Month: June 2024

Cottage Life

June 23:  A few days ago, worker mate and good friend Roy and I were working on a new deck at the back of the cottage.  An aluminum boat approached and the driver tossed an envelope on the dock in the manner of a guy delivering a daily newspaper. Sadly, it was not the news of the world which arrived, but rather promotions for local contractors and service providers and, most importantly for some, a magazine with the latest real estate listings in Muskoka.

There were two glossy magazines. The first carried ads for cottages currently for sale, and the second was all advertisements for contractors, home decor experts, and service providers ready to take your dull and boring cottage life to new heights.

There is no doubt about the importance of the cottage construction and maintenance sector to the local economy. Stats Canada tells us that the construction industry is the biggest employer in the municipality of Muskoka, employing 5,310 people in 2021. The retail-trade industry employed 4,615 people, while the accommodation and food services industry employed 2,295 people.  Cottagers spend a lot of money on maintaining and improving their summer residence – believe me, I know. What amazes me is the lengths people will go to “get away from it all” by creating monstrous “McMansions” for summer homes that bear absolutely no relationship to cottaging as I know it.

Case in point: this place featured on the cover of the real estate magazine. Four bedrooms and five baths, it features a lower-level recreation room complete with a home theatre, sauna, and gym, alongside an attached one-car garage. “The spacious kitchen is ideally set up for entertaining. The Muskoka room, a highlight with its wood-burning fireplace, opens onto a walkout barbecue deck. A golf cart pathway winds down to an impressive three-slip boathouse, which houses 2 bedrooms, an upper and lower bath, a kitchenette, and an inviting living area which leads out to a magnificent sundeck, offering a private space to enjoy the serene water views.” All yours for $10.5 million. And if you want more, there’s a neighbouring place for sale at $15.5 million.

I’m familiar with this property because it once housed a smaller cottage sitting alone at the top of the cliff right at the entrance to the Indian River leading into Port Carling. We saw it every time we went “to Port” and as a kid I often thought it to be a strange place for a cottage so high above the lake and with obvious problems accessing the dock for a swim. Apparently, these things are easily overcome with enough effort and money.

The property has been cleared of most of its mature trees, and the clifftop rock has been covered with acres of outdoor decking and the massive cottage. Where once there was a small cottage fitting in to the landscape, there is now a gigantic mansion visible for miles down the lake. What is being lost in that trade-off is what I believe to be the essence of cottaging itself.

Muskoka has been a place where the well-off come to spend the summer since the days when they arrived by steamboat with family and servants in tow. Perhaps the cottages of that era were every bit as ostentatious in their time as the modern cottages are in ours, but to me, a major difference seems to be that previous generations built large cottages to be comfortable for their vacation, whereas the current generation are building cottages to display their wealth and and make a statement about status. The proliferation of these monster homes diminishes the character of the lakes and destroys the very things people will claim they come here to enjoy: peace, tranquility and being in nature. It’s hard to see the sunset from the basement movie theatre….

The battle for the soul of Muskoka – Macleans.ca

For sale: 1086 PENNWOOD Road, Muskoka Lakes, Ontario P0B1J0 – 40587127 | REALTOR.ca

Bike Life

June 2:  I’m sure that many of us have had “close encounters” with bicycle couriers and delivery people who seem to believe that they have carte blanche to ride wherever they please on their way to drop off tonight’s dinner.  The following article by Shawn Micallef appeared in the Toronto Star. I think it nicely captures the issues around this relatively new phenomenon and expresses them much better than I could. I offer it for your consideration.

It reminded me of my first part-time job as a bicycle delivery guy for Tamblyn Drugs at the corner of Yonge and St. Clair. I started work in March at the age of 12. They provided a bicycle with an enormous carrier over the front wheel which I would fill with a cut-down paper towel box large enough to carry whatever needed to be delivered. This ranged from small packages of prescriptions to cases of pop which in those days were in glass bottles and weighed a ton. They were sufficiently heavy that in snow, they could unweight the back wheel leaving me with little or no traction.

We were given a cash float of $20 and ran a tab of what we delivered each night. It was not unusual to have $70 or $80 by the end of the night and it amazes me – looking back on that time – that I was  a 12 year old kid delivering narcotics alone on a bicycle (without lights or a lock) and carrying what was pretty close to a week’s working wages in cash. Different times for sure …..

Here’s Shawn:

Everyone’s talking about delivery people zooming around on e-bikes, riding and parking on sidewalks, blocking paths and overloading GO trains. If you listen to all the complaints, they’re a dangerous scourge. Maybe the worst.

Yet they are there because we want and demand they exist. Their annoying presence in the city has profoundly changed the civic landscape, but they’ve also shifted the moral topography too.

Tech people like to talk of “disruptions” — of the status quo and old economics. Think how ride-hailing apps shocked the taxi cab industry. Much disruption happens just out of view, or is easy to ignore in our peripheral vision, like the armies of precarious workers fulfilling our online orders that miraculously arrive days, hours or even minutes after being placed.

A line from “Steer Your Way,” a poem and song by Leonard Cohen released just before his 2016 death comes to mind: “As he died to make men holy, let us die to make things cheap.” Computers and apps have made things appear with a few clicks, as if humans aren’t the ones fulfilling all these orders, as if there isn’t a bigger cost.

The consequences are here, though. Delivery people are precarious, poorly paid workers impossible to ignore now, like during end-of-day scenes at Union Station. Delivery riders with their e-bikes line up for trains back to homes in relatively cheaper locations like Brampton. They overload passenger cars that already poorly accommodate just two permitted bikes. There have been cases of e-bike batteries catching fire, but they’re an expensive purchase for a poorly paid job. Is it any surprise low-cost, low-quality bikes proliferate? 

Do we ban them, punishing delivery people, or do we create train carriages just for bikes like they do in Denmark and other places?

The sidewalk situation is worse, where the hierarchy of road users starts with pedestrians, then cyclists and ends with motorists. The latter pose the greatest risk to life and limb, yet have the most protection. Each has to look out for the more vulnerable. That’s the deal, in theory. Pedestrians, the most vulnerable users of city streets, should travel without fear and have a clear path ahead.

I get annoyed at delivery people who ride on the sidewalks, even pointing to the road at times, feeling guilty because the road is dangerous. I hope over time they’ll become better riders. Some are new to it and don’t know the rules. However, I’ve heard stories of delivery people being assaulted for their sidewalk transgressions, indicating the situation is escalating and must be fixed.

Empathy is needed all around. They may be annoying but the job is hard, working in the rain, snow and whenever we’d rather stay at home. There are abusive customers, and now a public who seems to dislike their very sight.

Another way of looking at this is to hate the game, not the player. The game here is partly the companies who created this situation, paying so little that delivery folk need to rush and take shortcuts to maximize profit.

Should we punish the players, or require the companies properly train them, just as old school taxi, courier or trucking companies do, and also be responsible when rules are transgressed?

I say companies are only part of the game because everyone who has ever received a delivery by bike, which is an awful lot of people, are also “the game.” Without them — us — the companies would be out of business.

All of this makes arguments for and against cycling infrastructure different now. Putting aside the fact all members of society deserve to be safe, now everyone who has received a delivery in this manner is also morally implicated in how it got to their door. Even if they don’t ride a bike themselves, there’s now a personal connection to safe infrastructure.

As bike lanes extend into parts of Toronto that didn’t have them, familiar and tired old protests have started. In Etobicoke a group absurdly named “Balance On Bloor” is opposing, as if new safe infrastructure isn’t starting to finally add some balance. Amid other specious claims, they worry about the “deterioration of pedestrian experience.” One way to get cyclists off the sidewalk — a bad pedestrian experience — is to provide safe bike lanes.

Even local Liberal MP Yvan Baker devoted an entire newsletter against the lanes, demonstrating it isn’t just Doug Ford Conservatives who meddle in municipal affairs where they don’t belong. 

Before Baker lectures residents of Toronto about bike lanes, he should ask himself why his federal Liberal caucus isn’t championing Toronto transit funding. The only way to ease congestion is with fewer cars and getting people on bikes or transit. 

Another musical note comes to mind in all this: the 1987 album “Give me convenience OR give me death” by the punk band Dead Kennedys. Safe infrastructure for all helps prevent death and injury. Are those opposing it willing to give up the convenience, detaching themselves from personal moral culpability? Or are they OK with the risk others take for their convenience?

Shawn Micallef is a Toronto-based writer and a freelance contributing columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @shawnmicallef.