Wednesday, June 6th, 2007 ::: Billboard Permit Fraud

What I’ve noticed is that all of these events and actions had one thing in common: RECLAIMING. Whether we were reclaiming the road from cars, reclaiming buildings for squatters, reclaiming surplus food for the homeless, reclaiming campuses as a place for protest and theatre, reclaiming our voice from the deep dark depths of corporate media, or reclaiming our visual environment from billboards, we were always reclaiming. Taking back what should have been ours all along. Not “ours” as in “our club” or “our group,” but ours as in the people. All the people. “Ours” as in “not the governments” and “not the corporations.”… We want power given back to the people as a collective. We want to Reclaim the Streets.

- Toronto RTS

We have discovered that a lucrative CBS billboard along the Gardiner Expressway at Dufferin, which targets both Dufferin and Expressway traffic, was issued a permit ten years ago on fraudulent information.

This is what the sign looks like, it is the ground sign advertising Bell:

This is by no means the only illegal billboard in the Liberty Industrial Area. But it’s a pretty good example of what’s typical in this area.

This is the permit for the sign. In order to obtain that permit for this CBS sign, the applicant lied on page two of this document, where he attested that the sign is not located within 60M of a third party roof sign:

That was enough to trick the Buildings Department into issuing this permit. In fact, the sign is about 20 Metres away from the CBS roof sign on the same property, one of the largest and most conspicuous signs on the expressway.

And get this, the permit for the sign was issued on December 12, 1997. It is now almost ten years later and the Buildings Department has never inspected this permit; by way of practice, the Building Inspector should have found the false information shortly after the billboard was built 10 years ago.

Furthermore, CBS’s permit allows backlit ad-faces whereas CBS is currently operating posterboard ad-faces. You will notice in the rest of the Liberty Industrial Area that whenever you see a ground sign with a pole that is painted green, the sign is either a posterboard operating under a backlight permit, like side-by-side and bottom-to-top 10′x20s’ operating under backlit like this or side-by-side 10′X20’s operating under 14′ X 48′ permits or some other such altered and illegal combination. While no variance is required to change the ad-face of a legal conforming sign from backlight to posterboard, in most cases the ad-faces of these signs have been altered in orientation in a manner that would require a variance to legalize. A permit, of course, is still required to replace a backlight with a posterboard.

Let us say a few words about CBS. It is difficult to appreciate the pathetic stupidity of this company. Along this stretch of the expressway, CBS has taken about 10 billboards and replaced the ad-faces with smaller faces. 14′X48′ signs for example were replaced with two 10′X20′ signs for a total reduction in square footage from 672 to 400. Then CBS re-oriented the small faces to make them more visible. The re-orientation makes the sign not conform to the by-law and is illegal, whereas maintaining the original, larger face would give you a perfectly legal, and, in most cases, conforming sign. In other words, CBS takes legal signs and turns them into illegal signs by decreasing the size of the ads. Why? All because CBS’s idiot salesmen don’t know how to sell anything other than standard posterboards. You should be able to make more money on a larger sign. Not CBS. CBS makes more money on smaller, standard-size signs because they don’t know how to be an advertising company.

We’ll have more on the Liberty Industrial Area later because, of course, there are a few other billboards in Liberty Village that don’t comply with 60M separation requirements. In the meantime, we expect the Buildings Department to revoke the permit for 153 Dufferin.

During the April 14, 1997 meeting of pre-amalgamation Toronto City Council (the minutes for which, remarkably, you can still read online but, only at Internet Archive), City Council adopted a permissive exemption to the Signs By-Law (SS12N) which allows roof and ground signs in the Liberty Industrial Area to be erected higher and larger than at other industrial lands in the City. The Staff Report (not online) associated with this amendment explicitly notes that third party signs in the area would still be subject to 60M Separation of Signs. It was at this same meeting that, on a motion from Kyle Rae, the Signs By-Law Advisory Committee was disbanded. This committee was set up to guide the development of the City’s signs by-law and was almost entirely made up of advertising industry hacks.