Etobicoke lawn signs are an obsession, for someone

Thestar.com
June 1, 2018
Jack Lakey

A community uprising over lawn signs is brewing in Etobicoke, with dozens of people relentlessly emailing the city to demand that they be removed.

Or is it just one person, fixating on a problem that exists only in their head?

While lawn signs for trades are technically illegal, the city allows them, as way for small businesses to advertise.

The city believes it’s the latter -- and so do we -- after officials put far more time and effort into investigating the complaints than they deserve.

Our inbox recently began filling up with email from alleged Etobicoke residents that were sent to municipal licensing and standards staff, along with numerous other city officials, demanding action on lawn signs.

The signs, for trades such as paving, roofing, pool services and renovation contractors, are technically illegal. But the city has an informal policy of allowing them while the work is in progress, and for a short time after.

If they are a problem, it’s one that mostly resolves itself. Once their driveway is repaved or their roof fixed, most people take down the signs, if the contractor didn’t.

But judging by the emails to the city that we started getting a few weeks ago, it’s a crisis in Etobicoke.

At first, we assumed one person had managed to rile up a few neighbours as a way to add weight to the issue. Some mentioned “300” offending signs. But as the list of senders grew longer, we began to notice oddities.

The names of the senders -- upwards of 20 in total -- sounded more like Toronto in the 1960s than 2018: James Graff, Mark Bowman, Jean Lewis, Henry Murhpy, Ken Black, Sandra Fink and June Campbell, to name a few.

The email addresses are strange, and not one was Rogers, Bell or even g-mail. Instead, they are exotic-sounding sites like null.net, gmx.com or greenmail.net.

But the biggest tipoff that something’s hinky is the total absence of any other contact information, particularly phone numbers or home addresses.

So we started replying, asking over and over for a phone number or address or some other way to verify the authenticity of the sender.

The best we got was a reply from “Mark Bowman,” saying nobody will talk, and that “people are afraid because the MLS plays dirty pool.”

As our skepticism grew, we emailed Mark Sraga, director of investigations for MLS, to ask about it. You could almost hear the long sigh in his reply.

STATUS: In a phone interview, Sraga said the email campaign started last summer, stopped for a while and then resumed this spring. He said the city has put a lot of effort into investigating and verification, including having its IT staff determine where the emails are coming from. IT concluded that the servers are in Europe and the U.S., but Sraga said they have not been able to specifically identify the sender. “Whether this is one individual or two or three, we don’t know,” he said, adding that upwards of 1,000 emails have been sent since it began. Due to the lack of identifying information, they are considered anonymous complaints, he said, adding that the city does not usually respond to anonymous complaints. Enforcement officials sometimes get in touch with people who put up the signs and ask them to get rid of them, if a complaint is legitimate, he added. But with MLS charged with enforcing the city’s vast range of bylaws, the signs are at the bottom of the priority list, Sraga said. So it seems the Etobicoke sign uprising is, uh, overstated, to say the least.