Toronto Public Library administrators are endangering city libraries. If perpetuated, the multi-year anti-intellectual eruption of arbitrary branch closures will compromise public information, discourse and debate, and political activism.

I became acutely aware of library branch closures in my activity as an independent scholar and freelance environment writer.

Researching my ACTivist articles on environment & public health and Aboriginal justice, I routinely consult hardback reference books on Canadian history, geography and politics. In my preferred paperprint milieu, I seek especially to exploit Canadian Encyclopedia and Encyclopedia Brittanica.

The Dictionary of Canadian Biography (DCB) remarkably well identifies bands of antagonistic British and French merchant-explorers in the north, which I studied for my ACTivist articles: Why Conawapa?”, 11 March 2007, and “Conawapa Hydropower Construction Desecrates First Nation Cemetery”, 22 June 2007.

DCB details the despoliation of First Nations and their culture by the Hudson’s Bay Company and its agents in present-day northern Manitoba, including “inland-explorer” Anthony Henday and sea-captain Zachariah Gillam.

"Construction Desecrates" noted that marauder Gillam helped lead the Company’s exploration of James Bay and its tidewater estuaries in bitter conflict with French fleets.

Only from such detailed library compendia can one assemble comprehensive accounts of the colonization which dispossessed boreal, subarctic indigenous peoples. The federally-supported provincial electric utility, driven by metropolitan Canadian and cross-border energy consumers, then imposed massive hydropower schemes on traditional communities and their lands. Manitoba Hydro is now developing a generation & transmission-line project for electricity exports, valued above $6.1 billion, tendentiously termed "Conawapa."

Utility line crews clear brush for Conawapa around the Nelson River town of Gillam.

DCB Volume Three 1741 to 1770 explained that Englishman Anthony Henday was "outlawed as a smuggler in 1748."

My analysis of Winnipeg’s problematic name "Conawapa" for its ambitious megahydroelectric scheme quotes DCB entries on Henday, who compelled or cajoled the services of an Aboriginal guide named Conawapa for Hudson’s Bay Company’s pioneering 1754 "inland exploration" from York Factory (southeast of present-day Churchill).

"Why Conawapa?" recounts: "The Hudson’s Bay Archives disclose that Hudson’s Bay Company in May 1754 sent Henday with 'a trusty home Indian' Conawapa to: Bring presents to ‘country Indians;’ get goods from them, and deliver these pelts to York Factory."

DCB alerted me to primary sources at the HBC archives held in Winnipeg by Government of Manitoba, from which I secured the above instructions to Henday.

HISTORIC LIBRARY SHUTTERED

I consulted Dictionary of Canadian Biography at TPL’s Runnymede branch, within walking distance of my home office. A 1988 Canada Post stamp memorializes Runnymede’s distinguished stone edifice. As far as I can determine, Runnymede’s hardback DCB holding is virtually unique among TPL branches.

Reader access to DCB was unfortunately curtailed by TPL’s 31 January 2004 - 8 June 2005 "closure renovation" of Runnymede.

The unpredictable 3-26 June 2006 "closure renovation" of TPL’s Parkdale branch interrupted my research in Canadian Encyclopedia Year 2000 Edition.

Among other applications, I consulted Canadian Encyclopedia for its frank treatment of Canada’s intervention in the Korean War. I referred to this 1950-1953 tragedy in my Dominion article on Canada’s nuclearization of South Korea.

I also rely on Canadian Encyclopedia’s survey article "Saskatchewan" for my Activist and Carbon Capture Journal research on mounting provincial tensions between the electro-nuclear lobby and rival carbon capture & sequestration (CCS) development. Saskatchewan leads globally in the major new, environmentally-promising CCS field.

REOPENING SPECTACLES

TPL’s April-June 2008 quarterly Whats On, lists four branches currently "closed for renovations": Bloor/Gladstone, Dufferin/St. Clair, S. Walter Stewart and Thorncliffe.

On May 29, following nearly two years’ shutdown, TPL ceremoniously reopened S. Walter Stewart, a circular "district library" serving the East York Civic Center community.

At the informal S. Walter Stewart festivities, I approached several senior TPL executives then available for conversation. I dialogued in the similar milieu at the gala February 4 Jane/Dundas "reopening." I will report on these interviews in a successor article, accompanied by my chronology of revealing anomalies in TPL’s Jane/Dundas and Cliffcrest "renovations."

In sum, administrators confided that the recent outbreak of TPL branch "closure-renovations" urgently addresses their perceived necessity for timely physical renovation of chronically neglected, failing library facilities.

When I rebutted that readers endure much pain to achieve this gain, leading managers recommended "go downtown" to the Toronto Research Library for my research needs.

"Go to the Research Library" is routine management parlance at neighborhood branches lacking bibliographic control of their holdings and inter-branch borrowing knowledge.

Library administrators insist that reference books TPL holds electronically are deliberately short in paper print.

TPL executives believe that "open house" meetings at branches they designate for "closure-renovation" enable the reader community to influence command and control planning for branch shutdowns.

Disquieted by library attitudes, NOW Toronto quoted TPL board chair Kathy Gallagher Ross: "It’s a population service and so much more than getting a book. We’re talking about the gap between the rich and the poor, and that gap is tied to information." ("On the wrong page: If youth crime is so feared, why isn’t closing libraries a safety issue?" - 23 August 2007)

NOW’s municipal-political scribe Mike Smith needled: "Even the hippest bookseller can’t match the library, whose mandate is not that of the tastemaker but of the mind-expander, to stock not things that will sell, but materials of value where they are needed."

According to Smith, New South Wales, harboring Sydney and Canberra, defines libraries as "social capital and safe places to go" in Australia’s most populous state.

Jane/Dundas serves thousands of workingclass and Aboriginal-origin youth from buildings like the Jane/Woolner towers, including 190 Woolner Ave., and rent-geared-to-income housing at 3725 Dundas Street West.

Youth & families, and researchers suffered months earlier, when TPL shuttered nearby Runnymede.

TPL’s branch closure-renovations recall some lyrics from the song "Bulls on Parade" by the band "Rage Against the Machine":

Weapons not food, not homes, not shoes
Not need, just feed the war cannibal animal
I walk tha corner to tha rubble that used to be a library
Line up to tha mind cemetery now
What we don’t know keeps tha contracts alive an movin’
They don’t gotta burn tha books they just remove ‘em
While arms warehouses fill as quick as tha cells
Rally round tha family, pockets full of shells.

Stephen Salaff is a Toronto-based freelance writer and independent scholar. Salaff holds a PhD degree in mathematics from a major North American university, and taught mathematics in North America and Asia. He recently published "Saskatchewan moves from carbon capture to nuclear" in Carbon Capture Journal.

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