Getting to know you -Toronto

At the end of this month I will have lived in Toronto for five years, and in that time I have come to know this city well enough to know that, in actuality I know very little - about Toronto, or anywhere else for that matter. On the eve of that anniversary I have been thinking about what I do know. Then today as I waited, for several hours and at multiple locations, to pay a delinquent traffic violation, I realized that if you want to know how this city really functions head down to any municipal bureaucractic office and you will learn about the total chaos that really runs this city. I spent the first hour of my endeavour at Metro Hall, that glorious early nineties monstrosity at Wellington and John - you know the place. Only to be told that despite what my ticket said I could not pay the 23.75$ that I owed, for making an illegal right on Bloor. No, no, Metro Hall only deals with parking tickets. I mean I guess it makes sense that moving violations be dealt with twenty blocks away, just not sure why they haven't cleared that up on the ticket itself. Anyway, as I sat waiting in the Provincial Courts offices at 137 Edward Street, for over an hour, I reminisced about the last time I had been to Metro Hall.


It was just over a year ago, and Paul accompanied me. We waited for at least an hour, because I guess bureaucracy here is like 35mm film development; you can usually count on it being at least one hour. And while we waited, we saw perhaps the most aggressive civic disobedience that I have witnessed in this city. A gentleman, born in Toronto but raised in South Africa, who was several people behind us started the uproar. He fumed about how long it was taking, loudly saying, and I quote,
"Even in Africa it doesn't take this long... even in Africa"
Now I am sure I don't need to go into how uncomfortable this rant made the two dozen other waiting parking violators. But he did have a point, which everyone seemed to agree with. I mean over half of the people in that line were there because they worked for, either the City or exempt corporations, and they were only there to have their parking tickets voided. Makes one wonder why they were administered in the first place. In fact the gentleman directly ahead of Paul and I worked for City Hydro.

As a result of the growing frustration and the goading of the South African he began telling us about some of the more unsavory City infrastructure projects, he'd worked on. My favorites were the story about how he had been working in Rosedale on a broken water line, which had been crimped and the whole neighborhood was without water. He had his hydro truck on Yonge Street with all his equipment and the City had it towed. He had to wait four hours for a new truck so that he could restore water service to a huge swath of the city. The other was the ironic story about how five years ago the City changed the asphalt they use to repair potholes on our streets. They made the change because the new batch was much cheaper. Of course there is always a catch, and in this case it was that the cost savings was the result of a decrease in tar in the asphalt mixture, which resulted in a decrease in the materials longevity. Meaning that potholes filled with the new asphalt have to be repaired twice as fast as the original road around it. (And anyone who rides their bike around Toronto knows that road quality is something short of stellar). There were other stories but those sum it up rather nicely.

Anyway back to Metro Hall, while the City Hydro worker, Paul, and I commiserated, Mr. South Africa grew more and more enraged by the wait, and finally he stormed past the line to the window and began banging heavily, demanding to know why it was taking over an hour to deal with twenty people - something which legitimately seemed to be a surmountable task. He was so heated that others in line began to feed off his energy and suddenly Paul and I were members of a Canadian mob - not nearly as scary as others mobs but a mob none the less. Mr. South Africa wanted to know who was in charge and how he could make a complaint. He then proceeded to hand out the contact information for Metro Hall's parking complaint division to everyone in line. Before ceremonially departing as the buildings guards were being called.

I must say Paul and I agreed we had never felt more alive in this city or more connected to it than in that moment. We also laughed our asses off.