My background wasn’t recreation and it wasn’t community development. It was economics and political science. There was a lot of community activism in the early seventies. It comes of that whole Saul Alinsky approach to community development, and there were a number of leaders in Toronto who did that very well. It was an attack on bureaucracy, it was an attack on institutions and government. The Department of Parks and Recreation was very conservative at the time, very insular, city-hall controlled. They sent me out to meet with the community and be kind of a front person. So I got hammered from the community and I’d come back here, and they’d say, “well you’ve got to hold the line here,” and I’d say, “wait a second, you can’t, this is not going to go well here.” So I was almost like a broker between some of the community wants and desires and a department that was fairly traditional, fairly conservative, and very controlling.

By 1980 – 81, the more left-of-city-council and some of the community activists were really determined to have the board of management become the norm. And so city council created a task force to review the neighbourhood social and recreational services of the city. This task force was to see if there were ways to remove some of that central control from City Hall and put it into communities. The intent of that was really an all-out attack on the department, to try to dismantle it as much as possible and have most of the community centres be run by boards of management. During that time there was also a movement of neighbourhood city halls, to decentralize city hall and put little mini-city halls into the neighbourhoods. This would have been in the late seventies. When Scadding Court developed – it was a very radical approach to a community centre—and they wanted an independent board of management, it was my job to pull that back. Similarly with the 519 Church Community Centre, it was the radical politicians of the day that we had some of our biggest fights with. But my job was to protect the department and to try to keep as much power and control within the department as possible….The Commissioner asked me to represent the department on the task force. And we hired a director for the task force who did a wonderful piece of work. Rather than weaken the department, rather than have it all devolve into boards of management, what the task force established was a process by which communities could have some choice as to how their community centres operated. And the task force required the department to establish advisory councils in every community centre within the year.