“Smells like Ikea,” I said when I got home.I was referring to my basement — I had just accepted delivery of a couch so cheap it was eerie — but I could have been talking about Mayor Rob Ford’s cost-cutting Toronto, as both depress me to my core. The city he is trying to downgrade and outsource reeks just like my Ektorp, bought for peanuts, self-assembled and built to disintegrate in a light rain.
I did not think it would come to this.
I have nothing against the Swedish cult, indeed, The Bickersons go to Ikea is our home movie. But when I was an impoverished student I dreamed of a time when I would enter an actual furniture store and buy a plausible finished couch, in-vitro as it were.
Ikea sells boxed couch pieces. You have to rig them yourself and when you finally sit on the thing, you stand up again suddenly, alarmed by the lack of give. If it hurts to sit on an Ektorp, you are too old for Ikea.
So why am I buying it? Because it costs next to nothing. The backs of Billy bookcases are now made of what can only be called fancy cardboard, which is why Ikea can boast that one of its classic items gets ever cheaper.
Now I was once so poor that my furniture was made out of actual cardboard. I got boxes at the liquor store and sewed burlap slipcovers for them in cheery colours. God, I was spunky. Stick a glass of wine on it and call it an end table, is what I used to think. But it isn’t really true.
We’ve been reading the KPMG study of how Toronto can cut costs Ikea-style. It was released, appropriately enough, in pieces over the last two weeks, presumably to terrify us so that we’ll be grateful when Ford hammers us with cuts that are only half as bad as those contained in KPMG’s report. Bang, close Riverdale Farm, bang, mow your own parks, bang, close the libraries.
Even KPMG did the study on the cheap, as other more prestigious consultants interviewed by the Star have pointed out. You get what you pay for.
Ford is trying to Ikea Toronto. We once aspired to greatness. Now we’ll settle for adequacy. Toronto’s great public library system is solid wood, not pulp mash covered with laminate, and people love it, the proof being that they actually use it.
Everyone can enter a Toronto library and read for free. Its 98 branches are packed with books, chairs and all the digital material you can use. You can online pre-order what you want, your children are hugged with books, you can educate yourself if our school system didn’t quite manage it. Think of it as home-schooling for single people.
Our libraries are an engine of civilization, places that offer hope to people even if they don’t have a lot of money. It’s a concept that the playwright Alan Bennett word-painted beautifully in the latest London Review of Books. Go to its website, www.lrb.co.uk, and read his reaction to Prime Minister David Cameron’s cutbacks that will take an axe to Britain’s public libraries.
Councillor Doug Ford recently sneered that Toronto’s libraries outnumber Tim Hortons in his ward (in fact it’s the opposite, by 7 to 3). It’s not just that Ford hates the concept, it’s that he hates local branches.
Here’s Bennett who grew up as I did in bookless places: “To a child living in (apartment buildings), say, where space is at a premium and peace and quiet not always easy to find, a library is a haven. But, saying that, a library needs to be handy and local; it shouldn’t require an expedition. Municipal authorities of all parties point to splendid new and scheduled central libraries as if this discharges them of their obligations. It doesn’t. For a child a library needs to be round the corner. And if we lose local libraries it is children who will suffer.”
When Margaret Atwood Thursday called out her 225,200 Twitter followers to resist library cuts, saying, “Toronto’s libraries are under threat of privatization,” so many people signed an online petition that the website crashed.
And Riverdale Farm? I go glassy-eyed remembering the enchantment my children found there. Kids have time to stand and stare, to pet the bristly/fluffy/gnarly fur and smell the wonderful peaty smell, to marvel at how a confident clueless lamb will trot around oblivious to its mother’s watchful eye. At Easter, the farm workers would hand over bunnies that had mysteriously laid small gold-wrapped eggs, oh the wonder of it.
You could weep to see children studying the real thing, instinctive animal love, in a world where they themselves might never encounter family love or even fresh milk. Riverdale Farm teaches nurturing and respect. You can try to flat-pack love or call it Expedit and sell it in bulk, but kids won’t buy it.
The farm and the library are the real thing, no shortcuts. Ford might win on garbage but we will win on books and chickens.
Origin
Source: Toronto Star
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