Monday 1 August 2016

Toomas Karmo: Open Letter re DDO&P to Town Council, Addressing the 2016-07-29 Concerns of Councillor Karen Cilevitz







The DDO&P subdivision conception, showing the developer's proposed stormwater sump, lane, 14 street, and 520-plus homes. This plan comes ultimately from http://richmondhill.ca.  The southern (the longest) edge of the "DDO&P Trapezoid"  is of approximate length 1.5 km. The trapezoid encompasses an area of 72 hectares, of which around 32 hectares will be lost if the proposed subdivision  is constructed. The parts within the trapezoid coloured in green, and comprising around 40 hectares, are the greater part of the Town's envisaged rump park. To this must be added, however, the 5-hectare rectangle (the "Panhandle Lands") abutting the trapezoid's southern boundary, and ultimately to be incorporated into the rump park, and shown on this plan in white rather than in green. The long sides of the rectangle are aligned exactly north-south. -  I have modified the Town's cartography by adding an irregular orange-yellow curve, highlighting one particularly offensive part of the developer's conception - a clutch of putatively luxurious homes which it is proposed to erect in the immediate vicinity of the main telescope dome. It was this that I above all was hoping to suppress, impoverishing myself by spending 500,000 CAD or 550,000 CAD on casework - most of it in financing the courageous, yet fruitless, 2012, 2013, and 2014 legal actions of the Richmond Hill Naturalists  (http://www.rhnaturalists.ca), at the Ontario Municipal Board hearings and in Divisional Court. -  It is a  mystery, which I privately and subjectively hope will eventually attract the attention of Ontario's Attorney General, why the Richmond Hill Naturalists did not, with all their light-pollution testimony, persuade the Ontario Municipal Board to save at least the orange-bounded terrain. - Something like 70 percent or 80 percent of the trapezoid, from the western boundary to a roughly north-south straight line not far from its eastern boundary, is a Cultural Heritage Landscape (CHL) in the meaning of the Ontario Heritage Act. One  feature of the DDO&P casework is thus the developer's attempt to establish that houses, putatively including McMansions, can with impunity be built within a CHL. This feature gives the case a heightened legal interest, for all Ontario land-law analysts. 
Quality assessment:


On the 5-point scale current in Estonia, and surely in nearby nations, and familiar to observers of the academic arrangements of the late, unlamented, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (applying the easy and lax standards Kmo deploys in his grubby imaginary "Aleksandr Stepanovitsh Popovi nimeline sangarliku raadio instituut" (the "Alexandr Stepanovitch Popov Institute of Heroic Radio") and his grubby imaginary "Nikolai Ivanovitsh Lobatshevski nimeline sotsalitsliku matemaatika instituut" (the "Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky Institute of Socialist Mathematics") - where, on the lax and easy grading philosophy of the twin Institutes, 1/5 is "epic fail", 2/5 is "failure not so disastrous as to be epic", 3'5 is "mediocre pass", 4.5 is "good", and 5/5 is "excellent"): 4/5. Justification: There was enough time to make most of the desirable points. 


Revision history:


  • UTC=20160802T2004Z/version 2.1.0: Kmo adjusted his "tiny" to "easy to miss", in discussing the red-print materials at http://www.karen-vs-toomas-blog.ca, and repaired a missing pronoun (this fault obscured the intended meaning) in his discussion of Dr and Mrs Shelton.
  • UTC=20160802T1850Z/version 2.0.0: Kmo added a map, with a caption discussing the putative McMansions near the main dome, and the legal importance of this case. In uploads some hours earlier, but unfortunately not documented here, he had additionally not just confined himself to cosmetic tweaks, but had also introduced a new point of substance (the question whether convict Marco Muzzo, in lacking a university education, was capable of writing so grammatically faultless a public apology, as tabled in court). - Additionally, Kmo explained his motives in throughly publicizing his financial involvement (the risk was that had he not done so, lawyers, politicians, or developers might have done it for him, putting their own spin onto his story). - Additionally, Kmo corrected a minor inaccuracy, turning on the difference between 77-hectare "Trapezoid plus Panhandle" and 72-hectare "Trapezoid", in  his characterization of the developer's original 800-plus-home subdivision conception. 
  • UTC=20160802T0250Z/version 1.1.0  Kmo repaired many tiny blemishes of a cosmetic character, in multiple uploads, and added a substantive new point (in a place in which he now offers Karen Hamlet's advice to Ophelia - "Get thee to a nunnery" - in the eventuality that Karen thinks the developer's opening 800-plus-home proposal was meant seriously); and he reserved the right to make further tiny cosmetic tweaks over the coming 10 hours, as version 1.1.1, 1.1.2, 1.1.3, ..., without formal documentation in this revision history.
  • UTC=20160802T0001Z/version 1.0.0: Kmo made a first upload to the blogger server. He did not yet  proceeded to his actual e-mailing (i.e., to  the transmission to members of Council, with some appropriate cc's)  of the text here publicly, and in anticipation, displayed. 


[I alerted my usual correspondents, most notably Mayor and Town Council, to this open letter in an ordinary e-mail, timestamped by my workstation as UTC=20160802T192522Z.]

[CAUTION: A bug in the blogger software has in some past weeks shown a propensity to insert inappropriate whitespace at some late points in some of my posted essays. If a screen seems to end in empty space, keep scrolling down. The end of the posting is not reached until the usual blogger "Posted by Toomas (Tom) Karmo at" appears.]

0. Preamble


The David Dunlap Observatory and Park ("DDO&P") emerged almost a decade ago as Canada's weightiest heritage-conservation case. In our national casework, it has to be our community newspaper, the weekly free-distribution tabloid which is The Liberal, that becomes our newspaper of record. The Liberal, unlike Canada's usual newspaper-of-record, The Globe and Mail, stands close to week-by-week DDO&P developments, through a network of personal acquaintanceships. 

****

One of my many self-imposed duties in the case is, therefore, to keep a correctly critical eye on The Liberal

The Liberal has not, on the whole, served DDO&P too badly. The most dramatic bad thing has been in its editorial, as opposed to its news-article, columns, and here everything can in the end be forgiven. It is true that Ms Marney Beck, in her capacity as editor, has on more than one occasion run an editorial criticizing the principal fully conservationist organization, the Richmond Hill Naturalists (http://www.rhnaturalists.ca). But hey, it's a free country. Newspapers can opine as they wish both in their editorial and in their op-ed columns, provided only that they remain objective in their news reporting. 

****

The latest test of our paper's capabilities came either exactly on or almost exactly on 2016-07-22. On that day, the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada Toronto Centre (RASC-TC) e-mailed its members, including me, with the unexpected news that RASC-TC was pulling out of DDO. How would our paper cover this? How rapidly, and how thoroughly? 

The stress-test did not, in the event, go too badly. 

It is true that coverage was slow, with the story being broken by reporter Ms Kim Zarzour six days after my e-mail alert to her (an alert timestamped at my workstation as 20160723T134733Z), and indeed being broken on the afternoon immediately preceding a long weekend. The relevant article, as uploaded to server - paper publication in this instance comes, I think, very slowly indeed, around 2016-08-04 - is at  http://www.yorkregion.com/news-story/6787885-latest-wrinkle-on-richmond-hill-s-dunlap-observatory-sends-shockwave-through-star-gazing-community/. But in the absence of further forensics, it would be a mistake to make much of Ms Zarzour's delay in publishing.

Her coverage was systematic. In particular, she helpfully located and quoted a relevant member of Town Staff. 

Ms Zarzour's omission of comment from the developer's side is, admittedly, mildly noteworthy. Many will after all be asking, "Did the developer and its tenant RASC-TC jointly orchestrate this whole sorry thing, with RASC-TC running tours just long enough to confer cachet on the envisaged subdivision - pulling out, as mutually planned, once enough buyers had already in some rather informal but rather firm way committed themselves?" But Ms Zarzour can perhaps be forgiven for (1) not having thought of this angle in her story, or else for (2) fearfully (I cannot be alone in fearing this developer) thinking of it indeed, and yet in the end judging it prudent to repress her dangerous thought. 

A minor fault in Ms Zarzour's story, which to my mind lowers its quality a little, is its departing from full objectivity in handling Councillor Karen Cilevtiz. Here is what the paper published, with a commendable concision, but with a not-quite-objective summary of points:  

Karen Cilevitz, Ward 5 councillor and key activist for seven years in the battle to preserve the lands through the group David Dunlap Observatory Defenders, said the DDO is in good and capable hands with the town.

"I have no doubt we will install a competent, reliable team. I look forward to our first opening day from this publicly-owned invaluable cultural heritage resource, the jewel in the crown of Richmond Hill's public green spaces, a place for all to enjoy"

Here is the correction I have posted to that same server that same afternoon (in a terse bit of corrective phrasing, embedded in a spate of other commentary from me, on things unrelated to Karen):


Although Ms K.Zarzour's reporting here looks generally sound, /.../ KZ does community some degree of disservice by being silent on "key activist" K.Cilevitz's actual role. Karen C. assented @OMB 2012 to development by DG Group/Corsica: 520+ homes, 14 streets, ~32 hectares.

****

One might have hoped matters would be laid to rest there for the next few days, with no Town Councillors at this point cheapening themselves through polemic. But very soon, perhaps even just one hour or so, after I had made my just-quoted upload, Karen offered  two comments of her own, in her own server space  https://www.facebook.com/karencilevitz. The first of these made fully appropriate assertions, doing no damage to Council's good name, and being essentially free of polemic. I quote here a representative extract: 

Our residents can be assured TRH Senior Staff did a superb job attempting to negotiate a lease/public outreach contract with RASC-TC, as per the directions they received from Council earlier in the spring.

More than enough has been discussed regarding the legitimate Minutes of Settlement and its prescribed legal outcomes /.../

In a bit I have not here quoted, I do note Karen tumbling into a delicious malapropism: "Principle Heritage Buildings", where what is needed is not only the lower case, but also the other homonym from that troublesome pair of p-words. Such blemishes, however, are on the whole to be welcomed, not deplored. They indicate that she is in all probability doing her writing herself. (I know Karen's epistolary style well, from 2008-through-2011 fully conservationist DDO&P work with her.) We do well to be suspicious not when the grammar or punctuation or capitalization or orthography wobble, but rather when a public figure writes faultlessly. - I have here in mind convict Marco Muzzo, nephew of a DDO&P development-firm director, and without university education, in his effusive, and largely or entirely faultless, and press-quoted, apology this year to the terribly suffering Neville-Lakes. 

The problem is, rather, with Karen's second posting, in which polemic surfaces: 

Postscript: I usually ignore this individual's absurd rantings (whom I had to sue in 2014, in part, to get my name and website rights back), however, not this time. The individual "Karmo", author of some comments below the above article online, states in part: Quote: "....KZ does community some degree of disservice by being silent on "key activist" K.Cilevitz's actual role. Karen C. assented @OMB 2012 to development by DG Group/Corsica: 520+ homes, 14 streets, ~32 hectares...." -- Clarification: MY ACTUAL ROLE as then Chair of the DDO Defenders, was to lead this organization's OMB Mediation Team to a remarkable, landmark OMB mediated settlement, part of which saw the DDOD's hard work as the ONLY community group to include themselves as a Party in the OMB mediation, which lasted over a period of 7 months (2011/2012) and cost this organization tens of thousands of dollars to legitimately undertake - A landmark Settlement which saw, in part, 111 acres of 189 acres to become public land for the first time (99 acres to be conveyed to the Town at no cost), and the total amount of residences to actually be built reduced by ONE THIRD. So yes, I PROUDLY AND OPENLY confess that was my "actual role" as Citizen Karen Cilevitz. Next.




1. Background Considerations



With weak Richmond Hill voter turnouts (28.8% in 2010, 32.23% in 2014), we cannot afford to have Council's reputation lowered. 

And yet I have heard male voices raised in the Chamber, in unedifying displays of temper. 

Further, I have heard the former Councillor Nick Papa, Karen's dismal predecessor in Ward Five, objecting to the creation of Richmond Hill's Integrity Commissioner framework, complaining into his desk microphone "We are not little children."

Further, I have had the now-departed Councillor Carmine Perrelli (for "further and better particulars", one might try http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ontarios-cities-have-their-very-own-houses-of-cards/article21149780/) seek to get me ejected from the public seats, during Council deliberations over Yonge Street architectural heritage, simply for laughing a bit too long when Carmine was making himself an object of public ridicule. With the other conservationists in the public seats laughing for perhaps four seconds (our Chamber is decorous), I, who sometimes get tripped up by autism, laughed for perhaps six. As I hastily turned the tail end of my laugh into a sequence of coughs, Carmine said, "I want that man thrown out of the Chamber."  (To this our Mayor, showing good judgement, made the right reply: "He's not going anywhere.") 

Now we have, in addition to those and similar abuses from various men on Council over the years, polemic from Karen 

How, then, to react? 

I think, admittedly subject to correction by others, that to file a complaint with the Integrity Commissioner for Karen's low phrase "absurd rantings", and to argue that Karen is in descending to such language mocking my autism, or is mocking my episodic depressions, or is mocking my other emotional troubles, or is mocking my ever-so-public theological interests, would be to overreact. Canada, no less than such European Union members as Estonia, is a free country. Indeed to some newly democratic parts of the EU (I know this, at least, for Estonia, having  quietly entertained in a cheap restaurant one of the framers of our post-1991 constitution), Canada is or has been something of a role model. As Ms Beck, in her role as a Canadian press editor, must be free to run even editorials critical of those unimpeachable stalwarts, the Richmond Hill Naturalists, so also must Karen, in her role on Town Council, be free to be frisky. 

In a more happy piece of editorial comment (to which I will return at length, below), Ms Beck has indeed struck just the right note. On a tense occasion late in 2014, she called all parties in the DDO&P file to bury their differences and work together. 

I proceed, then, under the guidance not of hot resentment but of Ms Beck's cool summons to cooperation. 

It is necessary to do just two things here. First, I must set the factual record straight, remedying Karen's various omissions from her second, inappropriately polemical, posting of 2016-07-29. Second, I must reinforce my ongoing process of reaching out to Karen.  

2. An Advisory for Karen's Readers, Remedying Her Omissions


/.../ whom I had to sue in 2014, in part, to get my name and website rights back /.../: 

The relevant omissions are the following:

  • The envisaged suit was not against me alone, but also against the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA). 
  • The suit was never tried in court, being withdrawn. - I would indeed respectfully submit that in a free country, such as Canada or the United Kingdom or Estonia or Finland, citizens must be left very free indeed to file civil suits, over anything at all, even to the extent of filing SLAPP suits. Let the judge, I respectfully say, determine the merits even of a SLAPP suit, should the feuding parties decline to withdraw it after some gentle and neutral counselling. (Ontario judges nowadays have the power to dismiss SLAPP suits quickly, on the strength of the Protection of Public Participation Act. But because this statute was enacted in 2015, and because the Cilevitz-against-Karmo-and-CIRA proceeding was launched in 2014, this particular remedy - might it have been applicable? - was nonexistent when Karen contemplated taking me and CIRA to the Bench. - I add here, for the benefit of international readers, that "SLAPP" is our local acronym for "Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation".) 
  • The envisaged suit was part of a legal package which sought to obtain not only relief in the matter of the domain name karencilevitz.ca (it was this part that involved CIRA), but sought also a different thing. Karen's lawyer briefly, before being reminded of the way the system works, asked for a court injunction, in what I respectfully submit would have been an unacceptable trespass onto my civic liberties - indeed a trespass (so I submit, respectfully) meriting the contempt Canadians, Estonians, and all other free men and women accord to Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore and to Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov's USSR. That contemplated, and so-briefly-requested, court injunction would have barred me from talking door to door about Karen with voters in Karen's ward during Karen's 2014 election campaign. 
  • Karen cites "rights" without supplying context. The three directly relevant contextual facts are the following: (1) Karen failed in 2013 to renew the registration of her domain name karencilevitz.ca. She thereby triggered, under normal CIRA rules, a 2013 auction for ownership of the domain. She was at that administratively delicate point herself just as eligible to bid as anyone else - for instance, I - was. (2) I made a winning bid at the auction, obtaining ownership under the normal CIRA rules. (My hunch these days  is that there were no other bidders.)  I thereupon additionally took the prudential step of registering a small handful of other closely related, as-yet-unregistered domain names (for instance, votekarencilevitz.ca, and at one later point even notkarencilevitz.ca). (3) There is a prima facie legally relevant parallel between  karencilevitz.ca and robford.ca. The latter domain is duly registered at CIRA (through registrar Namespro Solutions Inc., with  expiry on 2017-11-16 if not renewed; I noted the existence of this site when Mr Ford was still alive). However, http://www.robford.ca links via redirect (and already linked when Mr Ford was still alive) not to Rob Ford political promo but to Rob Ford press coverage, including unfavourable coverage. If Karen enjoys an exclusionary right to karencilevitz.ca, then did not  Mr Ford in his lifetime, and does his estate not now, enjoy an exclusionary right to robford.ca
There is also an indirectly or tangentially relevant contextual fact. Any legal reasoning which establishes that Karen has, in defiance of CIRA auction rules, an exlusionary right to karencilevitz.ca should somehow comment on the fact that - admittedly outside CIRA's jurisdiction, in the ".com" as opposed to the ".ca" domain - there are prominent sites named for prominent public persons, and yet friskily and feistily critical of those persons. Here are five examples:
****

The individual "Karmo", author of some comments below the above article online, states in part /.../: 

The wording here conveys, whether deliberately or through clumsiness, the impression that I am not personally known to Karen. 

It is important in legal analysis, as for instance at our municipal Integrity Commissioner's offices, not to make too much of this, and in particular not to convey the impression that Karen is necessarily acting from malice. What some might ascribe to malice could equally well be ascribed to inadvertent clumsiness, on the part of an individual not always skilled at the keyboard. I have already documented Karen's occasional difficulties in composition, by remarking on her comic 2016-07-29 confusion of "principal" with "principle". 

The relevant facts are the following:
  • I worked closely with Karen on the DDO&P file from the northern-hemisphere 2007/2008 winter up to 2011, visiting her home time after time, and personally communicating by phone or e-mail - communicating perhaps, on average, four or eight or ten times a month - and even helping a little with her gardening. 
  • Karen took a solicitous interest not only in our mutual DDO&P full-conservation effort, but even in my personal welfare, in particular successfully inducing me to seek professional counselling for depression and for the autism-spectrum Asperger Syndrome. 
  • Upon my making a large donation to the ultimately unsuccessful Campaign Cilevitz in 2010 (when in Ward Five the then-conservationist Karen was, alas, defeated by the dismal Nick Papa), Karen gave me a card still in my possession, inscribed in ink, in her hand, "I will always treasure your friendship." My total donations to her 2010 campaign, although (of course) under the legally permitted maximum, were in aggregate larger than anyone else's aggregate donation to her 2010 campaign. 
  • I am the recipient of personal gifts from Karen over the years. The following are all the items I can now recall, but there might be others I cannot recall: long machine-knitted winter scarf, with matching toque and gloves, to a value of possibly 20 or even 30 CAD; ear buds for stereophonic listening, to a value of possibly 5 CAD; colour 2011 calendar, with quotations from psalms (on my desk now, as I work on today's writing; price is stated on the item both as 11.99 USD and as 14.99 CAD). 
In view of these facts, it would be better for Karen to write not "the invidual 'Karmo'", but something like "my 2010 campaign worker, and large 2010 campaign donor, and former DDO&P full-conservation colleague, 'Karmo', whom I have in the period 2009/2011 tried to help". 


****

A landmark Settlement which saw, in part, 111 acres of 189 acres to become public land for the first time (99 acres to be conveyed to the Town at no cost), and the total amount of residences to actually be built reduced by ONE THIRD. :

Karen states the land areas correctly, and in due conformity with the plan which, as of version 2.0.0 of this essay, I am displaying. In particular, Karen and I agree on the key point - I remarked on this agreement in a comment which I posted to her server on 2016-07-29, but which she or someone almost immediately deleted - that she, in her then capacity as head of the "DDO Defenders", was a signatory to an Ontario Municipal Board settlement which envisaged destruction of 78 acres. (I founded this organization late in 2007. Karen displaced me as its de facto head in the first half of 2008. - The 78 acres is the numerical difference between 189 acres and 111 acres; 78 acres is, to two significant figures, 32 hectares.) 

But a small addition has to be made regarding "at no cost". While 99 acres are indeed being conveyed to the Town at no cost, this is only 99 acres out of a conserved 111-acre total. An accounting must be given of the remaining 12 acres (this being the numerical difference between 111 acres and 99 acres; 12 acres is, to one significant figure, 5 hectares). The 12-acre - in other words, 5-hectare - "Panhandle Lands" parcel was bought by the Town from the developer for a high 19.5 million CAD, the developer having in 2008 bought all 189 acres (to two significant figures, 77 hectares: 5 hectares of "Panhandle", plus 72 hectares of "Trapezoid") from the University of Toronto for a low 70 million CAD.

The "ONE THIRD" also needs comment. Karen is here referring to the developer's initial proposal, to build well over 800 homes, with streets running all over the DDO&P trapezoid (not just over its eastern half). With the "ONE THIRD" eliminated, and the streets now confined mostly to the eastern half of DDO&P, we do indeed get to conserve a DDO&P rump park. But what kind of achievement is this? Is Karen seriously of the belief that the developer's initial proposal for well over 800 homes, with streets running helter-skelter into almost every part of the trapezoid terrain, was meant seriously? If she does, she has no place in the world of practical affairs: get thee to a nunnery.

I for my part, despite my autism, know that in the opening stages of a negotiation, one normally makes an outrageous proposal, so as to look good upon later trimming the offensive proposal back. 

****

/.../ cost this organization tens of thousands of dollars /.../ : 

Objectivity in writing would require the outlay to be put into context. I myself, financing the legal actions of the Richmond Hill Naturalists from 2012 onward, and also in other ways trying to save all 77 hectares (being at all points aware of the supreme UNESCO-designation importance of saving all 77 hectares) laid out a sum many times larger, eventually reducing myself to poverty. My own outlay was 500,000 CAD or 550,000 CAD. Karen knows that figure as well as anyone does.

I have taken care to publicize that figure thoroughly. If I had not done it, lawyers, politicians, or developers eventually might have done it for me, trying in the process to spin my story away from the objective truth: before I publicized, I had been already obliged to make a large enough number of people privy to my secret, and people in possession of scary secrets can grow more and more careless as the months pass.   

****

/.../  the DDOD's hard work as the ONLY community group to include themselves as a Party in the OMB mediation /.../ : 

Objective reporting would require OMB to be explained more fully. The Richmond Hill Naturalists, predicting OMB mediation to be a trap (they were right), took care to decline the invitation. They felt their sole hope of securing some justice to lie in a fight with the developer in open tribunal, in OMB public hearings (which were duly held, in 2012 and 2014: on both occasions the Naturalists introduced among other less-well-handled  things good, clear expert-witness testimony on light pollution). 

****

In addition, it must be remarked, somehow, that Karen split the grass-roots community into two antagonistic camps, thereby committing a fault which poet-theologian Dante condemns in vehement terms. 

(A) Betrayed by Karen through her 2011 decision to back the destruction of 32 hectares (in defiance of  her previously declared principles), and consequently upset with her, were not only I myself, but additionally
  • the Richmond Hill Naturalists, and with them a leading doyenne in Toronto-area heritage conservation (Marianne Yake, Prof. Gene Denzel, and others in this grouping have unburdened themselves to me in no uncertain terms - one of them  as recently as the morning of 2016-07-30)
  • the First Nations (Karen had strong words, which I partially overheard, in the 2012 OMB hearing room at recess time with the representative of the Mississaugas; and a First Nations figure with a less solid claim to be involved, David Grey Eagle Sanford in some sense of the Mohawks, has had a pretty public quarrel with Karen - despite having, at an earlier and happier stage in their quiet twosome chats, conferred on her the purported First Nations honorific "Endless Water") 
  • the Toronto conservationists loosely grouped around the principal historian of Ontario forest conservation, Dr John Bacher (2011 author of Two Billion Trees and Counting: The Legacy of Edmund Zavitz) 
(B) Generally siding with Karen were the DDO Defenders - the name is, ever since their 2012 signing with OMB, misleading - and (rather closely related to this) her backers in the Campaign Cilevitz 2014, in which her sedulously cultivated 2008-onward DDO&P press prominence successfully propelled her onto our Town Council. These people not only think with me that Karen should have won in 2010, but commit the error of thinking that Karen did well in winning in 2014. All the same, with just one or two exceptions, these people have subsequently been nice to me, evidently being reluctant to imitate Karen in a silly perpetuation of hostilities. 

**** 

I note by way of postscript, and with some mild anxiety, that my normal vehicles for expounding all things Cilevitz-and-Karmo, namely two servers http://www.karen-vs-toomas-legaldocs.ca and http://www.karen-vs-toomas-blog.ca, were at one point today, 2016-08-01, offline. If someone has been malicious here, it is unlikely to have been Karen, or any lawyers, or any property developers, or practically anyone short of ISIS and the Kremlin. Effective cyber-warfare requires exotic resources. So this I ascribe to mere, blind, accident. 

Here, at any rate, are the results from my worried cyber-monitoring, at the command-line prompt in a GNU/Linux /bin/bash session: 

$date -u
Mon Aug  1 18:33:05 UTC 2016
$
$ping www.karen-vs-toomas-legaldocs.ca
PING karen-vs-toomas-legaldocs.ca (173.254.237.157) 56(84) bytes of data.
^C
--- karen-vs-toomas-legaldocs.ca ping statistics --- 
3 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 2014ms

$ping www.karen-vs-toomas-blog.ca
PING karen-vs-toomas-blog.ca (173.254.237.157) 56(84) bytes of data.
^C
--- karen-vs-toomas-blog.ca ping statistics --- 
4 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 3024ms

$date -u
Mon Aug  1 18:33:44 UTC 2016
$


On pinging my pair of servers again at  UTC=20160801T205155Z, I find them responding normally. Accordingly, I refer any close students of Karen's case to them, should "further and better particulars" now be desired. 

In particular, http://www.karen-vs-toomas-blog.ca is used to house, with some modifications emerging from our out-of-court 2014 settlement (modifications are in red: keep scrolling down, folks, patiently, keeping an eye out for several things easily missed), the material I had early in 2014 been showing at http://www.karencilevitz.ca, as the then controller of the domain. 



3. An Appeal to Council, Seeking Help in Effecting a Reconciliation


I have already mentioned editor Ms Marney Beck's helpful call for all parties to work together.

Here is part of what Ms Beck wrote in that constructive editorial of 2014-12-18, at http://www.yorkregion.com/opinion-story/5212181-competing-observatory-groups-should-work-together/:

It would certainly benefit all residents if the three organizations, RASC-TC, DDOD and Naturalists - which all have passionate members - bury the hatchet, stop sniping at each other, and work together to ensure the observatory park is the "jewel" everyone says it could be.

/.../  wouldn't it be beneficial if all the best scientific and conservation minds could be put to work in 2015 to guide this park's creation?

Having endorsed these sentiments in my online comments at Ms Beck's server on her day of publication, and having in effect endorsed them on 2016-07-22  on this present blog, I today again endorse them. 

On 2016-07-22, I signalled to Karen that I am not proud. Well, I did add that if I were to fall into pride, then it would be my duty to mortify the vice. 

Karen and I can work together, and we should - indeed we in the eyes of God must - work together. None of us lives forever. Does Karen want to make her most enduring contribution to our local civic culture a sniping at "the individual 'Karmo'", as though this individual is for her some unknown stranger? Or does she, rather, in her heart of hearts desire a reconciliation?

Without herein commenting substantively on the terms of our out-of-court-settlement, I remark that I am now as at all past times happy to lift the restrictions on communication constructed by Karen and her 2014 lawyer. Karen - I think I can say this without commenting substantively on our settlement terms, in particular herein neither praising our terms nor damning them - Karen, I say, knows as well as I that our settlement allows communications to be restored by mutual consent. 

If this seems initially too hard for her, then she should in the initial stages see what she can achieve through intermediaries. For her task, after all, is easy. She has to open a door locked from her side alone. 

Ms Beck, whose ear Karen has, and whose newspaper has never treated Karen harshly, and with whom I am for my part also always happy to talk if she should some day decide to ask me something or tell me something, is one possibility. 

From within our own DDO family, Dr Ian Shelton and his (doctorally qualified) wife Tuba are helpful. I am always happy to talk with them despite their 2012-onward failure in heritage advocacy, and with one or another of them I indeed somehow talked or e-mailed in the past 12 or so months.  

From a municipal-governance standpoint, perhaps the most important possibility is Karen's Council colleague, Mr Godwin Chan, in whose ward DDO&P sits. I am happy to talk with him. Indeed I am happy to talk with any member of Council, of any political philosophy at all. 

I write today to all of you on Council, in the hope that two or three or four of you - first and foremost of these is Councillor Chan - can in what remains of this summer effect a reconciliation. A reconciliation with Karen will help secure the success of our joint work on the post-2016-07-22 DDO&P crisis in the Chamber this September. 


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