encouraged participants to “mark your calendula.”

Wordplay aside, the group, a local chapter of what has become an international movement, is quite serious when it comes to food security and awareness. “The Occupy Gardens movement is a collective of guerrilla gardeners. We’re here to make a statement on the state of the global food system, as well as the food system here in Canada,” said Katie Berger, who organized Wednesday’s event along with Occupy Gardens Toronto founder Jacob Kearey-Moreland.

“Right now we have a hybrid state-corporate food system that wreaks environmental devastation and displaces people from their homes through migrant labour,” Berger added. “While there are some good points to the Local Food Act that was just proposed by Premier Wynne, it is quite shallow. It doesn’t address the fact that the ‘local’ food that it’s promoting is grown under slave-like conditions. It also doesn’t have concrete targets, because that would violate Canada’s free-trade agreements. So we’ve essentially made our country impotent in the global system and our province impotent in the national system.”

In an attempt to fight back against what Kearey-Moreland called “the clutches of global capitalism,” Occupy Gardens Toronto is trying to provide people with an alternative. A year ago, the group celebrated International Workers’ Day by planting a community garden at Queen’s Park. The City ignored the garden’s existence for five months, while group members tended to the plants and expanded the patch. The night before they intended to harvest the crops, however, City workers received orders to remove the garden (in the middle of the night, no less). “They destroyed the garden and all of the produce was thrown out. There was over five kilograms of fresh, organic produce that they threw in the garbage rather than donating to one of the hundreds of understocked food banks in Toronto,” said Berger.

The crowd at Wednesday’s Occupy Gardens rally.

Wednesday’s celebration served as an act of protest, with a group of about 100 gathering at Queen’s Park to plant another community garden. The afternoon also contained a number of workshops, speakers, and even a musical theatre piece. Over a hundred people arrived on the South Lawn for the afternoon’s kickoff, where they were treated to free vegan chili, red bean and lentil salad, hummus, and assorted fruits and vegetables. Students, seniors, and families with toddlers all lined up for the free grub. A couple of suits even checked their iPhones while waiting for their turns.

Issues of food access are central to the Occupy Gardens movement. “We need to recognize the right to food,” said Kearey-Moreland. “We need to guarantee a meal for every kid in school, and we can help by having a garden in every school. We have this situation right now where kids are going hungry, while other kids are fed junk food and becoming obese. Meanwhile the solutions are quite simple.” The group’s Free Food For All project consists of volunteers “gleaning” unwanted food by dumpster diving, taking donations, and picking fruit from trees, and then using the supplies to teach workshops on canning and fermentation.

Occupy Gardens Toronto also runs the Toronto Seed Library, which allows borrowers to take out free seeds to use in their gardens. Users are given information on how to grow different plants and how to harvest the seeds from them, which are then returned to the library so the cycle can begin again. “It’s all part of a global seed-freedom movement, which is about taking back the most fundamental part of the food system, which is the seed,” said Berger.

According to Brendan Behrmann, who works with the Seed Library, hundreds of exchanges have already taken place. “Our goals are three-pronged: to reconnect people with food and the growing process, to promote the conservation of heirloom species, and to push back against GMOs and industrial agriculture,” he said. Within the next few months, the Seed Library plans to expand to 10 branches across the GTA.

If it seems like Occupy Gardens Toronto has its fingers in a lot of different pies, it’s a reflection of the multitude of issues that revolve around food and agriculture. Since 2008, food bank usage in Canada has increased by 31 per cent, with four out of 10 users classified as children or minors. 2.7 million Canadians are currently deemed “food insecure,” which means they aren’t certain of where or how they will obtain their next meal. In 2012, Statistics Canada reported that 31.5 per cent of Canadian children were overweight or obese. And, as farms become increasingly more corporate, farming is losing its appeal for young Canadians. Over two decades, the population of farmers under 35 has fallen by two thirds.

As a response to food issues both global and local, Occupy Gardens groups have cropped up across North America, in locations like Montreal and Philadelphia. “Not everyone has access to land to grow a garden, and the City has made cuts to the Live Green grant program. The number of people on the waitlist to get into community gardens or start new ones is getting longer and longer,” said Kearey-Moreland. In addition to providing free food for the hungry, an Occupy Gardens community garden at Scadding Court at Bathurst and Dundas streets offers people the opportunity to grow their own produce.

On Wednesday the mood was celebratory, even if the new incarnation of the community garden at Queen’s Park would likely be destroyed again. (Queen’s Park confirmed that while the event would be tolerated, the garden would be removed once planted.) In the meantime, though, participants lounged in the sun, listening to music and enjoying the complimentary meal. Adam Heller, a volunteer who showed up to help ladle out chili, was happy to be participating. He has his own concerns about food security. “I’ve gotten a lot better at scavenging lately,” he said. “I think food should be free, if you don’t care what you’re eating. I mean if you really don’t care what it is, you should be able to survive.”

Photo by Alisdair Jones, from the Torontoist Flickr pool.

It might be comforting to think that the tragic shooting of Michael Brown—an 18-year-old unarmed black man—by a white police officer on August 9 and the resulting chaos in Ferguson, Missouri, are distinctly American phenomena. The history of racial tensions, the heavy-handed policing tactics, the disproportionate criminalization of young black men—these are issues that have long plagued the United States, a country so obsessed with law and order that it has the highest incarceration rate in the world.

But look a little closer, and the lines between Ferguson and Toronto begin to blur. The photos of police officers in full riot gear brandishing body shields and tear gas canisters at protesters start to look a lot like the images from the G20 summit in 2010. The Ferguson police’s racial profiling mirrors the Toronto Police Service’s (TPS) practice of disproportionately carding and documenting young men of colour. And the six shots fired against the unarmed Brown while he attempted to flee echo the tragic killing of Sammy Yatim, who was shot repeatedly on an empty Toronto streetcar, or Michael Eligon, who was killed after walking toward police officers while brandishing two pairs of scissors.

Much of the discussion surrounding the events in Ferguson has focused on the discrepancy between Ferguson’s majority African-American population and the nearly all-white police force. Only 20 years ago, Toronto also had a police service that was 94 per cent white. While outgoing police chief Bill Blair has received many accolades for attempting to diversify the police force during his tenure, by 2010 only 18 per cent of the force was female, while less than 20 per cent belonged to a visible minority—a small step for a city where women make up half the population and half of all residents are non-white.

Toronto has a police force that still does not accurately reflect the communities it is meant to protect. A particular case in point is the Toronto Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy (TAVIS), a unit born out of 2005’s “summer of the gun.” TAVIS officers are not stationed in a specific neighbourhood, but are instead deployed to different parts of the city depending on criminal activity. Described as a “racial profiling unit” by community members, TAVIS is notorious in low-income neighbourhoods for conducting public strip searches, assaulting individuals, and pointing guns at unarmed teenagers—just like the Ferguson police. It’s not surprising that TAVIS has the highest rate of stopping and documenting black individuals of all TPS units.

Appropriate policing is measured both in terms of how police officers engage with individuals and how they engage with crowds. The Ferguson police’s appearance in riot gear and armoured vehicles during the initial protests last week sent a clear message to individuals attempting to exercise their right to freedom of assembly. Peaceful crowds chanting for justice have been repelled with rubber bullets, dogs, and a sound cannon, while families with small children have been tear gassed.

This trend toward the militarization of police forces—one described in a number of recent articles—has troubling impacts for police-civilian relations. Toronto police are not immune, despite major crime levels having dropped 20 per cent in the past three years. Rather than announce when exactly the TPS will implement its pilot program involving body-worn cameras—which have been shown to improve safety and police-community relationships—Chief Blair requested increased funding to extend access to Tasers from supervisors and tactical squad officers to general front-line cops, despite objections from mental health advocates. The request, which would have cost nearly $400,000, was denied by the Toronto Police Services Board.

Police forces argue that they require military-style weapons and equipment in order to defend themselves from violent crowds. Yet during the G20, when the Toronto police joined other forces from across the county in brandishing tear gas and riot equipment, reported injuries were the result of police officers attacking unarmed civilians, rather than the other way around. Police in Ferguson have argued that looting and property destruction have necessitated their brutal response, while protesters have said that they’ve remained peaceful and raised their arms in submission. In both Toronto and Ferguson, police have relied on advanced weaponry, restrictions on access to public space, mass arrests, and the harassment of journalists and media personnel to assert their dominance and control the public.

There are, of course, many differences between Toronto and Ferguson. In the U.S., a black individual is shot and killed by a white police officer every two weeks—a statistic that is thankfully unimaginable in Canada. The TPS has made progress thanks to Chief Blair’s admission of the existence of racial profiling and by attempting to build community connections through the Police and Community Engagement Review, which outlined recommendations for training and oversight. Yet at the root of the tragic events in Ferguson and the clashes between police and civilians in the past few years in Toronto is a growing divide between the police and the communities they are supposed to serve.

This divide was recently explored in a half-hour documentary film, Crisis of Distrust, that we produced at the Toronto Policing Literacy Initiative. In the film, young people from across Toronto describe the fraught relationship they have with police in their neighbourhood, and many discuss the profiling and discrimination that they have experienced. Any one of them could have been Michael Brown.

Screening the film to different audiences across the city this summer has taught us that what Toronto residents want from their police is the same as what the residents of Ferguson want: diversity, transparency, and equity. Toronto police officers can learn a great deal from the tragedy in Ferguson, provided they are ready to listen.

Wyndham Bettencourt-McCarthy is a former Torontoist contributor and a member of Policing Literacy Initiative. She covered the G20 for us and was hit by a police officer; hers is the second case that is now in the works against the one officer who has so far been convicted. Zakaria Abdulle is the Director of the Policing Literacy Initiative.

Photo by Ryan Walker/Torontoist.

“Strange.” It’s the word I’ve used most often when trying to sum up my feelings about being assaulted by a Toronto police officer on June 26, 2010, while reporting on the G20 summit. It’s the word I’ve relied on when describing the four-year long criminal proceeding that followed. And it’s the first thing I felt when I learned, on Wednesday morning, that Const. Babak Andalib-Goortani, the officer who was charged in my case, was acquitted of assault with a weapon.

It’s strange that I experienced violence for the first time in my (very lucky) life at the hands of an officer of the law. It’s strange that a photographer happened to be present at that moment and snap a picture. It’s strange that the officer in the photograph was identified by the Toronto Star, after the Toronto Police Service said they did not know who he was.

I saw some truly strange things that day, back in 2010. I watched police officers in riot gear storm into a crowd of people relaxing on a lawn, causing panic. I saw more police officers than I could count beating people on the ground with batons. And as I turned to look behind me, I saw, out of the corner of my eye, a short officer with a goatee come toward me with his baton raised. He hit me on my right hip, causing a red and purple welt.

This is the experience I’ve tried to relate, over and over again, during the past four years. I described it to the Office of the Independent Review Director (OIPRD) in my complaint, to the Crown lawyers assigned to the case, and to the pre-trial judge. I tried to explain that what happened to me was not an anomaly. Every officer I saw at Queen’s Park that afternoon—I was reporting from the “designated free speech zone”—had their badge concealed. I saw multiple officers beating people, while others dragged protestors behind barricades and into police vans. I did not observe a single officer stopping the violence.

But that part of my experience did not get very far. I was even instructed by detectives from the Toronto Police Service’s Professional Standards Unit, who investigated the charge against Andalib-Goortani, not to discuss what I saw other officers doing.

There’s a lot about the criminal case that I still don’t understand. Why I was questioned about my complaint only months after the assault by Andalib-Goortani’s TPS colleagues at Professional Standards. Why they refused to allow me to tape that conversation for my records. Why I had to schedule days off work only to be told, at the last minute, that my presence at court was not required. Why the Crown prosecutors sat silently while Andalib-Goortani’s defence attorney Harry Black yelled “fuck” and “cocksucker” at me on the witness stand during the pre-trial cross examination (the cross examination lasted almost an entire day—the transcript is over 80 pages long—and touched on everything from my employment history to my extracurricular activities in high school). And most of all, why my main point of contact throughout the ordeal was not the Crown, or the OIPRD, or Victim Services, but a detective constable at Professional Standards—a non-civilian employee of the Toronto Police Service.

The case hinged on a photograph: one that was taken by a stranger, and uploaded anonymously. After I was sent the photograph by a friend, I submitted it along with my complaint. This week the photograph was ruled in admissible in court because the Crown was unable to locate the person who took and uploaded the picture. It didn’t matter that the visual description I gave of the man who hit me matches Andalib-Goortani. It didn’t matter that a TPS sergeant had identified the man in the photograph as Andalib-Goortani last year. It didn’t matter that a certified forensic video analyst from the Ontario Provincial Police testified that she could find “no visual evidence of image alteration and/or changes to the image structure.” Defence lawyer Harry Black maintained the photograph could have been tampered with—the same defence that TPS Chief Bill Blair used when video footage of Andalib-Goortani assaulting protestor Adam Nobody surfaced (yes, that’s him, too). Andalib-Goortani was convicted in that case. This time, however, that line of defence worked. Without the photograph, the Crown argued that they did not have enough evidence to proceed, and Andalib-Goortani was let go.

The bruise on my hip after being hit by a baton. Photo by Alixandra Gould.

But Andalib-Goortani is also just the face of a much larger, more disturbing problem. He’s the scapegoat for a system that teaches police officers that the public are the enemy. He committed acts of extreme violence that weekend, but he wasn’t alone. He was just unlucky—he got caught. One of the arguments in the case regarded the tapes of the orders that TPS officers were given from their superiors that day. I never got to hear them, but based on the behaviour I witnessed on the part of many officers, I can imagine what they say. If Andalib-Goortani had been convicted for assaulting me, it would not have been wrong. But it might not have been fair, either.

In the end, what happened to me is not that strange. It feels that way to me, because it was outside of my range of experience, and not typical for reporters in Canada. But it’s not surprising to the marginalized young men in Toronto who experience racial profiling every day, to victims who have slogged through endless court cases, or to the more than 1,000 people who were beaten, arrested, and detained during the G20—a weekend Ombudsman Andre Marin referred to as the “the most massive compromise of civil liberties in Canadian history.”

Maybe the only strange part of any of this, really, is that nothing has changed. The Special Investigations Unit, which investigates cases of police misconduct resulting in serious injury or death, examined only six incidents from the G20. My injuries, which were deemed not “serious,” became one of the 357 complaints received by the OIPRD. From all of these, only three charges were laid: two against Andalib-Goortani, and one against TPS officer Glenn Weddell, for breaking bystander Dorian Braton’s arm. Weddell pleaded not guilty and was acquitted last year. Andalib-Goortani also pleaded not guilty to assaulting Adam Nobody, but was found guilty in December and sentenced to 45 days in jail. He was released on bail and is appealing the verdict.

Ten days after the G20, when photos and videos of police brutality were flooding the web, 36 of Toronto’s 44 city councillors voted to commend the TPS on “a job well done” over the weekend. In light of the largest mass arrest in Canadian history, Councillor Frances Nunziata (Ward 11, York South-Weston) accused those asking for a public inquiry of being “drug dealers.” Former mayor David Miller applauded the police, saying “[they] did their absolutely level best.”

Almost two years after the G20, Chief Bill Blair admitted that some things “were not done well” during the weekend, but failed actually to apologize. That same year, Toronto Life celebrated Blair as one of “Toronto’s most influential people.” When it was announced that Blair’s contract would not be renewed this summer, the Star drafted a glowing editorial that praised his “compassion, communications skill, sensitivity to Toronto’s ethnic communities and professional integrity.” (Torontoist‘s assessment of his tenure has some greater reservations.)

Just last week, I was in Trinity Bellwoods Park for a work function when I saw a group of police officers from 14 Division surrounding a man in handcuffs. My coworkers told me that before I arrived, they saw the officers knock the man off his bike, and punch and kick him. After questioning and searching him, they wrote him a ticket for running a red light and let him go. He’s currently waiting on X-Ray results for broken ribs and a damaged kidney.

None of this is strange to me anymore. It’s what I’ve learned to expect.

Wyndham Bettencourt-McCarthy is a former Torontoist contributor and freelance journalist. She currently works as a policy and research co-ordinator in the housing sector.

Photo by alisdair jones, from the Torontoist Flickr pool

Last Tuesday, 2,000 people gathered in downtown Toronto to protest a Missouri grand jury’s decision not to pursue charges against police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown. The group rallied against police brutality and racial profiling in Ferguson, as well as issues closer to home—including the Toronto Police Service’s practice of carding black youths, and the police actions that led to the deaths of Sammy Yatim and Michael Eligon.

Less than a week later, an Ontario judge handed down a sentence to a Toronto police officer who pled guilty to punching a drunk, handcuffed man—who suffered a concussion in the event—nine times. The officer’s punishment: a few months’ probation, and a $50 fine.

With protests across the U.S. and beyond over the decision in Ferguson, and mass demonstrations against government corruption and police violence in Mexico, the past month has constituted something of a watershed moment for police accountability. Even in Toronto, a number of opportunities for police reform have arisen: a new mayor, new appointees to the Toronto Police Services Board (TPSB), and a relatively new carding policy. And with Chief Bill Blair’s term ending in April 2015, the city will soon have a new police chief.

This focus on policing is something Toronto desperately needs. As TPSB chair Alok Mukherjee noted at the most recent board meeting, “a crisis of confidence” exists between Toronto police and the communities they are supposed to serve and protect. The police brutality seen during the G20 summit and the deaths of a number of mentally unstable people at the hands of TPS officers have kept the issue in the public eye. The Toronto Star’s series Known to Police, meanwhile, revealed the extent of TPS racial profiling: proportionally, more young black men have been carded in Toronto than have been subjected to New York City’s controversial stop-and-frisk program, which Mayor Bill de Blasio has vowed to end.

Although the board has pushed to reform carding and introduce new bias-free policing procedures, the problems nevertheless appear to be getting worse. A report commissioned by the TPSB and released last month revealed that officers in the Jane and Finch area spent all summer refusing to follow the new carding procedures: they continued to stop and question youth without a valid public-safety reason, continued to refuse to tell them why they were being stopped, and failed to provide them with the mandatory receipts that include their badge number and division [PDF]. When faced with the results of the report, Blair chose simply to reject the findings.

This strained environment—in which a police chief can dismiss findings with a wave of his hand, and an officer with a record of assaulting people is praised by a judge for doing “the right thing” by admitting that he’d beat a handcuffed man—is the one Tory is set to wade into. Noting that he was “not at all satisfied with the overall state of the relationship between the Police Services Board, the police service itself, and the community,” Tory announced four days ago that he would sit on the board himself.

That decision, and the decision to replace Frances Nunziata (Ward 11, York South-Weston) and Michael Thompson (Ward 37, Scarborough Centre) with councillors Shelley Carroll (Ward 33, Don Valley East) and Chin Lee (Ward 41, Scarborough-Rouge River), can be interpreted with either cynicism or hope. On the one hand, Tory’s move demonstrates a commitment to addressing policing issues in Toronto (his predecessor Rob Ford did not sit on the board, instead appointing Thompson as his delegate). Tory has stated that he supports carding reform, though he has stopped short of denouncing it altogether. His appointment of Carroll, who found significant efficiencies during her term as budget chief and argued for trimming policing costs in 2010, suggests he may be brave enough to tackle the behemoth that is the $1.08-billion police budget.

Still, Tory’s appetite for change when it comes to policing raises significant concerns. While running for mayor, Tory said he would support a renewal of Chief Blair’s contract, which suggests that he sides more with Blair’s status-quo approach to carding than with Mukherjee’s commitment to reform. His decision to remove Thompson from the board is also troubling. Not only has Thompson been an outspoken advocate for carding reform and an end to racial profiling, he’s also the only black member of city council.

Then there’s Tory’s denial of the concept of white privilege—an important issue in a city where black people are more likely than white people to be stopped and questioned by police in all 72 patrol zones.

Still, there’s a lot Tory can do to improve the tense relationship between the chief of police and the board, and between police officers and communities. Ensuring carding reform is paramount: not only should Tory champion the reforms passed by the board in April, but he should also push for more accountability for officers, and continue to commission and review independent research reports on policing practices.

At the same time, the police service itself must enforce the new policies. Some measures, such as body-worn cameras, can improve accountability, but there must also be serious consequences for officers who turn their cameras off while on duty.

With the current chief out in April, the time is also right for Tory to suggest an independent review of Blair’s brainchild, the Toronto Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy (TAVIS). TAVIS units card young black men at a higher rate than do other units, and are the subject of at least one lawsuit alleging police brutality. With Toronto consistently reporting the lowest crime rate among Canadian municipalities, TAVIS’s operations merit considerable scrutiny.

Over the past year, much has been written about our “divided” city. Few issues exemplify that divide like policing does, with its disproportionate impact on low-income and black communities located outside of the downtown core. If Tory is truly committed to building “one Toronto,” reforming police practices would be a good place to start.

Wyndham Bettencourt-McCarthy is a former Torontoist contributor and a member of the Policing Literacy Initiative.

Canada Square building at Yonge & Eglinton. Captured by Tony Lea via the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

“I’m really concerned about my property value going down” is not a statement that’s going to garner much sympathy in Toronto these days. In a city where a detached home costs over $1 million and low vacancy rates are pushing rental prices higher and higher, thousands of families are struggling. More than 78,000 households are currently waiting up to 10 years for affordable housing, hoping to land a place where they don’t have to choose between paying the rent and putting food on the table.

That’s not the case at Yonge and Eglinton, though. As yesterday’s article in the Toronto Star revealed, a group of residents in the affluent North Toronto neighbourhood are so concerned with maintaining the value of their million-dollar homes that they have banded together as the Density Creep Neighborhood [sic] Alliance to fight a new development proposal. It’s not a towering condominium that’s got them up in arms, but rather a four-storey townhouse complex where units will sell for an average of $500,000.

It would be comforting to think that this kind of upper-class entitlement is limited to only a small pocket of the city. But as the Star notes, similar battles against mid-rise developments are currently being waged elsewhere on Eglinton and in Leslieville. A half-million-dollar price tag hardly counts as affordable housing, but even if it did, the Density Creep Neighborhood Alliance’s fears would be unfounded. A significant number of studies have demonstrated that affordable housing developments have either neutral or positive effects on the property values of the surrounding community. Not-in-My-Backyard (or NIMBY) sentiment, however, is rarely grounded in evidence. Instead, it trades in the euphemistic language of neighbourhood “character” and “community,” while hiding a dark undertone—one that is increasingly reflective of the Toronto we already live in.

David Hulchanski, a professor of housing and community development at the University of Toronto, has spent years documenting how Toronto evolved from a mixed-income city to an increasingly segregated one. His “Three Cities” research [PDF], which was updated earlier this year, shows that from 1990 to 2012 the average household income in a number of neighbourhoods, such as North Toronto, increased by more than 20 per cent. In roughly the same number of neighbourhoods, though, average household income declined by 20 per cent. Meanwhile, the number of middle-income communities, which accounted for the majority of Toronto in 1990, dropped to less than a third of all census tracts.

This means that groups like the Density Creep Neighborhood Alliance are already winning, even if they don’t know it yet. Wealthy Torontonians are increasingly concentrated in downtown and midtown enclaves, while low-income residents are relegated to the inner suburbs, with limited access to transit, grocery stores, and other essential services.

Yonge-Eglinton at a distance. By Kiril Strax from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

It is important to note this segregation has a racial element, too. Residents in Hulchanski’s high-income “City 1” neighbourhoods are 82 per cent white, compared to the low-income City 3, where 47 per cent of residents are black, Chinese, or South Asian. The percent of residents who are foreign-born is more than twice as high in City 3 than in City 1. It comes as little surprise, then, that all the folks pictured on the Density Creep Neighborhood Alliance website and Facebook page are white.

Meanwhile, south of the border, anger over decades of racially segregated housing policies is reaching a boiling point. A recent New York Times editorial argued that in order to rectify America’s legacy of segregation, affordable housing must be created in “low-poverty, high opportunity neighborhoods”—neighbourhoods just like North Toronto.

There are a number of approaches that could help return Toronto to a city of mixed-income communities with diverse residents. Inclusionary zoning, wherein all new private developments have to include a percentage of units that are affordable to low and mid-income households, has had some success in increasing housing affordability in American cities, as well as Vancouver and Montreal. (The City of Toronto is currently restricted from adopting inclusionary zoning without the approval of the Province, but efforts are underway to make this possible.) Increasing government investment in existing social housing assets, which are badly in need of repair, and creating new, vibrant social-housing communities throughout the city would help diversify communities. And incentives for mid-rise developments, which are limited to six storeys on narrow streets and 11 storeys on arterial roads, have been touted by experts from the Pembina Institute to Toronto’s chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat as key to boosting the amount of affordable housing.

But none of these options are likely to please the Density Creep Neighborhood Alliance. These residents, and those involved in NIMBY causes across the city, want to isolate themselves from “transients” and other Torontonians that they deem undesirable. They want to erect a wall, as one member of the Alliance proudly stated, similar to the one in the Game of Thrones series, which will keep them “safe” from outsiders. The sad thing is, they’ve already gotten their wish.

Wyndham Bettencourt-McCarthy is a policy analyst in the affordable housing sector and a former Torontoist contributor.