My wife’s parents immigrated from abroad to Parkdale 60 years ago to raise a young family. I immigrated here from an impoverished region of Canada 20 years ago. My wife and I have been raising a young family here for 20 years, before gentrification began. We have jobs, pay taxes, fix up our apartments, save up for houses and play by the rules.

Parkdale was not then, nor is now, a neighbourhood “zoned” for addicts and the economy that supports addiction and criminality. We have worked with our community to steadily make the neighbourhood better for families and less prone to abuse by drug dealers, prostitutes and addicts.

We have had to deal with addicts who break into our homes and cars; with hookers having sex and addicts doing drugs in our back lanes and parkettes – the same places where our children are supposed to play. We have stemmed the tide of this kind of abuse of our civil and property rights and we don’t need a self-appointed do-gooder like Gord Perks telling us that addicts have rights that supersede ours or that we have to “accommodate” the criminal economy.

We elect representatives, not dictators. Perks’ mentality is testament to a dictator’s mindset: repeatedly saying “If I let…..” We welcome businesses and services which contrast with the kind of addict/dealer bars like Sun Fa, etc. There is no shortage of “essentials” shops along Queen St. Perks thinks he gets to decide everything without consulting the community – he snuck in a methadone clinic in a way that precluded letting the community hear about what was proposed and give feedback. He is doing the same thing with this ban…he thinks he gets to decide each and every business. Perks is a professional do-gooder who milks public funds to impose his self-righteous morality on an otherwise free thinking self-regulating civitas. He is not from this neighbourhood, he doesn’t understand this neighbourhood, he has no family roots in this neighbourhood, and he has no economic stake in this neighbourhood like those of us who own homes and businesses here. I respect all points of view on proper zoning but I don’t respect sneaky self-righteousness tactics of parachute preachers like Perks.

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The interim bylaw does not allow for a bake shop. So my dear you will have to go to Yummies for pastries or the newly open Hot Oven Bakery on Ronces instead of Queen St. in Parkdale.

By the way folks this Interim can be extended for another year according to the city planner.

For us enlightened Parkkdalians we need to organize an Appeal to the OMB immediately to stop this altruistic nonsense done by Chairman Perks.

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I don’t have an issue giving the small restaurants or little pub houses liquor licenses but I think the laws should be changed to make them non-transferable with the building/business. Here are some ideas for new licensing rules you purchase the building/lease :

- If you change the business name/interior, you must reapply.
- If your business model moves away from the original restaurant description towards a bar model, you must reapply.
- If you are a bar, depending on the residential density, you must reapply every X years or must reapply if you receive X complaints over X period of time.

If Perks wants to do something… why not focus on better rules that protect the ward from abusers versus punishing everyone.

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I sit writing this in Little Portugal, a nation on the border of Parkdale. Little Portugal used to be Ukrainian before it was Portuguese, you can see the vestiges in the old churches. It was known as Parkdale then. Now, the old Portuguese are dying off and their progeny are selling high-priced inheritances to young professional families and moving to Mississauga. Little Portugal is rebranding itself as West Queen West, Dundas West, Beaconsfield Village and Ossington.

Neighbourhoods changes, my friends.

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You completely missed the point of this article, which was to point out that the ban on new liquor licences negatively affects even those that it is aiming to ‘protect.”

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What I think this article is responding to is the growing trend among these elected officials to vilify nightlife as the cause of all social ills in the city. This is utterly ludicrous. And I have lived in the club district for seven years, so I think I can speak to what it’s like to live in an area with lots of nightlife. I moved there because I wanted the nightlife. And ever since, Vaughan has ensured that he does everything in his power to shut it down. Why are we not allowed to have bars in this city? Paternalism. The idea that drinking = bad. I UNDERSTAND that the issue here is also gentrification and rising rents. But I do not think a ban on granting new liquor licences will ever solve that problem. It’s a cheap solution designed to shut up the nimbys who want their neighbourhood to be more quiet. In my opinion, we should let neighbourhoods change naturally while trying to implement things like rent control so that those who’ve lived there for awhile aren’t forced out for financial reasons. If they don’t like the new bars, though, maybe it’s time they accepted that downtown is downtown – it’s going to be loud sometimes.

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