TPSC Upset At The 215

I had a very long day yesterday.

After a full day at work starting at 9am, I hopped the train to downtown and walked over to 215 Spadina for one of the biggest and most raucous Toronto Public Space Committee meetings ever. The room was packed and as we paced ourselves through the agenda, one thing became clear early on: the philosophy document produced by the committee charged with it's creation was going to be a tough issue.

Let me just break in in here with a question/complaint: Why is it that people who choose not to have a hand in the creation of something often insist on wasting the time of those who did bother to do the work by nitpicking and suggesting blatantly bone-headed ideas to a room of 42 people? It's no secret that discussing something as delicate and difficult as a philosophy document is impossible to manage with such a large group and yet, despite being given ample opportunity to contribute in a more sensible fashion, these people choose the most inappropriate venue to voice their opinion and ask for "discussion"... It's insane, and might I say disrespectful to the people who did show up to do the legwork in the first place.

Getting back to the recap, about six different motions were proposed directed at this document, most of them focusing on the definition of "public space". Originally a short definition of "Public space is any space created with the expectation that it would be used by the public", suggestions ranged from changing it to "Public space is a personal definition...", to "Public space has been defined as 'x' by person 'y', as 'a' by person 'b' etc.", to striking the definition completely. It was about at this point that I yelled out over the din of "discussion": "Why didn't any of you people come to the meeting instead of wasting our time here?"

The only motions that passed were one to change "created" to "exists", and one to move the definition to the middle of the document, without a header, as part of "what makes a good public space" -- which is a fucking ass-backward thing to do... This is what you get when democracy is taken to the illogical extreme. People who know what they're talking about should make these decisions, not ill-informed, unqualified people who didn't even bother to come out to the initial work meetings.

Sigh. I guess I'll chalk this one up to experience in diplomacy or something.