Toronto covid dystopia: unjabbed man turned away from green grocery market at Wychwood Barns

In this mid-December 2021 footage, a self-important City of Toronto clerk refuses an unjabbed man access to the weekly green grocery fair market at Wychwood Barns [0], mere blocks from where I once lived. Who knows, the poor man might even be an ex-neighbour!

As I know the place well, a few words are in order. Wychwood Barns used to be a garage for the St Clair streetcars of the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC). Since the TTC is owned and operated by the municipality, when the TTC decommissioned the Barns sometime around 1999, they escheated to the City. It is fair to say that the Barns are located in a very posh neighbourhood and instead of selling them to a property developer the City was urged by a left-leaning councillor (and ex-mayor John Sewell) and lots of citizen input to re-purpose them into an all-purpose event space. Fast-forward 20 years and the Barns now serve as a weekly green groceteria. It's a nice place to visit - put it on your bucket list.

The important thing to note is that the City of Toronto retains ownership of the property, and instead of contracting out the property management runs the management in-house. Which means Mayor John Tory has outsized influence over decisions. The staff enforce Council directives (more than, say, private condo concierges or the local convenience store cashier) and it is with this patch of thorns that our hero, call him P, was faced on his way to purchase a shaft of broccoli from a merchant, call him Q. Between P and Q sat a city clerk, call her R.

You might make a case that the broccoli transaction between P and Q was impaired by R, and it might well stand up in a court of law.

City clerks like this are often just meter counters, and I'm somewhat surprised that R restricted access to a citizen who was attempting to do business with another citizen. I mean, don't the citizens own the city? R certainly didn't facilitate the transaction. In fact, R interfered with the incipient transaction. You might go so far as to say a tort was committed, that of tortious interference [1].

Was R's behaviour justified? That all depends on the mood of a jury. Because jury trials are a feature of the common law that has yet to be expunged from the Superior Court of Ontario.

Notice that I didn't involve in my analysis the corporation of the City of Toronto, whose by-laws and regulations are well-known. At issue here is whether the clerk R did her job properly, and whether the measures that she enforced can supersede the common law that a merchant and a client be let to transact without any undue hindrance, even that of a recalcitrant landlord upon whose property they were about to deal.

I say no, and there's the rub. Some might say fortunately I no longer reside in the shithole province that has developed under Doug Ford's tenure. We may never know about the primary issue here: whether lawfare can convince a pawn to tread lightly in her duties as she conceives them to be. We are consciously attacking the pawn here, as a person of slender means she is likely to be overawed by courtroom procedure and may even consider it to be a nightmare. Moreover, she is likely to communicate this pain loudly to her fellow pawns and by this means we might rebalance the excesses plainly committed by the zealots in management.

As a bonus, once we strip away the pawns, the knights and bishops may become exposed to the identical lawfare, as the pawns might be convinced to take sick leave on the occasion P targets the Wychwood Barns again in search of more penalty money from an unwary R.

Does any of this make sense, and who wants to set up a gofundme page to explore this perceived weakness in the Schwabian rollout, internet friends? I'm eager to read your comments below: let me have your best verbal shot.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wychwood_Barns

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference