As the noon hour sun pressed down on the pavement, David Sharma walked in circles on the sidewalk outside Metro Hall. The 72-year-old looked more like an aristocrat than an ordinary citizen protesting the proposed closure of the Urban Affairs Library.
He was dressed in a dark blue suit with a white shirt and a patterned blue tie. His black Fila walking shoes hit the salt stained sidewalk as he followed the other, mostly unionized, protesters. He carried a blue shoulder pack over his white overcoat and wore a black fedora with a white and red feather. He donned a pair of sunglasses to protect his eyes from the harsh winter sunlight.
When Sharma was 20, he read a copy of Madame Curie which he said was a defining moment in his life. He realized that even though he’d never win the Nobel Prize, he could do something better with his life.
“Knowledge is power,” said Sharma, who was born in India. “If you close the library, you have cut off yourself from knowledge. So the library is very, very important in a competitive world. (Otherwise) you will become a second class citizen.”
As developers build more multi-residential condominiums in the downtown core and the population density rises, Sharma feels taxpayers need to get more involved in municipal politics.
“Democracy will never work when the majority of people don’t take part in it,” said Sharma.
It was the day before members of Toronto City Council would determine the fate of the Urban Affairs Library. If the Mayor and his supporters get their way, the library’s collection will be moved to the Toronto Reference Library that would save $100,000 this year and $629,000 in 2012.
The library contains more than 90,000 books and government documents, 300 current magazine titles and 195,000 microforms. Although located at Metro Hall, Urban Affairs is a collection of the Toronto Reference Library.
In 1911, Toronto City Council opened a Municipal Reference Branch at City Hall. It merged with Metro Toronto’s Corporate Library and moved to Metro Hall in 1992 and was renamed the Metro Urban Affairs Library. In 2007, it became a holds pick-up location too.
The frigid temperatures didn’t discourage more than 40 unionists and supporters from attending a noon hour rally Tuesday to stop the closure of the library, organized by the Toronto Public Library Workers Union (TPLWU) Local 4948 and closely monitored by no less than six security staff on the upper steps of Metro Hall.
Protesters walked around with signs dangling from their necks that said “CUPE Save Our Library” and “Toronto is not Wisconsin, Keep our Libraries Open”, yellow pamphlets in hand ready to distribute to passersby and people coming out of the building during their lunch hour. Others pinned buttons to their parkas that read “My Library, More than a Building.”
Blue and white flags that said “People Make Libraries Work – CUPE 4948″ flapped in the wind.
“Save Urban Affairs, save Urban Affairs,” they chanted. “No cuts to libraries.”
Shortly before noon, CUPE Ontario president Fred Hahn arrived in his white Ford Edge mid-size crossover SUV. Hahn inserted himself into the peaceful, yet spirited, group of protesters who kept themselves warm with Tim Horton’s hot chocolate.
A while later, Maureen O’Reilly, President of TPLWU Local 4948 introduced the speakers at Tuesday’s rally, including Toronto Public Library Board member Adam Chaleff-Freudenthaler.
“(He) has voted twice to beat down the Ford administration’s attempt to close the library,” said O’Reilly.
Chaleff-Freudenthaler pointed out that Toronto is in the midst of Freedom to Read Week.
“In Canada, we still have books censored, people who can’t use the internet freely and today we’re worried about whether people are even going to have a library to go to in this neighbourhood,” he said. “This neighbourhood needs a library. It’s not good enough to say that in three years time we’ll have one south of here. We need this library now.”
The City plans to open a library at Fort York Boulevard and Bathurst Street in 2014. In the meantime, neighbourhood residents will be forced to use the City Hall or St. Lawrence branch.
But the Urban Affairs Library is unique.
“This library serves the staff of our city and ensures that there is a great institutional memory for the planning documents that guide future decisions, the history of our neighbourhoods where researchers and students come to learn,” he said. “We can’t just sacrifice that for $100,000 this year.”
Chaleff-Freudenthaler reminded the crowd that the city charges the library “an obscene amount of rent” for the space and will be forced to find another source of revenue.
Several years ago, the city tried unsuccessfully to close down another branch. Then budget chief Tom Jakobek recommended closing down the City Hall library branch.
“The response from library users was amazing,” said John Cartwright, President of the Toronto and York Region Labour Council.
“Little old ladies from Rosedale got together with young students and people who represented the homeless to create a massive Toronto library users’ movement that put enough pressure on the Lastman regime to keep the library open.”
Cartwright said, “We don’t want to repeat that same kind of stupidity that those right wingers were wanting to bring to the library system.”
For the last two years, Edmund O’Connor has been using the Urban Affairs Library on a daily basis to pick up books, DVD’s and chat with his wife who works in Markham.
“To me I couldn’t imagine living without it,” said O’Connor.
But he might have to.
On Wednesday evening, the Toronto Sun reported that council rejected Councilor Gord Perks motion to increase property taxes by 0.15 per cent to generate enough revenue to “reverse bus route cutbacks, restore cuts to the Tenant Defence Fund, improve the city’s bedbug response and preserve the Urban Affairs library branch.”
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