Join us for a Beaches—East York Councillor Candidates Town Hall meeting on September 24
Volume 47 No. 13
BEACHMETRO.COM
September 18, 2018
THE BALMY Beach Residents Association, Beach Metro News and Community Centre 55 are hosting a town hall meeting featuring candidates running for city council in the riding of Beaches—East York. The meeting will take place on Monday, September 24, 2018 at Kingston Road United Church, 975 Kingston Road at 7:30 p.m. All registered candidates running for councillor in the Beaches—East York area have been invited and will be given the opportunity to make a statement. Written questions from the audience will be
accepted. If you have a question for the candidates, you can submit it at the start of the evening, or you may send it in advance by email to editor@beachmetro. com. This is a free event that is open to the general public. With the possibility of new ward boundaries, and both of our area councillors retiring, this is your opportunity to hear the new voices that you can choose to be our voice at city hall. As of press time, election day is scheduled for Monday, October 22, 2018.
Beach resident Dora Attard collected thousands of bits and pieces of plastic garbage from along the lakeshore of the Beach for a six-month period before deciding something more needed to be done to draw attention to the problem. To increase awareness, Dora took the garbage she and her family had collected and created several art installations to display her findings. A sampling of the over 1,100 straws and hundreds of balloons, lighters, and ribbons that she picked up are shown here. She was also able to create an eight-foot-high water bottle-shaped sculpture using the 1,000 plastic water bottles that she had collected. See page 17.
PHOTO: SUSAN LEGGE
Local city councillor candidates riding out ward limbo By Nina Rafeek
WEEKS AWAY from municipal election on October 22, candidates for Beaches—East York city council are in ward-boundary limbo after a series of unprecedented judicial jigs and political pirouettes. The shake-up, which involved Ontario’s Superior Court, Queen’s Park and Toronto City Hall, was over the provincial government’s decision to reduce the number of wards and city councillors to 25. Initially, candidates for city council were running under the 47-ward model, which was to be implemented on December 1, 2018, when the new 2018-2022 term of city council begins.
All of that changed on July 30 when Premier Doug Ford introduced Bill 5, the Better Local Government Act, to reduce the size of city council from 47 to 25 councillors. Under the new act, the boundaries for Beaches—East York would change to match the provincial riding, morphing two wards into one. On August 14, 2018, Bill 5 was passed at Queen’s Park and the city set a new registration date for those interested in running for council under the 25-ward model. From a campaign perspective, this meant that candidates for city councillor, many of which had been organizing their campaigns since May, had two weeks to change their campaign strategy after the bill was passed. New faces entered the race, while others decided to drop out.
For some candidates, this meant printed literature had to be destroyed, revised and increased to match the new ward boundaries, and fast — with the revised boundaries, the number of constituents in Beaches—East York jumps from 54,265 to 109,465 according to Elections Ontario and City of Toronto statistics. Valerie Maltais, who registered early as a candidate, is running for Beaches—East York. Maltais explained that she had to act quickly to ramp up her outreach and fundraising efforts. “It can certainly be a disadvantage for people like me and for others who don’t have the affiliations and the funding to adapt,” said Maltais.
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