Street signs are only one piece of the puzzle.
Signage and way finding is likely to be the largest capital expense though.
What about all the paperwork for every individual and business who lives on Dundas Street?
If you read the proposal, most of this is cost-free as the vast majority would be online, or covered by Canada Post, as what happens any time a street name is rejiggered, street numbers realigned, etc. CP will direct all mail with the old addresses to the new ones free of charge for a year. There were amounts mentioned for a small amount of remuneration for the businesses and those directly affected (ie; the 60 businesses using "Dundas" in their name name, or a reprinting of business cards, etc.), but even the city claims these are token amounts and will not cover an individual or company's full expenses. Frankly speaking though, the city doesn't have to give anyone anything if they change the name. Ask those who had their address changed when the city merged Dunbloor Rd into Dundas Street in 2019, but I digress.
The biggest expense is likely to be the two Subway Stations and Yonge-Dundas Square. But updates to TTC maps and way-finding, etc. already happen every couple of years (or more frequently, with several ongoing accessibility upgrades), and will certainly happen when the Crosstown is (finally) completed, duplicating a lot of the rename's costs. Some signage within the station will need to be updated, but honestly both Dundas West and Dundas stations are overdue for some TLC. Y-D square will likely be the single biggest change. And again, mostly just signage.
City council very rarely ever makes decisions I agree with, so it's a moot point.
I want to see a city with affordable housing, robust social services and mental health care that ensure that those who need it get the care they need, and that they are a danger to neither themselves nor others; a city with a reliable, expansive transit network; a city with an attractive public realm; a city with many pleasant spaces to go where one doesn't have to worry about breathing in the fumes of cars.
I want the same; but I'm also acutely aware of my place in a highly multicultural city – one where the transgressions of past colonialism aren't always forgotten in some communities. My brother-in-law's family still tells stories of their forced deportation from Jamaica, btw. It's how I know that not all Maroons left Nova Scotia; some joined communities of deported British loyalists there.
Some of this seems to be slowly coming together, but much too slowly; some of this won't happen for generations, some of this probably won't ever happen.
So, yes, council continue to be a bunch of clowns. If they put a fraction of the thought into solving our homeless and affordability crisis that they put into stupid garbage like this, we'd actually move forward, somehow. I know I'm asking for a lot.
It's not a lack of thought that's the problem, it's starvation from upper governments of funding we are entitled to costs forced upon us. The austerity isn't ours to own. Otherwise we just let people like Doug Ford get proxy control over everything municipal. The economic heart of and richest city in the country shouldn't have to be asking for handouts. Meanwhile our premier benefits from the city starving so he can exert greater control, apparently angry he didn't get to be "mare". Focus on the a-hole sitting on billions of taxpayers dollars and work on him to pay his fair share.
I did. I saw it circulating on the front pages of r/toronto shortly after it was created. I thought it was performative then, and I think it's performative now.
Leaders in racialised communities don't think so. People seem to forget that 20 academics and leaders of communities with interests in this were consulted — Actual experts and such. It's not like the city just saw a petition and jumped on it.
I don't know where I said that.
You said that $8.6 million (0.057% of the city's operating budget) was "a lot", but diminished 0.5% of the population as "not very significant". Just trying to figure out why you minimize the large number and maximize the smaller.
But it is rather disingenuous to suggest that the idea was popular. 14,000 is a trivial number. If you ran a referendum on the issue and made voting mandatory for every citizen of the city, are you confident you would get an overwhelmingly in favour response?
Disingenuous how? Where's the organized outrage against this? The best I can find is a
counter-petition that has less than half the signatories as Progress Toronto's 2020 original. There are very few anti-renaming petitions actually out there. I found four. Three are more than 2 years old; The first one listed above,
One with less than 150 and another with
less than 10 signatures.
Hell, there's even one started 8 months ago by a direct descendant of Henry Dundas that
hasn't managed to hit 1,700 signatures, isn't actually directed at anyone and whose attached GoFundMe lists them as the direct beneficiary. Kinda seems like a grift on stoked outrage, but you never know. Of course, CuLtUrE wAr outrage wouldn't be complete if some absolutely abhorrent people didn't
come out of the woodwork to make their bigotry known.
As an aside, the absolute astroturfing being done by the Dundas family is astounding. Two organizations (The Henry Dundas Committee for Public Education on Historic Scotland and The Henry Dundas Comittee of Ontario) sprung up nearly overnight in response to decisions made about the Melville Monument and Dundas Street. You'd be tempted to think they might have an air of legitimacy or something, were in not by the fact they're almost completely comprised of Dundas family members and not historians, and have been liberally writing "research papers" lovingly cited by those penning anti-renaming opinion pieces in local media. But again, I digress...
If you combine all the "don't rename Dundas" petitions it still isn't close to what Progress Toronto's initial petition garnered. So even using that as a sample metric for the greater population, more people are interested in renaming it than keeping it the same. Any other reading of it is purely subjective.
What about all the homeless people in the city? How many of them could you house and feed for $8.6m? Lots of working class people get by on yearly incomes of much less than $100,000 per year, so if you used that money to try to improve the lives of these people, you'd probably achieve some respectable results. This would have a real, tangible effect on the lives of people, whereas the renaming of a street would be a merely symbolic gesture that wouldn't actually help anyone or solve any known problems.
How is cutting from a very small expenditure more important than cutting the bloated ($1.16B) police budget, or scrapping the costly Gardiner rebuild? Cut those first before the small thing that's barely a dent. While I hate government/household budget comparisons, if you're starving; do you cut the $100 a month trips to the salon and the $150 cable bill, or the cup of timmies you get once in a while?
We make lots of "symbolic gestures" in this city that offer little overall benefit. How much would we save getting rid of heritage plaques? Nuit Blanche? Every street festival, every arts program that gets TCA funding, etc.?
I don't support cutting them either, but some of them would fall under symbolic, frivolous gestures that do little to actually benefit anyone and cost more than the city brings in from them. A city isn't built to fight one fire at a time or to be run like a business. It's there to support everyone.
I don't buy the slippery slope argument that will just lead to every street in the city being renamed to something politically correct. Each would require a council vote, tally of cost, etc. Just as the demolition of a single heritage property doesn't mean all are suddenly on the table. That's just slippery slope fear mongering.
There's a reason it's important with Dundas St. though; and it is the exactly the symbolism of renaming one of the longest, most recognized and used streets in this city. It runs the length of the city, through its core. And yes, it will cost money to do. It's not free. Which is precisely why it's not an empty gesture. Otherwise there will always be "more pressing issues" to justify ignoring the lesser ones.
Can we remove "proposed" from the title of this thread already by the way? According to council and both mayors, it's a done deal.
