WhatFinger


A crisis of unparalleled proportions

Torontonians are such wusses



There’s no other way to put it. This became readily apparent last week when Canada’s largest city suffered a crisis of unparalleled proportions. What happened in the city once known as Toronto the Good dwarfed other so-called crises such as the Asian tsunami, Hurricane Katrina and the current financial meltdown in the United States. Or at least that’s how it appeared to the city’s media. This catastrophe occurred when some electrical cables fell on the track of Toronto’s main north-south subway line.

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This mechanical failure took place last Thursday and caused much of the Yonge Street subway line to be closed. The closure happened around 6 pm during the evening rush and the line was not able to be fully operational until the next morning. Thousands of people, many them with feelings of helplessness as those who have ever been caught in a natural disaster can appreciate, emptied into the streets. Police had to be called to control the crowds who stood around lamenting about how they could not get home. The horror of it all! One 18-year-old who was “trapped” at Yonge and Dundas and lived in the Don Mills and Finch area was quoted by the Toronto Star as saying, “How are we going to get home?” Now this closure is not to be confused with a total shutdown of the entire public transit system that recently happened. TTC boss Bob Kinnear (actually he’s the union head but we’ll call him “boss” because he calls the shots) ordered his employees to walk out with virtually no notice to the public early on a Saturday morning. People, many of them young, stumbled out of bars and clubs with not enough money to take a cab and no other way to get home. Last Thursday, the entire system was up and running except for the downed subway line. At the risk of boring anyone who is unfamiliar with Toronto, the young man who was wailing to the Star could have simply taken the Dundas streetcar to the Broadview subway station, and then gone over to Pape Station where he could have caught the Don Mills bus. If he asked the driver nicely, the bus would have stopped at Finch. If he didn’t ask, it would have stopped there anyway. That is only one of the many ways that he and others like him could have gotten home instead of staying where they were, whining and bemoaning their fate. People were angry at the fact that there were hardly any shuttle buses coming and those that did arrive were too full to board. As the chair of the TTC, Adam Giambrone stated later, the TTC has buses in reserve, but not nearly enough to transport those riders who normally take the subway, especially during peak times. This was nothing more than common sense but it probably didn’t occur to a lot of those who were “stranded” along Yonge St. All people had to do was to take public transit east or west to find another north-south conveyance. And, of course the media didn’t help by reporting the subway closure as the crisis that it wasn’t. There are a couple of reasons why a lot of people panicked, viewing the closing of one north-south transit route, albeit the major one, as some sort of crisis. When something like this happens, the Toronto media, especially the 24-hour CP24, gives it continuous coverage making it seem to be worse than it is. And then there’s the guilt. People feel guilty that we in Toronto hardly ever face real crises such as tornados, hurricanes and tsunamis and having to face a “crisis”, even a manufactured one, makes a lot of people feel better. We also live in a nanny state where a lot of people simply leave decisions to government and are used to not having to make their own decisions. So when the municipal government’s one transit line went down, they were incapable of thinking for themselves and using alternate transit routes. They were waiting for the government to come and help them out. The pictures of the thousands of people standing at major intersections, seemingly frozen as to what to do is a sad commentary on present day society.


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Arthur Weinreb -- Bio and Archives

Arthur Weinreb is an author, columnist and Associate Editor of Canada Free Press. Arthur’s latest book, Ford Nation: Why hundreds of thousands of Torontonians supported their conservative crack-smoking mayor is available at Amazon. Racism and the Death of Trayvon Martin is also available at Smashwords. His work has appeared on Newsmax.com,  Drudge Report, Foxnews.com.

Older articles (2007) by Arthur Weinreb


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