Based on the report from a few weeks back, it looks like much hasn't changed but it's fair to say that not all TCHC buildings/units are as dire as what W-5 profiled. Derek Ballantyne claims W-5 only wanted to profile the negatives, not the positives or the future of TCHC communities.
Since then Derek Ballantyne has jumped ship and landed over at Build Toronto.
Official's YouTube diatribe an insult
Apr 29, 2009 04:30 AM
Joe Fiorito
Derek Ballantyne has left his job as head of Toronto Community Housing and he has landed a similar position at Build Toronto.
Nice work if you can get it.
Did he jump or was he pushed, and did he grow tired of the withering scrutiny?
Don't know, don't care.
What I do know is that, shortly before he landed in executive clover, Ballantyne recorded a bit of self-serving effluvia on YouTube.
His homemade star turn was an executive response to a recent documentary aired by the CTV news program W-FIVE.
A bit of background:
You recall a couple of columns in this space about George Hallam, who lived and died in community housing at 200 Wellesley St. E.
He was known, with grim irony, as Dirty George.
George's apartment was encrusted with filth, human and animal. It was also in a state of utter disrepair and was overrun with bedbugs, cockroaches, spiders and mice.
Journalist Victor Malarek took a TV camera into George's apartment, and then he asked Ballantyne to explain how and why George was allowed to decline for so many years – in full view of everyone – and not get any help before he died.
Ballantyne was tense on camera, and his answers were curt. He said that George's apartment had at one time been refurbished and that George had ample opportunity to get help.
Sorry, wrong answer.
I was in George's apartment. That sort of filth does not accumulate overnight – it builds up over the course of years, and is a sign of the deepest distress.
I can also tell you that the only help George got in recent months was a weekly half-hour visit from a Salvation Army volunteer.
That's nowhere near enough.
In his YouTube performance Ballantyne said, "A few weeks ago, W-FIVE asked to interview me. I said yes, why don't we go down to Regent Park and talk about the things that are positive that Toronto Community Housing is doing, what our staff are doing, and how it is we're improving people's lives ...
"(W-FIVE) chose not to come to Regent Park or any other community where we're doing fabulous work about making places change in a positive way ... their focus was on a small number of units and the way tenants live, and portray them in a negative fashion ..."
Oh, b-------.
In the first place, no one from Toronto Community Housing was doing anything to improve the life of Dirty George.
In the second place, there was no portrayal of any Toronto Community Housing tenant in a negative fashion.
In the third place, Ballantyne is a civil servant; he does not decide what the news is. If we simply sat back and relied on him to alert us, all we'd ever know is what he wanted to tell us.
In the fourth place, asking us to focus on the good work being done in Regent Park while some Toronto Community Housing tenants are dying of neglect is a bit like asking us not to write about a burning building when there are plenty of perfectly nice buildings in other parts of town that are not, at the moment, on fire.
I could go on.
The fact is that, in public housing, some men and women are allowed to live in relentless squalor, and some of them die in the absence of care or tenderness.
That's unacceptable. Here's what's worse: George was not an exception. Stay tuned.
But hey, no hard feelings – and good luck in your new job, sir.
***
Derek Ballantyne's YouTube response to W-5's follow-up -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ny5jR50nWgQ
Ballantyne's previous YouTube post before the W-5 follow-up -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohOs7d8Ynec
