June 16, 2025: A five-year anniversary

On this warm June evening in 2025, the parks and streets and cafes and bars are filled with young people hanging out. It's hard to believe, now, that five years ago, on a summer-like long weekend in late May 2020, the CBC reported that there was a dangerous clumping of young people at a Toronto park, who should not have been gathering at all.

In May 2020, the CBC website ran this photo showing people's "unruly behaviour" in a city park

The CBC's piece was called Isolation fatigue: Why some are ignoring distancing rules as Toronto reopens. The sub-headline read "Enforcement officers have witnessed 'unruly behaviour' in parks, including Trinity Bellwoods."

The CBC's crime reporter wrote "police and enforcement officers issued 100 tickets between April 1 and May 21 to people not distancing specifically in parks. In the same period, 84 tickets were issued for gatherings of over five people.....[E]nforcement officers have cautioned more than 4,600 people for breaking physical distancing rules since the beginning of May."

But neither Public Health, nor the police, not parks enforcement staff, could persuade young people in city parks to stop hanging out with one another altogether.

Thank goodness.

A twenty-one year anniversary

Twenty-one years ago, on July 6, 2004, Parks and Recreation's radical restructuring Plan (described in last week's blog) was released, just after city hall had emptied out for the summer holidays.

It was called “Our Common Grounds,” and it was enthusiastic about Toronto’s ability to “market” itself to the world: “London, New York, Chicago, Tokyo, Seoul….These cities are Toronto’s new competitors."

The month before, the general manager of Parks and Rec had announced that she had hired journalist Elaine Dewar to “toughen up” the PFR restructuring proposal and get it ready to present to City Council. Dewar said she would put in some “wows” and “big asks” so that Council would have something to reach forward to.

The Plan said that there had to be many, many more programs to keep Toronto's young people occupied. Youth just hanging out with their friends was identified as one of the issues that Parks and Recreation was in charge of fixing.

If youth don’t get recreation programs from city staff to keep them active, Dewar wrote, society would soon have to pay “billions…. to take care of this inactive echo….It’s not in the common interest to let the future take care of itself. We have to turn the river of the city’s youth in a new direction. But first we have to understand where it’s flowing….We need to offer youth inclusion into something larger than themselves.”

The language evoked a military-style youth corps.

But then, as now, many young people were stubborn about letting city staff pull them into something larger than themselves, to help Toronto market itself better.

Thank goodness.