The construction of the playground safety scare Jutta Mason

The playground monster In the early 1980’s, the playground at Dufferin Grove Park got a new play structure, built by a Canadian company based in Peterborough, Ontario, called Children’s Playgrounds. The new playground structure was made of wood, and it was very long. This structure had everything – baby-swings at one end, then broad steps leading up to a platform with two steering wheels, and a wide slide with a shiny surface fast enough to be exciting, even though it was short. Then a little climb up to a jiggly bridge, leading over to a broad platform with a higher, longer slide, with room for two at the same time. The end of that section had various interesting ways of getting up or down – a chain ladder, a fireman’s pole, and a steep slanted board with tires fastened on as footholds/handholds. As well, branching off to one side next to the steering wheels, there were some pretty challenging monkey bars a good ways off the ground. Underneath the baby platform there was, for good measure, a shop counter, for playing store. This many-faceted structure was immediately popular with all ages, up to and including the Grade Nine kids from St.Mary’s Catholic High School across from the park. Some of them used to come over during their lunch. They would lounge around on the platform up above the long slide, eating their sandwiches and behaving like unruly pirates on the bridge of their ship. When it rained, kids who were old enough to be at the playground without their parents or babysitters could sit underneath the structure and stay more or less dry, and talk. So the play structure was also a clubhouse at times. When the park’s recreation staff wanted some older kids to help with a park chore, they knew where to look for them. The best-loved part of the structure for the little kids, without a doubt, was the jiggly bridge. The fairy tale of the “three billygoats Gruff ” was often heard at this bridge, as grown-ups shouted out “Trip, Trap, Trip, Trap, WHO’S GOING OVER M-Y-Y-Y BRIDGE?” Laughing, shrieking children would run shakily back and forth over the bridge, making the most satisfying racket to spite the monster underneath. Unlike a real suspension bridge, the handrails were not attached to the bridge (and swaying along with it), but were stationary, with the slats of the bridge jiggling along independently. Also unlike a suspension bridge, there was no netting on the sides, and so parents often watched the children anxiously, as they swayed across – wondering whether someone would lose their balance and fall out the side. This was mainly an issue with the littler children who were shorter than the handrail. None of the kids had been hurt like that, but it seemed prudent to add some netting for protection. Parents made that request from time to time over the years, but it never went anywhere until we got to know the park staff a bit in the mid-1990’s. Then it turned out that the request was not as straightforward as we had thought. An inspector came out, then a planner, and they looked at the bridge and scratched their heads. They said that the structure came with a provision that nothing could be added or altered – if changes were made, the manufacturers’ insurance would refuse to pay for any claims arising out of an injury. The parents’ contention that some netting would mean there would be no injury, didn’t work. The more the parents tried to argue, the more the City inspectors stood firm. The general principle of insurance trumped a specific commonsense fix. So the bridge stayed as it was for a few more years. The worry about kids falling out the sides hovered in the adults’ minds as before. The delicious queasiness for the children, the shaking underfoot and the “trip, trap, trip, trap” to spite the monster, continued as well.

! 1

The monster none of us thought about was a new document about playground risk released in 1998 by a manufacturers’ group called the Canadian Standards Association (CSA). I had heard this “CSA” mentioned once, in 1997. A City planner had objected to our request to install two new benches at a ninety-degree angle, in the playground. We wanted to have a little conversation area for parents while they were sitting there watching their kids. The planner said the new CSA “playground safety standards,” coming soon, specified that no new playground structure could be closer than six metres to another structure. So the benches would have to be too far apart for the adults to sit and talk to each other. We said, benches are not playground structures! Since the CSA standards had not yet been officially released, after some struggle we won our point. The right-angle benches were installed and there have been many good conversations on them since. But once the new standards were announced, the City staff must have come back to check the playground against the risk list. One morning the children who came to the playground found to their shock that the jiggly bridge was gone. In its place was a stolid, immovable wooden passageway with a thick double handrail. The fireman’s pole was gone too, and the opening was nailed up. The “three billygoats Gruff ” game lost half of its thrill. The monster had won the contest most brutally. The brave little goats, bridge, story, exciting scary game – all had been brought under official control. The City staff who had told us that no alteration could be made, and who had then wrought this more radical change, were like thieves in the night. They never came to explain or to justify – no need. From their point of view, they had done the responsible thing by removing a risk. From our point of view, they might as well be vandals. But nobody knew how to undo the damage. It did start people wondering, though – how many children were getting injured in playgrounds, that the City would be so grim about spoiling the fun?

Pick a number, assign a cause We looked at Health Canada’s web site. If that agency was to be believed, Canada is the world capital for children being strangled in playgrounds. The web site stated that 17 children died of strangulation in Canadian playgrounds between 1982 and 1999. The same number was often quoted in other articles, and in risk presentations. When there was a footnote, it said “personal communication” from a Health Canada program consultant, and after that the trail went cold. A U.S. article on playground injuries counted 147 playground deaths in the U.S. between 1990 and 2000, of which 82 were said to be due to strangulation. Outside of North America, reports of child strangulation in playgrounds were rare. I e-mailed the general information link at Health Canada to ask how they had arrived at their number of 17. To my surprise, I got a letter back by regular mail, from the head of Canada’s Public Health Agency, Dr. David Butler-Jones: “the number of strangulations did not come from…coded data, but was based on cumulative information gleaned from coroners’ reports, incidents reported to the Product Safety Program at Health Canada and the Canadian Standards Association, and reports from other public health bodies. There is no single source that may be used to reference this information.” Dr.Butler-Jones said he had no more details. I spent an afternoon looking up journal references at the university medical library. All but two, maybe three, of the playground strangulation numbers turned out to be free-floating, unconnected to either a story or a source in the medical journals that dealt with child injuries and accidents.

! 2

As any first-year statistics student can tell you, a number without a verifiable source won’t get you a pass on your term paper. But the story remains influential. A 2007 press release from the Canadian Standards Association about its newest version of playground standards, still quotes the strangulation number first in its list of references. Many playground manufacturers and safety officials use the number, and many journalists repeat it, to this day.

How do playground injury numbers come into being? What separates guesses from fact? When little Janie plays tag with her best friend Sam at the park playground, and she runs into a corner post of the monkey bars and knocks herself out, what does a harried emergency room resident write on the data sheet as the cause of injury? When three children tie a fourth playmate to a playground slide with a skipping rope, as part of a make-believe game, and by a horrible fluke the playmate slides just far enough down the slide that she can’t breathe – and the plastic rope cinches around her neck so tight that her friends can’t get her loose – what was the cause of the accident? Skipping ropes made of plastic? Slides that a rope can be tied to? Children interested in acting out pirate stories? Parents in a small town who let their kids go the playground on their own, as the parents themselves did, hundreds of times, when they were kids?

Who knows? In the face of uncertainty, the simplicity and power of numbers is very attractive. And so the search is on, to discover numerical patterns of mishap that can be controlled. In April 1990, Health Canada established the Canadian Hospitals Injury Reporting and Prevention Program (CHIRPP for short) at 10 pediatric hospitals. Between 1991 and 1995 CHIRPP added 6 additional (general) hospitals, specifically to monitor emergency room visits of children. The categories of injury were not always clear, the emergency room staff didn’t welcome the extra paperwork, and since there were then over 750 hospitals in Canada, the numbers were hardly complete. But they didn’t have to be complete to be useful. For example: Sally Lockhart, a program consultant from Health Canada, worked for the Safe and Supportive Environments, Childhood and Youth Division. It was her job to figure out how the federal government could intervene to make all children safe right across Canada. Such an immense project needs a lot of numbers. On the Health Canada web site, Ms.Lockhart praised the new CHIRPP data collection. “By providing the rich detail on circumstances surrounding these injuries, it is now possible to focus interventions more effectively.”

Not everyone would describe the CHIRPP data as “rich in detail.” Little Janie’s crash during the game of tag, for instance, would have been listed as a “head injury” resulting from a “playground climber” and the E.R. resident may have been too busy to note that this was not a fall but a collision. Janie might have had a goose-egg on her forehead and a black eye, and maybe would have been kept in overnight for a concussion watch. But even if Janie’s mom took her home for breakfast, smiling and hungry, and Janie was out in front of her house by mid-morning, showing off her black eye to her best friend and tag partner Sam – in the government’s data base she would most likely have been put into the serious-injury group as a “head injury” with “hospitalization of at least one night” caused by a “playground climber.” The resulting number would then be available to be marshaled at some point for a safety intervention – replacing playground climbers, for instance, like the one little Janie ran into, with new climbers lower to the ground, to reduce the fall distance that could produce serious head injuries. The new CSA-approved climbers would still have corner posts, tall enough for kids to run into them during an exciting game of tag, and maybe even knock themselves out...

What was missing in detail and in completeness in the new government data after 1990 was soon filled in by extrapolation and guesswork. Sally Lockhart wrote on Health Canada’s web site, “Each year, more than 10,000 Canadian children are injured on

! 3

playgrounds. Many of these children require hospitalization, and, tragically, some die.” This number was based on yet another, unnamed Health Canada staff person’s “personal communication.” The same number was repeated by insurance companies for a few years, including the Ontario School Boards’ Insurance Exchange (OSBIE), which suggested that possibly all these 10,000 children “required medical treatment.” Then in 1998, OSBIE put out a special bulletin with a new number. The insurance exchange had “received approximately 28,000 playground incident reports in 1997 for Ontario [school playgrounds].” Did this number include scrapes requiring a bandaid? No details are given. OSBIE guessed that of the 28,000 school reports “an estimated 1,200 would have been serious enough to require medical attention.”

28,000 is a more impressive number than 10,000. In 2000, that Ontario schools incident-reports number may have migrated over to a Sick Children’s Hospital’s organization called Safe Kids Canada, and slipped into their booklet of advice for parents. The booklet gave the Canadian playground injury number as “more than 28,500 each year.” It cited Health Canada program consultant Tammy Lipskie as the source, but she couldn’t pin down further details when questioned later by playground advocates. In 2001, a Health Canada staff epidemiologist, Susan Mackenzie, told Today’s Parent magazine that the annual number of playground injuries might be 25,000, “estimating in a really crude way.” And in May 2005, when the Globe and Mail gave the Canada-wide playground injury number as 25,000 and the National Post said 28,500, the newspapers themselves came up with these calculations, multiplying some Ontario hospital data to make a national number.

As any first-year statistics student learns pretty fast, making up data by simple multiplication, without telling, will not get you a pass on the final exam. But this numeration was not about reputable statistical practice – this was about getting a number big enough to be a quick-click icon, to turn into a banner under which playground safety advocates would then march across the land, taking out swings, climbers, slides, and whole playgrounds on their way.

The cast of characters A child is hurt on a playground. This can happen in any country where playgrounds

exist – that is, industrialized countries where such structures are provided to amuse and exercise the children. When there’s an accident in a playground, there’s pain for the child and trouble for the family. So the question quickly comes up – how can we learn from this, so that we make sure this mishap doesn’t happen to anyone else? Playgrounds should not be places of distress.

That’s the first thought. The second one comes an eyeblink later: will the parents sue?

Insurance The Frank Cowan Insurance Company, whose head office is in Waterloo, Ontario, specializes in municipal insurance. It has a publishing department, which puts out a monthly newsletter of helpful information for the towns and rural municipalities which it insures. In June of 1991, the newsletter carried big news: A 17 year old boy, somewhere in Canada, “was riding his bike across a vacant property when he fell into a 3-foot wide by 6-foot deep drainage ditch.” Not only was there a park located 10 feet from the unfenced ditch, but the ditch – located on an adjacent municipally-owned property – had been “identified as a hazard” for two years already. But everybody in this unnamed town seems to have passed the buck about fixing it. The boy must have been badly hurt: damages awarded were $16 million.

The nightmare of insurance companies and their shareholders had come to pass: the court-ordered, giant settlement.

! 4

When big payouts are ordered, the industry sets about doing what insurance companies specialize in – putting protections in place to avoid having to pay out any more giant settlements in remotely similar circumstances. In this case, the injury happened 10 feet from a park, and that may have influenced the court judgment. Parks are supposed to be safe for children. Children go there to play. Play is supposed to be fun, not a serious business for insurance companies. But when an insurance company looks more closely at parks with a view to avoiding painful claims payouts, it sees one alarming thing after another. Children climbing – on trees, park sheds, and playground equipment; children swinging high up into the air; children sliding down slides, the faster the better; children of many different ages, running around all together, chasing each other, banging into each other or banging into fences or trees or tire swings, falling down, crying, getting up and running around some more. Playgrounds are lawsuits waiting to happen.

The best protection for insurance companies is legislation. The very best is legislation that disallows legal action altogether (such as the Workers Compensation Act). The next best is specific legislation that involves many detailed regulations which can be shown – in court – to have been followed. Proof of compliance with regulations can limit insurers’ liability in a way they find attractive.

But for public playgrounds there isn’t any specific legislation. That leaves the clients of insurance companies completely exposed to the provisions of the Occupiers’ Liability Act, which puts broad and sometimes unreasonable responsibility on the property owners – in this case, the insured municipalities – to anticipate any possible kind of danger anywhere on their property. Under this Act, insurance companies feel too dependent on the interpretations of judges or juries, without the protection of being able to show their clients’ compliance with a specific set of rules.

So the Frank Cowan Insurance Co., and many other municipal insurers, got busy trying to fix up what they called “the play environment.” The Cowan newsletter deplored to the absence of binding regulations to protect municipalities against lawsuits (and insurance companies against pay-outs): “If the goals and objectives [i.e.safety from claims payouts; ed. note] are to be achieved, those who contribute to the play environment must be obligated to its recommendations.” In the meantime, the newsletter drew attention to the 1990 manufacturers’ guidelines of the Canadian Standards Association, and urged their municipal clients to set up an inspection program based on those guidelines, for the present. They recommended three reputable sources to help set up a playground inspection program: “Your insurance carrier, a well-established playground manufacturer, or one of the many recreation related associations.” Advice taken: as it turned out, those would be the three main players in setting the stage for an epic of playground destruction whose cost would far outstrip any insurance settlements for injuries.

A few months after the first warning, the Cowan Insurance newsletter expanded its cautions, urging every department of every municipality to have a risk management program: “There is ongoing risk in every department, with more emphasis, of course, on those departments that deal with and provide services to members of the public.” Risk management was a task with unlimited growth potential. By October 1996, the Cowan newsletter reported that in the previous year, Cowan Insurance had presented 187 seminars to municipal clients about risk management: “...we have assisted many of you in developing sound Risk Management Programs….efforts in this area are beginning to pay dividends. Where in the past plaintiffs received awards because our clients could not produce proper documentation of their activities, we now find situations where courts praise the record keeping of our client and send plaintiffs away empty-handed!…we are beginning to stop the pendulum from moving any further along its unreasonable

! 5

course….You are targeted by plaintiffs more now than at any time in our history and we are pleased that together we are able to level the playing field.”

Insurers are generally very closed-mouthed about their claims pay-outs, so they gave were no specific examples or case studies of the unreasonable targeting of municipalities by plaintiffs, nor of the awards that resulted from a lack of the kind of documentation that courts might praise. The newsletter’s one actual example relating to parks – the 1991 claim resulting from the deep, unprotected drainage ditch, next to a park, a ditch that was not covered over despite years of warnings – hardly needed a “risk management program” to be obvious. And the claim on behalf of the boy, perhaps paralyzed and brain damaged and needing lifelong care, was maybe not unreasonable. This case had no direct connection to playgrounds, but it wasn’t long before the Frank Cowan Insurance Company, hunting for risk, made the jump to the part of parks that had most of the children. They took on the task of cleansing playgrounds of risk, and promoting standards of design and maintenance that could be used to shield their clients in court. Their efforts were joined to the Ontario School Board Insurance Exchange, and to the ramifying net of ‘risk management professionals’ in and out of government who were hanging out their shingles for this promising new long-term occupation.

The mix would result in the tearing out of playgrounds all over Ontario. So who were the players?

The Canadian Standards Association In an article about the Toronto schoolyard playground demolitions published in March of 2001, Today’s Parent Magazine described the Canadian Standards Association International (CSA) as “an independent, non-profit organization that develops standards for a wide variety of products, from bike helmets to carbon monoxide detectors.” It could more accurately be described as a manufacturers group that included a small number of government and school board members as well. In 2003, the CSA membership was: Commercial: 938; Government: 53; Trade Associations: 25; Crown Corporations: 18; Educational Institutions: 11; Licensing and Certification Bodies: 2 – for a total of 1047 members. Despite the association’s name, in 2004 only 572 of the members were actually Canadian (55%). The remainder (475, or 45%) were foreign companies, from the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Hence the qualifier “international” in the name. The CSA had then and still has, quite logically, the promotion of international trade as one of its primary goals.

CSA International was therefore a manufacturers group, barely over half Canadian. And even the companies listed at Canadian addresses might not have their head offices here. For example: Little Tikes, listed in Canada (with an office in Paris Ontario), had its original head office in Missouri, but was in turn owned by Playpower, which was bought by Investcorp in 2002, with a head office in Bahrain, branch offices in London and New York.

CSA had released an earlier version of playground recommendations in 1990, which it merely called “guidelines.” They let it be known in early 1997 that their playground committee was working on a new set of playground guidelines, much more rigorous than any previous ones, and meshing more tightly with the playground guidelines of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC). This would help Canadian playground manufacturers to gain American customers. The CSA named the new 1998 version “standards,” and the document was interpreted – by many civil servants – as requiring compliance, as though they were dealing with a new law.

The committee writing the 1998 standards was called the “CSA Playspaces Technical Committee,” which the CSA web site says is “composed of volunteer members representing stakeholders likely to be affected by the standard, including representatives of the Canadian

! 6

Child Care Federation, Health Canada, Canadian Parks and Recreation Association, Safe Kids Canada, Ville de Montreal, as well as various manufacturers and municipalities across Canada.” One of the more hands-on playground manufacturers on the committee was Bryan Belair, a former Henderson Playground Equipment salesman who had formed the Belair Playground Equipment Company. Belair’s son Scott Belair, also on the playspaces committee, had his own playground inspection company. Another CSA committee member was Peter Kells, also a former employee of the Henderson Playground Company. Kells became a freelance playground inspection consultant and went on to set up his own training program for playground inspectors. The Henderson brothers, who by then had bought the Peterborough Children’s Playgrounds Company, were on the committee, and so was Mike Hayward, then assistant general manager of Paris (Ontario) Playground Equipment, Inc. That company was actually owned by Little Tikes, which was in turn owned by an investment giant in Bahrain. All of these people put their heads together to write the new safety standards. Missing from the table were frontline workers with children, as well as parents. But all three levels of government were either part of the conversation, or keeping a very interested eye from the sidelines.

Health Canada Already in 1997, Sally Lockhart, the program consultant for Health Canada’s Safe and Supportive Environments, Childhood and Youth Division, alerted managers in parks, schools, and the child development industry that “many activities and training opportunities” were about to spring up, to accompany the release of the new playground standard. “The CSA standard is currently under revision and being harmonized with the U.S. playground standard, creating a uniform approach to playground safety in the two countries.” The question: “why would a uniform playground design approach on a continental scale be desirable?” was not of interest to Health Canada, given that this government agency was founded on the centralized project of improving the health of all Canadians. All-encompassing is best, international standards are good for business, and the government was there to make it happen.

So in August 1997, Health Canada sponsored a heads-up session in anticipation of the new CSA guidelines, by funding the Canadian Parks/Recreation Association to host the first Canadian Playground Safety Institute meeting in St. John's, Newfoundland. Additional funds to hold this meeting, Health Canada announced on its website, came from Safe Kids Canada, the Canadian Standards Association, and “a number of corporate partners.” The one-day conference, the website said, brought together around “100 elected officials, parks and recreation employees, health and safety professionals, lawyers, educators and government representatives.” Speakers from the legal and insurance fields painted a fearsome picture of the potential liability problems for playground owners (like day cares, schools and cities) – should they neglect to take action to make their equipment safer. An underwriting and marketing coordinator for the Ontario School Boards Insurance Exchange (OSBIE) presented case studies.

After the speakers detailed all the alarming possibilities, they followed up with the remedy: playground owners could institute a risk-management plan, based on the upcoming CSA standards and outlined in detail by the insurance experts. The day ended with recommendations for future action, including continued networking and the development of a Canadian certification program for playground inspectors. Participants also resolved to hold smaller workshops across the country on practical "how-to" ideas and legal liability. Health Canada’s Sally Lockhart posted their follow-up plan on the website: “Health Canada, through the Fitness/ Active Living Unit, will be supporting the follow-up from the Institute meeting, and the

! 7

planning committee has agreed to act as a steering committee, bringing new players on board and setting up task groups as needed to develop a comprehensive approach to playground injury prevention in Canada.”

So the founding conference participants went home, and spread the alarm wider, into every Canadian city and town and village, resulting in the destruction of many playgrounds right across the country, and a lot of children left sitting in the dust. Safe Kids Canada This is the name for the National Injury Prevention Program of The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. In January 2000 they published a free Playground Safety Community Action Kit (January 2000), asserting that over 28,500 children need hospital treatment every year for playground injuries. “This kit will help you to plan local programs and address playground safety in your community.”

A theory: Sick Kids has a yearly operating budget of $660 million, bigger than some mid-sized cities. Much of this budget is funded by government. But that’s not enough. The hospital sells debentures to raise money for new buildings. It hires an army of students to be out on the sidewalks in all weathers, asking for money for the hospital foundation. The hospital is a giant that needs to keep on growing. Injury prevention research is fundable, as is producing safety-education booklets for parents. Safety is an icon that gets to the money, and it carries an added benefit that’s important for giant organizations: a halo.

Canadian Hospitals Injury Reporting and Prevention Program [CHIRPP] This began as a program of Health Canada, Laboratory Centre for Disease Control (LCDC), Bureau of Reproductive and Child Health, Child Injury Division. Data collection started in April 1990 at 10 pediatric hospitals and between 1991 and 1995 at 6 additional (general) hospitals.

There has been lots of extrapolation from the numbers put out by CHIRPP, despite this proviso from the same Dr.Susan Mackenzie who was quoted in Today’s Parent. Dr. Mackenzie and another Health Canada colleague wrote in a 1999 article called CHIRPP: Canada's principal injury surveillance program: “A major limitation is representativeness. Only three communities, in which all hospitals with emergency rooms participate, can provide population based rates. The 16 participating hospitals are a small sample of the more than 750 Canadian hospitals that provide emergency room treatment of injuries. Because they are not representative, it is inappropriate to use the data to estimate the numbers of injuries in Canada, or even the number treated in Canadian emergency rooms.” [From Injury Prevention 1999;5:208-21] This caution seems to have been ignored by almost everyone, particularly by the Health Canada colleagues in the next building over, the Safe and Supportive Environments, Childhood and Youth Division.

The Canadian Playground Safety Institute (CPSI) This new group had its coming-out party at the August 1997 playground think tank in St.John’s. The launch was funded by Health Canada and some institutional and commercial partners, notably the Canadian Parks and Recreation Association (CPRA). The institute, created by the CPRA, was meant to develop a curriculum and teach the new playground inspectors who would designate the equipment that had to go, using the new 1998 CSA standards. The following May, it hired Tony Lake as its principal instructor, co-ordinator and administrator. Tony Lake was also president of Parks and Rec Plus, listed by Google as a “Playground Equipment, installation and repair” company in Leduc, Alberta. The company advertised itself as operating playgrounds and recreation centres as well as building them.

! 8

The relationship between inspector training and business was close and often confusing. The Playground Safety Institute, meanwhile, seems to have been – at first ambiguously and then proudly – a project of the Canadian Parks and Recreation Association, which in 2007 described Tony Lake on their website as their “guru” of playground inspection curriculum.

Canadian Parks and Recreation Association (CPRA) The Canadian Playground Safety Institute’s playground inspection course, only one day in length at the outset, was run under contract to the Canadian Parks and Recreation Association (CPRA). This is an Ottawa-based national professional association that was at that time getting its funding from membership dues, from its annual trade show, from running courses, and from government grants. Health Canada gave the CPRA four years of grants for running a “playground committee,” perhaps to do the follow-up from the first insurance meeting in St. John’s. The playground committee grant brought in a significant income. In 2000, for example, the Health Canada grant was $82,602, whereas the income from membership dues was only $71,820. But the playground safety course brought in even more: (2000: $220,814 gross, $81,205 net; 2001: $278,816 gross, $109,637 net; 2002: $335,024 gross, $122,766 net.).

Despite this income, the CPRA ran a deficit every year. The playground inspection courses were lengthened from 2 days to 4 days, and the fee therefore went up to $800. The deficit shrank but didn’t disappear. Moreover, some of the municipal CPRA members became angry. A minimum requirement of 50 playground inspection students per class meant a larger income per session, but the Maritime members threatened to withhold their dues if this 50-minimum rule persisted. Some provinces’ parks associations accused the CPRA of milking the courses by padding the required course length to 4 days, and of failing too many people, thereby doubling the cost for the municipalities who had to send their staff to do a repeat. The Ontario Parks Association (OPA) eventually persuaded the municipality of Toronto to drop the CPRA playground course and switch to a shorter, more straightforward course offered by OPA . (This switch happened around the same time that the OPA president was promoted in his City job – to being one of the directors of Toronto Parks and Recreation).

In 2003, when many school and park playgrounds had already been destroyed, amid strongly negative public outcries, the Health Canada playground committee grants seem to have stopped. The CPRA wrote in its annual report: “The shift away from multi-year and core activity funding to program funding is threatening the viability of this sector.” So CPRA undertook to build itself a new strategic vision, “positioning the field of parks and recreation sector [sic] as essential to individual, family and community health and well-being. Strengthening and creating strategic business relationships with members, partners, governments and allies,” they expanded their portfolio beyond playground safety, into “poverty, population health, crime prevention, and healthy child development…. [and] related issues such as sustainable communities, social capital, youth, obesity, and environmental stewardship.”

Soon after the portfolio expanded, CPRA got program money from Health Canada, the National Crime Prevention Centre, and Human Resources Development Canada. The tap had been turned on again.

But private sector “partnerships” were also essential. The biggest point of entry for close relationships with business was the annual CPRA Conference and Trade Show. Business was wooed with sponsorship brochures like this one for the 2004 conference in Halifax, headlined:

! 9

“Buying Power: Municipalities in Canada spend over 2 billion dollars on products and services in the parks and recreation sector alone!”

For commercial members of the CPRA, or non-member companies who were drawn to this opportunity, the brochure listed various ways they could get involved with the “buying power” represented at the annual conference.

1. They could buy an exhibit booth at the trade show, which cost $891.25 for members or $1121.25 for non-members. At the Halifax conference, playground manufacturers had 28 of 64 exhibitors’ booths. The non-commercial CPRA members were encouraged, in their conference material, to visit the trade show “and support the businesses that provide our programs and municipalities with the tools and products necessary for our daily work.” The trade brochure, for its part, said that the trade show “offers conference participants exceptional business development opportunities, and the ability to network with corporate suppliers….Corporate and organizational exhibits will demonstrate the latest in developing products, from A to Z.”

2. For $10,000, a company could buy the right to sponsor one luncheon or keynote address, plus one refreshment break, plus the standard sponsorship privileges: their logo and link on the conference web site, their promo material in the delegate package, and a copy of the delegate mailing list.

3. For a cheaper price – $5000 – a company could buy sponsorship of one program session, and most of the rest of the sponsorship privileges. If a company sponsored the presidents’ reception, it got to give a little talk to the whole group, plus all the other perks. If they sponsored the opening ceremony and keynote, they got to introduce the speaker and conclude the address, plus the other privileges; same if they sponsored any of the other keynotes.

From the Sponsorship prospectus: “Connecting with parks and recreation decision makers in more relaxed and informal settings makes good business sense….These opportunities make it easy for you to make a personal connection beyond your exhibit…..”

4. Beyond those three opportunities, there was a page in the trade show brochure called “EXTRAS.” Prices were not listed. The page offered a position at the front of the line: “First opportunity to select sponsorship opportunities,” and/or in the innermost circles: “Invitation to private receptions.” These commercial members could even receive a conference “call for papers,” and help structure a program session.

So it seems that commercial sponsors could set the agenda of the annual Canadian Parks and Recreation Association’s professional conference in many ways beyond merely exhibiting their wares. In the case of the playground manufacturers who were the “corporate partners,” this could include not only buying lunch or dinner for a banquet-hall full of appreciative potential customers, but even buying the right to present learned professional papers on the dangers to be found in existing playgrounds and the best way to replace them. Sponsorship arrangements between professional associations and companies interested in selling their wares are very common even when the optics are dubious all over. (For example the Taser Company sponsored the 2008 Conference of Canadian Police Chiefs.) But the extent to which the Canadian Parks and Recreation Association felt it had to go after funds from both government and industry makes it evident that by the end of the twentieth century, such a professional association operated much like any other fee-for-

! 10

service consulting company. The main difference was that – given business members’ overlap with the municipal Parks and Recreation employees who gave out the contracts – business people who gave money to the CPRA had open access to the inside track. This circle of connections neatly brought government staff together with people who had an interest in selling them goods or insurance policies or training courses – including courses leading to playground demolition, and the purchase of millions of dollars of new equipment, to replace the structures that the bulldozers crushed.

Laying the groundwork The playground risk meeting in St. John’s, with the representatives from the legal and insurance fields, and the underwriting and marketing coordinator for the Ontario School Boards Insurance Exchange, was in August 1997. In March of 1998, Canadian Standards Association released its document “Z6 14-98 Standard for Children’s Play Spaces and Equipment.” At a press conference (where the Canadian Parks and Recreation Association, being first out of the training-program gate, crowded the limelight), a CSA spokesman said that none of the new recommendations were meant to apply to existing playground equipment.

He might as well have been talking to the wind. The February 1998 Cowan Insurance Company newsletter had already promoted the brand new CPRA playground inspection courses: “…the CPRA is introducing the Canadian Playground Safety Institute and Playground Inspector’s Certification School.” The course content was just as weighty as the impressive-sounding course title. “Injury Risk Reduction for entanglement, pinch points, etc. and applicable test methods….This program is designed to allow those who would benefit from training to obtain recognized professional certification in this field. Participants will be provided with the expertise needed to face the challenge and requirement of reducing the risk of serious injury in our public playspaces.”

Many municipal governments fell all over themselves to “comply” with the new standards. In Toronto the Mayor himself sponsored the motion to send staff for training. The councillors fell in behind him. And no wonder – the Parks and Recreation staff report to the city councillors made it sound as though there was no choice:

Meeting of Toronto City Council, January 27, 2000: “Last spring the Canadian Standards Association adopted ‘standards’ for play spaces, as compared to the “guidelines” that were used in the past. As part of the shift to ‘standards’ there is a requirement for inspections of play spaces and apparatus to be undertaken by certified playground inspectors. To become certified, one must attend a seminar coordinated by the Canadian Parks/ Recreation Association and pass a written test. For the [Budget] Committee’s information, the seminars are heavily subscribed to, and we were able to secure only a limited number of spaces as the sessions had to accommodate people from across the Province.”

The councillors didn’t ask the basic questions: who ‘required’ certified inspectors, and on what legal authority? And they didn’t ask: who had the legal authority to set new standards? The only thing council was dubious about was a staff request for $90,000 in new funding to hire some extra playground inspectors. Why, the councillors asked, pay for outside inspectors, why not train the city’s own Parks staff in the new courses?

The embarrassing reason, hinted at in the staff report, was that most of the city workers eligible to take the course for professional inspector “certification” were park litter-pickers, handymen, and cleaners. Many of them were not comfortable with reading textbooks or writing exams. One of the complaints by municipalities about the Canadian

! 11

Parks and Recreation Association courses, after a few sessions, was that the courses required too much writing, and too many of the municipal outdoor workers failed.

Did the councillors forget to ask about the legal authority behind the manufacturers’ new standards, and these newly-minted ‘professional inspectors’ because the councillors were naïve? Or was the reason the opposite – that the councillors were so savvy that they didn’t need to be told about the political dangers of getting involved in this drama, with the insurance people directing the plot. Ask too many critical questions about safety and there could be a news story: “Councillor opposes safe playgrounds to save money” – not a good way to get re-elected. Were the councillors resigned to the Realpolitik of the Safety Industry? Maybe they were.

First the daycare centres Soon after the CSA’s press conference, the Ontario Ministry of Community and Social Services issued a directive to all provincially-funded municipal daycare centres: comply with the new CSA standards in your play equipment or lose your daycare license and send the children home. Inspectors had the power to remove a daycare’s license on the spot.

The effect of the threat was swift. Between 1999 and 2001, more than $11 million of provincial funds was “invested” (using the descriptor on the Toronto Public Health web site) in razing the province’s daycare playgrounds, with additional projected expenditure of $5 million per year until 2004.

Daycares that tried to negotiate to keep some of their equipment found they had more trouble, as inspectors constantly found new “violations”, and returned for frequent re-inspections, at $300 an hour. Some daycares ended up simply removing their outdoor playgrounds altogether, after spending thousands of dollars and still not getting a clean bill.

It got even more complicated. Many daycares are located in schools, and share the school’s playground. In order to keep their licenses, the daycares had to forbid the children to play in the schoolyard playground during daycare hours. Children of kindergarten age could play while they were at their kindergarten class – the Ministry of Education had issued no CSA “compliance” order, since the CSA document was never law, and therefore had no regulations attached to it. But the same children were barred from the same playgrounds during the hours they were under the daycare’s supervision. So shared-use playgrounds started to come down.

Daycare teachers and parents were fit to be tied, as they watched their play equipment being demolished and even the playground shade trees being cut down as a ‘collision hazard.’ But the situation soon got quite a bit worse.

Next the schools In May 1998, two months after the CSA had announced its new playground standards, but before any demolitions had begun, the Ontario School Boards’ Insurance Exchange (OSBIE) issued a special edition of its newsletter. It addressed the need for much more vigilant risk management in the matter of school playgrounds. OSBIE’s newsletter was called The Oracle, and its position on playground dangers was certainly oracular. “Taking risk [sic] is a necessary part of life – it is how our society has progressed. However, taking unnecessary risks is at the least irresponsible, and at worst criminally negligent.” OSBIE declared itself ready and able to guide school boards in how to avoid the criminal kinds of risk. It first stated the problem: “Using actual claims information,

! 12

we know that most playground claims costs are the result of injuries sustained from climbers, swings, and slides…” and then followed with the solution: “In simple terms, if the activity that may cause an injury does not take place, there is absolutely no chance of a loss [lawsuit] resulting from that activity. Applying this to the climber equipment, you can restate this principle to say: ‘If there are no climbers on the playground, then it is impossible to have an injury/loss resulting from the use of a climber.’ Removing existing climbers or avoiding new installations of climbers on playgrounds would be considered a risk avoidance strategy…it is the most effective way of avoiding claims, and should be used for any high-risk activity.”

The newsletter went on to counsel against donated equipment and volunteer installations if at all possible – only commercial playground structures and installers should be used. At the end of the newsletter a “risk management tips” list emphasized again: “Older equipment should be measured against the new CSA standards – if feasible, retrofit to bring it up to standard – if not – REMOVE IT!”

The Toronto District School Board took this to heart. It hired two of the first wave of inspectors from the Canadian Parks and Recreation Association’s new training program and instructed them to rate 1952 pieces of play equipment in 364 school playgrounds, against the new CSA standards. The lead inspector, Jeff Elliot (from Waterloo, where the Frank Cowan Insurance Company had its headquarters), had taken his first inspection training in a U.S. program and had then taken the Canadian course. He set himself up as a freelance playground inspector, with a partner who had taken only the Canadian course. In the spring and early summer of 2000, the two men worked their way through the schoolyards. On Sept.8, Globe and Mail reporter Sean Fine quoted Jeff Elliot about what he found there: “The design and layout contributed to having a criminal element infiltrate the structures. Some of the things I saw made my stomach turn. You’d see stuff broken, liquor bottles, litter and debris, human and pet feces, human vomit, hypodermic needles, homeless people. The design contributed because it provided shelter for them, and the design of the landscape around them deterred anyone, whether it be police or passersby, from seeing them.”

Elliot didn’t specify where he saw these many dirty things and homeless people that made his stomach turn, but his reports resulted in orders for demolitions. The school board called in the Priestly Demolition Company, and no one was able to stop their bulldozers.

The Globe piece reported that the Toronto school playground demolitions were completed in August, at a cost of $700,000 – not including the $130,900 paid to inspector Jeff Elliot’s company for the inspections. The cost of replacing or repairing the equipment was said to be at least $27.5 million. Elliot accused Mike Jones, the Board employee responsible for all schoolyard playgrounds before he retired in the spring of 2000, of “turning a blind eye to life-threatening dangers for 20 years.” Sean Fine quoted Jones in return, saying that “there was not a death or serious injury on playground equipment in his 33 years with the board, with the exception of a drunken teenager who was inadvertently kicked by a friend on a slide.”

* * * * * * At last, a court case This brings us to a short detour, into a rare instance of a playground injury report that gives details, not only a number on a graph.

! 13

Memory plays tricks. Mike Jones began working for the TDSB in 1967. He might have started off working in something other than playgrounds, and not taken detailed notice of a lawsuit that went through the courts in 1976. The lawsuit was based on an accident in a schoolyard playground in 1970. According to the court transcripts, the accident did in fact involve a playground slide, and a teenager, who may not have been drunk at all, but only very foolish. Most of the negligence in this injury was found against the City of Toronto, however, which was at that time using various schoolyard playgrounds in the summertime to offer Parks and Recreation programs.

According to the court transcript, the city had agreed with the school board that their playground equipment would be portable, and not “anchored or affixed” in any way, to avoid damaging the asphalt of the schoolyard. Since the city owned no portable slides (such tippy things didn’t exist), Parks and Recreation staff had sawed off the back legs of 18 wooden slides that were originally designed to be embedded in concrete. These wooden slides were heavy – between 350 and 375 pounds – but even so, they could be pushed over and “toppled” where they were set up in the schoolyards.

On August 31, 1970, three friends, two 15-year old boys and a 13-year-old girl, went to one of these schoolyard playgrounds. The boys rigged up a springy board by inserting a teeter-totter board into the rungs of one of these unmoored schoolyard slides. Then one of the boys jumped up and down on the board. The girl was sitting on the same board, and she saw the slide beginning to shake, and yelled at the boy to stop, but he kept on jumping. At that point, the vibration knocked over the heavy slide and it fell over on her and split her head badly. She had to have several painful reconstructive surgeries on her face, and was left with a long scar and a permanently blocked tear duct. The city’s wooden schoolyard slides had been pushed over other times, before this happened. According to court testimony, there were calls of complaint every season. But it seems no one had ever been seriously hurt before, by a 300-pound slide falling on them! And so nothing was done to fix the problem, not even in the five-year interval between the time the young girl was injured and the $16,000 court judgment against the City. Until the judge found the City negligent and made them pay, the unanchored slides kept being used (and sometimes falling over).

This 1970’s court judgment (the only playground-related court case our research group could find against the City of Toronto, all other reported claims being settled out of court) shows two things: - history gets lost quickly - the unsecured slide in the schoolyard needed no specialist in risk assessment, and no special technical standards. It just needed city staff with better sense, and the authority to fix the problem. Where were those people?

* * * * * *

Alfred Holden tells the school playground story Back to the events of the year 2000. Mike Jones told the Globe and Mail that he had worked for the Toronto School Board designing playgrounds for 33 years, until his retirement in 2000. He had also been part of the CSA Playground standards committee, and some of the time he was its chair. He said, "The standards state very clearly that they are not to be applied to old structures. To say that the play structures are unsafe boggles the mind. Most of the accidents that occur are just the scrapes and bruises of normal play. It's just deplorable and such a waste of taxpayers' money, it really is." And he told the Star: “Never, never, never….Nobody [on the C.S.A. committee] ever imagined this would happen.”

! 14

But neither Jones’ long career with the school board, nor his insider knowledge as a result of his participation in the development of the new CSA standards, seem to have carried any weight. He stopped talking to the media and withdrew into his retirement.

The school playground demolitions in the summer of 2000 caused a scandal, and soon the Canadian Standards Association dissociated itself. The CSA vice president at the time, Grant Carter, said his organization was “as surprised as anyone by the TDSB's actions. Our standard never said that older playgrounds were unsafe. It just applied to new equipment." Another spokesman for the CSA, John Vinsic, said the school board made a mistake when it used the 1998 standard to rate its playgrounds. He used the example, "The new standards for cars say they should all have air bags but that doesn't mean scrap all the old cars that don't have air bags."

On January 9 2001, the Toronto Star ran an article with this caption: “Playground design price: $880,000…Trustees heatedly criticized a plan yesterday to spend nearly $1 million of the money set aside for new playgrounds on designers to create unique plans for each school.” But, like the original demolition plan, the design plan went ahead despite protests.

Journalist and urban historian Alfred Holden wrote a piece about the school playground demolitions for Taddle Creek Magazine, which told what happened next. The school board, having spent nearly $1 million on playground demolitions (counting the inspection fees), and pretty near a million dollars on blue-sky playground replacement planning, told the parents they’d have to raise the money to get playgrounds back into their kids’ schoolyards. The Board’s scheme was that corporations would be glad to be approached for safe-playgrounds money if the school board matched the funds. Holden wrote: “….The busker’s outstretched hand was primed with three million dollars of the board’s money, later doubled to six million dollars, the source of which was not made clear in official releases, though it was apparently scrounged from the board’s own renewal fund, diverted from fixing roofs, boilers, and other building repairs.” Not many companies donated funds. But the planning sessions for the playgrounds did turn up some unsurprising facts about what the school kids wanted in their playgrounds. Alfred Holden: “…During the 2001–2002 winter, Orde Street students in different grades were asked to draw their dream playground. Working up their designs with pens, markers, and crayons, the youngsters may not have known what was good for them, but they knew what they liked: swings (especially tire swings, the most dangerous), tree houses (two, three storeys, reached with long ladders), teeter-totters (or see-saws, best used when there is subtle distrust between players), and fireman’s poles. One drawing showed a stick man walking tightrope-style on the top bar of a swing set. Another suggested a relationship between slides, height, and pleasure.” The hopes of the children and the plans of the risk managers were not in the same universe. And, surprisingly, many parents were closer to the kids than to the safety managers. Alfred Holden wrote: “….In 2000, an era when only a few parents let their kids walk to school, it seemed impossible that those same caregivers—the baby-seat boomers—would refuse to get on the playground safety bandwagon, but they did. “The only logical thing to do is have lawyers to design the playgrounds,” wrote one such parent, Linwood Barclay, the Star’s humour columnist. “Here are some pieces of equipment our kids will soon be playing on,” he continued. “The Litigator Teeter-Totter: As soon as children get on the equipment, they are tied up in red tape so they won’t be thrown off… . The Paralegal Bars: Similar to parallel bars from which kids can hang, but with much lower standing. Children will have to scrunch

! 15

down to get under them… . Contract Bridge: Before children can run across the hanging bridge that links one side of the climber to the other, they must sign a waiver… . The Remand Rink: Kids won’t fall and hit their heads on the ice here. At this rink, there’s always a sign that says it’s closed …” Parents making fun of the safety managers was pretty well what the child safety authorities expected. According to them, parents had been cavalier about their children’s well-being for far too long. From the Health Canada web site: “Unfortunately, as detailed in the recent Health Canada document Parental Attitudes Toward Unintentional Childhood Injuries, parents still feel that risk-taking and getting hurt are naturally occurring aspects of play.... It is clear that there is major work to be done to address these attitudes if parental support is to be garnered to decrease the incidence of playground injuries.” To fight the pervasive parental incompetence in looking after children, as they saw it, public health workers, along with insurance underwriters and risk managers, brought out their alarming injury numbers. But there again they ran up against doubters among parents and the media. Alfred Holden: “…Anyone who did check out the accident statistics found lots of numbers, again not so easy to interpret. Health Canada’s Canadian Hospitals Injury Reporting and Prevention Program reported 4,261 playground-related injuries that required hospital visits in 1996, out of a database of 646,335 injuries of all types to all people….. The most common injuries were fractures, bruises, cuts, and minor head injury. Just under half of the kids were sent home with no treatment or treatment requiring no follow-up. The number of fatal injuries was zero. [Globe and Mail columnist] Margaret Wente reported, “Some people have died on these pieces of equipment, an insurance official told me this summer. She couldn’t say who, or when, or how, or whether this was in Ontario.” Checking around, Wente found that “no children have died on school equipment in Ontario since 1987, the year they started keeping provincial statistics.” But neither the outrage of the parents, nor the retractions of the CSA, nor the questions in the media, could reverse what had been done to the schoolyard playgrounds.

I asked a young landscape architect who was my neighbour, whether she had ever had any playground courses in her education. She sent me back this e-mail: “Oh —no —definitely no course in University on playground design. When I was in school I never would have guessed that I would be designing playgrounds! haha. “ There is no formal course or training that I know for playground design except for a CSA (Canadian Standards Association) manual that deals strictly with safety (usually things like fall heights, surfacing etc., fairly technical and mostly related to equipment). I have never taken any course, but have designed many playgrounds... A lot of landscape architects and even architects have been designing playgrounds. Right after the City decided to clear most of the playgrounds for safety concerns, the TDSB sent out a massive blanket order in which selected firms (mostly landscape architects & architects) were assigned to 7-10 schools to act as playground facilitator and designer. We were assigned 7 in the west-end area, and our scope involved doing a Master Plan (ultimate ideal situation if budget allowed), and a Phase 1 detail design (in which due to low-budgets, most schools decided to just rebuild the equipment).”

Or to stay with the bare ground.

….And the park playgrounds came after that The school board became the mean poster child of Toronto playground demolition,

because the demolition bulldozers were so obvious and brutal, and they left 172 school playgrounds empty or with big gaps.

! 16

On October 2, 2000, Toronto city councillors on the Economic Development and Parks committee called the chairs of the two Toronto School Boards on the carpet at city hall. They wanted to join their constituents in expressing their outrage about the schoolyard demolitions. They berated the school board officials about unilaterally removing twenty-four playground structures that had been shared-use installations in schoolyards, which the city had helped to fund. The councillors voted to recommend to Council “that any future City of Toronto funding for [school playgrounds] be conditional upon the [school board] agreeing to consult with the City and parents” and they also voted that the school boards “be requested to hold community consultation meetings prior to any school playground equipment being dismantled in the future…”. Last, the councillors instructed City staff to “prepare a list of school playgrounds and other school facilities, such as pools and kitchens that have been partially paid for by the City, that are being threatened, and submit said list [to the school boards] with a legal opinion which would protect the city’s investment as soon as possible…”

But this was a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Toronto’s city councillors must have had amnesia. With the councillors’ approval, the

same process of playground demolition was quietly going on in their own parks. The Mayor’s motion to get started was adopted by City Council on October 1, 1998. The councillors had got an update from the Commissioner nine months before the reprimand delivered to the school board. Two months before the school board officials were invited to come to City Hall and eat crow, the Economic Development and Parks Committee had passed – without any public consultation – the city’s “playground revitalization program,” which city staff also called the CSA Playground Compliance Program. This was a huge project, involving replacements at 54 sites and repairs at 728 sites. The projected cost was $5.65 million, including the $1.6 million allocated in 1999 and another $4.0 million to complete the program.

In their first progress report, August 27 2000, the City’s project staff had boasted to the committee of Council that they were moving fast. They had originally hoped to replace 18 playgrounds and complete ‘repairs’ to approximately 60 sites by the end of 2000, but in fact they were doing even better than their projections. “…the program is currently operating on an advanced schedule. Time and cost efficiencies have been achieved through favourable bid prices, the economies of issuing multiple tenders and effective in-situ program management.”

No further details were asked or given, and there was no provision for public meetings in these transactions. If a matter required “compliance” with a safety standard, what business did the public have meddling in that? Playground safety was an issue of professional risk management, and the Parks staff congratulated themselves – sharing the glory with the councillors – for their economies. The staff reported that on some playgrounds they had managed to stay well below the $28,500 authorized by city council, installing very cheap goods. Still the playground project was no bargain. It had a projected cost of over $5 million. And that was all borrowed money, adding to the city’s debt. Did the councillors justify all this new debt by thinking about the money they’d be saving the city in lawsuits?

Although the CSA Playground Compliance Program was going so well, there was still one fly in the ointment. City staff noted: “Currently there are no mandatory requirements anywhere in Canada to control design, construction and maintenance of playgrounds or playground equipment.”

! 17

The staff report did not connect the dots – if this is not law, why are we borrowing $5 million and trashing our playgrounds to “comply”? Perhaps it was part of the city councillors Realpolitik. What matters now is not what the law says, but what Insurance says.

There were many unhappy parents and calls to councillors. Most of the new playgrounds were so boring that their use went down sharply. But the Parks staff tactics were fundamentally different than those of the school board. There were no empty spaces – the Parks project immediately replaced each playground they removed with a shiny new plastic structure. People who complained about the replacement of fine wooden playgrounds with cheap plastic got a lecture on safety – would you rather have a child die?

Risk journalism The same finger was being wagged all across the country. In its March 2001 issue, Today’s Parent Magazine, found in every doctor’s office, published an article “A Level Playing Field: What’s with all the playground paranoia?” by Lisa Kellar. The piece is a good example of the participation of the media in shoring up the platform for the risk industry. It began with sympathetic references to playgrounds “ripped out” and now “barren,” the “singsong rhythm of children’s voices” gone, the “dismay” of people strolling by the “craters” left where the “twisty slides, monkey bars and teeter-totters” used to be. But it soon changed to cautioning that playgrounds can indeed be dangerous and even fatal to children. It introduced the new CSA Standards by saying that “for parents and kids, what it boils down to are fewer serious injuries.” The first illustration offered was the elimination of playground equipment that causes children to be strangled when their scarves and drawstrings catch on slides or swings.

A mother who spoke against the schoolyard demolitions was opposed in the next paragraph by the reporter’s regret that although doctors and other safety advocates worked for two years to make the CSA guidelines, there was still no legal requirement for enforcement. “The problem is, the new standards they laboured over are still nothing more than voluntary guidelines in most jurisdictions.”

Yet the death and injury toll may be severe, said the article. Seventeen playground-related deaths spread over nineteen years were given as a sure figure, but the magazine hinted at even more: lacking a central registry “officials can only speculate about how many children have actually died through the years on play structures.” As for injuries, the article goes on to cite the number used by the school board: “in 1997, 28,000 children were hurt in playgrounds.” The reporter’s conclusion: “However you read the numbers, an awful lot of children are hurt every year in playgrounds, many seriously.”

The article in Today’s Parent practices a common kind of inoculation journalism. It reports on the outcry from parents. It quotes former TDSB playground manager Mike Jones at some length about the wrong-headedness of tearing down equipment, ending with his calling the teardowns "an outrageous misuse of the standard." Having given the critics their moment, the writer returns to the high road of safety. “Rhetoric aside, the bottom line for parents is the safety of their kids…” The magazine balances the “rhetoric” of Mike Jones with the clearer vision of experts like the Ontario School Board’s insurance risk manager, David Beal: "You can't really put a dollar amount on safety... every claim is a real person who's injured," he says. And the magazine gives a thumbnail sketch of a woman in Ottawa who spent “hundreds of hours” making sure that her son’s schoolyard playground was CSA-compliant, and fundraising to add even more compliant equipment. To finish off the piece, the magazine gives a little list of web resources. All the players in the playground removal campaign are there – the Canadian Standards Association, the Canadian Parks and Recreation Association, CHIRRP, and Safe Kids Canada, and then one more: the “International Play

! 18

Equipment Manufacturers Association,” which is “working toward universal voluntary compliance with CSA standards among the 15 or so Canadian playground equipment manufacturers. As of April 1 the site will publish a directory of all certified products.” The playground companies have the last word.

A contractor friend who took the inspector course just to see what they were saying, told me that after taking the course he began to receive almost daily brochures from playground manufacturers, who get the student mailing list from the course instructors. “The fox is in the henhouse,” my contractor friend said, “and he’s got all the eggs.”

Maya Litman’s obsession One day in November of 2001, a large and interesting play structure at Sibelius Park in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood was removed by city workers as part of the CSA Playground Compliance Program. It was replaced a few weeks later by a CSA-certified bargain-basement structure, costing only $14,355, from the Belair Playground Equipment Company. This company had recently been sold by its former owner, Bryan Belair. The playground world was pretty small. Mr.Belair was (and continues to be) an active member of the CSA technical playground standards committee that mandated the removal of play structures like the one at Sibelius Park. His son Scott Belair owned a playground inspection company and was doing curriculum development for the Canadian Parks and Recreation Association’s inspector-school curriculum.

Child therapist Maya Litman and her family lived two blocks from the park, but Maya hadn’t heard anything about the CSA program until she visited the playground with her three young children just after the switch and found the much-loved play structure gone – replaced by an uninspiring arrangement of cheap plastic. She called her city councillor, in outrage, but got nowhere. Councillor Chow’s office explained that it was an issue of safety.

Maya was not frightened off by the word “safety.” She told everyone who would listen that children needed to grow up well, and in the full enjoyment of their physical skills, not in the kind of safety straightjacket prescribed by the new Parks playground safety police. So she began a three-year quest to chronicle playground destruction, and to save the playgrounds that had not yet been spoiled. She talked to parents at playgrounds and collected protest signatures – over 2000 by the time she tried to deliver them to the mayor (but he was out of the country). She tried – with limited success – “the story’s been done already” – to get interviews in newspapers and television. She berated Parks workers when she came upon them dismantling the playgrounds with their tractors.

The playground workers were often sympathetic. Apparently their assignment of trashing so many good playground structures, some less than ten years old, was wearing on them. She asked one of the workers if they knew of the CSA. "He said, ‘Of course we do. We have to take those crazy courses. It's all manufacturers.’ I said: ‘It's a money pit.’ And the guy says: ‘A money pit – I'd call it more of an empire! They've built themselves an empire!’" Maya began to e-mail me reports of what she found as she travelled around the playgrounds with her children, tracking the equipment removals.

“At Hillcrest Park today, a 13 year-old girl told me she has grown up at the playground and loves it. I asked her what they removed and she said they used to have a merry-go-round.

“What is bothering many people is that the City workers will randomly pull out pieces of equipment from some parks and not others. And they will pull out structures that are in perfect condition, for seemingly no reason at all! There are merry-go-rounds around the city (Christie Pits, for example). Tire swings are everywhere in North York, but have all been yanked from downtown Toronto…why? There are twirly slides all over the city, yet

! 19

many, many downtown parks have had theirs yanked out. They are exactly the same twirly slide! Even the same manufacturer! All this beautiful equipment then gets crushed and thrown in the garbage. It just makes me sick.

“Many people are also very angry about the secrecy. Nobody knows what’s going on. A kid at Graham Park said they were all in shock when they came out to the park one day, and it had disappeared!

“Notice all the references from the Parks management in the community papers to replacing old equipment, adding equipment. From my observations, many playgrounds just LOSE equipment. E.g. Winston Churchill Park just lost monkey bars. Huron Park just lost its tire climber and 4-seater bouncy thing; Hillcrest and Village by the Grange parks just lost their tire climbers and merry-go-round. Nothing ever came back. I don’t know what they’re talking about.”

Arsenic Although the Dufferin Grove playground had lost bits of its equipment (the jiggly bridge and the fireman’s pole and the chain climber) by the time Maya began her research, the rest of the playground was still standing. There were so many other things going on in the park that I didn’t pay much attention. That changed at the beginning of 2003, when the Dufferin Grove playground was suddenly in the news – as a hot spot for arsenic in the wooden playground frame.

The whistle-blower this time was not the Canadian Standards Association, but an environmental group called Environmental Defense Canada. I had never heard of them until they called a press conference on January 9 2003, to release their report on arsenic levels in pressure-treated wooden playground structures in Toronto parks. The report showed many photos of Dufferin Grove Park. They had tested a single soil sample in each of a number of Toronto parks and had found that Dufferin Grove Park playground registered the second-highest arsenic levels in the city - 48.2 parts per million. That news made it into all the papers, and a TV crew came to film the ‘poisoned’ Dufferin Grove playground.

A week later the City published its own report about playground arsenic levels, based on testing that had been done all over the city during the previous summer. The testing company had taken four soil samples per park, and on its list Dufferin Park playground showed up as being fine. The Dufferin Grove playground samples showed arsenic levels much lower than the Environmental Defense sample, and lower than the federal government’s safe limit (12 parts per million was considered safe, and in fact that’s a level often found in nature). Whom to believe? At the very least, playground users thought we should re-test. But the City said, no. Re-testing would be very expensive. I called Steve Ruminsky, the City’s Richmond Hill environmental consultant from Decommissioning Consulting Services Limited. He said that the actual lab cost is only $18 per sample, but the technician to collect the 6 new samples we wanted would cost between $500 and $600, and the interpretation of the results would bring the consulting company’s fee up to $1000 plus lab costs. Too much money! But then an e-mail arrived from a park friend, offering help. Veronica Pochmursky was a regular shinny-hockey player at Dufferin Grove outdoor ice rink. She had been employed doing soil testing for the Ontario government for many years. She said she’d be glad to take the samples, and Environmental Defense agreed to send the samples to the lab they had used for the original test at Dufferin Grove. With Veronica’s help we could do our own interpretation. So on April 26 2003 – Environment Day – BoAnne Tran, a staff person

! 20

from Environmental Defense, came to the park and joined Veronica in taking seven new samples, with many park users observing. From the park newsletter: “Now the results have come back. They show even lower readings of arsenic than the Parks Division study showed, ranging from 1.2ppm (parts per million) to 4.1ppm, with the exception of one sample at 7.7ppm. Even that unusually high sample is still well below the acceptable level of 12 parts arsenic per million parts of sand. We shared the cost of the re-testing with Environmental Defense, 50/50. Each of the seven samples cost $17.33, so our portion was $51.66.” The Environmental Defense people agreed that their single sample must have been a mistake – perhaps it had accidentally incorporated a cigarette butt? But despite Dufferin Grove’s very low arsenic readings, Bo Anne wrote back: “I know you were concerned and hesitant about replacing the structure. Do you have any plans to seal the wood?” I called her and said, no, why would we change anything at all? She said, “just to be really sure the kids are safe.” As the conversation went on, it became clear that this young environmentalist still felt that it would be better to replace the wood with a plastic structure. And there was no hint that her organization’s sloppy testing and false alarm, causing extra work and expense and anxiety, required any apology. It seems that environmental concerns sometimes move closer to religion than science. Arsenic, a naturally occurring material found in trace amounts in a city playground, must be poisonous, and the cure must require funding, consulting, reporting, and then more funding for an environmental “remediation.” In this case, the ideal remediation proposed by the environmentalists was conversion to plastic. Strange bedfellows: environmentalists and the plastics industry. The arsenic scare was debunked at Dufferin Grove Park. But many of the kids and parents who use the playground said they were a little disappointed. They had already made plans for a big neighbourhood playground-sealing event, everyone with paint brushes, wearing old shirts, protecting their lovely playground against Bad Chemicals. There was to be a campfire with hot dogs at the side, and potluck cookies and cakes from home – “it would have been like an old-fashioned barn raising, I was really looking forward to it….” said one of the parents. A few weeks later, on the annual “Mayor’s Cleanup Day,” some parents brought paintbrushes and cans of different-coloured paints from home. They painted over some graffiti, and then they painted a few slats on the playground’s other wooden play structures, and then a few more, until about a quarter of the wooden slats were red, or green, or blue, or orange. By the end of the afternoon, when the mottled antique metal climber had been painted bright yellow, and everything was marked with “caution wet paint” signs, the painters said they were satisfied. They had marked their affection for their playground by painting it some pretty colours, but stopped short of making it garish. They looked happy, finishing up with free pizza at the park ovens.

Arsenic testing contracts The difference between our arsenic testing cost and the cost cited by the consultant was so extreme it made us wonder about the City-contracts gravy-train. I looked up the City Council committee reports to find out more about what the City paid for their arsenic checks of the other park playgrounds. I read: “Comprehensive Base Material Study of the soil and ground coverings of 82 locations and develop a Base Material Remediation Strategy will cost $90,000.” In other words, by those numbers it would have cost over $1000 per playground for the company to take four samples, have them analyzed for arsenic, and then write a report that says the structures over 12 parts per million

! 21

should be painted with an oil-based penetrating sealant and the sand should be removed, trucked away, and replaced. Painting all the wooden structures with sealant was quoted at another $1000 per playground. The city’s budget chief wrote on his web site that in 2003 the city allocated $200,000 to seal these 57 of the city’s 209 CCA-treated wood playgrounds. This was puzzling – the June 2002 staff report had estimated a cost of $300,000 to seal 209 wooden playground structures; had the City ended up spending $200,000 to seal only the 57 that might need it? I wrote to the budget chief ’s office twice to see if I had misunderstood his website item, but his staff never replied. That silence made me more curious about Maya’s stories of entire playgrounds disappearing overnight, and how much this was really going to cost the City in the end.

Supplier contracts In the fall of 2003 I contacted some technical staff whom I knew within Parks, and after following up five different leads, I was referred to the Supervisor of the Landscape and Environment Policy and Development, in the Capital Projects Section. I asked him the cost of replacing entire playgrounds, in the cases where that had happened. And what were the names of a couple of playground equipment companies he used the most, when buying replacement play structures? A month later he replied, saying that the city had limited the Parks Branch to $28,500 “per unit.” As for the two playground companies the city used the most: “…I do not believe one or two companies have dominated the market place but rather six or seven firms all seem to have a good chance at submitting a successful bid.” This answer was pretty tricky, and it bothered me over the winter. More than that, some of us were beginning to wonder – would Dufferin Grove Park lose its structure too? In April 2004 I wrote to the City supervisor in charge of arranging the actual playground repairs. “Could you please let me know whether there are currently any plans to remove the play structure at Dufferin Grove Park, and if so, when?” He wrote back that the park would get “a brand new play structure in 2006.” He may have thought that was a very nice, reassuring thing to say, so that I wouldn’t worry we were being left out. But of course it was rather bad news. I wrote again: “Who selects the playground equipment that's proposed for our park? Could you connect me with them so we can find out what it looks like?” The supervisor said that selection was up to him, since he was now in charge, but that there would be a public meeting at some point. In May I wrote to his boss, a life-long Parks employee named Frank Kershaw, now the director of Policy and Development, to ask for the 1998 CSA playground inspection reports. That way we could see what was supposed to be wrong with the Dufferin Grove playground, and we could compare its evaluation with other playgrounds that had lost equipment. We might as well get started. There was no answer, so I wrote and asked again. Still no reply, so on May 20 2004 our CELOS research group submitted a freedom of information request asking for the inspection reports. This request was already moving through the system when the director replied. He sent me a copy of the council minutes approving the CSA “playground enhancement” program. I wrote that we had seen the council minutes on the city web site already, we needed the inspection reports. He wrote back saying the matter of inspection was not his responsibility, and referring me to the general manager of Parks and Recreation. I tagged him back, saying that the council minutes gave him, not the general manager, as the official contact.

! 22

After that there was more silence. Frank Kershaw was a nature lover who had worked for years to protect the ravines around Toronto. He had overseen the comeback of the native plants in meadows and along bike paths, the renaming of bad “swamps” to good “wetlands” and the efforts to protect the city’s watershed. The accident of Toronto’s forced amalgamation with the surrounding boroughs had put him in charge of overall Planning and Development, which now included destroying playgrounds and having his planning staff pick cheap plastic substitutes from slick catalogues. This was nothing he knew much about, nor, probably, wanted to know. I heard that he was counting the days to retirement, and he retired soon after. The absence of answers to the questions I was asking made me even more curious. On June 12 2004 CELOS submitted another freedom of information request, asking for the list of which companies had sold new playground structures to the City. Then on July 8 we submitted the other part of the question, also to Freedom of Information. Which companies had got the playground repair contracts, what repairs did they do, and how much did they get paid? The playground equipment suppliers list came in the mail on July 20. Total number of firms: 7. Of those, there were two companies that got the lion’s share of the 45 contracts for new Parks playground equipment. Henderson Playgrounds plus Belair Playground Equipment together had contracts adding up to $696,613. That was a bit under 70% of the total amount spent on playground replacement. Why did the playground construction supervisor say there were no companies that “dominated the market place”? And – just as unsettling – both Henderson and Belair had been on the CSA playground standards committee, working out the new 1998 standards. Bryan Belair had sold his company several years later (and started up a new playground company, KSL, a few years after that). His son Scott Belair, who had his own playground inspection company, also sat on the Canadian Playground Safety Institute’s (CPSI) “Standardized Inspection and Audit Reporting Working Group.” By 2003, the year before my Freedom of Information request, Scott Belair was one of four people listed on the CPRA web site who worked with Tony Lake, the head of the “Safety Institute” and the owner of an Alberta playground company, to develop the institute’s 2004-2007 business plan. “The primary goal of the plan,” says the Canadian Parks and Recreation Association’s web site, “was to establish the Playground Safety Institute as the flagship entry into the training market for CPRA.” Six of the seven playground companies that got the Toronto Parks playground replacement contracts were listed on the Canadian Parks and Recreation Association website as paying the special high-end $1250 “comprehensive” yearly membership rate. In this way they could help sustain the organization which was running the courses for the inspectors who then went on to condemn and replace the existing play structures with the new ones, which these commercial CPRA members could then sell to those of their fellow CPRA members who worked for municipal Parks departments and were in charge of ordering new equipment. If that’s how it all worked, “comprehensive” would be a good word for the arrangement.

I looked up the Henderson Playground Equipment website. The home page had a little framed homily about natural play:

“Once upon a time, playtime meant something more than it does today. Children freely explored neighbouring fields and vacant lots, cluttered alleys and wild woods. They climbed trees, made friends with the frogs and the caterpillars, and built one-of-a-kind forts with their friends. They cultivated a growing sense of independence and a deep relationship with the natural world around them.

! 23

“Times have changed, but playtime doesn’t have to. You’ve discovered Henderson PlayWood – a commercial playsystem rooted in the natural world, but built to today’s exacting standards. For over thirty years, the Henderson family has brought safe and enriching playspaces to communities across North America and abroad. Now it’s your turn to rediscover play the way nature intended.” The pictures on the web site bore not the slightest resemblance to nature. Henderson was then selling modular wood and plastic structures with a lot of vertical bars. Many of the structures looked a bit like jails.

Maya’s research, with help from her friends The day after I got the list of playground manufacturers, Maya Litman forwarded me an e-mail exchange from her friend and neighbour Geoff Rayes. He had sent her a link to a news item about playground injuries, with his acerbic commentary: “Look at this: in 2002 the injury numbers were actually UP from when the playgrounds were torn out, especially in Toronto, with hospital admissions up from 77 to 96. And it’s the same in other parts of Canada. And look what they say in this report from the Canadian Institute of Health Information: “overall the rate of playground injuries has not decreased after the Toronto legislation…” What are they talking about, what Toronto legislation? That’s a lie! There was no legislation! And yet you can see, they can’t hide the fact that the playground demolitions aren’t making the kids any safer at all!!” I had read about the increase in playground injuries in the newspapers. After I read Maya’s email I called her and asked if I could come over for coffee so she could explain the whole story that she’d figured out so far, and I would pay better attention than I had up until then. Maya told me to come over the next day, but to be sure to stop off at Sibelius Park and see what had been done to their playground. So I cycled by the Sibelius Park on my way to Maya’s house. The playground had several very simple plastic pieces, a climber and some swings that were attached too high even for me to get up on the seat easily, with short chains. The whole business was inside a little fenced enclosure. One of the plastic bits had already cracked and was missing a chunk. I was there in the middle of a July weekday afternoon, and there were not many children in the playground. One thing was unusual – the playground had many cheap plastic toys scattered about, semi-broken riding toys and a lot of little trucks. They had obviously been brought to the park by playground users – perhaps to compensate for the lack of fun on the climber? In the years that followed, masses of semi-broken plastic toys would sprout in a lot of the other new playgrounds, like mushrooms, brought there by parents and child-minders who were trying to enliven playgrounds that were often so dull. When I got to Maya’s house, she had laid out Danish pastries and fruit and coffee. She had invited her sister Sarah, and her neighbours Geoff and Linda. All of them had been working with Maya on her playground mission. Linda showed me her photographs of Sibelius playground before it was demolished. She had photographed her children playing there over the years, even in the winter. The photos showed a complex structure full of children climbing, sliding, hanging from monkey bars, and generally goofing around. “All of this was destroyed,” they told me. Maya’s husband was a family doctor who had done shifts in emergency rooms for many years. He told her that the CHIRPP database of emergency room admissions was casual and poorly controlled, and that no reliable research existed for Canadian playground injuries. So Maya had searched the internet (including her husband’s medical database) for anything else on playground injuries, and built up her files.

! 24

It seemed that European and American injury data in the 1990s, before the CSA “standards” came out, had already shown pretty clearly that there was little or no correlation between playground alterations and lower injury rates. Maya handed me an envelope of photocopies and printouts of the articles she had found, and I put them in my bag to read at home. Maya told me that the previous summer, 2003, the CSA had actually revised its playground standards. One reason for the revision was that in some parts of the 1998 report, millimeters had accidentally been written as inches. If builders of play equipment used inches to measure their structures when they were building them, their equipment might not conform to the CSA standard because of the CSA’s own error.

Geoff read out the revised standard’s description of the committee’s composition: “The Playspaces and Equipment Technical Committee is composed of volunteer members representing stakeholders likely to be affected by the standard.”

“The list of stakeholders likely to be affected,” said Maya, includes “no parents, no teachers, no artists, no kids. – only the buyers and the sellers! How can they do that??” Maya pulled one of the articles out of my envelope, from a 1995 international meeting on playground safety held at Pennsylvania State University. Participants were discussing the lack of consultation with playground users. Standards and advice in many cases, she read out, “are usually the domain of industry and trade,” and “narrow commercial interests.” “See? Here they actually admit it!” said Maya. Geoff was the strongest conspiracy theorist. He had clipped the business column from the Thursday July 8, 2004 Montreal Gazette, which he said had also run in the Victoria Times-Colonist, Regina Leader-Post and Saskatoon Star-Phoenix. CanWest reporter Deirdre McMurdy had entitled her column “Playgrounds hot as child-obesity concerns climb.”

Geoff read from her article: “the playground industry is a highly competitive and fast-growing global business…. The proliferation of licensed day-care facilities, which must install play equipment that meets certain standards, has also contributed to surging demand. “It's quite a cutthroat business, very competitive,” said David Romano of the Outdoor Play Co. in Aldergrove, B.C., a manufacturer and designer of playground systems. “We're up against some big U.S. rivals in this market.”…Given that the design, construction and installation of a playground ranges from $20,000 to $125,000 in Canada, it takes considerable commitment to build and maintain a playground. That amount is just for equipment.

“Added Jody Marr of Winnipeg-based Playgrounds-R-Us: “It's all very grassroots stuff - bake sales, car washes, corporate sponsors and donors. That's where the money comes from now, with the exception of some provincial grants here and there.” The need to finance playgrounds privately has escalated to the point where most suppliers offer complimentary fundraising consulting to client groups.

“It's a standard part of what our network of distributors do now - offer local market advice and strategy on raising money to pay for playground equipment," said Deanna Gaetz of Romperland, a manufacturer with continent-wide sales, based in Humboldt, Sask. ….”

“See what I mean?” Geoff said. “Everybody’s in each other’s pockets, and they’ve got it so that people are falling for this, spending all their spare time raising money so these playground companies can make it past the ‘cut-throat competition!’ This has nothing to do with play, it’s just using kids, and their families, to build up business!” He brought out a spiral-bound booklet called the Playground Project Manual for Volunteer Groups, a project from Calgary. The booklet was jointly authored by Calgary Public Health, Parks and Rec, and lots of manufacturers. It was, he read out, “A manual distributed free to volunteer playground groups in Calgary,” and it thanked Calgary Parks and

! 25

Recreation, the Calgary Board of Education, eleven playground equipment companies, and the Rocky View School Division #41 Grounds Department for all their contributions. The booklet’s main messages were (1) volunteers must put themselves in the hands of playground companies and (2) playground equipment should be replaced every fifteen years. Volunteers should make sure to attend the annual Calgary playground fair, where they could “speak one-on-one to representatives of playground equipment and surfacing companies…Selecting a playground company with experienced designers is key to having a fun and safe playground design.”

Children should be included in playground planning, the booklet said: “cut out of a catalogue pictures of acceptable equipment pieces” and then have the kids vote on what to buy. If volunteers were helping to install the equipment, make sure no children are allowed on the site. “Ways that children can be involved include….writing and drawing thank you cards…creating and practising cheers that they can perform for the volunteers during break time…Also, let them have a guided ‘tour’ from outside the safety fence during a volunteer break time. Explain to them how the project will be done.” There was a section called “Grand Opening Celebration…Your playground supplier or other supplier may be able to provide door prizes or give-aways, e.g. promotional t-shirts or sample packs of sunscreen.”

And the booklet emphasized the need to thank volunteers. It recommended giving each volunteer this poem to show how much their efforts were appreciated: What are Volunteers? Volunteers are like Coke -they’re the real thing Volunteers are like Pan Am -they make the going great Volunteers are like Pepsi -they’ve got a lot to give Volunteers are like VO5 hair spray -their goodness holds in all kinds of weather Volunteers are like Hallmark Cards -they care enough to give their very best Volunteers are like Standard Oil -you expect more and you get it But most of all… Volunteers are like Frosted Flakes -they’re GRRRRRREAT! (Author unknown) Geoff was a good reader, and the banality of this paen to playground-erecting volunteers, a poem made up entirely of advertising jingles, had everyone around Maya’s table laughing until the tears ran by the time he had finished the list.

After the mood settled back down, I brought out the playground supplier list and some other bits and pieces that I had patched together. The playground construction manager had written me an update, saying that 49 of the 50 identified replacements had been completed, and that his staff had also completed about 80% of the “repairs only” category. Meantime, “the plan has grown to $6.3 million due to inflation…” Maya had a hard time with that. The “repairs only” was clearly a very large part of the project, but she had been seeing very little repair. The list of playground manufacturers that I got through freedom of information listed 48 playground contracts, for a total cost of

! 26

$1,048,410. That left more than $5 million for repairs, which the construction manager said were 80% done. Maya said, “okay….where are they?” I said, City Council originally approved replacements at 54 sites and repairs at 728 sites. If they’re only replacing 50, that means they had to do what they call repairs at 732 playgrounds. That could run you a lot of money, depending on what they do. Maya said, “it could. But there ought to be more signs of it. I can’t find much repair, and I’ve been at so many playgrounds.” Maya had gone to see Brenda Librecz, the general manager of Parks and Recreation. Brenda hadn’t been able to answer most of Maya’s questions. They had agreed that Maya would send the questions by e-mail, and Brenda would consult with her staff and respond in detail within two weeks. Maya said she would forward it to all of us when it arrived. Geoff had talked to a lawyer neighbour of his a few days ago, and the guy told him that for sure, this was not about kids’ safety, this was about the city wanting to lower its insurance premiums. Geoff had tried to find out through the city’s web site what the city’s premiums are, and what kind of claims the insurance companies are paying out for injuries in playgrounds, but the information wasn’t there. Maya had asked her Parks supervisor contact, but he said the front-line staff are never told details like that. Maya had even asked the general manager about insurance but Brenda said she wasn’t sure she could find out, because insurance claims were handled by a different division of the city. So I said I’d wait for Maya to send me Brenda’s answers to all her questions, and if the insurance information wasn’t there, I’d put in another freedom of information request. I went home and read the articles in the thick envelope that Maya had given me. It turns out that there’s a Centre for Decision Analysis and Risk Management in England at Middlesex University, School of Health and Social Sciences, and Maya had printed off whole sections of a book done by their head, Professor David Ball. This was risk management central, quoting material from all over the world, and it sounded as though what was now happening in Toronto with playgrounds had started earlier in many of those places, apparently with the same results: “over the past decade, during which there have been many playground safety interventions, coupled perhaps with less usage of playgrounds, there is as yet no sign of a downward trend in overall numbers of injury cases… There is no evidence in the UK data….which indicates softer surfaces present a lower risk of fracture than harder surfaces.”

And from a large study in Australia: “- equipment was involved in less than one-third of the cases – the upper limb was the most common injury location; head injuries accounted for 20% of cases and few warranted hospital admission – although climbing frames and monkey bars were associated with most of the equipment-related injuries, fairly few involved head impact with the ground – fall distance was not found to be a factor in relation to medically-assessed injury severity – head injuries rated as ‘severe’ more commonly resulted from collisions, either with equipment, other children or fencing/containment rather than from direct falls to the ground despite observations that few playgrounds in the study had much in the way of impact absorbing surfacing. Few of the head injuries classified as severe affected the skull, the majority being facial or dental injuries.”

And from another British study of injuries in school playgrounds: “7589 cases, of which they examined every 7th record: 1085. Of all these injuries only 3.3% involved playground equipment. The rest were sports, trip and fall on level ground, pushing, etc. From 1986 to 1999, 14 deaths happened in the UK in playgrounds, but of those only 3 or 4 were actually related to equipment (others included a fall from a school roof, hit by a playground service vehicle, collapse of a brick pier, etc.)”

! 27

Maya had also photocopied a paper sent to Linda Joe on June 25 2004, by Tammy Lipskie, Senior Analyst, Child Injury Division, Health Canada, about some research being conducted at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. It included a note from the author: “For your additional information I have included an abstract of their results that were presented earlier this month at the 7th World Conference on Injury Prevention and Control.” The researchers had concluded that the new school playgrounds were safer than the old ones, but the article gave no specifics about type or seriousness of injuries. The data were supplied by the Ontario School Board Insurance Exchange, which had pushed for the demolitions in the first place, and arguably had a strong interest in justifying them. And the findings were quite odd – the children at the schools with new playgrounds had fewer non-equipment-related injuries as well as equipment-related, whereas the children at the schools with the old playgrounds had more injuries than in previous years, on the same playground structures as formerly. Maya had written alternative conclusions to those of the researchers, at the bottom of the paper. “At the new-equipment schools there were fewer injuries on or off the equipment,” she wrote, “because all the kids were playing less. The new play structures were so bad that the kids were disheartened, they were sitting there at recess and getting fat.”

And “at the old-equipment schools,” Maya wrote, “the teachers told me they now have to report every little scrape.” The study had made no effort to address changes in patterns of playground use or in reporting. Nor was there any specific information about types of injuries. The study would have got a failing grade in an undergrad research-design course. It was, in short, a shameful piece of work. Maya had stapled a newspaper article from the Montreal Gazette to a printout of Health Canada’s original web item about careless parents who needed to be made more concerned for their children’s safety in playgrounds. Seven years after Health Canada’s call to arms about dangerous playgrounds and foolish parents, the Canadian Parks and Recreation Association was quoted in the Gazette reminding parents that free play is important. “There isn't a lot of unstructured time left for kids to just play, and it's not something many adults remember to emphasize," says Glenn McLean of the Canadian Parks and Recreation Association in Ottawa. "But when it comes to developing social skills, imagination, physical abilities - and a lifetime habit of activity - free play is critical.” So the parents still didn’t have it right! Before they were being far too casual about their children’s safety, now they were being overprotective.

Mr. McLean went on to explain that after the CSA guidelines had morphed into rules, “school boards and municipalities were terrified of losing their insurance if they didn't comply….it was very much a pre-emptive strike,” with arsenic worries hitting the “sector” as well. However, all was now better, said Mr.McLean: “a new balance has emerged, in part because of initiatives like the Playground Safety Institute in Leduc, Alta., which offers courses and certification for playground ‘auditors.’ ” This group, it will be recalled, was the one sponsored by the Canadian Parks and Recreation Association in 1998 to give the alarmist playground inspection courses that contributed to so much destruction in the first place. Its head was also the president of an Alberta playground equipment company. Now the CPRA not only wanted to distance itself from the “almost universally condemned” cheap plastic equipment put in to replace what was purged – more than that, it wanted to give its Alberta protégée Tony Lake the credit for creating “a new balance.” Glenn McLean didn’t mention that he and Tony Lake were close colleagues, and that in fact they managed the Playground Safety Institute, which he was praising, together for the CPRA. Maya had written “shameless” at the bottom of the piece.

! 28

City Hall to Maya Maya received her response from general manager Brenda Librecz the day after our coffee. It showed that Brenda’s staff had not a shred of doubt that they were doing good. There were some new numbers, too: “$4,941,590 has been spent on additions or replacements of major equipment components like swings, slides, sand replacement, labour and machinery…$800,000 has been approved for the “Play Area Enhancement Program for 2004.” And from 2005 on, park staff intended to ask for $1 million a year to keep enhancing.

To Maya’s question: “How can we access the inspection reports of past and present playgrounds?” The general manager had replied by sending only one sample inspection report, making it clear that the reports were too technical to be useful for a lay person: “Our playground inspection reports are working copies for staff to use to determine what work needs to be done at each site. These documents include abbreviated information and industry codes and notes from staff. We have included a copy of one full audit report for your review that gives you an example of the detail and pictures that accompany each file.”

In answer to Maya’s criticisms of the replacement structure at Sibelius Park, the general manager told her she was mistaken. “Based on the attached images of the old play structure at Sibelius, the wood play structure looks big but actually had very few play elements of value on it…The replacement playground did not achieve the same platform heights as the original playground, but incorporated play components with very close to the same play value of what was originally there.”

Maya’s question: what was the process for determining playground replacement under the CSA program? The general manager: “Staff identified 49 sites where play equipment was recommended for replacement rather than retrofit. Staff then met with the local area Councillor to brief them on the findings and requirements to make the play equipment compliant with the new standards.” (Maya’s comment in her forwarded e-mail: “In other words, the councillors were led to believe that these manufacturers’ guidelines were “requirements.”)

“The Councillor was asked if a public process for the replacements was required. For many of the replacements, a public process was initiated by the Councillor and the Public was invited to work with staff Landscape Architects to develop a plan and ‘shopping list’ for their vision of the playground.” (Maya’s comment: “I never once ran across a parent who said there had been a meeting to talk about the playground changes.”)

Maya’s question: “Could the City put a moratorium on playground destruction until they have the funds to replace existing equipment with good alternatives?” No, said the general manager, they had to act immediately. “We are guided and governed by the CSA approved standards, liability issues and funding limitations.”

Maya was so bothered by the general manager’s answers that she called and asked me to come over. Jeff came too. Jeff said, “you can’t go to a party anywhere in this neighbourhood without somebody starting to bitch about the playground demolition. And here their general manager says the old playground had had no more ‘play value’ than the new one. From looking at a picture! If she came and said that in this neighbourhood, she’d be burned alive! That’s why she doesn’t come, and so she can stay in her city hall bubble and never face the consequences! I can’t BELIEVE THIS!!”

Maya, who was in her last month of pregnancy, looked tired and grim. “I don’t know where she gets her advice, but it’s so bad. She says the City is ‘governed’ by the CSA standards – governed by a manufacturers’ organization whose members have a commercial interest in

! 29

selling playground equipment! Or by the insurance people who tell the city to get rid of anything that kids can actually play on. If the City can show me that they’re losing millions in lawsuits because kids are getting injured in playgrounds, I’ll totally back down. But I don’t believe they can.”

The general manager obviously didn’t feel that she needed to prove anything or show any injury claims figures to back up the project. Maya said she could see she had hit a big brick wall, and she couldn’t think what else to do. She had spent over two months gathering almost 2000 signatures, asking for a halt to the demolitions, from all sorts of people at playgrounds and schools and daycares. When she tried to get an appointment to present the petition to Mayor Miller, his office said he was out of town, and would be out of town whenever she wanted to see him, and that she should go talk to the general manager instead. Maya had e-mailed the deputy mayor, Joe Pantalone, to let him know about the petition, and ask him to call a halt. She showed us a printout of his response:

“Thank you for your e-mail regarding your concern about the City's Playgrounds. I am always happy to get feedback from constituents about the issues that concern you. Sincerely, Joe.”

Jeff said, “right, what does he have to care about you? You have no power. You’re not a manufacturer, or a developer, you have no office and no staff, so he can ignore you or even mock you – like that – no consequences!” Maya said that the worst thing is that the City staff and the councillors are probably reading the mood of the people right. Getting people to sign the petition was easy, but then there was nothing afterwards. Nobody seemed to even bother to call their councillors. They wanted to complain, Maya said, but they didn’t want to do anything about it. “People are just too lazy!” But she had to admit that the barrier to getting anywhere at City Hall was so high that lots of people may just think there’s no point trying to break though it. And the politicians may have learned to stay away from any issue invoking safety, liability, or insurance – too politically tricky. Your name gets in the papers for opposing safety standards, and there go your votes. So it was back to the drawing board. I said CELOS would try to get the claims and insurance information through freedom of information. And we’d wait to study the freedom of information details that must soon be coming through – about the $4,941,590 that the general manager said was used to add or replace swings, slides, and sand in those playgrounds that didn’t have their whole structure removed.

Freedom to ask questions On August 12, 2004, the Toronto Star reported that the number of playground injuries had still not decreased. According to data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information, they may have gone up. “Margaret Keresteci, manager of clinical registries at the institute….said most kids are hurt in playgrounds after falls from equipment more than two meters high. About three years ago, schools in the greater Toronto Area started replacing play equipment in their yards after many were found to be unsafe under new regulations set by the Canadian Standards Association. However, Keresteci said the number of injuries hasn’t decreased since then….” Since the CSA is a manufacturers group and not the government, it can’t set regulations, but the Star, like most other media and city staff, assumed they could. The CSA standards had resulted in the removal of playground equipment that was “found to be unsafe.” So why were the playground injury numbers not co-operating? The same day the Star ran its story, CELOS submitted two new freedom of information requests.

! 30

1. List of: Toronto’s annual insurance premiums for 3rd party liability (1980, 1990, 1995-2004), deductibles for each of these years, maximum amounts of insurance coverage for these types of claims, amounts of money paid out in each of these years by the City and by insurance companies.

2. Number of lawsuits filed against the City relating to Parks and Recreation (1980, 1990, 1995-2004), breakdown of types of lawsuits, status of litigation, amount of City’s funds paid, dollar amount of claims paid by insurance companies.

The requests overlapped, but it seemed smart to make sure we covered the waterfront. On Sept.20, I got a letter from the city’s freedom of information office, saying they

were claiming their statutory right of calling a 30-day delay, to give them more time to search for the lawsuit information. They were letting us know because the Act says they have to supply an answer (yes or no to giving information) within 30 business days. Despite that requirement in the Act, there was no response at all to the insurance question. And no response to the May 20 request for the playground inspection reports, after 4 months, nor to the July 8 request for the playground repair accounting. It was confusing – would there be consequences if they didn’t answer within the time the legislation called for? I was guessing not. One day around that time I was talking to an unhappy Parks supervisor. He told me that the week before he’d come across a City welder who has his playground inspection certificate. The welder was just finished loading a playground geodesic dome climber into his truck. The Parks supervisor told me this guy has a reputation – people say that he goes into playgrounds, no questions asked, decides that he should remove some metal equipment, cuts it off, throws it in the truck, and it’s gone. There are no consequences because his “inspector” status sanctifies what he does. Some of his co-workers say he takes the metal structures to the scrap dealer and pockets the scrap metal income himself. But nobody knows for sure, and nobody is looking into it either. Who would want to question safety? The Parks supervisor was frustrated. This climber had been very popular in the Christie Pits playground, and now it was gone. “What am I supposed to tell the parents?” I got an e-mail from Maya: “Today I had a very interesting conversation with a woman who sits on the Board of Directors of the Daycare at Denloe Public School. She said to me that following a few years of severe harassment by that playground inspector Jeff Elliot , and thousands upon thousands of their community monies spent, “we have decided we are pulling our playground out altogether. We are not rebuilding. In a year from now, they’ll tell us it’s inappropriate. No matter what changes we make, they will be obsolete in a year.”

Maya just had a baby three weeks before – their fourth child – and she was already back in the playgrounds, talking to people. October 12: I sent in yet another freedom of information request. Since no responses were coming, what difference would it make? But I had to try. I had found out that City projects often have a big markup, since the city’s capital projects section normally charges up to 10% in additional fees in order to cover their staff payroll. That’s on top of another 10% usually charged for design work by outside consultants. The City’s Capital Projects section has no operating funds, but they have city staff and they have to pay them. There used to be a section of the municipal act that forbade the use of borrowed money (like capital projects funds) to meet operating costs such as the wages of city staff. The reason was pretty obvious – if the staff who recommend capital projects depend on the projects to pay their wages, they would have a conflict of interest – the more capital projects they proposed, and the more complex and long-running and costly those projects were, the

! 31

more likely that the staff ’s payroll would be covered. City Council had voted to let this situation stand, so what choice did Capital Projects have? Maybe that might explain where some of the playground money went? So I asked about the “detailed design work” mentioned in the CSA playground project description. Which consultants, which playgrounds, and how much money went to them; and how money much went to Capital Projects staff for these projects?

A month later I got the reply, which included a letter and an illegible printout of a computer screen with no explanation. I asked for a printout that I could see better and they sent me a lighter version of the same thing, which I could more or less decipher. But it only showed the same numbers that the letter gave. The letter said that no consultants were used to re-design park playgrounds and that the capital projects staff only got $73,000 of the $5.6 million playground project cost. But the general manager of PFR had told Maya that the CSA-related changes cost $5.9 million. I asked: “where did the other $300,000 go?” I got a letter back saying that “there was a transposition error,” and the right number was indeed $5.9 million. “Capital Projects staff apologize for the error.”

At the end of the day, aside from finding out that a $300,000 error in arithmetic was apparently a fairly casual matter, I had not managed to get more information.

The information jackpot Then my luck changed. On October 18 2004, five months after I had sent in a request to see all the city’s 1998 playground inspection reports, I received a package in the mail. It was a CD with details of all “non-compliant” structures in every individual playground in every Toronto park – plus projected materials and labour costs per item to be removed or repaired, plus a 15% “contingency cost.” The projected cost added up to $3.1 million in total. It also had the inspectors’ photos of every playground before removal/ repair. We posted the information on our web pages on the Dufferin Grove Park web site, to make it freely available for research by anyone interested. Maya printed out some of the reports, but she had her hands full with the new baby and the other kids and couldn’t do much with this new stuff yet. Meantime, I looked up Dufferin Grove Park. The report listed a number of “non-compliance” issues and assigned $13,190.50 to do the necessary repairs. I looked at my spreadsheet of playground repairs and found that it showed the work as having been done in 2002. But, like Maya, I found that there was not much sign of repairs or replacements at Dufferin Grove. So I wrote to the head of playground repair crew, with my back-of-a-napkin estimate of how much it might have cost to take out the fireman’s pole and the jiggly bridge and the freestanding slide: “According to the costing on the Dufferin Grove report, that would have cost a maximum of $2041.25, including the 15% contingency. That leaves us with $11,149.25 to spend on the playground. Wonderful. The first thing on the list is to undo the mistake with the jiggly bridge and rebuild it with spacers like they use in Ottawa. Then we could have a meeting about how to keep our playground and have it be as good and safe as it can be. Please let me know if you can have a meeting with us, on this subject, and if my money calculations are correct.”

There was no reply. A month later I wrote again to the head of playground repair crew again, and copied the director this time: “I got no answer from you…Is the problem that a portion of the money that City Council voted for CSA-related city-wide playground repairs just vanished?” Two

! 32

days later the director himself replied: " The funds have not vanished….When the actual work began some sites required more than first expected and cost more while others cost less.....The overall budget was built site by site but it allows for flexibility to address issues as staff perform the work.” So according to the director, the money had been spent on other playgrounds. I asked which ones the Dufferin Grove money went to. But he didn’t reply. Maya and Jeff said: It’s a shell game.

Meantime we had resolved to send out reminders for those requests that were still being ignored, or to appeal to the province if a reminder didn’t work. We re-submitted the playground repair request, this time based on the new information that came in the inspection CD. 1. How much was actually spent in each ward for these CSA playground repairs, compared to the projected amount to be spent? How was the 15% contingency money spent? What was the dollar value of repair parts money that went to Henderson Playground Co? What was the dollar value of repair parts money that went to Belair equipment Co? Which two playground companies sold the most repair parts to the City, and what was the dollar value of what each sold?

2. How much repair money (base, parts, labour) was spent at Dufferin Grove Park? (Please include dates of repairs, itemized by tasks with actual costs) What was the 15% contingency money spent on, at this location? And then we watched the mail for the reply.

The Triaxial Accelerometer drop test A good deal of the expense of CSA-recommended playground fixes come from adding a special kind of new sand to soften the ground in case of falls from climbers or slides or swings. The existing playground sand at Toronto park playgrounds was said to be too compacted. But we thought – what if it was dug up from time to time, wouldn’t that work just as well as getting new sand, but with much less money? So we asked if the playground inspectors could bring over their triaxial accelerometer and test the hardness of the sand under the money bars and next to the higher climber platforms. Two city inspectors came to Dufferin Grove playground to walk around with five of us. The rec staff had dug up the sand with a couple of community-service-order youth, and we wanted to know if a simple digging, which could be a daily staff task, would pass the CSA playground surface test. So the men set up their shiny high-tech accelerometer (a metal ball on a wire). The dug-up sand passed at every spot that had been dug, with honours. No need for a pricey sand replacement. After the “drop tests” were done, we went through the list of the playground parts condemned in the 1998 Canadian Standards Association inspection. One of the inspectors said he might have done the original report, but he couldn't remember now because they inspected so many. With the carnage of playground destruction all over the city, it must be hard to keep it all straight. At Dufferin Grove playground, half the swings on the big swing frame are slated to be removed. The climber has to go. All the baby swings on the centre structure are supposed to come off, and the little slide there too, and the broad slide nearby. All horizontal railings have to be replaced by tight vertical pickets engineered so they are impossible to climb. As the inspectors walked around with us, they described in each case what injuries could

! 33

happen. Kids on swings could go sideways and smash into other kids on swings. Kids could climb on a railing, fall and break their necks. The conversation was full of dreadful images, smashed heads with permanent brain damage, strangling on monkey bars, complex fractures with permanent impairment from falling off the side of the slide. The only thing that would let the inspectors sleep well at night, as far as we could tell, would be ripping out the whole playground and starting over with a new structure. We said, “we don't want a new structure. We like this one.” They said, “why wouldn't you want something brand new instead?” “We said, would you like to throw out all your living room furniture, your favourite comfortable chair, the couch, the table you got from your grandfather, and replace it all with new stuff from the store?”

They said “.....hm.” These inspector-fellows are urged to imagine the worst thing, the one-in-a-million disaster that could happen in this world where gravity exists. They are not trained in math, so in their minds an event that happened once in a million times – on a playground, on the street, in the bedroom – is almost a sure thing to happen again, right here. Their mantra is: if even one child is saved from a terrible accident, all of the changes made in playgrounds will have been worth it. When we told them that the playground accidents in Toronto had gone UP since the great playground destruction that began here in 2000, they said that was not possible. It might be that emergency room visits had increased because parents are so neurotic that they'll take their kids to the hospital for nothing. But “no,” we said, “the number of at-least-one-night hospital stays has gone up. In other words, real injuries have increased since you guys put in what you hoped was "safe" equipment.” They were stumped. But only for a little while. When there's a new statistic that makes no sense in this CSA-safety-world, it can't find a toehold, so it just fades away. The inspectors left the playground with a promise to come back and fix all the dangers as soon as they could get the time. I sent my account of the walkabout to Maya, and her answering e-mail was a passionate rant. “A boring playground is a dangerous playground. All those measures put into place by CSA to prevent falls by the use of pickets, and changing all surfaces so kids can’t balance—making them pointy. They are telling children that these spaces are not part of the playground, not for climbing on! But they don’t provide anywhere to climb and healthy, active, normal kids will always climb so, at the playground……kids are naturally climbing more dangerously than ever before! So, kids are FALLING and getting injured more than ever before! Nobody told the kids that playgrounds are just for walking, standing and kicking at the dirt. So they still behave like normal, active kids and they still try to climb! Dumb kids! Playgrounds are dangerous. Stop climbing!”

Confusion in inspection school The CSA’s approach to safety was one thing; the interpretations of the inspectors may have gone quite a bit beyond that, in the damage that could result. I thought I’d better find out a bit more about the training arrangements. Early in the fall of 2004, I called the Ontario Parks Association to learn a bit more. Was their training program connected with the CPRA’s inspector school? I spoke to the OPA’s director, John Howard, who told me that his organization had got into the CSA Standards instruction business later than the CPRA. He sent me this e-mail:

“The City of Toronto staff experienced difficulties with the format (lecture style) of the CPRA program and the fact that 40% of the staff registered and attending the 1 ½ day program failed and were required to re-qualify by taking the course over again. In addition the City was staring at a renewal cost every 3 years that they considered a ‘cash grab.’”

! 34

The CPRA, as we’ve seen, seems to have had a contract arrangement with an Alberta playground manufacturer named Tony Lake, who was in charge of the CPRA’s Canadian Playground Safety Institute, and gave the training courses. But that, according to the OPA’s John Howard, brought more problems: “The contractor inherited the “Certification” designation which is not enshrined in any legislation that I am aware of. ….CPRA gave many people the impression that it ran a “CSA certified course” and in fact there were some graduates of their program who printed that misleading qualification on their business cards….I investigated the certification with CSA and was advised that ‘CSA does not certify people.’ There being no legislated designation for Playground Inspector, anyone could designate themselves as a playground inspector.”

In 2003, the Ontario Parks Association (OPA) set up a competing course. Their newly elected president was the Toronto Parks director in his day job. He began to send his staff to the new OPA course. Meantime the province’s childcare authorities were themselves confused. The OPA didn’t use the word “certified” but the CPRA did, and so, according to John Howard, “[o]ne of our graduates who operates his own Playground Inspection business and has staff who completed the OPA program ran into some difficulty qualifying as an inspector of play structures connected to licensed child care facilities, apparently because the Ministry of Community and Social Services directive stated that only ‘certified playground inspectors’ would be allowed to submit tender bids.” After the OPA protested, the Ministry agreed that the CPRA were “not in a position to designate where inspectors should receive their training and that in fact the word ‘certified’ should probably be replaced with the word ‘qualified.’ ”

Competition – how to get an edge over the others.

“Such records do not exist” The mediator at the Ontario Information and Privacy Commission had ordered the City to issue a response to my playground-lawsuits request by December 1. By December 2, they hadn’t replied, so I called the mediator, feeling like I was getting my big brother to come and yell at somebody who was being mean to me. The mediator called the City and gave them an order to reply by Dec. 8. They sent me a letter, to say that since the Claims Division of the Finance Department “has not as yet produced any records that are responsive to your request… for claims statistics in the post amalgamation period…we have to assume that such records do not exist.” The Legal Department also couldn’t find anything since amalgamation, but they did come up with a few reports from 1989 to 1994, for the former City of Toronto, which were enclosed. The spreadsheet had very limited descriptions, but it seemed that of 125 third-party injury claims over five years, only one had been for something (unspecified) that happened on “supervised playground equipment.” Cost: $23,570. Most of the claims seemed to be for traffic accidents involving Parks vehicles. But that was not what we were seeking. We needed to find out how the playground claims story continued from 1994 to the present, and the City was saying that claims records for injuries in parks or playgrounds did not even exist after the cities were amalgamated in 1997.

Buy a city secret We would have to appeal the City’s contention that the records we wanted were non-existent. A freedom of information request costs only $5, but an appeal to the province costs $25. If the City was hell-bent to make us appeal every single request – how much was this all going to add up to?

! 35

Time to ask park users for help. The December 2004 Dufferin Grove Park newsletter carried an unusual Christmas gift suggestion: “for the person on your list who has everything, why not buy a freedom of information request, or even an appeal to the province’s information and privacy commissioner, on their behalf ? You have a number of choices – take your pick of whatever question might be of interest to the friend for whom you’re buying this unusual gift.” And there followed the list of playground-related requests and appeals we needed to make. That got discussion going at the rink. The skating season was well started and the rink snack bar was the busy locus for some lively conversations – about playgrounds and bureaucracy – over hot chocolate or Fair Trade coffee. The Christmas-gift Freedom of Information appeals “sold out” in a week (since there were only three). So it was evident that in the case of the playground issue, people were not so much neglecting to follow up, as Maya feared, as they were waiting to find some way to do something real, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The freedom of information vouchers seemed to fit the bill, and they led to good conversations at the same time. With the gift vouchers came a promise of two loaves of park bread when the request was answered or the appeal was won. (We didn’t imagine, then, that some of the donours would still be waiting for their loaves of bread four years later.)

Access request #1 The first gift voucher was the appeal about how the playground “repair” funds were spent. There had been no response at all to the first information request to the City, on July 8, but after the request was re-submitted on November 15, the City had responded. Finding detailed information would be tough, the Parks staff wrote: “ there is no electronic work order system, database or any other electronic storage of the records required to be search [sic] in order to provide access to the information being requested.” The City estimated that it would take about 432 hours of staff time to find out the spending details we were seeking. This would cost us $12,960, and “…your written acceptance of the fee estimated together with a deposit of $6480.00 is requested prior to proceeding with this request.” Wow. I wrote to a maintenance manager I knew slightly at the City’s Property and Real Estate division, asking him – by way of comparison – how long it would take him to track any repair costs. He answered: “Usually the worker hours are inputted into the program within five to seven days. Contractor and material purchases are inputted into the system once they come in and are processed for payment…So on average, I would say that all the total information is available within 3 to 4 weeks of the job being completed. But this only requires us to perform a query which is a click of the computer. All the info is inputted on an ongoing basis. The amount of time staff spend inputting info is minimal…I’m guessing Parks has no such tracking system!” So the first “city secret” Christmas gift was an appeal about the size of the fee for the information request. This appeal was bought by Kate Robertson and her family as a gift to themselves. Kate said that she couldn’t believe the City would admit to such bad organization, as in “there is no electronic work order system, database or any other electronic storage of the records required.” She said that if she was in their position she would have scrambled to put all of the records together and pretended that they’d existed all along, rather than admit she didn’t know how they’d spent five million dollars. But that was not what the Parks staff did. There were three months of back and forth e-mails and conference calls, with new players coming on and leaving. The city’s freedom of information office asked us if we had any ideas of how to put the questions so

! 36

that Parks staff might find the answers more easily. I suggested we should have direct conversation with the playground project people. But another manager at the city’s freedom of information office sent an e-mail around to Parks management, saying that no one could speak to our group directly. Indeed, he wrote, even the city councillors ought to understand that their information requests had to go through the right formal channels. No talking! I had a friend in B.C. who was a city administrator, and I asked him for better phrasing of my questions. He wrote back: “Ask for these pieces of specific information: A computer print-out showing all account code numbers and titles/names relating to "park/playground upgrades." If the City's parks are accounted for separately or individually, ask for a computer print-out showing all account code numbers and titles/names relating to Dufferin Grove Park.” But the Parks management didn’t find this wording helpful. The general manager’s assistant sent an e-mail to the City’s freedom of information officer: “I am lost as to what she really wants here. I believe the request has changed from the original request.” I forwarded the e-mail along to Kate Robertson, and she said she didn’t get it. “We want to know how and where they spent the $5 million they said they spent for replacements and repairs of playgrounds. What is so confusing about that?” But the freedom of information office seemed to support Parks management’s position, and to lay their lostness at my door: “…your request has now changed considerably from the original request. Could you please email us back with a concise description of the records that you are requesting?” I was stumped. What more could I say? How was I to know a better description of the records?

But then the City put me out of my misery. A new decision letter arrived on April 28, 2005. Eight-and-a-half months after my original information request, the decision was no to providing any records of the $4.9 million repair money spending, even if we had been willing to pay $12,600, because: “Requesters have no right….to require an institution to create a record in response to a request.” I had the impression that the Parks staff felt they had finally got themselves “on message.” But we wondered – did the Freedom of Information Act really mean to support institutions in simply not keeping records, in order to avoid scrutiny? Apparently not. Their mediator from the Information and Privacy Commissioner said we could appeal, and that we wouldn’t be charged another $25 even though this was a different appeal than the fee-waiver appeal. I told Kate Robertson that her family wouldn’t get their loaves of bread yet, but that their original donation was doing double duty. She took that as a suitable consolation prize, for now. And then we waited.

Access request #2 The second appeal was about the lawsuits or claims paid out by the city for any park

or playgrounds injuries, from 1996 to 2004. It was sponsored by two friends, Ann Bjorseth and Leslie Toy, who gave it to each other for Christmas. Our appeal letter said “It does not seem possible that the Claims Division of the Finance Department does not have records relating to legal actions against the City of Toronto for injuries suffered by third parties.” March 31 we got this notice: “a manual search will be necessary to retrieve the information that you have requested…Cost of searching for the records: 35 hours at $30 per hour $1050….your written acceptance of the fee estimated together with a deposit of $525 is requested prior to proceeding with this request. Please make the cheque payable to the City of Toronto.” So the City was admitting that the information had to exist, but intended to charge us for the effort of cleaning up their files.

! 37

We told the mediator we’d have to appeal the fee. So he sent out a formal mediation report, reporting that we had “advised the mediator that [we] are appealing the fee estimate. This will be the sole issue in this appeal.” Once again we waited.

The CSA press release On May 24, 2005, the Canadian Medical Association Journal published the study done by Sick Children’s Hospital staff, the same study that a senior policy analyst at Health Canada had sent to Maya back in 2004. When I read the original version of the paper that Maya had put in my research envelope, I thought that a first-year Statistics student would have got a failing grade for the research design of this study. Nevertheless, it met the publication standards of the CMAJ. It had resurfaced as a learned article, and it made all the papers. The CSA put out a triumphant press release: “The results of the study show that CSA Playspace standards were an effective tool in identifying hazardous playground equipment, and that removing and replacing unsafe equipment is an effective strategy for preventing playground injuries.” The press release listed the various media that had covered the story without reservation: Canadian Press, CBC Television, CTV, the Edmonton Journal, Globe and Mail, Montreal Gazette, National Post, Toronto Star, Toronto, Sun, Vancouver Sun, “and many other broadcast, print and online outlets.” The Canadian Medical Association Journal had not found it problematic that the “study” did not specify types of injuries, and the lack of detail hadn’t bothered the media either. Brain damage, a broken arm, a split lip or a bandaid to the knee – in such a study all were equally “injuries.” On the CBC, a researcher from Sick Kids said that the insurance company that gave them their incident reports hadn’t been able to specify the injuries “because of privacy concerns.” But the Globe’s editorial page ran a critical editorial, the only dissenting voice in the approving media chorus:

Smoke and Mirrors on Playground Safety Five years ago, the board ripped out the playground equipment at more than 100 elementary schools because it did not meet the letter of tough new safety requirements. The cost of demolition and replacement was $6.3 million, not to mention the unquantifiable loss of beloved play spaces….Yesterday, a study by Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, suggested it had all been worth it… “New school playgrounds prove safer,” said the Globe and Mail’s report on the CMAJ study. “Child’s play now safer,” said the Toronto Star. “Fewer children hurt since monkey bars upgraded: accidents decline 49 per cent: study,” said the National Post.

There was only one problem. The study proved nothing of the kind. It said that, at the 86 schools with replacement equipment reviewed in the study, there were 550 fewer playground injuries in the course of the year. But the vast majority of that reduction, the study showed, occurred not on the playground equipment but elsewhere in the schoolyard. In fact, there was a reduction of just 117 injuries – at 86 schools – on the playground equipment. That amounts to roughly one fewer injury per school per year. And for this, Toronto spent $6.3 million.

So what, you might say. Perhaps it was worth the cost, if one fewer child at each school lost an eye or broke a neck or a back. But the study does not mention the seriousness of injuries on Toronto’s playground equipment either before or after it was replaced.

This is no trivial omission. The school board made it clear that its purpose in replacing the equipment was to protect against severe hazards…..Yet the authors simply did not have the data to show any such result…All they know is that the injuries required attention, whether from a hospital or simply from a teacher or a parent….

! 38

Maya wrote to me: “a bandaid. The teacher at the school near my house told me that they have to report an “injury” if a child needs a bandaid.”

The Ontario School Board Insurance Exchange website gave this incident-reporting protocol, in capital letters: IF THIS IS AN URGENT INCIDENT, I.E. A FATALITY OR STUDENT WAS ADMITTED OVERNIGHT TO HOSPITAL; PLEASE ENSURE TO HIGHLIGHT THE URGENT INCIDENT REPORT BOX ON THE FORM. There’s quite a gap between a death and an overnight hospital stay. If the insurance company conflated both into “urgent incidents,” was a bandaid for a scrape conflated with a broken arm as well? The Sick Kids’ study doesn’t say. Their researcher Alison MacPherson, interviewed on the CBC’s afternoon show, was asked by the show’s host how they got their numbers. She replied that they counted any student who was “injured severely enough that the school filed an incident report.” He asked, “and what kinds of injuries were there?” Ms.MacPherson lowered her voice slightly: “we don’t know exact details of their injury – confidentiality issues….” The interviewer let that answer hang in the air, and moved on to other questions. Canada’s largest hospital for children publishes research that doesn’t give injury categories, asserting that “confidentiality issues” forbid that level of detail. Canada’s largest medical journal accepts the research as peer-reviewed bona fide new information. Scary.

Access request #3 Meantime we played a long game of steeplechase with our third “buy a city secret” appeal to the province’s information and privacy commissioner. This was the question about how much the city’s insurance premiums cost, and – again – the amount of insurance payouts related to playgrounds. This third appeal was given to Jane and Bryan Smith for Christmas, by their daughter Andrea and her husband Jason Brown. The appeal followed the same game plan as the previous appeal – no reply from the city, then an order from the IPC requiring the City to answer, then a letter from the City “no records seem to exist,” then an IPC letter saying the case was closed since there was no information, then a protest from us that the information must exist, then a letter from the IPC affirming the new form of the appeal. The City skipped sending us a cost estimate of however many thousands of dollars of staff time it would take to find out who had successfully sued for a playground injury. Instead, the City went straight to refusing the information – on the grounds that answering our question would do economic damage to the City. We appealed this reasoning, then the IPC appointed a mediator, then the mediator made no progress with the City, and finally on June 8, the IPC said they were appointing an adjudicator to study the merits of each side’s argument. Then we waited.

You lose some, you win some. Sometimes you wait a long time and then suddenly lots of things happen, one on top of the other. On Wednesday June 22, 2005 we finally had the formal appeal hearing for the playground repair costs. The four CELOS researchers tried to convince the IPC adjudicator that if the City had spent that much money on playground repairs (between $4.3 - $5.2 million – estimates vary), they must have records to show who did the work and what the repairs were. The city sent five staff including two of their staff lawyers, and they tried to convince the adjudicator that they had done all they could to search for the records, and that there were no records specific to playground locations or even to wards, since the city had “bought in bulk to achieve cost savings.” The adjudicator had long red fingernails that were hypnotic when she gestured to underline a point. After hearing a day of back-and-forth arguments, she agreed with the

! 39

City’s staff lawyers. “The appellant” (our side) had not given the City enough information about what documents might exist relating to our question of how the playground funds were spent. The adjudicator wrote: “In summary, the City submitted that the matter I have to decide is whether they conducted a reasonable search, and that the City is not required to prove with absolute certainty that the records do not exist, rather, the City must show that it made a reasonable effort to search for records responsive to the request. …. While I understand the City’s methods of record-keeping as described at the oral inquiry, in my view, it is arguable that a more detailed recording keeping of expenditures perhaps ought to exist; however, I make no finding in this regard. ORDER: I uphold the City’s search for responsive records and dismiss the appellant’s appeal.” So the city won that round. If their staff hadn’t bothered to sort and record their invoices, and assign tracking numbers to cost out their projects, that was no business of the Information and Privacy Commissioner.

Sigh.

At the hearing, one of the city staff mentioned some documents that we had never heard of. Now we could ask for them by name and even by the correct numerical identifier. We sent two more requests to freedom of information right away. They sent back several fat envelopes of spreadsheets. But we were discouraged, and we tucked the spreadsheets into a folder, to wait for another day when there would be more time to puzzle them out. Then we forgot about them. Meantime, there was a sudden plot twist, a surprise from the Information and Privacy Commissioner that no one was expecting. On July 26, 2005, three weeks after the adjudicator dismissed our playgrounds accounting request, the Information and Privacy Commissioner sent out a press release that was prominently reported in all the newspapers: “Ontario’s privacy commissioner condemns the ‘protective mindset’ of city bureaucrats.” On July 22nd Commissioner Cavoukian had ruled against the city’s refusal to tell the CBC how much they’d paid out in legal claims against the four city departments including the police. On the 26th her ruling became public. She had written: “The bureaucracy has to be reminded that the government is there at the pleasure of the governed, and the government’s records are theoretically the public’s records.” The City was ordered to give the CBC (and anyone else) access to records regarding “civil lawsuits which the City had settled with third parties in 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004, including the number of lawsuits, dates settled, and dollar amounts.” This ruling led to a short flurry of other formerly secret numbers in the newspapers. I clipped everything. Resistance to our two remaining “buy a secret” information requests melted away overnight. The very next day we got a letter from the City’s Corporate Access and Privacy office saying that we would now be granted access to the insurance records that we had requested, “pursuant to Order MO-1947.” I wondered whether our appeal – on exactly the same issue, claims and insurance payouts – would ever have been accepted without the CBC decision.

But now we had it in hand. The information we got seemed to show that the city had paid out huge insurance premiums, and yet their deductibles were so high that most years they had covered almost all, or (in the years since 2001) all the third-party injury claims pay-outs from the city’s own funds, not insurance. The limits of the city’s liability had never been reached, so the insurance companies never had to pay. The question we asked ourselves was

! 40

– in that case, why pay for outside insurance at all? Maybe for a 9/11 style all-out catastrophe?

In a game plan that big, would the playground demolitions have any effect on the city’s premiums? It seemed totally unlikely.

Playground injury claims And then we got the playground injury claims information. The spreadsheet showed four more playground-related claims since the cities were amalgamated. Now we knew about five claims, a total of $35,033 paid out in 13 years. Compare that to $5.9 million paid to tear out equipment, buy new “safe” stuff, dumb down the playgrounds! There were still no details about the circumstances of the injuries. And it’s possible that there were more claims: the numbers on the chart we got through freedom of information didn’t add up, nor did they match the numbers in the newspapers. But even if there had been two claims a year instead of one, or four claims a year – for 833 playgrounds, thousands of kids playing! It was pretty obvious that playground injuries were not impoverishing the City, nor cutting down the city’s children in the flowering of their youth. The comparisons with all the newspaper claims figures were dramatic. Toronto spent $48.9-million to deal with 20,630 lawsuits against city departments from 1998 to 2004. The Economic Development, Culture and Tourism department (which at that time included Parks and Recreation) had 4,722 claims and paid out $6.1-million. [National Post, July 26 2005]. The playgrounds had four claims during that time, ranging from a low of $667 in 2004 to a high of $4,361 in 2002. The city tore up the playgrounds and spent $5.9 million, mostly unaccounted, to save itself from legal action – for a total of $11,463 in playground-related claims. September 2, 2005: I e-mailed the City of Toronto Corporate Access and Privacy office, to ask about the biggest puzzle in the spreadsheet they sent us: “the total parks-related claims paid out is listed as $848,744.05. When I add up the numbers myself the total is $268,468.60. Why the discrepancy?”

Sept.12: E-mail from C.A.P. staff: “I have checked with the insurance and Risk Management Office and they have advised that the total of $268,468.60 is correct. When the spreadsheet was prepared, the figures were totaled incorrectly in error.” So in two Freedom of Information responses there were two major calculation errors, totaling almost a million dollars. I caught them, but I wondered: do they reliably catch such errors themselves? Do they care?

While I was trying to force the city to open its books about playground costs, Maya and Geoff had been finding out more about the “playground inspection racket,” as they called it. It may be that the crossovers between government and playground manufacturers were adding up to some bad optics. Geoff said he had learned that a new provincial government rule had come out – playground inspectors must be “third parties,” not connected to either government or playground equipment companies. So Tony Lake’s company Parks and Rec Plus said they had discontinued doing construction and supervision of playground equipment for manufacturers and suppliers of playground equipment. And the Playground Safety Institute had stopped certifying people who work for manufacturers. Geoff wasn’t so sure about the whole arrangement. He sent me a proposal he’d written for the Fifth Estate, hoping they might investigate the whole playground story. (They didn’t bite.) “The way the system works is as follows: According to the rules set out by the Provincial Government, the Inspectors must be “third party”, but there is no way of assuring that they are really independent of the manufacturers,

! 41

or that they aren’t working for their own best interests to increase the volume of inspections at certain locations. If they have links to playground companies, it is in their interest to find problems so that they can take orders for new equipment and subsequently return to inspect. “We have seen many inspection reports that don’t match what has been done in the parks! CSA equipment came down, and non-CSA equipment stayed up. Equipment that was supposed to be retrofitted came down; equipment that was taken down in one park was left standing in another; equipment that was supposed to come down and be replaced was not replaced. When P.L.A.Y. complained, equipment came back or was replaced even when the City said it wouldn’t be. The situation is confusing and contradictory, and we can only wonder why? “I asked Shelly Wagner, a spokesperson for Parks and Rec Plus, how one could know who is a “third party” playground inspector. Her response was “by asking them” and “by reference.” She told us there are a small number of inspectors, so if someone has a bad name, people will find out about it. I asked, “If there are so few of them, why would they report each other?” Her response was “It works.” When I asked why they charge so much per hour, her response was “it’s seasonal work. They need to buy insurance.” Sept.13 2005. James Barber, commenting on the release of the Bellamy inquiry report, wrote that the inquiry cost the city $19.2 million. He wrote: “The city office charged with managing leases was ‘a shambles,’ she found, ‘flailing about without expertise and with no effective supervision.’ ”

That sounded right. Meantime, we were showing problems with “expertise and effective supervision” in another city department. The price tag for our inquiry was lower – about $85 to date. And it didn’t seem that any heads were rolling as a result of what we’d found so far. The money wasted on messing up the playgrounds was only $6 million, compared to $100 million on computers. But all of it was borrowed money – accumulating more debt.

Barber: “For every bureaucrat [Bellamy] identifies as compromised or outright corrupt, she finds a dozen more who were merely incompetent….”

On September 22, 2005, there was a big celebration at Dufferin Grove Park, in honour of Georgie Donais and all the adults and kids who had helped to build the cob courtyard – a long wall backing a food counter with four sinks, and twisting around at each end to form two small alcoves. Over 500 people came to eat supper together around the cob, and to marvel at the latest addition to the playground – constructed of earth and straw and mosaic glass by park users, with no funding and no involvement of any of the actors in our playground story. A couple of days before, the Parks and Recreation manager called to say that the spreadsheet of next-up playground “enhancements” had come across his desk for his approval. He had moved the 2006 Dufferin Grove replacement off the 2006 schedule and into the unscheduled “beyond,” with a click of his mouse. That was his gift to the park, and his affirmation to common sense. Hopefully no one would notice – the upside of a bureaucracy in shambles.

Maya and her family moved to Israel. Geoff was busy with his television career and with the problem of off-leash dogs in Sibelius Park. Linda’s kids grew older and no longer went to the playground. Nothing had been solved but the noise of bulldozers in playgrounds had got fainter – maybe they were going away? I turned my attention elsewhere.

* * * *

! 42

Almost three years later, on July 2 2008, just as the summer holidays were starting, I got an e-mail from the city councillor, forwarding a message from a City capital projects manager: “we have determined that the senior play structure at Dufferin Grove is to be replaced with equipment that meet the CSA guidelines for playgrounds. The main issues being that the existing equipment does not meet the standard and potentially expose users to risk and the City to liability in the event of an injury. This project is currently included in the 2009 capital budget.”

The message was sent on the same day the city’s budget committee released its forecast of the city’s deepening debt hole. The National Post reported that “Toronto’s net liability – its assets minus its fiscal obligations – grew by half a billion dollars in 2007 to $2.8 billion, primarily due to debt and employee benefits. Toronto’s net liability has come to comprise 42% of its own revenues, up from 27% five years earlier. The city’s long-term debt rose by $497 million to $2.7-billion…”

Playgrounds and wading pools, like most other capital projects, are funded by debt. So what? most people said. It’s so tiny it hardly makes a dent in the bigger picture. Nobody has to say – we’re cutting up the credit card until we get on top of this. No more debt until we figure out how to live within our means!

But the general feeling seemed to be, making more debt for playgrounds is other people’s problem, or nobody’s, or it’s an artifact of no political importance.

The additional debt to replace our playground, of course, is only the end of the story. The main story is the idea of tearing down a playground that is beloved and useful and familiar as a steady element in the landscape. Yet this familiarity is exactly what playground risk professionals see as the problem.

At Dufferin Grove playground, the steps up to the baby-slide are worn so smooth that they look like the stairway of a medieval church. There are no splinters, but the steps have been made curved, even wavy, by thousands if little feet going up and down over 25 years.

Safe Kids Canada (Sick Kids Hospital) had a power-point “handbook” on their web site called “Playground Safety and Standards.” The talk promoted the idea that any playground over 15 years old is ready for the scrapheap. Parents were warned to watch out for worn parts – in our case worn down by all the little people climbing up the steps to get to the baby-slide. Some of those same people, no longer little, were now standing at the bottom of the Dufferin Grove baby-slide watching their own children climb up the same stairs. But such a continuity was meaningless to Safe Kids Canada, which treated “worn smooth” as equivalent to “worn out.” It wanted parents to look out for “splits or cracks in wood or plastic” – as though wood and plastic were equivalent. The wooden playground frame at Dufferin Grove has long cracks that don’t go anywhere – they’re like the wrinkles of character that Queen Elizabeth’s mother famously refused to let a photographer paint out in her portrait. The Queen Mother said that those wrinkles were her stories and her life. It’s the same for the cracks in the playground’s wooden posts, posts shiny with age and handling – the long, superficial cracks denote the strength and endurance of high-quality wood, not weakness.

Even “paint chipping off ” was taken by Safe Kids Canada as a sign of danger and obsolescence, not a sign that someone should bring a can of paint and take good care of the playground boards, so they would last another fifty years.

Continuity, and conservation of playgrounds, meant nothing to the risk managers. The handbook had a page called “Balancing Opposition with Safety Concerns” in which the risk managers were called “advocates” and the rest were called the “opposition.” Conservation didn’t get a column in this balance sheet, but the “advocates” were credited with “alternative

! 43

‘green’ playground design.” They proposed another way to look at play: “Occupational safety analogy – play is kids’ work – right to a hazard-free environment.”

Kids were given the message that playgrounds are the workplace where they can do their job of keeping fit, so they’re not at risk of getting fat, or getting diabetes or a list of other diseases that will inflate our health care costs. Today’s children, being guided into proper alignment on the health care graphs, for the good of the economy, are not so different from the children a hundred years ago, being told that they must build strong bodies so that they could march off to war for the good of the nation.

Safe Kids Canada regarded its role as promoting the CSA standard and building “consumer interest in the standard.” For them there was no contradiction, no pleasure in old wood or a familiar meeting place. There was, in fact, no unique place, only a nationwide safety “model” that looked good anywhere — but for fifteen years only. Any longer for a playground, and safety would be compromised. So then the next wave of playground orders would come in, and business would continue to flourish.

Playground safety is a prescription for the playground industry that’s not unlike like blood pressure medication for Big Pharma: what’s needed for an industry to keep making money is a remedy that never solves a problem, that needs to be endlessly re-prescribed.

Copyright Jutta Mason/Celos. 2016

! 44