Toronto Councillor Joe Mihevc's White-Privileged, Exclusionary Farmers Market

The Artscape Wychwood Barns, in the heart of Toronto's midtown Ward 21, has won urban planning awards and has become a community hub; a veritable cathedral of Birkenstock socialism where local Councillor Joe Mihevc proudly plays the role of high priest. One of the Barns' most prominent features, where Joe often appears, is a weekly Farmers' Market inside the Barn's spacious open interior as well as its scenic exterior park. Local musicians serenade the shoppers as they peruse the costly, showcased organic offerings that one comes to expect from such a venue.

Now, whatever one may think of his competence following his shepherding of the St. Clair street car fiasco, still the subject of civic suits against the City, there are few politicians anywhere with a stronger commitment to non-discrimination and equity than Joe Mihevc, who was the lead at City Hall in making the Barns project happen.

So it might come as a surprise to Mihevc that, according to a recent Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) Master's Thesis in their Sociology and Equity Studies in Education (SESE) Department, his crowning achievement is a 'white privilege' zone that makes people of colour feel excluded.

Rachelle Campigotto, the author of the thesis, Farmers' Markets and their Practices Concerning Income, Privilege and Race: A Case Study of the Wychwood Artscape Barns in Toronto, claims the Wychwood Barns famers' market is patronized by whites at a ratio disproportionately high to the area, which creates an exclusionary area of white privilege. She reaches her conclusions by using "Whiteness Theory" - something that on the surface sounds like a subject more appropriate to a lecture by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke than an area of study at the University of Toronto.

Preposterous race-fixation is nothing new to UT/OISE's crackpot Sociology and Equity Studies in Education department, which behaves like a cult that conditions its adherents to view everything in terms of race. It is notorious for producing Jenny Peto's anti-Jewish master's thesis that alleged "a mainstream Jewish community that is dominated by racist.. ideologies" and postulated a Zionist plot to use Holocaust education for nefarious purposes. This same department also produced a Master's Thesis recently purporting that Western feminists opposed to female genital mutilation are racists motivated by a "preoccupation with genitalia" and the "pleasure of whiteness."

The Farmers' Market thesis says the "concept of whiteness is a critique of the privilege afforded to those who are white based solely on ‘being white’." So amid all the mumbo jumbo, the idea that Mihevc's farmers' market would be an exclusionary, white-privileged environment is a foregone conclusion.

Characteristic of SESE, the thesis is hopelessly flawed. The author did a survey of participants at the market and measured it, with limited insight, against the demographic data for all Ward 21 rather than the immediate area surrounding the farmers' market. Ward 21 is large mid-town ward where the overwhelmingly predominant mother tongue of constituents is English and like the rest of Toronto, there are a variety of ethnic groups in it. The largest identified ethnic group in Ward 21 is Jewish.

But the Barns themselves are a block away from Wychwood Park, a private neighbourhood that is one of the most affluent in the city. It is a stone's throw from the Forest Hill and Casa Loma neighborhoods, two more of the city's richest areas. The residential streets around the Barns comprise a middle/upper middle-class neighborhood that is predominately, as my Italian friends would say, "mangia cake" (i.e. white bread).

The patrons of the Wychwood Farmers' Market reflect the neighbourhood it is in.  It's no surprise that something produced at OISE and its pathological racial obsessions would fail to take such an obvious factor as that as well as something as basic as culture into account.

Culture may correlate to race on occasion, but they have no intrinsic link to each other. There is no racial component that makes a person more or less predisposed to be at a Famers' Market; that behaviour is a cultural attribute. While I'm not a cultural relativist and think Canadian culture is one of the world's best, it does have an element that is inferior to those of East Asia, the Caribbean and other locales from which many of Canada's immigrants are drawn.

Those cultures aren't so stupid as to produce a large segment of people who pay five times the value for a dirty bundle of carrots or a bug-eaten head of lettuce just because a vendor displays a piece of cardboard with the word "organic" on it. That particular attribute seems to be the province of dumb-ass, upper-middle class North Americans, of whom most happen to be white. That people from countries where the majorities are non-white are less inclined to be conned in that way speaks to a certain cultural superiority among those groups.

What is disgraceful about all of this is the University of Toronto continuing to give imprimatur to OISE's idiotic racialism. Unlike the enlightened part of society that seeks to treat individuals as such, OISE's Sociology and Equity Studies in Education department continues to implicitly teach that we are less individuals than representatives of our racial group.

The public has an interest in what goes on at OISE for two important reasons. One is that we help to fund it through our taxes. But more significantly, generations of Ontario's teachers are produced at OISE and promulgate this backwards type of thinking in classrooms across the province.

It's time the destructiveness of such programs were evaluated and we as Ontarians asked ourselves, are OISE's inane, intellectually vacuous race theories what we want our children to be brought up on?

Fisking Ward 21 Councillor Joe Mihevc: "The St. Clair Streetcar fiasco wasn't my fault" (or words to that effect)

Joe Mihevc issued an 11th hour press release before tomorrow's election. Now for the Fisking of Joe:

Also, it is important to remind everyone about St. Clair’s cost and construction timeframe because misinformation is being spread about this too. The streetcar line’s original budget ($64 million) [ The Toronto Sun reported, " In 2004, the 6.8 km of dedicated streetcar track, between Yonge St. and the Gunn’s loop, was to cost $48 million and take three years.] did not substantially increase; the fact is that the scope of the project increased. [The Toronto Star: The report, which will be presented to the TTC on Wednesday, notes it was never clear whether the transit company or the city was in charge of the project, with both making design changes almost as "an afterthought" after the work had started, escalating both the cost and period of time the street was in upheaval.]  Two major additions to the scope were burying the Hydro lines (because the businesses asked for it [The cited Sun article reports, " the city decided to put hydro wires underground along St. Clair"]  and the lines were due to be replaced in five years anyway) and replacing the water pipes (because of the higher standards demanded by the Walkerton water report). This cost about $40 million and increased the timeframe of construction. Further, the start of construction was delayed 18 months because of a failed lawsuit against the city and the city allowed Enbridge to take the opportunity to replace its cast iron pipes with PVC. The construction of the streetcar line and the new streets and sidewalks in Ward 21 only took about 8 months! 

[Toronto Sun: "The St. Clair streetcar right-of-way was a disaster because of changes to the plan, a lack of leadership, too many small-time contractors, a lengthy legal battle, and an overly sympathetic province, according to a report by transportation experts Len Kelman and Richard Soberman."]

Anyone who has been to St. Clair knows the street is more vibrant than it has ever been, with many of our old favourite shops and restaurants and many new businesses and patios. Both Business Improvement Associations (BIAs) in Ward 21 are supportive of the streetcar, and have worked closely with me on many shop local initiatives over the years.  ["We told them all that – there was no clear manager; it was like renovating a house without a general contractor," said Connie Lamanna, owner of the Ontario Fashion shop on St. Clair W. and chair of the Corso Italia Business Improvement Area, which opposed the project.]

TTC statistics show that peak time ridership on the 512 St. Clair streetcar route today is up about 50 per cent from 2009 before the new line opened (it is up 25 per cent from 2005 pre-construction). Further, during peak periods, travel time has been reduce by 14 per cent and during off-peak times the service is up to 25 per cent faster. The route is providing much-improved service and people are responding positively by using the route more often.

[The Toronto Star: "With no clear boss, constantly changing plans and too many small contractors crowding the job site, Toronto's controversial St. Clair streetcar line cost more time, money and local anguish than necessary, says an independent review requested by the TTC."]


This is from the TTC Commissioned Report:

“Getting it Right”



Lessons from the St. Clair Streetcar for the Implementation of Transit City


Les Kelman and Richard M. Soberman


7 January 2010
 
 
Reconstruction of the St. Clair streetcar route is intended to improve service reliability and enhance urban design features of the local streetscape. In September 2004, City Council approved a capital investment of about $48 million to proceed with the project, subsequently amended to $65 million as a result of a more through analysis of estimated completion costs.



According to the 2010-2014 TTC and City budgets, the estimated total expenditure for St. Clair is now $106 million. The most recent estimate of project completion (June 2010) results in a total implementation period of more than five years, considerably longer than anticipated.


These additional costs and delays have raised concerns about the ability of the City and the TTC to deliver projects, on budget, in a timely manner. Delay in project completion is also one of the reasons why this project has generated a general perception that unnecessary hardships were created for residents and businesses.

More from Joe here 
 
What was that about misinformation???