Open Hand/Open Eye

Subways

2012-02-10T02:36:00.002-05:00

I usually agree with Royson James, the Toronto Star urban affairs columnist, but I think his column on subways versus surface light rail transit has a logical flaw. He writes that he, unlike Rob Ford, will agree to pay for the subways that mayor wants Toronto to build. He indicates that Mayor Ford thinks the public will not agree to pay for the subways.

I agree with that part. It seems to me that Mr. Ford and his supporters have the approach to subway building that many teenagers have to household budgets: they want subways the way a fifteen year old wants the cool new cell phone. The parents have a credit card, so why can't they have it now? Mr. Royson, by contrast, takes an adult approach: if everyone gets a new phone, we can't afford a sixty inch plasma TV this year, so which do we want most? That puts him well ahead of the simplistic argument that we should have subways simply because people want them, regardless of expense, but I would argue he doesn't go far enough. Unlike families, cities operate in an environment of existential competition. If your son doesn't like his phone or the TV or the car, he can't usually go to live with the family next door. But cities do have to attract, and keep, businesses and the talented work force businesses require. Those businesses and people have alternatives, so the city has to provide good facilities at an acceptable cost. If a city fails at that task, its residents can face a bleak economic decline.

A city council contemplating a major capital investment such as a subway line needs to do more than simply agree to pay for it. They also have to do the work of planning, to make sure the money they spend buys services that enough people will use to justify the expense. Otherwise, the city tax base ends up saddled with debts for unused infrastructure, which means residents and businesses pay more taxes for the services they do use. This in turn creates an incentive for businesses and workers to locate elsewhere, leaving a declining commercial and residential base to carry the debt. This explains why, in urban transportation as most other things, those who fail to plan, plan to fail. Against this hard economic logic, claiming the people want subways, or even that current Toronto residents will agree to pay taxes in order to get subways simply does not suffice.

Bicycle trails

2012-02-06T09:41:00.000-05:00

(via I Bike TO) This evening, the civil servants charged with planning bicycle transportation will hold an open house at Northern District Library. They plan to present a proposal to fill the gaps in the city's bicycle network with trails. In many respects, I welcome this proposal. I have just a few questions: the civil servants and politicians charged with designing these facilities describe them with the word "multi-use". Does the city plan to provide genuine multi-use trails with a clearly delineated bicycle component, or will they simply go with a "shared" facility, which throws the burden of keeping traffic separated on the users, and which often creates conflict and even endangers users. When I go to the open house this evening, I have no doubt I will find out.

A trail defined as multi-use mixes pedestrians and cyclists. The West Toronto rail path, one of the best examples of such a trail, actually functions as more of a linear park than a simple trail; it offers benches and grassy areas, and the cyclists passing by mingle with the dog walkers, joggers, and children playing. The civility that distinguishes Toronto at its best often makes this mix work, but does not eliminate the inherent problem with the design. Bicycles travel too fast to mix safely with pedestrians. An cyclist can easily move about three times as fast as the average pedestrian; the average urban motorist only moves about twice as fast as a cyclist. As events last summer tragically proved, collisions between cyclists and pedestrians can have tragic results.

The designers of the Martin Goodman Trail on the waterfront tried to solve this problem by dividing parts of the trail into pedestrian and bicycle pathways. This works quite well on some parts of the trail, less well on others. How well this separation works depends on both the effectiveness of trail marks and signs, and on the willingness of trail users to cooperate. Ideally, a trail divided for bicycle and pedestrian use would separate the paths in much the same way as road designs separate pedestrian and vehicular traffic. Such a design would reflect sound engineering principles, by making the safe choices the easiest and most obvious, but would also affirm the status of bicycle paths, routes and lanes as transportation corridors, like roads and subway lines, rather than recreational facilities. Cyclists ride to get to destinations. We have places to get to, and like other users of the city transportation networks, we have time pressures and deadlines to meet. If the bicycle facilities the city provides do not permit us to ride fast enough in safety. we can always use the roads, but that eliminates the safety advantages the city has attempted to provide by building the trails.

Disappointment

2012-01-28T16:17:00.000-05:00

Feluccas on the Nile
source: CIA World Factbook

Goldblog recently linked an article by Eric Trager regretting the recent trajectory of the Egyptian uprising. He regrets that

...a befuddled Obama administration has failed to do anything to stop the coming disaster.

Considering the billions of dollars in aid the United States poured into Mubarak's Egypt, I have to wonder what more Eric Trager or anyone else thinks the Obama Administration could have done. President Obama, after all, represented a country which had enabled the abuses of the Egyptian government under Mubarak for thirty years. Americans had to expect the voices of their government would not carry a lot of weight when the dictatorship crumbled.

Mr Trager makes his perception of the extent of the "disaster" clear:

...their photogenic faces carried the promise of a more democratic, friendly Egypt.
But the activists were never who we hoped they were. Far from being liberal, their ranks were... an alliance of convenience for opposing Mubarak and, later, for denouncing the U.S.
Thus, when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Egypt in March 2011, a group of leading activists refused to meet with her.

In his desire for "a more democratic and friendly Egypt", Mr. Trager joins a long line of writers on American foreign policy who misunderstand the consequences of American policies at a basic level. Rightly or wrongly, American policy in Western Asia conflicts at a basic level with the hopes and priorities of millions of people who live there. In many countries in the region, the more the government follows the popular will, the less it will support American policies.

The article concludes on a gloomy note:

ONE YEAR after Egypt’s heroic revolt, Washington has no heroes in Cairo, only headaches.... a year after the ebullience of Tahrir, an alliance between military autocrats and radical theocrats is viewed, sadly, as a best-case scenario.

Slaves exposed for sale
source: Library of Congress Collection

Whether or not you agree with Eric Trager's assessments here, some perspective might help. American independence served to extend slavery for at least a generation, and led to increasing and increasingly brutal encroachment into territories of North American aboriginal peoples. If Americans, despite all the bad consequences of American independence, claim the founding of their country as a step forward for human freedom, on what basis do they denounce the Egyptians for the ways they have used their new-found freedom?

Observing a web controversy...

2012-01-21T06:01:00.000-05:00

In December, I posted about Hugo Schwyzer's resignation from the Good Men Project. At that time I said I saw his resignation as an act of integrity; I still believe that. I also mentioned, in passing, that his self-exposure made me uncomfortable. It makes me uncomfortable for two reasons: he has exposed other people while talking about his own history, particularly in the details he posted about his second marriage, and he has discussed past conduct he now rightly considers highly unethical. He has written about violating his trust as a professor with "consensual" sexual relationships with students, and last year he revealed that when he hit bottom as an addict he tried to kill both himself and a girlfriend. After Clarisse Thorn interviewed him for the web site Feministe via an interview by the controversy blew up into three posts (here, here and here), generating over a thousand comments. The discussion has echoed around web logs since.
A great many people have good reasons to feel anger at Hugo. But as the discussion has developed, an increasing amount of the rhetoric has come to address Hugo's whole personality and presence, rather than his actions. The discussion started with an important issue of principle: should a man with Hugo's past have a role teaching feminism, or the kind of visible leadership role he played when he spoke at the "slutwalk" in LA, or indeed a role of any kind in the feminist movement? A good number of people have answered this with very clear, and very angry "no". As happens to often on the internet, the rhetoric and the combativeness have escalated: Hugo has collected men and women partisans who have made outrageous comments about his critics, and put up a series of crude "sock puppet" comments on Feministe. Hugo himself has failed to make any moves to reconcile with the racialized women web-loggers he has offended. His critics, on the other hand, have escalated their rhetoric, from demands that Hugo withdraw from feminist organising and teaching to "let’s make sure to get Hugo where it hurts." [*], "We really despise Hugo Schwyzer. That's basically it. " [*] and "like that isn't exactly what hugo does - posts a picture of his supposedly handsome smug face all over everything to distract people." [*]

It seems clear that some feminist spaces that welcomed or tolerated Hugo won't welcome or tolerate him any longer, at least for the forseeable future. But I have to wonder how much Hugo really minds that. If you read his web log, which I have from time to time, he clearly lays considerable emphasis on moving on and not turning back. He quotes a poem called "Men at forty" fairly often on the subject. If he has concluded, at some level, that the time had come for him to move on from his stance as a feminist supporter or "male feminist", he has some compelling reasons. For one thing, teaching history, with or without a womens' studies or gender studies component, at a small community college does not carry the economic certainty it used to. A revolution in education led by online providers has jeopardized the future of entry-level colleges such as Hugo's employer. Moving away from feminism, and indeed moving away from college teaching, lets him avoid the coming dislocations and look for something else.

Consider his current pattern of highly provocative self-exposure shown by his posting articles on Jezebel and the Good Men Project (before he left it), as well as the post on his second marriage and, of sourse, the posts on his unethical behaviour. That may simply mean he's shown bad judgment; certainly I think he's made some very bad choices in the past. But it may also mean partly that he has chosen, whether consciously or not, to close a door behind him. Ironically, this whole discussion may have opened another door for him: as the discussion of Maia's article at Alas shows, a substantial addiction/recovery community views matters such as Hugo's conduct in a very different light than the people at Feministe and associated web logs do. By denouncing him in such public and at times in such an extravagant way, Hugo's strongest detractors may have given him a boost with a new audience.

One good movie

2012-01-18T03:05:00.002-05:00

In my case, I picked The Descendants. The movie had good reviews, I really like most of the actors. And the subject interests me: as I understand it, ultimately, the movie deals with the fallout from colonialism. In this case, colonialism meant the American missionaries who brought God and the Stars and Stripes to Hawaii, and whose children and grandchildren stayed and did very well for themselves. I had heard a little about this story, and I would have liked to see a movie about it.

But I did not. I haven't gone to see The Descendants. I almost certainly won't go. I may well not even rent the DVD.

I did not see this movie because I wanted to see it. I refuse go on buying cultural products from the bankers who finance films, and the artists who make them, even as those bankers and some of the artists undermine the freedom of the Internet that I depend on. So I picked one film and stayed away from it.

The Internet matters to me. It matters as a symbol of a new way of doing things, and as proof we can do things in a new way. It matters as an engine of commerce, and an engine of change. It matters as a repository of a vast array of beautiful, wonderful, brilliant, strange art and science and knowledge. It matters because this storehouse offers everyone on this planet, from the wealthiest to the most humble, access to the heritage of knowledge and beauty that belongs to every person as their birthright. For eons through our history, great men and women made art, and discoveries and innovations, and only a few people had access to their work. The Internet has changed that. I do not want to see this tool damaged or destroyed at the behest of the minority that make a living, often a very very good living, performing and promoting and selling the arts.

Rob Ford: My New Year Wish List

2011-12-23T11:19:00.001-05:00

I like Rob Ford, as a person, quite apart from his performance as mayor. I did not vote for him, and in fact I worked fairly hard for his principal competitor. But on a personal level, I like him, and I respect his philosophy of government as a servant, a philosophy expressed in his constituency work, work that even some of his harshest detractors grudgingly admire. That bears remembering as we look back on the past year, with its mixed record of some success for Rob and his brother, some failure, and a touch of outright farce.

A little less than three years from now, the voters will have an opportunity to pass judgment on Rob Ford's work as mayor. I expect we will pass a fair judgment, and I also suspect that if things do not change, we will decide that someone else would do a better job as mayor. Whatever we choose in the end, I want Toronto to have the best mayor we can have, not just a suitable butt for the sneers of the Toronto Star.

So here we have the top four requests from me to Rob Ford:

Celebrate the diversity and inventiveness of small business in this city. The year after David Miller first got elected, I went on a training course in Toronto's East end, near Woodbine. I stopped in at a store on Bloor Street to buy some cough drops, and the young woman at the till told me, with a combination of shyness, trepidation, and pride, that they had just opened the store. I remember thinking her courage in starting a new venture symbolized so much about Toronto that I would never expect David Miller to celebrate, and indeed I never heard Mayor Miller speak of the wonderful inventive exuberance that distinguishes small business in this city. On shopping streets from Roncesvalles to Bayview, I can walk for blocks and see only a handful of nationally advertised brands on storefronts. When you got elected, Rob, I hoped you would celebrate this aspect of our civic life. But in the past year, I have heard a great deal about what this city cannot do, and little celebration of the inventiveness, diversity and enormous potential of its businesses. You have almost three more years in office, Rob. Please consider taking some of that time and speaking out about this advantage of our city.
Come down to the city and ride in the Pride parade this coming year. You've let everyone know it's not your cup of tea, but having you there pays the appropriate respect to this city's history and to the tourist season it kicks off.
Rob, when you say the city cannot afford to pay for everything we would like, I get that. I don't always agree with the choices you make when it comes to funding, but I get the importance of budgeting. But please make an effort to devolve the responsibilities to local communities. Maybe the taxpayers of Malvern and Rexdale shouldn't have pay for Riverdale farm, but that doesn't mean you have to tell the people of Cabbagetown they can't have it. Please allow the neighbourhoods of Toronto the tools we need to put together the cash and the sweat equity that will let us keep the amenities we want. Communities as diverse as Thorncliffe and Dufferin Grove have shown they can manage their own parks. Please encourage people in the rest of the city to follow their examples. As a bonus, handing control of parks and other amenities to local communities may mean you can cut some management positions at City Hall.
Look for ways to grow the city. We need more opportunity, not less. We need more educated people, and more effective ways to make use of the knowledge we have. Government cannot make this happen for us, although it can help. You can play a part, if only by cheering on the people who want to build a twenty-first century world city. Understand the difference between saying we as a city cannot afford something and saying we need to find a way to make something good affordable.

Modesty and ambition

2011-12-22T19:56:00.001-05:00

Hugo Schwyzer, a writer and teacher from California, recently resigned from the web site "Good Men Project". He gave as his reason a conflict between his support of liberal feminism and what he perceived as a growing hostility to feminist ideas in the project. In particular, he cited the refusal of the site to publish a comment he had written on a specific dispute between the site founder and a number of women.

While I believe Hugo has told the truth about the specific reason he left the "Good Men Project", I perceive an underlying problem in his relationship with the project. Hugo has never hesitated to reveal himself on the Internet: I find his courage admirable even when the extent of his extroversion leaves me uncomfortable. He has frequently written of his belief in twelve step culture, with its emphasis on taking things one day at a time, sometimes on simply doing one right thing at a time. I respect Hugo's embrace of ethical modesty, particularly when it restrains the grand gestures that his writing suggests come naturally to him.

Since I can think of few ambitions more sweeping than an attempt to define the "good" for the three and a half billion men and boys on this planet, it seems to me, in hindsight, that Hugo's attraction to this project would clash with a more modest ambition. In the event, Hugo made the right choice in leaving the Good Men Project to protect his integrity.

I believe that we underestimate the value of modesty. Looking at the collective achievements of our civilization, we forget too easily what small steps led us to our current position, how far we have to go. We find it too easy to avoid considering the tenuous nature of our position, or even the possibility we seriously overrate what we have accomplished. When choosing between integrity and ambition, even the ambition to achieve on behalf of other people, it makes sense to choose integrity.

A for idea, D- for execution

2011-09-09T17:37:00.001-04:00

As an idea, you can't argue with it: cyclists shouldn't kill pedestrians. Moreover, cycling culture should take the obligation not to kill pedestrians very seriously indeed, and jurisdictions, from the city to the province, with responsibility for traffic safety should frame a comprehensive strategy to ensure the cyclists who do not understand our shared responsibilities get the message.

So how did the recent Globe and Mail editorial, which tried to make these simple points, do such a bad job? The answer partly lies in the atrocious phrasing the editorial claims cyclists should "know our place". And if we don't, do y'all have a rope, a tree and a bunch of good ole boys to teach us? Some phrases just bring up too many bad memories, and editorial writers should leave such phrases out of their tool boxes. Whoever wrote this particular editorial then added pomposity to their list of rhetorical blunders by writing this: "We do not occupy a planet where cyclist safety trumps all else." I get it: cyclists don't have a right to risk other people's lives to stay safe ourselves.

But this editorial does more than just break most of the rules of effective writing. It asserts a double standard and dares the reader to ignore it. Because anyone who spent much of last year in a conscious state has probably noticed quite a few very public decisions that paid no heed to the safety of cyclists. Fear of traffic doesn't cut it as an excuse for cycling on sidewalks. I don't cycle on sidewalks, and I ride my share of fast roads and heavy traffic. But consider the decision that Michael Bryant's fears absolutely justified all of his actions the night of his fatal encounter with Darcy Alan Sheppard, or the decision to tear out downtown bike lanes so a few residents of Moore Park can get downtown a few seconds faster, not to mention the frequent failure to file dangerous driving charges in many cases where pedestrians or cyclists get killed. I can't help getting the feeling that maybe my fears don't matter, but other people seem to think their fears, and even their resentments, do matter.

I know where I belong when on my bicycle: the bike lane or else somewhere between a meter and a meter and a half from the kerb in a lane wide enough to share in safety, secondary position (the right-hand tire track) in a lane too narrow to share, and primary position (lane center) in a lane to narrow to share where cars cannot pass safely. I ought not to cycle on the sidewalk, and I don't. But in a wider sense, I do not have a "place" any different from anyone else because I option a healthy, non-polluting option for some of my travels. I have exactly the same rights and obligations as anyone else, however I move around. And that sums up the underlying for the failure of the Globe editorial to make what should have been a simple point. Everyone, however we travel, has a moral responsibility to avoid harming other people, and the law should hold us all to account. But that raises a troubling reality: in many if not most cases where errant drivers have killed off cyclists, pedestrians, or even other drivers, the law has failed to apply the standard the Globe's writer proposes for those who bicycle on the sidewalk. Choosing not to deal with this basic contradiction, the writer of this editorial blends some very inappropriate rhetoric with pomposity to produce a very bad editorial.

I consider that sad, because I consider the underlying proposition valid. Indeed, I have seldom if ever seen the truth dressed up as such nonsense.

(Cross posted at I Bike TO; thanks to Yvonne Bambrick for pointing out the editorial)

The ends and means of culture wars

2011-08-05T05:31:00.001-04:00

The current battle over library funding marks a skirmish line in a culture war. A culture war develops when people who hold a series of attitudes, often incoherently, perceive themselves as a group and develop strong feelings of solidarity combined with hostility to others who hold competing attitudes. In Toronto, the culture war lines we all acknowledge include the Gay Pride parade and Mayor Ford's refusal to attend, bicycle lanes, and libraries. Less acknowledged but very real conflicts revolve around the word industrial, and the corresponding attitudes to the presence of actual industry in Toronto, and to existing industrial sites.

Because culture wars tend to involve incoherent clusters of beliefs, lines in culture wars can shift abruptly and without warning, propelled by the whims of popular culture and commercial media. I have written elsewhere of the growing acceptance of Toronto City Centre Airport and the corresponding collapse of the movement against it. In 2003, people calling for the closure of the airport belonged to a juggernaut that handed the mayor's chair to David Miller; a few years later, Toronto Life referred to them as a group of "aging hippies".

I hope I have conveyed my own belief that drawing lines in a conflict of cultures only damages the integrity of everyone's position, and even worse, makes compromise into a dirty word, coherent thinking about policy more difficult, and generally sabotages the process of effective self government. When a substantial number of people choose to validate themselves by joining or supporting arbitrarily defined factions, the ability of everyone to participate in effective self government will suffer. Over the next while, I hope to produce a series of posts on how to avoid and diffuse cultural conflicts.

The persistence of (disputes over) memory

2010-11-14T22:09:00.000-05:00

I remember the wars of the past and the war we have chosen to fight today in Afghanistan. I remember the wars that came before that. I remember how one war frequently leads to another, the compromises made for peace in one generation leading to the failure of peace in the next. What aware person with a mind and conscience can forget?

I remember all year long. Every time I participate in the political process, I remember that people have put their lives on the line for my right to do so, and whether or not I believe their sacrifice produced my freedom, I know they thought it would, and I remember and honour their willingness to make it. I remember the men and women who endured the wars, who went to fight and gave up their youth and the soundness of their bodies and the peace of their minds, and I honour the choice they made to do that for all of us, even if I don't agree with the specific cause they fought in.

And at the same time, I face the paradox that confronts everyone who remembers and honours those who fought for their country. As Jimmy Carter rightly said, the necessity of a particular war does not make war any less of an evil. In 1939, Canada and Britain may have had no choice but to fight, and the young men of this country who flocked to the colours then have my full measure of gratitude. But they would not have had to go if Hitler had not persuaded young Germans to flock to the colours of blood and night. Good people only have to fight for good causes because very bad people can deceive others into fighting for monstrously bad ones. Does our memory, our gratitude to the men and women who died depend on our opinion of their cause? If so, should the Germans relegate their World War II veterans to a past they feel nothing but shame for? If not, then what do we really celebrate about the men and women who went to war, and should we temper our gratitude to them with an awareness of the terrible ease with which very bad people can make evil use of the noble impulse to sacrifice?

Changes in technology have forever changed the nature of war, and the way we remember wars, warriors, and soldiers has not changed to keep up with it. We know, as an abstract truth, that the hope and expectation that most of the generations of the past entered wars with, the hope of a final victory, we can no longer expect. As Gwynne Dyer put it, if a nation with a nuclear option ever started to lose a war in a final way, then it would resort to its nuclear arsenal and everyone would end up dead. Europe would lie in ruins before the Russians ever again marched through Berlin, or the Germans marched through Paris. But that has to change the way we look at war; if war, the carnage and sacrifice on the battlefield, can no longer shape history, then what does? And how do we celebrate everyone that makes our history and passed on a heritage of freedom?

All these questions turn around one other hard truth: peace and freedom have never come without a cost. War, as our parents and grandparents knew it, has come to an end, and our survival depends of recognizing and accepting that. But the end of war does not mean an end to sacrifice. Brave men and women will still need to put their lives on the line for things that matter. More and more of those men and women will never wear a government uniform, but they will fully deserve our thanks and remembrance. How, when, and where we choose to remember will remain a point of contention for some time. Canadian, British and American merchant sailors in the Atlantic convoys suffered together with their naval counterparts and made sacrifices that undoubtedly made as much of a contribution to winning the war as any military person, yet they did not receive official recognition and veteran status until over 40 years after the end of the war. Even today, the day specifically set aside in Canada to remember the sacrifices of merchant sailors, September 3, does not get the public attention that November 11 has.

Maybe at some future Remembrance Day ceremony we will see peacemakers and peacekeepers, those who struggled for justice and those who fought for their nation standing shoulder to shoulder with all people whose valour and endurance made our world possible. Someday, the world may remember Americans such as Ernest Evans, Jean Donovan and Tom Fox, Canadians like Smokey Smith, and Norman Bethune together as brave men and women who gave their lives for justice and a better future for everyone, without making distinctions of uniform, rank, or status. But that day has not come yet.

Today a trademark, that most mundane, commercial, and, oddly, civilian of issues muddies the waters. Since 1948, the Royal Canadian Legion has had control of the poppy trademark granted to them by a special act of Parliament. Since at least the 1980s, they have engaged in legal scuffles with people who have attitudes to war and memory different from their own.Obviously, I disagree with the Legion here; I find the use of trademark law in an attempt to shut down political speech you disagree with highly inappropriate, and I consider it even more inappropriate to try to couple our willingness to remember and honour those who died in wars past to a particular view of war and peacemaking today. That view, that soldiers created our freedom and that only soldiers guard it, will fade into history with the time when wars could end in unambiguous victory, The soldiers who come home from Afghanistan will come home to praise and celebration, but they will almost certainly leave behind a country in turmoil and a still active Taliban. Freedom from the intolerance the Taliban and other extreme religious movements exemplify will not come from military action. To remember and honour the soldiers who gave their lives so we and others might have a better future, we will, in the long run, have to accept this and incorporate it in our way of remembering.

Canonization of Brother André, October 17, 2010

2010-10-17T14:54:00.002-04:00

My mother, Elena MacDuffee, told us the following story. As a young woman (in the late 1940s or early 1950s) she and her cousin visited the Oratory of St. Joseph in Montreal. Before entering the building, they strolled in the garden, where they met an elderly gentleman. He told them that he loved to come there every day, to sit in the garden and chat with the visitors.

The two young women said goodbye to the old man, and then entered the Oratory. A display about Brother André and his life caught their eye. And there was a picture of the very man they had just met—brother André, who had died years before, in 1937.

A not-so-scary ghost story in honour of All Saints’ Day.

Privilege (I): Transcending politics

2010-09-12T16:23:00.001-04:00

Many of us wish out politicians and commentators could transcend petty disputes about their ideas. Recently, several columnists did transcend their politics, and I learned to think carefully about what I wished for.

After the prosecutor assigned to Michael Bryant's case concluded he had no hope of convicting Mr. Bryant (a reasonable legal conclusion), a number of commentators, including a fair share of conservatives, hailed the decision as not only a legal victory for Mr. Bryant but a moral vindication.

I will have more to say about the question of whether the dismissal of the charges against Michael Bryant adds up to vindication in any but a legal sense; for now, I propose to focus on what the conservatives who expressed relief and satisfaction at the dismissal of charges against Mr. Bryant did not mention: his politics. Before his encounter with Mr. Sheppard, Mr. Bryant had served in the provincial legislature, first in opposition and then as attorney general, where he regularly promoted government as an wise caretaker of public health and safety. He did not just want to control guns, he wanted to control realistic toy guns. He banned pit bulls and dogs that looked like pit bulls. Ironically, he called for draconian enforcement against hazardous drivers, extending police powers to suspend licenses and impound cars without the bother of a trial. In short, he promoted and extended the nanny state in the service of a liberal government. His measures catered to the supposed anxieties of the "soccer mom" voting demographic.

Yet after his fatal encounter with a private sector contract worker, I read no conservative comments about the irony of Mr. Bryant's past stances in light of his predicament. Bryant's middle class status, his polish and accomplishments made him someone they could identify with, even if he had used those advantages in the service of causes most conservatives oppose on principle. They gave Mr. Sheppard no credit for keeping going and refusing to give up on his life after suffering insults and assaults starting from his childhood, and indeed from before his birth.

Our society carries on and awards unjust privilege in this quiet way, often as much by what we ignore as by what we proclaim, by what we do not say as much as by what we do.

Peaches Princess Johnson

2010-08-30T19:05:00.002-04:00

I planned to write a post about having a dog in the fight against cancer. My daughter's beloved pug, Peaches, found herself in the fight of her life against canine lymphoma, a very aggressive cancer. We went into the fight right along with her. I planned to say that as long as he body and spirit could keep up the fight, we would fight right along with her.

But today at noon the cancer won. Peaches's joyful spirit never faltered, and our love for her never wavered, but we both ran out of time. We took her to the vet yesterday because the chemo-therapy made her throw up. Today we found her listless and unable to eat; at noon she went into convulsions, and before we could reach the vet she died in my daughter's arms.

We feel so sad that our dog has died, for ourselves and the things we won't get to do with her, and for her and the things she won't get to do with us. We will never forget her; we will miss her joyful brave spirit, and we will do our best to honour the gifts she brought to us.

Peaches Princess Johnson, Feb 29 2008 - Aug 30 2010. We said goodbye too soon.

Radio (3) How to Switch the Station so you Teenager Won't Notice.

2010-08-20T06:26:00.002-04:00

If you have ever travelled in a car with a teenager, and become tired of listening to noisy and/or incredibly misogynist music, especially the song where the boy meets the girl in the club and, well, he doesn't want to be disrespectful...but he just has to say that her rear end is [...], then you will appreciate this method of radio sabotage.

This method works only if:

1) you are in the front seat and the teenager is in the back seat;
2) you have push-button radio;
3) the teenager has a friend (or a DS gaming system) with them, making them less vigilant about radio tampering; and
4) you want to switch seamlessly from the noisy rock/hip-hop station to an easy rock/light favourites station (you can't switch to classical music, or to CBC Radio 1, or to the Radio Netherlands Africa Report: it would be too noticeable).

Here's what you do, in 4 easy steps.

1) Wait for a commercial. While your teenager is busy chatting with their friend, etc., slowly reduce the radio volume, bit by bit.
2) When the volume gets down to a whisper, push the button for your favourite easy rock/light favourites station
3) very gradually increase the volume on the light station.
4) enjoy several miles of mildly pleasant music together (perhaps Michael Buble or the Black-Eyed Peas) until the teenager finally wises up and calls out "Hey! That's not my music!"

Radio (2) The Radio Gods

2010-08-18T22:30:00.004-04:00

I spend quite a bit of time driving through the western suburbs of Toronto, often taking our dog Peaches to the vet. While listening to the radio, I compose short essays in my mind--mostly about the radio. Every night this week I am contributing a little "radio" essay.

I have a theory that there are radio gods, who govern when we will get to hear our favourite songs on the radio. To please the gods, we must treat them properly. To cruise rapidly through the dial is not the way. For one thing, you will have to hear a lot of sub-par hip hop, gushing contest winners, Celine Dion songs, suggestive pizza ads, and--worst--the celebrity news as delivered by Ryan Seacrest.

Besides, do you really want to hear only the second half of your favourite song? I didn't think so.

So this is what you do. Push the up arrow to a new station. If you hear an advertisement or someone talking, move on to the next station. If it is a song, take a few seconds to recognize the song, and then decide how much you like it on a scale of 1 to 10. If you give a rating of 5 or less, move on.

If you rate the song at 6 or more, stay put. Most radio stations play a consistent style of music. This means there is a good chance you will also like the next few songs. And because you have found a congenial station, there is an excellent chance that, after 3 or 4 songs (and maybe a pizza ad or two) the radio gods will bless you and you will get to enjoy "Brown Eyed Girl" all the way through.

AM radio

2010-08-17T13:01:00.006-04:00

There is a station that we get in Toronto, Oldies 1150 (CKOC) out of Hamilton. It's one of the few oldies stations on the dial, so I have it programmed in as one of the 18 push-button options on my car radio. It and the all-news 680 (which I listen to mainly for traffic) are the only AM stations I have chosen to program in.

It's always an odd thing, when I happen to push this button, how the quality of sound is so different than the FM stations. The scratchy sound is like the grainy picture on an old TV with only aerial reception. The (lack of) sound quality, even more than the particular songs, really takes me back to my adolescence, when I listened to the radio on a sturdy battery-operated radio (it even accompanied me during my bath) and sometimes on a tiny avocado-green set that fit into my palm.

Back then, we didn't care much about the sound quality as much as the songs. I got excited the first time a disc jockey (on CKFH) played a request for me--it was 1971 and he played "Brand New Key" by Melanie. I spent most of the 1970s obsessed with the Beatles (yes, I know, I was a decade late, but better late than never). Mostly I listened to then on a portable record player that spun at 39 RPM instead of 33 1/3 (I had timed it). As the songs were speeded up, I always seemed to be getting up to change the record.

Listening to the few surviving AM music stations today, there is an odd time-warp about suddenly being surrounded by the sound texture of my childhood. It's as if I suddenly had a delicious whiff of my mum's "Green Pepper Delight" or plunged my nose into my dad's tin of Revelation tobacco.

A note on clothing...

2010-07-12T04:21:00.001-04:00

The people who criticize what some cyclists wear seem to have issues with spandex, complicated by the way cyclists sometimes wear bright colours. I can't think of a better answer than to tell those afflicted with it to keep their minds on driving rather than fashion criticism. Cyclists who wear bright coloured spandex do so for two severely practical reasons: it cuts down on wind resistance, and therefore on the work they have to do, and it helps other road users see them. Winning fashion awards from passing motorists doesn't figure into it-- for any of us. Motorists who think that should worry us should grow up; we have more important things to worry about, and so do they.

On having a sick pet

2010-07-04T05:50:00.000-04:00

Our dog Peaches fell ill over a month ago. She's lost weight, suffered from frequent vomiting and persistent intestinal upset. Several visits to our vet and to the emergency clinic have failed to resolve the problem, and the vet now tells us she either has a long term condition we can manage, or else a cancer that will kill her in at most two years.

When I think of her joyfully leaping off the deck into the yard, or leaping back up into the kitchen, or singing as we filled her dog dish and burying her dear face in it the moment we put it down, I feel as though my face and chest have turned to lead-- lead with a great ache behind it. The thought of losing our dog, and losing her so young hurts. The thought of her losing her life, a life she enjoys, hurts more.

I don't have much of any control over all this, but I can at least choose this: to learn from the joyful wholeheartedness of Peaches's life. If I put some of that into my work, then let her live a long and full life, or let her barely get beyond a puppy, that happy spirit will not have disappeared from the world.

And so I choose to face what the next weeks or months or (I hope) years bring us in that spirit. Not that I would have chosen this; I'd rather have my dog with me, joyful and healthy, forever. But time doesn't grant us many victories, and those we can eke out come from joy and learning. I'll do the best I can and take the best I can get.

G20 and the police

2010-07-02T04:28:00.000-04:00

A great many people have already written about the events of the G20 weekend in Toronto. I participated in the First Nations protest the Thursday before the meeting, a protest which went off without any major problems, largely because the First Nations organizers requested, and expected, peaceful conduct from everyone.

But most protests in the city happened that way, and even the most aggressive demonstrations neither got near the leaders' meetings, nor caused any serious injuries, nor caused a serious amount of property damage. The G20 ended with two or three police cars destroyed and a lot of broken glass; plenty of sports events, and even some rowdy weekends in cottage country, end up with more damage than that.

By any standard, we now have an impressive number of accounts that indicate the police overstepped their bounds, and the police have responded with evidence of the protesters' evil intentions which, to put it mildly, fails to convince.

At this point, I can only add one comment to this. We have a legal system in Canada, a legal system that includes the police and courts. As Rupert Ross, the Crown Attorney who wrote Dancing with a Ghost and Returning to the Teachings points out, a lot of First Nations people remain far from convinced we have a justice system. A good many poor people, social activists, and others, likewise, have very little faith that we have a justice system. Incidents like this merely reduce that faith. A loss of faith in the legal system has consequences, and those consequences tend to compound. The fewer people believe they can get justice from the system, the fewer use it or cooperate with it. Fewer people call the police, report crimes, or come forward as witnesses.

It may comfort a few people to claim that, as one poster to the CBC wrote (go to page 21 from the start of the comments):

You'll go crying, "Mommy, mommy the bad man took my money and hurt me. Help Police!" I just hope they treat you the same as everyone else and help you out when you need it most. You will take their help as if it was your God given right and then you will whine and complain about the shameful police again once they've helped you.

I can tell you from personal experience that not everyone does that. Nor should this surprise us. The argument that if something bad happens to us, we will go to the police no matter how we feel about them simply goes in a circle: you don't trust the legal system, but if something bad happens, you will. The proponents of this view never explain why we would pick the worst moments of our lives to turn to people we do not trust. I suspect they have no real answer, outside of a comforting daydream scenario. In reality, distrust of the legal system exists and has consequences. Some communities sum up their arguments for refusing to cooperate with the system in slogans like "Stop Snitching". But distrust of the legal system does not merely affect struggling and impoverished communities. It affects everyone.

End the impunity. See what happens.

2010-06-22T20:46:00.001-04:00

Jim Kenzie, among others, has claimed that, for no reason he cares to make explicit, Canadians will not stop driving cars and drivers will not change. I think he and people who think like him underestimate the intelligence and decency of the driving public. I think drivers would do the behave much better if the law and the culture around us sent a clear message about the right way to drive. Specifically, I think insisting drivers will never treat other road users respectfully makes it much less likely they will. Whatever the reason, this country suffers from a road death rate that makes it very likely that over a normal lifetime you will lose a family member or friend to a traffic crash. I have a modest proposal to change things.

End the impunity.

Recently, the courts convicted a driver for having a car illegally modified for street racing in a way that defeats important safety features, driving that car at a reckless speed, and causing a death. Having reached all those conclusions, the court sentenced the driver to one year in jail. This would not bother me as much as it does, if similarly reckless behaviour with firearms attracted a similar sentence. Someone who deliberately disconnected the smoke alarms in a house, or permitted someone else to, then behaved recklessly with matches and inflammables would face a charge of manslaughter, if not murder, should their behaviour kill someone.

With the series of judicial and police decisions over the past year, it seems hard to deny that dangerous drivers in this culture can expect a presumption of good faith and a leniency that few others can. If you pull the trigger, the courts assume you meant to shoot. If you strike the match, the courts assume you meant to burn. If you defeat the safety measures in your car, drive recklessly, and kill someone, the courts appear to assume that you meant to arive at your destination will everyone aboard well and hearty. This has reached a point where it amounts to impunity for drivers.

Let's end the impunity. Let's do whatever it takes to ensure the courts cannot presume good faith in the face of evidence of reckless conduct on the roads and tampering with safety features. If judges in this province regularly treat homicidal recklessness with motor vehicles as much less culpable than recklessness with guns or fire, then maybe the law should require minimum sentences. Maybe, then, drivers would treat the responsibility inherent in operating a vehicle capable of causing serious harm with more respect. If not, then at least offenders will receive proportionate punishment, whether they use a bumper or a bullet to kill.

These days, they come for the dictionary first...

2010-06-18T05:48:00.001-04:00

Joe at Biking Toronto wants to ditch the word cyclist, and at first sight he seems to have a good argument. Goodness knows, with both the friends and enemies of cycling engaged in a demented race to pile more and more baggage onto this poor two syllable word, it should make sense to just chuck it and start over. Look at all of the attempts to define a cyclist: someone who wants to save the planet but won't bother to stop at traffic lights, an impoverished elitist, an altruistic member of a self-interested minority. Can we save this word? Do we want to save this word?

Speaking for myself, yes I do want to save the word cyclist. I want to cut the straps and let all the baggage fall off, but I want to keep the word. A cyclist can vote BQ, Conservative, Liberal , NDP, or Rhinoceros. A cyclist can obey all the laws with great care, or can proceed through the world making up his or her own laws. A cyclist can believe in capitalism, anarcho-syndicalism, or any other economic system; in representative democracy or absolute monarchy. A cyclist can love the planet, hate it, or believe it doesn't matter because the world will end next Tuesday. Only one thing makes a cyclist: the use of human-powered, wheeled transportation. Anyone who has used a bike reasonably recently can call themselves a cyclist.

The word "cyclist" describes those of us who ride bicycles with an elegance and brevity that the words "people who happen to ride bicycles" will never achieve; but I have two more basic reasons for not wanting to give up the word.

First, to the noisy minority that shows up in newspaper and blog comments after every story involving cyclists and whips themselves into a froth (and they do constitute a minority), the problem has nothing to do with words. I do not know what many of those people really object to, but they focus their venom on human-powered vehicles and those who ride them. Just as advocates for people with cognitive impairments gave up the word idiot, imbecile and retarded when these words each evolved from a medical diagnosis into a schoolyard taunt, if we start calling ourselves people who happen to ride bicycles, we'll start to read abuse directed against PWHTRBs. These days, before they come for the communists or the trade unionists, they come for the dictionary. Let us not kid ourselves: the ultimate target has nothing to do with the words we use, or even the actual technology that moves us. They want our freedom.

This brings me to my second point. Some years ago, on a visit to the ancient seaport of Marseilles, I encountered a young street tough who asked me for money. When I had none to give him, he snarled "Juif". What should I have told him? The truth? Je ne suis pas un Juif would hardly have sounded dignified. In the end, I had no good (verbal) answer for him and just treated his comment as a stink in the air, not worth acknowledging. The point for us: when someone attacks us, it may seem to make sense to separate ourselves from the kind of people we think our accusers must really dislike. But that kind of denial preserves neither our dignity nor our rights. If we propose to drop the word cyclist as a way to distance ourselves from those dirty lawbreaking anarchists, we might as well forget it and preserve our dignity.Maybe I see myself as better than cyclists who ride badly, arrogantly or confrontationally; maybe I don't. But to many of our opponents, just riding a bike makes me just the same as all the cyclists they criticize. Maybe we need to debunk their stereotypes, but we sure shouldn't surrender to them.

A thumb in the eye for a courtesy...

2010-06-15T04:26:00.001-04:00

View Windermere Route in a larger map

When returning from the waterfront to Bloor West, I frequently take Windermere Avenue; it provides an easier and safer ride. Recently at the intersection of Bloor and Windermere, I had yet another experience of the factors which make for friction between motorists and cyclists. The Windermere/Bloor intersection has two northbound lanes: a right/through lane and a left turn lane. I reached the intersection on a red light, the first in line. I noticed the driver behind me wanted to turn right on the red, and the traffic conditions would allow him to do so safely, so I moved to the left to let him through. He made his turn safely and waved his thanks. Then the next car in line moved up and when the light turned, the driver went straight through the intersection on my left. That didn't cause me any great problem, since only one car went through the intersection that way. But If a whole line of cars had decided to pass me on my left, particularly if I also had cars going southbound, I might have found myself in a very uncomfortable position as a result of my courtesy to the driver turning right. I don't blame the driver who passed on my left; in Ontario, we don't train drivers to look out for cyclists.

The moral? The next time you see a cyclist and think that person could let you go ahead but won't, don't take it personally. Look at the situation from the cyclist's point of view. They may have no trouble letting you through safely, but they can't predict what the car behind you will do. Keep in mind also that the cyclist in front of you can probably do nothing to get you home sooner; if we let you through, or you pass us (safely, please) we'll probably see you at the next red light. Also, where you have crumple zones, seat belts, and air bags, we have a half millimetre of cotton or spandex. The other moral? If you want to speed up your actual travel time, well, get a bicycle. But if you have a load you have to move by motor vehicle, and you want to get through the city quickly, behave courteously to vulnerable road users, and encourage other motorists to do the same. For every driver who blows through a crosswalk, some pedestrian will push the button and wait for the lane to come to a complete stop. If you want crosswalks to work better, watch for the lights and obey them. If you want cyclists to offer you little courtesies, then make sure we don't find ourselves in dangerous situations when we do. If I move left to let a motorist make a right on red, that does not give you permission to pass me going straight. I try to treat other road users with respect and I expect respect in return, and respect and tolerance have to start with the people behind the wheels of the two-tonne steel bombs.

Too much fun in the rain forest...

2010-06-09T06:48:00.002-04:00

A new cafe has opened on Annette Street called "Good Neighbours". Their lattes add a whole new layer of meaning to the phrase "guilty pleasure", and the decor of the place mixes contemporary art with traditional touches in a pleasing way.

When I lived in the United States and visited Toronto regularly, I always noticed the vibrant diversity of Toronto's business community. In all but the very largest American cities, the tried and true, the franchises with nationally known names, tend to dominate the landscape. Here in Toronto, a hundred thousand flowers have bloomed. Not for the first time, I feel the business climate resembles nothing so much as a rain forest, in the vibrancy of its diversity and its sheer sensuality.

In Toronto, we celebrate creativity with festivals: Luminato in the spring, Nuit Blanche in the fall. But we seldom seem to take the opportunity to celebrate the creativity all around us, in the simple act of opening a new cafe, or a store, or a restaurant. But when we honour creativity only in the official artists, we close our eyes to a wonderful bloom in forn of us every day.

...and a bad argument against cyclists

2010-06-08T14:53:00.007-04:00

Jason Henderson wrote an alternet article making the reasonable enough point that driving cars creates a demand for oil, the demand creates the impetus to drill, the drilling leads to disasters such as the one currently in the Gulf og Mexico. He proposes, as a solution, that we should accept driving as an activity fundamentally at odds with the environment and the values that progressive people hold. His prescription: don't drive. Not even a "green" car such as a Prius.

The comments attracted a set of fascinating defences of the car and denunciations of bicycle culture. One idea stands out: we shouldn't cycle, because "bohemian" cyclists oppress the "true" working class. Consider the following:

I see "progressives" like Jason Henderson every day. People who ride their bicycles inside highly electrified cities benefiting from wealth and privilege that made high education possible, while others in the vast service industry grew and shipped their food, made and shipped their clothing, maintained the day-to-day infrastructure working long hours for pennies and built the gigantic buildings required for a privileged few to have sufficient free time to pursue being "progressive" by cycling to a university.

It would take too much time to unpack all of this for one post, so I will focus on the central fallacy here: the assumption that bohemians in general, and perhaps cyclists in particular, partake of some privilege that renders them (us) at odds with some vague notion of an "authentic" working class. That, in turn, depends on a single (false) argument: that cycling necessarily requires so much time that only those people with both flexible and undemanding work schedules can manage to use a bicycle for practical purposes. I know from experience that at least in an urban centre, where most people now live, bicycles provide a more efficient way to get around. Whether from an economic, resource, or time perspective, the bicycle simply works better in the city than the car does.

Cycling requires organization and a measure of physical fitness. It does not require a "bohemian" or academic work schedule. Those people who want to suggest they drive in order to express solidarity with working people will have to think up a better excuse.

A challenge to the cycling community....

2010-06-08T14:17:00.008-04:00

In my opinion, the best challenge to cyclists seldom gets made. The best possible argument against the cycling community would go like this: you (we) have the potential to achieve genuine excellence in the way you (we) travel, so why don't you (we) do that? The answer, of course, would go like this: we do come much closer to complete excellence than motorists allow. But we still make to many excuses for our own and each others' mistakes. We still settle for a lower standard than we could potentially achieve.

Too often, we can't find a good way to say to the world that we exist, we have an unquestioned right to the roads, and at the same time to say to one another that we fall short too often. We have the potential for genuine excellence: we can make our journey through the world a positive thing for our bodies, our minds, for the world around us. Motorists can never do that, or as with cyclists (most of us) who also drive cars, I need to say that when we drive, we can never do that. Behind the wheel of a car, we can only seek to limit the damage we do. But on a bicycle, we can grow our bodies, calm our minds, and travel peacefully and lightly in the world.

So why do we so often accept all the anger and frustration of the motorist, and return it to them with a little interest of our own? Why do even those of us most gifted with privilege, most able to forgive, sometimes cycle with a chip on our shoulders? Why foster a cycling culture that ratchets up the impulse to confront, to accuse, to respond to the violence motorists do, to themselves, to us, to the world, with anger and accusation? Can we find a better way?

A thumb on the scale

2010-06-08T03:39:00.003-04:00

Over the weekend, someone put up a poignant protest at the courts: a white bicycle protesting the lack of justice for cyclists in Ontario courts. While I agree that Canadian courts have, in recent years, treated cyclists appallingly, I would go much farther than this. It seems to me that in virtually all cases where anyone, whether cyclist, pedestrian, or motorist has fallen victim to homicidally bad driving or roadside violence, someone, somehow, has put an obliging thumb on the blind lady's scales in favour of the errant motorist. Two young men kill a taxi driver by speeding on a downtown Toronto street at an estimated 30 to 90 km/h over the speed limit. They plead guilty of dangerous driving causing death, an offence which carries a maximum penalty of fourteen years in prison. They get a sentence of one year under house arrest, followed by an 11 pm to 6 am curfew, which their parents can override by giving them a note. Toronto drivers kill fourteen people un a little over three weeks, including one woman who runs a red light, kills a woman and very nearly kills the infant in a stroller. The police lay only provincial driving charges. An ex-politician tries to shake a cyclist off his car, battering him to death, and a prosecutor sees no prospect of conviction. A driver in Quebec hits a group of cyclists from behind, killing three; the police have yet to lay charges. A homicidally reckless, possibly drunk driver hits a car with his cement truck in Calgary. He kills five people, including three children, and virtually wipes out a family. The court awards a sentence of eight years, of which the defendant will serve five and a half. While heavier than most sentences for driving-related offences, this falls far short of the life sentences usually imposed for homicide, particularly in cases of multiple homicides with violence.

Not all of these cases represent the same level of leniency, and you could argue that in some of these cases, the courts have simply served justice based on the facts. But I challenge anyone to look at the overall record and maintain that the same trail of mayhem committed with guns or knives would elicit a similar response from the police and courts. The evidence that the legal system in this country treats the same harm very differently when delivered through a motor vehicle seems overwhelming, and it also appears equally clear that in too many cases, air bags, seat-belts and crumple zones do much less to mitigate the harm done by recklessness than car companies would like us to believe.

Some councillors and others have taken to whining that Toronto has embarked on a "war on the car". It seems clear to me that homicidally reckless drivers have long ago declared war on all of us: pedestrians, cyclists, and other motorists. So far, dangerous driving has killed more North Americans than al Qaeda and the Islamist movement, the Communist party (all communist parties), the government of Hideki Tojo, and the national socialist german worker's party. Combined. Maybe the time has come to stop mourning our dead, and instead to do something serious about the deaths.

...a long time coming

2010-06-08T02:28:00.001-04:00

Jeffery Goldberg ascribes the recent events in regard to Gaza aid flotilla to military and short-term political incompetence. I think that does the Israeli politicians and generals a disservice. As long as Israeli forces maintain the Gaza blockade, by all accounts a popular policy in Israel and a very unpopular one elsewhere, people willing to risk death can make Israel look bad. The Gaza relief ships simply have to keep steaming toward port to compel the Israeli military to either abandon the blockade, or to use force and risk subsequent casualties.

Rather than blaming the Israeli Defence Force, it helps more to ask how the Israeli government got their tails in this particular crack. It seems to me that Israel blockaded Gaza in despair, because they had run out of options. Having beaten the corrupt Fatah party in the election of 2006, Hamas had a earned, by the normal rules that govern these matters, a right to govern. But governing the Palestinians meant working with the Israeli government, and the Israelis could find no way to work with people dedicated to their destruction. Here, I believe, two quite understandable impulses in Jewish life collided with disastrous results.

The first impulse, which for convenience I will refer to as the ADL impulse in honour of the Anti-defamation League, holds that the Jewish community cannot ignore or condone hostility. The second impulse, which I call the IDF impulse in honour of Israel's defence forces, says that the Jewish community can never afford to rely on goodwill alone, because enemies can overpower even the most sincere of friends. Both impulses make sense, given Jewish history, but they lead to fatally contradictory policies. If you have power, you can dictate to your enemies what they can and cannot do without having you punish them for it, but you can't try to force them to like you. A policy based on the IDF impulse would have ignored Hamas rhetoric, but punished any government led by Hamas for hostile actions against Israel. A policy based on the ADL impulse would have deplored the hostility to Israel shown by Hamas, but not used force in response to it. In fact, it appears the impulses collided, and Israel refused to recognize the results of the election both because of the past terrorism by Hamas and also because of the ongoing hostility of Hamas to Israel.

If Fatah had taken control of Gaza by force, then Israel could have released the blockade. But since Hamas won the election and the subsequent power struggle in Gaza, I can see few good options for the Israeli government short of a more general settlement with the Palestinians. In the meantime, blaming the situation on Israeli commandos, or even on the planning staff of the Israeli Defense force, strikes me as a less than useful simplification.

Semantics and car dependency

2010-06-07T05:18:00.000-04:00

Cyclists who set out to argue with opponents of bicycle lanes and other facilities for cyclists have a problem: our opponents tend to speak a different language, to a different purpose, than we do. Many cyclists who argue for bicycle facilities also drive, but many motorists who argue against us do not cycle. That means many of our opponents have little if any experience choosing their transportation mode. To go any medium distance (one to a hundred kilometres), to them, means to drive a car. They know, in a sense, that they could cycle, but someone who has not cycled for transportation in their adult life has no actual experience of actually weighing the two transportation modes and choosing the one best for the purpose.

In practice, this often means that when cycling activists speak of the problem of car dependency, our opponents often answer us by talking about the advantages of "auto-mobility". I can't speak for other cyclists, but I do know about the advantages of the automobile. When I have a computer CPU, or other heavy gear, or a bunch of kids to schlep, I use a car. When I have just myself and something I can fit in panniers, I generally use a bike. But for someone who has never biked as an adult, in their practical experience cars mean mobility (and vice versa). The different experiences of cyclists and motorists cause us to speak a different language, and I believe it helps to both discuss the question of what purposes the private car will prove useful for, and to affirm the importance of choice in modes of transportation.

Safe in traffic: no one way

2010-05-12T12:24:00.001-04:00

In his autobiographical Life on the Mississippi,Mark Twain writes of setting out as an apprentice to a Mississippi river pilot and expecting to learn the river, and finding out that instead, he had to do something harder: learn to read the river.

Working out the correct lane position for riding a bicycle likewise requires reading the street. The linked video (above) from the League of American Bicyclists, and even more the associated discussion, contain many claims about "the" correct lane position, one commenter going so far as to argue that a study from the UK establishes the correct lane position for bikes, worldwide. To his credit, the researcher concerned say he makes no such claim.

I would argue that no one rule works for lane positioning, even in a given city. In Toronto, the situation changes all the time. A ride on Queen Street at 1400 (2pm) on a week day, with parking in place, takes place in a very different cycling environment from a ride at 1700, with the parked vehicle removed (we hope) and large numbers of commuters filling the street. At any given moment, the cues that predict motorist behaviour, from the sound of engines to the configuration of their vehicles, allows a cyclist to decide when it makes sense to pass, and when it does not, how far into the lane to ride to keep the drivers passing at a safe distance, when to ride in the kerb lane and when not to.

It takes much less time and effort to learn to read the street than Mark Twain needed to learn to read the Mississippi, but it does take some effort and attention. Precisely because novice cyclists need time to learn the skills of reading traffic, bicycle lanes make sense: they allow new cyclists to observe traffic from a cyclist's eye view and a protected position on the road. But neither bike lanes nor any single technique offers a solution to bicycle safety: that comes primarily from education and enforcement directed at motorists, the operators of the really dangerous vehicles. The best safety measures cyclists can take for ourselves depend on observation and learning.

Oops..

2010-04-21T21:32:00.000-04:00

Last night, turning onto Bloor, I rode past two people at the corner waiting to cross the street when the light changed, and failed to see the person behind them, walking the other way. She started to cross the street, I saw her to late and braked, but not in time to avoid her. We bumped into each other, not hard, and neither of us lost our balance. I apologized, she assured me the collision had not hurt her, and we went our separate ways.

Two observations:

As I do more cycling, I have to stay sharp, and not just look out for vehicles.
An apology and a willingness to admit when I make a mistake go a long way to resolving tense situations.

Number two man

2010-04-19T01:13:00.000-04:00

In the field of candiates for mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford now polls in the number two spot among decided voters. Since only about half the voters have made up their minds so far, it doesn't do to take these polls without a large grain of salt, but his performance should definitely wake up those who snickered that a man with his body mass index and antediluvian ideas shouldn't even think of running for mayor. It doesn't do to underestimate Rob Ford.

It doesn't do because behind the well-known personality, Rob Ford has a coherent, consistent theory of government. All the public positions I have seen him take point to a belief in a minimally intrusive government, service oriented and responsive at the local level. Thus, for example, he supports or at least tolerates bike lanes in the downtown and inner suburbs, where people manifestly want them. If he has changed his previously expressed opinion about urban cycling, that would mean he has changed his opinion in light of voter sentiment; a rare attribute in a politician. I have no reason to doubt his commitment to service oriented government, either. Any time I have had cause to contact him, I have received a reply the same day.

So what kind of mayor would Rob Ford make? He would do some things well. He would clear bureaucracy out of the way of local initiatives in public parks, particularly self-funded ones. He might well set new standards for responsiveness in Toronto's government. On the minus side, Rob Ford's belief in minimal government would mean that without either a regional authority or a public-private partnership to get the work done, he wouldn't expand the TTC. Transit City would stay on hold. Mr. Ford's reliance on local initiatives and opinion in policy making makes coordinating city-wide initiatives difficult, if not impossible. Mr. Ford's record in council also makes it difficult to see how he will put together the majorities he will need to govern effectively. And some of his ideas, like trying to bring back Julian Fantino as Toronto's police chief, simply don't make sense.

The time has come, in fact it has long passed, for those who do not want to see Rob Ford as mayor of Toronto, as well as those of us who simply think someone else could lead the city better, to stop trying to make Rob Ford into a joke. The audience has stopped laughing. We have to engage seriously with Mr. Ford and his ideas, and present better ones.

To an unknown motorist

2010-04-18T00:44:00.000-04:00

Last Thursday, I rode downtown to see an art exhibit at OCAD. The daughter of an old friend of mine goes there, and has a picture up in the exhibition. You don't know that, of course. Because of the location of OCAD on McCaul Street, it made sense for me to ride back west along Queen Street. You know that much, because you encountered me just outside Trinity Bellwoods Park, near CAMH.

You might not even remember the rest. I rode in the right lane, close to but not hugging the kerb, in the right tire track. The middle lane had a left-turning car in it, and you couldn't get past me, so you blew your horn, and as soon as you could you sped past me, too close for comfort. Since the left turn lane you wanted had cars it it already with the light turning, you only made it about 100 meters ahead when I caught up with you without much difficulty. You probably don't remember starting straight ahead, avoiding eye contact.

You ran a very small but definite risk of hitting me, with very unpleasant results for us both. Maybe you just saw me as a slow object in front of you, and didn't notice that the cars at the intersection you needed to get to had stopped moving completely. You beat me to the red light, but you didn't save a single second.

Before you got your car, you probably watched a lot of car advertisements. And most of those those advertisements told you an enticing story: of personal freedom in time and space, of figuratively and sometimes literally flying, of empty roads and open space and speed. And if you compare the experience of driving in Toronto or any other city with the car advertisements, you can't help but see that when you buy a car, you buy a pack of lies along with it. Maybe you simply wanted to make a tiny part of the promises you paid so much for come true.

But those of us you speed by have stories too. They have less romance, fewer open roads and sunsets and happy endings than the stories in the car commercials, but they have the advantage of truth. I hope my story would have changed your mind if I told it to you. I have a spouse and a kid. I design and write software to manage fund-raising campaigns. I work on First Nations justice, I have spent seven years doing literacy work (tutoring) and five years working at suicide prevention. Whatever you do, you can't make the stories in the auto commercials come true. Don't bring my story to an end trying.

Statistical nonsense about bikes

2010-04-16T18:51:00.000-04:00

Opponents of bicycle lanes in Toronto have repeatedly argued that nobody uses them. The statistics on cycling contradict this, but even if true, their claims would have no relevance.

Motorists appear to grossly underestimate the number of cyclists on the roads. Bob Hepburn wrote that

I saw only 15 bicyclists during the entire commute, even though all these roads have bike lanes and the weather was perfect for riding.

This seems to imply that if a driver, presumably focused on driving rather than counting took note of only fifteen cyclists, only fifteen used the roads that day. In fact, according to Statistics Canada figures, helpfully mapped in the Toronto Star's web graphics,between 5 and 10% of all commuter's in Toronto's downtown core ride bicycles. According to a study done by Ipsos-Reid for the City of Toronto, over a third of the downtown residents use bicycles for commuting, shopping, or visiting at least some of the time. So all the complaints about catering to a tiny minority fail on the facts; cyclists do not constitute a tiny minority, and we actually get less than our share of road space.

But the numbers don't really matter. Our motorized culture promotes an inactive lifestyle which causes many life-shortening, debilitating, and painful illnesses. Public policy has no more business pressuring people into a motor vehicle centred lifestyle than the government would have pressuring people to smoke cigarettes.

A secular heaven that looks like hell

2010-04-13T02:12:00.000-04:00

Artificial wetlands

The Green Central blog of the Times online has some bad news:

The war for hearts and minds over climate change is fierce and the sceptics are winning the communications battle.

Given the possible consequences of catastrophic climate change, that does look like good news. The article goes on to argue that climate change activists compromised their message by "selling hell". I think they have that half right. From my perspective, climate change activists actually want to sell their version of heaven. Unfortunately, to many of the rest of us it looks like hell.

Climate change activists like George Monbiot have made no secret of their hope that the austerity they see as necessary to save the planet will also promote the kind of culture they favour. The loss of easy access to energy will promote equitable, egalitarian, and communitarian values; the need for conservation will enhance the power of the state at the expense of business corporations, and the loss of cheap travel will produce a spiritual reconnection with the land.

While I consider these romantic fantasies, and highly unrealistic, I consider it even more unrealistic to try to sell a policy based on this approach. It misleads the public in ways too obvious to miss. When a public figure raises a scientific issue, then abruptly dismisses any talk of a technical solution, it doesn't take a bloodhound to smell a bait and switch. When the aviation industry, which accounts for two percent of the actual emissions, gets over half the attention, most of us can tell the priorities involved reflect something besides concern for carbon emissions. We can tell that many climate activists want to dictate the way we live. A public that suspects climate activists of making an issue this important a means rather than an end will probably not trust the activists, and that mistrust may well spill over into skepticism about the science.

For the sake of the planet, we'd better get to work on effective solutions to greenhouse emissions, and quickly. The current crop of climate crusaders can help by taking a hard look at their priorities.

Craving affirmation: a bad root with many branches

2010-04-11T17:10:00.003-04:00

Diana West doesn't like American efforts to win the trust and cooperation of the people of Afghanistan. The American military, tasked with finding ways for two profoundly different cultures to share one planet, have evidently decided mutual respect will work better for them than mutual contempt. Ms. West writes:

...the U.S.-drafted Afghan constitution (like Iraq's) has recognized Sharia law as supreme since ratification in 2004. What seems different now, or maybe just more noticeable, is an unseemly American pandering before such law -- Sharia law, tribal law, any law but our own -- increasingly manifested by official U.S. military policy.

The US military seems to understand that human societies get to choose their laws, and that traditional Muslim societies will tend to choose Islamic law. It seems to me that anyone familiar with the principles of the US Declaration of Independence would reach similar conclusions. So why does this offend Ms. West? Does she really want American troops to embark on a millennium long project to force the Afghanis to accept American values? To what conceivable end? It appears the notion of mutual respect, in and of itself, raises Ms. West's ire. But once again, why?

I'd suggest that behind this position lies a bad habit that corrupts our decisions in matters both important and trivial: the habit of seeking conformity or submission at every possible opportunity. Behind this habit lies the unspoken position that other people must affirm my choices, either by imitating them, or by admitting the inferiority of their own.

This habit of thought creates all manner of conflict, both profound and trivial. It kept the battle between national mythologies going in Northern Ireland for forty years, and it keeps the battle going in Israel to this day. It has led to cultural genocide and political repression. Its poison leeches into our streets, as unemployed and marginalized young men lash out in bids for "respect", and motorists honk in resentment of cyclists' refusal to affirm the supremacy of their cars.

The idea that we can force people different from us to break down and admit their errors tempts all of us. We as a species have never needed to resist this temptation more than we do now.

An (almost) equitable sentence

2010-04-11T00:19:00.001-04:00

(via take the lane)

Casey Meads partied most of the night; well into the small hours of the morning, he drove his truck home. On the way, he fatally hit William Timothy Korol, throwing him off his bicycle 25 meters into a ditch. Since the police found no evidence Mr. Korol had lights at the time of the crash, the prosecution would have found it difficult to prove the defendant's conduct led to Mr. Korol's death. However, since Meads drove home instead of stopping, attempting to help Mr. Korol, or reporting the crash, the authorities had no difficulty making a case for hit and run against him. He claimed he thought he had hit a deer, and could not tell he had hit a cyclist because his airbag had deployed. Even if you believe this claim, driving after a crash serious enough to deploy airbags endangers all other road users, because your vehicle may have suffered enough damage to compromise its safe operation.

While a two year sentence fits the facts the crown can prove well enough, the three year driving prohibition seems a little light. As the provincial governments frequently remind us, a driver's license confers a privilege, not a right. I do not believe that anyone who fails to take responsibility for their actions should have the privilege of operating a two tonne bomb in public. Actions such as those Meads confessed to do not usually result in a lifetime driving prohibition. But maybe if they did, fewer people would drive home after partying, or tell themselves they just hit a deer without looking around their airbags.

...we have to think about this?

2010-04-09T02:55:00.000-04:00

When the major users of parks in Toronto, the local communities, organize and put sweat equity into building innovative programs suited to their own needs, how long should we think before giving the process our enthusiastic support? A computer would take about a nanosecond to make a choice this obvious. The City of Toronto seems to need considerably more time than that.

I think the city should allow any neighbourhoods willing to manage their own parks to do so. To make this work, I propose the following principles:

Inclusion: any community event or activity in a park must welcome anyone from anywhere in the city.
Accountability: money raised at any activity must return to community activities. The central parks and rec authorities can help here by exercising some basic financial oversight.
Environment: the Department of Parks and Recreation has the right and the responsibility to prevent any harm to the park environment. This applies in particular to the building of permanent facilities. The department should also oversee planting, to prevent the introduction of inappropriate non-native species.
Governance: every local resident and group should have access to their local parks, and the opportunity to have an equal voice in facilities provided. The exact mechanism for this may vary; in some situations, it may suffice to allow different community groups to reserve time in a park for their own activities. In others, a formal governance structure in which every resident of the area served by the park has a right to attend meetings and vote, may prove appropriate.

However we accomplish it, the local management of parks in any city makes sense. It makes particular sense in Toronto, the world in one city. Trying to manage parks from Thorncliffe to Bloor West, from New Toronto to Malvern, from Kensington Market to Rosedale, using just one set of rules chosen at 100 Queen Street will produce nothing better than a bland parks system and an uninvolved public.

An alternative for funding transit

2010-03-31T09:39:00.001-04:00

Toronto needs the transit city development plan. While legitimate debate may exist about where we should build subways and where we should rely on street rail, we need a transportation development plan for the next century. And we cannot simply keep putting it off.

Now the province has weaseled out of paying what they promised for construction, we have to raise the money ourselves. Sarah Thompson, to her credit, has proposed road tolls on the Gardiner and DVP. Tolls raise money, but they have a problem: they don't offer drivers anything. If you institute tolls on the Gardiner, the motorists who don't find another route will throw their two twonies and a loonie in the basket, and then drive on along the same overcrowded roads.

Imagine a system which offered drivers something in return: a chance to drive on roads free of traffic congestion. Drivers would pay, but in return they would get a reasonably smooth drive to their destination. We have only so much road space, and more people want to drive than the roads can accommodate. Normally, when we have a commodity where demand outruns supply, we have some form of an auction. Essentially, it works like this. You tell (via a kiosk or website) a central computer you want to drive to a destination, when you want to get there, and the maximum amount you will agree to pay for the privilege. The computer then matches the number of people who want to drive in a given area at a given time. If more people want to drive than the roads will accommodate, the computer block those who offered to pay the least from driving in that area at that time. Then if more people still want to drive than the roads will hold, the computer repeats the process. The system bills everyone who drives in a particular area at a particular time the minimum accepted price; in other words, if you bid twenty dollars to drive downtown at nine am, but the system accepted bids for fifteen, then you pay fifteen dollars for your drive.

Auction-based congestion pricing involves significant technical problems,and it would require a significant investment. However, the city would probably recover money equal to a significant proportion of what we currently waste on traffic congestion, and according to the OECD, we currently waste over two billion dollars. If the city could recover even half of those losses, we could fund transit expansion easily.

Just... wow

2010-03-30T21:09:00.003-04:00

(via Greenwald)

At the height of the cold war, the USSR tested a single thermonuclear weapon with a yield equal to fifty million tons of TNT. In 1985, as the number of nuclear weapons peaked, a total of 65,000 existed at various levels of readiness.

In this context, the following statement from this essay occupies a special place among the polemical statements I have had the pleasure of reading:

The cyber-war mirrors the nuclear challenge in terms of the potential economic and psychological effects.

When I read that, I had to wonder who spiked the author's water supply with LSD. As a computer professional, I have no doubt that a significant cyber attack would have unsettling effects. Getting money from a bank would prove difficult. The attack would affect infrastructure, from the water supply to roads, in unpredictable ways. In economic life, a cyber attack would have a dire effect;. it would diminish business confidence and could easily trigger a recession. At worst, cyber attacks on industrial process control systems could lead to serious spills of toxic or even radioactive waste. We should not take these risks lightly.

But the worst imaginable cyber attack would lead to a major disaster, not one beyond comprehension; we have experienced disasters on this scale before. It took just one nuclear weapon to end one hundred thousand lives at Hiroshima. Unleashing forty to sixty thousand of them would have created a catastrophe such as humanity has no memory of in all our recorded history. Equating these two possible events, at any level, completely ignores reality.

Glenn Greenwald rightly objects to the shadow-government agenda this kind of hyperbole aims to promote. I expect plenty of civil society organizations will stand up to defend freedom in cyberspace. Even if it does not succeed, however, exaggeration of this kind does harm by subtly eroding our sense of proportion. Accepting that political argument has no necessary relationship to reality makes it harder to perform the essential task of a democracy: governing ourselves.

Suffer the children (II)

2010-03-29T01:31:00.000-04:00

In the 1970s, St. George's Anglican Cathedral in Kingston hired John Gallienne, as organist and master of choristers. Over the next fifteen years, he compiled one of the worst records of sexual abuse against children in the Canadian Anglican Church outside First Nations Residential Schools.

My family belonged to that cathedral. I left the cathedral in 1978 as a university student mainly because, without knowing the cause, I had grown aware that Gallienne's manipulations of choir parents had a corrosive effect, making the cathedral a place I no longer wanted to worship. I came back in 1990, shortly after the record of abuse came to light. For the next four years, my family and I lived our church lives inside a storm of recrimination.

As a result of this experience, I perceive sexual abuse as primarily an abuse of authority. The abuse almost always comes from a trusted figure in the child's life, often from a trusted figure in the community at large. If we hope to reduce the incidence of child rape in our institutions, we have to address the difficult question of authority, and how it functions in our church institutions.

This means arguments about the recent scandals in the Church of Rome that ascribe the crimes of some clergy to a failure to assert authority strike me as absurd. Once strict church oversight faltered with Vatican II, some clergy engaged in unauthorized experiments with liturgy and even doctrine. But does anyone believe that having missed an unorthodox prayer or homily, the church could do nothing about child abuse? Consider what Jesus said: the gospels leave no room for doubt about the importance of caring for children and cherishing their faith.

If the gospels call for us to cut off offending limbs and take out evil eyes, what should we expect the Creator to ask of us when the forms authority takes in our churches shows itself so ripe for abuse? At the very least, I suggest we need to look hard at the way the structures of our churches work, at the people we trust and expect our children to trust.

Suffer the children (I)

2010-03-28T14:07:00.000-04:00

The book Shepherd's Granddaughter tells the story of the life of a Palestinian girl near Hebron confronted by Israeli settlers. According to this account, "two Jewish groups accuse it of being one-sided".

The book tells a fictional story based on a harsh reality. Israeli settlers in the West Bank constitute a small minority of Jewish Israelis. That small minority includes an even smaller group of extremists, whose behaviour towards their Palestinian neighbours I can only describe as slow motion ethnic cleansing.
International observers have documented the struggles of Palestinians living near the settlements to continue their lives, from going to school to grazing sheep.

Children live this reality every day. They have the same right any child living in a struggling community has, from African American children living through the Montgomery bus boycott to First Nations children in isolated and neglected communities in Canada: to have their story told and heard.

No Canadian who reads stories like these should ever think our country better than Israel. Too many First Nations people in Canada face choices as bleak as those faced by Palestinians in the West Bank of Gaza. Those people who teach this story should also emphasize that most Israelis reject the agenda of the extremist settlers. When we tell these stories, we ought to remember the harsh words Israel's premier Yitzhak Rabin spoke to the extremists after Baruch Goldstein's mass murder of Muslims at prayer at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in 1994:

You are not part of the community of Israel... and many of the people despise you. You are not partners in the Zionist enterprise. You are a foreign implant. You are an errant weed. Sensible Judaism spits you out. You placed yourself outside the wall of Jewish law.

Handfuls of intolerant extremists do not represent the people of Israel. But they exist, they cause real suffering, and those they cause to suffer deserve to have their story heard.

Who, me?

2010-03-27T15:27:00.003-04:00

(via Daily dish) In an attack on David Frum following his departure from the American Enterprise Institute, Charles Murray writes:

AEI has a culture, the scholars are fiercely proud of that culture, and at its heart is total intellectual freedom.

Let's follow the implications of that. Any group of people have the right to come together and call themselves scholars, to title themselves an institute. But the American Enterprise Institute does more. It pays salaries. It offers a health insurance plan. To do that, it has to participate in the economic world. In short, its participants have to offer something the world wants to buy. Think tanks, like editorial pages, make their money by producing opinions. That constrains them to to produce the opinions and research donors will buy. The market has the final word, which means that whatever their institutional culture told them, the members of the American Enterprise Institute do not have, did not have, and logically could not have "total intellectual freedom".

Nobody has defended those strictures at a more fundamental level than Charles Murray; he has specifically argued that having to rely on a menial job, if necessary, to provide for dependents does the soul good. If we apply Charles Murray's rules to American Enterprise Scholars, we should reject on principle the idea of anyone having a sanctuary in which they can produce whatever they please and have a guarantee the market will accept it. If you write, you have two choices: write things some market will accept, or else write for nothing. The management AEI appears to have given David Frum exactly that choice. I would expect Charles Murray to say, approvingly, that so they should.

Instead, he gets very angry indeed with the idea that anyone in the management of the American Enterprise Institute responded to the choices of the people who pay the bills. He does not call this making the kind of compromise that gives meaning to life, embracing hard realities in order to live life well. Instead, he refers to Frum's allegations as an attack on "the core of the Institute’s integrity". As I read his arguments, it appears the idea that economic rules which he passionately defends apply to people like himself makes Charles Murray incandescent with rage. He has disavowed his former friendship with David Frum on that basis. But what does that say about conservative principles, and the devotion to the free market avowed by conservative scholars?

...a picture of a death spiral

2010-03-26T17:19:00.000-04:00

Politics has one basic rule: it exists to govern. This rule has a corollary: governing takes real work, and politicians drift away from governing.

Governing means taking ideas, imperatives, limit, and crafting them into structures both legal and customary. These structures form the framework of our public lives: rules of commerce, employment, and personal conduct. The shared principles we live by, if they work well, keep us at peace with one another, and foster sustainable and just interactions between people, communities and nations. It takes very hard work. Sometimes, it lays intolerable burdens on people.

Particularly when a political movement reaches maturity, when it has either achieved all it set out to do or else decisively failed, a sclerosis sets in. This syndrome has appeared in enough situations that we can describe it fairly well. Where a governance aims at specific ends, whether justice or freedom or prosperity, a declining government or movement focuses on power and structures as an end. Then the focus on power shifts to a focus on strategy, and then on tactics as ends in themselves.

The Left fell into this trap at the end of the 1960s, when the rush of doing an action, getting media coverage, and daring the police to react with violence on national TV replaced a coherent way forward to a more just society. We see it now in the American right. Ann Coulter has shaped a minor incident in Ottawa. Her supporters hope, as her detractors fear, that donations will pour in. Clubs will form, offices will open, and then what? Without a coherent end, or an effective path to reach that end, what do Ms. Coulter's admirers hope to achieve? Ms. Coulter and her fellow conservative ideologues, of course, can expect to make a lot of money out of all this. But without any real ideas for governing, they can't accomplish much more. The danger exists that all of the energy poured into movement tactics comes at the expense of a serious effort to formulate and promote ideas useful in actual governance. This has one good effect: a focus on tactics will leave the formulation of new ideas, and the future, to the Left. It also has one bad effect: the absence of a real, viable, and thoughtful challenge from conservatives will leave the solutions implemented by the Left less rich, less effective, than we could otherwise have made them.

A tangled web...

2010-03-26T09:42:00.000-04:00

I really only know one thing about the Ann Coulter speech that turned into a debacle in Ottawa: I don't care what Ms. Coulter thinks of me or my country. For that matter, I don't pretend to know what she thinks at all. As many people before me have pointed out, people like Coulter and Limbaugh make their money as entertainers. Making extreme statements to an aging audience may bring in the money, but it shows a basic lack of seriousness about actually getting candidates who might support their positions elected, or getting an actual political platform enacted.

In her current Canadian speaking tour, Coulter advised a Muslim student who didn't have a flying carpet to ride a camel. Have the conservatives who sponsored her tour looked at Canadian demographic trends lately? An outrageous statement makes good copy; Ms. Coulter may sell some books because of it. But does anyone think telling a Muslim student to ride a camel in the name of conservatism will help Stephen Harper get a majority in Parliament?

Serious political commentator or entertainer, public intellectual or charlatan, Ms. Coulter presumably deserves the same right we all have: to speak freely. So did the university deny her that right? Did the students and others who showed up to protest?

Let's start with the university. The Ottawa University provost, Françoise Houle, wrote Ms. Coulter a note asking her to respect Canada's hate laws. Ian Hunter described this as telling her not to "say anything too controversial lest delicate Canadian sensibilities be ruffled." But Ms. Coulter has tacked much closer to the line separating comment from incitement than this suggests. We do not always remember that her suggestion that Americans invade Muslim countries, and forcibly convert the people concerned the editorial staff of the National Review; not a terribly liberal or delicate bunch.

So did the protesters violate her rights? Not unless they threatened her. Opinions vary about whether the crowd threatened her. Someone did pull a fire alarm. Some students have the bad habit of using this illegal trick to thwart an unwanted event. But without knowing who pulled the alarm and why, we can only speculate. The accounts do not seem to differ much on three important points:

if police arrested anyone at the scene, nobody seems to have reported it
organizational issues led to chaos at the scene
Ms. Coulter and/or her handlers called off her speech themselves.

In a final twist, conservatives who have rejected the very notion of human rights commissions now plan to make a complaint to the human rights commission that the university and the protesters violated Ms. Coulter's rights. It appears that some conservatives in this country have had their sense of irony removed.

When words fall over each other

2010-03-24T15:10:00.000-04:00

The American Scene web log allows comments. Their blogging software has a feature which only accepts comments after the writers have reviewed what they have written.

For those, like myself, who often find errors in our comments only after we have posted them, this feature provides a distinct advantage. I find that as I type, my thinking often outruns the signals going to my fingers, so I often find a word with the last letter of the word I had intended to type before it attached. Also, when I go back and change a sentence, I often leave a word that no longer belongs. Previewing my work beforehand sometimes saves me from looking foolish.

Big nanny

2010-03-19T12:42:00.001-04:00

Not too long after I started riding my bicycle in Toronto, I had the seat and the handlebars sprung. Toronto has some of the worst road surfaces I can remember riding a bicycle on, and I don't like coming home after riding with a headache. And since I have no hope that Toronto will maintain the streets, I spring my bicycle and grit my teeth.

But the same city that claims to balance its budget by the proverbial shaved hair every year, the same city that regularly proposes to raid its assets to meet current needs, the same city that scrimps on repairs to infrastructure, the city with some of the highest transit fares on the continent, can somehow afford to pay "inspectors" to prowl the streets looking for front yards that offend their esthetic sensibilities, and write up orders for the property owners to conform.

Cities can and should provide mechanisms to resolve disputes about people's decorating or design choices when informal neighbourhood dispute resolution fails. Cities can and should provide encouragement to homeowners who want to plant trees, as the City of Toronto does. But imposing a citywide standard on the appearance of houses, particularly ones the neighbours don't object to, merely wastes money.

In the same paper, we read another story, also about an individual's less than happy encounter with government. The story contains a paragraph which could, by itself, define the psychological contours of the nanny state:

But one of the agencies involved maintains the rules were applied fairly and equally, and Wilson must follow them like everyone else.

Yes, the government must apply the rules fairly and equally, but that doesn't suffice: the rules also have to make sense, and their application has to make sense in each individual case. Maybe in this case they do; not every business or home owner who complains of unfair treatment has a good case. But I would suggest the following rule: if an issue concerns aesthetics or "quality of life", governments should restrict their role to mediation rather than attempting to impose rules.

Meanwhile, could we focus on important things and fix the potholes, please?

Who could have guessed...

2010-02-27T16:47:00.000-05:00

that the moral hazards of an international legal regime that forbids war would include fecklessness on matters of war and military policy?

A couple of weeks ago, our junior foreign minister announced that “an attack on Israel would be considered an attack on Canada.” Years ago, before the UN charter forbade war, we used to call a declaration like that a security guarantee. Governments thought before they made such guarantees, because they might have to back them up. When Franklin Roosevelt came to Queen's University and announced in 1938 that the United States would not "stand idly by" if a foreign power threatened Canada, he understood, and the Canadian government understood, that he pledged American lives and treasure. Everyone in the American and Canadian governments understood the seriousness of his statements.

Fast forward to the present. The UN charter renounces the use of force, Israel needs no help with conventional defence, and Canada has little meaningful help to offer with the dilemmas which really cloud Israel's future. Why should a junior minister not throw a little "red meat" to the "Christian Zionists" and other supporters of current Israeli policy, whose support his government has zealously courted? In a dangerous world, governments should retain a sense of responsibility about the statements they make. Perhaps this one statement will not lead directly to any bad results, but it does not do to get into the habit of making statements about serious matters without evidence of serious thought.

A bad law...

2010-02-26T02:22:00.002-05:00

and one more reason to repeal it.

While a minority of irresponsible dog owners pose a serious danger to both the public and to their own pets, that does not make the dog owner's liability act of 2005 anything other than an unconscionably vague, disruptive, expensive and harmful law. The government could, and should, have addressed this issue with laws punishing the behaviour and aggressive propensities of dangerous dogs.

Not everyone understands the bond that families develop with their pets; if you do not, please take my word for it that losing a pet can devastate a child, a senior, and in many cases an adolescent or an adult. The power to take away a dog implies the power to inflict significant trauma on a family, and it does not do to confer that power lightly. Clauses in the Animals for Research Act that allow a pound to transfer or sell dogs seized under this section to research facilities have the potential to compound this problem: how would you like to explain to a six year old that the municipal authorities have seized her pet for animal research?

Therefore, a pit bull ban which, like Ontario's, includes the phrase

A dog that has an appearance and physical characteristics substantially similar to any of those dogs [pit bull terrier, Staffordshire bull terrier, American Staffordshire terrier, American pit bull terrier]

places more trust in the capabilities and probity of the enforcers of the law than any statute or regulation ought to. So far, where this law has inflicted trauma on families, the problem appears to arise out of nothing more sinister than misguided zeal on the part of animal control officials. But a law this vague lends itself to horrendous misuse. A politician guilty of serious malfeasance could tell critics or anyone else he or she wanted to manipulate, that if they did not shut up and/or cooperate, their pets will start looking very like pit bulls to municipal staff. Any law that vaguely and casually grants significant powers with wide discretion lends itself to abuse, and a corollary to Murphy's Law states that if a thing lends itself to abuse, someone will sooner or later abuse it.

The time has come to repeal or significantly narrow this law before it does any more harm.

An important statement

2010-02-18T16:04:00.001-05:00

John Tory, the man not running for mayor and currently head of the Toronto City Summit, made an important point: the cities and towns of the greater Toronto area need to think of themselves as part of an interconnected region. That needed saying, and the city councils and officials we elect next November need to act on it, if we hope to prosper in an increasingly competitive world.

Unfortunately, saying it also pointed up one of the current mayor's greatest failings: in 2006, he admitted at a public meeting that he could not get the other governments in the GTA to sit down and work out a transportation policy. A press officer for Mr. Miller tried to address this with a textbook non-denying denial:

"Talk radio hosts are obviously entitled to their opinion."

Well, yes. Actually, you don't need a radio show to have a right to your opinion. But neither the initial comment nor the indignant clarification from the press office involved answered the important question: do the cities and town of the GTA need a regional vision for planning, has the current mayor succeeded in fostering such a vision, and if he has failed, does he plan to take any steps to try and remedy the problem before he leaves office? I don't need a talk radio show to see the importance of regional planning, and if the current mayor has come up short, it makes sense for him to try to fix the problem.

...and illustrating another classic dud argument

2010-02-17T16:34:00.003-05:00

Terence Corcoran's piece on George Smitherman and Rocco Rossi also provides the fodder for another in my series on classic dud arguments. Mr Corcoran the proposal by Mr. Rossi to "review" the transit improvements proposed for Toronto and the GTA:

Mr. Rossi wants to reform city financial planning and has called for a full review of the monumental Transit City plans for billion-dollar streetcar runs.

Here Mr. Corcoran provides an excellent example of the fallacy of hidden costs. Just because doing something has a price tag you can see, it does not follow that doing nothing has no cost either. The OECD has estimated that traffic congestion costs the economy of the Toronto area a billion dollars every four months. To focus on the "monumental" cost of building better transit while ignoring the steady hemorrhaging of time, money, resources and quality of life in an unending traffic jam fits the classic phrase "penny wise and pound foolish" perfectly.

Accepting a large cost in opportunity and time to avoid a much smaller cost in actual money: example number two in the series on of a dud arguments.

Municipal, political, irrational

2010-02-17T16:28:00.004-05:00

The former American house speaker, "Tip" O'Neill, famously remarked that "all politics is local". Mr. O'Neill understood that in politics, the services provided at the local level, not the grand sweeps of political rhetoric, make or break political ideas and political careers. Someone should explain this to the National Post's Terrence Corcoran. Mr. Corcoran wrote in praise of Rocco Rossi for what he calls "solid non-leftist ideas", which apparently include:

undoing the city's bizarre 5¢ plastic bag tax, limiting bike lanes to roads that are non-arterial, and privatizing Toronto Hydro.

Notice how Mr. Corcoran glossed over any question of the wisdom or workability of Mr. Rossi's ideas with the neologism "non-leftist". When the public makes their final evaluation of a policy, and rewards or rejects the policy makers, the division between left and right counts for far less than the division between wise and foolish.

But Mr. Corcoran's description of the policy of "limiting" bicycle lanes makes even less sense than this suggests. To make the superficial point, limiting bicycle lanes in the sense Mr. Rossi proposes really means not having bicycle lanes, because literally all of the through roads in the city core have a designation of "arterial". Aside from the logical problems with Mr. Rossi's statements on cycling, it does not do to pretend they have any meaningful connection with the right, or even with that more nebulous entity, the "non-left". No conservative principle I know of speaks against provision for bicycles, and cycling policies, along with many other matters of urban policy, must stand or fall on their own merits.

Let's stop talking about Adam Giambrone

2010-02-15T03:00:00.001-05:00

David Miller would prefer it if the media didn't talk about Adam Giambrone and his sex life. I agree. This city has more important things to talk about than Mr. Miller's former successor.

We could start by talking about the nature of political campaigns in this city. We can talk about all of the competent, intelligent, and personable men and women of colour who contribute to political life. We can talk about why, with so many such people around, our extravagantly white mayor gets to anoint a successor of almost the same complexion as himself, and why so many (supposedly) progressive insiders go along with this. We can talk about who gets ballots dropped in boxes for them, and who gets police contact cards filled out, and why. We can talk about why the supposed progressives in this city have so much to say about streetcars and rights of way, and so very little about justice, and fair treatment, and human dignity.

We can talk about the press description of Downsview and Jane-Finch as places where the jets descending to Pearson fly past the windows of tower blocks where the police regularly stop young men, and we can talk about the calls to shut down Billy Bishop Toronto City Centre Airport based on the status of the downtown waterfront as a "premium" residential area. And we can talk about how the media reports these things but never quite draws the connections between the people viewed as worthy of deference and political office, and the people who urgently need their whereabouts recorded by the police at all possible opportunities.

These things go on, in part at least, precisely because nobody talks about them. So let's talk about them.

Priorities

2010-02-13T12:28:00.000-05:00

The Toronto Environment Alliance has released its six priorities for this municipal election. All six make a great deal of sense, from the promotion of public and active transportation to reductions in toxic chemical use in industry.

I would only add one thing to their list: both transit and active transportation promotion strategies benefit tremendously from integration. A transit system that does not accommodate bicycles, or that attempts to serve an area designed exclusively for car dependence must deliver each rider right to their destination. Since riders will always have destinations off a transit route, such a transit system will lose many potential riders. Likewise, the ability take transit for part of a route makes cycling much more practical.

Cell phones and bike lanes

2010-02-09T00:02:00.007-05:00

On a ride downtown today, I encountered two vehicles stopped in bike lanes. One belonged to a driver making a short pick-up who promised not to do it again. The other belonged to a driver on a cell phone, who presumably thought of stopping in a bike lane as a way to dodge the new distracted driving law. I have bad news for any driver who thinks that:

78.1 (1) No person shall drive a motor vehicle on a highway while holding or using a hand-held wireless communication device or other prescribed device that is capable of receiving or transmitting telephone communications, electronic data, mail or text messages. 2009, c. 4, s. 2....
(6) Subsections (1) and (2) do not apply if all of the following conditions are met:
1. The motor vehicle is off the roadway or is lawfully parked on the roadway.
2. The motor vehicle is not in motion.
3. The motor vehicle is not impeding traffic. 2009, c. 4, s. 2.

Parking or stopping in a bike lane impedes traffic; even if you get a sympathetic police officer who does not think of me and my two wheels as "real" traffic, stopping in a bike lane leaves your car sticking out into the high carbon emission vehicle lanes. If you want to make a receive calls that badly, pull into a real parking spot. Alternatively, take the bus or get a cab.

To my friends at the TTC

2010-02-08T12:32:00.004-05:00

I use crosswalks on Jane just above Bloor a lot. On a brief errand down to Bloor one day a few weeks ago, as I pressed the button, a southbound bus slowed quickly to let me cross. I felt the driver had gone beyond the call in showing respect for pedestrian safety, so I went into the station to thank him. His warm response made my day. I give TTC employees respect, and most of them give it back with a bonus. They do a boring but exacting job and do it well. I cannot even begin to compare the level of simple decency most of us get from TTC employees with the rude, incompetent, and sometimes deadly driving that most of encounter in our cars. As a group, the workers of the TTC have nothing to apologize for.

The few times TTC workers have done a bad job in my presence, I have remembered it. I have bought over twelve transit passes since the transferable pass came out, but I remember the one time I went to buy a pass and a collector treated me like a nuisance, rather than a customer, telling me how to count out my bills and throwing back the extra bill I passed him. A tourism consultant once told me that people tell more of their friends about their bad experiences than their good ones. Certainly, I never took a picture of the driver who went out of his way to respect my safety at the Jane Street crosswalk, and the Sun will never publish such a picture. If we don't tell the stories about the good workers at the TTC, we will never get a true picture of the service.

However good the service, it can always stand improvement. That means respecting the customers who pay the costs of the TTC and want service and courtesy. It means that some workers need to improve their skills, or their habits, or both. Apart from anything else, if the minority of workers who deliver bad service clean up their act, the atmosphere at the TTC should improve for the good workers. That makes the recent news, that some workers at the TTC want to force the public to appreciate them by holding a job action, very hard to understand. The union cannot solve the problem. In fact, part of the public irritation, fair or not, with the few bad workers at the TTC stems from the conviction that the union will protect its members no matter how far below the mark they fall. The transit worker's union could not make a worse mistake than to take action against the rider, mostly fellow workers of theirs, who want decent service. Some TTC workers need to change. The service, while excellent, can use improvement. The union can play an important part in that process. If it does not, then it will simply increase the sense of frustration felt by many of us who have witnessed or experienced bouts of bad service.

Go Sarah Green

2010-02-03T06:50:00.000-05:00

Latest in the seal hunt controversy: the anti-seal hunt forces want to ban Sarah Green, Miss Newfoundland, from the Miss Canada pageant. Apparently they didn't like her wearing a seal fur coat. And instead of apologizing, she then actually stood up for the traditions of her province.

I don't often pay attention to the Miss Canada pageant, but I have one thing to say to them: don't even think about banning Sarah Green. I suspect that most of the people she's offended live lives that do far more harm to the biosphere then most outport Newfoundlanders ever will. Those fake fur and polyester coats, for example, come from oil, the same stuff that Exxon Valdex and her many sisters regularly coat marine life with.

I could say a lot more on the general topic, but I'll let it wait. As a Canadian blogger, and a sailor I'll give my support to someone who's stood up for a Canadian maritime tradition, and leave it at that.

Dreams of Achievement, Nightmares of Domination

2010-02-03T00:40:00.000-05:00

David Brooks, in writing about the developing Israeli high-tech economy, made a comment that Jeffrey Goldberg liked:

Israel’s technological success is the fruition of the Zionist dream. The country was not founded so stray settlers could sit among thousands of angry Palestinians in Hebron. It was founded so Jews would have a safe place to come together and create things for the world.

I disagree with two minor points here: Jewish people have a right to "a safe place", whether they "create things for the world" or not. All people have that right, including, of course, the Palestinians. And when Brooks speaks of "stray" settler's "sitting", he glosses over an ugly fact: while most West Bank settlers almost certainly did "stray" into the settlements, drawn by promises of inexpensive real estate and government subsidies, a hard core of ideological settlers, including some in Hebron and the Hebron Hills, most certainly did not "stray"; they came with the purpose of claiming the land. And claiming the land, in this instance, means ethnic cleansing.

But Mr. Brooks and Mr. Goldberg have expressed a very important truth: the Israelis who dream of creating new knowledge and new products best embody the hopes of Zionists and of everyone who wishes Israel well. The handfuls of ideological settlers in Hebron and similar on the other hand, contribute little more to the world than the nightmare of sectarian conflict and slow-motion ethnic cleansing.

Speaking of an even deeper division and a greater evil in American life, Abraham Lincoln said "a house divided against itself cannot stand". The way of looking at life, and of living it, that drives the settlements in Hebron conflicts with the way of life in the Tel Aviv high-tech cluster in a fundamental way. These ideals cannot both define life in Israel; one of them will have to yield.

I have already made it pretty clear that I prefer the world view of the high-tech cluster in Tel Aviv. Aside from my own belief in the value of knowledge, and aside from the ugly violence the ideological settlers inflict on their neighbors, including children, I fundamentally disbelieve the idea behind many of the settlements: that the establishment of a Jewish state covering all the territory ascribed to it in the Bible will bring about some basic change in the human condition. I regard this as magical thinking, something at odds with not only the scientific world view behind Israeli technological achievements, but also at odds with most Christian and Jewish traditions. The idea that establishing dominance by force will somehow clear the way for the Creator to act in history, as some Jewish millennialists appear to believe, and as many "Christian Zionists" claim, makes human action, violent human action, a precondition for the divine response.

In other words, this ideology imposes human choice in a place which above all calls for humility. A magic spell or a computer program can embody the phrase "my will be done", but in appealing to the Creator, a prayer must ultimately say "Thy will be done".

Excuses and misdirection

2010-01-29T03:24:00.000-05:00

Dylan Reid has a post up on Spacing Wire, arguing that the law doesn't actually say you can't cross a street in the middle of a block. Since I have neither a law degree nor the facilities necessary to research this, I'll take his word for it, but I'll still make an effort to cross at the crosswalk.

Of course, that does not mean I'll feel safe at the crosswalk; I've seen too many cars sail through crosswalks, and, honestly, I have to admit I've gotten distracted and done it myself. The same goes for a multitude of other driving mistakes; they all endanger other road users, particularly pedestrians. The infuriating aspect of a blitz ticketing "jaywalkers" right after collisions with cars killed eleven pedestrians in as many days has less to do with the legalities, and more to do with the way a blitz ticketing pedestrians reinforces the motoring culture of excuses, entitlement, and impunity.

Like everyone in this city, I walk. I also cycle, like most of us, I take transit, and I drive. When eleven pedestrians die in as many days, and the police and the media lay a large part of the blame on the victims, that makes everyone less safe. Pedestrians do not have the same responsibility as motorists do. When I take a two-tonne steel bomb into a public place, I have the responsibility to ensure that I don't kill anyone with it. When I haven't had enough sleep, or I have alcohol, any alcohol or sedating drugs, in my system, that means I let someone else drive. The rest of the time, it means I use all my skills and concentration to make as sure as I possibly can that the convenience I get from driving does not come at the cost of someone else's life. I consider what I do the bare minimum that any responsible person who takes a motorized vehicle on the roads has a duty to do.

When the media promote the line that pedestrians always lose in a collision, presented as a concern for pedestrians rather than a dire responsibility for drivers, we all get a lot less safe. Because even if we didn't have to get out of our steel cages, even if we could live behind our crumple zones and air bags, we know car safety features will not protect us from the recklessness possible with a car. Everyone ~~can lose~~ loses in a crash.

This way lies madness...

2010-01-26T23:08:00.002-05:00

actually, I think we passed madness a while back. Sanity lies back the way we came. Well back.

Consider just one example. Toronto has a mayoral election this year, and the candidates include one Mr. Rocco Rossi. Mr. Rossi recently gave a speech in which he highlighted his transportation policy. In that speech, Mr Rossi vowed to cancel all the transit city projects he could, and "review" the bike lanes on major "arterial" streets. It would have made sense to ask whether or not this would work. How many streets does Toronto have going through the downtown core that planners have not classed as "arterial"? Given that Toronto already loses three billion dollars' worth of productivity to traffic congestion, what choices for moving people around to we have? Questions such as this have some actual relation to the needs of the city.

In fact, very little of the response to his speech addressed practical questions. The Globe and Mail's headline sums up what they focused on: "Rossi woos centre-right". This way of looking at politics has two things wrong with it. First of all, it detaches politics and political positions from any kind of practical reality. In fact, some policies work and others do not, some proposals make sense and others do not,and we can determine the difference by careful analysis and reference to the facts. Take for example Mr. Rossi's proposal for bicycle lanes; in Toronto, virtually no minor thoroughfares go straight through for any distance, so Mr. Rossi's proposal, as he reportedly made it, simply won't work. Thinking about policy ideas in practical terms keeps us in touch with the realities which policies have to address. Anchoring proposals to the political spectrum, which by definition people disagree about, creates a situation in which policy proposals inhabit an indeterminate world like that of Schroedinger's cat, nether alive nor dead, neither true nor false, neither sensible nor ridiculous. We all get to believe what we want. But the defects in pure partisan analysis go even deeper than this implies, because not only does our policy analysis end up with no relationship to reality, it also ends up with no discernible relationship with any political principle.

Twenty years ago, two colleagues introduced me to the idea of advocating for cycling and cyclists' rights; that cyclists did not and do not have to accept a road hierarchy in which we come well below cars and trucks. They also thought of Preston Manning and the Reform Party as a bit too liberal. Nobody then associated bicycle activism with either the left or the right. As a position, you accepted or rejected it on its own merits, and it had nothing to do with balanced budgets, or social morality, or anything but practical transportation. Some time in the last two decades, someone decided that bicycle advocacy belonged on the 'left'. And despite the overwhelming evidence that people from all over the political spectrum ride bicycles and advocate for cyclists' rights, we too often just accept that fatuous, nonsensical classification.

Accepting a prix fixe ideological menu, in which we get to pick a single point (left, centre, right) and have all our ideas and opinions instantly decided for us may save some mental effort, but that saved effort inevitably comes at the expense of a sane world view. In the end, if people vote for Mr. Rossi, not because they agree with his position on bicycles on the merits, but because they see it as "centre right", they will have thrown away one of their most precious rights: the right to cast an informed ballot.

Astronomy

2009-12-25T15:56:00.007-05:00

Four hundred years ago, Johannes Kepler worked out the motions of the planets around the sun, and discovered a mathematical basis for determining the location of any planet at any time in history. In doing so, he plotted the positions of the planets back to 7 BCE, and discovered that in that year, the planet Saturn had passed behind Jupiter. Because of the motion of the Earth relative to the other planets, an Earth-bound observer would have seen Saturn appear to merge with Jupiter, then reverse its motion and pass Jupiter again, then move in regular orbital motion once more. Astronomers and astrologers call this a triple conjunction; they occur at irregular intervals. The last one took place in 1981, and the next one will take place in 2238.

In the Middle Eastern astrology of the time, the planet Jupiter had an association with kingship, and Saturn had an association with Judea.To the astrologers of the first century Mediterranean basin, and probably to the Zoroastrian astrologer-priests known as the Magi, a triple conjunction between Saturn and Jupiter would have meant the birth of a new king for Judea, then ruled by a puppet king and a Roman imperial governor.

The basic unit of astronomic distance, the light year, indicates distances and speeds that we find difficult to grasp. A single light year contains over nine trillion kilometres; if every man, woman, and child on Earth traveled the distance between Toronto and Winnipeg, we would cumulatively have traveled about one light year. Yet we can see the Andromeda Galaxy, two and a half million light years away, with our own eyes; and telescopes can detect the light of objects even farther away. Darkness does not overcome light.

These things we know from observation and from calculation; what Ursula LeGuin called "number the indispoutable". Other things we experience; the sense that the birth of a child brings a chance for redemption and renewal, and experience of birth as a spiritual, rather than just a biological, event. And sacred writings handed down to us over the centuries tell us still more:

But the angel said to them, ‘Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is the Messiah,^* the Lord. (Luke 2:10-11)

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Will someone save these people from themselves?

2009-12-23T23:27:00.000-05:00

Last week I rented and watched The Queen, a superb performance by Helen Mirren as Elizabeth II struggling to come to terms with the changes in British and world culture that intruded into her life after the death of Princess Diana. In it, Tony Blair lets out a cry for someone to "save these people from themselves", after some particularly tone-deaf behaviour from Buckingham Palace.

That phrase sums up my response to the behaviour of the global environmental movement before and during Copenhagen. The conference itself, with its focus on long-range goals and dire threats a decade hence showed how not to address a problem in an international forum. It didn't help that a batch of emails that showed the environment movement and climate science in the worst possible light had surfaced right before Copenhagen.

George Monbiot took care to criticize the tone-deaf scientists who wrote up the climate emails. But if he wants to know why so many people eagerly bought the idea that these emails convicted climate scientists, and the whole climate movement, of fraud, he and fellow environmental campaigners should take a look in the mirror. Romantics who fantasize about "redefining humanity", or "changing our culture from the ground up" and forcing everyone into a life where less is more do more to convince millions of average people that their happiness and prosperity depends on cheap energy, and carbon emissions, than all the propagandists big oil and big coal can possibly buy.

Just to make things worse, Mr. Monbiot embraced the prospect of an alliance with NIMBY groups, not grasping (or not caring) that most NIMBY positions, as well as deeply inconsistent, also reflect the interests, economic and otherwise, of relatively privileged communities. The poor worry about literacy, schools for their kids, and jobs. The rich have the leisure and political influence to try to dump the airport on the neighbours.

If anyone really believed that introducing themselves as the people who will save us from ourselves would help the environment movement make progress, the fate of the Copenhagen Conference should give us all a clue that it won't. As someone who participated in one of the early green transportation experiments at the end of the seventies, I have three suggestions:

Get the engineers together and have them start talking about what we can accomplish. technically, right now. Not ten years in the future, now. We have the technology to build windjammers and use them for slow freight, right now. We have planes in the air, today, that produce about 30% of the global warming effect of high altitude jets. Solve the problems; make lifestyle change the absolute last resort.
Quit treating the issue as the supposed moral and philosophical failings of European culture. If you think life has a higher purpose than working for the weekend so you can head to Walmart and shop 'til you drop, make that case. Don't saddle the environment with all the hopes for personal, political, social and economic redemption you can't sell without the prospect of environmental apocalypse. The majority of the world doesn't live near a Walmart; their life savings would not buy a pair of fashionable running shoes, and they cannot afford to wait while we save the souls of over privileged Westerners.
Let us see this as a problem we can solve, a challenge, even, dare I say it, as exciting, even fun. If Kennedy had tried to sell the prospect of landing on the moon by telling Americans to make do with less, go dumpster diving, and lament their profligate ways, the moon landing would have gone the way of the Copenhagen conference. We could afford not to send a man to the moon. If the scientists have thier climate predictions right, we cannot afford to fail on global warming.

Lies I tell to soldiers

2009-11-30T16:52:00.000-05:00

I don't tell the lies directly, but politicians and poets tell them for me.

We will remember your sacrifice forever. Since we ask for absolute sacrifice from soldiers, sailors, and combat aviators, we offer them unlimited memory. But while many of us make an effort remember the men and women who sacrificed their lives on our behalf, wars fade into history, and thus, sadly, irrelevance over at most ten or fifteen generations. Since most of the young men we send off to die in war give up any hope of making a mark on the world by something other than their sacrifice, we owe them the truth.
You died in a noble and necessary cause. Most Canadian soldiers who died over the past century have died in worthy causes. But a dishonesty at the heart of this statement poisons it, because we would ask our soldiers to die even in bad cause. So many people just like ourselves have sent their children to die in manifestly unjust causes over the centuries that it would take extreme egotism to believe we would not do the same. I remember a Remembrance Day hymn from long ago: "tranquil you lie, your knightly virtue proved, your memory hallowed in the land you loved", that captures the problem perfectly. It implies that all soldiers fighting for a cause they love prove their virtue and earn the love of their compatriots. But in saying that soldiers who died for a cause they believed in deserve honour in memory, even if they died for Hitler's Germany, we contradict the argument that the soldiers we and our forbears sent to die did so in a noble, or at least a necessary, cause.
We will put an end to war after this one. Fewer politicians have told this lie recently; I do not know whether I should welcome a break from hypocrisy, or despair at the thought that so many people seem comfortable at the thought of war as a means of settling political disputes going on into the indefinite future. Whatever politicians today have taken to saying, though, millions of young men still lie under graves in Flanders from two wars which politicians promised them would end war. Every time we go to war either reluctantly or eagerly, we break faith with two generations of young men, who went through horrors so that we could have lasting peace.

I also tell soldiers two things that definitely are not lies:

Thank you for your service. While I wish fervently and work for an end to all war, I know that it will take hard work and struggle to accomplish it. How can I not honour the impulse that leads men and women to service and sacrifice?
I wish you safe return. May you come home whole in body and mind, to a warm welcome.

A religious argument for same-sex marriage

2009-11-20T19:34:00.004-05:00

A few days ago, I posted about the temporal argument for same-sex marriage. Since the secular debate about same-sex marriage in Canada has pretty much ended, I thought I would take on the more important issue that still faces Canadians and others of faith: what does the Creator, who created us man and woman, but quite possibly also Gay and straight, wants for us.

I believe this: the Christian church should affirm and give thanks for loving and committed and caring relationships, same-sex and otherwise. In Mark 12:29-31, Jesus says: Jesus answered, ‘The first is, “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” The second is this, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” There is no other commandment greater than these.’ (NRSV) The Gospels make clear that no commandment can contradict these; that any interpretation of the scriptures that would allow us to act in a less than loving manner to our neighbour must necessarily contain an error. Luke records Jesus's answer to the question "who is my neighbour?" with an answer that takes us to the heart of the question: what does the Creator want us to do for one another. He says (Luke 10:30-37, NRSV) "...a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii,* gave them to the innkeeper, and said, “Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.” Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?’ He said, ‘The one who showed him mercy.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Go and do likewise.’ In other words, Jesus sets the standard of love for neighbour as practical compassion. Nor does Luke speak alone here: Matthew, in one of the few places where the gospels record Our Lord speaking in uncompromising terms of condemnation and judgment, says that Christ will call out as blessed those who have visited the despised and the outcast in prison and in sickness, shared food and shelter with them, and by doing so will have done so to Him. (Matthew 25:31-46)

What does this mean when we confront someone in a faithful, committed relationship with someone whom they deeply love, asking for our blessing? Consider the parable of the Good Samaritan, the summary of the law, or Jesus's teaching us about how He will judge the nations: these lessons do not suggest to me that we should say to people, sorry, you do the wrong thing with your pelvis, and the person you love has the wrong chromosome. And I emphasize once again: these lessons go to the heart of the Gospel message. Mark and Luke both drive home the point that the Great commandments of Deuteronomy 6 and Leviticus 19:18 make up the heart of the Christian ethical message. I do not believe that condemning two people in a loving relationship accords with the spirit of these commandments, or with Jesus's teachings about them.

A field guide to dud arguments: the temporal red herring

2009-11-19T17:39:00.001-05:00

A long time ago, I used to participate in a usenet forum on capital punishment. That experience gave me an up-close view of all the common logical fallacies, and I eventually developed a list of "dud" arguments: arguments made (by both sides) which contained one or more logical fallacies.

I hope to make this the first of a series of web-log posts exploring bad logic as I encounter it today, in issues of municipal government, in provincial issues, and national and international issues as well.

Over the past year, I have repeatedly heard variants of the phrase: "you can't turn back the clock". It frequently appears in arguments about modes of transportation, where opponents of cycling have attempted to paint the bicycle as a "nineteenth century" mode of transportation, and advocates for "developing" Toronto's port lands have attempted to argue that marine transportation has likewise had its day.

Like all really good duds, this argument does not advance a simple falsehood, so much as fail to apply an important truth in a clear manner. As circumstances change, the solutions we use logically have to change as well. And since all change happens as a function of time, we easily gravitate to the use of time as a substitute for change. But an argument based on nothing but time, such as referring to a technology as "nineteenth century", with the actual changes that have taken place since the nineteenth century unmentioned, qualifies as a dud. Arguments against relying on bicycles for transport may exist, although I have yet to read any good ones, but the words "nineteenth century" do not, in any sense, qualify. The same holds for marine transportation, and many other technologies and customs. The changes that time brings may indeed create good arguments for doing (or not doing) things in a certain way. The passage of time itself does not.

A disturbing juxtaposition

2009-11-12T17:17:00.001-05:00

A motorist beats a cyclist so badly the cyclist loses a tooth. A passing class catches the incident on video. A judge acquits the motorist, on the ground that the cyclist impeded the motorist's "right of way", and the motorist feared the cyclist might "assault" his car.
David Chen, a shopkeeper in Kensington market apprehends a serial thief who has, earlier that day, stolen sixty dollars (almost a day's wages for one employee) worth of merchandise. The crown charges him with assault, forcible confinement, and kidnapping.

These two decisions seem troublesomely inconsistent. Our society might decide that citizens must never use force against one another under any circumstances; that even a shopkeeper, working on thin margins, may not use force against thieves who torment him. But in that case, a motorist would never have the right to use force in the case of a minor traffic dispute.

Alternatively, we could decide to allow citizens to use "reasonable force" to defend their right of way and their vehicles. But if a motorist has a right to beat a person merely out of a concern that this person may dent his car, surely a storekeeper has the right to use force against a person who has actually stolen from him.

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms speaks of not bringing the administration of justice into disrepute. But those who administer justice have to do more than simply avoid dishonesty; they have to follow a consistent set of rules. They have to give those of us whom the system purports to protect reason to believe that if we act in good faith, and follow the law as the courts have interpreted it, we can expect the police and the courts to uphold our rights, whether we suffer an assault or stand accused of one. If the courts, meaning judges, crown attorneys, and the police, do not follow consistent principles, then people will simply stop relying on them.

November 11

2009-11-11T08:19:00.002-05:00

To begin at the beginning: Basil Launcelot Cumpston, my great uncle, fatally wounded near Bullecourt, 1917; John Cox, my cousin, died in when his Dakota went down in Myanmar, 1945. George Weber and Tom Fox, CPT colleagues, died in Iraq, 2003 and 2006. Andrew Olmsted, a US Army major and a web log author I admired, died Iraq 2008. Relatives, colleagues and friends who have sacrificed their lives for a better world link all of us to war, and we have come around, once again, to the day of the year which we set aside to remember them.

The hardest part of remembering is reconciling our debt to the men and women who died with our determination to avoid sending our own children to die in the future. I and millions of others can say of our relatives who gave their lives in the Allied Cause during the Second World War, that they died in a noble cause. But then we come face to face with an uncomfortable truth: good men and women only die in noble causes because bad men find it easy to trick or force people to kill, and die, for bad causes. If so many men had not followed Adolf Hitler and Hideki Tōjō, millions of men and women would not have had to go off to war. And facing that truth, too, we confront another: advancing the noble cause Allied soldiers, sailors and aviators fought and died for required years of struggle that went on years after the war and well beyond the borders of Germany or Japan. The militarism of Imperial Japan or the genocidal fury of National Socialism were only extreme cases of racist ideologies that stained all Western societies. Denazification did not only happen in Berlin and Nuremberg; Martin Luther King's march on Selma, decolonization in Africa and Asia, First Nations struggles in Canada, all formed an essential part of the process which, we can hope, will prevent genocidal fascism from ever rising again.

The clash of arms only begins the process of building a better world. If we carry on most of the work without violence, we must still commit to it, give our all, and accept the reality that humanity will never move forward without struggle and sacrifice. And so today we will remember those who struggled and laid down their lives, whether with guns or with empty hands. And we too will pick up the task they laid down, and do our best to carry forward the work of building a better world.

A practical and secular argument for same-sex marriage

2009-11-09T16:57:00.001-05:00

After the voters of Maine rejected same-sex marriage, a majority vote that restricted the rights of a minority, and one commentator has even suggested that majority vote determines the truth. It doesn't. And in truth, we have very good arguments, both practical and secular, as well as ethical and religious, that same-sex marriage makes sense for Gay and Lesbian people, and we should support it.

The simplest, and I believe the most compelling, practical and secular argument for supporting same-sex marriage goes like this: the alternatives don't work. We have tried the only alternatives to accepting and celebrating same-sex relationships: special status and repression, and both have failed catastrophically. Repression of Gay and Lesbian relationship through laws restricting acts of love between adults no longer passes constitutional muster in the United States (and nobody has even tried to get such a law past the Canadian Charter of Rights). But legal rights aside, repression has had such disastrous results that no responsible government, tasked with preserving a working economy, would engage in it. Consider the case of Alan Turing, the mathematician who laid the foundation of computer science, and later put his discoveries to work constructing the computers that broke the Nazi enigma codes. In 1952, the British police discovered he had a gay relationship, and hounded him to his death. That single act of misplaced morality cost the British the services of one of the twentieth century's great geniuses, and probably any chance at keeping the lead in computer development. Killing Alan Turing probably cost the British economy a trillion pounds over the last half century. Quite apart from the monstrous cruelty of the treatment Turing suffered, millions of other people lost opportunities because of what the British authorities did to him. Neither government nor industry will take these risks today, which explains why private employers moved ahead of governments in support of committed same-sex relationships; they want to attract and keep skilled and talented workers.

Most opponents of same-sex marriage no longer even try to defend the history of repression; they appear to accept the ugly images of police harassment and humiliation of Gay men and Lesbians belong to the same lamentable past as the routine humiliation of women and racialized people. But they still insist that recognition of the rights of Gay men and Lesbians must stop short of marriage. Regardless of the ethics of insisting that any group of people settle for second-class status, the status of outsiders for Gay men and Lesbians has not worked out well. Equality, after all, carries with it responsibility; if we choose not to accept Gay men and Lesbians as equals, we diminish their responsibility to the rest of us. We can hardly blame those we deny the institutions that foster permanent connections for behaving promiscuously. A line from the heartbreakingly beautiful movie Outrageous! contains a reminder, grim in hindsight, of the days of irresponsible promiscuity, when one character says to two handsome young men: "I'll have to take both of you; I'm too horny to make up my mind." In 1977, it seemed that the Gay community could indulge such behaviour; it seemed that the straight community could keep marriage as "our" institution, and indulge a sense of superiority into the bargain. Today, we know we never had that luxury: if we exclude anyone from the rights and responsibilities of life, everyone faces the consequences.

Today, it seems that the best way of expressing those responsibilities, and the sense of belonging that comes with them, comes with participation in, and affirmation of, marriage. To deny Gay men and Lesbians this choice seems, in the end, a self-defeating choice.

NIMBY without the varnish

2009-10-13T20:45:00.000-04:00

Downtown Toronto's local paper, the Bulletin, thinks Porter Airlines belongs at Pearson International Airport. No surprise there; they have generally opposed operations at Toronto City Centre Airport. But they make their case for an alternative in unusually bald terms: Porter belongs at Pearson. Their stated reasons have a well-worn ring to them: they refer to air traffic as a "blight", and they term the waterfront "residential" and "tourism oriented".

Calling the waterfront "residential" begs the question: what about the people who live near Pearson? Anyone with access to Google and the Canadian census (now on the web, although you have to work a bit to get the data) knows that 58,000 people live in the neighbourhood directly across the road from Pearson Airport, with houses considerably closer to the Pearson flight paths than any dwelling on the central waterfront comes to the Toronto City Centre Airport flight paths. If people live near Toronto City Centre Airport, which will at most handle 3% of Toronto's air traffic load, and people live near Pearson, which handles the other 97%, what makes imperative that we relieve the downtown neighbourhoods of any burden at all, and shunt it off to the people of Rexdale and Malton? The argument from tourism rings hollow; considering how many tourists get to their destinations, people who live near an airport have something to do with tourism as well. The Bulletin's argument seems to suggest that the downtown deserves all the jobs and the urban beautification that tourism brings, while Rexdale and Malton should get all the noise.

Needless to say, I disagree. I suspect most people who live under the Pearson flight paths would disagree. And I hope the more preceptive of the people who live on the downtown waterfront see they have more to gain from a city that at least tries to share environmental burdens than they have to lose by putting up with 3% of the air traffic that keeps this city wealthy and culturally vibrant.

...how much can you blame them?

2009-10-12T15:17:00.000-04:00

The Obama administration would very much like to resettle the Guantanamo detainees their predecessors picked up in error; the innocent people (mostly men) caught in the backwash of the badly misnamed war on terror. In the frantic early days after 9/11, when so many of us thought al Qaeda had the resources to mount a whole campaign of terror against the United States, a terrorist was a terrorist if his uncle, or his tribal leader, or the bounty hunter who showed up with him in Peshawar or Kandahar said so. We all know the result that the Obama Administration wants us to help make up for.

And we ought to. We took part in the war on terror. To the eternal credit of our government and especially of M. Chretian, we wanted to see it waged sensibly, but we had, and have, troops and special forces in Afghanistan and ships in the Indian Ocean. Some of the people taken into custody by our forces almost certainly ended up in Guantanamo or some other, even more secret prisons. We didn't make the mess, but we helped. So why not help do justice now?

Well, for exhibit 'A', meet Janet Napolitano, the secretary of Homeland Security for the United States, who eight years after 9/11 thinks Mohammed Atta and his fellow evildoers entered the United States over the Canadian border, and who has invoked that misconception in defending the expensive and highly disruptive program to require passports from all travelers at the US/Canada border. For exhibit 'B', consider Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen shipped to Syria by the Americans (with the apparent connivance of Canadian officials). The Americans have banned Mr. Arar from their country and their airspace, and still refuse to tell the Canadian government why. If Canadians have a real problem with the persistence of myths in the American public discussion, and if Canadians find the American government less than transparent in the war on terror, we have reason to.

And thanks to another ideology many leading Americans hold dear, the idea of the global economy, any Canadian government that fails of the border file has a lot to lose. We embraced continental economic integration with the Free Trade Agreement, and later extended it with NAFTA. Whether that made sense or not, we now have a fully integrated North American market. Should some American demagogue take advantage of the presence of the remarkably persistent myths of 9/11 hijackers coming from Canada, compounded by any so-called "gitmo terrorists" we accept to severely restrict the border, both countries will get shot in the foot; but the US, a country ten times as big, will take a lot longer to feel the pain.

So much as I like and admire President Obama, and as much as I consider Steven Harper at best a placeholder in the Prime Minister's office, I still have to admit that our government has real reasons not to want to take any Guantanamo detainees.

How issues work

2009-10-10T18:26:00.034-04:00

Recently John Lorinc, a columnist with whom I often agree, raised the possibility that the cycling plan might emerge as one of the decisive issues in the 2010 campaign for the mayor's office. A year before the election, the decisive issue has yet to emerge, but clearly some conservative pundits and prospective candidates have started sniffing at possibility of making cyclists that issue. From time to time, a trial balloon floats by on the breeze; a reference dropped into a speech here, and column or two there. With all of this, John Lorinc fears, and a few people presumably hope, that some conservative will ride (pardon the pun) a denunciation of cyclists straight into the mayor's office.

To understand whether this will happen, and for cyclists to prevent it from happening, it might help to look carefully at the way issues work; how people make decisions based on particular political promises. David Miller did get elected mayor in 2003 largely on the strength of his promise to cancel the bridge to Toronto City Centre Airport, but why did that promise work for him? The common description of the bridge as a "wedge" issue doesn't fit very well. A wedge issue, according to the usual definition, splits your opponent's supporters. In Canadian politics, the gun registry functions as a wedge issue: it separates the worried urban middle class, that likes tough on crime policies but doesn't like guns, away from rural conservatives. For years, the gun registry made it politically impossible for conservatives like Stockwell Day to make common cause with anti-crime activists like Priscilla deVilliers. You have a wedge issue when two halves of your opponent's coalition (or potential coalition) will die on opposite sides of the same hill. But few people in the coalition behind Barbara Hall or, as far as I know, John Tory coalition wanted their candidate to persist in supporting the bridge if it meant defeat.

His stance on the bridge did not so much split David Miller's opponents as attract supporters to him. But how did opposition to the bridge work for him? Looking back on that year, I think the bridge and the airport brought David Miller's campaign two things: an issue that influential segments of civil society coalesced around, and a symbol. The idea of a bridge over the Western Gap offended boaters, an influential group in Toronto politics and society. Meanwhile, Toronto's Medical Officer of Health had concerns about the effects of aviation-related emissions on the waterfront. As a result, at least two large, elite groups came together in opposition to the proposed bridge, and their support had nowhere to go but David Miller's campaign.

Meanwhile, the coalition campaigning against the airport and the campaign to elect David Miller, both together and separately, worked to paint the bridge as a holdover from the Lastman years, and a product of corrupt lobbying by an unaccountable financial elite and a remote and uncaring Federal government. They worked to portray opposition to the airport and the bridge as a symbol of commitment to a livable city as opposed to a profitable business community.

The symbolism had a darker flip side, whether David Miller and his supporters intended it or not. Since the 1970s, a basically conservative elite governed Toronto by consensus. They had a positive influence on the city, exemplified by the "tiny perfect mayor", and later Conservative MP David Crombie. As immigration reshaped Toronto culturally, racialized communities, with their own issues and needs, migrated to the ring of suburbs around the city. The concentration on an issue of greatest interest to the central waterfront neighbourhoods signaled that the wealthy, educationally privileged "creative class" that dominated Toronto politics for thirty years would continue to shape city politics for some time to come.

What does this mean for cyclists?

For one thing, it suggests we do not need to panic. Most of the conditions that made stopping the bridge into a winning issue for David Miller do not apply to the attempts to make cyclists an issue. The well organized segments of civil society that opposed the airport bridge do not oppose cycling, and we may actually count on support from some of them. That leaves the risk that some demagogue may try to harness the inarticulate resentment some motorists feel against cyclists by attaching a meaning to it. While I do not like to underestimate risks to the cycling community, very few politicians have the talent to harness inarticulate resentment. Certainly, David Miller never did: he had strong and solid community groups pressing for a clear and limited measure. Nor have David Miller's failures turned the whole population of Toronto into clones of Mike Harris. The city as a whole remains progressive, concerned about livability, and receptive to anti-pollution measures. As a cyclist, I believe in staying engaged and concerned, but I do not expect opposition to my bicycle to emerge as anyone's winning issue.

Why do we do this to ourselves?

2009-10-01T11:36:00.000-04:00

Today, CTV News put the headline "American legislator calls Canada 'parasitic'", with the attached story, on their front page. Clicking into the story, I discovered that Dr. Carolyn Bennett, a Liberal MP and medical doctor, had testified before an American house committee, and one of the minority (Republican) members had regaled her with codswallop about how the US does all the world's medical innovation. He didn't even single out Canada; he threw France in with his list of so-called "parasites" as well, although I seriously doubt the French media will take much note of what he said.

Why do we? Why do Canadian media seem to highlight negative comments about Canada by American Senators and members of the House, no matter how minor or marginal? I remember once CBC had an aide to Senator Helms trashing Canada's engagement with Cuba. I remember thinking that it would surprise me very much if any American network would give a second of air time to this ranting minion of the most controversial (read widely disliked) member of the American senate. Yet our national network duly gave him time and attention.

I think Canadians should pay serious attention to informed, intelligent criticism of our national policies. I do not think we should pay attention to comments just because a US legislator utters them. We should definitely have a conversation about Canada's contribution, both historical and ongoing, to medical innovation world-wide. If we discover that we don't contribute enough, we should increase our funding, and find ways to improve the incentives we offer to innovators. We have had this conversation before, in many respects, it goes on all the time. But we don't need to define ourselves by what other people say, particularly when those people have their own agenda: in this case, a health system that siphons 16% of the wealth produced by the world's largest and most productive economy, and delivers no more than medicre results.

Gentle angry people

2009-09-06T07:03:00.001-04:00

The Star called it a "protest". The CBC, more accurately, called it a memorial.

Last Tuesday, like many other Toronto cyclists, I learned of the death of Darcy Alan Sheppard on one of Toronto's main streets. The next day, Wednesday, I pedalled downtown to take part in a memorial ride. I regularly take part in these rides; indeed, I ride in them much too often. This time, the extreme violence on the incident made it more compelling for me to attend. As I approached Avenue Road on Bloor, an increasing number of cyclists joined me. I spotted a cycling acquaintance from my end of the city, and expressed to him the incoherent grief and anger I felt. A knot of cyclists and cycle couriers had gathered at the actual site of Al Sheppard's death, and I worried for a moment that I had missed the actual ride. I asked a cyclist if people still planned to gather for the ride at Bloor and Bay, then rode, past an officer talking to a cyclist, and over to Bay. I looked on the wrong corner for a moment, saw very few cyclists, then noticed the south-east corner of the intersection, the open space in front of the Manulife Centre. Bicycles and riders covered every inch of it. I felt deeply moved, and the phrase "We are a gentle angry people" came to my mind.

A short while later, the ride began; we first rode east to Yonge Street, then south. As we rode down Yonge Street a thousand strong, bicycle police held up traffic on the side streets to ensure the safety of the ride. We turned west on Queen, and as we passed the cenotaph in front of Old City Hall, the trumpeter who often rides with us sounded the notes of Last Post. In a ritual four thousand years old, we sounded the horns in memory and honour of our dead. The ride went as far as University Avenue, where we turned north toward the place where Darcy Alan Sheppard met his end. As we turned, the ride caught up with a young man riding north on University in a suit. He asked one of the cyclists about the ride that engulfed. We explained, and I added another phrase that came to mind. In JRR Tolkien's The Two Towers, Gandalf explains that the two Hobbits Merry and Pippin have come to the forest of the Ents, the great tree shepherds, and adds:

A thing is about to happen which has not happened since the Elder Days: the Ents are going to wake up and find that they are strong.

Then we returned to the corner of Avenue Road and Bloor. First, we raised our bicycles in a salute to Dacy Alan Sheppard, then we observed a moment of silence. I saw the young man in the suit had stayed with us, and I thanked him. Slowly, the crowd thinned out. An ambulance came along, and we quickly cleared a lane for it. Then the police told us we could keep one of the lanes of Bloor, but they needed to open one eastbound lane. I decided to head for home.

What is it with the end of August?

2009-09-02T06:32:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, running errands on my bike, I rode West on Dundas West, when a small Golf came up on my left side and then abruptly turned into the parking lot. I braked hard, and as my bike skidded forward, the car turned right into me. The side of the car pushed against my leg and pressed my bike into the kerb, but as we converged at a sharp angle and I had nearly slid to a stop, I got out of it unhurt, and my pedal didn't even scratch the car door.

Not a bad outcome, for me; another Toronto cyclist fared far worse, but still, what is it with the end of August?

Time, space, and the suburbs

2009-08-06T21:55:00.004-04:00

Last week I saw a movie at the Cineplex Odeon Queensway, a huge multiplex in Etobicoke. I have often enjoyed two pieces of sculpture on the property: a metal canopy by Jean McEwen entitled Between Heaven and Earth, and a soaring spiral tower (I don't know the artist's name or title) that has a weird resemblance to Tatlin's Monument to the Third International.

On this visit I noticed something I hadn't seen before: a row of beautiful old maple trees lining the parking lot to the northwest of the theatre. They were evenly spaced, with trunks I would guess about two metres around, and generous , spreading branches. From the leaf shape I think they were some less common type of maple, maybe mountain maple or striped maple.

I found it intriguing to speculate about who had planted them in such a regular way, and why. Had this row of maples lined the driveway of some vanished farmhouse? Unlikely, since there was no answering row of trees. Were the maples planted by some enlightened factory-owner to provide shade for picnicking workers at lunch? More likely, especially since this was, I believe, an important area for defence industries in World War Two. Or were the trees planted by the municipality to line a street, now swallowed up by the entertainment complex?

In any case, the trees provided a graceful link to an earlier time, a puzzling yet powerful reminder of the existence of the past amidst an instant landscape.

My second experience, somewhat related, occurred today. I visited Woodbine Racetrack (again, in Etobicoke) for the first time, accompanied by young lady, in order to watch the races and bet on the horses (we bet $40 and won $32, not a bad price for an afternoon's entertainment for two). The race track forms part of a very large complex. The building that houses the stands is a large, modern facility, impressive in many ways, with its horse-themed photomurals and super-efficient staff.

However, in some ways the building's slickness made it seem more like a mall--one felt this especially in the food court. It didn't have exactly the kind of rakish excitement that I associate with horse races in old Hollywood movies.

What fun then, to step out of the sliding glass doors, and find just the kind of simple, uncomfortable, outdoor stadium seats that one might see in a 1930s drama. The racetrack designers made a conscious design, in this part of the facility at least, to stick with tradition. We sat down, felt the cool breeze and we knew that our horse was going to win!

Drunk driving and the purpose of justice

2009-08-06T19:21:00.005-04:00

In sentencing Garth Drabinsky, Madam Justice Mary Lou Benotto clearly appealed to a widely accepted principle: that the punishment for a crime has purposes that go beyond just the offender. We jail murderers even if we believe they will never in their lives kill another person. We jail perpetrators of corporate fraud to make the point that, as Ms. Benotto said in her sentencing, society does not allow individuals to make their own rules. In other words, the law employs retribution as communication. The courts express the displeasure of society with harmful actions, they communicate our prospective disapproval to any other people who might find the behaviour tempting. So many authorities have laid out these foundations of retributive justice, the expression of our collective outrage at a crime, and the deterrence of others, that they hardly need repeating.

Models of justice other than retribution clearly exist, and have much to recommend them. In his book Dancing with a Ghost, Rupert Ross describes the First Nations understanding of justice approvingly, and notes that we have the justice system we do because "we live in a society of strangers." He clearly finds the First Nations concepts or restorative justice attractive, and quotes a First Nations elder: "we know you have a legal system; we aren't sure it's a justice system." I worked in prison literacy for a long time. I have shaken the hands of child killers and taken flowers to the parents of murdered children. I know some of the limits of the justice system. Retribution does not bring anyone back. It offers catharsis, or "closure", more often in fiction than in fact.

But I know this too: that the justice system makes no sense at all when it makes distinctions not between harms but between instruments. The law ought to discriminate between harm done by negligence and harm done by malice. But the courts ought not to make a distinction between a child killed by negligence with a car bumper and negligence with a Glock. I have read about drunk drivers leaving a trail of death and getting lenient sentences, and of defence lawyers allowed to argue before juries that "any of us" could have driven drunk and killed. From time to time, I read a variation of the bitter comment that if you want to kill someone, you can best do that by getting drunk and running them over.

It does not do to blame this state of affairs on the courts; the courts simply reflect a more general unwillingness to face up to the responsibility that operating a machine as potentially lethal as a car entails. We make excuses for drunk drivers that we would never make for someone who went into a convenience store to get the money and ended up shooting the clerk. Whether we want retributive justice or restorative justice, we should apply it fairly and consistently, and without regard for the instrument by which the criminal committed the offence. We should not have one law for a thief with a pry bar and another for a thief with a calculator and an account book. Similarly, we ought not to have one law for a killer with a gun and another for a killer with a car or truck.

Union buys future division to settle now...

2009-08-02T16:40:00.006-04:00

I don't think the mayor won this strike. And I know the people of Toronto, particularly the children who went without pools and summer programs, the students who went without jobs, and anyone within smelling distance of an "emergency" garbage dump lost. So quite a few commentators argue that the union won, that the city "caved". In the short term, that may very well hold true. But in the long term, the unions signed onto deal that prolongs the problems with the sick bank by postponing a resolution. In effect, union negotiators, and the members who ratified the deal, have kicked a problem down the road to their successors.

The city negotiators who first accepted a contract with the sick day bank provisions might have hoped the city would prosper enough to fund the eventual payouts with no difficulty. Unfortunately, the union should have no illusions about the problems that the compromise they have accepted will create. Whether future contracts come up for renewal in good times or bad, in every future contract the union will have to face the option of giving up the sick bank for all employees in return for a larger pay increase, or perhaps even a smaller pay cut. In other words, until the union finally accepts the end of the sick day bank, members will face the same choice at each successive contract: fight to keep the benefit for some of the workers, or trade it for something for all the workers.

Allowing a contract clause that keeps a perk for some workers but not others flies in the face of what unions represent; it creates a permanent division and conflict of interest in the workplace. That would cause enough trouble, but for the next few contracts, the greatest conflict will take place between new workers and those hired in the 1970s and early 80s. Given the demographics of Toronto, this means a conflict between a young and very multi-cultural cohort entering the work force, possibly with an actual majority of workers of colour, and a more "white" cohort nearing retirement. Unless the poisonous legacy of two centuries of modern racism evaporates over the course of this contract, CUPE has bought a serious challenge to solidarity over the next two years.

I don't call that much of a win for the union.

A bad week...

2009-07-26T16:00:00.004-04:00

One week ago, an irresponsible driver seriously injured five cyclists riding in a bicycle lane and then left the scene. Cathy Anderson, 45, Hilary McNamee, 26, Rob Wein, 35, Rob Harland, 45, and Mark White, 33, had all gone for a training ride in preparation for a half marathon. Their route, March Road, had a wide bicycle lane. Police investigators allege that 45-year-old Sommit Luangpakham plowed straight through the group at about 8:00 last Sunday morning. Police have charged him with leaving the scene of an accident, and will consider other charges as their investigation proceeds. As of the last news story available, Mr. Wein remains unconscious and in critical condition. Over the week following this horrible crash, at least two other motor vehicles have collided with cyclists.

I read about these tragedies and think about how easily they can happen, how but for the Creator's Grace I might end up on the side of a road, critically injured. At one of the ghost bike memorials I attended, one of the participants said "they kill us and they kill each other; what can we do?" I can think of many things we can do, but above all, I think we need to end the culture of entitlement that surrounds the automobile. When people comment on these stories, we read again and again that cars "always win" by simple physics; regardless of the law, a two-tonne car always beats a bicycle. Comments like this imply, or sometimes state outright, that motorists always ought to win because they have a big bomb. We will have a lot more peace on our roads when more people begin to understand that a bully with a car threatens the lives and peace of those of us who obey the laws as a bully with an Uzi or a Glock.

A scene from a garbage strike

2009-07-19T16:08:00.002-04:00

Our family has (so far, touch wood) had enough room to store our garbage, bulk composting, and recycling. It helps that we paid for the largest size garbage and recycling bins. It also doesn't hurt that we have had a (vegetable) compost bin in the back yard of every house we have owned during our marriage.

But a couple of nights ago, the raccoons severely tested our preparations. I don't know if CUPE 416 has made Toronto's raccoon population honorary members of the local, but the longer the strike goes on, the more opportunity the raccoons have to get fat and make a mess. They certainly got through the bungee cords we used to close our green bin, and made a terrible mess of our shed. To prevent a repetition, we bought an extra bin, some contractor-grade 3-mil garbage bags, and three lengths of chain. We now have all the garbage a raccoon can eat (or the raccoons might think they can eat) in bins closed with chains and screw shackles. We'll see if the varmits can open that.

Where do my sympathies lie? 10% with CUPE and 90% with the ordinary citizens of this city, especially the young, elderly, poor and vulnerable. The city management botched the negotiations as thoroughly as possible: their initial offers to CUPE went way past inadequate. In the context of the contracts with other city workers, to say nothing of the pay raise the councilors voted themselves, the city's offer insulted the members of CUPE 416 and 79. The offer essentially amounted to a pay cut, told the workers they contributed less to the city than other workers (less even than city council). I find it hard to forgive the incompetence of the city politicians, particularly when I contemplate how easily my family has gotten through this strike so far, and what having the pools closed must mean to a family that can't afford to buy their kids a season's pass to Canada's Wonderland.

But the behaviour of the picketers, and the angry reactions of the local when the city made its offer public, raise the uncomfortable question: when a public service union goes on strike, who have they struck against? The managers and politicians, or us, the public, generally?

The time has long since come for Toronto politicians to make a deal CUPE can live with, or at least to make a solid, decent offer. And when the city makes a decent offer, the time has come for the unions to take it. I and my family have the resources to ride out a long strike; not all residents of Toronto have such good fortune.

Notes on a walk...

2009-07-18T15:00:00.000-04:00

I went for a walk to get coffee. On Jane Street, just above Bloor, a crosswalk serves the students of St. Pius X school. I pushed the button, held up my hand-- and two cars promptly zoomed through the crosswalk. The first might have had an excuse; perhaps the driver found themselves too close to the intersection when I pushed the button. The second I can only fault for not paying attention (in fairness, most of us have committed this particular offence). I looked to see if the lights on the crosswalk had some problem, then waited until I saw vehicles approaching from both sides visibly slowing down.

I have often thought that if drivers need a reason, beyond the law and simple decency, for taking care at crosswalks, they should consider the following: because pedestrians face such serious consequences if a driver does not stop at a crosswalk, pedestrians will wait to cross until they see cars slowing down. That, of course, delays traffic. And the more drivers breeze through crosswalks, the more pedestrians will wait, just to make sure drivers have really prepared to stop. The more pedestrians do that, the more traffic gets delayed. So if you want to get somewhere on the roads in Toronto in a car, pay attention to the crosswalks and stop.

Notes on a ride

2009-07-17T08:54:00.001-04:00

I rode downtown yesterday in the heat of the afternoon, not the best idea for someone recovering from strep throat and with a heavy load of antibiotics on board, but going without riding for too long makes me nervous, depressed, and then I can't function. And right now, I need to work well.

On my way downtown, I passed a side street with a Purolator van coming out of it, and the driver pushed the stop sign. He didn't stop on the white line, he edged into traffic. That got me thinking that I had no way of knowing whether he saw me and would have stopped well short of my path, or whether timing alone made the difference between me scooting past him and me ending up as a hood ornament on his truck. Another white bicycle and another motorist saying they just didn't see the cyclist. And that got me thinking that car and truck drivers have to remember how threatening their moves can look to cyclists. In a car, I have a steel cage, crumple zones, and air bags to protect me. In a bike, I have about a quarter millimeter of cotton. So when you see a cyclist (or a pedestrian) heading your way, and you have a stop sign, stop. Stop at the white line. You may see us, you may intend to stop well short of our path, but we don't know that. And if you don't stop, we end up getting badly hurt or killed.

Then on Bloor street, I rode downtown in company with a cyclist who jumped the stop light at every intersection. He headed out when the light for the street opposite turned red, a second or so before the light facing us turned green. That made me think, too. Partly, I thought about the disagreements in the cycling world; we can't seem to make up our minds whether to obey the traffic laws, and criticize cyclists who don't, or whether we want to flout those laws. It also made me think this: the second or so pause in the traffic lights in Toronto gives traffic time to clear the intersection; it gives everybody breathing room. If you make a habit of jumping ahead the moment the other light turns red, you defeat the purpose of a safety feature.

Finally, I notice that several months after the city council voted for bike lanes on Annette, the parking signs still haven't changed, which means motorists endanger themselves and us by parking in bike lanes (with their cars sticking out into the high carbon emission lane).

What took you so long....

2009-06-28T13:01:00.010-04:00

...and have you really shown up?

Leah Sandals and Toronto Star reporter Murray Whyte describe the emergence of a new collective that calls themselves the "Creative Class Struggle". This group focuses on the flaws in the theory of the creative class, and the person of Richard Florida. I strongly support the first focus, but I have serious reservations about the second.

My reservations about making a particular university professor the focus of this enquiry involves two objections, one major and the other minor. The focus on a single faculty member concerns me, partly because I dislike a focus on one person on general principle, and partly because some the kinds of objections raised to Professor Florida's presence, his inadequate teaching load and his unconscionable salary, reminds me of other conversations in other places, part of a larger conversation that has gone around and around academia forever. Also, I do not believe Professor Florida represents a symptom of the problems in our society, or that any conceivable social change will dislodge him. Men and women gifted at expressing and affirming the hopes of their societies have prospered under every system known in history. From the praise singer of ancient culture to the Bards of pre-Christian Europe to theoreticians who found their place in the Soviet Nomenklatura, I cannot think of a society in which writers and thinkers have not both prospered and provoked rivalries.

But the greatest problem with the focus on Professor Florida lies with the way this focus distorts his relationship to our city. Richard Florida did not come to Toronto to make it in the image of his ideas; he came because the city already expresses his ideas, and has done so for some time. I would argue that if we want to make a serious try at addressing the influence of Dr. Florida's ideas, we have to address the way our city expresses them. And we'll know we have done the job right if it makes us very uncomfortable.

To start with the obvious, well before Richard Florida came to Toronto, our current mayor, David Miller, called the industrial waterfront a "wasteland", and declared that the skilled workers, the pilots, aircraft mechanics and others who work at Toronto Island (City Centre) Airport should have no place there. The group most vociferous in their demands destroy the airport, Community Air, once made the connection between their demands and their vision of a waterfront reserved for the "creative class" explicit, claiming that failing to destroy the airport would imperil the waterfront's "potential as a major tourist, recreational, cultural, knowledge worker, and residential area serving the entire Greater Toronto Area.... Film makers, outdoor entertainment venues, restaurants, boaters and other recreational users, condo developers, and high tech businesses would all begin to flee..." (emphasis mine)

If we push industry and transportation away from the waterfront, where will they go? The city has a vision for that, too; for some time, transportation planners have prepared a special train to take passengers to Pearson International Airport from downtown. So does anyone live near Pearson? It happens that many more people live right near Pearson International Airport and its flight paths than live on the downtown waterfront. It also happens (surprise) that the people living in the neighbourhoods near (in some cases directly adjacent to) Pearson have, on average, about exactly half the household income of the people living in the downtown waterfront.

This process got rolling long before Professor Florida ever arrived on the scene. He came because a large part of this city's official ideology suited him perfectly. When it comes to the ideology of the creative class, and the issues of privilege (at all levels), disenfranchisement (for a long time, some waterfront advocates refused to acknowledge that the people of Malton even existed, insisting that Pearson Airport had a large buffer zone) and equity in public policy.

But that raises a problem: many prominent leftists in this city actively participated in the efforts to socially cleanse the waterfront in favour of "clean" high tech, creative-class industries. If we want to truly address the ideas that Dr. Florida puts forward, we will have to look hard at why he found such a congenial home here, and that look will not necessarily feel comfortable or pleasant. If you truly want to take on these issues, then I very much look forward to exploring them with you. If you just want to scapegoat one successful academic, someone else will eventually come along and ask us to think about what about us attracted this individual.

Environmental fairness video

2009-06-21T18:57:00.001-04:00

Civic menaces

2009-05-20T18:49:00.003-04:00

Last night, at a meeting in north-west Toronto, at a school near highway 400 and Jane Street, community police officers encouraged the community to use their parks and other public spaces. When people assert their right to use a park, they said, the drug dealers and hoodlums find another place. They don't like the light and they don't like traffic and they don't like having ordinary people going about their lawful affairs near them.

Meanwhile, closer to the south end of Jane Street, near Jane and Dundas, the neighbourhood I live in has had four murders in the past three weeks. The police suspect three of these killings have some relation to gangs and drugs. One of them probably involved mistaken identity. The most recent murder victim in the area, a fourteen-year-old, attended my kid's school last year. Two of these killings took place within half a kilometre of where two friends of ours live. At the same time, a park near the south end of Jane Street, once alive in the mornings, now stands largely deserted. But the people who use this particular park don't fear drug gangs much. People have avoided the park because the authorities have it up. They have the place under high-profile surveillance. This does not reassure people in the area, because the authorities here have a target other than drug gangs or child killers in mind: dog walkers. City bureaucrats, apparently intent on their annual spring meddle, have sent by-law officers to crack down on off-leash pets. The park, once home to dozens of people in the morning, now stands deserted. Intrusive signs have sprung up, ordering people to keep dogs on leash and on the paths.

The police, who have to deal with actual crime, want Toronto communities to claim their public spaces. The city bureaucracy sends exactly the opposite message: these spaces belong to us, not you, we will decide how they get used, the neighbourhood has no voice, and we will punish anyone who violates the ukase from downtown. This has put the neighbourhood on edge. Nobody seems to know where this impulse to disrupt the informal mechanisms of our community came from, we don't know how to deal with it, and we don't know how to resolve it. We just know that where a pleasant morning activity that did more than most other things to help people get to know their neighbours used to happen, now we have high-profile surveillance (men in black trucks lurking and taking pictures) and an empty park.

Needless to say, I completely agree with the real police: we have no better way of preventing gang activity than building involved communities. But when city bureaucrats insist that only their regulations matter, that the hundred informal relationships that make a community work do not matter, they make this process far more difficult. More than that, they foster an attitude that pits the city as a whole against the local needs of neighbourhoods. When I first came here, I stood up for a policy designed to improve the environment for the city, the policy of intensive development in areas near subway stations so that people would not need cars. I got called "Judas" for it. I have begun to see where this NIMBY impulse comes from. If those who claim to represent the "city as a whole" regularly meddle and disrespect the informal mechanisms that keep Toronto's neighbourhoods civil, why exactly should anyone, support measures designed to benefit parts of the city we don't live in?

Environmental fairness

2009-05-15T06:54:00.000-04:00

The Globe and Mail quotes Cameron Doerksen, an analyst with Versant Partners Inc., as saying that because of competition from Porter Airlines, "WestJet... has actually cut back on capacity relative to two years ago." Capacity, in this case, means flights. Because of the establishment of Porter Airlines, fewer jets fly out of Pearson International Airport. Those of us who supported Porter on the grounds of environmental fairness, in the hope that traffic coming out of Toronto City Centre Airport might offer some relief to the people of Rexdale and Malton, who bear the vast majority of the environmental problems coming out of Toronto's use of air travel, may have seen the beginning of that change.

The Running of the Pugs!

2009-05-07T14:22:00.003-04:00

Every year, the Toronto Pug rescue organization holds an event called "the running of the pugs" to celebrate the joys and amusements of living with the noble pug. This video shows the 2009 running of the pugs. Enjoy.

If the dry cleaner asks...

2009-05-05T02:43:00.008-04:00

about those bite marks on the seat of Mayor Miller's trousers, he can tell them that his most fervent, and most demanding batch of supporters, Community AIR, ran out of patience with him. Again. The waterfront lobby claims they have never yet "gone public" with their frustration with Mr. Miller; that depends on what they mean by going public. Representatives from Community AIR have certainly seldom hesitated to make their desires known to the mayor and the city. And the limits of the mayor's ability to deliver have seldom failed to frustrate them.

Three stubborn facts continue to obstruct the members and supporters of Community AIR, and they remain stubbornly tone-deaf in their approach to these facts. First, the environmental effects of air traffic raise regional issues, and affect people in other cities beside Toronto. And that matters, because Mayor Miller will find it much harder to get support for initiatives such as regional transit if he has alienated cities on all sides of Toronto. The members of Community AIR can claim, as they did in their latest leaflet, that the aviation activities they find intolerable on the waterfront "belong" at Pearson International Airport. Community AIR, of course, has the freedom to claim that the aviation belongs at Pearson, and that the environmental effects of aviation belong in the ears and lungs of the people in Rexdale and Malton. But Mr. Miller has to get along with the politicians who represent the voters in Rexdale and Malton, as well as North Pickering, where the GTAA wants to build an airport. Community AIR can dismiss these people and their interests; the Mayor of Toronto, not so much.

Secondly, most of the airport lands belong to Transport Canada, precisely because in Canada we depend on our transportation system for our country's economic and political health. More even than most nations, we cannot do without a system of transport that includes aviation. And while Toronto City Centre Airport can only play a minor role in the passenger transport system, reliever airports, including Toronto City Centre, typically play a much more prominent role in the medical transport system, And Toronto City Centre Airport handles, on average, ten medical flights a day. Transport Canada has no intention of ignoring the needs of those ten flights, nor will they hand the city title to the airport property for nothing.

Community AIR has one thing right: their rhetoric helped make Toronto City Centre Airport an issue that David Miller rode to victory in the Mayor's race, over at least two candidates who would, in my opinion, have done a much better job of governing. But overheated claims do not stand the test of time very well. The jet fleets pictured on David Miller's election posters in 2003 never materialized. His promise to cancel the bridge to the airport cost a great deal more than a twoonie to keep, and now, as Toronto weathers a severe recession, the success of Porter and Bombardier's Q-400 turbo-prop offers one of the few industrial good news stories we have. For a few years, the rhetoric of David Miller and his waterfront supporters captured public imagination, but Bob Deluce provided actual jobs, actual service, and some very deft branding.

But the issue does not simply involve promotion or jobs. Community AIR and their supporters have made a great many contentious claims over the years, and a good number of them have not come true. Consider the claim, made by Community AIR in the 2003 election, that Deluce Turboprops might take the Don Valley VFR corridor to go north of the city. It didn't happen. Or consider the oft-repeated argument that travelling in a Deluce turbo-prop causes more environmental harm than driving a hummer. By my calculations, based on the published fuel consumption figures for various cars, and on the published fuel load and range figures for the Q-400, flying on a Q-400 releases just slightly more greenhouse gasses than driving a car with average fuel economy, less than driving a light truck or SUV, and very considerably less than driving a hummer. Rhetoric may attract public attention, but to keep it, you have to meet actual needs, and make environmental trade-offs that make sense.

Still, Community AIR had so much to do with the election of our current mayor, and enough people have expressed frustration with our current mayor over taxes and services, that Community AIR might hurt him by withdrawing their support. But who, and how, how do they intend to replace him? As far as I know, Community AIR does not have a bull-pen full of Mayoral candidates with great hair. And the arbiters of taste in Toronto have take to gushing over Bob Deluce. By continuing to insist on maximal demands, Community AIR and its supporters have set themselves up for a very likely failure.

Abuse on a schedule...

2009-05-02T02:18:00.004-04:00

Every spring, someone vents their rage at cyclists for violating the laws, both the actual traffic laws (red lights, stop signs) and the laws that exist only in their own minds (the ones that forbid us from filtering through stopped traffic because the sight of cheeky cyclists passing them annoys some motorists).

This spring, I find myself wondering if the papers that publish this nonsense might want, at long last, to move on. If the resentment some drivers feel at cyclists qualified as news once, it really doesn't any more. And reading the endless, dreary repetitions of the same set of grievances, I have to wonder if the papers might try to promote peaceful coexistence rather than fan the flames of resentment every year.

Yo, dude...

2009-04-06T05:23:00.002-04:00

have you seen my bike lane?

Bicycle lanes in Toronto tend to disappear for four months of every year, under the stress of snowfalls, the problems of driving and parking in winter, and the general reluctance of the police to come down hard on cars illegally parked during the winter. And on Annette Street, where the city council only recently voted to install a bike lane and the street repairs have barely finished, the lane scarcely exists at all.

But now spring has arrived, and the city has painted stripes in preparation for the hard-won bike lanes. But the old parking signs have stayed up all winter, and as of the first week in April, when I took these photographs, the city had not changed the parking signs to reflect the presence of the new lane.

I know that in the spring, the city's traffic engineers have to make good a lot of the damage done by frost and motor traffic over the winter. But it can't hurt to remind the city, in a gentle way, that some work remains on the bike lanes on Annette.

The self-destruct button

2009-03-26T12:58:00.000-04:00

Hilzoy, of Obsidian Wings, gets the essential paradox in the spectacle of investment bankers who lost trillions of dollars feverishly defending their bonuses:

If I were an investment banker making millions of dollars a year, I would be trying to convince the people around me to simply take the hit for a couple of years, the better to preserve our ability to go on raking it in in the future.

This raises the obvious question: why don't they do that? Whether you look on this as a matter of mass psychology, a matter of pure supply and demand, or a simple matter of justice, it doesn't matter. Employees who put their company in what amounts to government receivership can hardly claim to have "earned" large bonuses or even high salaries. The collapse of most of the investment banks on Wall Street means that many more traders need jobs than institutions need traders, so the logic of supply and demand argues for a pay cut. And the men and women of Wall Street made their money out-thinking the market; surely they can grasp the current public mood. So why do something that goes against their education, values, and experience?

A serious challenge to any idea will naturally tend to set up a particular dynamic among those who strongly believe in that idea: a tension between the impulse to allow our ideas to evolve, and a fear that compromise with an opposition will unravel them. Several factors can increase the rigidity with which partisans of an idea hold it: the perception that those who defend an idea derive personal advantage from it, or the perception of a connection between ideas that mean compromising one idea would lead to the compromise of other cherished ideas. Consider, for example, this story. I will credit the Vatican and the Brazilian Bishops with enough intelligence and compassion not to actively want a nine-year-old child to carry twins to term. I can only explain this judgement as an expression of fear, the fear that if the church gives any ground at all relating to abortion, they will lose all authority relating to reproductive rights and morality.

Yet nothing destroys an idea as quickly as rigidity. Rigidity confesses weakness. Strong ideas can withstand challenges. Strong ideas can survive compromise. When upholding the implications of an idea leads to harmful results, we generally insist on compromise rather than accept the harm, and good ideas can survive those compromises. We can take children away from parents who abuse them without compromising the ideal of parenthood. We can arrest corrupt politicians without compromising democracy. If the Vatican we cannot accept the actions of doctors who saved the life of a victim of child rape without having the whole edifice of their teaching on reproductive ethics crumble, then perhaps they should think about the apparent fragility of the ideas they teach.If bankers cannot cut their salaries for a few years to save their institutions and the credibility of the financial system, then parhaps they, and we, should reconsider the whole structure of economic inequity in our society.

New comments policy...

2009-03-20T23:35:00.001-04:00

Now that blogger allows for the moderation of comments older than a certain number of days, I have removed the moderation requirement on all posts seven days old or less. As before, we welcome comments from all perspectives, as long as the authors follow two simple guidelines:

Avoid all forms of abusive language. That means overtly racist, sexist, homophobic, and ableist language, personal attacks, and plain old profanity.
Do not post spam

If you write with reasonable civility and decorum, you can feel free to challenge us on anything. Not everyone agrees with this choice, but I have three reasons for it. First, I want to make this a lively and challenging forum if possible. To do that, I need people to read and comment. If I invite people to write, to add value to this web log, it seems to me that I have an obligation to give something back, and freedom does not seem to me too much to expect. Secondly, I want my ideas challenged. I have every expectation that they will survive, and if they do, I will have more confidence in them, and probably better arguments for them, than I did before. Finally, I believe I have a responsibility to respect everyone I cooperate with, and that doesn't seem, to me, to include trying to control people's ideas.

So, welcome. I look forward to reading everyone's comments.

No more bull market, and no more excuses for cheerleading it...

2009-03-20T05:19:00.001-04:00

Yesterday, the Toronto Star decided to run a column by Richard Cohen of the Washington Post. In it, Cohen objected to Jon Stewart's take-down of Jim Cramer. Mr. Cohen, apparently, has concluded that since the CEOs of companies like AIG and Lehman Brothers lost money of their own in the wreck, that nobody could have predicted the disaster.

Well, I have a link right here, to a blog post by a professor of ethics at John's Hopkins University, dated March 2007, just about exactly two years ago. In it, she looks at the subprime meltdown, and concludes, among other things:

Moreover, the whole business of collateralized debt obligations and similar financial instruments looks likely to contract in a pretty major way. If this spills over into the general credit market, as Nouriel Roubini argues that it will, we will have a credit crunch.

If an ordinary, educated observer with only the background in economics that most educated people with an interest in current affairs have, could write something like that in 2007, just what did the supposed legions of analysts and others at CNBC, and in the business press generally, do with their time between 2007 and the fall of 2008? The bloggers at Obsidian Wings did not have some unique insight; a lot of us looked at the numbers for the fundamentals of the American economy and found them worrying.

Mr. Cohen points out that the captains of this industry suffered personal losses, and suggests that this somehow justifies the failure of the business press to dig into the unfolding mess. Let us leave aside that when corporate leaders sell their stocks just before a crash, the government starts investigating concerns about trading on inside information and subpoenas, trials, and prison sentences often follow. Details such as that obscure the big picture: the leaders of the financial community obviously deceived themselves about the risks they took. That doesn't excuse the business press. They don't work for the CEOs, who have research staffs of their own. The business press works, or should work, primarily for the small investor.

I have no doubt Mr. Cohen actually knows this, but I'll say it anyway: a CEO with a (paper) net worth of two billion dollars can live more comfortably then 99.99% of the world's population after losing 1.9 billion. On the other hand, someone with their kid's college fund in the market who loses fifty thousand dollars has suffered a major reverse. So the business press has a more immediate and pressing moral obligation to the millions of small investors than they do to the few big-time gamblers.

And Jon Stewart spoke for these small investors.He spoke for the people who believed that their modest dreams, of educating their kids, of a good life in retirement, would also help fund the economy, and who got a rude shock when the markets collapsed, and a casino they had never heard of took all their money. Mr. Cohen should listen.

Talking about racism: to do versus to be

2009-03-18T05:39:00.001-04:00

This also applies to sexism, homophobia, and ableism. Everyone can have a lapse, and in fact, the way our culture works, it gets hard not to lapse into saying something you didn't mean to say. Our culture contains a lot of dark currents, and they get awfully easy to tap into, and then, often before people really know it, they've stepped into a deep dark pool that's lurked just under the surface of our society for generations. And then a lot of ugly assumptions come bubbling up.

For example, our culture has a lot of ideas about people with differences of various kinds as living symptoms of the vices in our society. We have people talking to themselves on the street because we have an alienated culture, or we have turned away from the true path, or we have the genocide of First Nations people in our past. In fact, most of the people who talk to themselves on the street have brains that work differently from those of the rest of us. But accept the idea that difference expresses and carries all the vague guilt so many people encourage us to feel, and some really ugly things can happen.

Or take privilege. We all value the ability to say what we want, and to strive for good things for ourselves and our families and our communities. And we've come to value local activism; in fact, many of us buy the green motto, think globally, act locally. But what many times, we look the other way when what happens globally works to our benefit, even if we would act locally to prevent those things from ever happening in our neighbourhoods. Plenty of people who would "act locally" to shut down an electronics recycling facility near them still buy the newest, greatest computer systems and ignore what happens when a truck takes their old system away.

That doesn't make us bad people, but it does make us people who have choices to make.

Liam Neeson takes us through a very bad script

2009-02-07T07:47:00.008-05:00

Sometimes I suspect other actors envy Dustin Hoffman most for getting a major acting award for reading the phone book in "Rain Man". While a great script produces a better product, a mediocre or downright bad script leaves the audience, and the critics, in no doubt about where the entertainment value of a film comes from.

Whatever I think of his decision to bring the script of Taken to life, he has certainly turned in a profitable film that appeals to a large audience and a reasonable number of critics; having seen it, I would say that he had no help at all from the script. At some moments in the film, I found myself literally carried along; the intensity of the performance kept me from noticing the absurdity of the situation. For example, early in the film, Neeson's character finds the identity of a member of the gang, locates him, and then proceeds to try to interrogate him in the worst possible place. This pattern in the script, of making the character relatively clever, subtle and methodical when the action requires it, and utterly foolish and impulsive at other times, persists through most of the film. That may work for setting up certain kinds of suspense, but it does not help us believe in the characters.

The dialogue doesn't do much to entertain the audience, either. The script serves up lines used a hundred times before, sometimes so out of context it hurts to watch. In the lead-up to the penultimate scene, I had to wonder if they really, really intended to do what they did, and then even the legendary acting ability of Liam Neeson could not carry me any further. I found myself thinking that Lloyd Simandl does this kind of thing better. But even as I alternately cringed or laughed as the script went from preposterous to absurd and the remaining minutes of the film ran out, Neeson's performance had a separate life. The script writer may have had complete contempt for the audience, but the actor never stopped giving us everything.

Europe actually has a problem with sex trafficking, one that has absolutely nothing to do with American kids getting kidnapped from upscale Paris apartments (any Albanian gang that decided to try that would find themselves in prison, probably with serious injuries, before you could say Natalee Holloway). A writer with more talent and conscience could have given us a much better film on the subject: made Maggie Grace's character an aspiring journalist, followed the macabre dance of the real slavers, their enablers and victims, the reporter trying to expose them, and the reporter's father in the shadows, ready to protect her and spring his own trap on the villains. Perhaps someone will make that film, or one like it, that tells something like the real story of human trafficking in twenty-first century Europe. And if that film gets made and opens people's eyes, some of the credit may have to go to the people who proved that a bad film about human trafficking could make money, and to the brooding actor who made that film work.

Haven't we spent enough time on this?

2009-01-29T00:02:00.007-05:00

I have to wonder how long the politicians in this city will continue doing face plants in an effort to cater to a well-heeled, articulate, and voluble interest group on the waterfront, that has now carried its losing campaign against Toronto City Centre Airport into its seventh year. Most recently, the city tried to levy a hefty tax bill against City Centre Airport, and a dispute advisory panel has ruled that the city can only tax the airport based on the number of passengers it carries. The city of Mississauga collects taxes from Pearson airport on exactly the same basis.

Needless to say, the politicians who want to close the airport want the taxes based on their claims about the value of the land, although in public they regularly claim that they want a park on the property, which would, of course, pay no taxes at all.

Surely the time has long passed to put the issue behind us. The waterfront dwellers, with their lobbyists and supporters, wanted environmental privilege; they lost. Bob Deluce started an airline that now stands as one of the few recent business success stories in Toronto. He won. Maybe we should just move on. Nobody can say the governments of Toronto, Ontario, and Canada do not have more important things to pay attention to.

Terror, courage, and justice

2009-01-26T08:41:00.003-05:00

President Obama's decision to lead off his term in office by bringing his administration into compliance with the law has led to some hyperventilating from some quite predictable quarters.

I have written elsewhere about my conviction that the use of torture undermines the foundation of Western freedom, limited government under law, in a way that nothing else can. Preserving that freedom takes courage; a people that writes their government a blank cheque in the name of fear will eventually lose their freedoms to a leader who promises security.

But giving up freedom out of fear of a few hundred plotters in al Qeada does not only denote a cowardice that ill becomes the children and grandchildren of men and women who endured the horrors of battle against the Third Reich. It also shows a rather pathetic inability to evaluate risks. Consider this: in the worst years of the crack epidemic, from 1988 to 1992, homicide statistics from the US Department of Justice suggest that conflict over drugs may have led to over 9000 additional homicides. During that period, young drug dealers indulged themselves in expensive cars and lavish pre-paid funerals. Too often, they used the funeral services before they could legally drive the cars. And yet, with all this mayhem, with almost three times the number of deaths caused by al Qeada's attacks on the United States, the American government never considered suspending the rule of law. The perpetrators responsible for drug wars appeared in courtrooms and enjoyed the rights of any criminal defendant. And the rule of law prevailed; even with the terrorist outrages of 9/11, fewer Americans died violently in the year 2001 than in any of the worst years of the crack epidemic.

So people who fret that a civilised nation and justice system cannot handle a few fanatics hiding in attics and scribbling in Internet chat rooms really need to consider their recent history. The justice process has handled serious bloodshed before, and it can do so again.

Rememberance and faith

2008-11-12T05:15:00.006-05:00

Yesterday, I stood with a crowd of people in the center of Toronto, at the cenotaph by the Old City Hall. We stood in silence awaiting the hour: the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, when ninety years ago, the guns fell silent. As the notes from the bell in the old city hall clock faded, a bugle played the haunting notes of last post, and a flight of four Harvard trainers passed overhead, just over the tall buildings of downtown Toronto. As the passed us, one pitched up and made a climbing turn westward, in that most moving of all aviation displays, the missing aviator formation.

I thought of memory, and how the custom of sounding horns in honour of the fallen probably dates back to pre-Christian times, when my forbears honoured Arawn, the hunter of the dead, consort of the Great Mother. I thought of the wheel of time. I thought, too, of this. Both my grandfathers took part in the Great War. They returned after the armstice, and eleven years after the eleventh day of the eleventh month came the birth of my parents. And politicians let go of the promise that my grandfathers had endured the mud and the horror and the death to end all wars, and Hitler plunged the world into another war even worse than the Great War. And eleven years after that war, my parents welcomed me into the world.

And I thought of this too: that if we continue to permit war, accept war, then we do not merely break faith yet again with those men who, ninety years ago, fought to end all wars. We break faith even more terribly with our children, because unless we make an end to war, they have no future. For our society has developed the means to destroy itself, and we know that, soon or late, those means will fall into the hands of someone in the throes of dark pain and hopelessness, or of unthinking belief. They will come, in other words, to someone who will use them. And then we shall have no civilization, and the Earth will no longer support it inhabitants, and if anyone survives, they will count themselves less fortunate than the dead.

Therefore, let us never dare remember the sacrifice without the promise that prompted it. Every day we let by without looking for a way to keep the promise given to those millions of suffering men, those ninety years and more ago, we break faith anew.

Felicitations to my friends and relations in the United States

2008-11-05T02:33:00.003-05:00

When I was seven or eight, one of the junior ministers in my church, in sleepy London Ontario, announced that he planned to travel to the American South for the freedom summer. My parents believed deeply in justice, so with their encouragement I got a quarter or so together, put it in an envelope, and gave it to him. I know the gesture touched him, because he said so.

Tonight, I went to a celebration in Dundas Square of the election of President Obama. Young people waved the Canadian and American flags together, something that I have not seen as that strong an affirmation of an American political development in my country for a long time.

Whatever comes, I want to remember this moment. Our societies, our nations, our people, can affirm each others moral achievements, and challenge each other to reach further, to exceed our accomplishments.

One day left...

2008-10-28T02:40:00.001-04:00

to send a message to city council if you want to support the Annette Street bicycle lane. Click on the link above to see how you can get involved.

Lessons from Annette Street

2008-10-12T14:51:00.008-04:00

Last Friday, the cyclists of this city lost the Annette bike lanes from Jane to Runnymede, and we lost badly. A back room deal trumped the efforts of those who came out to two public meetings and gave deputations to the committee. The outcome did not only short change cycling in this city, it insulted public participation. Those of us who rearranged our schedules, lost work, time with our families, or sleep to come out and speak up got the door slammed in our faces and had our voices trumped by lobbying and back room deals.

So what lessons should we draw from this?

We have a broken city government; unfortunately, just knowing that won't get us any further ahead.
Toronto politicians, for a mix of good and bad reasons, listen to the concerns of merchants. Since merchants fear the loss of parking as much as anything, plans for bicycle lanes will have a very rough ride if they do not accommodate the perceived need for parking. In some respects, this makes sense; a bike lane contributes much less than it otherwise could to a livable city if the loss of parking bankrupts local businesses and drives their customers to Wal-mart and other local big box complexes.
I draw a simple if less than pleasant lesson from this: we have three choices when it comes to pushing for bicycle lanes.
- We can find ways to accommodate merchant concerns about parking. We can run bicycle routes around commercial clusters. We can push to replace residential parking with commercial (merchant) parking. We can accept gaps and sharrows in the network.
- We can push, hard, for the facilities we need. That may make us disliked, because to get bicycle lanes, we will have to take away parking, if not merchant parking then residential parking. We would have to work to deprive some people of a level of convenience they have come to feel entitled to. We would probably have to use boycotts, and would certainly have to work very hard to defeat certain councilors.
- We can turn up at public meetings, as we have done, and continue to lose. I don't consider that a good option, but we seem to have chosen it, and we will have to make a conscious choice to do something else.

In the short term, we have to decide quickly whether or not we want to offer a compromise when we bring this situation before the full council. We have a good process argument against the decision, in the sense that cyclists got left out of the negotiations on the final proposal. But that argument works better if we can say we really would have negotiated. Certainly, if I had known that Councilor Saundercook would push for the installation of sharrows, I would have worked hard for a better compromise. If we take the position that we want bicycle lanes, we have a right to bicycle lanes, and we insist on nothing less, then council can reply that we simply reached an impasse, and the councilors did what they thought best for the city as a whole.

Belated Update, November 4:

I stand corrected; over 150 emails later, we have our bicycle lanes. And let us not underestimate the importance of this achievement, either. City council has traditionally chosen commercial parking over bicycle lanes, and this may mark the first time they deferred to community pressure (thanks to all who sent in the email messages or otherwise lobbied council). We can make change, and we don't have to back down.

Memorial ride today

2008-09-17T03:16:00.003-04:00

A memorial ride will take place to day at 6:30 (1830) to memorialize a cyclist killed on September 10. We will meet at Bloor andSpadina and ride to Trethewey Drive and Tedder Street.

Mourn the dead; fight for the living.