LeasideLife issue 8_LeasideLifev1 12-06-18 11:32 AM Page 1
No. 8 • July 2012
Leaside Life
Our own Mr. Baseball is __honoured P-11
CYNDA FLEMING
Redway calls Parker a ‘mugrump’
We’re taking a holiday in August Leaside Life will skip publishing the summer issue at the end of July. We’ll be back at the end of August for our September issue. Meanwhile, we’ll be making some changes. As you might see from this issue, we’ve improved the quality of the paper we’re using. And we hope we’ll have a web site up by September. We’re working on it. Meanwhile, we hope you all have as good a summer as we’re hoping for ourselves.
UNDER ATTACK: Councillor John Parker, centre, listens as angry residents complain he’s not leading the charge against the proposed SmartCentre development on Wicksteed.
Angry residents yell in attacks on Parker The tone of the SmartCentre public meeting on June 11 was set when the first panel speaker, former East York mayor Alan Redway, called Councillor John Parker a mugrump. By the end of the meeting many of the 300 people in the audience were complaining loudly that Parker was insulting them and they were yelling at him. In his day, said Redway, a mugrump was a fence sitter, with his mug on one side and his rump on the other. “We need you, John, to lead the charge against this proposal” by SmartCentre for 147,000 square feet of retail shopping on Wicksteed at Laird, he said.
That was the common call throughout the three-hour meeting, organized by the Leaside Property Owners’ Association and Leaside Unite. “We don’t need him to tell us to let the planning process unfold as it naturally should,” said Redway. But Parker refused to agree with an attack approach. “You’ve got to focus on what exactly is in the application. We are bound by the Official Plan that applies to this site,” he said. The plan permits retail based on the affect on other businesses and traffic problems in nearby areas. Emotions ran high when Parker ANGRY, Page 6