Lesley Parnell

Lesley Parnell is the type of woman that, if you were to ask her age, she would spread a rumour about you serving frozen dinners to your family on

Christmas. Her humblebrags about trips to the farmers market show that she wants the community to see her as a fellow citizen. She runs the planning committee like a teacher that has broken every class clown that showed evidence of red nosed and over-sized shoes tendencies. Meaning that she makes sure that everyone on council listens to what staff, constituents, and other Councillors have to say.

Everyone needs an advocate

This week was the quickest to date. One could attribute this to the short agenda for the planning committee meeting which only contained one item. Other’s would explain this because the words Parkway and PDI never entered the room or left exited a mouth. Whether or not these topics are on the agenda also determines whether there are 3 or 30 constituents in attendance. What remains static is the use of representatives on behalf of business to make their case to council.

This week it was a Lawyer named Pete Lawless who was there to represent the owners of Mark’s Work Warehouse in their bid to move their business from Lansdowne and Webber to Lansdowne and Clonsilla. People like Pete are able to to take the exhausting language of managing“bottom-lines”, maintaining “overhead”, and enforcing “mission statements” and translate it into the equally tiresome language of “community building”, “social capital”, and “opportunity creation”. People like Pete are a Rosetta Stone with a price tag that your average constituent does not have the luxury of accessing.

Mark’s Work Warehouse on the Rise?

If there’s any evidence of the world becoming increasingly mysterious, it’s the words exiting the mouth of applicant for the move, Peter Lawless. “My clients’ business has grown larger than his current location allows” is the sentence that when applied to Mark’s Work Warehouse, sums up the entirety of 2016. Mark's Work Warehouse, a place where white men go to buy clothes that say “I’m working classy”. I have not set foot inside of a Mark’s work Warehouse since my failed campaign to get a job in the summer of 2014.