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Shadow dancing

It’s strangely genteel at the Queen West Theatre Centre Monday night, September 13, when Active 18 hosts its all-candidates square-off.

Despite the fact that there’s a sizzler of a city council race here in Ward 18, the back-and-forth between seven contenders on traffic issues, bar concentration, development and planning is smart, friendly and mostly informed – and the tensions stay in the subtext.

There’s certainly no hurting for choice in a contest that includes former Ontario Green party leader Frank de Jong and the impressive Joe MacDonald, a long-time NDP campaign manager and corporate communications expert.

Nonetheless, the big show is really Kevin Beaulieu, Adam Giambrone’s exec assistant, versus Ana Bailão, a former aid to Liberal councillor (now MP) Mario Silva, who held the ward previously. In the 2003 election, she scored 40 per cent to Giambrone’s 52.

Still, the differences here under the theatre lights appear tonal despite Bailão’s swipes at Giambrone’s reign, and if you fiddle with your phone you could miss the subtle digs. Beaulieu says, “It’s fine to say you’re going to consult, but it’s a platitude unless you know who to consult.” Bailão retorts, “The community has not felt it was called upon to participate.”

On heritage buildings, there’s a gush of consensus: “It’s a question of what enriches a neighbourhood,” says Beaulieu. “Buildings with good bones preserve heritage.”

“The emotions in those buildings are expressed long after the people who built them are dead,” adds software developer Doug Carroll.

And most contenders praise Active 18 for scoring live/work spaces in the Queen West triangle condos, and lament that neighbourhoods enter the planning process too late to shape design. “It’s up to the councillor to bring these issues to the community,” Bailão says pointedly.

The oversupply of drinking establishments on Queen West generates further communion, and most concur with former June Callwood Centre president Hema Vyas that “whenever one kind of business outpaces the others, we lose our balance.”

Too many come into the area by car just to imbibe, suggests de Jong. “We need 200 Eloras in this city – communities of 20,000 each” that service people locally and aren’t clogged with out-of-area vehicles.

And MacDonald makes a thoughtful distinction between gentrification and revitalization. “Let’s let the villages-in-waiting emerge,” he says.

Only once do we get the frisson you’d expect between two ambitious front-runners – a one-speaking-over-the-other dispute about the city’s legal reach when it comes to development.

The fangs are surely sharp in this ward – but not tonight.

news@nowtoronto.com

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