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Stephen Dulmage: I am a business person and I hate to see waste. Once I got there (on the board), I saw that there was a lot of waste going around. For example, we have about 98 branches in total, we could lose 20 of them. Not to mention there are three times more branches south of St. Clair as there are north of St. Clair. It should be geographically spaced out.

Councillor Paul Ainslie: You have to look at population density, obviously in the downtown core (south of St. Clair) there are a lot more people. You can say that we have too many libraries, but they are all highly used. In fact we have the highest per capita library usage in North America

Dulmage: Currently we are stuck on this old business model where they load all these branches with millions of books. People these days go online to search for books and then order them to be picked up at their branch. We could pull 80% of the books and move them to a central warehouse. This way rather than having 80 copies of the same book, we could go down to 20.

Ainslie: You have to think of the cost of getting the book from a central warehouse to a branch and back. Not to mention if you have a warehouse you have to pay for it. This idea flies in the face of having a library as an open and accessible place.

Dulmage: We entertain mothers and children with puppets, have yoga classes, English-as-a-second language classes. Where does it end? This is not the mandate of the library. We have 200 community centres in Toronto already. The library is not a welfare agency.