No Vision So Dangerous...

The other day I was trying to figure out the best way, should I ever meet him, to piss off Harlan Ellison™. I mentioned this to the ever-helpful Shaun Duke, who advised me that both of the strategies I offered would likely result in (a) a chewing out--which, honestly, Harlan Ellison™ rarely needs much justification for anyway--and (b) assault, which wouldn't surprise me much either but is really far more trouble than it's worth.

You may be wondering why I would want to antagonize a figure like Ellison™. The answer is bound up in four charged words that have hummed with golden anticipation for more than forty years, even if more than a few bulbs have burned out: The Last Dangerous Visions. Never heard of it? If you're not one of the ones plugged into the history of science fiction or the fannish grapevine, there's no reason you should have. That's not how it was meant to be, though.

Let's go back briefly to 1967, when Harlan Ellison™ put out one of the most influential anthologies of the 1960s, Dangerous Visions. The thirty-three stories it contained were groundbreaking in their time, helping to define what the New Wave of science fiction literature was, and of a sort that were too "dangerous" to be published.

Today, of course, they're innocuous. Well-written, of course, but with the possible exception of one story, there's nothing that wouldn't make it into Clarkesworld or Lightspeed or even Analog today--back in 1967, they would have earned furious ten-page rejection letters from John W. Campbell--but that's the way history unfolds. Ellison™ followed up with the sequel volume Again, Dangerous Visions in 1972, which is definitely a reflection of its time; witness, for example, Kurt Vonnegut's "The Big Space Fuck," set in a world where giant mutated lampreys live in a polluted Lake Erie and the government is launching a rocket full of freeze-dried jizm to the Andromeda Galaxy. Envelope-pushing in its day, perhaps, but in a time where stories like Kij Johnson's "Spar" win Nebulas and make the Hugo shortlist, there's almost a quaintness to it.

The Last Dangerous Visions was to be the capstone of this project, a deep and towering work that would put everything that had come before to shame. Ellison™ talked the project to rarefied heights as he lined up a phalanx of everyone who was anyone in early 1970s science fiction, from old hands like Algis Budrys and George Alec Effinger to brash, young newcomers like Anne McCaffrey and Orson Scott Card. Science fiction fandom waited in anticipation...

...and waited, and waited. You may note, from your privileged viewpoint here in the 21st century, that of all the ways you might describe writers like McCaffrey and Card, "newcomer" is not one of them. You may also note that with the exception of Card, all those writers have died. In fact, I've gone through the list of contributors that's up on the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, and of the one hundred and two names, forty-six are definitely dead as of 2014. Many more authors are flagged as having been born in the 1920s and 1930s--Harlan Ellison™ himself turned 80 earlier this year--and it won't take much longer for The Last Dangerous Visions to be a book of ghosts. If you're interested in all the sordid details of its stubborn non-existence, check out Christopher Priest's The Last Deadloss Visions.

"So what?" you might say. Vaporware isn't anything new; look at Duke Nukem Forever, for example. No, really, look at Duke Nukem Forever. It was to be the pinnacle of a well-liked, boundary-pushing game series, intended to reach new heights of popularity and so on... and look what happened. After fifteen years of being a punchline, it actually came out--something that still surprises me from time to time, honestly--but it couldn't live up to itself. What's more, it had been left behind.

The Dangerous Visions series was intended to be the vanguard of a new way of looking at things, an ambassador to show the world that science fiction didn't have to be just about rockets and rayguns and square-jawed white male engineers solving technical problems. But if The Last Dangerous Visions came out tomorrow, it would be a wet firecracker. Sure, the individual stories still have relevance and quality--but not in the context that the book was meant to provide. If anything, the book as a whole would be a time capsule of 1970s science fiction; of interest to a particular subset of fans, sure, but not much more than that.

It's possible to judge the quality of The Last Dangerous Visions to a degree; a handful of authors did recall their stories from Ellison™ and actually allowed the world to see them, but not many; by my search, there are fifteen ex-TLDV stories out there whose authors lived to see their publication in other places. But only to a degree. The kicker of it is that all these stories exist, sure--in a box in Harlan Ellison™'s house somewhere, for only Harlan Ellison™'s eyes. For any stories, this would be bad enough--but remember that Ellison™ was looking for the best of the best, the state of the art as it was in 1973.

There's a hole in science fiction that can be felt only by its absence. A hole that Harlan Ellison™ has refused to sew shut for forty fucking years. He had the capstone of his drive in hand, but for whatever reasons, he fumbled. He fucked it up. Today, The Last Dangerous Visions is irrelevant as anything but a historical curiosity. Given the degree of cultural shift, I'm confident that there is nothing in its evanescent pages that would not pass muster in a magazine today.

Beyond that, The Last Dangerous Visions was meant to be a showcase of up-and-coming authors with new perspectives... and that's another thing that hurts. Going through the ISFDB list, I found five authors whose only credit was the story that never appeared in TLDV, and many more whose careers seemed to hit a brick wall in the 1970s. TLDV, had it come out in 1973, would have been groundbreaking, a landmark, something to propel its writers to greater heights. How many stories could have been written, but now never will, because it never materialized?

Again, TLDV would be a forty-year-old snapshot. Writers like Ann Leckie and Seth J. Dickinson, N.K. Jemisin and Benjanun Sriduangkaew--they are some of the people on the genre's forefront today, they are the sort of authors that TLDV was made to showcase. But it didn't, and it never will. At this point I am confident that Harlan Ellison™ will die without completing The Last Dangerous Visions.

It's ridiculous. Let me put it into a bit of perspective here: had The Last Dangerous Visions come out when it meant to, all the way back in 1973, this year's Campbell Award winner, Sofia Samatar, would have been two years old. Ann Leckie, who swept every major award for Ancillary Justice this year, was seven. For many other people who are making their mark on the genre today, they wouldn't even be born for years to come.

That's why I want to piss him off. Because it would move the equation ever-so-slightly back into balance, after what he's done to science fiction.

Breaking the Action

For a while, I've been buying and reading old science fiction magazines - Astounding, Galaxy, If and so on, partially because they reflect the stages through which writers' sensibilities have passed. Even reading something from the 1970s gives me some insight as to how styles, assumptions, and modes of thought have changed in the subsequent decades, and I think that helps me improve as a writer. Still, it also means I find things fairly often that annoy me, and which I can't explain.

Things like the commercial break.

Okay, that's not what it's actually called - I call it that not only because I have no idea what term is appropriately applied to it, but because that's what the thing feels like. I'll be reading through a story, generally be in the middle of a conversation between two people, when the author will toss this my way:

#

That, in standard manuscript format, indicates a line break, and line breaks are generally used to separate scenes. What really gets me, what really grinds my gears and so on, is when it feels like that line break is misused - when it's jammed in the middle of a conversation for absolutely no reason. I was always of the impression that a scene should end on a conflict, an unresolved question, or a potential sticky situation in order to encourage the reader to keep going on. What I tend to find more often in these twentieth-century stories are line breaks inserted seemingly for the sake of line breaks. There's no scene transition - when they're misused, things pick up after the break exactly where they left off, and it's not even a natural break.

Let me illustrate what I'm talking about - here are a couple of paragraphs from my short story The Platinum Desolation, very slightly modified to accord with what I'm complaining about.

"Then it's a betfair that Lady Luna didn't start potshotting their ride until they were long after gone," Sujatmi said, ensconced in their own rumbling rover. "Question is, why haven't they come back? No one's filed any recent missing reports. The rover's listed as surplus out of Yutu, thirty years old. They rent them out to tourists, I've heard."

#

"Goddamn idiot earthworms," Christine stood and sighed. It figured she'd have been led there when the beacon needed quick fixing, lest some hauler wander off the trail and end up paying an unscheduled visit to Neil Armstrong's grave. "Don't know the first thing about their own security. They'd take off their own helmets on the surface if they could."

That break seems a bit out of place, doesn't it? I mean, nothing's changed. The situation is exactly the same as it was before, the characters are doing the same thing, and the break feels as artificial as a shoehorned TV commercial break. There's no reason for it to be there.

Maybe this was some kind of style back in the day. I don't know. All I know is that it's distracting; the way I see it, scenes should be separated because they're different scenes, not because separate scenes are just something that's done.

I Would Have Made a Better Mayor than Rob Ford

Sometimes, it's best to lead off with utter arrogance. Maybe I'm way off base; I know that being Mayor of Toronto is an extremely trying position with heaps of responsibility and is, in a lot of respects, utterly thankless. I know that, as a 27-year-old unknown, my chances of victory were less than the chance of Boehner's Republicans agreeing to tax increases to keep the American economy from imploding. Nevertheless, after having observed the situation in Toronto from my perch in New Westminster for the last nine months, I can't help but think that I would have been a better mayor than Rob Ford.

For a while, it was something of a joke. But recently I've started wondering if it shouldn't be serious. Now that the Gravy Train is emerging from that long, dark tunnel, letting us see just what that chuffing engine Hizzoner da Mayor warned us about is pulling, we're in a better position to appraise Rob than we ever were before.

This is a man who made the Gravy Train the centerpiece of his campaign. This is a man whose proposed cycling infrastructure seemed specifically designed to be as inconvenient to use and serve as few people as possible. Fundamentally, this is a man who appears to be led by ideology: a man who does not judge the utility of a concept on its own terms, but only by the manner in which it fits into his existing political worldview. Cycling infrastructure? It takes space away from cars so it's bad. Surface-running LRT? It takes space away from cars so it's bad, despite the fact that surface-running LRT has taken hold in such car-centric sprawltopias as Phoenix and Los Angeles - but I don't expect Rob to know anything about that. Subway? It's underground and fast and people like subways and it doesn't get in the way of cars, so it's good. Who cares if it's a white elephant addendum to a white elephant project that should never have been built the way it is in the first place?

I wouldn't have cancelled Transit City - I liked Transit City. I wouldn't have cancelled the vehicle registration tax, either - in my view, tax decreases are things that should come when things are on an even keel, not when the storms of deficit and debt are tossing ships of state and city around the world. I would have worked to build Toronto to be a better place than I found it, to as much as I could have managed.

I guarantee that I am not crazy, just arrogant as hell.

I can't help but feel that's part of the problem. Rob does not strike me as a builder or improver. He's a business manager, looking for efficiencies and not really too concerned with the effects of finding them. He's proven the maxim that it's easier to destroy to create - after all, from Transit City to the Fort York pedestrian bridge, it seems as if he's focused disproportionate energy on preventing things from being created.

Creation is a fundamental part of the city. Hopefully Toronto will learn this well in time for 2014. But meanwhile, it's going to be a long three years in Hogtown... and if the city wakes up one fine October morning to find Tim Who-Dat in Queen's Park, it's probably going to seem like forever.

Defaulting to the Plutocrats

Things are not well in the birthplace of democracy. To be honest, Greece has been on shaky ground for a while; it's only recently, however, that threats of Greece defaulting on its debt, and potentially throwing the "recovery" - such as it is - into jeopardy, have been making headlines. Yesterday, the Hellenic Parliament passed its second austerity vote, necessary to secure a €28 billion bailout from the European Union, despite fierce opposition from the thousands of people on the streets of Athens.

This is, predictably enough, being framed in the media as Greeks being unwilling to lose their state-funded entitlements and wanting to continue to live in the lap of luxury while German and French taxpayers foot the bill. Like many frames the media hangs on the wall, it's a bit crooked. Remember that this isn't the first round of austerity measures that the Greek government has just barely managed to squeeze by - and it's the Greeks that are going to be squeezed as a result.

I picked up this 100-drachma note in 2000, only a couple of years before the euro came into force and all the old currencies of Europe were swept away. Back then, with sovereign control of its own currency, Greece wouldn't be in nearly this bad of a situation. Such is progress!

Nor is it just that. Part of the deal with the bailout is that the Greek government is selling many of its assets - such as its lottery, its 55% stake in Athens International Airport, some of its real estate, and so on. Now, one might think that this perfectly normal; particularly Athens' interest to lessen its stake in the national railway system, which as of May lost €1 billion a year and had a debt of €10 billion. But look it at it realistically - the government isn't going to want to sell something that isn't profitable, or which they think can't be made profitable before the sale. If that was the case, who'd want to buy it?

What I suspect here, what I see here, is another triumph of neoliberal ideology - the same ideology that gave us the wonderful philosophy "privatize the profits, socialize the losses" - such as when a bank makes cash hand over fist it's laissez les bon temps roulez for the bosses and investors, but when it loses a wad on a stupid risk, suddenly it's the taxpayers who have to have to shovel the green back into the money bins.

It's something that's never actually said outright, but is hinted at this way and that by the actions of governments, usually conservative - "the government has no business making money." Witness the 1999 Ontario provincial election, where the government of Mike Harris sold Highway 407 for $4.1 billion, under a ninety-nine year lease, to a group of private investors less than two years after the highway had opened. It could have been a consistent money source for the government, but... there was an opportunity there to balance the budget by getting rid of state assets at fire-sale prices! Other examples aren't hard to find; look at the sale of Chicago's parking meters, for instance, or the noises Rob Ford was making about selling the city's stake in Toronto Hydro during the election.

If Greece was really expected to pay down its debt, it wouldn't be selling - or, perhaps more appropriately, forced to be selling - profitable assets. Without those, the government will have less money to work with in general, and thus be less able to pay back the debt. But this isn't about debt, I don't believe. Greece's debt as a percentage of GDP was 142.8% in 2010 - put bluntly, even if Greece put every single euro it had into paying down its debt this year, it would not be able to. Greece's debt problems have got so bad since joining the Eurozone that I don't think a default of some kind is avoidable anymore.

I doubt I'm the only one who suspects that. Thus, then, I can't see what's going in Greece as an honest attempt to stabilize the country - rather, I see it as an opportunity being taken advantage of by the unfettered psychopaths who have come to dominate the global economy, who care about little except the acquisition of greater and greater wealth. After all, Greece wants money, don't it? So it's a perfect time to pick up great formerly-government assets at bargain basement prices, and tap them ruthlessly for profit! Remember the railway? Don't forget how Reuters reported that "the government will try to sweeten the sale by closing loss-making routes and making other cost cuts."

Who does that sound like it's serving? The Greek people, those who the Greek government exists to serve - or the capitalists?

Writing for Twits

The other day I got an unusual mention on Twitter - and it wasn't unusual just because it was someone other than @vancouver_rt retweeting one of my photo links. It was obviously spam at the time, and the message's disapparance from my message timeline bears that out; nevertheless, I checked it out anyway. And I didn't really appreciate what I found on the other end of the link.

"URGENT: Writers needed, more writing jobs than we can fill..." You'd think that would be of interest to people like me, people who are interested in the prospect of being able to scratch together rent money by stringing words together. But it didn't take me long to look over that splash page, and sure enough there was something there that made me want to put my fist through the monitor. Three simple words: "no experience required."

In fairness, no matter how much the outfit tries to convince you otherwise, there is no way their business is legitimate, and there's no way you would actually need any experience anyway. $25-$50 for a blog post or comment on a blog? $100 for an article? If I could make that kind of scratch I wouldn't have to hold down a day job - but it's the particularly rare person who ever finds themself in that sort of situation, and when you consider that the posts or blog comments you would get paid for are likely a) pharmaceutical spam or b) political astroturfing, someone who is actually a writer can do much better.

I don't care that this outfit is transparently a bunch of scamming spammers; my problem is the denigration of the skill. Just because someone can write, in the sense of using a set of symbols representing spoken-word sounds to encode messages on appropriate materials, does not mean that someone can write in the sense of making the result easy to read, comprehensible, and clear. Writing is more than connecting a bunch of words, just as cooking is more than emptying a bunch of ingredients in a pot. A careless or inexperienced cook is much more likely to produce something that's unpalatable or worse; a careless or inexperienced writer is apt to create something not worth the time it would take to skim it.

Writing is not something you pick up overnight. It is a skill that has to be honed by long practice and the production of vast quantities of dross - and frequently self-taught, as well. Personally, I've been writing stories for fifteen years and it was only recently that my skill reached a stage where it wasn't pure narcissism to send out a submission in the expectation that it would be bought. Likewise, these weblog posts were honed by essay after essay after essay in high school and university.

It's easy for people to dismiss the necessity of experience in writing; after all, writers just throw a bunch of words together, right? What they miss in that dismissal speaks more to their lack of experience than their belief that experience is unnecessary.

Cruisin' For A G20 Bruisin'

I was not looking forward to leaving Vancouver - primarily for the reason that I knew I would be returning to a Toronto where a miniature police state, courtesy the Government of Canada, is busily under construction. Though the walls have begun to go up the disruptions right now are minor, but ultimately what it's like in the third week of June doesn't really matter. What's important is the G20 summit, the two-day summit for which Our Glorious Leader is shutting down the core of Canada's largest city and spending $1-billion (whoops, excuse me, that's $930-million - can't sacrifice accuracy, yanno) for the privilege, fake lake and all.

Here's a note: I work in downtown Toronto, right on the edge of the traffic control perimeter. Based on the reports on how things are most likely going to shake out, it looks like there's a good chance I will have to bring my passport to pass through the checkpoints. The prospect of needing my passport, the document that I use to transit national borders, to get around in my own fucking city alarms me greatly.

Summary: while the G20 summit in and of itself is not going to leave Toronto a smoking ruin, during it and a little while afterward, at least some of us will probably wish it had. The worst part, to my mind, is that there's absolutely no reason for it to have happened at all. I don't mean that the summit could have been held in Exhibition Place, an easily-secured and more isolated area that the city offered and the federal government rejected out of hand - I mean that it shouldn't have been held in this city, or, for that matter, any city.

This has long since escalated beyond photo-op to pure farce. One of the consistent narratives that Harper and the Conservatives have been spinning is that this is an opportunity to showcase Canada to the world - which is complete bullshit. All they're going to be "showcasing" is a lake that cost $2-million taxpayer dollars to build - money that could have gone to things that are, you know, actually worth something - and a city locked down behind security cordons, where not even kite-flying will be allowed. Because, you know, terrorists!! could strap a bomb to a kite! And... do something!

But that's the elephant in the room, isn't it? The insane depth of the security measures that will be going up in Toronto stem from one reason and one reason only - the threat of terrorism. If they really believe that there is a clear and present threat of a terrorist attack on the G20 summit, than in my opinion it shows only how utterly reckless and unconcerned with consequences the Conservatives are. Ultimately, though, whether the worst-case scenario comes to pass or it's just an issue of a few protestors or totally non-involved people getting beaten to death, the responsibility will fall at the feet of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the others who buffaloed this summit through - and it's us, the people of Toronto, who will be left paying for it.

The idea of this being a vehicle to "showcase Canada to the world" is, in my mind, likewise flawed; it's entirely the wrong model for a summit with as much importance as the G20. In my mind, the appropriate comparison should be that of a behind-deadline writer being locked in a hotel room by his publisher until he produces enough copy. We're living in turbulent times, and it is the responsibility of the heads of government to look at the hard questions and to make some difficult decisions, not bask in the light of a media circus.

Because there is an alternative. I just wish that the people behind the summit had considered it before they decided it would be an awesome idea to throw the locks on Toronto.

The Holland America Line cruise ship MS Zuiderdam passes Vancouver's Brockton Point Lighthouse as it sails through Burrard Inlet, bound for the Pacific Ocean - June 12, 2010

While I was in Vancouver I saw two cruise ships making for the Lions Gate Bridge and the open ocean, the Coral Princess and MS Zuiderdam. Seeing as how cruises don't generally go up the St. Lawrence, these things aren't exactly a common sight in Toronto Harbour, and neither are they of a scale that can be appreciated from photographs alone. These things are literally floating cities, and I had no idea that something so absolutely massive could move so fast.

Wouldn't it be far more straightforward, not to mention less taxing on whatever hapless cities get saddled with the dubious privilege to host this wonderful summit in years to come, to just create a meeting place for future G20 summits and the like? Wouldn't it be easier to, bluntly, pack them all off on a ship? I mean, it's not as if we'd have to worry about the world leaders getting "out of touch" with the people - they're not in touch with them now, and the bigass security fences around the summit perimeter here are hardly going to encourage any extra awareness.

Hosting the G20 on a cruise ship would enable a decrease of the security overhead - it's easier to secure something floating than the downtown core of a city - and it could be put in the middle of a carrier battle group for the duration. There's no way that renting out such a ship for a few days would be more expensive than Toronto's security tab. The way things are going, we're getting to the point where we need to lock our leaders in a room until they come up with workable solutions. This way, even if they do manage to jimmy the door, they'd have to swim for it. Hell, it might be easier for them to just make decisions and do things. Shock!

Stepping Back from the Marks

Now that the Biggest Hangover in British Columbia's History is well into its first week, and will be around in the background until the 2010 Winter Olympics are finally paid off - probably sometime in the 2040s, considering the depth of the economic straits we're currently submerged in - thoughts are naturally turning to the future. Torontoist's Stephen Johns, who was covering the Olympics from Vancouver, thinks that future should include an Olympic Games in Toronto. I can remember a time when I would have wholeheartedly agreed with him. I remember gnashing my teeth in 2001 after the announcement that Beijing had won the 2008 Summer Games over Toronto. I remember standing in Chicago's Daley Plaza last October, wearing one of those bright orange "CHICAGO 2016" shirts they were handing out for free, and seeing the crowd switch from anticipatory to angry in an instant when the Windy City was defeated in the first round of the voting that Rio de Janiero eventually won.

Now, though... I've had ample opportunity to re-evaluate my priorities. Hosting an Olympics in Toronto would, I think, be a mistake - an appeal to a too-temporary euphoria that puts itself above the day-to-day necessities of a vital city, even more so now than before. Max Fawcett at You Shall Know My Veracity fulminated about this yesterday, and I tend to agree with him. Vancouver's truly important projects, such as the SkyTrain's Canada Line linking downtown Vancouver to Richmond and Vancouver International Airport, is a sensible addition to that city's transit network and would have been built regardless of whether the Olympics were landing in town. What we should be thinking about is what Vancouver won't be able to build because the Olympics came to town.

I can think of one possibility - the Evergreen Line, a new SkyTrain extension. While BC Finance Minister Colin Hansen pretty much said that it was "full speed ahead" for the six-station line, intended to start construction next year, there is still $400-million that has yet to be accounted for. I can imagine it'd be slightly easier to find that money if Vancouver wasn't on the hook for a six billion dollar party.

Toronto has its own necessities waiting in the pipeline. The Downtown Relief Line, for one, which will only become more vital with each passing year, particularly once Transit City lines start transporting new passengers into the existing subway system. We have problems with insufficient community housing budgets and daycare program budgets and basic social infrastructure budgets. To prioritize what are literally called "games" over vital patches of our urban fabric is, in my opinion, totally wrong. These are serious times we're living in.

Honestly, times are frequently serious in Toronto, as the extremely limited powers it was granted in the City of Toronto Act tend to leave it in a difficult position. The current brouhaha regarding billboard taxes has arisen in part because billboards are one of the few things that the provincial government will allow Toronto to tax. Other cities have wide revenue streams - Toronto's is based on property taxes to an unhealthy extreme. If you think things are bad now, just wait until Toronto homeowners have to pay even more and more and more to make up for the cost of an Olympic Village or new purpose-built venues that would have to flounder for some post-Olympic role - because, after all, if there was a need for them, they wouldn't need to wait for the Olympics in order to be built.

Vancouver paying for their Olympics until the 2040s may be an exaggeration. It may not be. I would rather not take the chance. Ultimately I'd rather have Toronto's money go to something that gives us concrete benefits, something more valuable than simple egoboo and two weeks of warm fuzzies.

I Strongly Disagree With Giorgio Mammoliti

Though we've still got eight months to go before the question of who Toronto's next mayor will be is settled, there's one thing I am sure of - right now, Giorgio Mammoliti is definitely the comic-relief candidate. I can't look at his platform - the pieces of it he's unveiled as of this writing, at least - and think anything else. His was the first platform the citizens of Toronto learned anything about; he laid down its first planks back in October, more than two months before the race got in gear, and if anything I think they've warped with time.

The idea of opening a red light district for Toronto, and plugging Toronto's budget gap with a "sin tax" and revenues from a casino he'd also like to site in the city, are Mammoliti's - though I don't imagine the people behind Casino Rama or the Niagara Falls casinos would look kindly on that. Since then, we haven't known much more about where he stands, except for an interest in corporate sponsorships or private-public partnerships. He's been pretty much harmless, then, advocating policies that no other candidates has come even close to touching.

After what I read yesterday, I'm going to have to amend that to mostly harmless.

On February 24, The Globe and Mail reported that Mammoliti's platform is to be revealed tonight, and gave us a sneak preview of what we can expect - and, in my mind, it's nothing good. The keystone of that article is a proposed pledge to eliminate property taxes for all Torontonians over 65. I know, I know, a politician pandering to a specific social group is totally unheard of, but I find this particularly distressing.

That Mammoliti would even suggest this suggests, to me, that he does not have the sort of perspective that a mayor of Toronto would require. In a city that has made being underfunded a way of life, in a city that is hamstrung by its provincial overlords about how it can actually raise the money it needs to survive, let alone prosper, Mammoliti wants to end property taxes on people over the age of 65 almost literally just as the first baby boomers start turning 65. That's a real genius maneuver, Giorgio. I'm sure that obligating the young generation to pay for the old will ingratiate you to people who plan to be alive in 2050. The only potentially saving grace is that, as an immigrant city, Toronto's population is still biased toward the young - the 2006 census, which gave the total city population as 2,503,280, indicates that 353,445 - approximately fourteen percent - were sixty-five years of age or above. Nevertheless, I still think this is a bad idea - just look at the Chicago Transit Authority, which not only is struggling with significant service cuts brought on by revenue shortfalls, has had its finances further compromised by an Illinois governmental initiative that gave seniors free rides on the CTA - estimated at $1 billion over the next twenty years.

Remember, though, Toronto is legally prohibited from running a deficit, so all that revenue that would have come from 65+ property taxes will have to be made up elsewhere. Good thing that his campaign gave us that info, too - "massive layoffs and more private-public partnerships." Hooray! Because as we all know, there isn't a problem in the verse that can't be solved by putting people out on the street. After all, the news keeps saying the recession is over! So why shouldn't we not only compromise Toronto's capacity to raise balanced budgets, but remove as many people as we need to from paying work? It's a new day in Toronto, people!

Also, just remember - these are only crumbs. We haven't even seen Mammoliti's real platform. Are you excited yet?

The Fire and the Fussbudget

Earlier this week, the City of Toronto released its 2010 capital and operating budgets to no shortage of criticism. This is something that, unfortunately, the city has to live with. Unlike the federal and provincial governments, the city is required by law to balance its books every year and so cannot run deficits. Considering the way that Ottawa and Queen's Park have acted for basically my entire life, this is definitely a "do as we say, not as we do" thing. Because of this, though, the city frequently has to contort itself in painful ways to make the budget work.

I'm still going through the budget, and honestly, the thing is so dense and unapproachable that it'll most likely take a good while. But I have been poring through the new user fees, and while most of them are understandable if a bit galling - take childrens' activities at City recreational centers, formerly free, but now they'll be $15 per participant - there are some that I have no idea how the City can defend. Like, say, the new charge that is going to be rolled out for false fire alarms. From what I understand, this is a modification of an already-existing charge - but where it was originally slapped on repeat false-alarm offenders, now it's for every single false alarm, regardless of whether it's the result of idiot kids or drunks pulling the alarm or an overly sensitive smoke detector that doesn't like your cooking.

This is a $350 charge. It's not a flat rate, either - it is $350 *per vehicle*! The next time that someone triggers the alarm in my building, then, at that rate there'll be more than a thousand dollars worth of fines idling on the street after a few minutes. The City plans to make $4,890,375 from this charge - which means that because of this, thirty-eight times every day people will not appreciate the whirr of the sirens approaching.

If I am elected Mayor, I pledge to eliminate this no-forgiveness false alarm charge, and return it to what it was before. I hope that the eventual winner, whoever it may be, keeps this in mind.

$350 for the first false alarm call. Thank you, City, for making the hard budgetary decisions.

I honestly can't understand what the City was thinking when it brought this in. Budgeting based on punitive fines that are, ultimately optional - in the sense that people can theoretically choose to avoid committing actions that would result in fines - is not good economic sense. More than that, though, in my mind it amounts to an assault on the common Torontonian, whose own fiscal resources are already being strained and don't have the liberty of imposing fines to find level ground. If this fine fell squarely on the shoulders of whoever pulled the fire alarm, then I wouldn't mind as much - personal responsibility is something that shouldn't be avoided.

I seriously doubt this is what's going to happen, though. I and many other Torontonians live in multi-unit apartment buildings, and it's rare that a month goes by without the harsh, wailing jangle of the klaxon waking us up and sending us down to the cold street way too friggin' early in the morning. I would not be surprised to see landlords simply turning around and charging their tenants to make up the cost of the fine. For a big building this isn't killer, but smaller buildings don't have many tenants to spread the pain between. What I worry about are the smaller fires that would previously have been caught, but won't, because people disconnect their smoke alarms to avoid accidentally setting off a false alarm.

This is purely a stopgap solution, and it shows. I don't think this is the sort of thing we should be pursuing, and it's not the sort of thing that Toronto should hold on to. We're a better city than that. Nevertheless, this sort of thing is going to keep happening. Governments of the last few decades were blinded by prosperity, thought it would last forever, and thus took no action whatsoever to prepare for times that would not be so good - except for Alberta and its oil-powered Heritage Fund. Wise governments would plan for that, and not simply scramble for whatever scraps they can find in the pantry.

The Ninety-Fifth Rule

Considering that it's all but certain now that NASA's plan to return to the moon is dead in the water, it's hardly a surprise that the peanut gallery would erupt with the rabble of people who think this is a good thing. Who think that human space exploration is a waste of money, a ridiculous luxury, or purely obsolete. These are all goddamn ridiculous opinions. I've written about my opinion on this before, and I don't know how more clearly I can state it than this:

A PURELY ROBOTIC SPACE PROGRAM IS WORTHLESS.

In my opinion, the point of a space agency is to arrange things to get humans off Earth. Robotics is acceptable as a means to that end, but it has no right to be an end in itself. To people who say that space exploration is a ridiculous luxury, I say that you have no business subsidizing research for research's sake on the public dime. I'm vociferous about this because, in the end, the equation is simple.

Either we go to space, or we die.

See how simple that is? Eight words that sums it all up, and all the goddamn telemetry in the world won't change the fact that all the money pumped into deep space probes will have been wasted if we just step back from the brink, circle our wagons around this planet, and wait for some asteroid or comet or major solar flare or environmental collapse to finish us. Because one of those will happen. With the right timescale, the certainty of anything approaches totality.

I'm not saying that by going to space we assure our survival as a species - space, you know, is a dangerous place. But that is the only choice that allows for the possibility of our survival being assured. Sooner or later, no matter how well we take care of it, Earth is going to become uninhabitable. I have no interest in the extinction of the human race if this can possibly be avoided - which, thankfully, puts me in a different category than Charles Stross, who believes that the opinion I'm expressing here is "an appeal to sentimentality," because "the future extinction of the human species cannot affect you if you are already dead: strictly speaking, it should be of no personal concern."

I have to wonder if this idea isn't in some way hitching a ride on the modern-day fallacy of economics - the idea that infinite growth is possible in a finite system. We're already running into the failings of that particular philosophy. It's easy for a person to think people can live on Earth indefinitely; I mean, look how BIG it is! These tend to be the sort of people who don't think through the implications of their actions or ideas.

I will close on a clip from the first season of Babylon 5, which sums up what I've been trying to say.



Also, anyone who recognizes where I got the title for this post gets an egoboo.

Like A Poor Marksman...

Regular readers of this weblog may recall my post of November 5th, "The TTC: An Un-Fare Perspective," where I expressed my disagreement with the legions of people howling about the then-possible, now-realized Toronto Transit Commission fare increase to $3, effective January 1. I felt then, and still feel now, that the TTC needs to fill its $100-million budget gap somehow. I think Torontonians should count themselves fortunate that the prospect of service cuts is completely off the table - other cities aren't so lucky. St. Louis slashed much of its service a while ago now, a victim of the recession, and the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority is considering service cuts that would cancel outright, or restrict to rush hours only, forty transit routes, including one of its new light-rail lines. The TTC should be applauded for its commitment to maintaining service in a time as challenging as this.

Not everyone is as willing to give the organization a break as I am. Previously, it was limited to newspaper columnists and the Twittering legions, but a new force is entering the fray now - OCAP, the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty. I know this because yesterday someone representing OCAP left a comment under my November 5th post, attempting to drum up volunteers for flyering in preparation for a Public Action they've got planned for December 12th.

If you're interested in the precise content of their message, check it out through the link above. I won't repost it here. Suffice it to say that they're upset. What irks me, personally, is that it's obvious whoever left the comment didn't actually read my post - I presume they were just trawling for weblogs talking about the TTC fare increase, whatever they might have said, and scattering seeds to see which ones sprout.

I will, however, use this corner of mine to speak in response.

Ideally, fare increases are something that transit agencies would avoid. A long-standing, unchanging fare, if it allows stable funding, helps attract and retain riders, which at the core of it is the reason for a transit agency's existence. The TTC doesn't have that luxury. Ottawa is too busy building up Canada's climate-criminal reputation to care about day-to-day transit operations, and the province isn't doing so hot on the financial front and, as such, can't fund the TTC as lavishly as it did during the 1980s, before Mike Harris showed up on Ontario's doorstep to peddle the Common Sense Revolution. More than 70% of the TTC's operating funds come out of the farebox, and my understanding is that the City of Toronto itself makes up much of the rest.

Not that this seems to matter to OCAP, if their comment's any indication. While they do take shots at Ottawa and Queen's Park for granting "BILLIONS of dollars of public money" in the recent bailouts, they also point the finger of blame at "the bourgeoise socialists affiliated with the NDP on Toronto City Council" - the first time, by the way, I have seen someone use the word "bourgeoise" in seriousness since I finished university.

What's their demand? That "transit be federally funded and affordable for everyone." That, I can get behind. How are they planning to bring this about? With a call to arms of "we should refuse to pay" and a demonstration at City Hall.

OCAP wants to get the federal government to finance affordable transit in Toronto, and they're going to demonstrate in front of City Hall? Obviously they've stumbled onto the same cache of forbidden municipal knowledge that I have. One of the little-known secrets of City Hall is that there is a chamber deep beneath Nathan Phillips Square where Mayor David Miller keeps Rumpelstiltskin chained in adamantium shackles, spinning straw into gold through nights and days. On December 12th, OCAP will expose this source of wealth to the world, and the federal government will have no choice but to grant the TTC its fair share! ...or something.

To be perfectly honest, I have no idea whatsoever what OCAP thinks a demonstration in front of City Hall will accomplish. The federal government doesn't give a shit about Toronto anyway. Why should they? There aren't any Conservative ridings within the City of Toronto, and it's not like we have a federal government so that it can act in the interest of Canadians as a whole.

I agree, this situation sucks. What people don't seem to appreciate is that it could be a hell of a lot worse than it is.

We Can Do Better Than Westminster

By the end of the work week, we may well know if Canadians are going to have to reckon with an election once again. The opposition in Parliament, dominated by Michael Ignatieff's Liberal Party, lost its composure recently and announced that it would no longer support Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative minority government. For those unfamiliar with the Westminster parliamentary system, a minority government is one where no party holds more than half of the seats in Parliament, and as such the governing party is dependent on the support of at least some of the opposition in order to govern at all.

Yesterday, facing the potential of Canada's fourth election in six years, the Globe and Mail's John Ibbitson asked, "Is Canada broken?" Election after interminable election, he wrote, may be indicative of a "malfunction" in the political system, and that the parties are spending more time jockeying for power and influence than actually doing their duties. Canada isn't particularly used to minority governments; before 2004, when Paul Martin's lackluster campaign kicked off our current stretch, Canada's last minority government was in 1979, and from what I can tell, there has never been such a long string of minority governments in Canadian history.

What I have to ask, though, is - is this a bad thing? Or, more to the point, are we asking the wrong question? Could it be that it's not Canada that's broken, but Canada's system of government that's broken?

I've never been enchanted with the Westminster parliamentary system. My first substantial introduction to it came in a high school Politics class, where I first learned of and was disgusted by the concepts of party loyalty and party discipline. Maybe part of that derives from my proximity to the United States, and the constant news from there about Democratic and Republican senators and congressfolk trading support and influence like bubblegum. Here, it's not the same. If a Prime Minister stands at the head of a majority government, he or she wields supreme executive power - and considering the four-party nature of Canadian federal politics, it's hardly derived from a mandate from the masses. In the 2000 federal election, the last time a majority government was voted in, the Liberals won their majority with 40.85% of the vote.

Another of Ibbitson's issues is that due to this constant electioneering, a majority of the bills tables in Parliament are never passed into law, and as such Parliament is not doing its job. To be honest, I prefer these slate-blanking opportunities when I look back at what the Conservatives have tried to do. Our prospective new copyright law, Bill C-61 - written with the assumption, it seems, that the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act did not go far enough - died on the table in 2008, and Canada is better off for it. Minority governments, and the electioneering associated with them, can filter out terrible bills that would be pushed through without a blink if one party had control.

The way I see it, it's the Westminster system that's broken. I'm thankful that we've not had a majority government for the last five years, because it means that one party has not been able to run roughshod over the loyal opposition and remake Canada in its image. I would like nothing more than for there never to be a majority government again. Effective, responsive governments are based on consensus, and parliamentary majorities discourage exactly that. No party should be handed the keys to the country by merely a plurality of the voters. That's not what real democracy is.

Maybe the Conservatives are right - maybe it is time for a change. Maybe they were just wrong about exactly what it is that needs to be changed.

A City of Villages

While riding home on Wilson Avenue last Saturday afternoon, trying desperately to stay ahead of the dark clouds scudding in from the northwest as a concrete retaining wall rose to separate me from the industrial district and highway to the south, I encountered something so utterly out-of-place that I had to stop and take a photo.

I've been trying to expand my familiarity with Toronto in recent months, but even then, potted plants hanging from a streetlight with no commercial properties in sight aren't precisely common. As it happens, this plant and the others like it along that stretch of Wilson Avenue were placed by Emery Village, a Business Improvement Area anchored around the intersection of Finch Avenue West and Weston Road and, as point of fact, appears to be the sole BIA in the entirety of North York. Founded in 2003, it appears to be one of the newer ones.

What I don't understand is why so many BIAs now have to identify themselves as a village. Beyond Emery Village, we've got Davisville Village and Liberty Village and Mirvish Village and practically anything else you care to name and stick "village" at the end of. Of the sixty-seven BIAs presently listed on the Toronto Association of Business Improvement Areas website, twenty-three are "villages." While a few of them, such as Forest Hill Village and Parkdale Village, are legitimate in that Forest Hill and Parkdale actually were independent villages before becoming part of Toronto, we've also got names like, say, Yonge-Lawrence Village that have no basis in history.

Is it just because "village" is good for marketing? If that's the case, what does this preoccupation with the village life say about us?

I can see what the average person might get out of a village - something charming, maybe, something quaint, something nice to show off to everyone back home. Maybe it's the idea of a stronger, more interconnected city, the prospect of reconnecting with the people next door, or simply the security of uncomplicated peace that you'd find in a country village where everyone stands up for each other. Villages have practically been fetishized since the beginning of the Industrial Age as reminders of a less complicated, more pure lifestyle, and the rural impulse that villages represent keeps cropping up again and again, most recently in the "decivilization" meme I wrote about back in April.

To me, it's something different. Villages don't suggest security and bucolic happiness to me. They suggest isolation, provincialism and parochialism. The traditional concept of a village hardly even exists anymore - even in the back of the back woods, you can at least get dial-up internet to supplement your satellite television.

In the end, it's an appeal to mythologized history. What's never asked, though, is this: should we be lionizing this meme? Is the idea of the village something that should be supported and evangelized? Shouldn't we be looking not to the past, but to the future?

Copyfight, Win, Prevail

Copyright will be the struggle of our age. Twenty-five years ago, no one except for video pirates like Marty McFly in the first draft of Back to the Future would have had reason to care about it. Today, the implications of copyright are everywhere, and as it gains in scope and influence, copyright maximalists have begun coming out of the woodwork to channel it like water in a Sumerian irrigation canal.

I think that's a valid comparison. Just as the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt were hydraulic empires, deriving their authority from control over water, the issue of control over intellectual property may well be one of the defining struggles of the twenty-first century. Steve Jackson Games' Transhuman Space series explores this issue in detail - and, to be honest, it was seeing its presentation of copyright in 2100 that galvanized me to work towards something fairer, something more equitable, in the here and now.

Yesterday, Cory Doctorow over at Boing Boing wrote about Access Copyright, a copyright license agency up here, attempting to throw its weight around in the current copyright law consultations being run by the Canadian government - which will, more than likely, completely ignore the outcome and just pump electricity into Bill C-61's corpse, but that's neither here nor there.

Their broadside paints the project to its membership as "[taking] aim at your livelihood," and claims that the consultations are "dominated by individuals who do not agree you should get fair compensation for digital and other reproductions of your works." What's really telling about Access Copyright's intentions, though, is in the message sample they provided as a means of getting their members to record videos and circulate their perspectives.

"When someone reproduces my work for free, it destroys the market for it, and I suffer the consequences."

This may be one of the single most ridiculous sentences I've ever read. An author's greatest challenge is obscurity, not piracy. When I think of "reproducing work for free," I think of Jonathan Coulton and Cory Doctorow and Paulo Coelho, creators who wholeheartedly embrace free sharing through Creative Commons licensing or otherwise and who have seen their awareness among the public increase greatly as a result.

This is what copyright needs to recognize. When I read Access Copyright's post, I was galvanized, yes - but probably not in the way they intended, as I made a video and posted it on YouTube, detailing why I disagree with what they're doing.



That room is like an echo chamber.

In Defense of the Island Airport

In Which Andrew Will Somehow Mask His Irritation at VIA Rail Settling the Strike Nine Hours After He Cancels His Reservations With Them

Recently I've begun seeing flyers around Parkdale, flyers which feature an infant in a breathing mask and criticize the five four hundred "TOXIC diesel trains" that will be roaring through the neighborhood when the Blue22 rail link between Union Station and Toronto Pearson International Airport comes to fruition. Personally, I have always thought that Blue22 was ridiculous, the sort of project only a politician could support. For one, it steals valuable rail corridor space that could be put to much better use as a western extension of the Downtown Relief Line.

I think this conflict all stems from a misapprehension of the situation at hand. See, personally I don't think air travel, in its most common form, has staying power. Those big turbofan jetliners, the Boeings and the Airbuses and Ilyushins, are not the cheapest machines in the world to operate. There's an old joke: what's the easiest way to become a millionaire? Be a billionaire and buy an airline. The environmental cost is no less, even if it's not commonly thought of; a 2006 Guardian piece reported a "general consensus" that aviation was responsible for 4% of global carbon dioxide emissions.

Here in Toronto, I think the Island Airport - officially, Toronto City Centre Airport - provides a much-needed alternative. For the last three years, Porter Airlines has been the sole passenger airline operating from YTZ, flying Bombardier Q400 turboprop aircraft on short-haul routes in eastern Canada and the northeastern United States. When I was planning for my trip to Montreal next month for the 67th World Science Fiction Convention, Anticipation SF, I was only interested in VIA Rail or Porter Airlines because the two of them offered the lowest environmental impact.

Nevertheless, the Island Airport has historically had a fractious relationship with the city of Toronto, both old and new. The controversy goes back to the late 1970s, when the first whispers of passenger service out of YTZ reached City Hall, and reached a fever pitch in 2006 when Porter Airlines began its operations. Mayor David Miller, you see, doesn't like the idea of the Island Airport, and was elected on a platform that included a halt on the construction of a bridge across the narrow Western Gap to the airport - perhaps out of the hope that ferry-only access might choke Porter's profit margins like Hercules in the crib.

It hasn't really worked out that way, but Miller still opposes the idea of passenger aircraft flying from the Island. Personally, I think the city should encourage development and use of the Island Airport. No matter how much Pearson's management might want it to be otherwise, there is no reason to believe that the status quo will last forever. Short-haul flights on efficient aircraft like the Q400 are far more sustainable a mode of transportation than modern jetliners.

For a mayor who's staking so much, like the Jarvis bike lane project, on his environmentalist creds, Miller's continued opposition to the Island Airport seems quixotic and more than a bit shortsighted to me. For my part, I imagine what's possible - a pedestrian and transit bridge that flies across the Western Gap, and a platform where travellers can step straight on a streetcar and step off again at Union Station.

It'd be a hell of a lot cheaper, cleaner, and quieter than Blue22.

Road to 2011: Premier Who-Dat?

As of yesterday the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario leadership race is over, and Tim Who-Dat Hudak will be their great golden hope to carry them back to the Premier's Office after a six-year absence. I can't say I'm surprised, but neither can I say I'm excited - I wrote about his run back in April, and even then he seemed like one of the better candidates. Witness Christine Elliot's predilection for a flat tax, say, or Randy Hillier's proposal to have "Highway 448" crash through Scarborough¹ and to dismantle the Ontario Human Rights Commission. I've seen Frank Klees described as a "social conservative," but I haven't yet found anything in the fragments of his platform to bear that out.

It seems as if Hudak may be the least objectionable of the lot.

Oh, joy.

Hudak's victory was the lead story on the Toronto Star's website this morning, and it ran with a photograph of Hudak being congratulated by former Premier Mike Harris, who ran the province (into the ground, some might say) from 1995 to 2002. Highly appropriate, as Hudak has ditched his previous "unknown cipher" status and embraced the role of a Harris loyalist, and if he does march victorious into Queen's Park two years from now, we'd only need to look at history to see what he'd do.

I suppose that the time is more than good enough to hold a wake for the Big Blue Machine. Back in the day, you see, the Progressive Conservatives had the same sort of grip over Ontario as the Liberal Democratic Party still does in Japan. In the sixty-two years between 1923 and 1985, the PCs were only out of power for a nine-year interlude, and most of that owed to Mitchell Hepburn. They managed this stretch by being competent in government, by not rocking the boat, and particularly in the 1970s by out-liberalling the Liberals.

Back then, it seems "conservatism" meant a steady hand on the wheel, worthwhile investment, and a lack of interest in legislating social issues or ideology. While Mike Harris didn't represent social conservatism of the sort that's far more common in the United States, he sure as hell did use Queen's Park as a blunt instrument to stamp his ideology onto Ontario. Among his more storied victories were the forcible amalgamation of the cities of Metropolitan Toronto and the sale of Highway 407 to a foreign company in a sweetheart 99-year-lease that included unlimited control of tolls on the highway. In the original plan it was only supposed to be a toll road for thirty-five years, and that only to pay off the cost of its construction.

Why was it sold, by the by? According to a 1999 article from TOLLROADSnews, because the province would get $900 million "profit" back after paying off its 407-related debts. And, you know, why would the province possibly want to retain control over a major highway when it could turn it into a one-time opportunity for bread and circuses right before an election?

The Big Blue Machine is dead and, at least in the foreseeable future, isn't coming back. Personally I feel that the success of Stephen Harper's Conservatives at the federal level are responsible for this. The Conservatives in Ottawa have taken a particularly right-wing tack ever since their foundation in 2003, and really, it Just Wouldn't Do for provincial conservatives to be ideologically out-of-step with their federal brethren. Bear in mind I'm not saying this isn't something Harper's engineered. It's more the case that there's only room for one flavor of conservatism in government at a time.

At this point, it's far, far too early to speculate on whether Hudak will actually win the 2011 election. All I can say is that there's a chance for it to happen, and given the legacy Mike Harris left this province, I can't say that I'm looking forward to the prospect of an encore.

¹ But he DID support building the Downtown Relief Line... I'm torn!

City Council's Dragon-Pokers

For the last five days, Toronto has been trudging through a city workers' strike - though, like many other things, this is simplified in common parlance to a "garbage strike" because city workers pick up garbage in most of the City of Toronto - bringing a halt to meetings of municipal government. Striking workers have set up a picket line at City Hall, and the city announced that council meetings would be suspended for the duration. Ordinarily this might not be much of a problem, as whether a particular motion gets passed now or later is rarely of much consequence.

It's an unusual time, though. Recently the city inked an agreement with Bombardier to buy new Flexity Outlook streetcars to run on the existing streetcar system and the planned Transit City lines, but the $1.2 billion deal had to have funding committed by June 27th or else it would lapse. The dust-up between City Hall and Ottawa over an improper application for federal stimulus funding was a big enough complication as it is without the strike thrown into the mix.

Nevertheless, important things can still get done. An special session of Council is being held this morning in the Metro Toronto Convention Centre for the sole purpose of dealing with the streetcar issue - at this point, it looks like the TTC is going to fumble for the rest of the cash itself, although the particulars of its financial gymnastics haven't yet hit the streets. Furthermore, the striking workers won't be picketing the convention centre or otherwise interfering with the meeting. Pretty good, right?

Not for everyone. Yesterday, Councillor Karen Stintz, who sits in City Council's right wing and is one of the more credible contenders for the Toronto mayoralty in 2010, sent a letter to Mayor David Miller on behalf of a loose coalition of councillors called the "responsible government group." In it she criticized the plan for council to sit in the Convention Centre.

"There is absolutely no justification for holding this meeting off site," Stintz wrote in the letter, which was excerpted in the Toronto Star yesterday. "We have critical business to conduct and council should not have any reservations about crossing picket lines to do so."

For hell's sake.

One of the biggest problems with this strike is that neither the city nor the union is in any position to budge. The union, rightly, sees itself as defending concessions it won previously and is unwilling to sacrifice when other unionized city employees, such as police, fire, and EMS, don't have to share it. The city, on the other hand, can't afford weakness. Mayor Miller's always been a friend of the unions, and quickly giving in would only assure his defeat in 2010.

There is already enough acrimony on both sides over justifiable grievances. This situation is bad enough as it is, and what we don't need is for the city to give the union even more of a reason to dig in its heels - and this over something that is, in the long run, irrelevant. In ten years it will be remembered as a historical curiosity, a trivia tidbit or a sentence on a Wikipedia page, as one of Toronto City Council's handful of extraordinary meetings.

Toronto's councillors should work to resolve the issues that face the city before they inflame existing ones.

More than a Busy Highway

Personal disclosure time: I've absolutely no motive to be charitable about anything the City of Barrie does, because I was made to live in that sprawling suburban labyrinth for nearly thirteen years of my life. I'm thankful that university allowed me to escape, and I never want to live there again. It seems, however, that the Barrie government wants to bring itself ever closer to me anyway, like a zombie cut in half dragging itself across the rocks.

What's happened is simple, understandable as a mere extension of previous policy, and to my mind still indefensible. The province of Ontario has given the go-ahead for the city of Barrie to annex yet more chunks of Innisfil, a town to the south that seems to exist solely to provide Barrie with something to annex, where it will proceed to build a number of new transit-oriented developments linked to downtown and Barrie South GO station by quick, speedy, reliable light rail vehicles.

Hah. Got you, didn't I? What they're really going to do is the same thing Barrie has always done - they're going to drop down some more ill-designed residential subdivisions in virgin land and call it a day. This is nothing new for them. Back when I lived there, I thought I knew the place like the back of my hand. I can't say the same now, as half of the city that exists now wasn't even built in 2001.

That is if you can call an agglomeration of meandering suburban roads, inexpertly stapled to a downtown core more appropriate for a community of 30,000 than 130,000, a "city."

Personally I find this move distressing - in this day and age, suburbs are the last things we should be investing in, when the rewards of densification and new urbanism have the potential to reinvent our way of life in a positive manner - but not unexpected. What really gets me is the way the Toronto Star, where I became aware of this, frames the issue.

"Drive up 400 could get worse," the headline reads. "Highway 400, notorious for its bumper-to-bumper traffic, could get a lot more crowded," says the first line of the story. It's telling that the Star chooses to focus purely on the traffic consequences of this planning decision. Not the social impacts, not the environmental costs, but the fact that drivers on the 400 will have to spend more time on it than before because of more people using it. (God forbid they take the GO train - public transit's for the plebes, I suppose.)

The greatest problem with this is that the consequences will be invisible. All we'll have is more endless rows of houses where once were farmers' fields. Because, really, we don't need agricultural land - we can always buy food from other countries! The concept of food security is just so gauche, isn't it?

Live in the Present, Or Else

While most people just party like it's 1999, I tend to still live that way. Compared to my contemporaries I'm a technological dinosaur. The laptop on which I wrote this post and the digital camera with which I gather photos to release into the public domain are, effectively, my only handholds in the 21st century. I don't have an mp3 player. I don't own a cellphone. I certainly don't think that my life is more hollow now than it would be if that wasn't the case.

I'm not a luddite. I don't begrudge the existence or ubiquity of cell phones; I only see no reason and have no desire to have one for myself. I like being unreachable when I leave the apartment. I enjoy solitude when I go out walkin', solitude that's never interrupted by some jangling ringtone. If I'm in unfamiliar terrain, that's what the map book in my backpack pocket's for. My camera eats enough batteries as it is.

I've made a choice to live without that, to live outside that web of instantaneous communication and text messaging and Facebook-on-the-go. What concerns me is that inevitably, inexorably, unless something's done about it, things like owning a cell phone will cease to become a personal choice and will instead be the result of social compulsion - that you have a cell phone because you must.

This is already going on at the University of Missouri. According to an article by Beverly G. Rivera in the Columbia Missourian, starting with the upcoming school year, students in its journalism program will be required to purchase an iPhone or iPod touch. Why? Apparently, it's so that they can be repurposed into learning enhancers. "Lectures are the worst possible learning format," UM associate dean Brian Brooks was quoted as saying in the Missourian.

That's funny, because in my university experience, lectures were always the best part of the course. I always loathed having to truck my ass out of the dorm or the apartment for some for-the-birds seminar. But then, considering I'm already unusual for not owning a cell phone, I'll jot that down as me being some kind of strange outlier.

The article goes on to elaborate that "the requirement will not be enforced" and students will not be penalized if they don't buy an iPhone or iPod touch. Nevertheless, I can only imagine that this is the first step on a long, downward path. Sooner or later requirements like this will be practically enforced, and people who refuse to go along with them will be punished. How long before being able to be contacted 24/7, regardless of location, ceases to be something that's merely encouraged, however strongly, and becomes an actual condition of employment as necessary as references on your resumé? How many years will pass before these devices, or something like them, become so ubiquitous that not having them will in itself be worthy of suspicion?

Why exercise choice when you can just be swept up by the wave, and left fighting to keep your head above water?

The Sun's War on Sense

"Who needs a car in L.A.? We have the best public transportation system in the world."
- Who Framed Roger Rabbit, 1988

God forgive me, but over the weekend I bought - actually paid money for - a copy of the Toronto Sun.

I was only ever a casual reader of the Sun at best, and that was nine years ago, and only because its tabloid format fit conveniently on the counter of the gas station where I worked at the time. The only reason I bought their Sunday edition this weekend was that it provoked what may be my first instance of stopping and laughing at a newspaper box, just from the sheer stones its front page exhibited.

"GETTING THE GEARS," the headline goes, a remarkable departure from the ordinary for the Sun considering it does not have anything to do with the Leafs or a murder - a predilection pointed out by James D. Schwartz at Toronto Sun Sucks, who has also commented on this story. It is, in fact, a Sun Media Special Report "on fixing the decline of our great city," bylined by Jenny Yuen. Its subheadline elaborates thus: "T.O.'s war on cars: Transit gets the dough while gridlock's a way of life for city's beleagured drivers."

Because if there's one word that can adequately describe the cultural and political force that has shaped the patterns of urban development in North America for the past seventy years, it's "beleagured."

Yuen and, undoubtedly, the editors-in-charge of the Sun come shooting right of the gate, attacking Metrolinx's 25-year, $50-billion "Big Move" transportation initiative as having "no plans to make it easier for cars to move throughout the city." Gridlock, you see, accounts for two wasted work weeks per year, and the only alternative to that is simple, at least if you're the Toronto Sun: insufficient vespene gas roadways! The city council is described as "anti-car" for its support of the Sheppard East LRT - there's no mention of the Finch or Eglinton LRT, strangely enough - and its projects to expand the city's network of bike lanes.

"It's city policy to put pedestrians, cyclists, and transit ahead of automobiles," Yuen writes. What isn't said, but what the reader is obviously meant to hear, is "and this is a bad thing." The special report, occupying three full pages in the Sun's print edition, does its best to not only cast the issue as "the automobile vs. everything else," but to make the automobile the underdog.

So what is anti-car in the Sun's estimation? Beyond the obvious hot-button issues which already frustrate drivers, such as the potential demolition of the Gardiner Expressway east of Yonge or a lack of parking at their destinations, it appears that anti-car encompasses everything that prevents a driver from getting anywhere he wants as fast as possible. The "What Cars Are Up Against" infobox has every appearance of being directly transcribed from a whiteboard after an editorial brainstorming session; apparently cars are threatened by, among other things, scramble intersections (because those extra twenty seconds at Yonge and Dundas will throw your whole life off kilter, don'cha know), highway tolls (apparently it's written in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms that all citizens have the right to use taxpayer-funded multi-lane expressways to their hearts' content, and transit systems shall have to beg and scrape from whatever scraps may fall from the table), transit expansion (because your lonesome self in your car is way more important than the ninety people in the streetcar ahead of you), and speed bumps.

Goddamn speed bumps. How wrong we were to dare to limit internal combustion's roar! Please, charge through this quiet residential subdivision as fast as you like!

The automotive-liberation and automotive-adulthood memes - "a car means freedom" and "you're not really a grown-up until you have your own set of wheels" - have had nearly a hundred years to cement themselves into almost every facet of North American life. What seemed like a good idea in the 1920s, after the Armistice put an end to war and the world was luxuriating in prosperity that would never end, has since become a straitjacket that most of us don't even see anymore. Public transit, by comparison, has to deal with the "only poor people and losers ride the bus" meme that, since the end of the war and the explosive growth of suburbia, has become entrenched outside of major urban centers. It may be that this idea is stronger in the United States than in Canada, but the aggregate effect is the same.

The way I see it, the 21st century is going to be characterized by the realization that we have dug ourselves into a damned deep hole, and it's starting to get dark outside and the rope we have may not be long enough to climb out. One of the best things we can do now is to invest in alternative means of transportation, transportation that isn't predicated on the assumption that everyone has their own set of wheels, and encourage new patterns of travel.

Cars in and of themselves aren't negative or bad - in my mind, it's what they encourage that's bad. Sprawling subdivisions where everything is far removed from everything else, winding roads that cut through forests as cleanly as a lumberjack's axe, rows of cardboard castles groaning between the weight of a return-to-rural ideal that has no place in the modern age. They encourage dependency and they encourage isolation.

I'll admit that the article does have its bright spots. It points out, for example, that a 15% decrease in car emissions by 2031 could result if active measures were taken to reduce congestion and increase transit use. Nevertheless, that's still only an estimate, and I have to wonder if it would take into account the additional emissions that would be produced through the induced demand which new road systems would provoke. "If you build it, they will come" will always be the case so long as our civilization retains its present shape. We will be exactly where we started, except even more land will be buried under asphalt and concrete, and calls to give drivers a break will start anew.

Nevertheless, through this report the Sun is, at its core, agitating for business continue as usual. It would have us continue following the blueprints of a bygone age until they crumble to dust in our hands - and when that day comes, rather than build something new, we'll just redraw them just the way they were.

The worst part of it, though, is that this special report is also available on the Sun's website, and I needn't have laid down my money for it at all. The North York Brain Rays must have got me again.

north york brain rays would make a good name for a rock band