Chris Selley on a tempest-in-a-teapot that is convulsing Toronto’s Cabbagetown residents:
Houses in a typical Cabbagetown street in Toronto.
Photo by Alain Rouiller via Wikimedia Commons.
Every city has its Most Precious Citizens — that hyper-privileged group of over-comfortable supposed progressives who are too hopelessly tone-deaf to realize the rest of the city can’t stand them. MPCs can serve a valuable unifying purpose: Residents from all walks of life, who might otherwise struggle to share common experience, can bond in mutual appreciation of their ridiculousness.
Torontonians are truly blessed to have the Quintessential Cabbagetowners to play this role. These folks make the Ward’s Islanders look blue-collar. Riverdale might as well be a 1950s Welsh coal mining village. And the Quintessential Cabbagetowners’ most recent performance has been a classic: A businessman wants to open a daycare in a lovely corner house with storefront space. The MPCs have been freaking out in ways that have their reality-based neighbours hiding their heads between their knees.
Some claim a daycare is simply incompatible with Cabbagetown’s gorgeous 19th-century Victorian row houses. As a “de facto commercial operation,” one resident complained, it would represent “a slippery slope for this iconic neighbourhood” and “an outrage.”
“This is standard-issue capitalism run amok,” a local resident told the magazine Toronto Life. He’s a mining executive, which is absolutely perfect.
The most precious quailed at the thought of hearing children at play. “The idea of tolerating (it) is frankly ludicrous, and completely incongruent with this, or any other, residential corner in this city,” one couple wrote to the city.
More reasonable folks claim daycare in Cabbagetown is a fine idea, just “not on this particular street,” because it is “too narrow,” with “too many cars on it.” That describes all streets in Cabbagetown, though.
Toronto’s downtown neighbourhoods
