A8 | NEWS OTHEGLOBEANDMAIL | MONDAY,OCTOBER21,
U
niversity Avenue is Toron-
to’s grandest street, but it’s
also an unwelcoming
place to be. That could start to
change next year: A private not-
for-profit group is ready to bring
forward a public-art installation
that will shed light, literally and
metaphorically, on this central
place in the city.
It could – and should – be the
first step toward bigger change in
this important public space.
The Friends of University Ave-
nue is proposing a multiyear set
of changes to the avenue. Step 1,
in January 2020, would be an in-
stallation that would be sus-
pended above the median of the
street: a large gem floating in the
air that casts beams of light up
and down the avenue.
The design details aren’t final,
but clearly this would “send a
message,” Friends member
Christine Ralphs said in an in-
terview Friday. “It helps position
University Avenue as the soul of
the city.”
This initial project would be
designed by public artists Studio
F Minus and lighting designers
Mulvey & Banani.
The executive committee of
city council will vote on the pro-
posal this week.
The Friends group started in
2017 out of conversations be-
tween Ms. Ralphs – head of Lloyd
Ralphs Design and a co-founder
of Club Monaco – and her circle
of friends. (The group includes
prominent interior designers Ge-
orge Yabu and Glenn Pushelberg,
among a dozen others.)
She was thinking about the
times she had spent at Princess
Margaret Hospital: First for the
treatment of her late husband’s
cancer, and then during years of
treatment for her own. (“I’m do-
ing great,” she added with a
broad smile.)
At the hospital, “You really see
a microcosm of humanity,” she
said, “And there are a lot of peo-
ple there who need hope and in-
spiration.”
For her, the obvious focal
point was the avenue outside. As
she correctly points out, it is a
very unpleasant place to be, es-
pecially after dark.
“It’s a black hole,” she said.
“And as an old retail designer,
you think immediately about
how to change that. Lighting is
everything.”
This is why the lighting de-
signers Mulvey & Banani are in-
volved, and why the first installa-
tion will be bright. In drawings, itresembles a pear-shaped dia-
mond, hanging on cables that
connect to the adjacent hospital
buildings of Mount Sinai, Prin-
cess Margaret and Toronto Gen-
eral. All three institutions are
supporting the project, “literally
and metaphorically,” Ms. Ralphs
says.
The Friends group is also plan-
ning to contribute to changes to
the parkland on the median of
the avenue, including lighting,
but also replanting and adding
more seating.
In future years, the group sug-
gests a rotating public-art exhibi-
tion, changing every year or two
years – as is the case for a similar
program along Park Avenue in
New York. “That would reignite
people’s interest in what is
there,” said Rebecca Carbin, an-
other Friends member who is acurator and public-art consult-
ant. “And the work can be more
provocative and more timely.”
Philanthropic moves to im-
prove Toronto’s public realm
have been rare.
But The Bentway – the public
space under the Gardiner Ex-
pressway near Fort York –
showed what’s possible in over-
looked areas of the city. It
spurred a new project, an-
nounced earlier this month, to
make areas under the express-
way safer and more pleasant for
pedestrians.
Something similar should
happen here. The city’s current
plan for the downtown area in-
cludes transformations of sever-
al streets, shrinking the space for
cars and making them places to
be, not pass through. These in-
clude University Avenue fromQueen to College Streets. As I
wrote in 2017, it’s a powerful idea
that deserves to move forward
right away.
“This is the tip of the iceberg
of a much larger transformation
of University,” said downtown
councillor Joe Cressy in an inter-
view. He enthusiastically sup-
ports the Friends proposal.
“There are certain streets in To-
ronto that, with the right vision,
could be great. And this is one of
them. It is dramatically under-
used in terms of city building.”
This is true – because too
much of it is used for cars. That
needs to be rebalanced, and once
it is, the effect will be dramatic.
The Great Streets proposal
would create a linear park of
nearly nine acres.
Maybe the change starts now,
with a flash of light.HowTorontocouldlightupthe‘soulofthecity’
Anon-profitgroupis
proposingaglowingart
installationonUniversity
Avenue–oneofseveral
projectslookingto
improvethedarkstreet
ALEX
BOZIKOVIC
OPINIONTheFriendsofUniversityAvenue’sproposal,seeninanartists’conceptrendering,wouldbedesignedbyStudioFMinusandlightingdesigners
Mulvey&Banani.TheglowingorbwillconnectthehospitalbuildingsofMountSinai,PrincessMargaretandTorontoGeneral.OSVALDOSEPULVEDAARCHITECTURE
F
or an example of how stig-
matized, devalued and ig-
nored people who use drugs
are in Canadian society, look no
further than the federal election
debate, where the leaders from
the six political parties assem-
bled for a nationally televised dis-
cussion of the most important is-
sues facing our country.
It wasn’t the stigmatizing lan-
guage that was alarming; it was
the silence. Not a single word was
spoken about the overdose crisis
by any of the six party leaders.
Meanwhile, according to the na-
tional averages, an estimated 12
people died of drug overdose that
day.
Was it optimistic to hope that
13,000 overdose deaths would
make it into the conversation?
A Canadian dies of a drug over-
dose every two hours. The health
crisis is responsible for life expec-
tancy falling for the first time in
40 years. Throughout the past
few years, the situation continues
to worsen, spreading east from
British Columbia and Alberta.
Instead, the agendas of our
federal leaders focused on issues
that fall under the “cost-of-liv-
ing” banner. If we look closer at
the economic, social and emo-
tional costs the overdose crisis
has had on thousands of families
across the country, it makes cost-
of-living issues such as property
taxes and infrastructure expendi-
tures seem absurd by compari-
son.
Earlier on the campaign trail,
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh de-
scribed the Liberalgovernment’s
refusal to declare a national pub-
lic-health emergency as a “be-
trayal” of families affected by the
overdose crisis. The NDP is pledg-
ing to end “the criminalization of
addiction.” Elizabeth May and theGreen Party promise to do the
same. Meanwhile, the Liberal
platform emphasizes rerouting
offenders into drug courts rather
than criminal courts, and extend-
ing the operating hours of super-
vised drug consumption services
such as Insite in Vancouver, along
with investing hundreds of mil-
lions into treatment.If you watched the English-lan-
guage leadership debate, you
would not have come away with
any of this knowledge. In fact,
you wouldn’t even know that
Canada is facing an increasingly
severe health crisis, because itwas not mentioned by any of the
party leaders.
The implicit message taken
from this exclusion: It doesn’t
matter how many people die,
how many family members are in
mourning or how many more
people Canada will lose to over-
dose in the future. These lives are
not worth discussing, except – as
in the case of Andrew Scheer and
the Conservatives – for those
who use them as political scape-
goats.
Sadly, there are still far too
many Canadians holding the
misguided belief that if people
“just stopped using drugs,” the
dying would stop. However, it’s
more accurate to describe the
overdose crisis as a policy issue,
meaning the laws and policies
that are supposed to control and
regulate drugs are actually driv-
ers of the crisis.
This is exactly why it’s so dis-
heartening to see politicians
avoid discussion of the role their
own policies, both current and
historically, are playing in the sit-uation.
Canada will likely experience
tens of thousands more deaths in
the coming years if the country
does not make the systemic
changes necessary to save lives.
Canada’s illicit drug supply is ex-
periencing widespread contami-
nation in the form of drugs such
as fentanyl or carfentanil contrib-
uting to the majority of overdose
deaths. Efforts to increase access
to safe drug supplies are used by
Conservatives as a wedge issue.
Unless Canada puts concerted
funding, resources and political
capital into replacing the con-
taminated supply with a safe sup-
ply, the death toll will continue,
in lockstep with a political lead-
ership that hardly notices.
This is the worst public-health
crisis in a generation. A stagger-
ing 4,000 Canadians have died in
just the past year. Despite years of
effort aimed at reducing stigma,
the catastrophe remains largely
an unspoken one, and excluded
from the most important politi-
cal conversations in the country.Whyaren’tfederalleadersaddressingCanada’soverdosecrisis?
JORDANWESTFALL
DAVIDMENDES
OPINIONCo-foundersoftheCanadian
AssociationforSafeSupply
Canadawilllikely
experiencetensof
thousandsmoredeaths
inthecomingyearsif
thecountrydoesnot
makethesystemic
changesnecessary
tosavelives.A group whose mission is to elect
candidates committed to restrict-
ing access to abortions in Canada
is trying to recruit pro-life people
to staff newly elected MPs’ offices.
RightNow has produced “a
guide to advancing the pro-life
movement as a political staffer”
and is sending it to members as
part of a pitch to persuade them to
apply to become a political staffer.
“We are on track to have a very
good evening on Oct. 21, electing a
solid number of new pro-life can-
didates across Canada,” Right-
Now co-founder Scott Hayward
says in an Oct. 14 e-mail, to which
the guide was attached.
“Our newly elected pro-life
members of Parliament will be in
need of pro-life political staff and
it is of utmost importance that the
pro-life movement has excellent
pro-life political staff (such as
yourself).”
Conservative Leader Andrew
Scheer, who is personally anti-
abortion, has said that a Scheer-
led government would not reo-
pen the abortion debate, but has
sidestepped the question of
whether he would allow individu-
al MPs to present private mem-
ber’s bills on the topic. The Liber-
als and NDP are officially pro-
choice parties. While some Liber-
al candidates are personally op-
posed to abortion, they are not
allowed to run unless they agree
to support a woman’s right to
choose in any vote on the matter.
Green Leader Elizabeth May has
said her party, too, is unequivocal-
ly pro-choice, despite initially say-
ing that as leader, she has no au-
thority to tell party MPs what bills
they could or couldn’t introduce.
Mr. Hayward did not respond
to requests for comment by
phone or e-mail. His group was
founded with a mission “to nomi-
nate and elect pro-life politic-
ians,” according to RightNow’s
website. The website also pro-
motes an internship program foryoung people interested in poli-
tics who want experience on Par-
liament Hill and doing campaign
work.
It is registered as a third-party
advertiser in this election cam-
paign, but Elections Canada has
no financial documents posted
for the group, suggesting it hasn’t
raised or spent more than the
threshold of $10,000 that requires
immediate reporting.
The nine-page guide mostly
covers the nuts and bolts of life as
an aide to a politician – what kinds
of tasks need doing in a political
office and what a typical day’s
schedule might be. But it is expli-
cit about the influence pro-life
staffers could wield. “There’s a
common saying on Parliament
Hill that personnel is policy. Noth-
ing could be more true; the peo-
ple that exist in the space of deci-
sion-making and power (i.e. polit-
ical staffers) heavily influence
policy,” it says.
“Everyone brings their own
opinions, biases and experiencesto the decision-making table and
therefore if an office or a ministry
is staffed with pro-abortion con-
servatives, the decisions, policies
and actions made or taken by that
office will reflect that side of the
political spectrum.”
Pro-life staffers will “have the
opportunity to influence those
around you,” including in other
MPs’ or ministerial offices, to con-
sider “the pro-life worldview and
the logic of the pro-life side.”
They’ll be able to draw their
MP’s attention to news items and
events with implications for the
pro-life movement and suggest
possible courses of action the MP
could take, from issuing a news re-
lease to presenting a motion in
the House of Commons.
The guide also suggests that
pro-lifers need not stop at staffing
pro-life MPs’ offices.
“While it is absolutely impera-
tive that we have solid pro-life
staffers assisting our pro-life par-
liamentarians and ministers, it is
equally important to have goodpeople staffing non-pro-life par-
liamentarians and ministers. This
ensures that there are good influ-
ences around them and prevents
them from being surrounded
solely by pro-abortion influen-
ces.”
Discretion is among the qualifi-
cations the guide says are needed
to be a political staffer. “Be careful
who you tell and what you tell
them, even within your own cau-
cus or party. (This is especially
pertinent to pro-life issues. There
are many people within the par-
ties who are not on our side and
who would love to know what
types of things we are working on
so that they can work against us.)”
In his e-mail, Mr. Hayward says
RightNow has a “staffer co-ordi-
nator” who will help those inter-
ested in applying to work for an
MP and “ensure that your resume
and interview allows you the best
opportunity to come to Ottawa as
a pro-life political staffer.”THECANADIANPRESSAnti-abortiongroupencouragessupporterstobecomestaffersatMPs’offices
JOANBRYDENOTTAWA