LILLEY: Bradford's real promise on Yonge-Dundas Square is to clean it up
· Toronto Sun
The good news in the announcement last week from Brad Bradford isn’t that he wants to change the name of Sankofa Square. It’s that if he is elected mayor of Toronto in October, he’ll work to clean the place up .
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If you haven’t been to Sankofa Square lately, the place most of us still call Yonge-Dundas Square, it’s a mess.
Rather than a place that hosts concerts, small festivals and gatherings, it’s a place for rampant public drug use, sleeping on benches or the ground, for people in a zombie-like state to wander and scare the tourists. The place that should be at the centre of communal life in Toronto is instead an example of everything that is wrong with the city.
“It’s dirty, it’s unsafe, there’s open drug use in the middle of the afternoon. Tourists avoid it. Parents grab their kids by the hand and move quickly through the space, or even worse, they avoid it altogether,” Bradford said last week.
Bradford rightly pointed out that Mayor Olivia Chow hasn’t taken steps to clean things up. She seems to be of the view that this is just how big cities operate, but it does have to be this way.
Permanent police presence in the square
Bradford is promising a police presence in the square and a standardized and scheduled clean-up of the area.
“First, we need to clean it up and make it safe for everybody, a published standard for cleaning and upkeep, so that the bar for Torontonians is clear, transparent, and we can hold the city to account,” Bradford said.
He also proposed a police substation in the square, similar to what New York City has in Times Square as well as treatment and services for the homeless people and drug addicts who populate the area now.
“A real outreach for mental health supports and housing for the folks who are in crisis, because Canada’s most prominent public square is not the place where people who need treatment and support should be abandoned and left to linger. They need to be directed to the proper facilities where they can get the help that they need,” Bradford said.
Chow is avoiding the real issue
When asked about Bradford’s plan last week, Mayor Chow’s office was dismissive and focused just on the idea that Bradford would change the name to Toronto Square from Sankofa Square. A statement sent by Chow’s office to various media outlets said that the mayor was “focused on actions that make Toronto more affordable and safer, not renaming things.”
Really?
It was Chow who pushed through the renaming of Yonge-Dundas Square to Sankofa Square based on the false allegation that Henry Dundas was a racist who supported slavery. None of that is true, and his name still graces one of the longest streets in the city, but we spent close to $1 million to rename the square due to her political bent.
Yonge-Dundas Square, like the rest of the city under Chow, is dirtier, it is less safe, but it does lecture you with regular land acknowledgements posted to the many screens located around the square.
Chow has offered no plan to clean up the square, or the city for that matter. She still clings to the idea that we should be handing out more crack and meth pipes, she backed the drug policies that helped take so many of our fellow citizens into the zombie-like state we so often see in the square.
“A city that’s not safe is a city that’s not free,” Bradford said. “We need to make this intersection safer and cleaner.”
The whole city needs to be made safer and cleaner. Brad Bradford sees that, he understands that, Olivia Chow simply wants to ignore what we all see on our city streets and at Yonge-Dundas Square.