Last Thursday I went to the public meeting at the Scarborough Civic Centre. I left that meeting feeling that the City is trying to push through a major change in public policy with as little public consultation as possible. In fact, the event in Scarborough didn't seem like a public meeting at all. It was more like a sales presentation. When Brenda Librecz was speaking, I felt like was at an Amway convention where everyone is expected to be enthusiastic about the new product line. The discussion afterwards was so tightly controlled that it was hard to say anything meaningful. I think you need to slow down and have more public meetings. These have to be real public meetings where members of the public can speak freely.

We've been told that Everybody Gets to Play will protect and expand free drop-in recreation and leisure activities. Right now we're in the middle of winter. For a lot of us recreation at this time of year means skating and hockey. The City of Toronto runs 49 outdoor artificial ice rinks. Skating and hockey at these rinks are free drop-in recreation and leisure activities. They are activities that the City should make as available as possible.

However, if this is the City’s approach to free drop-in programs, I think it needs some quick fixing. I've been visiting rinks across the City. I found out that in North York public rinks are not always open to the public. At one of those rinks, I waited for an hour for public skating hours to begin. During that hour this skating rink sat empty, because the gates were locked top keep the public out. The compressor that makes the ice works whether the rinks are open or not. At another North York rink, kids have to sneak in to play hockey when the rink is officially closed. The rink is sitting there empty. Why not open the gates and let the kids use it? At the rink I visited in Etobicoke, kids sneak in through a hole in the fence. Again, why is the gate locked in the first place? It doesn't make sense to keep them locked when there are people who want to skate.

In Etobicoke, the skating and hockey schedules posted on signs outside the rink are often completely wrong. There are major discrepancies between what is posted on the signs and what is printed in the Etobicoke skating guide. As I said, skating and hockey are free drop-in leisure activities. If your goal is to increase participation in the City's recreation programs, you could do that cheaply by making it easier for people to use the public rinks their taxes already pay for.

When I mentioned the outdoor rinks at the Scarborough user fee meeting, the facilitator said hockey was on the decline because of immigration. This doesn't make sense to me. My background is Ukrainian. My parents are immigrants, but that didn't stop me and my brothers from being hockey fanatics. Now my neighbourhood is largely Portuguese and if you go to the rink near my house you will see plenty of Portuguese kids playing hockey. And there are Tibetans, and Chinese, and Cubans. If you go skating at High Park or at Irving Chapley up in North York you will hear people speaking Russian. Go skating at City Hall or Harbourfront and you will see every culture in Toronto represented. This is a drop-in activity that lots of newcomers are attracted to, but somehow it doesn’t seem to be of great interest to Parks management. For quite a while now, my friends and I have made city management aware of the problems with the free drop-in programs at the outdoor rinks, but not very much has changed. North York still keeps its rinks empty and locked a great deal of the time

The situation I’ve described may be a sign of a larger problem that will affect the new plan which is being discussed tonight. We’re concerned that drop-in programs might be even more neglected under the new plan. That’s what we’d like to put on the list for discussion.