[VIDEO] The streets of Toronto, as seen by drone

CBC Toronto shared the below video at their Instagram account.

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Here's what the streets of Toronto look like after public health officials asked people to practice social distancing and stay home during the COVID-19 pandemic. • • • 🎥: Sue Reid/CBC #cbctoronto #cbcto #covid19 #coronavirus #toronto #selfisolate #socialdistancing #stateofemergency

A post shared by CBC Toronto (@cbctoronto) on Mar 25, 2020 at 5:30pm PDT

[URBAN NOTE] Ten Montréal links

• The Map Room Blog links to some old maps of Montréal.
• Major English-language newspapers in Montréal, including the Montreal Gazette, are no longer being distributed to Québec City clients. CBC reports.
• Radio-Canada employees’ union is concerned over cost overruns in the construction of a new headquarters for the French-language chain. CTV NEws reports.
• La Presse notes how the to-be-demolished Champlain Bridge is a home for, among others, falcons.
• The Bibliothèque Saint-Sulpice, after the latest delay, will have been closed for nearly two decades. La Presse reports.
• The Montreal Children’s Library is celebrating its 90th anniversary with a fundraiser. CBC reports.
• CBC Montreal looks at how, even without a stadium, legendary mayor Jean Drapeau brought major league baseball to his city.
• The anti-gentrification University of the Streets group has some interesting ideas. CBC reports.
• The city government of Montréal is looking into the issue of the high retail vacancy rates in parts of the city. CBC reports.
• At CBC Montreal, Ontario-born Jessica Brown writes about her struggles with employment in her adopted city.

[NEWS] Five Canadian politics links: Ontario, western Canada, the North

• iPolitics notes that Ontario may come out ahead with a federal carbon tax, here.
• Last month’s essay of Stephen Maher at MacLean’s suggesting the Doug Ford government’s approach to energy and the carbon tax will cost Ontario more than it might save looks positively prescient.
• I agree entirely with the argument of Karl Nerenberg at Rabble.ca that CBC should cover the municipal elections in Ontario: Local democracy matters, too.
• Global News reports that a recent Ipsos poll suggests western Canadians tend to identify more closely with their province than with their wider country. (Is this not the case generally in Canada, I wonder?)
• The Canadian program aiming to make food affordable in the north is, as minister Dominic Leblanc admits, in desperate need of reform. CBC reports.

[PHOTO] Five photos from the Ivan Harris Gallery, Canadian Broadcasting Centre, Toronto (#cbc)

The Canadian Broadcasting Centre‘s Ivan Harris Gallery is hidden away from the CBC Museum, behind the escalator leading to the Centre’s food court. My attention was caught by the vintage technology on display, by the RCA TK-76 A camera that enabled mobile news gathering in the late 1970s, or the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 that could transmit as many as ten pages of text (!) from the field.

[PHOTO] Barbara Frum Atrium, ready for filming

[PHOTO] Nine photos from the CBC Museum, Toronto (#cbc)

The CBC Museum is a free space inside the CBC headquarters in downtown Toronto on Front Street. The small space is full of artifacts from CBC’s technological past and from more recent children’s television programs like Mr. Dressup and The Friendly Giant. My attention, naturally, was focused on the latter.

[URBAN NOTE] “Montreal’s new CBC headquarters could help right an old wrong”

The Globe and Mail‘s Robert Everett-Green writes about exciting prospects for the new CBC headquarters in Montréal.

Incredible as it may seem, there was a time in recent memory when cutting-edge urban planning could include replacing a bustling residential neighbourhood with parking lots. If the CBC and two private developers have their way, a notorious result of that kind of raze-and-pave mentality in Montreal’s east end may be partly reversed.

The public broadcaster has accepted two purchase-and-development offers for its large and desolate Maison Radio-Canada property, which was expropriated in the 1950s from a working-class community of 5,000 people. The deals are the first step in a plan to build a new headquarters for French-language broadcasting on the site’s eastern edge, and a 280,000-square-metre mixed-use development on the rest of what used to be the old francophone neighbourhood of Faubourg à m’lasse.

“We’re definitely going to try to make up for what was done,” says Vincent Chiara, whose Groupe Mach plans to build about 20 silvery buildings of varying heights on the western portion of the site, including condos, social housing and retail and office space. Chiara also said he would restore some of the road network that criss-crossed the vanished Faubourg, and convert the 24-storey Radio-Canada tower into loft-type offices.

The new broadcast centre would be built by a consortium led by Montreal-based Broccolini, with Béïque Legault Thuot Architectes of Montreal and Quadrangle, a Toronto design firm that developed CHUM/MuchMusic’s pioneering broadcast spaces. Computer-generated illustrations and a video of the concept show a luminous, mainly glass-walled complex of buildings linked by a four-storey atrium. Elevated walkways will pass through the wooden-beamed atrium, which will be visible from offices and multiplatform studios, and will have the same versatility as the atrium at the CBC’s English-language HQ in Toronto. The aim, CBC president and chief executive officer Hubert T. Lacroix says, is to create a more compact, transparent and publicly accessible HQ than the old tower, where 80 per cent of the usable space was underground.

[PHOTO] CBC cool in Leslieville

The T-shirt with the classic CBC logo on the mannequin in the front window of a Leslieville clothing store tries to evokes a certain cool, successfully I think.

[LINK] “CBC/Radio Canada asks for $400M in increased government funding to go ad-free”

I really approve of this CBC proposal, described at the CBC itself. Why not establish Canada’s national broadcaster as financially independent?

CBC/Radio Canada has submitted a position paper to the federal government proposing the public broadcaster move to an ad-free model, similar to the one used to pay for the BBC in the United Kingdom, at a cost of about $400 million in additional funding.

“We are at a critical juncture in our evolution, continuing to operate under a business model and cultural policy framework that is profoundly broken,” said the CBC’s document, released on Monday afternoon. “At the same time, other nations are moving their cultural agendas forward successfully — and reaping the benefits of strong, stable, well-funded public broadcasters.”

The additional money CBC is asking for would largely be “replacement funding” if the media organization eliminates advertising. The proposal requests $318 million to replace advertising revenue: $253 million in lost ad sales plus $105 million to “produce and procure additional Canadian content” to fill the programming gaps in their absence. CBC is also asking for $100 million in “additional funding of new investments to face consumer and technology disruption.”

However, the proposal notes that removing ads will also result in savings of $40 million in the cost of selling advertising.

Total government funding for CBC would equal an investment of $46 per Canadian every year — up from the current $34 per Canadian it currently receives, the document says.

Two-thirds of the ad revenue given up by the CBC, the proposal argues, “would migrate to other Canadian media, including private TV and digital, for a net gain to them of $158M.”

[LINK] “Conservative MP Kellie Leitch calls for CBC to be dismantled”

The Toronto Star‘s Hina Alam reports on Conservative leadership candidate Kellie Leitch’s call to take apart the CBC entirely, going one better on Maxine Bernier’s call to defund and reorganize the broadcaster.

Conservative leadership candidate Kellie Leitch is proposing to sell the CBC, saying she doesn’t believe the broadcaster should be “propped up by taxpayers.”

“What I’m proposing is that it either be subject to an asset sale or an IPO, whichever will salvage the best value for Canadians with the intention being we get the best value for money for taxpayers,” said Leitch (Simcoe-Grey) on Thursday.

The pledge was dismissed by the NDP as “ridiculous.”

“We’re back in the 1920s,” said MP Pierre Nantel (Longueuil-Saint-Hubert). “How about going back to Morse code?”

Leitch linked her proposal to another of the major policy items she has put forward — instituting a cap on government spending. This means that every department will have to play its part, she said.