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LED astray: signs of excess

The best thing about fighting billboards is that it’s possible to rack up specific victories with measurable, tangible impacts. You get an illegal sign taken down or prevent a new one from going up, you see the direct effects of your efforts. It’s a rewarding pursuit.

The worst thing about fighting billboards is that it never stops – the march of billboards, that is. You can relinquish the battle, but the damn things keep coming.

As long as there are people whose full-time jobs involve finding new ways to expand and intensify their company’s billboard portfolio, the creep of outdoor advertising will proceed, the fingerprints of late capitalism left across the city.

In 2009, however, we thought we had slowed it down. I was a campaigner with the Toronto Public Space Committee (TPSC) – one of several groups that spent years pushing for a comprehensive new bylaw to tighten the city’s control of an industry that had spent over a decade outmanoeuvring it. Corporations that showed so much contempt for Toronto by erecting illegal signs – consistently, persistently and deliberately flouting the rules – hadn’t earned the privilege of defining large parts of our cityscape.

With the new bylaw, the city was finally able to pause the installation of new signs and the conversion of old signs to newer technologies. But just four years later, City Hall is already conceding to industry pressure to ease vital constraints on the brightest, most imposing signs of all.

A series of public meetings held by city staff last week aroused a feeling of dismal déjà vu.


Variances are permissions to deviate from a bylaw. They are only supposed to be requested when a particular planning or building application complies with the general spirit but not the specific letter of the law.

In the years after amalgamation, however, sign variance applications would more often than not get rubber-stamped regardless of the degree to which they conformed to the relevant rules. Complicating things further, each of the former municipalities had its own sign bylaw that remained in effect getting them harmonized was simply not a priority for council.

Month after month, members of the TPSC’s Billboard Battalion would show up at community council meetings to depute on variance applications, urging councillors to reject those without merit. Eventually, the Toronto and East York Community Council began examining billboard requests more critically. The North York Community Council followed suit.

But it would nearly always come down to the preferences, values or other interests of the local councillor. It was easier, for example, to erect a billboard on the west side of Bathurst downtown than on the east side, because then-councillor Joe Pantalone was more broadly sympathetic to signs than Olivia Chow or Adam Vaughan.

The variance process resulted in arbitrary standards and exhausted activists who wished we could achieve some type of finality.

Repairing this process was one of the objectives of the new harmonized sign bylaw adopted by council in late 2009, after two years of input from activists, councillors and others. (As with any industry opposing new regulations, the billboard companies maintained that they were never adequately consulted.)

Variance requests would be adjudicated by a new citizen panel, free from political interference. And certain things, like video billboards, would not be allowed to take advantage of the variance process at all.

The new bylaw ended up working as it was supposed to in this regard, and requests for sign variances slowed to a trickle. The Sign Variance Committee, with its rigid application of defined criteria, is harder to get around than council had been.

But the new rules include a loophole: instead of variances, companies can seek exemptions for individual signs by applying for site-specific amendments to the bylaw itself. These get heard by city council through the Planning and Growth Management Committee and are subject to the same influences as before.


Among the other significant but tenuous successes of the bylaw was the throttling of applications for new video billboards.

There is nothing the industry would love more than to replace its entire current stock of paper/glue/wood signs with high-definition LED screens that can cycle through different ads every few seconds. The companies would save on materials and labour and greatly increase the number and visibility of the spaces they can sell.

Digital signs are beacons that can be seen from kilometres away, and the flipping of one ad to the next draws the eyes of motorists in a way that traditional billboards don’t the consequences for surrounding areas are severe.

Despite lobbyist efforts to have permission for such signs incorporated into the bylaw, council opted to stick with staff’s recommendation that they be limited to the Yonge-Dundas area and the stretch of the Gardiner adjacent to Exhibition Place.

But by spring 2012, Sign Bylaw Unit staff were receiving so many applications for amendments to permit these signs that they asked council to direct them to conduct a comprehensive review of the technology and its attendant implications.

The city rehired the same consultant who’d developed the original framework for the bylaw and set out on a series of consultations to gauge the appetite for a revision of the rules.

Yet rather than recommend that the protocol for requesting bylaw amendments be tightened, the consultant is now proposing that the restrictions on electronic signs be relaxed [pdf]. Staff are in the process of testing public opinion and reviewing studies on these matters in order to make their own set of recommendations to council.

The industry’s tenacity has paid off the outdoor advertisers have convinced the city to restage a key battle that they lost just four years ago. And this time, the conditions are more favourable: the 2010-14 city council is more amenable to such schemes than the prior one, and the public space movement that previously fended off the industry has allowed itself to fall apart in the absence of any urgent need.

And so on the evening of Wednesday, September 25, a handful of my former TPSC colleagues and I found ourselves back in the council chambers at City Hall for one of the public consultations on the latest proposed rules.

I recognized half the attendees as billboard industry representatives and lobbyists, though I’d forgotten a lot of their names. “Oh god,” I thought. “You guys again.”

I’m sure they were thinking the same thing.

jonathang@nowtoronto.com | @goldsbie

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