Toronto Mike'd: The Official Toronto Mike Podcast - Ed Keenan: Toronto Mike'd #1182

Episode Date: January 5, 2023

In this 1182nd episode of Toronto Mike'd, Mike chats with The Toronto Star's Ed Keenan about the second anniversary of the January 6 United States Capitol attack and what's making waves in Toronto. Warning: early in this episode, Mike and Ed recite the lyrics to Maestro Fresh Wes's Let Your Backbone Slide. Toronto Mike'd is proudly brought to you by Great Lakes Brewery, Palma Pasta, Canna Cabana, Ridley Funeral Home and Electronic Products Recycling Association.

Welcome to episode 1182 of Toronto Mic'd, proudly brought to you by Great Lakes Brewery, a fiercely independent craft brewery who believes in supporting communities, good times, and brewing amazing beer. Order online for free local home delivery in the GTA. Free local home delivery in the GTA. Palma Pasta. Enjoy the taste of fresh, homemade Italian pasta and entrees from Palma Pasta in Mississauga and Oakville. Electronic Products Recycling Association. Committing to our planet's future means properly recycling our electronics of the past.

Ridley Funeral Home. Pillars of the community since 1921. Canna Cabana. The lowest prices on cannabis. Guaranteed. Over 100 stores across the country. I should update that copy. I think it's closer to 150.

Learn more at cannacabana.com. And Sammy Cone Real Estate. Ask Sammy any real estate questions at sammy.cohn at properlyhomes.ca. Joining me today, making his return to Toronto mic'd, is the Toronto Star's Ed Keenan. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, baby. Now, is that a macho man or is that Oliver's jewelry?

They're similar, right? The Kool-Aid man. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, the Kool-Aid guy just went right through that wall like it wasn't even there. That's like when I want to hype myself up, I just picture that. Because he's just like a pitcher, right? He's a pitcher, not a baseball pitcher.

He's a pitcher. There was some debate. I don't know if this was an online thing or my kids were telling me about about whether the kool-aid man is the kool-aid or the pitcher like and whether when he's empty he's still the kool-aid man or not and that's a philosophical question like when they say you know imagine the sound of one hand clapping and then it all kind of goes right like it's like is the kool-aid man is he the kool-aid or the pitcher i don't know man but now i'm in this meeting and the two there's like a holy trinity thing here and before we press record uh i'm in a bit of a i don't know a funky mood i don't know i just took a great bike ride to ontario place and we're gonna talk about ontario

place very soon this is a different episode oh yeah but yeah. Oh, yeah. But then I hear you. That is Kool-Aid guy. But then I think of like, Macho Man Randy Savage is always my old man guy, but it's been decades since I worked on my impression, so I don't know if... Because FOTM Scott MacArthur does a really good Macho Man. He did it for me, and it's spot on.

Let me hear yours. No, no. I can't do it right now. I'd have to listen to him a little bit. I thought you were going to say I have to smoke a couple of cigs before I can do a macho man. I need the visual stimulation of Miss Elizabeth to sort of put me in the right mindset.

Let me tell you, Ed Keenan, I'm here to take Miss Elizabeth. Before we press record, I mentioned, I think I said something about not my first rodeo. And then you made a clever quip as you do about this being my 1182nd rodeo. And then I pointed out there's actually some episodes in the Toronto Mike

feed that didn't get numbers. Like, and I said, the good ones don't get a number. Are you going to tell me that one of those unnumbered ones is Macho Man Randy Savage? Oh, yeah. I wish I had Macho Man on the show. But then I said, I started getting nostalgic.

And I was about to press record. I said, I'll save it. And then I said, I always say I'm going to save it. And I never actually get to it. So right off the top, I was going to point out, because we're similar vintage, I bought a lot of CDs in the 90s, especially that first half of the 90s. I bought like hundreds and hundreds of dollars worth of CDs.

A lot of the CDs I'd buy had hidden tracks. Like the last, let's say the 12th cut on the CD would be like 25 minutes long because the song would go for like three minutes. 46 or something. And then there'd be all this silence. And then suddenly there'd be a song. Like this happened, I'm thinking Pearl Jam and Nirvana and Stone Temple Pilots.

Like there's so many examples. I miss the hidden tracks. You can't have a hidden track on Spotify. No, you can't. You know Taylor Swift, Midnight's, it's not hidden tracks but it was like bonus tracks where the the record or whatever you want to call it

now the playlist was released at midnight but then at 4am there was like a bunch of bonus tracks released that's the modern maybe the modern equivalent

but it's only four hours of mystery there right I guess but do you have any like did this happen to you where you would be listening to a CD on your boom boom box and you'd fall asleep that's how it was so happy to be a lot

and then all of a sudden a song would start playing because the hidden track there's all this silence and you're sound asleep and then all of a sudden whatever like you've been lulled right off to sleep and then there's a song half an hour later all of a sudden and it's always like some it's something uh loud and proud there was uh one and i wish i remember what it was but they did the hidden track thing by having like you know there's 10 or 11 tracks on the record right and then there was like 87 blank tracks okay i think i know where you're going like is it crackers kerosene Hat? It might have been. Okay, so I had.

So when you put it on shuffle, like you'd put it on shuffle, and all of a sudden it would constantly be playing these like one second blank tracks. And then here's my memory of that, which is exactly like you're describing. But let's say I like this song called Euro Trash Girl. Euro Trash Girl by Cracker.

And it was track number 69 but there weren't 69 yeah which is haha but there weren't 69 songs on this album like it would skip a bunch of blank track numbers it'd be all like 22 23 24 but you can't depending on what cd player you had though it would like go through them all in sequence yes yes if it wasn't a smart cd player it wouldn't just skip to 69 it would like go through them all in sequence yes yes if it wasn't a smart cd player it wouldn't just skip to 69 it would like you'd have like one or two seconds while it tried to load up track 29 right and then tried to load up track 20 30 look at us nostalgic for the 90s when things were simpler right the first i i remember um finding her majesty at the end of Abbey Road. That's like the first one maybe. And feeling like

I had, and now I think when I look back at the record sleeve, because I still have that on vinyl and we recently got a new record player, so we've been playing it. I think Her Majesty is actually listed on there and yet when I first heard it, I didn't know it was there

and it's like like and in the end the love you make and it's like oh here we are at the end right and and then suddenly there's this little just a little more than a riff which i think was like i think it was a mistake that they just kept there because they like the mistake like i just heard this is is a quick aside, is that 1999's Billboard Song of the Year was Do You Believe by Cher. Okay, so at a time when boy bands were ruling the roost, this woman in her 40s actually does rule the roost. Auto-tuned it up. And it's the first time auto-tune is thrown into the wild for the mainstream folks. Not the cool alternative folks like you and I, right?

Like the great unwatched. We'll go with that, you and I. And the story was told that it was a mistake in the studio that Cher insisted they keep in there. Like this whole, I believe this whole auto-tune thing was like an accident, a mistake, and it wasn't intentional. And then she heard it and she dug it and she said, we need to keep the mistake.

Yeah, I mean, I have not heard that before, but it doesn't intentional. And then she heard it and she dug it and she said, we need to keep the mistake. Yeah. I mean, I have not heard that before, but it doesn't surprise me at all because it, it's like auto-tune was already in use for actually tuning people's voices, right? Keeping them on. Right.

And then, but it's like, Oh, if you, if you really twist it, it does something crazy. Right. Which obviously is what,

what we think of with it now but it doesn't surprise me that there was a mistake and then it was just kind of like what but you know what yeah that sounds cool well and then the rest is history right they're like literally artists who made careers out of uh is it acon and what's the guy i think it might be t-pain that's yeah like t-pain's whole thing is uh i i sound like this auto-tune. I saw him on The Masked Singer a couple years back, and he was not auto-tuning. Yeah, can you do auto-tune live? I think you can.

You just have to run it through your PA. I guess I have to go when Cher comes to town. It would be hard to do like auto-tune unplugged, like T-Pain unplugged would just be his natural voice. That's another thing I miss while I'm talking 90s. I miss the unplugged. Like I was just, this is a spoiler alert, but the next episode of Toast is sad songs.

And one of the saddest songs I love is there's a version, an unplugged version, like an MTV unplugged version of this like 90s grunge old rock band that I like. Surprise, surprise. Anyway, I was thinking, man, I really like the unplugged explosion of the 90s, like the MTV unplugged.

Not just the Nirvana one, which might be the greatest, but like Alice in Chains and, you know, there's a Pearl Jam unplugged bootleg I've got. Like we don't, I don't know if we do that anymore. Like there isn't any like unplugged, you just sort of stream an acoustic channel. Yeah, but even beyond that, what happens is when a song becomes popular,

a thousand people will meet immediately. And good musicians. On YouTube, you mean. Not famous people, but good musicians will do various renditions of it on YouTube. And so there's like, before the original artist ever comes up to like all right i'm gonna take this down a notch and give you a total

reinvention of this song right uh you've already heard a whole bunch of good point this is why you're so uh amazing in the toronto star okay so i am gonna set the table by explaining like how this came to be and there'll be a big shout out for 1236 oh yeah see i'm going to set the table by explaining how this came to be, and there'll be a big shout-out for 1236. Oh, yeah! See, I'm going into Oliver's story. Before we even get right into the story, I just want to note that if you count a certain way, if you use the wise-bloodying calendar,

which is one of your... Today is 1236. It's the 36th day of September. Of December, sorry. Except that's not true. It's the 36th day of September, of December, sorry. Except that's not true. It's the 37th day. No. Oh, yeah, you know, you're right.

Today's the 5th. You know why? Here's my great thing. 31 days in December. You have a pair of glasses on the table, right? I do. When do you wear it and when don't you? I wear them when I'm driving.

I wear them when I'm watching television or the movies. And I need them. They're progressive lenses. So I need them to read fine progressive lenses so okay i need them to read fine print and then i need them to see distance so let me show you something since we're opening the vault here on toronto mic early you're in the magic zone okay well i mean it's a magic zone that i've been in for like 10 years now right which is like i don't know i'm gonna put them on for a second here so okay so like i don't need them in fact i'm gonna take them off because i'm kind of

pretty comfy without them but in the top right corner of my macbook the five and six no longer look different to me this is where i'm at so i glanced over and saw it was january 6th that's what just happened there and i went in my brain and said okay there's 31 days in december and we're on the 6th what's keenan talking about about? This is 1237. Okay, this is... That'll happen in real time really quickly right there. When you said no, then I said wait a minute. I'm seeing a Jan 6, but now with the glasses

on, I see it's Jan 5. So, yeah, I'm in that weird spot where I don't need to wear the glasses, but I probably should start wearing the glasses more because the 5s and 6s look the same to me now. i'm getting old i'm getting old there you go and tomorrow tomorrow will be january 6th which of course is the anniversary of a significant date i was i was there on the capitol building i don't know is this on your agenda well i'm gonna now it is okay you're right

i was watching uh i was watching it on television and i remember telling my wife that this is a coup so i do want to talk about so let's set the table by saying i did not book you on toronto mic today i think it might be the first time like a guest is here that i didn't book so we should explain this okay so i have a recur this is some insight in for fotms to see how things work over here but there's a recurring event in my calendar. So I live and die by my Google calendar. If it's in there, it happens. Like everything, I just pick something up in, where was I?

In Parkdale, and that's because it was in my calendar. Like everything in my, I had a hit on Humble and Fred this morning because it was in my calendar. Everything in my calendar happens, okay? And if it's not in my calendar, it might not happen because I live by this calendar. And I have a recurring event that the first Thursday of every single month from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m., I block that time for Mark Wiseblot. It's been there for years. First Thursday of the month,

2 to 5, no one can, because my clients book me through Calendly, which looks at my calendar and sees if I'm available. They can't touch me the first Thursday of every month from 2 to 5 p.m. Eastern, because Mark Weisblatt is going to be here. So this recurring event was his blockage, and he said he wanted to do something different, because he was here last week,

and we kind of recapped like two months worth of like, you know, Ridley Funeral Home Memorial segments and what's going on in the Zeitgeist and Roger Shaw and all the typical stuff. And who's not at CP24 anymore. There's so many things we're covering there. How many lawsuits are there against Bell Media? All these things.

So Mark said, I want to do an episode with Ed Keenan about alt media for Gen Xers because we're all identifying here as gen xers and i said to mark i said mark whatever you like i love ed keenan i love you it would be my pleasure to recede into the background and turn on the mics and let you two hammer this out like i didn't envision i'd get a word in edgewise and I was fine with that. And yeah, so then he booked me. So he booked you. It was a big surprise to me. He was just like reached out and said,

Did you wonder if he has a big Gen X media gab fest and we're going to talk about all media and this is the date. Does that work for you? And I was, yeah. So when you stuck in your calendar to be here at 2 p.m. Did you have a moment of like,

should I confirm this with Mike? Like, does he know? It never occurred to me. He's an agent of the... Typically, I assume that Wise Blood speaks for you. He does, typically. So he, delicately speaking, he just took a...

He's going to do this episode later. We're not doing the Gen X alt media episode. But I saw you in the calendar and Mark said, Hey, I'm tapping out on this one. I said, like,

why mess with my calendar? Like I have Ed Keenan coming in. Let's just do it and we'll make a difference. So this episode is that, and that's how it came to be. And, uh, Mark's going to like,

I guess delicately, because people will notice that he's going to to take a pause on his Toronto Mike appearances, but he will unpause at some point when he's ready to unpause. And then I will throw my door open and welcome Mark Weisblatt back with open arms because I am like his dealer when it comes to craft beer and weed. So how long can he go without? He needs his Great Lakes beer, so he's going to be back.

And, of course, he only gets high on the Canna Cabana supply. So much love. Get your weed at a Canna Cabana location and get your craft beer from Great Lakes. Those are orders for all FOTMs. Ed, how was your holiday break? I'm still on it. This is part of it.

You're part of the festivities. This is the... Oh, good. What is today? Today is the 11th part of it. You're part of the festivities. This is the... Oh, good. What is today? Today is the 11th day of Christmas. It's 1236. Yeah, 1236 is the 11th day of Christmas. And so the Feast of Epiphany is tomorrow.

Okay. I believe. Do you celebrate that? Sure. I feast, but, you know, like every day. You feast every day. I'm not big on epiphanies. They don't have a song for that, though.

I soldier on in ignorance. We have songs for the Feast of Stevens. Like, we can go, dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun, on the Feast of Stevens. Here's your former altar boy. Let's do it. I was raised Catholic, too.

Let's do this. Yeah, so the song for the Feast of the Epiphany would be We Three Kings, because what happened on the Feast of the Epiphany is that the magi showed up from the far east bearing gifts murph frankincense what did maestro say in that song right you got that gold and frankincense that's in uh yeah yeah i make a lot of sense sense f is gold murph and frankincense right when i'm in france they throw me Franks. Frankly, a Swiss account is where I bank. At home, I make bills brown from a sound.

In the States, green like the grass in the ground. When I'm in England, they pass me pounds. I collect cash in every town, so I slide. And nowadays, I'm what? So many suckers on my sacroiliac. It's like a rapsack backpack. Quick, Jack. Give me some slack, Jack.

Jungle from vine to vine. Swung line to line. Swung line to nine to nine. I'm colossal. Use a mosquito. I'm a playtaz and you play cheetah. Cheetah, biter. Love to forge.

Better yet, I call you Curious George. Curiosity cold killed the cat. Can't hide from... Let your backbone slide. Wait, we're almost there. This is the throne. Keenan, that was so weak- weak ass I need to edit that out I've never edited an episode you're the only guy who had me edit an episode

and you did it again I don't know where that came from though why did we start doing these because he said gold, murph, and frankincense and you're telling me about the three kings so yeah the feast of the epiphany so actually clearly let your backboneast of the Epiphany. So actually, clearly, Let Your Backbone Slide is the epiphany. It's a Christmas song.

Yeah. This is our argument. Die Hard is a Christmas movie, right? You and I are going to go to bat that Let Your Backbone Slide is a Christmas song. Yeah. And so what you need to do is just dub in him doing the rapping on that instead of us. We should call him up. He's at FOTM like yourself.

He would join us via Zoom. I think he's in New Brunswick now. I did not know that. He moved out of the T-Doc. We're going to talk about the two-year anniversary tomorrow. We're going to start with that because you were there. Then I have Toronto-centric stuff I want to talk to you about. And it's interesting that Maestro moved out of this city that he was born in and he loves, and he actually moved away during the pandemic.

And that's kind of an interesting like theme of some of the things I'm going to talk to you about because my city, I love that. I, you know, unlike you, I didn't escape to Washington DC for a while. I'm still here, man. But as much as I love this city there are uh flaws of the city we need to discuss but before we talk about Toronto on Toronto Mike take me back to two years ago tomorrow and what was going down in your neck of the woods where you were living yeah I was in Washington DC as the as the Washington Bureau Chief for the Toronto Star, the American correspondent. And of course, it was January 6th, which now is one of those dates,

one of those events in American history that's known by date. But, so, you know, I was covering that. Donald Trump was refusing to concede that he'd lost the election. The votes were going to be counted up on Capitol Hill. He had a big rally in the morning. He made a speech. I was filing my copy about his speech when the Capitol security perimeter was breached.

People started going in. So I ran down there. And basically, I didn't get inside the building and and it's just as well good you might have got shot or something and i wasn't already inside the building i was out covering trump's speech and everything um but it was it was just a wild wild scene as everybody knows by now right but um there was i mean my biggest concern for me because i was on the um the the west lawn the the the area of the capitol building on the senate side okay uh but so i was sort of circulating from the lawn where there was a much bigger sort of more diverse group of people people had brought their kids uh there were people in costume and stuff there were like food vendors and stuff out there like our truck convoy yeah and and then when you got close

to the building there was this hand-to-hand combat going on there were lots of uh and at the time i didn't know who was like i assumed two tear gas was being like fired out of the building by security guards or smoke bombs right um but i I now understand that a lot of that, like pepper spray and whatnot, was coming from the protesters themselves. They were smashing at the windows. They were chanting about killing people. This is an insurrection.

And so I spent quite a few years, a few hours there while their insurrection was on. And it was really chaotic for me trying to cover it, not just because of the general chaos, but there was like, I guess because of the general chaos but there was like i guess because of the crowds and everything you couldn't really get a good cell signal like uh right i so so i was trying to tweet out videos and photos that i was taking but i was also trying to find information about what the hell was going on so i would walk two blocks away and get an update and see that, oh, my God, they're inside the Senate chamber.

You know, the people have all been evacuated. And then you'd come back and I'd be in an information vacuum again. And so words are coming here and there from the insurrectionists themselves, the protesters, people who who often were like under the impression they were and so let's say not that the paramilitary types who actually got in and you could spot them in the crowd because they're dressed like they're invading a foreign country or something right right um but the the sort of more average Trump rally attendee type people who were there were genuinely under the impression that this show of force was going to lead the members of Congress to refuse to certify the election and call a new thing. And correct me if I'm wrong, but the VP, doesn't he have the final certification? Isn't Mike Pence the guy who would have to make it official at some point and that yeah he has a he has a role

as a pure formality overseeing the count um and like uh getting people to report the count and then reading out the results so you know you can go back to the george bush al gore election when al gore was the vice president who announced that George Bush had beaten him, right? Donald Trump was convinced and was telling Mike Pence and telling everybody else that that meant Mike Pence was the decision maker, that he could just choose to reject. Mike Pence had lots of constitutional advice

that that's not actually the case, that his role is to read out the result not make any decisions yeah he's uh it's a formality like uh like sort of like when the the queen resides over this nation like it's a it's kind of a but so i mean formality it it's i mean and after i covered the the most of the hearings of the january 6 commission since then yeah the public hearings into it and everything uh i've read parts of the hearings of the January 6th Commission since then, the public hearings into it and everything. I've read parts of the report. I've been back here writing about Toronto,

so I haven't been as involved day to day. But, I mean, it's still looking back, it's this like, you try to figure out what the strategy was. And like a lot of Trump things. And so it's kind of appropriate that we're talking about this a couple years later as the Republican majority in the House of Representatives

is incapable of electing a speaker right now because 20 of their members, the sort of Trumpiest members, are just refusing to play ball. And they have no apparent list of demands. It's a big hostage-taking of the House. They don't have any demands. Like there's no strategy you could point to where you say Matt Getz winds up

sitting in the speaker's chair himself and that's why he's doing this or even that he gets anything he wants. It's just like they like to see the world burn. And Trump's strategy on January 6th was like, do not admit I lost. Now, if we cause enough chaos, maybe a window will open where I can do something, right?

And so there's scenarios you could imagine in retrospect that certainly some of those people involved thought were going to happen, is that if the riot was big enough and the certification of the count got delayed, Trump could declare martial law, the Department of Homeland security and uh and whatnot send their troops in and then he sort of like declares a temporary uh delay while they're going to investigate this and then you can you can stir

shit up but even the absence of that it's just like maybe they could get clarence thomas in the supreme court he pointed all these people so maybe he he finds a a big enough delay where they can then declare the election null and void or maybe uh members of the states so it's like it's basically a delaying tactic right but by like physically violently attacking his own the the the house of the seat of government of the united states of america and in the process attacking his own sitting vice president uh who won't do what he wants him to do so in real time it was astonishing like i'll just add this because we don't want to spend forever on this but in i had spent a lot of time covering Congress up till that point.

I didn't spend a lot of time in Washington at the White House. I did go to the White House. It's a fascinating visit. But as a visitor, you paid your money and took the tour. Well, sort of. Yeah. Sorry, continue. But I did spend a lot of time in the Capitol building.

And the security there on a day-to-day basis is actually very tight. And it's just such a giant edifice with its own... It has a police force. I'm not talking about the Washington, D.C. police force or the National Parks Commission police force or the Secret Service. I'm talking about the Capitol police. Just the Capitol has almost as many officers as the toronto police force does wow like this is like 400 no so it's not actually almost as many as okay

but it's gonna uh so i'm trying to remember it was like ottawa police actually that's i i was called on to make this comparison at some point and it's like the capital police alone are almost as big as say the ottawa police force like it's like um hundreds and hundreds because we got like 10 cops on every block so yeah yeah and we're getting more yeah we'll talk about that but uh the the point being that it's it's like massively secure building and and when you look at it it looks like i mean this is something about dc that toronto very seldom has but like it's built at a scale to try and uh be awe-inspiring right you look at this building built in the 1800s when the united states was still a relatively smaller country not a world superpower and you say they built that capital to be the capital of a superpower right like the mall here the vistas that stretch

off and the washington monument in the distance and right um it's it's meant to to sort of knock you back a bit and and that it was so easily overrun by people with like flagpoles and and um loud you know megaphones it appeared in real time as i watched it appeared that possibly the uh whatever the name of this police force is what is it capital police capital police capital police almost it seemed like they might be complicit in this like they were sort of laying down their arms and saying welcome like it didn't i didn't understand how this ragtag group of mega men could penetrate the uh yeah i think get in there i honestly think and this is where when you get into like the difference in how some of those, most of those black lives matter protests were policed right at in DC,

like, um, and this like black lives matter, weren't going to get honestly, when they saw the black lives matter protesters and knew that they were coming, they would say, this is a potentially violent group of,

you know, anti-fa and black activists and anti-police people. We need to meet force with force kind of thing, right? That's my charitable interpretation of what they're saying, right? So they get the gear, they set up lines

of riot-geared police guys with, like, tear gas cannons and shields and it's ready to repel them. I think, honestly, my charitable interpretation, again, is that when they're preparing for the Trump rally, they expected it to be like a Trump rally,

like a bunch of noisy rednecks in their 60s who like to shout a lot, but who are basically friendly to the police, friendly to authority. You think they would exercise great caution. Like, yeah, they think it might be that, but they would probably, you know, err on the other side of caution there.

Well, they did not. So in the moment, when you go back and look at even some of the video that appears to show Capitol Police people just saying, okay, just go, right? Right. And this is after sitting through all these committee hearings and stuff. I think, honestly, those officers were trying to make a decision

to try and not escalate the situation, not get themselves killed, but also not lead this into a gun battle when they suddenly realized it could be, right? There were bombs planted in the morning at the DNC and the RNC. They still haven't caught that guy. So, you know, these officers on the scene are suddenly aware that this is the situation, right? And so it's like that one officer who winds up being portrayed as a hero who led the mob away from where Mike Pence was crossing the hallway right there. Like he looked and saw the members of Congress and the vice president are right there. I got to take this.

So he tells them he starts a goose chase where he gets them to follow him in the wrong direction. And because we know he's leading them in the wrong direction and what was at stake, we can see that he's being heroic. But I think a lot of the cases where the Capitol Police are saying to people like, oh, just go this way, or like, listen, don't kick down this door. I will open it for you. They're trying to like prevent a scene of violence,

hoping that they can get it back under control good point good point and you know eventually they did get these guys out of there now where i was standing back again out on the lawn near the senate side there were a bunch of as the the people inside were sort of starting to filter out of the building and you could see you know they're sharing information with the people. That's when I think some reinforcements from the MPD and whatnot had arrived and there were a bunch of flashbang grenades

that went off. It's huge. It sounds like bombs. There was more tear gas. People were herded away. Right. Wow. And it kind of ended with a whimper like that

after that kind of show of force that everybody was like, well, I guess this is over. It's time to go home. We've got our selfies. the one guy said like this is one guy i was standing next to and this is the one day in washington actually i think it it's the only time and i went to a bunch of protests in dc i went to cover george floyd stuff in minneapolis i covered a lot of contentious scenes um This is the only time that

day I had my press credential inside my shirt, like in case I need to pull it out to show it to somebody in authority, it was on around my neck, but it was hidden, right? And I was sort of undercover. I didn't have a notepad out, you know, introducing myself to people as a reporter because I was legitimately in fear that that would endanger my life. Yeah, you're the enemy of these people. Yeah. And I mean, a couple of weeks before I had been angrily confronted by somebody at one of the sort of lead up rallies to the January 6th rally. There was a pro-Trump march to the Supreme Court building. And during that march, I was just walking along, taking some

pictures with my cell phone and, you know, making some notes, observing things. And a woman started shouting at me because she could see my credential around my neck, like, Mr. Reporter, why don't you write this? Why don't you write that in Pennsylvania? They have 500 ballots that appeared overnight in Philadelphia out of the blue that changed the whole thing. Why aren't you writing that? And so I went over and said, is there something that you wanted me to say? And I was recording. I had a video recorder, or an audio recorder

that was holding up to her mouth. And then she started to clam up. But then she started screaming at me again. And she basically like was telling me that I was the enemy. That is like people like me who are conspiring to steal her government from her, right?

And that was quite, and not 20 feet away from us, there were a bunch of Proud Boys in their battle gear. And they were harassing, there were like four Black Lives Matter matter uh anti counter protesters who were just sort of standing there silently holding signs and they were harassing them so this was so that was like two weeks before so i i legitimately thought i had good reason to fear for for and you did i think you did on the capitol uh that day and and so it was a crazy scene, but so I was just kind of like among the people like listening. I wasn't asking a lot of aggressive questions and stuff like that.

But there's one guy said, I overheard this conversation where a guy was like, I guess we'll go back to the hotel. And the other guy said, yeah, my wife's going to kill me if I get arrested today. So we should probably go back and maybe get dinner and then regroup later. That was one of the smart ones.

They're like starting to talk about like, and it's no joke. They're talking about, um, like where in DC is a good place to go get dinner tonight. Like, and, and,

and then as we're walking away, like again, some of these more aggressive guys start accusing loudly, shouting, accusing some guy of being an antifa agent and like literally kicking his ass down the street like running behind him kicking him wow and but as they're going and a crowd is kind of behind him there's this long orderly line of people for the porta potty like just yeah right like they're at edge fest or whatever yeah yeah no exactly and so i guess for these guys anyhow it was um they are sorting it out in the united states

still um i i feel kind of honored that i was able to sort of see it with my own eyes firsthand and and be there for that moment in history i'm uh just as happy that I don't have today in Toronto to see a lot of those moments day to day. Well, now you can worry about things like the real McCoy's burgers and real McCoy burgers in Scarborough and all these important things here, which we're going to get to. But just because I have a couple of quick questions. One is that, okay, I understand they made at least some of these people who were uh behind the insurrection

like literally made t-shirts like there's like january 6 insurrection style t-shirts that were made right like so it a lot of it seems uh clearly like premeditated it doesn't doesn't feel to me like trump's doing a rally and then they get all you know he pumps them all up and says go go go make it right or something and then like it absolutely seems like it was organized on social media um i don't know via facebook and all these other places where such people would uh collect yeah i mean they consciously, I think almost everybody there expected this to be a 1776 moment, right? Like, and I think some of them thought so more literally than others. Some of them, I think some of those people who were in attendance, quite a lot of them, you know, thought that what they were going to do is, is have a protest so large, uh, that,

that the, it can't help but turn the tide of the discussion. Right. Um, but other people were planning a military operation, uh, and lots of people who were there for a big protest, uh, got swept up in it. And I don't mean that as like an excuse of them. I mean, once, once they realized oh this is what we're doing we're stomping the cops we're going in there we're hunting nancy pelosi they were like finally somebody's doing it like they may not have expected that that was going to happen when they got there but they were relieved not um upset but relieved to find out that that was what was going on because because I think a lot of them just thought,

it's time we just take over. Like, end this bullshit, this process, this democratic. Well, I guess what's key to remember- Everybody's got to vote. Every snowflake wants to process respect. It's like when you think of the base of all this, the commonality amongst these people is that they seem to sincerely and legitimately believe

that this election was stolen from Donald J. Trump. So I suppose, and I'm, you know, like with many conspiracy theories and stuff, if you believe that to be absolutely true, you would be willing possibly to take up arms

and defend what you think is defending democracy because Biden and the democrats have stolen this election yeah and and i think the departure from reality the becoming completely unchained from any sense of evidence and reason is the problem here because you're absolutely right that if if you if you thought the can Canadian election was stolen and that some illegitimate actor had just seized the reins of government and the military and all of that, what would the appropriate reaction be, right? Like, revolution, right? Rebellion. reaction be right like revolution right rebellion um and and beyond that i think like if you also believed that that person was part of some like satanic uh conspiracy to like enslave children

and which which a lot of these guys also did believe right right i mean if you really believe that you're confronting the face of evil, right, and that it's taken over, then what is the appropriate reaction? And yet,

the thing is is that there is no reason at all to believe any of that, right? Except, except, except that they want

to believe it, right? Like, a part of them wants to believe that the people they hate are bad guys and cheating. And I think Donald Trump, we talked about this the last time i was here but i think donald trump talking about what he believes and doesn't believe and when he's lying and not

becomes tricky because it's so pathological that i think he he comes to believe the lies he makes up like the first time he says that he's kind of uh fudging the truth but then he comes to believe it's true by the time the 10th time he says it. Before I get us back to the T-dot here and cover some local stuff with you, before we leave Washington, I want to ask you about the accountability, like ramifications for Donald J. Trump.

So where are we at with that? I think there's a lot of fantasies. A lot of us have this fantasy like he's going to get arrested for this this like he's going to have to actually be held accountable for this insurrection and uh what say you ed keenan i mean i think there's a chance he winds up under arrest for one of these things right there's like uh the official secret stuff there's the january 6th stuff there there's other um obstruction of justice stuff that that's come up so there are multiple overlapping investigations into him that have

closed in that have you know gotten a lot of people close to him now um i mean i think there's a real chance he winds up arrested i don't think we wind up seeing him fog-marched in handcuffs and denied bail and everything, right? I think it winds up being more years of court processes and whatnot. But I think there's a dual threat involved there, right? Like a double-sided coin kind of thing, where I think, uh, to some extent, the legitimacy of the American democratic process in the medium term depends on people being held accountable for this, right? You can't try to overthrow the government essentially from the inside. Right. Uh, and, and then just walk away and try it again. Right. Right. Um, there has to,

and then just walk away and try it again, right? There has to, something has to happen. And yet, you know, something close to half of the American voters will consider any arrest or prosecution or accountability to be a partisan witch hunt in itself, right? But, I mean, I think at a certain point you have to do the right thing. And I think, so, at a certain point, you have to do the right thing. And I think so, but I'd say like, I think the odds are about even. Like, I think there's a good chance

he winds up charged with something. I don't, I think there's a good chance he doesn't wind up charged with something. But I think it's like, the chances seem to be higher than I would have thought they would have been a year or two ago. Okay, okay.

Well, stay tuned, everybody. What interesting times we live in. And that was surreal in real time, watching that unfold two years ago tomorrow was surreal. But two years later now, talking to you, who was on the scene there, it's as surreal as ever. Like, it's unbelievable that that happened. Like, it's just, to me, this is wild.

So we'll stay tuned and see what happens next but uh the anniversary's two years tomorrow yeah no exactly so okay fascinating now i'm taking you taking you back to the six okay now you live here now with your family i do you're not visiting here bluer west village yeah we have a home and everything and a home and you must be doing very well to have a home in Blue Earth Village. Well, I don't own it. Okay. I rent it.

Because I could not live in Blue Earth Village, Mr. Keenan. But what a lovely neck of the woods. Okay, so where do I begin? Lots of places I want to start. But a quick question for you. And I think you're a bit younger than me, actually. But the Parachute Club. Okay, so why am I bringing up the Parachute Club?

Because earlier this week, Lorraine Segato dropped by. She drove here all the way from Dundas, Ontario. I don't know if we're still allowed to say that name, but that's where she drove from. She sat here and she made her Toronto Mike debut. And I love the convo. I love talking to this woman. She just got, she's going to get the Order of Canada.

She was one of the people who got the news late last month. Well-deserved. She's always giving back to the community and, uh, fighting for justice. And, you know, she's a member of the parachute club rise up everything.

I loved my combo with her. I'm just wondering, like when it comes to like important Toronto musical acts and Toronto music and stuff, the parachute club and rise up to me early eighties, but, uh, absolutely vital to this city is like musical fabric. musical acts and Toronto music and stuff, the Parachute Club and Rise Up, to me, early 80s, but absolutely vital to this city is like musical fabric. What say Ed Keenan about the Parachute Club?

I think, I feel like the Parachute Club were a bit before my time, but which is not to say I was unaware of them, but it's like in the 80s, they were never, I heard this song Rise Up, especially that's the one I could name today. Well, the big one but um and of course like jack layton used

to use it as an anthem like later when when he was uh uh leader of the ndp and lorraine uh actually sang that song at jack's funeral yeah but um but i i knew the Parachute Club as like, maybe the Parachute Club and Rush, when I was like in elementary school, they were the big Canadian bands that people would name check or that you would hear like on commercial breaks on the radio station and being advertised and stuff. And so I knew them as a big deal.

Right. But I didn't have like any tapes of theirs or anything like that like i wasn't spending a lot of time listening with my friends and i so i maybe haven't taken the time that i could have to uh grow an appreciation for them later in life but they're they're more significant to me as like a signpost like in the 80s uh especially the early 80s when i was like in elementary school. They were kind of like these local... Like you're aware of this thing.

Local icons. Right? Yeah. But you were more into a wham. I think possibly to... Yes. And for Canadian content, there was like Corey Hart and Brian Adams.

Oh, yes. Come on. Glass Tiger. Platinum Blonde. Platinum Blonde. I loved Platinum Blonde. I loved Platinum Blonde. I loved Platinum Blonde. And then

Mark then was like in charge of the Mod Club and everything. Who came up with Lorraine because they both sang on Tears Are Not Enough. And Mark famously, infamously I guess, took a limo to that recording. And I always look at it

now like, okay, that was for famine relief in Africa. Like that was a bunch of people giving their time, donating their time to raise money to help with Ethiopian famine relief. And I just think it's so tone deaf that he took a limo to it for something that just doesn't seem to fit for me. Toronto Mike would bike to the

Tears Are Not Enough recording. That's what I would do. Okay. So the Parachute Club, Lorraine Sagato was great. I got nothing on that. I throw that in there. Can you say a few words,

give us an update of what's going on, but real McCoy, now you're here in Etobicoke right now, but on the other end of the universe, the other end of the city, there's a borough known as Scarborough. Far away, but close enough that it's still the same city.

That's the city we live in it's very very big vast right i know real mccoy i i've been there believe it or not uh but i know it because they have this like um they had this mojo radio ripken uh banner that was celebrating the fact that back in like 2001 i want to say ripkin had a contest on 640 mojo radio and announced that real mccoy was the best burger in toronto and they had this big thing it's been up there ever since so that's like over 20 years ago what's the update the big news i got was that real mccoy had to shut down because they're going to build condos, which is shocking. Yeah, and then the semi-update was that they had a real estate agent who had looked at the lease and saw that they still were supposed to be able to stay open another year, and they were maybe going to reopen after they had their big closing.

Yeah, but they're not going to now. So they got a settlement from the landlord. So they were improperly evicted early. They got a settlement from the landlord like so they were improperly evicted early okay they got a settlement on that front the owners of the real mccoy are um looking for another uh location um and hope to reopen but there's no like it's a family right and there's no sure thing that they're ever going to reopen and all of that. They've been there forever. And I lived in Scarborough for a long time. I went to Real McCoy a few times, and then my dad became a giant fan of it for takeout

like in the last 10 years or so. I love the vibe. The food, just amazing, right? Like it's like... Well, here, when I... Just a really good burger, that's all. Is it like... Because, you know, you used to live in the Junction.

So is it like Scarborough's Jumbo Burger? Or is that underselling it? I think maybe in what it means, like as a neighborhood joint, it's the same. Okay, let's go back to Tobacco then. What about Apache Burgers? So Apache Burgers is legendary in Tobacco. Yeah, I put it in the same category as Apache Burger, pretty much.

And Jumbo Burger's in there too. I just think that I love Jumbo Burger's in there, too. I just think that I love Jumbo Burger's onion rings a lot. And I actually like a Jumbo Burger burger, but I don't feel like there's anything like exceptional about the burger, where you taste it and say, this is just such a great burger. Real McCoy was like

legitimately great burgers. But also like just a neighborhood joint like a uh not just neighborhood like a regional sort of like um like apache burger or something like this is the place to go and of course they sponsored all kinds of kids sports teams and all of that so there were all these like little connections into the community but like what's significant to me about this because yeah these kinds of places close all the time and and it's part of the cycle of it right like when vesuvios and the junction closed i like

i was living in dc but i cried real tears like my i was so upset that we'd never get back there right like um it but but i mean they said you know the pandemic kind of did us in but it's like they didn't have a greedy landlord or anything like that. It was just like the family had been running it for a long time. The kids who might be in line to take it over were like doing other things. And this happens a lot actually. They were thinking like, should we sell it and let somebody else ruin it? Or should we just call it a day?

This kind of stuff happens, right? And it's always kind of sad. But you need a succession plan. But what's kind of happening now, and it's always kind of sad but what's kind of happening now and this is the weird thing is that so many of our landmarks like i'm a big guy in believing that um that like we need more places for people to live in this city we need more housing and we need a lot of it um so i'm not like on an anti-condo march. But what keeps happening is that like all the places that are beloved

because like they're the only place like that anywhere are getting leveled and they don't come back, right? Like they're not replaced by some other one of a kind institution. No, they get replaced by like an A&W is what happens. Yeah, or not even. Like it's like a frigging pottery barn or another shopper's drug mart or a block-wide LCBO. And there's a glass tower.

It's like, can we do something interesting on the main street to let these kind of places... These are the character places. You can't just be... I'm thinking of your old stomping grounds of Kiel and Dundas there. Oh, yeah. Stockyards, right?

Yeah. Okay, throw it. There's a there's a home depot now there's a canadian tire across the street like it just sort of feels very and i know target was there right famously the only purpose-built target in the city as i recall like every target was like previously zellers except they now it's a nation's food so which which yes right nations is good but good, but there's no character to that. No, and I mean, I think, like, my kids and I have a tradition.

It started because my daughter needed a research project when she was like eight or nine and we were like, we needed her off our back and we were planning a trip to Montreal

and so I said, we were going to Montreal and Quebec City and I said, can you research, like, the signature foods? Like, what are the foods we're going to have to eat while they're there? Cause we're going to need three meals a day. Love this.

Yeah. And so she was like searching on the internet and she came up with a list. Like, well, we go to, it's not just what's the food, but where do you go to get it? So we went out Schwartz's to get smoked meat sandwiches and all of that. And it's like, we had this place for poutine and we have, and so now it's, we've been road tripping for years and years. And everywhere we go, my kids look up a list. So we go to like eat the Cincinnati chili at the place where you go, right?

Primanti Brothers sandwich at the original location, downtown Pittsburgh. So you got that sandwich with like pastrami or whatever you want. But with the coleslaw and the french fries on the sandwich. You know, we went to Pat's king of steaks uh in in philadelphia to eat the the we've had the the lafayette dogs in in detroit wow and in washington dc of course like what might be the the absolute only washington dc uh signature food is like a half smoke from ben's right Ben's chili bowl has half smoke hot dogs so it's like a sausage a particular kind of sausage that comes from Baltimore actually

but then they put chili and mustard and onions on it and it's like it's nice but then you go to Ben's and it's like a black owned business on U Street which used to be the African-American cultural capital of DC, right? Like it was like when it was Chocolate City. And during the riots in 68, Ben's is the only place that stayed open. And both the cops and the rioters would go in there. It was like the DMZ, like they would go in and eat and get refreshments and like whatever. And it's an institution there. And when you go there, you can feel the history. That family still owns it, and so we've done a bunch of these, right?

Which I love, by the way. I could probably go on with the signature foods, right? Signature foods, love it. But the point is that in some places, these foods are actually really good, like a Philadelphia cheesesteak. I've had cheesesteak sandwiches

throughout my life here in Toronto and elsewhere, and I'm always like, eh, whatever. It's like, I, you know, I'd prefer a burger maybe or whatever. Like this is fine. But then I had it in Philadelphia and it's like, oh no, this is legitimately a different frigging sandwich. This is great.

Crab cakes in Baltimore are like not like whatever crap you're getting here. Right. So, but sometimes they're just kind of meh. Right. whatever crap you're getting here, right? So, but sometimes they're just kind of meh, right? Like the Cincinnati style chili, which is like spaghetti with chili and then a mountain of grated cheddar cheese on it is like, and it's this cinnamon spiced chili. It's like not my favorite thing.

But when you go to the place, you're like, this is Cincinnati, baby. Well, when in Rome, right? This is it, right? Sure. And so I feel like not just the foods, but the kinds of places that give you that same vibe. In Toronto, I have a bunch of cheese ball examples

that spring to mind. It's like Honest Ed, Sam the Record Man, whatever. Right. But also little places like Family Run Joints. They're just disappearing, right? Right. Well, I was going to ask you. So you go on

these road trips with your family and this that's a that's a great thing like what is the signature food make sure you go to that place to get the signature food but what are like what is how does that work for toronto like what are the signature foods of toronto good uh i've written about this a few times i'll probably write about it again and i think oh i love that everybody has different ideas but it's interesting because one that for me would be female bacon sandwiches, right?

Especially from the market. Oh, I thought you were going to say from Mimico Arena. They're very good. Oh, the ones at Mimico Arena are amazing actually. That's Mike by the way. Shout out to Mr. Mike.

Because in there you get the female bacon and they put a fried egg on there and some cheese and fried onions. So good. One of the best deals for the city. But I mean, and lots of people say,

oh, I don't really like female bacon. Or they say like, you can't get it everywhere. Like it's not a everywhere in Toronto thing. It's certainly more of everything. But when I was in DC, you just can't get it. Like they don't have female bacon. They don't have anything like it. They have the Canadian bacon is the um the ham

that's on an egg mcmuffin yeah that's that's actually called canadian bacon that's what americans call canadian bacon it's not the same thing at all right so we made our own female bacon uh in washington a couple times my daughter and i and you know it was a little too salty but i wrote a piece about it for the star and some guy on twitter yeah was like this is the white bourgeoisie crap like this guy thinks pimeo bacon is like what reminds him of home why isn't he talking about like korean great korean food that you can get here or filipino food and and i didn't respond to him but in addition to everything else he was saying in washington dc i had so many great korean food options so many great filipino options the best ethiopian restaurants outside of

ethiopia like every country's cuisine of the world you can get in washington dc just like you can in toronto but what i couldn't get was like butter tarts and pimeo bacon right but you know what else i couldn't get what and this is think, so like butter chicken roti, which butter chicken roti is like a Toronto invention. And it's amazing. Butter chicken is not. Right. Roti is not as a sandwich.

Although it's in parts of the United States, it's where there's not as big a Caribbean contingent. It's hard to find like a roti sandwich, like a Caribbean style roti sandwich like a um uh caribbean style roti you right you um but um and really good jamaican beef patties are not a toronto thing but they're they're not an everywhere thing either they're not like they're ubiquitous here you can get them at a so i mean i'm open to other suggestions but to me, the signature food is not just like, Oh,

Toronto has really great Italian food. Obviously lasagna is our signature food. It's like, well, every city has that. David Sacks, uh, who, who wrote,

uh, a book about the death of the Jewish deli in New York. He's a Toronto guy. He's got a new book, uh, about analog. Um, I wish I could remember the title.

Like the future is analog the future is analog yeah but anyway at one point i talked to david sacks about this and he was saying we were talking about you know um like a california sandwiches or san francesco's veal sandwich yeah like the veal parmesan sandwich with like the all the sauce on it on a bun you don't really see that in other cities like you do see italian sandwiches but they're more like deli sandwiches interesting and um you see a meatball sub but it's like a different thing so um potentially that's a toronto kind of innovation that is also fairly common in toronto like to to find like a veal or chicken cutlet sandwich served that way uh which doesn't seem to be in other places but

i'm i'm always open to more suggestions but like that would be my short list there would be like butter chicken roti p meal bacon on a kaiser uh or a soft broil uh uh those veal veal sandwich from one of the two Little Italy institutions that spread around the city. California sandwiches. Here's another thing. Tell me. At one point I suggested like,

there seems to be some California connection because it's called California sandwiches. And so the short version, here it is. Let me hear it. The Italian community that immigrated to Toronto originally and settled in Little Italy,

what became Little Italy. Yeah. Patron saint of that region of Italy was San Francesco, St. Francis. So this restaurant opened San Francesco's and they start serving these sandwiches. And so when their competitor opens to, but people, especially non-Italians,

think that restaurant's called San Francisco's. Right. So they want those San Francisco sandwiches. So another competitor opens and calls it California sandwiches to take advantage of this San Francisco confusion. I don't have it 100% for sure that that's the actual history,

but from talking to a few different people, that seems to be the best guess of why we might have some idea that's a that's a fun fact right there love it by the way uh we talked about mimico arena having the great uh pimeo bacon sandwiches uh george bell arena so i so my oldest played at george bell arena and my youngest son plays at mimico arena because i moved that's what happens but you have you been spending time at george bell arena i miss that old barn i have been so there's a connection here uh we used to go for practices at mimico arena uh and i would get the early

morning practice and i would get the female bacon sandwich mr mike so i started talking to back then let's say we're going back seven, eight years, the George Bell snack bar was almost never open. And when it was open, it was like somebody had the concession and they didn't have like, they had coffee and soft drinks and chocolate bars. And that's it. I know this period. And so I started telling John Bell, who runs the George Bell House League there, we got

to get this female bacon situation. And I probably wasn't the only one. Right. But what happened is that one day he came to me and I was coaching three teams at George Bell at the time in the House League. And he said, we got the concession. Like our House League is like the George Bell Hockey Association is going to take over the concession next year. We're going to run it. And they had the little frying pans. They started doing the female bacon sandwiches. They started doing other stuff and it was thriving. i came back now i registered my kids are playing hockey we were at george bell yeah and they got the female bacon sandwiches

and they're full on it's great um but uh we went my daughter's actually playing the swansea girls league which plays wednesday nights at george bell and saturday uh renny park at renny park outdoors right uh so we went for our Wednesday game, and they said this is the last game of the season at George Bell Arena because they're closing the arena until the spring. And the scoop is that the roof is going to cave in if there's a heavy snowfall.

Oh. Potentially. I was going to cave in if there's a heavy snowfall. Oh. Potentially. Over the ice. I was going to say, what? Because that's why I was like, how come? If the building's unsafe, why are we still going out there tonight? But it's basically, they're worried about snow. Right.

The weight of the snow. If there's enough heavy snow, it's going to do. And apparently, the city already had allocated $5 million. George Bell, the arena board, has $5 million to spend on renovations. That's why they had an engineer in. Looking at the roof, he said, you can't play. This is worse than you thought. We've got to shut it down.

It's a safety issue. And so that's why they're shutting it down. They have the money and the budget to fix it. They're going to fix it. Although they won't fix it in the winter because you don't want the workers up there under the snow either. So it's just going to sit vacant all winter.

It'll reopen in the spring potentially and then they'll have to reclose it to repair the roof next summer too. But if all goes according to plan, next season will be a going ahead at George Bell. It really is. I think so. It might be my... I mean, I have grown now that I spend a a going ahead at George Bell Arena. It's just, it really is. I think so. It might be my,

I mean, I have grown now, you know, that I spend a lot of time at Mimico. I'm going to be there twice this coming weekend. I actually like that Mimico Arena now, but George Bell had my heart. Like I had,

I sat at the lonely end of the rink. It just had this like old Toronto arena feel to it that I really dug. And great ice too. Ted Reeve Arena and George Bell Arena share a quality that I love for junior hockey great ice too. Ted Reeve Arena and George Bell Arena share a quality that I love for junior hockey,

for like minor hockey, for kids hockey. Right. In that the seats go all the way around the same way that they do at a professional arena.

It's not like a stack of bleachers on one side and like, yeah, which is where Mimico is. It's got one, yeah,

but there's, yeah, except for the side of the Zamboni. You're right. Like George Bell, I have, I remember there was like toronto uh roller derby used to be in there and they sold tickets like there have been concerts there it used to be the leafs practice ice right um for years and then the toronto furies professional women's team semi-pro women's

team uh played there that was their home ice for a while it it's it's like a it's got a good vibe in it right like great vibe but if you ask people like you ask a jeff merrick right like uh you know what's your favorite arena to to skate at he'll say the best sheet of ice that he plays on is george bell arena really and i will say this uh mike lackey from great lakes i think he had a i I know... I think there was a weekly game that was taking place at George Bell because my daughter would play soccer right beside George Bell Arena.

She used to play soccer there. And then I would always see Mike Lackey there. So shout out to the guys at Great Lakes Brewery. Going back to the food real quick though, because you mentioned the veal parm. I just want to point out the veal parm from Palma Pasta is delicious. They got locations in Mississauga and Oakville.

Pretty close to Toronto here. I do, because you mentioned everybody loves lasagna. Ed, you're going home with a large meat lasagna from Palma Pasta, buddy. I know that's why you're really here. That's why I'm coming here. I'm not on the reefer like that wise

blot. That's a recent development. But. I'm not on the reefer like that wise blot. That's a recent development. But I do like the pasta. I am hooked on the pasta. You got the pasta. By the way, speaking of Lorraine Segato, she chastised me the way that Jim Cuddy recently chastised me. I say pasta, and they seem to think that we say... I say pasta.

They seem to think we should be saying pasta. What does Ed Keenan at the Star say? When I didn't even know this was a thing until I moved to the States, and my kids came home, and the number one thing, especially my daughter Irene, who won't be listening to this,

but if she is, the number one thing she was teased for was that she says pasta, like everybody else in Toronto and Canada, and they say pasta. And then she would be like, what am I saying different? Pasta. And they were like, pasta. Pasta.

Pasta. And so it became a real Canadianism that I was, like, aware of. I mean, there are other things we pronounce differently, but I'm not even hearing the difference most of the time. Like I can tell what the difference is now, but when people would say like, it didn't sound weird to me. Right.

When somebody says pasta. Right. It's just that my mouth says it differently. So that my origin story, and I've told it a couple of times now, mainly to Jim Cuddy and Lorraine Segato, but I say pasta

because I used to watch the, I used to love Mother's Pizza. Right. And they had one on Dundas. It's now the Rock Pile. Like it's... I used to love Mother's too. We had some of their,

we'd get a float and a cup you could bring home. We had, those were some of our kid fancy glasses. Do you remember when the Blue Jays invested in it? Like Ernie Witt, I want to say. I don't remember that i digress but okay so there were television

ads for mother's pizzeria starring dennis weaver okay dennis weaver who i didn't actually watch the dennis weaver stuff like i'm i'm older than you but not much older than you and but i knew dennis weaver as this cowboy dude with this great mustache and he would be sitting in the mother's and he'd go, he'd say this line, okay? Mother's pizza. He'd go, pizza pasta. I'm butchering his line. I'm no Dennis Weaver, but he says, pizza

pasta made perfect. Like this was the line. Pizza pasta made perfect. And I don't know, my brain just said, hey, it's pasta. And I went with that because I was influenced by American media that's how most of the world pronounces it right like that's how Italians pronounce it right yeah well Anthony Petrucci at Palma Pasta

told me it is pasta but now twice Canadian musicians twice have told me it's pasta so I'm just throwing that out there okay thank you for that story because it explains a lot I'm saying it the American style yeah the my kids were mocked mercilessly for their Canadian accents,

but almost exclusively around this word. So the two things in middle school, if you say washroom, they don't know what you're talking about. Wow. It's the bathroom, right? Or you might say the toilet or the restroom. Fancy places would call it the restroom.

Right. But it's would call it the restroom. Right. But it's like everybody just says bathroom. And I, not just the middle school people, but like you go to your server in a restaurant and say, can you tell me where the washroom is? And it's not like they can't piece it together, but it's like the words are coming out like in a rush. So they're like like excuse me and

you say the washroom and they what the washroom oh you mean the bathroom yeah yeah it's just down here and it's like if if they had seen it written down yeah i think they would know what a washroom is but they're so unfamiliar with hearing it it's like if a british guy comes up to you like where's the wc and you're like the who the the WC? And you're like, the who, the who, the what? Right. Oh, oh, the water closet. Or if they tell you, oh, I had trouble getting here. I was stuck behind a lorry. Yeah.

Or something. Yeah, yeah. Lorry. In the spur of the moment, though, whenever you're asking Americans for a washroom, they're always like, huh, the what? Oh, that's good, though. What are you talking about? Let me ask you another one then.

Because I've been told this is similar, I guess, to the pasta thing. But would your daughter in school be making great progress or progress? Oh, see I'm not 100% sure. I think Americans are progress and produce and I think we're produce. But I could have that backwards

because what do I know? Okay, lots of words like that. But the one I do distinctly know when I watch TV and somebody says, oh yeah, I'll meet you in the foyer. Well, that's just a in the foyer. Well, that's just a mispronunciation. They hate French. That's how much they hate the foyer. Okay.

Lots of ground. I realize now, uh, there is no, there is no like 90 minutes of Ed Keenan. Okay. This might as well be a Mark Wiseblood episode. Okay.

But I do want to cover a bit more ground here. There's a tweet. Let me do this one. Oh, so many, so much ground, but let me start's a tweet let me do this one oh so many so much ground but let me start with a tweet here okay so and i need to disclose i feel i need to disclose that i consider myself a friend of diane sacks okay now that's on the record now okay a friend and that not only was she a client but we spent a lot like for a couple of years we talked

often and i quite like i quite like her as a person and part of what i like about her not only because she's so passionate about um climate the climate emergency and the future like our grandchildren and their future on this planet earth but uh she and this is many conversations privately of diane sacks in my humble opinion smart as a whip really really, really intelligent, Diane Sacks. So I have this history of Diane Sacks. I've now fully disclosed it. Now I will proceed to read a tweet. I just want to read a tweet for you

that Diane Sacks tweeted and just talk to you about it because initially I was kind of like, oh, I don't like this tweet, but then I kind of sat with it for a bit and then I thought, well, maybe this is actually like just, maybe she's too smart for

good and this is just not as political as we're used to and it's like actually a good tweet so i'm going to read it to you okay publicly tweeted not a private text from diane sacks publicly tweeted here let me find it for you all right diane sacks got a tweet at her about uh we should not be okay with our city looking this way. Huge hazard to cyclists and probably even drivers. Basically, the same old bike lanes. Is this a picture of a specific site or something? Yeah, that didn't make this tweet here,

but I think it's a subtweet and there was a picture of a blocked bike lane. But here is what Diane Sachs tweeted. Okay. If you don't like the city in such disrepair, then send in a submission to the budget committee and ask the city to raise enough revenue

to pay for a good quality of services and infrastructure. It won't happen unless people speak up for it. Okay, that's the tweet. Yeah. Let me go to you here. Because when I initially read that, I was like, like, isn't that your job? Like you're the city councilor and somebody's like raising this issue

and you're basically telling them to go fill out some, some forms and for the budget committee, because we're not, we're not going to have clear bike lanes until we have money to pay for good. And I feel like, like, no, like, I feel like this is something we should have today like I pay a lot of money in city taxes etc we should have this today I want to know

what you think of that tweet is that correct or is it just not as political as we're used to is it real talk and we're just

not ready for it I know I'm blindsided did this tweet become controversial I've been on vacation so I'm just catching up

so here's this situation. As I've just recently come back, I'm not up to speed on Diane Sacks entirely. I know who she is, obviously. I read up on it. I don't think I've met her in person. I know her a little bit by reputation. I've seen her at City Hall.

She doesn't have a big track record. She won a three-way contest to take over from one of the most progressive city councillors by pitching herself as a potential ally of John Tory's, although John Tory was less openly pitching her as a potential ally. She didn't vote to debate the strong mayor powers at the point where everybody wanted to debate them right so that made everybody think oh maybe she's going to be a tory lackey i think

probably she's more one of these uh wants to be a centrist but doesn't want to rock a lot of boats wants to see if she can get what she can from a relationship with the mayor in terms of this specific tweet i think if you're a politician and one of your constituents says, the city hydro wires, city owned property is causing a threat to my life. In your ward, your job is to say,

let me see if we can get that fixed. Right? It's also your job as a city councilor though, to try and get more money in the budget to repair that infrastructure so she's absolutely right to say in the budget process we need people like you out there to support

raising the revenue to fix this stuff absolutely that's right but at the same time you also if one of your constituents reaches out to you and asks it's like if you go to your boss you are your own boss from what I can tell. But imagine somebody who works in a corporate environment goes to their boss and says, there is a desperate health hazard in my workstation that needs to be fixed. It's endangering my life by working here.

And the boss says, what you need to do is make a submission to the annual budget process to see if the board will approve removing that hazard and if they won't approve it i don't know what else we can do and you say well i'm not what are you talking about it's your job well that's it so and i know you're on vacations i'm blindsiding you with this but i feel like like should we are we at a point now in this city of toronto and I'm going to bring up a bunch of stuff now, a little more negative stuff than our wonderful pea meal bacon sandwiches, but we should have to speak up now for good quality of services and infrastructure? Isn't that the whole reason we have

the city and city council? Why do I have to speak up for safe bike lanes in my city? It feels like this is... Well, the short answer to that is honestly because the people who want those bike lanes removed are speaking up every day and i hear from them all the time i write about completely unrelated things and i get emails from

people saying the real problem is we put in all these freaking bike lanes so that toronto mike can haul his gear on a winter. Which I do. And I, meanwhile, the rest of us can't drive, right? Like, we can't get through. The traffic is crazy. And they're right that the traffic is crazy. They're just wrong that the bike lanes have anything to do with making it crazy.

The bike lanes are actually an improvement. But the point is, squeaky wheels get grease all over the city. The point is, squeaky wheels get grease all over the city. And there's no squeakier wheels than the demographic of people who are retired and cranky and angry and wound up. They don't want to pay more taxes. The forces of the status quo are loud and powerful. and powerful and and certainly but now yeah if you're a toronto voter you would hope diane sacks is one of your types speaking up for you at city council right i think the charitable interpretation of i i've read i've heard the 100 280 characters there or whatever um But I mean, when city councilors put out those like, please support higher taxes, this budget process or whatever,

those are the councilors who are already planning to support that themselves. What they're saying is, I need allies out there. You need to let the mayor know. You need to let Mark Grimes know, Mike, that...

He's gone, by the way. A little update for you. You need to let... Shout out to F amber morally yeah yeah one of the biggest surprises in the last election of the most pleasant ones but your mayor by the way i will give her a little time uh you know doug holiday no you need to let whoever else right like that's the question uh the counselor like diane sack saying that to somebody is saying the city needs to rise up so that rise up

so that the rest of these politicians understand what I already understand right so just we're just not used to politicians I feel

it's just an interesting tweet I wanted to bring it up but on that note here Neil writes in when he heard you were coming on he says you may want to ask Edward Keenan. He calls you Edward.

I know your name is Edward. That's mine. I like it. I know. You may want to ask Edward Keenan about Vision Zero. In the last eight hours, and he wrote this before a death, we could throw a stone from here, and a gentleman, a 59-year-old man, was killed in a hit-and-run.

This black pickup left the scene, and this happened. You could throw a stone from here and hit where that happened. But he wrote before that, in the last and run, this black pickup left the scene. And this happened like you could throw a stone from here and hit that where that happened. But he writes, he wrote before that, in the last eight hours, three separate incidents of pedestrian injuries, one of which, he is actually pointing out the one that happened, so he miswrote it after. What more

does he think the city needs to be doing to put the safety of pedestrians and cyclists, thank you for mentioning that, Neil. First... I know, you said you're running for office here. No, no, no, but I've written about this quite a lot before I left.

I haven't written about it so much since I came back, and I haven't... Don't break my chairs there. I don't have to send a total-starred invoice. I'm just adjusting the parts that are meant to be adjustable. It is strange how it does that. I think the city needs to do a lot more. And I would say to the city council and this mayor's credit,

over the last eight years they have done some. If you've been in here, it may be hard to appreciate how many more miles of separated bike lanes we have now than we had eight years ago. But when I went away for four years or three years and came back, I was like, whoa, the University Avenue lanes, the Bloor lanes, they all hook up. I have a safe route to work when I go to City Hall and stuff. There's still a lot more needed, but I think those are good steps. But they need to do a lot more of that.

there's still a lot more needed, but I think those are like good steps, but they need to do a lot more of that. And I think like, I don't know the details of these specific cases that they're talking about, but I think like right now we have a speed camera, the most lucrative one in the city is on Parkside Drive near High Park.

And of course, there's a problem at Parkside Drive is that people are coming off the Gardner then coming off Lakeshore Boulevard and Keele Street, Parkside Drive slash Keele Street is the main only route up to the north end of the city, right? Right. You can take Windermere, which is a side street, whatever.

But Keele Street is a basic way. If you need to get up to the 401, if you need to get up to the Northside. You're right. I think between Jameson and Windermere, that's it. 403, right? Like if you're coming from Hamilton or like whatever. So that, it used to go right past my house. I lived on Keele Street, right?

And so people fly, right? And so even though there's a ticket, and they know by now, most of the regulars know, like I'm going to get one of these photo radar tickets, and they know by now, most of the regulars know, like, I'm going to get one of these photo radar tickets, and yet they're still speeding. Because the road, the way it's designed is basically telling them, this is a 60 kilometer per hour zone. You feel safe driving at 60 there. The signs say 50 or 40 now, right? If you want people to go 40 you actually have to redesign the road here's an interesting thing i observed yes i lived like you wait a second i have to go out and check maybe not like

you but like people in your neighborhood there were no sidewalks in my subdivision in uh dc right i have sidewalks and yet there are parts of new toronto that have no sidewalks. That is correct. And Mimico. Few and far between in Toronto these days. But in my DC neighborhood, my suburban DC neighborhood, there were no sidewalks. And kids would play in the middle of the road all the time. Almost every house, not almost every house, but let's say two or three houses in each block had like basketball nuts out on the road.

Kids would just go out there. Our kids walked by themselves unaccompanied to school every day in the middle of the road. You know what they did do? Everybody there in that suburban neighborhood had a driveway, but everybody parked their car on the road. And they parked on both sides of the road. So there was two-way traffic,

and then cars parked on both sides of the road. So the road was only wide enough for one car to barely get through. Delivery vans had a hard time. So you could not speed. Right? Like there was no way to fly through that neighborhood. It was just like there's so many cars like were obstacles on the road. And the narrowness of the lane.

You have to make the road narrower. You have to make the lanes smaller. And so you give some of the road, more of the lane you have to make the road narrower you have to make the lanes smaller and so you give some of the road more of the road to to pedestrians right you give more of the road to cyclists you make the lanes narrow and yes yes you want cars to be able to move but maybe one lane in each direction on bluer street today works better in my estimation when i drive along it it moves along smoother than the old two lanes did because you don't have people weaving in and out in front of you but also the speed on our highways for instance everybody drives 120 even when the speed limit's 100 right and

that's because like safety engineers always think the road needs to be designed to be safe at like 20 or 40 over the speed limit because they're assuming you know you don't want a speed limit crash to be deadly so you design it to be safe at much higher than the speed limit right but when you're driving on it what feels like the natural speed is the speed that's safe if there's no other cars and the road's like real wide like the lane is extra wide you feel like it's just safe to go faster right and so then you go on so what you actually what we actually need to do in the city though and it's a longer term project is like redesign the streets in ways that force people to slow down. Now, the trick is doing that while also actually allowing traffic to move. And I mean, I don't think fast moving car traffic should be the city's highest

priority. I think it should be down on the list, but it can't be no priority, right? Like deliveries need to be made. Ubers need to get people to work on time or whatever, or their hospital appointments. Like people need to get to the grocery store and back. Shouldn't take four hours. So I don't think, I don't think cars speeding along is actually going to be the way that we get where we're going faster, right?

Like I think you can move at a slower speed, more consistently, safely, and get where you're going faster than you would with higher speed limits if there's chaos and accidents and unsafe. So, I mean, there's a lot of engineering that goes into that, but I think the short version in answer to this question is that the roads need to be designed to slow people down. You can't just post a sign that says 30.

And enforcement is great, but what you actually need is a road that makes drivers feel like 30 is the speed they should be going great point now uh this is a natural segue to uh something i just read from fotm matt elliott shout out to fotm and elliott this is the headline transit in toronto has never felt so broken okay let me tell you something my friend ed keenan that uh one of the reasons i literally there's many reasons actually but i do bike everywhere i can bike like i i have a weekly thing at jarvis and uh uh queen's key and no matter what the weather like i'm getting there on a bicycle from here like i like i have these

destination rides and stuff and it's i'm taking the bike like I'm biking. And one of the reasons I bike is because when I do the math on the whole transit and the whole chaos, it's like, oh, my God, like I TTC is like, forget it. And I don't want to ever I don't try not to drive anymore. TTC is whatever. Now I'm on a bicycle. OK, not everybody can bike everywhere. And I'm well aware of that. So where do we go from here? Like transit, okay? Somebody wrote in, if you're having Ed Keenan on, they said, we need to discuss Eglinton Crosstown, Ontario Line, et cetera.

Like what say you about this transit problem in Toronto? Oh man, there's not a transit problem. There's a whole series of problems. And so the Eglinton Crosstown and the Ontario Line, among other things, the Finch LR these are these are part of the solution uh there's a whole nother problem in the competence of metrolinx uh building them in a reasonable time frame as expected on cost like that that's a separate issue almost a separate problem or a contributing problem or a spinoff problem but when the eglinton crosstown opens it it it solves a lot of problems

for a lot of people who live along there right like uh it's going to be a miracle for a lot of those people who suddenly have a high-speed rail at their doorstep to get them across town or to the young subway line or out to town or to the Yonge subway line or out to the east end from the Yonge subway line and without having to go up to Shepherd, out to the west end and all of that, right? Right. The Ontario line, again,

a lot of these complaints I'm hearing from people about the impending construction are, you know, broken eggs that are necessary to make an omelet. But we've reached a point where we almost don't trust Metrolinx enough to believe that they've got the omelet recipe right. Like they're just smashing eggs all over the place. And you're like, some of those had to get broken,

but I'm not sure which ones, right? And so that's one thing. A second thing, and I haven't read Matt's column yet, but I think, you know, the transit agency just announced that they're raising prices 10 cents. They're also going to cut service. They didn't announce this, but it's buried in the report that the, you know, subway service in some places

or rapid transit service is going to go to every 10 minutes um and in other you know they're going to increase bus bus crowding standards to 45 people which i mean all of that sounds maybe like not much to to most people but we're in a dangerous point right now and it's a tricky point i don't think that the politicians have easy an easy answer available that they're not taking i I think it's actually a difficult thing. Revenue went way down because of the pandemic. It hasn't come back up because people in downtown offices, a lot of the rest of us have all returned to life or returned to our regular working lives.

People in downtown offices are not working there anymore in the morning. No, I can tell you, my wife is called in two out of the five days she's got to be in the office. That's suddenly, that's three out of five days she's here. Yeah, and now this is transit revenue is down like about a third, right? Right, right.

Now, you have a problem when you're running a transit agency, right? Is that when you have ridership is down, what you think is, well, we got to run less service, right? Uh, but if you run less service, ridership goes down even more. I used to live in Scarborough and I did not have a car. I did not have a driver's license. So I was, uh, so the Bellamy bus say would come every 15 minutes and that's crappy. Like, so you walk out there and if you just missed one, you're waiting 15 minutes and that's crappy like so you walk out there and if you just missed one you're waiting

15 minutes but then on saturdays it was every half an hour right and that's like well i can barely rely on that at all i have to check the schedule so i check the schedule and see but then if it's you know off schedule i'm screwed and then on sundays i run it once an hour and it's like there's no way i will walk a half hour out of my way to go to a different bus line because this is useless to me. And if I had had 50 cents to my name to spare, I would have gone and got my driver's license and bought a car. There's no way I would have relied on that transit service.

And so at scale, this is a problem across the city. You know, revenue's down because ridership's down. Well, if there are fewer riders, let's run less service. When you run less service, it means that people can't rely on it, so there's fewer riders still. They find alternative modes. And I will say, like, one magical thing that I realized when I moved to D.C., but also visiting Chicago, visiting San Francisco,

is that the frequency of service we have here in Toronto, people in Toronto will complain about it. But like, it's not unusual in DC or in the Chicago L train network. If you're off peak, like if it's the evening and you go to a subway station, you see, oh, the next train's in 22 minutes. And people aren't freaking out. It's not a delay. That's this next scheduled train, right? You could go recently to North Etobicoke or Scarborough, where the transit service, we all agree, is subpar. But still, there's a bus route where there's a bus coming every five minutes. It's not even rush hour or every 10 minutes.

This is a level of suburban service you don't find in other cities. And it's a great asset to Toronto. And what we need to do is not foul that up. The problem we're going to have right now is that we're short money. And the solution to that in the longer term is going to have to be that like, if we want the riders to come back,

the service needs to be there for them and it needs to be reliable enough. But's another problem right now and believe it or not it's a housing problem is that there's a lot of safety issues that are real and perceived on the ttc right now that people are really and i i did a cbc segment talking about this recently you can get a lot of things twisted up when you start talking about violence but like there have been a couple episodes of random style violence like unprovoked violence on the subway and what contributes to that though is like let's assume whether or not those are entirely random not part of a big pattern but you know, crap happens in a big city and you hope it's not going to happen. But is that like, after that segment, I started, I got on a

subway train to go home and there's a homeless guy sleeping on it and it's fine. So I sat down at one end of the, you know, next to the, where the, where the driver would be, except it's not like one of those driver-conductor cars. It's just an empty thing. So I'm in the seats beside that. And this guy gets up. He's probably 25, but he looks rough. He's obviously sleeping rough, and he's got a backpack.

So he walks over to me, to the only seat beside me. So I'm in one end of the train, and he puts his bag down on the seat right in front of me. And then he pulls a pair of scissors out of it and just stands there sort of with his mouth hanging open, breathing hard. And now I just came off a segment on the CBC

where I've been talking about two violent stabbing episodes on the TTC and an attack. Right. So I stood up and I walked past him and he just kept staring at me and I walked and he put his just kept staring at me and I walked

and he put his scissors back in his backpack and he sat down. And so, I don't know, in the general scheme of things, I didn't feel like he was a big threat to me. Maybe he was going to try and stab me or something. I did feel afraid, but I just didn't, it's not the kind of thing that I'll carry with me

for the rest of my life, where he made some stabbing motion. It was more like he put it down there. He was staring at me. He was holding these scissors. But in that moment, you're worried for your personal safety. But then everybody else on the train who had just watched him, I didn't see what happened where he was sleeping before or where he was lying before.

But they were all watching him. And so they saw me coming out, and they're all staring at me. So I actually got off the train and got on the next train but i think what's happening here yeah is that people don't have a place to live they're in park encampments they're they're in all kinds of places they're going and you see this in other cities they go to the to the subway because it's a it's warm right right? It's dry. But that creates issues, right? It creates issues both because some subset of the homeless population, especially those who are sleeping rough, who are on the TTC,

have other issues they're dealing with, whether it's substance abuse, whether it's mental health and all of that. But also just because like the nature of those of somebody who's trying to sleep and stay warm there and whose life is a ball of stress being surrounded by computers who hate them and don't like them i i just want to connect one dot here though which is the thing is that like recently there is an election in there were elections in san francisco in california and public safety quote unquote was like the big issue in those elections and Democrats were kind of losing. But when you drill down into the numbers, one of the biggest things that makes people

feel unsafe is the presence of visible homeless people around them, right? We can say that people shouldn't feel that way but it's it's the truth um and they start looking for law and order solutions they want crackdowns now like putting homeless people who are camping in the park in jail is not going to make me any safer right but it it's gonna like the real solution is give those people a place to live. Like you can say that guy who seemed to menace me on the subway, uh, you know, he's got other problems,

but you know what? 20 years ago, a lot of, uh, people in Toronto had those same mental health problems, had those same addiction issues, but you know what else they had a place to live, right?

And so the, the issues of homelessness that you see in Vancouver, in San Francisco, increasingly in Toronto on the street that make people feel like this is an unsafe situation, even while most of our crime statistics, other than car theft, show that actually crime is continuing to go down. Murders, violent assaults, all of those things, there's less of them now than there was last year and less than there was 10 years ago, you know? But people feel unsafe because, you know, my example on the subway, right? Or whatever situation.

Like, there's a solution to that, is to give these people a place to sleep that's warm and dry where they're not up in your face. In Finland, so in Finland, I actually read this earlier this week because i know we can do better and uh in finland the the number of homeless people fell very uh fell sharply they uh people who are i'm not even sure what is the new nomenclature for homeless people somebody told me we don't call un Unhoused, I think. Unhoused, okay. So those unhoused people, they got a small apartment and counseling

with no preconditions and four out of five people affected made their way back into a stable life. Like this is in Finland, slightly more progressive than we are. But if you just look at the cost, like monetary cost, this is

less expensive than accepting homelessness. Like, I just think we need to start tackling this problem. Yeah, I mean, right now we come up against a few things in Toronto. We do have a housing first policy in Toronto. David Miller began it. It continued to some extent under Rob Ford. John Tory has pushed it. It's like, you need spots though.

Like these people actually need places to live. I wrote a piece like 15 years ago or something for the Grid or iWeekly about, like I actually did all this math where like the amount we spend on a shelter bed per night, like it would be cheaper to just buy, at the time it would have been cheaper

to rent those people one bedroom apartments, like each one. Every single street homeless person in Toronto who's in the shelter system, like it costs more than the rent. Or we could have bought them all a condo, right? The problem is we just don't even have enough condos to give them all, right? Like it's like at this point, housing has become so unaffordable. There's a legit shortage of housing for the people who live in Toronto.

And so we actually need places to put them. Like the city's shelter system is like overwhelmed right now. And their leases are coming up. They were looking at closing some of these because the COVID restrictions were being closed down. And yet, so we need emergency shelter spaces, but we also need transitional housing, whether that's a no questions asked apartment for them to live in, whether it's a supportive unit, whether it on anybody who ran one, because I had considered Airbnb my whole house when I moved, rather than selling it, right?

Like, I think everybody's trying to make the best decisions for themselves, but the number of rooming houses and, like, basement apartments that got turned into luxury vacation rentals, that takes out the low end of the market, right? And it's like, we just need places, inexpensive places, or even mildly expensive places for people to live. And a lot of other problems disappear. And like, I think a lot of the perceived safety issues

on the TTC and a lot of the real safety issues on the TTC could be solved by housing people, weirdly enough. Well, you know, condo mania continues in this city. I'm telling you, like I was reading up on the Greater Golden Mile. 77 residential towers and over 50,000 people will be housed. This is in Scarborough, the Greater Golden Mile. And there's a whole bunch of stuff like on the verge of,

what is this, three point, this is a big one. Where is it here? The well, that's front in Spadina. So it'd whole bunch of stuff like on the verge of, what is this, three point, this is a big one. Where is it here? The Well. That's front in Spadina. It'd be out of our price range. That's where the Star's new office is. By the way, I mentioned Jervis and Queen's Key so I'm biking there and I see on the

south side of the tower, so facing the lake, you still have at one Yonge Street, you still have the Toronto Star lettering. Because I've been reading, it's gone. There's no more letters up there but i still on the south side you see i saw it facing facing out facing them where captain johns would have we still have a billboard for the ships coming in bringing americans well you're hoping captain johns comes back uh speaking of places with character right that have disappeared i just watched uh so with my library card i get canopy with a k and i was streaming um the silent partner have you ever seen this movie so

it's a christopher plumber movie from like the late 70s john candy actually has a little role in this thing but it's it's really toronto like you got to see it just because this bank is in the eden center they're going to the the silver. It's so Toronto. They have a meal at Captain John's back when it was actually a decent... I don't know if you're my age. We don't remember Captain John's as a swanky, cool place. It's just been a dump since

the 80s or whatever. There is a lot of development. Cloverdale Mall has got to close soon because there's going to be a huge thing. We're not far from Park Lawn right here where the Mr. Christie's factory... That suddenly is like a whole new city unto itself that didn't exist 20 years ago.

It's just there is... There does seem to be a lot of condo development. The Galleria Mall! My Galleria Mall! Now that's a development. Honest Ed's, we talk about the character in the city. But if you look at the... So actually like, oh, I recently compiled a bunch of numbers about this and I don't even have them at my,

because it was like 25 years since Amalgamation. So I wrote a anniversary, like happy birthday column or whatever. But, you know, however many units we've built since 2020 or since 2000, which is a lot, right? Because like none of those high-rises, there was no development south, it was a sea of parking lots

south of Front Street, right? Like, City Place did not exist. Go watch Strange Brew. Go watch Strange Brew. Okay, early 80s. It's all parking lots. Liberty Village

was just warehouse built. Lost, yeah. No high-rises, right? Yes, yes. So, we have built like, but whatever the number we've built, like our population has grown significantly more than that, right?

And in the meantime also, a lot of former like, like I bought a rooming house in the junction and evicted the tenants and turned it into a single family home. Me, I was like poor. That was the cheapest house in the whole city. And I, you know but but that's happened at scale like it used to subdivided places in mature single like so the upper middle class has moved back into the city and and and so when you look at the population density of the annex

it's gone way down right like lots of downtown neighborhoods like that. Yes, we've built a bunch of condos, but at the same time, lots of new people have moved into the city and the population has grown. And it's just like there's not enough supply of housing to meet the demand. Now, when we're talking about homeless people, when we're talking about the very low end of the market, we also have a real desperate and dramatic shortage of subsidized housing possibilities and affordable units and the types of places... But doesn't it have to be a part of these new developments?

...regulated income co-ops that serve people who are never going to really be served by the market, right? The housing market in a growing, thriving city, right? But like we need both, right? But Ed, when you're a new developer and you've got a new complex you're building,

let's make it up. Like the Cloverdale Mall thing that's going to, you know, I saw that, or you can do the One Young Street, you can name it. There's so many big developments going on in this city right now.

But isn't there some legislation in place, some bylaw thing or something like x percent there are there are a couple different ones yeah where like a certain percentage of the units have to be uh like affordable guaranteed affordable often run administered by the city there are different definitions some are like affordable by market uh averages some are like affordable by market averages some are affordable like like the toronto community housing will run it as a rent geared to income spot some of them there's all different standards but we do usually or mostly uh are imposing that on new developments now that a certain number of of units need to be affordable by some desk definition. And,

and, you know, maybe we need to do more of that, but at a certain point it's like you, you keep saying, I don't know if we're at that point. And actually I got to look into this more, but it's like, well,

I'm giving you homework for next time. When we're saying it, say, say, you know, when we do that, it's like you say to a developer, like 20% of this units you build here are going to have to, you're going to have to give away for free, right?

The developer's like, well, let me do the math and whether that's still going to make it profitable for me, the rest. Can I charge enough on the rest of these units that I still make my profit that I need to make? Because this is just an investment for me. I'm not, I don't love building housing out of the goodness of my heart yeah you're going to make money um and if they can then sure they do it right and the cost is passed along to the market unit right people right um and if they can't make money at that they say no or like the project goes kaput or whatever but you know at a certain point does the city really think it's gonna solve all of its affordable housing problems by turning all subsidized housing over to the whims of developers

right like like if the city wants to build subsidized housing units the city should goddamn build subsidized housing units right like you you've got this city-owned land if you want to build public housing on it or mixed market housing or co-op housing like nothing's stopping you and to some extent you know we are doing that or trying to encourage that in spots but it's like it's the same with like there's there's no solution to the shortage of homeless shelter spaces that doesn't involve A, opening homeless shelter spaces, and B, and or B, probably N, be finding a place where those people can go and live

because there's nowhere for them to go right now. Look, then they get that NIMBY bullshit because on Lakeshore they were proposing a temporary, like a homeless shelter. Yeah. And this was quite a moment in this neighborhood because neighbors whose faces I see,

you know, on a regular basis when they're mowing their lawns or whatever, were protesting against this. And I wanted to get a protest in favor of, like, it's like this NIMBYism

is out of control. Nobody wants it in their backyard. Yeah. No, exactly. And it's a truism and i like i mean nobody thinks they're the nimbie though either right like i i i had this thing i think i wrote about it where like i would go out and like when you say to somebody like well this is just nimbism and you say you think it's dindiism but you don't understand they're talking about putting it in my backyard. And I'm saying not in my backyard. Right.

You call that NIMBYism? That's not NIMBYism. They literally want to put it in my backyard. And it's like, well, you know, yeah, that is, that's what NIMBYism is. And I realized, oh my God, there's so many topics here, so much, and I'm getting slightly depressed here. We are going to have to, yeah. and I realized oh my god there's so many topics here so much and I am getting slightly depressed we are gonna have to yeah let me because I wanted to

just bring this last thing up so we talked about a lot by the way Chris Black did write in and say to talk about city golf courses but I don't have anything to say about city golf courses

because I don't know anything about it so I don't know like do we have a lot of like is there I've done most of my golfing at city owned golf courses I have to say

like Scarlet I barely golf at all. Yeah, like D'Antonio Park, the Victoria Park Station, or Scarlet Road, Tam O'Shanter. There's a Dixie one, but I don't know if that's Mississauga or Toronto. Okay. All right, so let's leave the city golf course thing. I do know that some golf courses,

I don't know if they're public or private or whatever, do fuck up the bike trail. Like, I'll be on the great bike trail, and it'll be amazing along the etobicoke creek for example and then you got to get off for a while because there's a golf course there and that does piss me off but i didn't want to make this episode about biking but last thing i'm going to leave you with so we talked about all this development going on the city there's a proposal for our ontario place that includes a private water park and spa with underground parking for more than 2,000 vehicles. So this will be

our last topic today. I'm hoping, like I'm thinking Ed Keenan visits once a quarter, sits down in that seat and we hash it out of all this stuff

once a quarter. They're going to have to be like four hours. It's like, well, we're going to keep this under two hours. It depends how the

Ontario Place chat goes. But I visit, I will just preface this and say that I visit Ontario Place, I would say I'm there maybe three or four times a week, like in a typical week. And I like to bike through Trillium Park and then go through,

and I often take photos there like I did today of my bike. I do this bike TO photo thing there. What the heck? Private water park and spa? I went down for the first time in a long time with my daughter, like for the first time since we moved back,

but it was a long time before that. We had gone, you know, the new Bill Davis Park, the Trillium whatever. Yeah, that's the Trillium one. The newly renovated part. It's great. We did go and visit that once when it first opened as a family, we walked along.

But like my daughter and I actually were down at Exhibition Place because I wanted to show her the new sculpture garden that's open at Ontario Place. Those sculptures had been hidden, they're private, blah, private blah blah blah i wrote a column but then i said oh yeah i should bring my kids back to look at this so i brought my youngest daughter there and then while we're there it was like okay yeah fine did nice sculptures dad and you gotta see why don't we walk across the way here so we went over the pedestrian bridge yes and we explored the entire west island uh on foot and it was amazing, right?

It's an abandoned amusement park. My daughter was in heaven. She's like 11. And so it's just perfect for her to run through the old areas of the wilderness adventure ride and climb up into the old ride operator's booth where people have graffitied it up and used it as a garbage dump. But it's like you can still just climb up and around this stuff onto these things. And what I noticed is obviously it doesn't scale up.

You're not going to charge admission and, hey, kids, jump around the old abandoned, falling apart. But it's already a beautiful park down there. It needs to be spruced up a little bit. It needs some TLC. It needs some attractions. Yes. What I noticed when I've traveled around too is like,

you think of great city parks elsewhere, like waterfront parks, and like you look at the Chicago waterfront that Doug Ford loves so much, or you just like look at Central Park or Balboa Park in San Francisco. And like what you see is like they have attractions like museums, art galleries, big water features or sculptures like public art, right? They have attractions like sometimes they get programmed.

And you have things like horse-drawn carriages or whatever, like a carousel in there, right? You don't have like giant enclosed horse-drawn carriages or whatever, like a carousel in there, right? You don't have like giant enclosed indoor private for-profit water park taking up the entire spot, right? Like it's like, like I have taken my kids to Great Wolf Lodge. I got to say I'm not much of a spa guy.

Like I don't spend a lot of time with a mud mask on in the sauna and then wading out into the but but i could see taking my kids to ride the water slides and stuff right like but i don't understand why you would do that there yeah do it somewhere else not at uh ontario place the waterfront we we only have like the thing is is like we don't have very much waterfront land. And they're not making more.

And most of it is either developed or is under development. You know, the port lands is there. There's a plan for that and all of that. Like, but, you know, if we give this away, if we sell it, it's gone. And so, if it was free. Yeah. It's gone. And so if it was free,

now I have been unable to get the province to answer my questions about how much the province would make on this deal. It seems possible they're not making anything, as weird as that sounds, right? They, Thurm, the company that proposes the water, and like, I gotta say, like I have nothing in principle against this company, right? I just, I don't blame them for bidding on this.

I don't blame them for wanting to build the spas. That's what the company does. Right. I just like really don't think this is the spot for it. And I think Ontario and the city of Toronto will be making a huge, like, like a huge mistake that's very difficult to undo. Yes.

Like for generations, we might regret this. Right. If they put this here, right? Give them a spot up in Vaughan Mills or something, right? Right. That's where these kind of things, this kind of feature would be great out on the periphery, right? There are lots of places where it would be useful. But, you know, the province seems hell-bent on having this built.

The idea that they are, in addition to that, not just going to build it, but potentially spend like $300 or $400 or $500 million to build a new underground parking garage to serve this like at public expense right so like a half a billion dollars like it money the numbers the number of zeros it's easy for our brains to to to start thinking they're all the same thing right yeah but like remember when it was a scandal for rob ford Kyle Ray spent $12,000 on a retirement party or where we thought that the entire Shepard subway line

was a boondoggle because it cost $1 billion to just get a subway line? They're talking about a half a billion dollar parking garage here. Wow. And when people park there, they will be customers of a private business so the city's not the province is not getting it stinks the revenue from this and in addition to that sort of like

stinky giveaway and all of that we lose a public park that we had and was well-loved in Ontario, in Toronto before, could be well-loved again, I think, with a relatively little TLC. And you referenced that, okay, this Trillium Park,

the Bill Davis Trillium Park part, right? What I don't understand, so there's that, and then that connects to the Ontario place, because I did the bike ride today before you got here, and you do the thing.

I don't understand why we can't just do what we did there at the Trillium Park, just extend that like sort of like, you know, you can keep your Cinesphere

or whatever and just extend the Trillium Park part so to extend that. I guess. There's one more thing though is that when you drive that, when you walk that,

when you cycle that. Yeah. So you've got the Trillium Park part. Yep. And then over on the West Island there's the forest with the old wilderness and adventure line and then the beginning in the middle you can see both the uh cinesphere and stuff but also the live music venue there the echo beach no well you got the budweiser stage sure but then there's like what they call echo beach there yeah is like a vast expanse of concrete if you're going to build a new indoor right water park facility that water slides used to be there the tower is still there

if you're going to enclose part of it like instead of raising a forest on the west island why wouldn't you take the giant parking lot and put the new building there? If, at the very least, I don't think the waterfront is a place for this. But, I mean, it's a park. I think there's just so much wrong with this. Yeah. So like,

just keep that park a park, right? It's a public park. Yeah, it's ours. And the whole thing's infuriated me now. So I am going to play some Lois of the Low and say goodbye to you.

But we did mention, and maybe one sentence on this my kids had swimming lessons this past summer that were canceled you know why these swimming lessons these are toronto city lessons you know why they were canceled lack of staff labor shortage nobody right so that happened which i'm like was shocking to me that oh we you know lack of people to teach the swimming lessons to my kids at the city thing. Meanwhile, I was reading the other day that John Tory proposes, what, $48.3 million budget increase for Toronto police.

Like, is it just me, this guy, just this idiot down here in southwest Toronto? Like, I don't understand why we, if we have a labor shortage for swimming lessons, maybe we pay a little more to get people to teach our children how to swim in the city. And then those kids are engaged in positive activities

that keep them out of trouble. And safe when they go to see Ontario Place and they play on those rocks there by the beach. By the way, Ben Rayner loves the beach there at Ontario Place and Ben Rayner, your former colleague, has a great piece in the Toronto Star today, by the way. Your great newspaper where people can read the rest of your great writings. But Ben Rayner, your former colleague, has a great piece in the Toronto Star today, by the way.

Your great newspaper where people can read the rest of your great writings. But Ben Rayner is my guest next week. Oh, that's going to be a fun one. Let the world know. Ben Rayner's desk was famous. Tell him the new office, there's a clean desk policy. You're not allowed to leave anything on a surface there.

I will tell them that. Ed Keenan, Toronto Star, that's where we. Ed Keenan, Toronto Star, that's where we read Ed Keenan. Keep on doing what you're doing, buddy. Thank you so much, Mike.

I actually do hope that you'll visit every quarter. Shout out, thanks to Wise Blot for booking me today. Maybe that's, Wise Blot, you could be my booker. That would be great

if somebody would schedule my guest and I just answer the door and I have a chat. I would love it. But thanks so much for this, buddy. This was great. even though I'm really like thoroughly depressed with my city right

now we didn't even talk about that shitty airport and it's reputation I'm so depressed I'm going to be moving to keep something in the reserve right and that brings us to the end of our 1180 second

show by the way we were live streaming and really quickly, will there be a second edition of Some Great Idea? Andrew Ward wants to know. I don't have anything in the works, but you never know. There may be some update on that

or a sequel. Who knows? Stay tuned, Andrew. Stay tuned. You can follow me on Twitter. I'm at Toronto Mike. Ed is at The Kenan Wire. Our friends at Great Lakes Brewery

are at Great Lakes Beer. Palma Pasta is at Palma Pasta. Recycle My Electronics are at EPRA underscore Canada. Re, re, Recycle My Electronics, I already said that, but Ridley Funeral Home

are at Ridley FH. There's a new episode of Life Undertaking with Brad Jones. We recorded it yesterday and I get to co-host that. It's great. Canna Cabana

or at canna cabana underscore. They won't be undersold on cannabis or cannabis accessories. And if you have any questions about real estate and how to get out of Toronto because it's going to the pits here,

Sammy Cohn can help you out. Write him, sammy.cohn at properlyhomes.ca or find him on Twitter at Sammy Cohn. Cohn is K-O-H-N. See you all. dot cone at properly homes dot ca or find him on twitter at sammy cone cone is k o h n see you all

checking this out see you all monday when my special guest is jim sheddon Well, I've been told that there's a sucker born every day But I wonder who Yeah, I wonder who Maybe the one who doesn't realize There's a thousand shades of gray Cause I know that's true, yes I do

I know it's true, yeah I know that's true, yes I do I know it's true, yeah I know it's true How about you? Oh, they're picking up trash and they're putting down roads And they're brokering stocks, the class struggle explodes And I'll play this guitar just the best that I can Maybe I'm not and maybe I am But who gives a damn

Because everything is coming up Rosy and gray Yeah, the wind is cold But the smell of snow warms me today And your smile is fine, and it's just like mine And it won't go away, cause everything is rosy and green Well, I've kissed you in France, and I've kissed you in Spain And I've kissed you in France and I've kissed you in Spain. And I've kissed you in places I better not name.

And I've seen the sun go down on Chaclacour. But I like it much better going down on you. Yeah, you know that's true because everything is coming up rosy and green. Yeah, the wind is cold, but the smell of snow warms us today. And your smile is rosy and Everything is rosy and gray