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Nov 12,2006 - Nov 19,2006 |
Transit a key in many Italian wards
From St. Clair to North York, transportation a common concern
By Alan Patarga
There are so many challenges, and so few of them clear cut, where Italian-Canadian candidates (whether incumbents or challengers) will vie for a City Council seat.
With the passing of time, the Italian-Canadian community has grown steadily more fragmented, yet there are areas that continue to be beacons - even for people who don't live there any longer - and that still elicit emotion and interest. Many if not all also share a common denominator: transit, a key issue of this campaign. Facets of this issue include the St. Clair Right-of-Way, i.e. the controversy over preferential streetcar pathways, as well as the extension of the Spadina Line of the subway, which concerns most of the neighbourhoods where Italians concentrate and should eventually cross Steeles Ave. into Vaughan.
COLLEGE
Once upon a time there was College Street; now there is perhaps a little less of it, because what was the heart of Toronto's Italian community has become an area crowded with Italian restaurants (some authentic, some less so) and other locales, a kind of happy island that has experienced no great upheavals in the past few years. Such peace overlaps with the 'reign' of Deputy Mayor Joe Pantalone (Ward 19 - Trinity-Spadina), who's been representing this area for over two decades. The recent renaissance, which turned Little Italy into a very cool zone, has further contributed to defuse potential challenges, and Pantalone should coast to re-election without sweating, in this Italian- and Portuguese-speaking area running from Dovercourt to Bathurst and from the Lakeshore to Dupont.
ST. CLAIR
The opposite goes for the other historic Italian centre: dealing with an almost constant decline, despite its continuing role as a focus of the Italian-Canadian community (as the huge spontaneous party for Italy's World Cup victory clearly demonstrated), Corso Italia is a battlefield, where at present the hottest - but far from the only - issue is the TTC ROW. The steady influx of Portuguese-Canadians has finally eroded the prevalence of the Italian-Canadian community, and for the past few years the local councillor has been Cesar Palacio (Ward 17 - Davenport, Dupont to Eglinton and Dufferin to Caledonia), and one of his main challengers, Alejandra Bravo (who came in second three years ago), despite bearing an Italian-sounding last name, was born in Chile. Her electoral signs (coloured white, red and green) raised the ire of candidates boasting Italian roots, such as businessman Fred Dominelli (regarded as very close to Pantalone and to Toronto COMITES chair Gino Cucchi) and Cinzia Scalabrini, a former restaurateur from Lombardy who runs on her opposition to the Right-of-Way and to any form of enmeshments between public and private interests. In neighbouring Ward 18 (Davenport), incumbent Adam Giambrone, who served as Federal President of the New Democratic Party of Canada from 2001 to September 2006, runs for re-election. His ward runs along Dufferin from Queen Street West to Dupont.
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