<<He should have known what his neighbors wanted? You mean the same neighbors for whom he fixes lawn mowers? Those neighbors? You think those are the neighbors who are saying "we want our neighborhood our way"? Seems to me they have no problem with him fixing their lawn mowers. If they don't want him doing that, they could simply not take him anything to fix. >>
I doubt very much that every house in the fucking neighbourhood brings him a lawnmower to fix. You are writing this story as if 70 or 80% of the households in the area are bringing lawnmowers to the guy. In reality, a few homeowners bring the guy lawnmowers to fix and the rest probably don't even know whose stuff is being fixed or who the guy is. Be that as it may, the legislation does NOT allow Joe Tennant and his favoured friends to re-write the Official Plan of Pickering, which probably took hundreds of hours of town meetings, planning committee meetings and council meetings to enact, hundreds of thousands of dollars of local rate-payers' money and hundreds more hours of public meetings at the Ontario Municipal Board hearings to approve the Official Plan.
That plan was made at a very great cost in time and money and represents the will of the community. NO law-abiding community can allow its collective decisions to be flouted at will by whatever individual finds it to be offensive. If Tennant and his neighbours are really aggrieved by this, there is a procedure outlined in the Municipal Act which permits an application to be made to a local board known as the Committee of Adjustment of the City of Pickering, whereby a "minor variance" may be sought, minor variance being permission granted to be exempted (for good reason) from the operation of the Zoning By-Law and a corresponding minor variance ina the provisions of the Official Plan. If they can't convince the local Committee of Adjustment, there are provisions for further appeals to the Ontario Municipal Board and then to the courts.
Tennant seems to be like some kind of fucking anarchist - - too good to obey the local laws and too contemptuous of them to avail himself of the appeal processes carefully set up for him. Guys like that probably brainwashed by crypto-fascist propaganda assailing Communism, probably have encouraged him to believe that selfish self-advancement principles outrank the principle of community interests and the public weal. Fuck this guy, the community comes first.
<<And how the fuck do you know where he keeps them while he works on them?>>
Who gives a shit? The law was enacted with the general idea of keeping the ostensible signs of business OUT OF the neighbourhood. The law is necessarily of general application - - it can't micromanage every single manisfestation of the general phenomenon it was designed to prevent. If Tennant feels the law was overly broad, he can seek the exemption as I outlined above, and can appeal further to the courts if he doesn't get the relief he is seeking within the procedures set up specifically to deal with planning issues.
<<Perhaps like myself and Hnumpah, he didn't know that fixing other people's lawn mowers free of charge as a hobby was also considered a business. >>
How the hell
WOULD he know? That's what you hire a lawyer for. If he thought he could figure out the meaning and application of complex legislation like the zoning by-laws and the Official Plan, which the average
lawyer doesn't fully understand unless he or she specializes in real estate law, then he's a schmuck and deserves whatever consequences befall him.
<<But you've decided that he can't have made that sort of mistake. You have some how divined that he is merely a selfish bastard out to have everything his own way. >>
Well, selfish for sure because if he didn't know the law when he bought the property, he sure as hell knows it now. And maybe just plain dumb in the beginning. Up here, EVERYBODY hires a lawyer to buy real estate. Title insurance has not taken off here as it did in the U.S. That's probably a good 20 years ahead in our future.
