What the CBC Means to Me

It's just another data point that the verbal assurances of the Conservative Party aren't worth the air molecules that got shook around so you could hear them. Nearly a year after finally seizing a majority government that may well owe its existence to a campaign of electoral fraud, the knives are coming out in Ottawa. Foreign aid? Cut. Military expenditures? Cut. Even Katimavik has been cut, and hell, I didn't even know Katimavik was still around; I thought Mulroney had got rid of it twenty years ago.

However, some of the biggest cuts were reserved for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which is one hell of a way to honor its seventy-fifth anniversary. Specifically the CBC is facing a 10.4% cut, which will see its funding go down by $115 million in 2015 compared to 2012's outlay. Its budget is literally being decimated. Contrast this with what happened back in May 2011, when Heritage Minister James Moore assured us that the Conservatives "believe in the national public broadcaster. We have said that we will maintain or increase support for the CBC. That is our platform and we have said that before and we will commit to that." That's the great thing about the internet; it really bricks up the memory hole.

Already the usual suspects are coming out of the woodwork in regard to this. The other day Larry Miller, MP for Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound, appeared on Sun News to complain about how the CBC cuts didn't go far enough and bemoan that it was only a cut of 10% over three years, rather than a 10% cut per year. James Moore has already changed his tune, saying that the CBC "can be run more efficiently," which really smells like gravy to me. Are claims of the gravy train at the CBC soon to follow?

I involve myself in this because I believe the CBC is important, that it has an important place in our society and that it is key to the development of Canadian arts and culture - and if you're thinking of dismissing that as some Dipper bullshit, keep in mind that James Moore said, essentially, the exact same thing back in May. Though I still regularly read CBC News on its website and wander through the CBC Archives from time to time, it's been a while since I've watched CBC on TV or listened to it on the radio - in my defense, my rabbit ears can't pick up CBC and the antenna on my radio is thoroughly busted. But it wasn't always like that.


Let's go back, say, fifteen years - Earth, 1997: specifically Barrie, Ontario, in a house that was within sight of the CKVR transmission tower. Though the station had rebranded itself as "the New VR" in the first stage of a process that eventually led to the modern CTV Two network, it had been a CBC affiliate before that and at that point still simulcasted a fair bit of CBC programming. I had a cheapass CRT television balanced on top of my dresser, and thanks to the broadcast tower's proximity I didn't need rabbit ears to pick up the signal - not that rabbit ears would have been worth much; there weren't any other broadcasters in Barrie, and I wasn't going to be able to pick up a signal from Toronto with them.

I was still able to get things I considered worth watching, though. At 4 PM, I think, there was Jonovision - Jonathan Torrens' 90s talk show for teens - and I believe it was at 5 that Family Matters came on... you know, the show with Urkel. Sandwiched between them was a show that really stuck with me, not the least because it was made in Halifax and, for me, at the time Halifax was a distant and exotic place full of wonder and mystery: Street Cents.

This was a show targeted at teenagers, built around the idea of instilling wise consumer practices - knowing how to not be taken advantage of in the marketplace, how to spend your money intelligently, and to look beyond the claims of advertising and gauge the products themselves in order to make a more canny customer in a capitalist world. There are clips of it scattered all around YouTube, and even a full episode or two. I like to think that the show played a part in making me the overly suspicious bastard I am today. One laudable thing about it, which I can't recall if it even registered with me at the time, is that it aired commercial-free; what "commercials" existed were parodies and sendups. It existed to be a consumer review and education show for teens, and the presence of commercials would have led to a difficult balancing act - it's a bit more difficult to pass judgement when the judged are, in part, paying your bills.

A show like Street Cents, in the form the CBC broadcasted it, would never air on a major network... a major commercial network, that is. The only other place in North America I can imagine it landing on would be PBS - another public broadcaster like the CBC, which aired cherished childhood shows like Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? and Reading Rainbow, and which has itself regularly come under attack from the Republicans. Really, can you imagine that kind of show on CTV, say, or NBC? Not only occupying precious time that could be filled with another goddamn celebrity dancing show, but not even generating any commercial revenue?

Some critics of the CBC attack it as a "state broadcaster," as if that was enough - this is bullshit, and an obfuscation of the truth. The CBC receives support from the government, but it isn't an arm of the government, and I think that's the key as to why the Conservatives dislike it so much. If the CBC really was a state broadcaster, the Conservatives wouldn't be cutting its budget - they'd be using it to parrot their messages from one end of the country to the other. When it comes to state broadcasters in Canada, where "state broadcaster" means "a broadcasting organ firmly loyal to the state and always acting to advance the interests of its leadership," you need look no farther than the Sun News Network - practically Canada's own Pravda.

James Moore may have been shooting smoke back in May, but that doesn't mean he didn't stumble onto the truth. The CBC is important; it is a key Canadian cultural institution. Its government funding allows it an independence that could give it power if only it was done right - power to look deeply into things without worrying about whether this story will offend that major advertiser. In an ideal world, the CBC wouldn't need to wade into the ratings battle with the commercial networks. The ideal would be for the CBC to be supported by television license fees, such as Japan's NHK, the BBC, and practically every other public broadcaster in the Anglosphere. But it would never fly, not now. Politicians in Metro Vancouver received death threats when they aired the possibility of taxing vehicles; what do you think the uproar would be if the government decided it was going to start taxing TVs?

The CBC continues to play an important role in Canada. The fact that the Conservatives hate it so much only gives it all the more reason to stick around, I think.

Funding for this post was also provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the National Science Foundation, and the financial support of readers like you... no, not really. But that'd be nice.

Photo: That's A Lot of Skulls

If you visit the George C. Page Museum in Los Angeles, where they display some of the interesting things that have been recovered from the adjacent La Brea Tar Pits, among the things you will notice are the dire wolf skulls. There were a lot of dire wolf skulls in the tar pits; thousands have been found so far. The dire wolf itself went extinct ten thousand years ago, but considering the extent of its former range, that likely has more to do with human predation than getting trapped in tar pits.

Though I notice now that these dire wolf skulls they've got on display, apparently with the lower jaws removed - they sort of look like fossilized prehistoric shoes.


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It's All One Big Honor System

There are plenty of things some people do which deeply worry me. One of the big ones, which I've thankfully never personally encountered thus far but have heard of from others, are religious people who believe that atheists are immoral because they have no higher power to guide them. It's not an uncommon viewpoint; a search for "atheists immoral" on Google comes back with six and a half million hits. For some people, the idea is that these rules on living a good, just, and moral life were passed down from on high to the believers, and that someone who has rejected the notion of a higher power likewise rejects the morality ascribed to that power.

It's a hollow opinion, especially since it completely ignores the existence of secular ethics - the idea that someone can do the right thing because it's the right thing, not because a messenger of some deity told the people to do this thing and that it is good, and also that if you don't do it you'll be punished for eternity in the afterlife.

The reason it worries me is because of what's implicit in that argument. After all, people don't tend to agree with things that they know are bullshit, right? When I hear of a person making that sort of statement, I see a person who honestly believes that faith and morality can't be decoupled. I can't help but conclude that if a person who held that kind of a view was somehow convinced that there was no god and no afterlife punishment for sins, they would act in exactly the manner they ascribe to atheists and live a thoroughly immoral life.

Now that I've laid that out, it's time to approach my actual point. Earlier this week, the story broke that TransLink, Metro Vancouver's regional transit provider, has no authority to enforce the payment of the $173 fine you'll be slapped with if you are caught riding on its transit system without the proper fare. For now, it's easy to ride the SkyTrain and the SeaBus without paying; they function on the honor system, much like GO Transit in Greater Toronto, and until those dozens of construction projects are finished there are no barriers to someone who wants to get on without paying. Fare inspections, which take the form of transit police officers inspecting tickets near the station platform, out of sight of the fare-paid area boundary, or boarding a train or bus in motion don't happen too often in my experience - even so, whenever the police come aboard, there's always at least one passenger who shuffles off with them at the next station.

Sure, they'll get a $173 ticket, but once they shuffle off there's nothing that obligates them to pay it, legally speaking. Despite what seems to be a popular belief, ICBC won't even prevent people from renewing their license or insurance if they have outstanding fines.

Faregates: coming soon to a SkyTrain station near you. Unless you don't live in Metro Vancouver, in which case they're pretty much all equally distant.

Nevertheless, ever since TransLink embarked on the faregate construction project, it's been taking flak over the cost. According to its own numbers, in 2010 the fare evasion rate was 4-6%, working out to $18 million per year in lost fares; meanwhile, the implementation cost for the faregates and the Compass system works out to somewhere in the neighborhood of $170 million. Given that criticism, I couldn't help but take this news a bit... conspiratorially. Especially this close to month end, it's certainly a convenient time.

Here's what I suspect: TransLink released this information to the media intentionally, making people aware that this loophole existed, to help determine the degree to which fare evasion might rise once people know they won't be punished for it after getting off the train. I've already encountered people celebrating the "honor system." If fare evasion goes up significantly for April 2012 in comparison to April 2011 or, more tellingly, if pass sales experience a drop, it'll be all the more ammunition for why the faregates and smartcards are necessary.

But it all comes back to that question of ethics and internal morality, I think. The question of who you are in the dark, when no one except yourself can pass judgement on your own actions, is something that people have been wrestling with for millennia. For many people, it's no doubt profoundly disturbing to consider the possibility that such a deep darkness really does exist. We all react to it in our own way.

Still, I can't help but feel there are a considerable chunk of people in Metro Vancouver now who aren't buying passes anymore, because they know there's no punishment for their transit sin. People who are taking up space without paying for the privilege of doing so, who aren't doing their share to help the system deal with the load.

Honest morality, whether it deals with social ethics or two-zone tickets, has to first come from within. If something that's imposed from above abruptly disappears, well... it's not necessarily the sort of world I'd want to live in.

Photo: The Blossoms are Coming Out

Of the last four weekend days in Vancouver, at least three of them have had particularly nice weather; that, more than anything, is evidence that winter is finally shuffling away from the Lower Mainland. As the days get longer and the conditions get warmer, it's as if the city is waking up from a long, cold sleep. I was in Kits the other weekend, and the cherry blossoms on some of the trees there look like they're almost ready to erupt for another year.


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An Unnecessarily Sexy Description

If you had to describe, say... Indiana Jones, what kind of adjectives would you use? Daring, perhaps; capable, adventurous, and lucky would also work, considering how many of his plans were improvised on the spot. The same is true of most of the heroes of paper, stage and screen - these are competent people, able to face challenges that would slam most of us back on the mat without even blinking, standing in the face of danger and death and making it through because that's what heroes do. Words like bold, uncompromising, tough, and fearless tend to make the rounds fairly often, as well.

For dudes, that is. When it comes to female characters, the score is strikingly different. For a heroine, someone has decided that one of the most important factors is whether or not she's attractive - that the things a woman can do, what qualities she brings to the situation, are of less importance than what she looks like. This idea has been hideously persistent down through the years, but now that people are finally starting to realize that we should know better than that, this double standard just becomes more galling and grating - like a train screeching across old, rusty rails.

The DVD case for Tomorrow Never Dies, for example, describes James Bond as being "devastatingly cool," because in Hollywood that's something only a man can be. Imagine that they made a movie about Jane Bond - what description would be more likely? Something like "devastatingly cool" or, more likely, "stunning and sexy?"

It happens since I see evidence of it every day, even if it's not always thrown into my face. That's just the chance I take now whenever I board a SkyTrain, since they started placing ads for the new Ava Lee novel, The Wild Beasts of Wuhan. I growled at it inwardly the first time I saw it, then again, until I took a photo of one of the ads so I could properly tear it down without doing something that would get me a talking-to from one of those nice SkyTrain Attendants.

If Indiana Jones was likewise described as being fearless, sexy, and lethal - all qualities which are, admittedly, beyond argument - we might be better off, I think.

This frustrates me, this irritates me, because decisions to present people like this give a fresh jolt of electricity to the shambling beast that is the traditional view of women in Western culture. Especially in a non-visual medium such as a novel, but equally true for the world in general, whether or not a woman is "sexy" shouldn't warrant such prominent consideration unless it's directly relevant to the situation at hand.

Here's the problem: it's all marketing. This ad was most likely dreamed up in some office after being bounced from person to person in some committee, trying to maximize its impact. I can tell that's what happened because when I go to the website of the author, Ian Hamilton - an author whose name, incidentally, is practically absent from the ad itself - take a look at the words he chooses to describe Ava Lee. Words like "methodical." "Determined." "Confident." Certainly stands in stark contrast to the presentation in the ad, don't it?

Except, like I said, the ad reinforces that shambling beast. The continued presentation of women through this kind of prism encourages the belief that this sort of thing is okay, that there's nothing wrong with the implication that one's attractiveness is a question of fundamental importance for half of humanity. It helps give life to antediluvian attitudes that have no place in a civilized society - a society that, in many respects, still treats a woman's body as public property.

It's a relic of times far more barbarous than ours. We need to do what we must to relegate those relics to history, where they most assuredly belong.

Photo: Call It Like You See It

Back when I lived in Toronto the Trump International Hotel and Tower was still under construction, a metal skeleton rising up in the heart of downtown. I understand that it's complete now, which makes photos like this all the more difficult to take. I took this photo of the then-incomplete skyscraper back in April 2010, and the sign seems to be uncommonly frank about the nature of its namesake.


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Achievement? HAH!

Up to now, I've made it a point to stay well clear of the Sun News Network, Canada's own bush-league Fox News; I'm hardly the only Canadian to do so, since one of the problems Sun News has struggled with since its inception is viewership and the lack of same, particularly in the demographics that advertisers covet. That's not much of a problem, though - they can, and do, compensate by being so dedicated to the claim they've staked in the political landscape that the people who cluster around there will never stray. It's easy to forget about Sun News completely; in fact, I did forget it existed for a few months there, until some notes on Twitter started reminding me of it.

In six days, it'll be Earth Hour; this will be the fifth consecutive global recognition of it, and it didn't take long for some people to start polishing their knives for it. The "movement," such as it is, seems like it may be beginning to coalesce around something called Human Achievement Hour, originally promoted by a libertarian think tank and which I wrote about two years ago, when it was still fresh in the news cycle. But don't ever accuse the Sun News Network of passing up on a tack that fits with its ideology; after all, everything's new to someone. With that in mind, I took some time out of my day to watch a clip in which Ezra Levant laid out his case for spitting in Earth Hour's eye.

"I will never celebrate underachivement and lack the way eco-whackjobs want us to," says Levant, capping off the two minutes and forty-four seconds he spent furiously assembling one of the nakedest strawmen I've ever seen in the media. To him, Earth Hour symbolizes "repudiation, renunciation, and devaluation of people." It suggests "the world is better without human ingenuity," and that prosperity and progress are "the problem, instead of the solution." He brings out the satellite photo of the Korean Peninsula, contrasting the bright lights of South Korea with the empty darkness of the North - a North where, to hear Levant tell it, it's "Earth Hour all the time."

So all this time, Earth Hour wasn't about reflection about humanity's role in the environment, or trying to raise awareness of what's going on? Turning electrical appliances off for an hour denigrates humanity? My god... now I finally understand. All those times when I was a kid and my mom told me to turn off the TV if I was leaving the room, she didn't want to make sure our hydro bill was as low as it could be; she was devaluing my worth as a human being, because obviously, the only real way to measure our worth is by how much energy we consume! That's why I'm no doubt a worthless, self-denigrating envirotard because my average daily power consumption, according to New Westminster Utilities, is somewhere in the neighborhood of two kilowatt-hours - so roughly seven hundred and thirty kilowatt-hours per year, compared to a national average of nearly seventeen thousand.

I need to make up that shortfall somehow if I don't want to be devalued! I should go and buy a diesel generator, fill it up, and run it all day without connecting it to anything! After all, according to ol' Ezra that's the way to celebrate Human Achievement Hour; turn everything on! Even your blenders! You do have multiple blenders, don't you, citizen?

Pictured: human achievement. Wait, shit! I forgot that wind turbines are beloved by environmentalists and are therefore denigrating to humanity and don't count!

Before I go any further, I want to make it clear that I don't believe that there's anything wrong with the concept of a Human Achievement Hour. It would be instructive, I think, for the average person to have a better understanding of the ways in which humans have reshaped the planet, from laudable things like the Dutch reclamation of the Zuiderzee, to failures like the devastation of Kazakhstan's topsoil thanks to Nikita Khrushchev's Virgin Lands Campaign and the drying-up of the Aral Sea. Besides, those failures were both set in motion by the policies of the Soviet Union, so why wouldn't right-wing media folks like Ezra Levant want to trumpet them?

He's also got a point about electricity, and the key importance it holds in modern civilization. Life without electricity generally is poor life, by any reasonable modern metric, and one of the biggest stumbling blocks facing a developing country is how to deliver a reliable electricity supply to its people. That's why China is building coal power stations at such a breakneck pace; as far as it's concerned, the ability to supply electricity to its people is of greater importance than air you can't skewer on a fork. All together, human innovation and achievement have granted us a prosperity and capacity for action unprecedented in history, and that's something that everyone should be able to recognize.

What's less recognized is that with great power comes great responsibility. Whether or not we own up to it, we're still responsible to ourselves, to the planet, and to those generations that will come after us. We have the capacity to step away from choices that were made decades and centuries ago, to take careful stock of the world around us and consider choosing a new path.

That's not the way Ezra tells it, though. According to him, Earth Hour represents a time when "the elites will tell you to flip the switch off of innovation!" Yes, because our continuing dedication to fossil fuels to supply our electricity - something which was discovered in the nineteenth century - is so innovative. That's not all - Ezra helpfully provides us with a timeline of progress, detailing what he presumably believes are the key inventions underpinning the modern world: Edison's lightbulb, Ford's Model T, John Logie Baird's television, and Steve Jobs' iPad.

Wait, what? The goddamned iPad as a symbol of human innovation and achievement? To me, it underscores how simple and facile and purely conventional this list is. Where are the truly innovative answers and the revolutionary inventions? Where's the washing machine or the pill, which helped liberate women from toil and drudgery around the world? Where's the innovation of learning how to draw power directly from the environment? Where's the telephone or the internet, which expanded the sphere of human communication from the room to the planet? For that matter, where's writing?

I'm still having some trouble believing that the video is real, that it's not some parody dreamed up by a Canadian version of the Onion. Whatever cogent points may exist around Ezra Levant's argument are burned away while he dials up the heat, turns on all the lights, runs a blender just because he can in what feels like the smuggest, smarmiest manner possible. To me, it's as if someone criticized the moment of silence on Remembrance Day because it "implies that the world is better without countries fighting for justice, for what they believe in."

The world is a lot more complicated than that.

Photo: Two Specks and a Wire

The close conjunction of Venus and Jupiter is over now, and while they've begun pulling away to go off to their respective corners of the sky, they're still relatively close together and shine brightly enough with reflected sunlight to burn through even the light pollution you'll find being thrown up over downtown Vancouver on a Friday night. Venus is the brighter one at the top, thanks to its proximity to Earth, and while it isn't responsible for casting that light on the wire, once I realized the effect it was too good to pass up.


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Quaff Review #21: Howe Sound Rail Ale

Looking back through my life, it seems that with the exception of New Year festivities, whenever I've drank in commemoration of an event it was to soften the blow, as it were; I can't remember what I knocked back when Rob Ford was propelled into the Toronto mayoralty, but when Harper and the Conservatives robocalled their way to a majority last year, nothing alcoholic in my apartment was safe. I was getting a bit tired of this; after all, the old saying isn't "eat, drink and be miserable." In that spirit, then, I stopped off on my way home from work last night to properly toast not only Toronto City Council's victory but Rob Ford's defeat with the effective resurrection of my favored mode, the Transit City light rail plan.

I was looking for something that I could at least tangentially connect back, and I was fortunate to find at the top of the cooler a tall, thick bottle of Howe Sound Brewing's Rail Ale Nut Brown. The one-liter, potstopper-equipped resealable bottle cost me $9.30 at the local bottle-o with taxes included; you'd probably find it for cheapear at the BCL, but for that much beer it's still a fine enough price. The strange thing about it is that even though Howe Sound is based up in Squamish, barely one hundred kilometers from New Westminster, the liter bottle I picked up was produced for the American export market - as evidenced by the Surgeon General's warning and the complete absence of French on the label.

Enough of that, though - what's it like?


In a word: thick. Of everything I've drank before, Rail Ale Nut Brown feels closest to Guinness; true to its name it's dark and opaque enough that it could probably stand in on camera for motor oil, it's got the viscosity, and it's got a similarly tangy taste, and while the taste of black licorice does become progressively stronger as the beer cools down, I couldn't really detect any hints of the chocolate which the label assures me is also present. It had a nutty, woody aroma, bringing to mind images of nineteenth-century steam trains cutting through the western wilderness, chugging past ancient forests and craggy mountains. It's got a 5% alcohol content, so as long as you don't down the entire bottle in one go, it's a good weekend or after-work relaxant; would be good with dinner as well, I think.

As for the taste as a whole, it's slightly bitter and did not become much more bitter as it warmed up, which was a definite plus to me. It was rather sharp and heavy, too - for me, at least, this wasn't the sort of beer I could chug even if I was interested in that sort of time. It feels like it needs a bit to filter down one's esophagus.

Just remember that, according to the Surgeon General, consumption of alcoholic beverages impairs your capacity to operate machinery - so as long as you're not driving the train on Sheppard Avenue East, go for broke! Raise a drink to the Toronto light rail system - or to the defeat of Ford's ephemeral subway dream, if you'd rather - and let the rails take you along.

ANDREW'S RATING: 3.5/5

Previous Quaff Reviews

• #20: Olympia
  
• #19: Eel River Açaí Berry Wheat Ale
  
• #18: Bah Humbug
  
• #17: KLB Raspberry Wheat Beer
  
• #16: Mana Energy Potion
  
• #15: HE'BREW Messiah Bold
  
• #14: Mackinac Pale Ale
  
• #13: Ola Dubh Special Reserve 40
  
• #12: Hitachino Nest Japanese Classic Ale
  
• #11: La Loubécoise
  
• #10: Summer Honey Seasonal Ale
  
• #9: Earthquake High Gravity Lager
  
• #8: Route des épices
  
• #7: Sparks Plus
  
• #6: Hurricane High Gravity Lager
  
• #5: L'Indépendante
  
• #4: Antigravity Light Ale
  
• #3: Nektar
  
• #2: Innis & Gunn Original
  
• #1: Abbey Belgian Spiced Ale

Photo: Just So We're Clear On This

Among the forty thousand files I currently maintain in my photo archives, I have a surprising number of ground-level photographs of Toronto's Sheppard Avenue East, circa February 2010. The reason behind this is that I was planning to do a before/after phototour on the construction of the Sheppard LRT, since this was long before a) I moved out west and b) Rob Ford had even registered as a candidate for mayor.

Pictured here is the intersection of Sheppard Avenue East and Victoria Park; one of the compromises that Ford batted away would have seen the stubway extended two stops to this intersection. Sure, the apartment buildings may give the appearance of density, but the key to a subway is continuous high-level demand; if the subway functioned purely as a commuter shuttle that'd be one thing, but that's not why subways are built. It doesn't really get much denser than this the further east you go. If anything, Victoria Park looks like a place where a subway would end - yet in Rob Ford's world, at Victoria Park the new tunnel would be just getting started.

What's more, this intersection would be practically impassible for some time during cut-and-cover construction of the station itself. But don't expect to hear hizzoner go on about that. "People want subways," after all.


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saisho ni sekitan ga kesu

The lights are still on in Japan, but a year after Fukushima the question on everyone's mind is how best to keep them on. After experiencing such a massive shock to the system, the whole idea of nuclear power is being approached very skeptically in Japan; it's a vast change from before the tsunami, when government plans were for Japan to continue increasing the nuclear foundation of its generation capacity. Considering the incompetence with which Tokyo Electric Power Company, the owner and operator of the Fukushima reactors, approached not only the disaster but disaster planning - ignoring or dismissing multiple opportunities in past years which, if implemented, could have prevented the meltdown - along with the dream of "absolute nuclear safety" being shattered in such a dramatic way, it's absolutely reasonable for people to have second thoughts. Of all the nuclear reactors in Japan, by the end of this month only the Tomari Nuclear Power Plant in Hokkaido will still be generating power, with the remainder suspended for checkups and stress-testing.

Utilities across Japan are, therefore, confronting hard choices: not only what to do to keep the lights on for the immediate future, but how to approach power generation in the years and decades to come. Earlier this week the Japan Times reported that the Kansai Electric Power Company, which supplies electricity to Japan's populous Kansai region partially from eleven nuclear reactors, is potentially facing demands from some of its shareholders - namely the cities of Kobe, Kyoto, and Osaka - to phase out its nuclear generation capacity, accounting for nearly half of its total supply, and replace it with renewables.

When taken in isolation, this is a laudable goal; however, laudable goals don't easily translate into reality, and it's possible that the highly understandable reaction to the Fukushima disaster may end up worsening things in its own way.

The Tomari Nuclear Power Plant in Hokkaido. Photo by Mugu-shisai, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

The nuclear power plants that supply the Kansai region are situated in Fukui Prefecture, on the coast of the Sea of Japan and about seventy kilometers as the crow flies from Kyoto. What's significantly closer is the northern coast of Lake Biwa, the largest lake in Japan and a reservoir used by fifteen million people. A sufficiently bad nuclear accident could contaminate the lake - which, to me, is just another reason for safety measures at the existing plants to be beefed up. It's not as if the plants are going to be decomissioned tomorrow; hell, by the original schedules, Fukushima Daiichi was to have already begun the decomissioning process on the day the tsunami struck.

Japan is in a difficult place when it comes to nuclear power for the very reasons that led it to install nuclear power in the first place; it's a geographically small, relatively resource-poor country. Germany may be trumpeting the fact that it's shutting down all its reactors and increasing the presence of renewable power sources in its mix, but what tends not to be mentioned is how Germany is bringing more and more coal-burning power plants on line to fill the gap - which, if you care about air pollution and the increased deaths it absolutely causes or atmospheric emission of carbon dioxide, is a significant problem. It's hardly the "environmental" choice.

Fortunately, the mayors aren't pulling for coal - however, in addition to their drive for renewables, they want KEPCO to replace its nuclear reactors with liquefied natural gas power plants; granted, they're not as polluting as coal-burning plants, but they still pollute and still emit carbon dioxide.

My own view of this is simple - if KEPCO is to replace its reactors, it should first demonstrate that it's capable of replacing a substantial mix of its generating capacity... how fortunate for my argument that its mix also includes twenty thosuand megawatts worth of "thermal" generating sources. It's unclear which of these are coal-burning plants, since that lovely word "thermal" hides so much, but with more than a quarter of Japan's electricity coming from burning coal I don't think it's a much of a leap to suggest that at least some are.

So - let KEPCO first mothball its existing coal power plants, replacing them with renewables and - if necessary - LNG. If there aren't any problems with that kind of switchover, then the drive toward a local phase-out of nuclear would at least have the precedent of a functional solution. The real enemy here is coal; personally, I would much rather live next door to a nuclear power plant than even within sight of a coal-burner's smokestacks.

Photo: Laden Trolley

Today is the equinox and therefore winter is finally over - technically, at least; I think that message will take some time to get to the Lower Mainland, considering the way the jetstream is practically tracing the Oregon border in the west and yet sailing over Ungava Bay in the east. Still, even the coolness of a British Columbia winter doesn't stop some people taking their bicycles out at every possible opportunity. When I was living in Toronto, it would be a fairly frequent sight to see some bicyclist taking advantage of the front racks - seeing two at the same time was a bit rarer. It happens considerably more often during the warm weather in Vancouver, as evidenced by this trolley - it's got as many bikes as it can handle.


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A World-Class Misfortune

Once in a rare while, I come across people talking about how Vancouver is, or should be, a world-class city. This fills me with shivers and dread. Not because I'm opposed to the idea of living in a world-class city, mind, but because in my experience it is easy for the "world-class" ideal to twist the political narrative in an unfriendly, distinctly unwelcome way, reducing it to a political dogwhistle. For now, I'm happy for it to stay below the horizon in Vancouver. This city knows what it is - wet, green, unaffordable - and knows where it sits in the community of cities. Sure, people may criticize the installation of separated bike lanes, but generally they're basing their criticism on reasons other than "world-class cities don't have separated bike lanes."

Not so in Toronto.

Toronto may look monolithic and imposing from the outside, but on the inside it's an insecure city that has been grappling with a monumental identity crisis for decades. Fifty years ago it was the second city of Canada, an Indianapolis of the North, making its way in the world while the real center of national gravity was over in Montreal. When the Parti Québécois came to power and started making noise about independence, there was a corporate exodus down the highway to Toronto and by the 1980s, it had taken over Montreal's position as nerve center of the country. The problem was that Toronto didn't have to do anything to achieve that - its primacy was awarded by pure circumstance.

As a result, in the decades that followed there's been a great deal of hand-wringing in Toronto that boils down to whether or not the city deserves to be on top, and a lot of ambitious plans that are in essence meant to prove that Toronto is worthy of being in the top spot, and not just an Indianapolis of the North that got lucky off Montreal's misfortune.

The winner, by technical knockout...

I'm glad that the Evergreen Line is finally being built. It's extending rapid transit service into an area of Metro Vancouver that has never had it, where the downtowns were built with the understanding that such transit service would be extended there. They've been waiting twenty years, but now the preliminary work is finally, astonishingly underway. Imagine, though, that instead of using SkyTrain, the decision had been made to build the line using ground-level light rail technology, as was considered during the early planning of the line. Then imagine a popular push-back in the Tri-Cities, with people clamoring and yelling that Vancouver was a world-class city and deserved world-class transit, namely SkyTrain.

This is precisely what's going on in Toronto today. Organizations in Scarborough, one of Toronto's eastern inner suburbs, are jostling for the incipient city-wide light rail plan to be overturned in favor of extending a single subway line into Scarborough, a subway line that would cost billions and doesn't even meet subway ridership levels as it is. Sure, the construction of the subway would mean that underserved areas of the city would get nothing... but Toronto is a world-class city and deserves world-class transit.

That is, without exaggeration, the argument being made by the pro-subway group SAFE - a group which seems to be at odds with reality. They're even agitating for a Finch Avenue subway, something which never existed in any official plan and exists only because a particularly outspoken councillor had no grasp of what was being done - a rough Metro Vancouver equivalent would be not only agitating for a SkyTrain line all the way down King George Boulevard to the White Rock border, but agitating for it to be completely underground as well... and even that probably has a far better business case.

There are some people in Toronto who desperately want to make sure that it's a "world-class" city, though strangely enough the "world-class" option generally seems to be the most expensive of all of them. Boosters use language like "building for the future" or argue that Toronto should be following the example of cities like New York and London - which really gives insight into the world-class mindset, because the only way I can see Toronto becoming equivalent to New York and London involves New York and London ceasing to exist.

Vancouver, it seems, has no such identity crisis. Vancouver knows what it is, and is satisfied with moving forward at its own pace, on its own merits. Like many other things, the ideology of city-building is more relaxed out here. In Toronto, it's maddening - many people there see themselves as living in a city that's just barely not world-class, that it's just too far away to grab, hanging there, tormenting them.

That's no way to build a city.

Photo: Shattered Glass

I'm not sure what happened to this storefront window on Columbia Street - perhaps some drunks or idiots or drunk idiots had a spare rock that they needed to get rid of. It's never welcome, seeing a broken window on the street... but there is a certain cold beauty in the way the glass buckles and cracks.


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I'm Getting Reports of the Death of SF

Don't be surprised that I spend a lot of time thinking about writing. It is, after all, vastly easier to think about doing it than to actually do it... it all comes out in the wash, anyway. While I'm focused on individual stories, some folks prefer instead to think about the larger genrescapes as a whole. Last night James Nicoll pointed me to Iain J Coleman, who had Things To Say about what is wrong with science fiction today.

"Then there's prose SF, which is basically dying... there are still fine novels being written that you could classify as SF, just as there were before Goddard and Tsiolkovsy - but, just as in those days, they are not generally shelved in a special section of the bookstore called 'SF'."

Admittedly, this is hardly the first time I've heard this sort of argument. My old roommate in Toronto would bring it up fairly frequently, arguing that our generation was suspicious of the traditional SF tropes of galloping science solving social ills, and that a dissatisfaction with the idea of science in general was one of the factors pushing the growth in fantasy-focused literature. While what may charitably be described as "science fiction" does still bring in the bucks in the movie theatres, I'll readily admit that when it comes to what you'll find between two covers, it's not as sharp as it must have been back in the day.

Understandably, though. You use a knife enough times, it tends to get dull. Science fiction authors have been digging down into the mines of tomorrow for more than eighty years now, and even if most of the early work was crazy pulp about supertechnology and planetary invasions - so, really, not too different from a lot of the stuff you'd find on the shelves today - there were thoughtful gems from the start, even amid things like "Revolt of the Ants."

A significant fraction of the works on this shelf may have already been almost completely forgotten!

I know I'm biased as hell, but even so I don't think "dying" is an entirely appropriate way to describe the state of written science fiction today. For me, it feels like we're more in a winter of sorts - sure, the sun is still shining, but no longer is it the summer blaze of the 1960s and 1970s, when Everyone Knew that moon bases and space colonies were Definitely Right Around the Corner. We've finally reached the point where a lot of things featured in SF of older days should be coming to pass... except it isn't. If SF was a roadmap to the future we've finally pulled into the parking lot, but someone's taken down all the signs pointing us to the entrance.

As for prose SF? To be honest, it depends on the medium. For decades, it's been dominated by novels; novels were the way authors tended to get their stories out there, novels were the way that the lion's share of authors became known. Perhaps it's that aspect of the genre that's dying instead. I have to wonder if we're not becoming primed for a new age of short stories - brief, comparatively simple things that still have the capacity to touch, to affect, and to be read while riding the train to work. That's one reason why I don't read novels as much now as I used to, I think - I prefer to devour in a single sitting, if at all possible.

Of course, seeing as how I am primarily a short story author, I am likewise biased as hell here. Even so, I wouldn't mind a new age of short stories. There's something about a magazine or anthology that's worthwhile - a multiplicity of viewpoints and ideas, small and nimble and yet still effective. Science fiction has been around for eighty years - I don't think it's on death's door. What it needs is new viewpoints and new voices, and a new way of reaching the world.

Photo: Unfreezing the Wing

There was a slight delay on the ground when I found myself flying to New Brunswick in November; after all, even in Vancouver it tends to get cold in winter, and to make sure the ailerons didn't freeze up during the middle of the flight and so on, YVR ran the plane through de-icing before we were allowed to leave. It's the first time I've had the chance to see it in operation, spraying deicing fluid down.


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By the Light of the Rails

The advantage of being several thousand kilometers from Toronto is that aside from freaks out here like me who read the Toronto Star, only the news that's of significant importance and affect makes it this far. Thankfully the light rail antics of hizzoner da mayor don't fall into that, since whether or not Toronto builds any of those lines will have no real impact anywhere west of Thunder Bay. Given that, it's actually rather comforting to see municipal leaders on this end of the country giving an honest look at light rail, rather than hooking the pantograph to an ideological lightning rod to score some cheap political points.

Earlier this week, Surrey mayor Dianne Watts used her state-of-the-city address to reiterate her calls for the installation of a comprehensive light rail network in British Columbia's second-largest city, a city which remains firmly rooted in the twentieth century in terms of higher-order transit. That something needs to be done is undeniable - over the next few decades, estimates have Surrey's population outstripping Vancouver's, and Surrey barely has the road capacity to serve its current population. What's more, building purely with a focus to the automobile, catering to the driver above all else, only sets up Surrey for a long and painful fall should that mode end up losing the primacy it has commanded for decades now.

Personally, I'd like to see light rail go in the ground down in Surrey. Without a higher-order transit system to tie it together and offer a transportation alternative that's more reliable than buses, Surrey will remain a place of low-density sprawl, spread out and disconnected from itself. It's not as if Surrey would be going it alone, either. When you look at all those cities in the United States and Canada west of the Mississippi, Vancouver is one of two that doesn't rely on light rail exclusively. Los Angeles is the other one, and even it has invested far more in the expansion of its light rail network than its subways; it's even got its own Expo Line set to open this year. Unlike in Toronto, where it's easy for people who aren't deeply familiar with the situation to equate light rail with streetcars, Metro Vancouver is surrounded by examples of the alternative.

And yet...

One of the Muni Metro's hybrid heavy streetcar/light rail trains moves folks through San Francisco.

Light rail isn't politicized out here yet, and right now there's no worry that it will be; in a manner befitting the Mississauga of the West, Mayor Dianne Watts crushed her opponents last year with a commanding eighty-one percent of the vote; Rob Ford may talk about mandates from here to Siberia, but eight out of every ten is one hell of a mandate. Sure, there's always the chance that some challenger will rise up between now and 2014 and attempt to use light rail as a wedge issue, but without local, concrete examples to distort like the so-called "St. Clair disaster" in Toronto, it's doubtful someone would go particularly far with that.

If someone did, though, I already know who'd be lining up behind them. The folks at SkyTrain for Surrey are still up to their old tricks, still describing light rail as "cataclysmic" with a straight face, still steadfast in their conviction that Surrey will not be property served by anything less than SkyTrain. In this, I see early parallels to what's going on now in Toronto - the only difference is in the different prestige modes. In Toronto it's the subway that's sexy, so Scarborough wants a subway. Here it's the SkyTrain that's the most important part of the system, and so it's what everyone wants. These attitudes have already had influence on the Metro Vancouver transit network - the original plan for the Evergreen Line had it using LRT rather than SkyTrain technology - but thankfully they were dealt with in a manner befitting calm, responsible adults, and the well here is still free of poison.

Surrey needs transit, yes. But is an expensive series of SkyTrain extensions the best way to deliver it? Personally, I think Surrey would be better served by a comprehensive light rail network capable not only of delivering riders to the SkyTrain but speeding people through Surrey as well. The money that would have otherwise gone to stringing more elevated tracks along King George Highway would, I think, be better spent on system upgrades, like extending Expo Line stations so that they can accommodate even bigger trains. I mean, when it's standing room only on a train to Surrey at 10 o'clock at night in Columbia Station, I have to wonder how far away we are from hitting capacity ceilings.

Photo: A Bridge of a Different Color

While the Golden Gate Bridge may be the iconic bridge of San Francisco for everyone who's seen it in movies or television or photographs, it's not actually the most important bridge in the Bay Area - after all, on the far side of it you'll find the rather rural Marin County. One of the linchpins of Bay Area transportation is far less well-known in the wider world - the Bay Bridge, which connects San Francisco to Oakland and which for some reason is not named after Emperor Norton even though he was calling for it to be built a hundred and forty years ago.

Here, one of the Bay Bridge's towers rises above the palm trees of the Embarcadero.


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Captive, Bound and Double-Tunnelled

The day after tomorrow is the Ides of March, the day to beware; the day after tomorrow was to be, before some behind-the-scenes wrangling delayed it, the day of transit reckoning between Toronto mayor Rob Ford and the other Toronto mayor Doug Ford on one side and City Council on the other. That's been delayed until next week, and while I'm confident that Council will follow up on its previous rebuke and vote in favor of the light rail plan and not in favor of extending the subway to nowhere, I have to wonder... does it really matter? At this point, will it really make a difference?

After more than a year in the mayor's office, Rob Ford admittedly has done one thing well: he has thoroughly politicized the concept of light rail transit. Five years ago it was innocuous and unknown, and the average Torontonian on the street likely would not have been able to explain it if asked. Now, of course, it's a tool of the downtown elites, a program of "glorified streetcars" that devastates neighborhoods and makes people wait in the cold winter and takes away lanes from cars and hurts Scarborough's feelings. It doesn't matter that the average Torontonian on the street still likely couldn't accurately explain LRT if asked; the clamps have been hooked on and the current is flowing, and anyone who grabs that baton now is going to find out whether the juice runs out of the battery before they get electrocuted.

In theory, there's no reason why Toronto can't still embark on an LRT-building program, regardless of what the mayors think. They're just one vote apiece, after all, and in the end the power resides in Council. In reality, though, not every choice can be made - sure, you might be able to see the other option, but if you took the right fork a while back on a road that doesn't let you go backward, you just can't reach it. That's my concern, coming on the heels of the notoriously rowdy and disappointing event at the Scarborough Civic Centre last week, where LRTs were practically found guilty and hanged in absentia. That at this point, tempers are too high and ideology is too thick for light rail to move.

You might want to go straight, but the tracks say otherwise.

It wasn't a short road that led Toronto to where it is today. The roots of the city's present choice go back a long, long way, back to 1994, when Mel Lastman latched onto the idea of a subway as being key in the transformation of North York into a major city in its own right. As early as the 1960s, municipal politicans were speculating about the possibility of an east-west subway through North York, and the idea of the Sheppard Line as connecting downtown North York to the "emergent downtown" at Scarborough Town Centre is as old as I am - of course, those plans did not take into account the massive growth that would be experienced in York Region, and thus that the densities subways required wouldn't have materialized even thirty years later. The Sheppard Line was the only aspect of 1984's Network 2011 proposal ever to be realized.

Particularly after what's been going on, I can only conclude that the Sheppard Line as a whole was a mistake, and that for the last eighteen years the people in charge made choices that only dug ourselves deeper. If it had been built all the way to Scarborough Town Centre, that would be one thing - perhaps Ford would then be leading the charge for an Eglinton West subway. If it hadn't been built at all, though, it would be vastly more difficult to get things off the ground; people like finishing things, after all, and from the bare concrete walls of the platform levels to the fact that it's little more than a shuttle service between two shopping malls, the Sheppard Line is manifestly unfinished.

The choices that brought Toronto to where it is today may have seemed wise at the time; today they bind the city, restrict its paths, push it forward resolutely.

Photo: Save the Daylight

Daylight Saving Time has now officially begun in those North American jurisdictions that implement it, and although it seemed unnaturally dark outside when I woke up this morning I can at least take comfort in the knowledge that the days are seriously getting longer now. I was getting tired of the sun already setting around 4:40, like in this photo I took looking up Granville Street last November or December. Sure, it looks nice, but I'd rather have sunlight at that hour.


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Learning to Read, Again

I don't remember what it was like to not be able to read English; I can't remember that far back. I know from what I've been told that I started reading simple things as far back as preschool and never stopped. I kind of wish I did recall that experience now, because without that knowledge the next thing I can fall back on is the conviction that I must be able to learn to read, since I've already done it once.

Read Japanese, that is. Recently I've had Japan on the brain, and this has manifested in actual academic study of the Japanese language through the University of British Columbia's continuing education program. Despite my failed attempts to sign on with the JET Programme at the end of my university days, I never had a real opportunity to study the language in Ontario. Right now I'm capable of extremely basic conversation, but speaking a language is only part of it - if you can't also read it, you'd better be a pretty good bluffer if you have to spend any significant amount of time in a society that speaks it.

You've probably heard that Japanese doesn't use an alphabet natively. Instead, it uses two syllabaries, hiragana and katakana, as well as kanji, an array of Chinese logographic characters of which up to three thousand or so are in common use in Japan. The familiar Western alphabet isn't unknown over there, though - it's called romaji, is often used in a Japanese context on things like street and destination signs, identification, and computer interfaces, and it's taught in the schools. So, even if a Japanese tourist visited Canada with only a limited command of English, written material wouldn't be completely unfamiliar.

The reverse is, unfortunately, not the same. I've heard rumors that some high schools in British Columbia offer Japanese as an elective language class, but otherwise it's pretty much no dice unless you attend a university with a sufficiently sophisticated languages department. Neither is there a particularly strong presence of Japanese writing in Canada, so far as I've noticed. Not even my package of authentic miso soup has any. The result of this was that when I started trying to learn hiragana and katakana, they were completely alien systems that bore no resemblance at all to anything I'd ever seen or heard of before.


Over the course of a few weeks I did manage to eventually wrestle katakana to the ground, but for a while there it was a struggle that would leave my mind blank at the most inconvenient moments. Hiragana presents its own challenge that I still have yet to take on squarely, and kanji... there's a lot of kanji. But it would've been considerably simpler, I think, if this had been the sort of thing that I'd been exposed to through society during the course of my life.

In retrospect, in some ways it's almost surprising that there wasn't very much of this. Back in the 1980s, when I was growing up, one of the dominant cultural assumptions in the West was that Japan was going to rule the world thanks to the unrelenting power of its keiretsu megacorporations - the bursting of the economic bubble put an end to that particular assumption, but even so. In other ways, though, it's not surprising at all - until very recently, Western culture in general was rather provincial and xenophobic against anything that wasn't considered to be a subset of "the West." Sure, there are sushi and pho places on practically every street corner now, but twenty years ago the situation was vastly different.

So I'll continue learning. Nevertheless, I can't help but look at photographs of subway station signs from all across Japan, seeing their names given in kanji and romaji both, and wondering why not even the SkyTrain does the same in reverse. I mean, they're replacing the signage anyway. Sometimes, the will to read comes from the most unlikely places.