| The Boy Who Always Cries Wolf |
| by Max Fawcett | |
|
Max Fawcett discusses why one of Toronto's newest folk heroes needs to turn down the rhetorical volume. *** You might not know who Dave Meslin is. That's understandable, if only because the public profile of the self-described "professional rabble rouser" has yet to extend beyond Toronto's free weeklies and an assortment of e-zines, websites, and other digital rewraps of traditional word-of-mouth. In a condescending but friendly Toronto Life profile a few months ago, Ryan Bigge observed that "the neo-Jacobites have pitched a tent big enough to house an assemblage of like-minded but previously unconnected groups, including bike nuts, artists, musicians, writers, photographers, civic activists, community gardeners, local musicians and energy conservationists. And Meslin is at the centre of it all." I've met Dave Meslin a few times, and I've witnessed nothing that indicates that he's anything other than a nice guy with genuinely good motives. He'll give more back to the city of Toronto than most of us do, and he'll do it without expecting anything in return. That's rare these days, and rarer still in the political circles in which he travels. But as a friend of mine once observed, it's virtually impossible to walk the walk if you're talking the talk loud enough for anyone other than yourself to hear it. Meslin often sounds as though he's got a megaphone stuck in his throat. That's excellent for attracting attention and it has served him well as the leader of the Toronto Public Space Committee, a group of activists who describe themselves as "a grassroots non-profit organisation run completely by volunteers." Since Meslin founded the TPSC, which he left in 2006, it garnered more attention, more hard news coverage, and more attention from the city's elected officials than any other community organization in Toronto that isn't obsessed with the airport on Toronto Island. But shouting is less helpful when it comes to changing people's minds. The diminishing returns of this strategy were evident in the recent battle between public space activists and the City of Toronto over public street furniture. The April 23rd announcement that Astral Media was being awarded a twenty-year contract to outfit Toronto's streets angered the public space activists, Meslin among them. The street furniture contract will provide the city with an assortment of benches, bike stands, and other public facilities at no cost to the taxpayer, and thus was presented as a win/win kind of deal. It could, according to the deal-makers, net the city as much as $900 million over the course of the contract in advertising contracts, not a small matter given the City's depleted financial reserves. But Meslin and his colleagues, true to their mandate, are troubled by the fact that program may threaten Toronto's public spaces. Their concern is focused on a clause in the contract that caps the number of advertisements rather than the total square footage, the unit of measure used by the advertising industry. Under the new arrangement, while the total number of ads on Toronto's streets will decrease by 14%, the total amount of advertising - measured in square footage - that our eyeballs are exposed to will actually increase by 11%. Meslin and his friends were also concerned about the willingness of the two primary bidders to stay in compliance with the contract considering that they're already in breach of a number of the city's advertising bylaws relating to the size, shape, and placement of advertisements. Unfortunately, these very legitimate concerns, as well as a justified dissatisfaction with the too-brief public consultation process, weren't really listened to by anyone outside Meslin's own constituency. Nobody was listening because like Aesop's little boy who cried wolf, Meslin has sounded the alarm bell one too many times. In describing the street furniture contract, Meslin argued that "what we're doing here is legalizing bribery....give us $400 million and we'll completely ignore our own bylaws." The bluster in that statement gave Meslin the media attention he was clearly after, but it also closed the minds of the people who were making the decision on which he wanted to be heard. Hinting at corruption isn't a very good strategy when your objective to influence the thinking of the people that are supposedly being corrupted. Jonathan Goldsbie, a 3rd year anthropology student and Meslin's de-facto successor at the Toronto Public Space Committee and a man apparently animated by the same political calculus, took Meslin's strategy one step further when he told reporters that "we'll do our best to embarrass the city and stop the contract." Unsurprisingly, it was the TPSC that got embarrassed. This isn't the first time that Meslin's tendency to overplay his hand has gotten the better of him. In the recent municipal election he clashed repeatedly with Adam Vaughan, a then-candidate for city council who shares many of the same values as Meslin and who gave Meslin some of his earliest mainstream media exposure on his City TV public affairs show "Hour Town." During the campaign he attacked Vaughan twice, first for suggesting that public laneways, like the crack-infested ones in Kensington Market, be gated off to deter drug dealing and other street crime, and later for wondering whether it might be a good idea to require parental consent for children under the age of 18 seeking to purchase spray paint. In a NOW Magazine article written by Glen Wheeler about Vaughan's campaign, Meslin was quoted describing the first as a "bad idea" and the second as "the worst stuff I've seen in this entire election." Meslin's response was predictable both in its hysterical tone and its disconnection from the reality of the situation. After all, hasn't Meslin ever listened to the stuff that comes out of Rob Ford's mouth?
Meslin's preference for rhetoric over
results has torpedoed guerilla gardening in Toronto. Guerilla gardening is
premised on the perfectly sensible notion that while public spaces in wealthy
neighbourhood frequently feature city-funded gardens, those in poorer
neighourhoods are more likely to feature a mixture of garbage, concrete, and
brown space. Gardening requires some expertise and some fairly hard labour. Gardening in neglected spaces may brighten the
neighbourhood, improve public space, and inspire others to do the same, but
it's still hard work that has be done right. If the basic work doesn't get done properly, none of the other benefits are going to survive beyond the moment of planting. At the planting I attended two years ago, at an abandoned half-lot behind a Toronto Dominion bank on Queen Street near Euclid Avenue, the plants were tossed into a hole scraped into the rocky clay dirt with plastic spoons and then spritzed with someone's water bottle. This wasn't an accidental and isolated failure either, as the TPSC's website on guerilla gardening encourages the use of seeds, plastic spoons, and water bottles, even featuring a photo of two young women using their Nalgene bottles to ineffectively water a plant. As a result, most guerilla planting withers and dies before the informational leaflets about the program that are distributed near each planting - "Guerilla Gardening: Graffiti with Nature" - have made it to the recycling depot. Guerilla gardener Carly Stasko told Eye Magazine's Nicole Cohen that gardening according to the TPSC's principles was a "political act" and a form of "organic culture-jamming." Lovely rhetoric, but when the plants all die within 36 hours, what have you really given the community but a deeper sense of futility and hopelessness. During Meslin's presentation about the street furniture program - shortly after describing the bidding process as "the worst attack on public space I have ever seen," - he noted that "it would be so nice if people were listening to me." I agree. It would be nice if people listened to Meslin, because along with the hundreds of other young activists that he's inspired, he has more good ideas on any given day than the political bodies he'd like to have listening to him. But if nobody's listening, it doesn't matter how good his ideas are, nor how creative his approach to spreading the ideas, nor how many friends and neighbors he can rally in their support. If the people who make the important decisions on the issues he cares about have decided to tune him out, then he won't be able to make the kind of difference to his city that he wants, and that his city needs. Toronto, May 30, 2007 - 1,384 w.
Only registered users can write comments. Powered by AkoComment Tweaked Special Edition v.1.4.6 |
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
