The G20 Down Under

Here's the thing: over the past ten years, the ubiquity of the internet has made it easy for people everywhere to learn about everything, fromthe latest Korean celebrity gossip to the effect of vacuum on unspacesuited humans. Practically all of the information of the world is at our fingertips--perhaps that's part of the problem. We have access to all this knowledge, but we still haven't come to terms with it, and we're not using it in one of the very important ways. Namely, we're not using the opportunity it provides to learn from the experiences of others.

To illustrate, consider the leading sentence in a Sydney Morning Herald article published yesterday on the subject of Brisbane, Australia winning the dubious opportunity to host a particular political meetup in 2014. "Hosting the G20 summit - boon or burden?" As someone who was a resident of Toronto during the 2010 G20 summit, I don't need to think very hard to answer that question. To its credit, the article specifically brings up Toronto's experience, and that it was "a nightmare" for the city.

Except... Brisbane's lord mayor, Graham Quirk, isn't interested in paying attention to the experience of other cities. Instead, he's of the mind that Brisbane needs to consider "the long-lasting economic benefits that it will bring to our city." Yes, because when I think of Toronto's G20, I think of economic benefits like, erm... the fake lake! Yes! Presumably part of these economic benefits will be realized for Brisbane through the production of specially reinforced hats to protect visiting journalists from drop bear attacks, even though the hats would probably be made in China anyway. Or, alternatively, perhaps the Australian government will reject half of the compensation claims made by businesses that will be damaged in the inevitable riots, just like the Canadian government did.

There's that, and the idea that thanks to the summit, Brisbane will appear on the world stage. While it is true that Brisbane isn't very well-known outside Australia--even for me, its only remarkable factor is that its name rhymes with "fizzbin"--hosting the G20 is not exactly the way to go about it. It's kind of like molesting a kindergarten class so that people will know your name.

This is pretty much what Australia looks like to people who aren't from there.

What really makes this ridiculous, in my mind, is that Sydney is whining about this. Yes, Sydney, most likely the only Australian city that the vast majority of the world outside Australia has ever heard of--this is essentially the argument that New South Wales' Planning and Infrastructure Minister, Brad Hazzard, used to suggest that the G20 would be better off in Sydney, because Sydney "is the gateway from the world to Australia." He also suggested that Brisbane's selection was for political reasons, "to use the leaders of the world as political pawns in her game to try and win back the votes across Queensland."

To which I say, what? Seriously? What in blazes are you thinking, Brad Hazzard--in what world would something like the G20 be a good thing for votes? Now, I don't know anything about the culture of Queensland as a whole, but I can't imagine that the people of Brisbane itself would take a look at their city locked down for the benefit of a handful of foreign VIPs, their airspace restricted, their protesters kettled and carted off to holding cells for the unforgivable crime of being on the street somewhere, and think "it was good for Juilia Gillard to do this. We should vote her back into office!"

No one, no one, except the politicians ever want G20 summits. They are a blight on cities and their people. If it was up to me I'd have them hold the summit in Bartertown and be done with it.

Politics, Science, and Same-Sex Marriage

As Bill Nye explained to my generation back in the '90s, science rules. In science we have a mechanism for testing the way the world works, and even though there are those who have a vested interest in spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt about the conclusions of some scientific inquiries it's far too valuable a tool to give up. It's not immediately apparent to the eye, but the twenty-first century world is built on a scientific foundation and we ignore that at our peril.

True to form, there's plenty of peril in politics. Politics and science have something of a caustic relationship in this day and age, since more often than not science is telling governments, "hey, you know that plan you're really keen to enact? It's bullshit." Politicians don't like it when hurdles are dropped in their paths - just look at Rob Ford's ongoing temper tantrum over Toronto's subway issue. What's more, by their actions politicians don't like using the scientific method - assuming, that is, that they understand it.

There's one aspect of society where a more scientific outlook would be particularly welcome, I think: same-sex marriage. For decades this was something that was addressed only in science fiction, if at all; over the last eleven years the idea of extending marriage has begun to pick up steam, and it's now fully legal in ten countries. It's going to be a long and uphill battle, though, since there are many out there who see same-sex marriage as a fearful, threatening thing, and will invest all their energy in bailing back the tide.

Australia is one of the many countries where same-sex marriage isn't currently recognized under the law, though there is a growing current of support for it. In fact, it's prominent enough in certain circles that last week, as part of its coverage of the 2012 Queensland state election, the Brisbane Times reported on an attack flyer being distributed in the Brisbane suburb of Ashgrove that accused Kate Jones, an MP in the Queensland Legislative Assembly, of supporting a "radical law that violates kids' rights to a mum and dad... and voted for same-gender unions that require zero commitment."

For clarification, this appears to relate to Queensland's Civil Partnerships Act, which allows couples to formally register their relationships with the government.

Register a same-sex relationship? Strewth! (Pictured: government. Hey, give me a break - it's hard finding photographic accompaniment for something abstract.)

Personally, I find it almost comical when I encounter politicians from Australia to the United States going on from the bully pulpit about how same-sex marriage will destroy society, somehow or other. A lot of people accept those that sort of claim uncritically because it meshes with their own beliefs; now it's not just that they oppose same-sex marriage because they think it's icky, but they're Standing Square and Strong in the Defense of Their Country! The scientific method doesn't enter into it at all.

Nevertheless, in situations like this the scientific method provides an appropriate counterpoint. Sure, you have all these organizations raising a hue and a cry over how legal recognition of same-sex marriage will destroy society... what I'd really like is to see them explain Canada. Remember that Canada has legally enshrined same-sex marriage for nearly ten years, from coast to coast to coast. Canadian society hasn't collapsed. Nor have things fallen apart in Iceland, Spain, South Africa, Argentina, Norway, or the other countries that allow it. Truly honest politicking would take these facts into account. The countries that allow same-sex marriage have, in essence, begun a grand social experiment, and a decade in things are calm. In Canada, it's barely even a thing.

In order to get that, though, you'd need a crop of honest politicians on the "no" side.

Like I said, then, ultimately it's comical - but the sort of comedy where you laugh because otherwise you'd cry.

Brother, Could You Spare a Cite

If there's one question that people have been struggling to answer conclusively ever since it was asked for the very first time, it's this: "how should we live?" Through the ages, thousands of religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines have been tested to destruction as we've searched for an answer. Personally I think it's a question that will never be answered, at least not to the satisfaction of everyone; life is too big, too unique, to complex to be boiled down into a simple answer. The best we can do is find an answer that works for ourselves while at the same time fitting into society. That's the crux of it, really - the question would be better posed as "how should we live with each other?" Or possibly "without killing each other?"

Yesterday, the Brisbane Times - of Australia, for all you geography majors - reported on the latest noises issuing from the Liberal National Party of Queensland, a state-level party that is described by Wikipedia as being a party that combines "conservative liberal" and "liberal conservative" ideologies, somehow. They seem to be backing the continued prominence of religious instruction in government schools as a means for ethical education of students, in exclusion to secular ethics classes of the sort that started being rolled out in New South Wales' education system recently so that non-religious students could have an option aside from opting out and "studying" in the library.

Why? Because the party, according to its education spokesman Bruce Flegg, "believe[s] that the overwhelming majority of Queenslanders want their children brought up with a Judeo-Christian grounding in religious education. In many cases this applies to people who themselves may not be particularly religious. I am sure this also applies to the increasing number of Queenslanders who identify themselves as Islamic."

There isn't a [CITATION NEEDED] big enough.

The stained glass window represents religion.

Those are pretty big concepts - "believes," "I am sure," and likely more that aren't quoted in that snippet from the Times - and full of truthiness. There's no evidence brought up to support the case for why the LNP has reason to believe this, there are no studies or surveys or quotes; there's just what the party claims to know from the gut. It's the sort of intellectual viewpoint I'd expect from the Conservatives up here, or the Republicans in the States... more and more, it seems like right-wing parties across the Anglosphere are working out of the same playbook.

Now, I'll admit that Flegg's stance isn't totally out to lunch - there are people who send their kids to religious schools without being really religious themselves in order to get what they perceive to be a moral grounding. I know because I went to high school with one such dude, who had gone through Ontario's Catholic elementary school system for that reason... though I do only know one such dude. Ultimately, it's a choice that should come down to the family, and not to the government.

But it should also be a choice. The availability of secular ethics courses does not diminish religious ethics courses; only in the minds of people who can only be secure when they have an ideological monopoly is that so. To claim that secular instruction is unnecessary because you believe without evidence that people are sufficiently satisfied with it to not need an alternative is not only doing a disservice as a political party - it's intellectually dishonest.

After all, religion is not the only way to ethics, not the only possible path to answering that age-old question. I know because you won't find my footprints on that road.

Sustaining Immigration in a Sustainable Future

You may not know this, depending on where you are and what sort of news you pay attention to, but Australia is in the thick of another election campaign. With the Ruddbot shunted off to the political wilderness and Australia's first female prime minister jockeying to stay ahead of those who'd love to see her time in office be short, politicians are coming out of the woodwork to argue about what should be done. Whether or not it will be done is, of course, dependent on how much faith you have in the democratic process.

One such issue, and one that has been rather politically charged over the course of Australia's history, is immigration. Recently Tony Abbott, the leader of the conservative Liberal Party, announced his party's intention to cut Australia's annual immigration rate to 170,000, down from 300,000 in 2008. The headline in the Brisbane Times specifically mentioned "unsustainable" immigration levels, which at first made me think that a political party had seen the light and would be fine-tuning their immigrant acceptance numbers in line with an environmentally-sound development policy. Most of Australia is a desert, after all, with the population disproportionately clustered around the few centers of agricultural productivity.

Well. Turns out they're not using "sustainable" in that context, because the Liberals want Australians to have more children - "one for mum, one for dad and one for the country." Considering the love/hate relationship Australia has traditionally had with regard to immigration - from the White Australia Policy to the apex of One Nation in 1998 and a more modern spate of "FUCK OFF WE'RE FULL" bumper stickers - it's not much of a surprise to me. But that doesn't change the fact that Australia has come to its current prosperity by exhausting the resources of an old and sunburned continent, and that the models of development that held true in the twentieth century cannot be blindly followed as gospel in the twenty-first.

North America didn't get to be what it is today by turning all the ships around at the shore.

What this feels like to me is an expression of attitudes that are commonplace in throughout the world, particularly in continental Europe - the idea of immigrants as some strange "other." Australia is one of the relatively few immigrant societies in the world, since the local natives were unable to prevent the Europeans from stealing their land out from under them - even more so in Australia than elsewhere. Nevertheless, immigration is valuable. The mix of cultures, backgrounds, and ideas produced in an immigrant state lends a dynamism that I think will be vital in the years ahead. Look at the example of Toronto - today one of the most vibrant cities on Earth, but sixty years ago a backwater provincial burg dominated by the Orange Order.

Australia's Treasury has estimated that, if current trends continue, in 2050 its population will stand at thirty-six million, up from 22.3 million in 2010. I'm doubtful whether or not the Australian continent could support that kind of population. Already it's planning large-scale pipeline water transport, and its electrical generating infrastructure is disproportionately based on dirty coal. Immigration should be made sustainable, sure, but what it shouldn't be made as a scapegoat - slashing immigration but spurring an increase in natural population growth does nothing to solve Australia's potential support problems. A country that cuts itself off from the world does so out of fear, and if Australia's leaders believe Australian culture is so fragile that immigrants could replace it wholesale, to me that speaks to how well they'd be able to deal with problems ahead.

Given its climate, I tend to think of Australia as a canary in the coal mine for the future of the developed world. We should all pay close attention to the problems it faces, and the avenues it explores to solve them. We may need to be making similar decisions ourselves a few decades down the road.

I've Got Bicycling on the Brain

For more than a century, bicycles have been a popular way of getting around. They're liberating in the same way that many people believe that cars are liberating, but are more honest - not only are bicycles zero-emission vehicles, when you get to where you're going it's because you earned it with your own sweat and exertion. Today, more and more cities are recognizing bicycles as a key component of a healthy urban transportation network. Bixi, a municipal bike-sharing system pioneered in Montreal, has now spread as far afield as London and Melbourne and is set to start rolling in Toronto in 2011.

I'm glad to see it happen. I've been riding bicycles for more than twenty years, and when I lived in Barrie those two wheels were my only option when I wanted to go somewhere on my own schedule. When I visited Montreal last year to attend Anticipation, I had the opportunity to try out Bixi for myself, and discover the city from a new perspective. I came very, very close, but in the end I couldn't bring myself to swipe my credit card and take one of those bikes out for a roll. Why? Simple, really - I didn't have my bicycle helmet.

Though I do have photos of myself as a kid riding a bike without a helmet, back in those freewheeling 1980s, I don't remember ever settling on the saddle without one strapped around my chin. To me it was as vital as a sturdy lock or inflated tires - and that's not only because Ontario required all bicycle riders under the age of 18 to wear helmets starting in 1995. The reason I wear a helmet is, fundamentally, because I'm not a tremendous fucking dumbass.

It seems as if my view is not shared particularly widely. I've recently been reading an article from Washington City Paper, originally published in March 2009, which asks why so many DC cyclists eschew helmets when they cost so little and can prevent serious damage to the single most important part of one's body. Excuses range from perceptions of helmets as "corny" to the ridiculous, with one man claiming "he can't wear a helmet because he wears headphones when he rides." Well, if you're going to be a tremendous dumbass, you might as well go all the way.

Apparently, attitudes such as these are crashing full-force into the law in Melbourne, Australia. Yesterday The Age of Melbourne reported on the city's new Bixi-derived bike sharing system, Melbourne Bike Share, and its tribulations - apparently, despite investing $5.5-million AUD ($5.1-million CAD) in to the system's development, not even 70 trips per day are made with the system's six hundred bikes.

A Bixi station in downtown Montreal, August 2009

Why such a low takeup, when similar systems have seen great popularity elsewhere? The fact that it's the middle of winter in Melbourne right now? No - it's helmets, apparently. Whereas the use of bicycle helmets for over-18 riders in Ontario has been up to the adult's discretion since 1995, the state of Victoria - of which Melbourne is the capital, for all you geography majors - has mandated that all cyclists wear helmets, and that since 1990. As the explanation goes, Melburnians are unwilling to hop onto a Melbourne Bike Share bike because they can't be arsed to wear a helmet.

It's ridiculous. Try as I might, I cannot see bicyclists who eschew helmets as anything other than reckless fools. I know that there are arguments. One of them goes like this: "Oh, but there are so many accidents that a helmet wouldn't do anything to protect yourself from!" I damn well know that. My major bicycle accident involved a collision with a stationary object that wasn't even on the road at all. That doesn't mean I shouldn't have been wearing a helmet.

The brain is an amazing machine, an incredible machine, but the brain is likewise a fragile machine, and while it can still work after sustaining damage it's rarely at optimum capability. I realize that I am my brain. Those 1200-odd cubic centimeters enclose my memories and experiences, hopes and dreams, personality and consciousness. Even the fingers I've used to type out this post are nothing but remotely-controlled mechanisms that allow me to interact with the world.

I'm not sure how we should proceed from this. Personally, in some greyer moments, I've toyed with the notion that we should let consenting adults who choose to ride without helmets suffer the consequences of their decisions. That is, if you get into an accident and you're not wearing a bicycle helmet, your health insurance should not cover it. I know that it's vengeful, and that this would result in thoughtless dumbasses bankrupting themselves and their families to cover medical expenses arising from helmetless accidents, but-- I just don't know. Riding without a helmet is as foolhardy as riding in a car without wearing a seatbelt. From what I understand it took a long, hard campaign of memetic engineering to change the popular attitude. We may need a similar campaign to firmly establish the helmet-safety meme in our society. If that can be combined with shareable helmets as part of bike share systems - perhaps something involving a disposable outer lining, maybe - we could make a lot of progress toward a safer, healthier transportation system.

Ultimately, I believe it comes down to laziness and a sense of invincibility. In Melbourne they claim that no one is riding because everyone must wear a helmet - and yet in Vancouver, where helmets have been mandatory for all cyclists since 1996, bicycle use is exploding - from the dedicated lanes on Dunsmuir Street to the successful lane test on the Burrard Street Bridge, and the racks on the buses which always seemed to be carrying at least one bike along.

I won't ride without my helmet. I'm not about to put my brain into my own hands.

The Perils of Bulldozing Through

The Toronto Transit Commission is, without question, the Butt Monkey of Toronto. It seems like nothing ever goes right for the TTC, and it's always taking heat from irate commuters or antediluvian talking-heads who think it would be so much better if it all just went away. Recently it's been taking some heat over a recent plan to expropriate and demolish some houses in East York in order to build second exits at Donlands station and Greenwood station - since they've only got one exit each at the moment, they're not necessarily the best places to be during an emergency. After an outpouring of discontent, the TTC has come up with an alternative that wouldn't result in any homes coming down, and it has admitted that there should have been a public consultation on it from the start.

I'll admit that time after time, the only conclusion I can draw from the evidence at hand is that the TTC is still learning just how to operate a metropolitan mass transit system. That's the only reason I can think of that explains why I can find two 512 St. Clair streetcars back-to-back on the new right-of-way, why it hasn't picked up articulated buses for high-traffic routes like 29 Dufferin, why it can't make accurate station-area maps, and the generally erratic nature of surface transit schedules in general.

Though, on the other hand, these problems may well have existed since the dawn of streetcar service in this city. It's easy to conceal what would be erratic service when you're running more than seven hundred streetcars. So I'll reserve judgement for the moment.

But really, give the TTC a break. It could be worse - like what happened recently in Footscray, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia, where the residents of twenty-six houses discovered from the media that their homes would be expropriated and demolished in order to build the proposed Regional Rail Link. Not only was there no consultation with the government, they weren't given any prior warning because... well, apparently because Victoria Premier John Brumby thought it would be totally awesome to synchronize the notifications with an announcement of the project at a business lunch.

LOLZ HAY GUYZ GUESS WAHT ^_^

According to The Age of Melbourne, the government totally planned to inform the residents that their houses were going to be reduced to rubble - but the bringers of bad news "fled when they saw television camera crews in the area... and had made the judgment that it would be better not to have such a 'personal and private conversation' with residents in front of TV cameras."

Let me state right now that I'm not blaming the messengers here. This was obviously a totally awkward situation. The point is that they shouldn't have been put in it! Say what you will about the TTC, at least it 1) announced its plans, 2) was receptive to public response, and 3) altered its plans based on public response. That is how a government agency should work! I'm really not sure how much room there was for public consultation in this at all - while the routing was apparently unveiled in June 2009, until the announcement it seems to have been cloaked in secrecy, with no one but the government knowing what the deal is. Beyond that, the fact that the affected people did not know if their homes would be demolished until they learned as much from the media suggests to me that, no, the government didn't exactly do a sterling job on entertaining public opinion for the route.

What makes it even more delectable is that Premier Brumby is refusing to apologize for the way the situation's been handled. "Every effort was made to contact those people," Brumby is quoted as saying, but The Age does not specify whether he's referring to actual efforts or just efforts in Government Land, where idly entertaining the possibility of performing an action while staying as motionless as possible is functionally equivalent to carrying that action out.

So say what you will about the TTC. At least it recognizes, when it counts, who it really reports to. The actions of the Government of Victoria here follow all the cherished traditions of government, in which it is to be obeyed and it is above the manners of mortal men.

Australia, Vanguard of Doom

While at Worldcon in Montreal earlier this week, I had the opportunity to attend a couple of panels dealing with the subject of climate change: one explored potential ways to mitigate it through geoengineering, and the other investigated whether or not it was "storyable." Though I did get a few interesting ideas from it, the single overriding concept I left the two panels was this: we're fucked.¹

The news I see after having returned home isn't much better. Australian newspapers have been charting the course of a potential emissions trading scheme in that country for at least the last few weeks, if not more, and nothing of what they're reporting looks good. On August 13th, Australia time, the Sydney Morning Herald published an article entitled "Doubters attend lecture as ETS bill heads for doom," with a simple message: this bill is fucked.

The proposed ETS is the work of Malcolm Turnbull, leader of Australia's Liberal Party and thus Leader of the Opposition in the Australian Parliament. Having never seen him in action, I've got no idea how Mr. Turnbull compares to Stéphane Dion in the charisma department, but I'm already seeing disturbing correspondences with Canada's own wrestling match with environmental legislation, after Canada's Liberal Party fought and lost an election with environmental issues as one of their prominent planks.

Granted, Australian PM Kevin Rudd's no Stephen Harper - though both their Wikipedia pages are, as of this writing, "semi-protected to prevent libelous additions." For one, Rudd actually seems to think that climate change is a problem, and has been making noise about Doing Something. Hell, his first official act as PM was to sign the Kyoto Protocol for Australia.

The problem here is one of coordination and correspondence. Sure, most countries say that climate change is a problem and that they want to do something about it, but none of them actually will until someone makes the first move. Rudd has delayed the introduction of emissions trading in Australia until at least 2011 for this very reason.

Predictably, the coal companies are throwing their weight around in this debate, and Australia is uniquely vulnerable to coal companies. It's a dry continent, so there are few rivers substantial enough to dam for hydroelectric power - only 6.8% of its electricity is from hydro sources, according to the World Nuclear Association - and while it is not quite as crazy as neighboring New Zealand, there is still enough anti-nuclear hysteria in Australia that nuclear power generation has no presence at all.

The end result is that Australia is utterly dependent on coal to a degree practically unmatched anywhere else - even China has a more diversified generation portfolio. According to the Australian Coal Association, more than eighty percent of Australia's electricity is derived from burning coal. Australian coal plants produced nearly 200 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year in 2007. How can anyone down there possibly entertain fantasies of environmental stewardship without totally ignoring that?

The problem with governments is that governments have to, have to, govern with the status quo in mind, because if they rock the boat too much an angry electorate will throw the bums out. The problem with the status quo is that the assumption that goes along with it is that we have unlimited time to change things around, that we could keep burning fossil fuels at our steadily-climbing rate until the 22nd century or beyond, and that nothing bad would happen.

Science does not bear this out. Carbon dioxide concentrations are increasing, the icecaps are melting, and the permafrost is beginning to thaw - and the methane currently sequestered in the permafrost, the methane that has the potential to kick global warming into a seriously high gear, is the elephant in the room that no one is talking about.

At least in places like Canada, the United States, France, and even China, dirty and dysenvironmental coal-based generation is not the only source of power. Australia, handcuffed as it is to the fortunes and filth of burning coal, has a lot further to go.

¹ For example, a solar shade with 8% reflectivity, stationed at the Sol-Earth L1 point to reduce solar impact on Earth by 0.25% and temperatures by 2 degrees Fahrenheit, would be a good way to create a "planetary thermometer" for environmental regulation, if only there was an easy way to build thirty-seven million tons worth of solar shade up there.

Streetcar Lessons from Melbourne

As a lifelong resident of the Toronto region, it was easy to fall into the trap that streetcars are a historical anachronism, and that of all the cities they rolled through only Toronto didn't tear the tracks up. Even in North America that's an oversimplification; New Orleans, Boston, Pittsburgh, and other cities maintained their tracks when most others were dismantled, although it's true that no other Canadian city did.

Overseas it's completely different. I wouldn't have guessed it in the time before Wikipedia, but it happens that while Toronto operates the largest streetcar system in the Western Hemisphere, the city of Melbourne, Australia operates what may well be the largest in the world - right now, there is a lack of consensus on Wikipedia - and their trams are just as much a part of the urban social fabric as streetcars are in Toronto. Nevertheless, from time to time the scissors still need to come out.

The Age of Melbourne reported yesterday that the city's "tram superstops" - miniature stations in their own right, reminiscent of the new boarding platforms along the 512 St. Clair streetcar's new right-of way - are too short for the new vehicles the city will take delivery of in 2012, and that they will have to be extended. I haven't been able to find any reference as to what these vehicles are or who the manufacturer is, but the cited length of thirty-two meters matches up nicely with Bombardier's Flexity, the same family of streetcar that will hit the streets of Toronto next decade to relieve the aging CLRV and ALRV fleets. Melbourne's most recent purchases were of Combino trams, the longest of which are just shy of thirty meters long.

Two meters, it seems, counts for safe departure from all doors.

This possibility of obsolescence is definitely something that should be taken into account by planners when it comes time to design the Transit City stops. All-door boarding has been one of the intended hallmarks of the project since it was unveiled, and a streetcar longer than its station would turn that hope to dust. The rights-of-way will be expensive already, and it'd be far better to design in some extra room from the outset rather than plan only for today and leave tomorrow to tomorrow. It's thanks to that kind of foresight that Bloor-Danforth subway trains can cross the Don Valley beneath the Prince Edward Viaduct.

I'll be keeping an eye on the Melbourne tram system - it seems to me to be a worthwhile "other" against which to contrast Toronto's own streetcar operations. Few things can be studied seriously in isolation. For example, no matter how people might have gnashed their teeth over the cost Toronto's had to assume in order to make sure new streetcars hit the rails, it's not really all that bad. The city and the province will, together, pay $1.22 billion for two hundred and four vehicles and their assorted spare parts. Melbourne's tab for a mere fifty new trams is $1 billion AUD, which according to the exchange rate measured by XE.com at 12:28 AM today, converts to $903,719,804.17 CDN.

Perhaps Mayor Miller is a better negotiator than he lets on.

Extra, Extra: English Hard to Spell

On Sunday in North America and Monday in Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald reported on the findings of a survey reminding us that, yes, written English is not straightforward. The survey of four hundred people over the age of 16 in Sydney and Melbourne found that 70% of respondents couldn't correctly spell "accommodation," and 25% consistently misspelled "February." Probably as Febuary, though I don't know if that pronunciation is common down there.

It's something I've been seeing increasingly often myself, from quarters you wouldn't necessarily expect. The Herald's story cites Deborah Abela, an Australian children's author, who blamed "spell check and text message abbreviations" for the poor showing. While technological assistance is probably a factor in the decline of spelling ability, it won't be for a decade or two until the scope of such effects really become evident.

This isn't just a problem in Australia, either. It's systemic. Rarely a day goes by when I don't come across some error of language. Witness those TTC extended-service ads which used "everyday" instead of "every day" and were everywhere, and which I personally complained about to TTC Chair Adam Giambrone. Sure, part of it's no doubt due to the crutch effect of technological aids. Beyond that, though, there's a lot of damage that can be done to the language through laziness and simple ignorance.

If you've spent any time at all on the internet, you've probably seen someone write "should of" when they mean "should've." This is a simple problem of ignorance compounded by the nature of the language. "Should've" and "should of" both sound the same, and if someone is more used to speaking than writing, when it does come time to write it's easy to understand that they'd go for the familiar, unaware that it's wrong.

I see this in Toronto a great deal, too. One of our main east-west streets and the gateway to Midtown is Eglinton Avenue, named after a village that once stood where the intersection of Yonge and Eglinton is today. In the 1820s, a clerical error transformed "Eglinton" into "Eglington" - this was not the first time a city was named for a misspelling - and it wasn't until sixty years later that the extra "g" was finally removed.

One "g" good, two "g" bad! Also, gotta love that there Vitrolite.

That hasn't stopped people, though. The common pronunciation in Toronto seems to skew far closer to "Eglington" than it does "Eglinton." With the error maintained in the spoken word, it's no wonder that the extra G keeps appearing where it's unwelcome. The new automated announcements on the subways and buses use the correct pronunciation, though, so there's a fair chance that the proper spelling will be cemented in the years to come. Right now there are two million hits on Google for "Eglinton" and only 207,000 for "Eglington" - and only that because there apparently are a few people with the surname Eglington.

Strangely enough, there doesn't seem to be any similar problem with spelling "Etobicoke."

That Jumbuck In His Taser Bag

Despite the possibilities of our modern wired - or, more appropriately, wireless - future, it's instructive to remember that while news can circle the world in a blink of an eye, people aren't necessarily going to see it. A great deal of news has an inherently local basis and bias, and lessons learned in one corner of the world may be entirely unknown or ignored in another, even if they spring from the same seed.

Ignored in, say, Australia.

The Sydney Morning Herald carried a story yesterday entitled "State's police licensed to Taser," reporting that police forces across the Australian state of New South Wales will be equipped with tasers in "the biggest revolution of police equipment since... 1862." It explains that tasers have been in limited use by NSW police special operations units for two years and regular police departments since last year, and that while previously "Tasers had to be signed out by supervisors," under the new state of affairs "every officer will have a Taser on his or her belt."

Progress, right? On the face of it the introduction of a "less than lethal" alternative into the police's arsenal will enable them to defuse situations that might otherwise have ended with a bullet. The article states that New South Wales police "have drawn Tasers about 280 times, but the sight of the weapon has caused suspects to capitulate about 180 times."

That's a pretty significant takedown-by-threat ratio alone. You'd have to wonder why. Maybe it has something to do with the concern raised by taser opponents, who say they are "potentially deadly."

The phrase "potentially deadly" comes up twice in the document. The word "kill" does not appear once. I have to wonder if this is a result of limited research or biased reporting. Here in Canada, where tasers have been used by police since 1999, twenty people have died after being shocked by one. The case of Robert Dziekański, who died after being tasered by Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers in Vancouver International Airport in October 2007, is just the most high-profile. Similar cases have occured in the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere.

In Australia none of this appears to be a blip on the radar. In my opinion, the circumstantial evidence alone surrounding taser deaths should merit something stronger than the bloodless "potentially deadly." At no point in the article is any reason given as to why tasers are "potentially deadly" - it's as if the comment was shoved in there just for the sake of addressing it, without really doing so. It's not as if the Sydney Morning Herald would've had to work to find this out; in a search for "taser" on Google.com.au, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation news story "Man dies after police use Taser" is hit number five. The next three hits also deal with taser deaths in Australia.

So it's not even the case that taser deaths are a "foreign problem." Australia, it seems, has already got plenty of its own to deal with.

I have to wonder if this is research failure or an intentional effort to strengthen one side of the debate by papering over the other. Ideally, newspapers should present both sides of an issue to fulfill their honest mandate, that being to inform the reading public. Realistically, that doesn't happen very much at all anymore. That doesn't mean I shouldn't be irritated when I find a newspaper being derelict in its duty.

if that swagman had been boiling his billy today, the squatter would've given him a taste of the electric rifle well before he could've got up and jumped into that billabong

The Mighty Atom, King Coal, and the Future of Australia

As far as I'm concerned, the single most pressing problem facing the future is environmental degradation. With the incoming Obama administration in the States looking to take a far more forceful tack on climate issues than did the Bush White House, I'm not quite as pessimistic about the future as I was during the night shift, when the combination of long stretches of time without seeing the sun and a great deal of opportunity to trawl through the Science/Environment sections of the New York Times and BBC News, among others, pushed me into "oncoming envirocalypse" territory.

Not that that's the realm of fantasy; I still have my concerns about the Arctic methane upwellings. Nevertheless, nevertheless--

One of the most significant contributors to climate change is the burning of coal to generate electrical power, and the fact that it is still so widely used indicates the vast degree to which modern civilization remains mired in nineteenth century modes of thought and action. Coal may be cheap, yes, but that's only because its dollar, or euro, or renminbi cost only includes what's needed to take it from a hole in the ground to a roaring furnace. Once it's in the atmosphere, it's someone else's problem.

We've had a solution to this for nigh-on sixty years now, and it's a testament to the short-sighted foolishness of humanity that it has not been implemented on a greater scale. Nuclear power, which according to Wikipedia produced 14% of global electricity in 2007, has always been the red-headed stepchild of the electricity industry. Now that there's an environmental consciousness growing in the West, new desires to Do Something are running up against that incessant buzzing whisper in so many peoples' ears that Atoms Are Evil.

Recently I came across an article in the Sydney Morning Herald, "Clearing the air" by Clancy Yeates, about the problems and possibilities Australia will face as its "addiction to cheap coal" faces the threat of climate change and the opportunities of new sources of power. The article's focus was primarily on renewable energy, solar and wind and the like, and how bringing such installations online in the near future could seriously decrease Australia's dependence on coal and, thus, its environmental footprint. But what I'm more focused on is its omissions.

In this five-page article, in its two thousand, six hundred and ninety-two words, the word "nuclear" did not appear once. Not even in the context of "nuclear power is, of course, no solution for Australia's environmental problems." Frankly I would have preferred that. Kneejerk anti-nuclear sentiment is something I've become used to. Not even mentioning it in an article meant to examine methods of weaning a country off of coal dependency strikes me as a serious oversight.

One of the reasons I enjoy living in Toronto is precisely because it is conveniently located to not one but two nuclear power plants, at Pickering and Darlington. Together with Ontario Hydro's early focus on exploiting the hydroelectric potential of Niagara Falls and, eventually, every single river in the province that could economically be dammed, I can feel confident that any given electrical device I turn on is not powered by coal. I can live with nuclear, because it lets me live with the concept of a future.

No matter what happens, it's unrealistic to think that coal burning won't play a major role in electrical generation for the near future. Nevertheless, it's irresponsible to continue in a state of affairs that sets up the choice between coal and renewables as the only option. Nuclear fission deserves a place at that table.