Ruling From the Echo Chamber

It's a hard lesson, but it's true: no one group, be it an individual or a government in power, has all the answers. They may think they do, as people are wont to do, but that just demonstrates humanity's boundless capacity for arrogance and self-deception. Everything we see, everything we know about the world is filtered through many lenses: what we believe, what we know, what we want to achieve, and so on. Be it one person or one group of like-minded people, they're incapable of coming to a nuanced understanding of the world just by interrogating it from their own perspective. Outside input is necessary to challenge us, to find the weaknesses that we never would've noticed ourselves.

You know what else, though? Challenges hurt. Something in our heart of hearts, the most primitive sectors of the brain, doesn't like it when someone else points out flaws in our view. What do you mean there are flaws? There aren't any. It's perfect. You're just trying to displace me and become alpha male of the troop, aren't you? You're trying to replace me!

It's a deep-seated drive, sure, but it's easy enough to overcome with the application of enough conscious will and intellectual vigor. So it should come as no surprise that Canada's Conservative government embraces it.

On Monday, the Globe and Mail reported on the fate of the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, an independent advisory group which had been around since 1988 and was defunded in the Conservatives' first majority budget last year. While Harper's mouthpieces initially claimed the defunding was because the group was redundant, with advice on sustainable development far more easily available from a multitude of sources now than it was in the '80s, we now know that it was really just nothing but governmental capriciousness.

"Why should taxpayers have to pay for more than 10 reports promoting a carbon tax, something that the people of Canada have repeatedly rejected?" John Baird said in the House on Monday. “It should agree with Canadians. It should agree with the government. No discussion of a carbon tax that would kill and hurt Canadian families." [CITATION NEEDED]

I don't even know where to fucking begin.

This isn't really a concept I can illustrate - so here, have a nice, calming photo of Cariboo Park.

Let's put the typically shrill Conservative arguments aside for a moment. The issue here is not their defunding of an environmentalist advisory board. No, the real issue is that this government is so arrogantly self-assured, so convinced that it is the font of authority and knowledge and wisdom, that there is no room for anything which does not already agree with its preconceived notions. This government doesn't want challenges - Harper has never wanted a challenge, and I can only imagine how much he raged for the five years his power was restrained by those idiotic citizens not making the obvious right choice and sweeping him into a majority in 2006.

The issue here is that, by its actions, this government is making it clearer and clearer every day that it has no business being in power. This is a government to which ideology is paramount, and a government that is too stupid to realize that ideology is an artifice. Events will not unfold a certain way because it would be politically convenient for them to do so, and all the ideology in the world won't hold back the relentless tides of reality. Entertaining disagreements and alternate viewpoints are vital if you want to remain dynamic, if you want to keep yourself from being blindsided by what you can't see yourself.

For some people, echo chambers are comforting - they provide a place to be right. In an echo chamber, you don't have to worry about some stranger barging in with some new information, frightening information, information that threatens your view of the world. No, in an echo chamber you have a place where everyone agrees with each other--at least, superficially so. But no group has complete consensus on everything, even a group kept in as tight an ideological lockstep as Harper's Conservatives. The details may seem irrelevant to outsiders, but inside an echo chamber, irrelevancies are magnified... particularly when people have the temerity to disagree.

There are still three years before the next scheduled election; I can't help but wonder if Harper won't be able to keep a tight grip on the reins, if the overwhelming importance of ideology will create cracks in the great grey Conservative edifice. As long as there's life, there's hope...

It's enough to make a man pine for Cascadia.

History in Harper's House

There are two important reasons, I feel, to have at least a basic familiarity with history. The first is the ability to avoid pitfalls by recognizing past mistakes and learning from them; the second, which doesn't come up quite so often but remains important, is being able to recognize when other people are trying to reinforce a bad argument with some claimed historical precedence. Whether it was through political calculation or sheer ignorance, the other day a reminder of the importance of that second reason was brought to the floor of the House of Commons, and from there to the country as a whole. As someone who actually holds a degree in history, it's something I care a bit about.

It started as an ordinary back and forth about Afghanistan, with NDP beard-in-chief Thomas Mulcair pressing the government about whether it had any intention to keep Canadian military forces in Afghanistan beyond 2014, the current projected end of the mission there - thirteen years after the initial invasion, and I thought the Soviets were in there for a long time! In response, Prime Minister Stephen Harper gave a calm, collected answer, justifying the faith Canadians have put in him and his majority govsnerk -- sorry, I couldn't keep that up. Here's what he actually answered Mulcair with.

"The leader of the NDP, in 1939," Harper said, "did not even want to support war against Hitler."

There's only one small problem with that, if you consider summoning Hitler's ghost for political points to not be a "problem" - the NDP, in 1939, did not exist. What did exist was the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, which would eventually disband and unify with the Canadian Labour Congress to form the New Democratic Party, sure - but in 1961.

You may have heard about this via the deluge of #HarperHistory tweets that followed after news of this made its way out to the world. "The NDP refused to come to the aid of men when Mordor invaded Gondor... The NDP didn't support the creation of the Magna Carta... The NDP cut down the last tree on Easter Island." The #HarperHistory hashtag continues to trend in Vancouver twenty-four hours after I first encountered it, though it seems to have fallen off the radar in the rest of the country in favor of Justin Bieber getting his twenty-one-millionth follower - because news, yanno? It's not the first time the Conservatives' antics have launched a satiric hashtag to mock them - shades of #TellVicEverything from a couple months back - and there are certainly going to be more before the Cons are turfed from power, because it's essentially the only opportunity the people have to make their voices heard under a majority government.

The NDP wants to correct the grammar on this war memorial plaque. I mean, who uses "liveth" anymore? #HarperHistory

I'd hoped I wouldn't have to live under a government that summoned the ghost of Adolf Hitler for cheap political points. What is Harper trying to say here? That if Canada doesn't stay the course, a charismatic dictator will rise to power in Afghanistan and attempt to build the Fourth Reich through conquest and bloodshed? The fact of the matter is that J. S. Woodworth, the CCF leader in question, was a committed pacifist and thus essentially alone in the House of Commons in his opposition to Canada's entry into the Second World War.

The biggest problem here is that this criticism of the NDP through the actions of its predecessors is being done through a modern lens. The subconscious thought process is probably something like, "Hitler was an evil man. Hitler wanted to conquer the world and killed millions of Jews and was the greatest monster in history. What sort of person would not want to stand fast against him?" If the NDP had been retroactively criticizing Canada's participation in the Second World War, this line of attack may have had some foundation. But it wasn't.

To use present-day knowledge in our assessment of history is, essentially, cheating. If you wanted to be honest about Woodworth's motives, put yourself in his place in early September, 1939. It's twenty-one years after the end of one of the most devastating wars in history, a war that saw 67,000 Canadians die and another 150,000 wounded, a war that churned up countries and beggared nations and killed millions over muddy patches of a European quagmire. In 1939, Hitler's Final Solution had not even been agreed upon by the Nazi hierarchy - where the camps existed they were for the imprisonment of the Jewish population, not their annihilation - and while there were severely anti-Semitic laws in Germany, Canada was not particularly fond of Jewish people either; witness the voyage of the MS St. Louis and its nine hundred and seventy-three Jewish refugees, which Canada refused to allow sail into Halifax, or the sort of cultural antisemitism that gave rise to people like Adrien Arcand and reinforced restrictions on Jewish immigration.

In 1939, to Canadian eyes - particularly a pacifist Canadian's eyes - what was Hitler? Just another manifestation of German militarism and expansionism, a latter-day Kaiser Wilhelm II or Otto von Bismarck, who would no doubt grind Europe back into the dirt it had spent two decades getting out of. Until Hitler's attack on Poland, when the last line had been crossed and alliances brought the United Kingdom and France into the war, Canada had no dog in the fight. At the time it was an ordinary war; it wasn't until the 1940s that evidence of what the genocide being engineered by the Nazis filtered back to the Allies.

This trap is an easy one to fall into, that of criticizing historical figures for actions they took based on information they did not have, but dammit I expect better of our government than this. It's the fact that this majority government evidences its lack of understanding or respect for history, or for that matter Godwin's Law, that particularly irritates me.

Look on the bright side, though - back in 1917, it was the Conservative government of Robert Borden that brought in the income tax as a "temporary measure" to pay for the war. If the NDP can be attacked for the actions of its forebears, the Conservatives can certainly be attacked for their own.

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.

Stay Classy, Scarborough

There's nothing like moving to the other side of the country to get a fresh perspective on the place you left. When I lived in Toronto I was too close to it, pressed up against the window, too close to resolve any of the flecks of dirt on the glass. Here in British Columbia I have access to, and continue to follow, the same media sources that kept me informed when I still hung my hat in the megacity, but they're bloodless now. Thankfully, the present antics of the Toronto municipal government have no effect on New Westminster, and I can watch things unfold from a dispassionate, outsider's perspective.

That's the theory, at least. It's kind of harder in practice, particularly when it starts looking like Toronto is about to go Oroborous and start eating its own tail.

Hizzoner da Mayor hasn't done particularly much for municipal unity in the year since a plurality of voters propelled him into power. His support base was in the outer-ring cities of Metro Toronto, and he's been excellent at reopening old wounds and cutting fresh ones. I don't recall suburban venom being so close to the surface during any previous mayoralty. This time, the problem was less the mayor himself than what he set in motion, and it was presented in all its starkness last night at the Scarborough Civic Centre, where hundreds of people crowded in for an honest debate on the merits of light rail transit versus the subway.

"Subways! Subways!" According to the Star that was the sound of the crowd. "Not glorified streetcars!"

Sure looks like a streetcar to me.

It annoys me, but I can also understand it, because the average Torontonian - many of them unwilling to do even a modicum of research themselves, despite having the single largest gathering of knowledge and information in all of human history literally at their fingertips - doesn't know what LRT is, and can only put it in a familiar context; that is, streetcars.

What I can't understand, what drives me to gnash my teeth, is the unrelenting childishness that's surrounding the "debate" of this issue. I mean, really, if you were charged with building a business plan for funding a subway extension, the appropriate response to someone asking where in the plan one could find an explanation for where the money's coming from is not "are you thick or what?"

Ultimately, it doesn't matter what fools like the debate's loudest voices want - the numbers, be they political or financial, are not on their side. Toronto does not have the money to extend the Sheppard Line east, and the people of Toronto are not interested in paying higher taxes in order to build it. At this point, though, Ford's work has been done. Back in 2010 the path was clear for Transit City and LRT, but his constant hectoring has opened a wound there too.

When I look at the arguments that are going on regarding the subway now, I can't help but find them extremely pathetic. Extending the subway into Scarborough doesn't make any sense in terms of the business case or the efficiency of moving people - the fact of the matter is that Sheppard Avenue East cannot support a subway. It was a mistake to build it at all - we can thank Mel Lastman's ambition to make North York a real city for that - and extending it now, when only a fraction of its capacity is used as it is, would only compound that mistake. But people aren't thinking of the business case or the efficiency case. I can only conclude that the big problem here is that the notion of the subway is being tied to Scarborough's sense of self-worth, that if only it can get a subway it'll stop being Scarberia.

I know that all of Scarborough isn't like this. Really, though, these antics are reflecting poorly on its people. It's the sort of situation where I wish I could make every Scarboroughnian subway supporter go up to busy rush-hour bus stops on Finch West and tell the people waiting there that Scarborough deserves a gold-plated subway more than they need a modicum of rapid transit, or have the government of Ontario just throw up its hands and reassign that Transit City money to, say, Hamilton. Let Hamilton build a light rail system and show Toronto how it's done.

Foaming at the Mouth and Falling Over Backwards

Actions speak louder than words, and the recent actions of the Conservative Party don't particularly accord with the actions I'd expect from an organization that knows itself to be innocent. Rather, it's a lot more like the political version of snapping on a light in a room infested with roaches. Conservative MP Dean Del Mastro only brought that into starker relief the other day when he stood up on his hind legs and not only demanded that the Liberals prove a negative by opening their phone records to demonstrate that they weren't responsibile for the robocalls, but refused to do the same.

"Obviously our party is not behind these calls," said Del Mastro, who I heard was some kind of used car salesman prior to entering politics. "We know that."

[CITATION NEEDED]

What a wonderful example of circular reasoning; there's not much there to boil down, but what is there reduces to "we didn't do it because we say we didn't do it." So it's coming down to asking Canadians to trust the Conservatives on their word... the same Conservatives who, if you'll recall, were found in contempt of Parliament last year regarding crime bill expenses, the issue that triggered the last election. The same Conservatives that practically rewarded Bev Oda when she made a handwritten addition to KAIROS funding documentation, changing it from a confirmation of funding to a confirmation of NO funding. The same Conservatives who, by their actions, agree with the notion that you are either with them or with the child pornographers.

I ask you, Conservatives - how fucking stupid do you think I am?

Stupid enough that to my great shame I voted for the Conservatives once, back in 2006. Source: Elections Canada.

Look at the way the two parties are approaching this. The Liberals, even though they were the party targeted in the robocalls and thus have no reasonable motivation to have done them in the first place, are opening their phonebooks. If the Conservatives were reasonable, and had no reason to believe they were behind it, the sensible thing would be to do the same. The fact that they're not, that they're digging in their heels over this, only makes me more skeptical of their protestations of innocence. It was the Conservatives who were using that poisonous old "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" rhetoric; so the question is, what do they have to fear? This is election fraud - ELECTION FRAUD - and they do not exhibit ANY interest in confirming that they have nothing to do with it. I mean, they're only the MAJORITY PARTY, after all.

The Conservatives, I'm sure, will be poring over them for the slightest, most irrelevant issue or inconsistency to pounce on, in the hope that consistently hammering one point will tilt the discourse in their favor. That has already started to happen; witness Margaret Wente's characteristically insipid column in the Globe and Mail, dredging up all those tired old "it can't happen here" arguments. Yeah, you're right, it can't happen here - and while you're busy saying that, it's happening behind your back. Vigilance goes hand in hand with freedom, and the Conservatives don't want us to be vigilant. You can't prove a negative, but the Conservatives will no doubt be doing their utmost to convince the Canadian people that you can.

I was willing to give the benefit of the doubt before. That's over now. Actions speak louder than words, and I would need an extraordinary action from the Conservative Party to convince me that they're not the ones who are trying to compromise the integrity of our democracy.

I am not as stupid as they think I am.

An Act of More than Minor Treason

There's only been one instance in my entire history of telephone ownership that I've received a worthwhile robocall, and that was from Amtrak letting me know that my train the next day had been cancelled because of heavy snowfall in Seattle and that there was no alternative transportation available. Every other automatic call I've been received has been a complete waste of time - though they are somewhat considerate in that they usually start with a foghorn blasting in your ear or tell you to "hold for an important announcement," meaning you can hang up almost immediately and cut your time losses down to a few seconds.

When the call is purportedly from Elections Canada in the days leading up to a major federal election, though, it's a bit difficult for some people to just hang up. So instead, in dozens of ridings voters received robocalls claiming that their polling station had been relocated. While Peterborough Conservative MP Dean Del Mastro has recently said that his own campaign was targeted by robocalls, on the whole they appear to have been targeted at close-run ridings such as Etobicoke Centre, where the Conservative challenger won with a margin of twenty-six votes. This sort of thing works: voting just isn't a priority for many people, so if they head to what they think is their new polling station and instead find nothing, a lot of folk would just say nuts to the whole thing. Wheels have already begun turning for by-elections to be held in affected ridings, which may yet jam a stick between the spokes of Harper's majority.

While Elections Canada has been investigating this for nearly a year now, after initial complaints by voters in Guelph complaining of misdirecting calls, the news cycle started to pick it up again with the discovery that at least some of these calls traced back to Racknine, an Edmonton company that has done robocall work in the past for the Conservative Party. Evidence is still coming in regarding this, and on the whole I feel it's pretty damning for the Conservatives; the Greens were focusing all of their effort on Vancouver Island, the Liberals would gain nothing from keeping people from voting for them, and none of the scenarios I can imagine for NDP involvement make very much sense at all.

Regardless of who did it, the fact remains that a campaign such as this, an active campaign to mislead and suppress and prevent voters from exercising their democratic rights, strikes at the foundation of Canada's just society. It's an attack on democracy and therefore an attack on all of us. My own viewpoint is that whoever was behind this, whoever planned it, whoever orchestrated it, and whoever carried it out, whoever they may be, deserve to be charged with treason.

Through the ages, treason has taken many forms.

The Criminal Code of Canada defines treason as follows:

(2) Every one commits treason who, in Canada,
(a) uses force or violence for the purpose of overthrowing the government of Canada or a province;
(b) without lawful authority, communicates or makes available to an agent of a state other than Canada, military or scientific information or any sketch, plan, model, article, note or document of a military or scientific character that he knows or ought to know may be used by that state for a purpose prejudicial to the safety or defence of Canada;
(c) conspires with any person to commit high treason or to do anything mentioned in paragraph (a);
(d) forms an intention to do anything that is high treason or that is mentioned in paragraph (a) and manifests that intention by an overt act; or
(e) conspires with any person to do anything mentioned in paragraph (b) or forms an intention to do anything mentioned in paragraph (b) and manifests that intention by an overt act.

I'll be the first one to admit that "election fraud" isn't in there - but what is in there, under the category of high treason, is assault, kidnapping, and attempts on the life of the Queen; no surprise, considering that the continuum of treason laws stretch back centuries, and that back in the day treason was considered to be a more heinous offense even than murder.

Nevertheless, what we have here is an organized attempt to subvert the electoral process. It doesn't matter if two people were misled or twenty or two hundred, the fact of the matter is that the integrity of the democratic process must be sacrosanct if the elected government is to have any legitimacy at all. Whoever was behind the robocalling scheme isn't a traitor by the letter of the law, but to my eyes at least they are no better than a traitor. Electoral fraud isn't just some act of minor treason; whoever they are, by their actions they have undermined and compromised the democratic foundation of this country.

No matter what happens, I'm confident that the government will work to sweep this under the rug as quickly as possible and put up some scapegoat so that the people can forget about what's going on and they can go back to telling us that ignorance is strength. The fact remains that the people behind this are effectively traitors of the modern age; they are traitors against democracy and traitors against the people.

A World-Class Hole in the Ground

The recent ups and downs of Toronto politics put me in the mind of an adventure serial from the early 20th century, like Flash Gordon and its precursors; a series of cliffhanger episodes, each one leaving the hero in some kind of dire peril, each time trying to top what happened last time and each time leaving the audience asking how the hero's going to get out of this one. In this particular political adventure, the hero is the city of Toronto and Rob Ford is the peril that keeps outdoing itself when you think things can't get any more ridiculous than they already have. First hizzoner acts like he thinks he's an absolute ruler, calling the will of Council irrelevant; then he gets his snivelling bootlickers on the TTC board to fire chief general manager Gary Webster without cause for having the temerity, the unmitigated gall, to not be a cowardly yes-man and meekly agree with what the mayor wants to do.

Yesterday, Ford took it directly to the people with an article in the Globe and Mail, in which he (or, more likely, someone in his office - I never got the impression that Ford was much of a lit'rary man) spends a few hundred words trying to conjure up a dream world where subways clatter hither and yon. It's something I never considered the possibility of encountering; this is literal subway propaganda.

Even if he didn't actually string these words together, Ford's fingerprint is all over it - the article is suffused with the casual assumptions of someone for whom public transit is not at all a part of their daily life. He leads off bemoaning that the average Toronto commute is twenty-four minutes longer than that in Los Angeles, but somehow I get the impression that that's focusing on vehicular commutes; I doubt it takes into account riders reliant on the 36 Finch West bus, the people who would have been beneficiaries of the Finch West LRT but are again caught in a storm of uncertainty now that Giorgio Mammoliti's insane, delusional Finch subway concept wasn't immediately forgotten. Also very Ford-like is the casual dismissal of the TTC before construction began on the Yonge subway in the 1940s, as if everything that had happened before then was irrelevant. Considering that the TTC and the patchwork of privately-run transit companies it replaced were streetcar operators until then, it's not much of a surprise that Ford wouldn't want to even risk acknowledging a history of surface-running transit.

What do you think you're doing, subway? The surface is for cars! Get back underground!

"The TTC must become a sustainable, world-class transit system... I passionately believe a world-class city builds world-class rapid transit," Ford says, because obviously cities like San Francisco, Vienna, Brussels, Frankfurt, Rome, London, and Los Angeles are on the same level as Indianapolis. "A hundred years from now, Toronto will have more subway lines providing reliable high-speed transportation for millions more people. The only real question is whether we will start building those subways now, or wait another 20 years and build them at 10 times the cost."

First off, Rob Ford is pretty much the last person who I feel is qualified to be expounding on the transportation patterns of the twenty-second century; we can make even fewer hard plans for it than the leadership of 1912 could plan for today, and would the leadership of 1912 have anticipated suburbanization, telecommuting, the ubiquitousness of the automobile, or the new cities that emerged in Scarborough and North York - places which, back in the early twentieth century, were as rural as Garafraxa. Ford's actions as mayor have demonstrated that he doesn't much care about the potential problems of the next decade, let alone the next century.

Nor is he much qualified to talk about cost, either. He claims that a "modest parking levy" could bring in $90 million or more per year, to be used as seed money for a public-private partnership to build the Sheppard subway extension. Now, granted, PPPs aren't unheard of in public transit - Vancouver's Canada Line was built that way, but there is a key difference in the situation. The Canada Line connects downtown Vancouver to Western Canada's busiest airport and a city of 200,000 people; Ford's dream Sheppard Line would connect a mall to North York's Potemkin downtown, about as wide as a fingernail.

This is another part where propaganda comes in, since he doesn't actually bother to justify this; he just states it as a given. That right there is the crux of the problem, and the most likely reason why he can find anyone to use as examples in his constant "people want subways" claims - he treats these projects of his as if the only barriers are political. When people at Eglinton Square tell him they'd rather have a subway than LRT to Scarborough, they probably assume that they're equally valid choices, that Ford would not be putting the question forward if the resources to build the subway didn't exist. But they don't; last year, the TTC's estimate for subway construction cost was $351 million per kilometer. Ford's "modest parking levy" would therefore be able to build maybe four hundred meters of subway per year - not including stations, of course. Those are extra.

Rob Ford may cloak himself in the garb of progress, constantly repeat the mantras of sustainability and a "world-class" Toronto - whatever the hell that means - but his actions have demonstrated that those aren't his interests. His is a mayoralty of fiat and pique, in which ideology is the core consideration. Ford has amply demonstrated over the last year that he's incapable of disassociating his own view with what's good for the city; with Ford, it's his way or the highway, and woe betide any light rail train that gets in his way.

Achievements in Ignorance

In very rare and narrow circumstances, there's a certain advantage to ignorance. Every once in a while, we meet a roadblock in life that we feel like there's no choice but to climb, and only once we're on the other side do we find out just how damn dangerous it was to scuttle across. There are things that we would never do if we had a greater understanding of what it really meant in order to do it, things we do because they seem easy or convenient and the fact that we're playing the numbers every time we do it is hidden from our senses - like living in a seismic danger zone, for example, or on the flanks of a sleeping volcano. If people had known that, say, Mount Rainier was ready to blow its top, it's doubtful that cities would have been built where ancient lahars seared the earth.

Things like this are understandable when it comes to the ground beneath our feet; it appears stable, and that appearance is deceiving. It's one thing to make achievements in ignorance when the natural danger not only looks safe, but has been that way for ten thousand years. It's another thing entirely to extend that ignorance to something new, and something human-made.

That is, of course, if you consider the beings who write the bills that our parliaments and congresses foist on us to be human.

It could be that they are actually tricksy crows who have learned to hold pens in their beaks.

Remember Vic Toews, he of the mustache, who asserted that one either stood with the Conservatives in support of their internet surveillance bill, or with the child pornographers? That claim, in itself, was an achievement in ignorance; it was so ridiculous, so far beyond the pale that it galvanized a response in the form of the now-defunct @Vikileaks30 and the #TellVicEverything hashtag on Twitter. That response was quickly picked up by the media and spread well beyond that segment of the population that uses Twitter, spread far and wide.

According to an interview with the CBC this past weekend, good ol' Vic was "surprised" at the content of the bill he's been so vociferously defending. "This is the first time that I'm hearing this somehow extends ordinary police emergency powers [to telecommunications]," he said. "In my opinion, it doesn't. And it shouldn't."

Well, Vic, it's too bad that what your opinion of what the bill says is irrelevant; the only thing that matters are the words on the page. A page which, incidentally, was hastily and cynically retitled from the Lawful Access Act to the Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act. He does, however, deserve some measure of kudos for stating so forthrightly that he is not doing his goddamn job. Of course he wouldn't put that into words - that's where it comes down to folks like me to interpret.

Realistically, though, this sort of ignorance is completely inexcusable. As Minister of Public Safety and the prime defender of this bill in the House of Commons, it is Vic Toews' responsibility and duty to understand this bill and what it represents. He has demonstrated through his words that he has failed in that responsibility, and has failed us.

In the course of my own job, from time to time things with some measure of legal sensitivity cross my desk, and it's my responsibility to see that they're dealt with appropriately. If I didn't, and subsequently told my bosses something along the lines of "I didn't pay attention to what I was doing, but in my opinion it wasn't a problem," how much longer do you think they'd be my bosses for? There are some things where no second chances should be given, and I think that government is a good place to find them.

Vic Toews has demonstrated through his actions that, in his mind, accusing the Opposition of standing alongside child pornographers is more important than understanding the bill he's defending. For that he no longer has any business being in the House of Commons, and the fact that he will doubtless remain there only goes to show how intellectually and morally bankrupt the Conservative Party has become.

Dealing in Absolutes

You know, it sure is thoughtful of the Conservatives - now that they've got a majority in the House of Commons and can thus do whatever the hell they want thanks to the wonderfully broken system we call Westminster-style parliament - to keep giving us reasons why it was such a bad idea to elect them into power in the first place, because they don't have to face the electorate for another three years and by then most people will have forgotten.

The latest was a zinger of a punch delivered by Vic Toews, the Minister of Public Safety - a position, incidentally, that immediately brings to mind Revolutionary France - in response to an opposition MP who attacked the Conservatives for overstepping their bounds with their latest controversial law, which would substantially increase the ability of the police to conduct potentially invasive investigations into Canadians' digital lives without first obtaining a warrant to do so. Michael Geist provides a good look into the implications of this bill - I encourage everyone to check it out.

"He can either stand with us," Toews said of his critic, "or with the child pornographers."

Just don't think about that for a minute - here's a picture of a bunny.

It's rare that things are so utterly black-and-white in politics. Usually people have to dig a bit for things like this. As the Globe and Mail says, though, this is completely in-character for the Conservatives; eight years ago, when they were still trying to crack Liberal fortunes in the House, the party issued press releases claiming that the Liberals and the New Democratic Party supported child pornography. Now that they don't have to worry about the opposition or the electorate, why should we be surprised that this sort of talk is resurfacing?

The way I see it, there are only two options here - Vic Toews is either a manipulator or a shithead. Either he's fully aware of what he's doing and is using the argument to marginalize opposition, or he honestly believes that an ordinary, law-abiding citizen would have no reason to oppose what the Conservatives are putting forward. I can't figure out which is worse.

It's easy to realize why they actually use this charge: it's indefensible, horrific, political poison to touch and thus they toss these claims like grenades. The fact that the Conservatives do use it, and have used it consistently, likewise explains a lot about the way the party as a whole thinks. For the Conservatives, it seems, everything boils down to a binary choice - this or that, us or them, good or evil.

That's no way to run a government. It's a cynical ploy to marginalize their opponents in the eyes of their core supporters, the people who will follow them solely because they are Conservatives - like, say, Alberta, which seems to have an inexplicable political reflex in that it consistently gives absolute majorities of its votes to the big blue machine. It's that kind of automatic support, support given without regard to whether the party acts in a manner to make it worthy of that support, that energizes things like this. If the Conservatives were still a minority government, Harper would likely have already thrown Toews under the bus by now. Here's hoping that this causes at least some of those automatic supporters to consider throwing the Conservatives under the bus instead come 2015.

At its core, it's completely indefensible - equivalent to me saying that either one stands with the opposition or with the fascists. If an opposition MP stood up in the house and suggested that the Conservatives were supporters of fascism, I have no doubt that that MP would shortly find out what it felt like to be raked over the coals.

The ideal of government is consensus, not dominance. Binary choices have no place there. Nevertheless, there are far too many people out there who can only think in terms of one or zero - good or evil.

There's Jewelery in the City Hall Basement

I was waiting for the Queen streetcar the other day, so of course I had plenty of time to think. Some parts of Toronto have changed drastically in the past year and some haven't changed at all, but what seems to be different no matter where you go in the megacity is the undercurrent that you're in Rob Ford's Toronto - and that is a drastically different city than the one I lived in. I didn't live in a Toronto where news of new proposed service cuts came every day, where the leadership was unresponsive to anything but its pre-plotted ideological course, and there wasn't a drop of gravy to be found.

What really gets me is the way it's been talked about. Rob Ford never talked about service cuts until very recently; it was always about "efficiencies," which is one of those all-too-common euphemisms that really means something along the lines of "we're going to save money by putting a bunch of people out of a job." To be honest, though, Rob Ford is no stranger to euphemisms or idiosyncratic phrasing; I've heard him make paeans to the "taxpayers" of Toronto time and time again, yet I've never come across an instance of him referring instead to the "citizens" or just "people" of the city. Personally, I find it rather offensive. The people of a city have a far more important role in it than simply being sources of tax revenue. I suppose this is one of the natural results of running the city as a business.

If that's what hizzoner is trying to do, though, he's doing an awful job. A business being run the way Toronto is right now would have people jumping ship for its competitors - too bad things don't work the same when it comes to municipal governments; I was able to get to British Columbia before the hammer came down, but plenty of people have no option but the Toronto option. The latest news is that cuts are going to be deep and brutal, and that Ford's support is unsurprisingly nosediving. It seems clear that Rob Ford's likely not going to be mayor four years from now, but it's still going to be a long four years.

Still, he's trying to run it as an efficient business... and so the cost-cutting recommendations include not only slashing necessary services like Blue Night late-night bus service or charging premium fares for them - because when I think premium, I think of the Vomit Comet at 2:30 in the morning - and of selling the Toronto Zoo and the city's performing arts centers. The KPMG consultants also recommended selling the Toronto Parking Authority's garages and parking lots, which bring in around $50 million a year. I don't doubt that in the days to come we'll start seeing recommendations to sell the lots to make up the gap.

That's when it hit me - the realization, not the Queen streetcar. If Ford and his ilk can continually frame the argument with terms like "taxpayers" and "efficiencies," it's not just a one-way road. I realized what he's doing, and what Toronto will likely see much, much more of before 2014.

Rob Ford is pawning off Toronto.

Infrastructure for cash! Your old, broken-down, profit-generating assets for cold hard cash!

It's really not surprising - this is the trajectory conservative governments follow time and again, taking advantage of difficult economic times by selling off publicly-owned assets to private developers, whether it be a favor for an election supporter or just misplaced ideological fervor. Look at Highway 407, Ontario's monument to that kind of thing - for a highway that cost $1.6 billion to build, in addition to $100 billion in land acquisition costs from the 1970s, the Progressive Conservative government of Mike Harris leased for ninety-nine years to a private company, in exchange for a one-time US$3.1 billion windfall and absolutely no say on what sort of tolls the company would charge.

The situation is potentially different with the performing arts centers and the zoo - I'm not sure how much money they bring in for the city. But what's more at issue here is this administration's willingness, almost eagerness, to cannibalize the city in search of short-term solutions. In my mind, selling off city-owned services should be a last resort - hell, it's not something you can rely on, because a service can only be sold once but the bills keep coming. Yet like a junkie pawning their toaster for another fix, the city government isn't really thinking of tomorrow. They'd be better off looking for William Lyon Mackenzie's pirate gold.

I'm damn glad that the election campaigns in Vancouver and New Westminster are, thus far, refreshingly normal - you know, aside from the newspaper commenters trying to crucify Mayor Gregor for installing bike lanes. Must be all that ocean breeze and B.C. bud.

Scrambling for a Choice

I can't say it's a surprise. It wasn't that long ago, just after Rob Ford was made hizzoner da mayor of Toronto, that he announced the war on cars was over. The surprising thing is that it's taken this long for the Fordists to train their sights on the scramble intersection at Dundas and Yonge. Don't forget that back in 2009 the Toronto Sun, Ford Nation's newspaper of record, classified scramble intersections as part of the war on cars - just below Pedestrian Sundays and well below speed bumps - and now that His Fordness has dealt with the pernicious threats posed by transit expansion and bike lanes, the new administration is free to focus on lesser threats to the dominance of the automobile.

If you've never crossed or seen a scramble intersection, the concept is simple: once the two cross streets have had their turn to go through the lights, every light at the intersection goes red for twenty-five seconds and pedestrians can cross in whatever direction they like. Yonge and Dundas, which in addition to being one of the many claimed locations of the center of the universe is where you'll find the Eaton Centre, the structure formerly known as Toronto Life Square, and Dundas Square, has an understandably large pedestrian presence - the Toronto Star referenced a city study that found that daily users on foot outnumbered those surrounded by wheels to the tune of 17,000.

Not that it matters, apparently. Earlier this week Denzil Minnan-Wong, the chairman of the city's public works committee and one of Ford's staunch allies, called for a surprise review of the scramble before more can be built. The fact that he tried to justify it in vaguely environmental terms - asking whether scrambles were the best way "if it takes pedestrians thirty extra seconds to cross... yet vehicles are being lined up for four or five minutes spewing all that exhaust" - just makes it even more disingenuous. Suddenly the Ford administration cares about exhaust being spewed into the air? Transit City would've provided an alternative to exhaust-spewing cars and buses throughout huge stretches of the city, you know.

But we mustn't forget the war on cars, or the fact that the Fordists' power base is in the suburbs, where cars are free to zoom along and sidewalks are those lonely strips of pavement that see about as many footprints as Tranquility Base. It's not surprising that the champions of the suburbs would champion pro-suburban ideals; nor is it surprising that they'd attempt to impose those ideals on the downtown core that came out strongly against them in the last election.

Here's hoping they get a fight on their hands.

Pedestrians cross one side of the Yonge-Dundas scramble intersection in front of a streetcar... two enemies of the car working hand-in-glove!

You know what? I'm sick and tired of it all, of the notion that the car is something precious and fragile that has to be coddled and catered to at every possible opportunity to the greatest possible degree, like some spoiled sixteen-year-old wannabe princess. I grant that traffic congestion is an important issue to address, given that so many people have no other way to get around thanks to the monumental fuckwittery that has been enshrined in North American patterns of development for the last seventy years, but the answer to that is not to give cars more perks. It's not to make the roads wider. It's to enhance other choices.

From my point of view, I have a real hard time feeling sorry for the driver on Dundas that has to wait a couple of minutes longer now than before the scramble was put in place. That driver can still make a trip in ten minutes that would take me an hour on foot - even longer out in the sprawls that were built with the assumption that modern folk have wheels riveted to their hips. Aside from spots here and there where the more person-focused layouts of the past still hold sway, today's society is built around the automobile. Rob Ford and his ilk are like those Japanese soldiers that went guerilla on Pacific islands and stayed that way for decades - the war's been over for a long time and they don't even realize it. Except that their side was the one that won.

I think the primacy of the car was rooted deep enough in the modern cityscape that we can afford a few sops to pedestrians here and there.

Lying On A Bed of Rails

"This subway plan is realistic, it's affordable, and it will deliver real benefits for people living and working in Toronto in time for the 2015 Pan-Am Games."
- Rob Ford, from the Rob Ford for Mayor Transportation Plan, September 7, 2010

These are strange times to be a transit supporter in Toronto - which is just as well for me, seeing as how I'm not in Toronto anymore. Despite that, as a member of the Torontonian diaspora I can't help but watch and listen as the city groans a little bit louder with each passing day. I think it may come from the gradual realization of certain truths - such as the way in which Toronto's transportation infrastructure is continuing to lag behind, the way in which Hizzoner da Mayor's ideological emphasis on subways - specifically, the Sheppard subway, a wholly suburban line connecting a mall in North York to another mall in North York - and staunch opposition to surface-running light rail is making sure that Toronto will continue to operate a 1970s public transit system well into the twenty-first century.

Many of the important truths in life are simple. So simple, in fact, it's easy to go past them without noticing, leaving them lying neglected on the pavement. One such truth is one of the key points of argument - correlation does not imply causation. Said another way, just because two things happened at the same time, it does not mean that one caused the other. This would be a good thing for politicians to know about, or at the very least not ignore quite so much. That's more than I can expect for Hizzoner, though.

Recently, Ford claimed that he "campaigned on the Sheppard subway and people supported my platform." Well, I'll give him this - both of those statements are true. He did campaign on building the stubway to nowhere out to Scarborough Centre, and enough people did support his platform to propel him to the Mayor's Office. The assumption here is that people supported him because of his subway plans. Myself, I don't buy that - but I don't imagine that matters. People voted for Rob Ford, so in Rob Ford's mind, every single person who marked his name on their ballot wanted the whole package. To be fair to him, too, he's not doing anything that he didn't warn us about in his pre-election transportation plan - which is one of the reasons I was so opposed to him.

Mostly because his transportation platform rested on discarding a plotted-out system with plenty of dedicated funding that had been in the offing for three years, in favor of back-of-the-napkin "plans" with no money to pay for them. Now, that proud brashness may finally be biting at Ford; Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty appears singularly uninterested, and rightly so, in giving Ford $650 million to pursue his dream of a completed Sheppard Line three years from now. Dollars which, by the way, come from the Eglinton Crosstown LRT construction - because the Ford camp is "already certain" that one of the most expensive infrastructure projects in Toronto's history will come in under budget.

Pull the other one.

A subway train departs from, or possibly arrives at, Sheppard-Yonge Station. Since they use the same tail track it's hard to tell sometimes.

There's ideology, and then there's just stupidity. Sure, I like subways; they're fast and smooth and have a lot more room for people to move around inside - unlike the SkyTrain here in Vancouver, where just because someone's standing next to the door it doesn't mean they're getting off at the next station. I feel that the Ford administration has already breezed past ideology and moved to stupidity in its monomaniacal pursuit of a subway underneath Sheppard Avenue East. If only Ford was pursuing his promise to not cut services with the same sort of mania.

On Wednesday, Randy McDonald at A Bit More Detail asked whether it was worth it for McGuinty to throw sand in Ford's eyes, for Toronto's sake - "is it worth taking down Ford if Toronto's left with no major transit expansion plans?" Personally, I say yes. Despite what we may be inclined to believe, there are circumstances where it's better to have nothing than to have something that's not appropriate for the situation. A completed Sheppard Line would be a money pit for years; the TTC is struggling to afford its current operations, and that doesn't even take into account the additional fiscal pressures that will kick in once the extension to Vaughan opens in 2014.

It was the suburbs who voted overwhelmingly for Rob Ford, drowning out the old city of Toronto's support for Smitherman. It was the responsibility of the suburban voters to know what they were in for when they marked Ford on their ballot. It's the suburbs who will suffer because they decided to listen to the subway crusader, without stopping to consider that the choice wasn't between LRT and subways - it was between LRT and nothing. This isn't the same category as people voting for Ford on his gravy-drinking bona fides, only to find him preparing to close libraries left and right - this was his plan for the start, regardless of whether the money was there.

The money isn't there. So there won't be much of a start after all.

A Smell of Communism

Toronto is, I'm sure, becoming more of a laughingstock by the day, and by the time 2014 rolls around I expect the administration of the Brothers Ford to have provided textbooks worth of object lessons for "what not to do" in the world of public relations. The most recent event isn't even that much of a surprise when you put it into a Fordian context... but just because something isn't surprising doesn't mean you expect for it to happen.

On Monday, Toronto city councillor Giorgio Mammoliti, one of my opponents in the mayoral election last year and now a strong ally of the Brothers Ford, opened a new page on Facebook: “Save the City..Support the Ford Administration.” In itself, it wouldn't be newsworthy; people create Facebook pages all the time. What's different about this, though, is that Mammoliti has explicitly set it up from the get-go as a political echo chamber. Only posts that agree with and support the direction Toronto is taking under the Fords will be allowed; posts from "people who are clearly working for a living, and wanting their tax dollars to be used in a particular way." Why? Because Mammoliti is "trying to wean out the typical communist thinker who will be doing nothing but whining."

After all, if you didn't vote for Ford, you don't deserve to have your voice heard. Ford won (with a plurality of a minority of valid electors), so for the next four years what he says goes. Granted, it fits within the letter of democracy, but it savages the spirit of it. The point of leadership is to lead.

But it doesn't matter, not to these folks. Because, you see, there are communists in Toronto. Not only have they smashed open the gates, they're attending all-night deputations at City Hall to speak out against service cuts! Amazing that out of one hundred and sixty-nine speakers, one hundred and sixty-six would thus prove to be communists, but don't worry. Mammoliti and Doug Ford and Denzil Minnan-Wong have determined, presumably through science, that the speakers at the deputations were unrepresentative of Toronto's population and thus their opinions can be safely ignored.

Except for one thing - it's goddamn ideological bullshit. Either Ford's supporters are too lazy or self-interested to go down to City Hall to support their leader, or... gasp... Ford's supporters supported him because "no service cuts" was the core of his platform. The political doublethink here is amazing, if also disgusting. So, magically, people who oppose the Ford administration's current priorities, who want Hizzoner da Mayor to live up to the commitments he made on the campaign trail, become communists... and who ever cared about what a communist thought, anyway?

This is what Giorgio Mammoliti sees when he sleeps, presumably; only Ford stands between Toronto and this.

To me, this is just another example of how hopelessly out of touch this administration is with the modern day and with people of my generation and after. Rob Ford is forty-two and Mammoliti is fifty; I can understand that when they were growing up, in those heady days of the 1970s and early 1980s, Canada's popular culture was vastly influenced by the Cold War and the idea that communists were the bad guys was a given. They grew up surrounded by the threat of war, with the idea that the Reds over the horizon were just waiting for an opportunity to nuke the hell out of them.

Today, it's vastly different. I don't remember the fall of the Berlin Wall, the effective end of the Cold War; I was six years old at the time. By the time I started becoming really aware of the greater world during Operation Desert Storm, the Soviet Union had less than a year of life left to it. It's been twenty years since there's been a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and for an increasingly large segment of the population, communism is effectively irrelevant. It's something people learn about in school. Communism doesn't keep Canadian sunseekers from the beaches of Cuba, it doesn't hamper the flow of trade between Canada and the People's Republic of China, and North Korea is almost as much a monarchy as it is communist. When Mammoliti says he's not going to be accepting comments from communists I have to laugh, because it's meaningless.

It still has an effect, though. It legitimizes polarization. It demonstrates that the administration is concerned only with its supporters, and that it does not care about those who disagree with the direction it's moving in. Which is a problem, as the government of the City of Toronto is supposed to represent all Torontonians. It poisons political discourse in the city, and it makes me thankful that I was able to escape to British Columbia when I did. I mean, were there ever any city councillors during the Miller years who dismissed their opponents as fascists or Nazis? Mammoliti is doing the same damn thing right now.

Speaking of the Soviet Union, though, there is a very good Russian term that deserves to be brought into this, I think: nekulturny. Literally translated it means "uncultured," but like many insults there's a hell of a lot more oomph packed into it, and so far as I know it is one of the strongest insults available in the Russian language.

If Mammoliti can smell communism, it's only because he and the Fords - since if they really didn't agree with his direction, they would've come down on him by now - are simply nekulturny.

Photo: The Flag of Communist Toronto

Having failed to find a place to build Toronto a red light district, it looks as if he's settled for just finding some Reds. Yesterday, news broke that Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti, erstwhile mayoral candidate and now one of the Brothers Ford's allies on Toronto City Council, opened a Facebook site "to give voice to the silent majority of working-class Torontonians" - because you know all of the people who showed up at the all-night deputations a little while ago to speak out against the service cuts that Hizzoner da Mayor assured us would NEVER HAPPEN back when he was on the campaign trail? They're communists. I am not exaggerating here; these are Mammoliti's own words. He knows how "communists smell," and believes they are attempting to "brainwash" him.

So to commemorate this red-letter day in city politics, I thought I'd present this - a flag for the communist City of Toronto. Would that make it the Union of Torontonian Socialist Municipalities?

Comments and criticism on the design are welcome. Photos will return on Friday, but you will likely be seeing this flag again tomorrow, as I know precisely what I'm going to be writing about.

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Take A Look, It's In a Book

The library has always figured prominently in my life. When I was a kid, the Milton Public Library ran a book-reading competition of sorts that encouraged youngsters to read. When I rode my bike straight into a rusty Ontario Hydro mailbox, it was because I was on my way to the Barrie Public Library and my usual route was closed due to construction. When I needed to get my high school essay just so, I'd head to the Toronto Reference Library to get that source I just couldn't find up north. One of the first things I did after signing my lease here in BC was to get a New Westminster Public Library card.

I was originally planning to write something about the forty-second anniversary of Apollo 11's lunar landing and the thirty-fifth anniversary of Viking 1's landing on Mars, but no matter how important space exploration is to me, this is something even dearer to my heart. But there's still a tie there anyway - libraries are the foundation of curiosity and exploration, those attitudes that led us to go to the moon and to Mars. Libraries are the foundation of a literate, knowledgeable, inquisitive, intellectual society. Libraries are gateways to other worlds, other modes of thinking - and especially in times like this, when the economy is approximately as stable as a matchstick skyscraper, they're vital to the poor - whether you're a kid or an adult, even if all your money is going toward food and rent and the necessities of life, the library will always let you in.

Now, though, it seems that Toronto's mayor Rob Ford and its other mayor Doug Ford have confused the smell of books with that of gravy, and they are paddling their gravy boat straight toward the Toronto Public Library system.

The Toronto Reference Library circa October 2009 - there are 1.6 million items in the catalog here.

Over the past few weeks, Hizzoner Rob has been gnashing his teeth so loudly at his inexplicable inability to find the oceans of gravy he knew flooded the basement of Toronto City Hall that I've been hearing it here in New Westminster. I mean, it's got to be there, doesn't it? After all, he promised the taxpayers that it was there, and he would get rid of it, because obviously their taxes were being wasted! However, I guess the last thing David Miller did in office was engage the emergency override that crash-dumped the city's gravy reserves into enormous bunkers fifty kilometers below the surface, so he and his brother Doug have had to look extra-hard for this gravy, lest the people of Toronto start dismissing it as a myth.

As I doubt that the Fords had the same experience with libraries as I did growing up - hell, I'd be honestly shocked if either of them had even been inside a library of their own free will in the last ten years - I didn't react with surprise to this look into their policy toward the TPL. It was more of an anger thing. This is an excerpt from CFRB 1010 that gives a disturbingly clear look into the situation: audio, and more details, are available here.

CFRB 1010: Doug also has a problem with the number of libraries we have in the city of Toronto.

DOUG FORD: We have more libraries per person than any other city in the world. I’ve got more libraries in my area than I have Tim Horton’s.

Notice: Ford pronounces "library" as "li-bary," and presumably pronounces "tomorrow" as "tomorrey," much like Homer Simpson - except I think I'd much rather have Homer Simpson as Mayor of Toronto.

It's an insightful look into Doug's psyche, and his priorities. The implication here is clear - there are more libraries in his area than Tim Horton's outlets, and that's a bad thing; that the availability of cheap-ass, bitter coffee is more important than the combined intellectual history and development of thousands of years of civilization. Toronto operates the largest and busiest city public library system in the entire world, so OBVIOUSLY the solution is not to take pride in the fact that Toronto is able and willing to serve its citizens in such a comprehensive way - no! It means there's GRAVY. Because god knows that the role of a city is to do the bare minimum possible in every respect.

I'm pretty sure I know what the Fords would really like to do to Toronto's public library system; they'd like to privatize them. Too bad we already have those - they're called bookstores. The ENTIRE PURPOSE of a public library system is to be PUBLIC; to be OPEN and AVAILABLE to the PEOPLE. Through actions like this, through their denigration of city services intended for the COMMON WEALTH, meant to ENRICH the lives of the people, they show their true colors to me - the colors of toadying ideologicals who don't care what kind of damage they do, so long as the Exalted Taxpayer has more money in their wallet.

Sometimes you have to be blunt. In that respect...

IT'S BEEN EIGHT MONTHS, ROB. WHERE THE FUCK IS THE FUCKING GRAVY?

Contracting for Democracy

Recently, I've realized there's an implied social contract at the heart of every democracy, and it's this: the elected government of a state recognizes that it is duty-bound to listen to and protect all of its citizens, and in return, those citizens who did not vote for the elected government acknowledge the legitimacy of its authority. Simple as that, really... but history has shown us, time and again, what power does. Fortunately, it's also shown us what happen when the people get sick and tired of it - but it's not something you can really set a watch to.

It's a lesson that Stephen Harper's Conservative Party, having somehow been handed a majority government, would do well to keep in mind. 2011 is, after all, the last time a conservative party has won a majority since 1988, when Brian Mulroney's Progressive Conservatives kept the spirit of 1984 alive; you may also recall that once the dust settled in 1993, the PCs were left with exactly twice as much pull in the House of Commons as the Green Party has today. You'd think they'd recognize the importance of treading softly, particularly considering it took them three kicks at the can to get this far.

You'd think it would have taken more than a month after the election for things to get this far, but you would be wrong there as well.

For much of the spring, Quebec's Richelieu Valley has been dealing with severe floods. As early as May 4, the Richelieu River had broken records, hundreds of people had been evacuated, and thousands of homes had been flooded. Quebec has been doing what it can to beat nature to a draw, but standing firm against nature is always a risky business.

In the United States, from what I understand, it's common for National Guard units to participate in this kind of disaster relief. As Canadian provinces have no National Guard equivalent, though, when the need for heavy lifting comes up they've got little choice but to request that the federal government make regular Canadian Forces elements available for relief efforts. It's not an unusual thing; it's been twelve and a half years, but people still mock Toronto after Mel Lastman called in the army to help the city dig out of a severe snowfall, and during the ice storm of 1998, the military was critical in immediate disaster response and relief.

So, with the floods proceeding, Quebec Premier Jean Charest requested military aid from the federal government, and what did he get? A letter from Ottawa - specifically from Vic Toews, Minister of Public Safety - that claimed that due to pressing "defence activities," the Canadian Forces would be unable to lend assistance in Quebec - also, because it would put them "in competition with the private sector."

Because, as we all know, the sole role of a government is to allow private business to reap the maximum profit possible in any given situation... and what is a disaster if not an unparalleled opportunity to profit off the affairs of the desperate?

Nice waterfront you've got there, Vancouver. You want it to stay dry? Sure, but it'll cost ya.

In the end, the federal government caved; two hundred and fifty more soldiers were dispatched to Quebec to assist with disaster relief efforts. But the fact that its reflexive reaction was an appeal to the invisible hand is telling.

Even the most out-there libertarians I've heard of tend to recognize a role for a state, even if they feel it shouldn't go beyond assuring the common defense. I would argue that the defense of the people from natural hazards, such as the Richelieu floods, qualify. Conservatives from Harper to Ford tend to couch their rhetoric in corporate terms, calling for governments run like businesses and preferring the term "taxpayer" to "person" - but how long would a business that took customers' money without providing a service in return stay in business?

The business of a government is to protect the people. Politicians can bluster and obfuscate all they want about what they think they're doing, but in the end it really does boil down to that. If a government cannot be counted on to even help protect its people, if its first answer is to tell them to call someone else... is that really the sort of government that should be representing us?

That deserves to represent us?

It may be that Stephen Harper, flush from a victory that even his own inner circle had given up on as hopeless mere days before the election, has forgotten the source of his power - aside from Alberta, that is, which I strongly suspect would vote a ficus plant or head of lettuce to Ottawa if it was run as a Conservative.

Hint: it's us.