Drunk driving and the purpose of justice

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...

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...

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

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...

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

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....

...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

Civic menaces

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

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!

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...

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...

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...

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

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...

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:

1. Avoid all forms of abusive language. That means overtly racist, sexist, homophobic, and ableist language, personal attacks, and plain old profanity.
2. 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...

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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...

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

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?

1. We have a broken city government; unfortunately, just knowing that won't get us any further ahead.
2. 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.
3. 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

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.

Another Annette Bike lane meeting

Monday night, Bill Saundercook, the councillor for Ward 13 meeting to discuss bicycle lanes on Annette Street, and thanks to I Bike TO getting the word out, I and a number of other cyclists attended. City staff had presented three alternatives: bicycle lanes on Annette from Jane to Runnymede, bike routes along Ardagh to the south of Annette and St. John's Road to the north, joining the bicycle lanes at Runnymede and connecting to Annette at the Annette/Runnymede junction, and a bike-friendly curb lane with chevrons encouraging road sharing on Annette from Jane to Runnymede. For maps of what these might mean, see below.

Nobody in the crowd opposed bicycles or lanes in principle, although some clearly wanted to preserve the facilities for automotive traffic, and one or two asked questions about the volume of bicycle traffic on Annette. The meeting appeared to have a pro-cycling majority, with a few business owners concerned about their parking, and one or two people clining to the notion that cars will and must always rule the city.

Option 1: Bicycle lanes on Annette from Jane to Dupont

View Larger Map

Option 2: Bicycle routes diverting around Annette from Jane to Runnymede

View Larger Map

Option 3: Sharrows for Jane to Runnymede; lanes from Runnymede to Dupont

View Larger Map

Peeking over the Fence: a Dangerous Assumption

On the subject of Sarah Palin's controversial prayer for wisdom in the context of the Iraq war, Julie Ponzi writes:

No fair-minded person could read that as an assertion that our task abroad is certainly "from God." It is, rather, a prayer that the task will be a task from God, i.e., a prayer that we would do as God approves. It is, as she said, an invocation of Abraham Lincoln’s prayer that we might have the wisdom and the fortitude to do as God would have us do and not any kind of claim to special or privileged knowledge of the will of God.

This analysis makes a great deal of sense, but it interests me that many of the "movement conservatives" who explain what Palin's prayer "really meant" have apparently not thought through the implications. Sarah Palin's prayer implies that as an official of the US government she would act, first and foremost, as a humble servant of the Creator. If so, we can expect that many of the arguments made by secular conservatives about national interest and power politics would have no effect on her. Many of the neo-conservatives who have hailed her as the hope for salvaging the McCain campaign appear to assume that if elected, she will shape her faith to conform to their ideological needs and policy prescriptions; that she will claim, as conservatives before her have done, that American power by definition has the blessing of the Creator.

Anyone who assumes they can manipulate or predict Governor Palin's religious convictions would do well to read the history of people like William Wilberforce, John Newton, and the Great Awakening. They might follow up that with a look at trends within the American evangelical community. A clear understanding of that history will reveal something that properly ought to alarm the neo-conservative movement: the arguments of people such Jim Wallis and Ron Sider may well reach her more effectively than theirs.

Neo-conservatives and their allies the "national greatness" or "Jacksonian" conservatives share this essential error with secularist liberals: the delusion that social and political change can only come through a secular argument that both changes individual minds and harnesses the power of the government. But that overlooks the role of faith in all of the great positive paradigm shifts of past centuries, from abolition to civil rights. Those secular conservatives, and especially the conservative political operators, who think they can control the church and make Christian doctrine conform to their idea of the national interest simply haven't paid attention to either history or to current trends.

Link via Jim Henley.

Ten kinds of people...

There are ten kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don't -- computer programmer's saying.

I have an elegant watch with a black dial, white numbers, silver hour and minute hands and a red second hand. It keeps good time. My parents gave it to me, on the last Christmas our whole family celebrated together. More than anything else, I treasure gifts that say: I know you, because they celebrate connection. We could see each other, each shaped by a lifetime of struggle, always with the world and often with each other. We saw each other, as parts and as a whole. I knew my parents and they knew me. And I carry the proof on my wrist. The dial contains a visual pun: an analog watch dial with binary numerals. It says, clearly, that this watch belongs to a computer geek with a sense of irony, a relish for contradiction, for the complexities of life. As I said, my parents knew me.

Like many people, I have deeply ambivalent relationship with time. I do not understand it well, and what I do not understand I make my enemy, struggling hard, sometimes, to resist a flow I will never control or even really understand. And yet, sometimes, my life reveals a hint of what the wonderful phrase "in the fullness of time" tries to convey. Three years ago, I misplaced the watch. I searched and fretted for weeks. Then I settled into a belief that the watch would turn up again at the right time, that I needed to separate myself from the need to keep time for a while. While I never quite freed myself from the fear that I had simply lost the watch, I never gave it up for lost, either. A few weeks ago, I moved my office. When I dismantled my old desk, found my watch underneath it. A new battery, a clean crystal, and a new watchband later, it sits on my wrist. It reminds me of the way time passes, and it also gives me a powerful reminder of what time can never take away.

End the Impunity

In this country, or at least in this province and city, drivers who kill people can expect a light punishment, unless of course they kill themselves as well. Although the public appears to have no sympathy when reckless or drunk drivers kill themselves or their friends, we appear to have a distinct disinclination to punish the same kind of driving when people engaged in it kill other people.

While this seems inconsistent, it makes sense for people who want the law to overlook driving errors. If a dangerous driver kills himself or herself, showing sympathy would imply the need for a law to encourage people to behave responsibly. If they kill someone else, then we can expect to hear the argument that however egregious the offence, ruining the life of the driver at fault will not bring the victim back. These contradictory positions add up to a single effective demand: impunity for bad or even homicidal drivers. As a rule, you can expect that no matter how egregious the driving behaviour and no matter how many innocent people it endangers, someone will come forward and defend it.

I believe the time has come, for the sake of all road users, and to promote some kind of responsibility within automotive culture, to demand an end to impunity for dangerous and irresponsible drivers. Committing mayhem with a car should draw the same penalties as mayhem with any other lethal instrument, and the penalties should reflect the harm done, not the tool used. That means we should punish dangerous driving pretty much the way we punish dangerous shooting, and dangerous driving causing death the way we punish dangerous shooting causing death. I believe we need to start seeing the wheel of a car as an awesome responsibility, rather than a quick ticket out of the consequences of misbehaviour.

Ride blogging, First Day of School

With the first day of school for my young hopeful safely underway and errands to do on the waterfront, I took my bike out. The map below shows my route; click on the placemarks to see pictures and comments about where I went. For best results, click here to enlarge the map first.

To explode a myth...

From one point of view, Jim Kenzie shoves the viewpoint of the entitled driver in my face so clearly and effectively that he ought to raise my blood pressure. But in the current cycling environment, I mainly feel a sense of relief when I read his most outrageous arguments. Because he clearly shows the real face of Ontario drivers, not the imaginary drivers we see held up as the opposite numbers of cyclists every day.

Which imaginary drivers? The perfect ones. The ones who would never break the law, the ones who react with hurt puzzlement whenever a cyclist fails to come to a full stop at a four-way stop sign, the ones who react with justified outrage whenever a cyclist blows a red light. Where do we find these drivers? If you believe what you read on the web, you can expect to find them just about everywhere.

Read Mr. Kenzie, on the other hand, and you get the reality of drivers in this province and this city. You get a clear picture of those who speed in public, in the city, and then justify their recklessness on the grounds that people don't use the streets for anything but driving, as though the lack of a lively street life had nothing to do with their behavior. You hear the voice of drivers who will accept no limits on the speed they drive. You see the arrogance of the drivers who demand that we take their disrespect for the law as votes for changing it. What you see in columns such as Mr. Kenzie's defence of speeding, we see on the street, up close and uncomfortably personal.

Update: I see I have a fair bit of company here.

Ride blogging: last day of summer

I have decided to try an experiment in ride blogging. I provide an introduction explaining the purpose of the ride, and a map of my route, with the places I visited or photographed along the way. Click on the waypoints to see the story of my ride. You may find the map much easier to read if you enlarge it before trying to follow the line. Oh, and the ride starts at the bottom and goes to the top. Enjoy!

This first ride celebrated the last day of summer. I rode the Toronto bus and then my bicycle up to Canada's Wonderland in Vaughan Ontario. My family met me there, and together we spent a last lazy afternoon before starting on the fall round of school and more school.

I welcome comments on everything I write, but I would especially like to see any reactions to this way of telling the story of a ride.

Civility

MSNBC quotes a Jason Goldtrap as calling the practice of locking up people with mental illnesses and neurological variations “...an important element of trying to maintain civility." They then go on to quote him as saying "There is a place for mental institutions.”

Obviously, I disagree. I hope most people disagree. While I agree that many people with neurological variations such as autism need and benefit from supportive communities, those communities exist to serve and support those who live in them, not maintain what Mr. Goldtrap calls civility. I do not just disagree with what Mr. Goldtrap reportedly wants to do with people who have neurological variations and mental illnesses; I disagree with his very notion of civility. Long ago, my mother taught me that true civility has nothing to do with some magical realm where nobody ever harshes your mellow; civility, at its base, means concern for other people. When people make noises or act strangely out of neurological variations, they haven't behaved uncivilly themselves, since they have little if any control over their behaviour. But they do need us to act civilly, with concern and empathy, toward them. If we do that, we will have no need to institutionalize people with neurological or cognitive disabilities. If, on the other hand, we adopt a version of civility that makes comfort more important than empathy, we will all find ourselves under the care of big nurse (or big nanny) in time.

A Bad Idea Makes for Worse Policy

The early nineteen eighties saw the rise of a phrase to public prominence that most of us had not heard before: moral equivalence. Over the years, the users of the phrase back-formed it into a verb: moral equivalencing. Whatever form it takes, I consider this term one of the worst examples of the political abuse of language.

Moral equivalence, in its current sense, arose as a scornful label for the notion that moral standards apply to everyone equally, and therefore the crimes in the name of "anti-communism" ought to concern us. In the late 1970s, the phrase had a coherent idea behind it; some neo-conservatives developed the idea that Marxism had a uniquely corrupting effect that eliminated the possibility of any reform. This meant nations ruled by corrupt despots who took the American side could evolve into democracies, while nations ruled by despots who favoured the Soviets could not, and therefore we should not judge "friendly" dictatorships, and the atrocities they commit, by the standards we apply to "hostile" rulers. The events of 1989 to 1991 pretty well refuted this claim, but just as the Cheshire Cat disappeared leaving nothing but the grin, the idea behind moral equivalence has left the phrase as its only trace.

The phrase has persisted mainly as an indirect way of reinforcing or enforcing political identities. It implies, since a direct assertion would make the absurdity of the proposition unavoidable, that "we", however the speaker defines "we" cannot err. This kind of expression abuses words to prevent, rather than express, thought. It has serious effects on the quality of decision making in politics wherever people use it. Historically, the assertion of the moral equivalence of individuals and their actions underpins the rule of law, which asserts the wrongness of an action such as murder, regardless of who commits it and against whom they commit it. As a result, the use of the phrase "moral equivalence" when speaking of international relations denies the possibility of the rule of law in an international context, and more broadly denies the possibility of a coherent international policy at all. After all, to make a rational guess at what the government of another country may do, you have to first appreciate that they belong to the same species you do, with motives and calculations you can in principle understand. But I can see no clear boundary between a recognition of common humanity and the dreaded "moral equivalencing".

We can see the results all around us. In 2003, Canada's Prime Minister Jean Chretien warned that he could see no legal basis for the United States to invade Iraq. An international system can only work on one of two basis: the rule of law or power politics, and we have recently seen what power politics looks like, as the Russian government moved to quash what they saw as a threat from the Republic of Georgia. If the policy makers involved had kept a clear view of international relations, they might have seen that absent a consensus based on international law, extending NATO to all the borders of Russia would look very aggressive, and risk provoking a violent reaction. Nothing, perhaps, could blind decision makers as effectively as a complacent sense of moral superiority, exactly the sort of outlook I would expect the unthinking acceptance of a phrase such as "moral equivalence" to foster.

Bob Deluce Conquers Cool

I like Robert Deluce. The few times I have met him, he has struck me as shrewd, genial, competent, and a businessman who does something, in this case aviation, because he cares about it.

Bob Deluce has done a lot of things right recently. When he started Porter Airlines, he gambled that buying the most modern and fuel efficient turbo-prop planes available would enable him to offer attractive service from Toronto City Centre Airport. The recent rise in fuel costs has hobbled his competitors, especially Air Canada, who suddenly find the cost of feeding their jet fleet growing at an unexpected, and uncompetitive rate. Porter Air has steadily expanded, and looks set to fly to Boston as well as New York, and possibly Chicago. Robert Deluce has built something; he has moved a great many people while burning less fuel and emitting less pollution than most of his competitors. He has helped make a superb, and superbly efficient aircraft design viable.

But Bob Deluce has done more than that. He has conquered cool. When he first proposed flying from Toronto City Centre Airport, he stirred up strong opposition from an articulate and wealthy downtown community. The airport he proposed to fly from turned into a political issue. His opponents basked in their media depiction as a group of hip players, pivotal in the election of a new mayor. What a difference success, branding and time have made! The opponents of Bob Deluce's airline still gather that the foot of Bathurst Street on a Friday evening for protests, but media reports dismiss them with one of the ultimate kisses of death: ageing hippies.

I have no sympathy for Bob Deluce's opponents, because under their counterculture exterior I see a hard-edged elitism. One of their proposals artlessly referred to park they hoped would (at great expense) replace the airport as a place for "people in Tilley hats". I found it telling that anyone could, with complete lack of any apparent self-consciousness, call for the city to build a park specifically for the tiny fraction of the world's population that can spend fifty dollars on a hat. Worse, the opponents of Toronto City Centre Airport and Bob Deluce bolstered their claim that Toronto should concentrate air traffic at Toronto's main airport, Pearson International, with the claim that no residential neighbourhoods exist in the vicinity. At one public meeting, when I showed picture of the neighbourhoods that sit directly across from Pearson Airport, and a map showing the noise these neighbourhoods experience, I heard a wave of nervous laughter from the benches behind me where the opponents of the airport and Bob Deluce sat.

So expect no sympathy from me for the opponents of Bob Deluce. Still, I cannot help but wonder what "cool" has done to the process of debate. The opponents of Bob Deluce and his airline ought to lose, I believe, because they have a bad case, not because of branding, or cool, or because of their ages. I congratulate Mr. Deluce on a well earned success, and I believe in celebrating his achievement as something more than fashion and branding.

The Mass: With All Its Faults, Still Critical to Cyclists

Sergeant Mark Tonner of the Vancouver Police force asks a number of questions of his readers on the subject of the Critical Mass bike ride. I think all cyclists, whether they ride Critical Mass or not, have their own answers. I thought I would give mine. What I have to say pertains to Toronto and not other cities with a critical mass ride; as a cyclist who sometimes rides with Toronto Critical Mass, I can comment on the things I have seen. I only know about events around Critical Mass in other cities from news reports and comments.

Sergeant Tonner repeats two arguments against Critical Mass: that "corking" cross streets to keep the ride together violates the law, and cyclists on the ride engage in various forms of aggression against motorists. I don't accept the first argument; often when a large number of people take to the roads at once, private individuals or the authorities direct traffic to assure orderly and safe movement. Since cyclists have the right to use the roads in Ontario (under the highway traffic act) and the right to assemble (under the Canadian Charter of Rights), I believe we can, and should, direct traffic to make sure we can ride as safely as possible and with minimal disruption. However, on recent Critical Mass rides I have seen deliberate halts at major intersections, that do not make the ride safer or more comfortable. Those actions celebrate bicycle culture and the freedom to ride; they protest against automotive culture by disrupting it.

I have no objection to civil disobedience. I have engaged in a number of acts of civil and religious witness in which I risked arrest. And I believe a reasonable person can see in automotive culture, with its social isolation, environmental pollution, and careless carnage, something badly in need of protest. But I would not advise anyone to bring pre-teen children on a civil disobedience action, and I would strongly advise anyone at Critical Mass wishing to engage in civil disobedience to allow a clear separation between their challenge to the law and the families out for a ride and a celebration.

With all its faults, all the tension at the corks, all the push and pull about whether to turn Critical Mass into a full anti-automobile and anti-pollution demonstration, or into a celebration of cycling, the mass remains a critical celebration of the cycling community, and a reminder of its solidarity and strength. Because the cost of riding a bicycle on the streets of Toronto includes an endless round of daily, petty, and often dangerous harassment: the motorists who feel free to honk their horn and tell you what to do, the driver who tries to take your right of way at a four way stop and curses you out, the automobile passenger who thinks it a great joke to yell at you out of a window to see if you'll jump. We need reminding, and our tormentors need reminding too, that we belong to a community. We stand for something. They can make us angry, they can make us frightened, but they cannot make us give up. And as long as an ugly minority of motorists keep trying to push us off the roads, the celebration of Critical Mass will include an element of defiance; it will celebrate endurance and survival as well as all the things we gain for ourselves through that simplest of machines we choose to add to our lives.

Shania the cat...

Biking down Bloor on the way home, I saw a young cat step out into the side street. A Jeep Cherokee approached. The car stopped, the cat looked at the car. The driver honked. The cat remained still, as if to say: "So you got a car... that don't impress me much." After another moment, the driver gave up and drove around the cat, and a moment after that, the cat moved on across the street.

From such roots

...does cyclist militancy grow.

Yesterday, riding down High Park Boulevard, I stopped at the four-way stop at Sunnyside Avenue. I stopped, the vehicle to my left went through the intersection, then I started across in turn. The vehicle on my left, second in line, pulled into the intersection. At first I thought he intended to turn left, but he made straight for me. I rang my bell, and he slowed, shouting something that sounded like "you're not a motorcycle". I replied sharply telling him to pay attention. He passed through the intersection behind me, yelling an obscenity at me, to which I replied by giving him the one-fingered international salute.

Every cyclist who uses public roads has to worry about encounters like this, and we can only hope we get out of it with nothing more than a minor feeling of irritation. Most of us have experienced much worse things than this. The whole experience left me feeling three things:

1. Cyclists have a right to use the road. If motorists don't feel like waiting for us, as the law requires, tough. I don't always feel like sharing the road with cars.
2. No motorist has any business taking the behaviour of some other cyclist out on me. I try to keep the rules as a cyclist and a driver. I expect others to do the same.
3. I have no patience left with anyone who tells me I can solve the problem by giving up my right to mobility, or by driving and adding to the pollution problem like a "normal" person.

Safety first!

The Ontario Highway Traffic Act covers a lot of detail, but neglects to state its prime objective clearly. Does Ontario regulate traffic to ensure the safe movement of people, goods and vehicles on Ontario roads, or do we regulate traffic to facilitate speedy movement? The Highway Traffic Act should clarify this, first because of the number of influential voices insisting that we have roads so that cars and trucks can move fast on them, and because those voices, coupled with the lack of clarity in the Highway Traffic Act, lead to the harassment of lower speed traffic; not only bicycles, but as anyone who does it knows, cars that actually obey the speed limit.

In aviation, the laws make a clear statement: safety comes first. The pilot has absolute responsibility for the safety of the passengers and the flight, and nothing moves until and unless everyone with a responsibility for safety agree that the flight can proceed. I strongly suggest the Highway Traffic Act should say the same thing. It won't change the attitude of the drivers who believe they have a right to push their cars to the limit on public roads, but it may affect enforcement if the rest of us can point to a law that says, without ambiguity, that our safety comes first.

Blind drivers, invisible cyclists

Driving my kid into Toronto from Mississauga, I turned southwards at a major intersection. I saw three or four pedestrians at the corner to the right of me, checked the cross walk and the traffic, and turned. As I headed south, I looked in the mirror and saw three bicycles in the cross walk. It brought home to me how quickly a bicycle can travel from outside the range of a driver's scan, and how cyclists make it difficult for drivers to see us when we act as pedestrians do.

It put me in mind of another time, driving through a wall of rain in the late evening, straining to see, a shadow passed in front of me. I braked. Of course, I had come close to a cyclist riding at night and in filthy weather without a light or much of a reflector. Once again, when cyclists do that, we make it very difficult for drivers to see us.

Of course, cyclists have to worry that even when we do everything right (lights on, signalling) drivers will either not see us, or else act as though they do not. This affects me as a cyclist most when I go to change lanes; when I signal for a lane change, I always have to wonder if the cars behind me in the lane I want to change to will slow down for me. I have certainly had cars speed past me while I signalled and tried (in vain) to shift lanes.

As cyclists, we need to make ourselves visible in traffic. As drivers, we need to make an effort to see all road users.

Unexpected blessings

We vacationed last week at a resort at Honey Harbour. On the last night of our holiday, I went out on a canoe with a guide to learn a bit more about the history, human and natural, of Georgian Bay and its 30,000 islands. I had expected to see birds; Georgian Bay has huge flocks of Geese. The loons who let us see them up close as they beat the water with their wings on takeoff came as an unexpected gift. So did the mallards as they slipped off a rock into the water of an inlet colourful with water-lily blossoms. Then a Great Blue Heron surprised us taking off from the shallow waters of the inlet, and at the end of the evening, we came upon a group of turkey vultures picking the skeleton of a fish.

Today, home in Toronto, I went on the everyday errand to buy a gallon of milk. The sun had sunk behind the clouds, and filled the streets of Bloor West with golden light. The houses, with the tapered porch pillars that distinguish the architecture of Bloor West, stood out beautifully. The light somehow gave the neat houses, their lawns and brick pathways and even their parking pads a special beauty and distinctiveness. It took no more than a time of day and some dust and clouds, to turn the city I see passing by nearly every day into an unexpected beauty.

Memorial Ride Announcement

Thursday night, June 7, 2007, I rode home from North York. I rode down Bayview from Sheppard, and noted the alarming speed and indifference of the motor traffic. The morning after that, a dump truck killed Alan Tamane in the same place I had ridden down. If I possibly can, I plan to join Toronto's cycling community on a memorial ride.

We belong to a community. Cyclists ride together, organize together, fight for our rights together, and when one of us goes down, we mourn together. See you there.

I append the announcement from Toronto's Advocacy or Respect for Cyclists (ARC).

Help finish Alan’s ride.

On the morning of June 8th, 2007 Alan Tamane left for work. His family was expecting to see him again that evening. They never did. He was killed by a City of Toronto truck while riding his bicycle to work.

Alan’s loss was devastating to his wife Amanda and four children along with being a huge loss to the community. Alan was the epiphany of devotion to family, friends, co-workers and the community.

Alan devoted more time to his family than there was time in a day. When his daughter was diagnosed with Kabuki Syndrome he became an advocate for her and the disabled. He became a soccer team coach when he found out his son wanted to play soccer. During each of his wife’s four pregnancies he gained weight in sympathy. Alan supported his wife in her demanding career as a police officer, together they offered a free Judo program to community children at the Police College. He devoted some of the same energy for his co-workers, becoming a vocal union steward in his workplace. His devotion to anything that he was involved in was apparent to anyone that met him and it made him many friends. When Alan thought about the future for his children he knew he had to work at helping the environment. That is when he decided to ride his bicycle to work year round.

On June 8th, 2008, family, friends and cyclists will ride together to symbolically complete Alan’s final ride. This is both to commemorate Alan’s life and in his spirit bring attention to the risks faced by cyclists on Bayview Ave.

The ride will leave the Bayview Arena (Finch and Bayview) southern most parking lot at 11am and follow what is believed to be Alan’s intended route that day to Sunny Brook. Alan’s employer has arranged for an area for cyclists to gather after the ride where a few words will be said by friends and family. Alan’s 10-year-old daughter Michiko will conclude the ride with a song for her father.

RIDE DETAILS

June 8th, 2008. Main ride leaves Bayview Arena (north west corner of Finch and Bayview) southern most parking lot at 11am expecting to arrive at Sunnybrook at approximately 12 noon.

From the Finch Subway station the start location is about a 10 minute
ride.

For cyclists riding from the Downtown area we will meet at Spadina and
Bloor St for a 915 am departure.

For more info on the ride - Advocacy for Respect for Cyclists - Darren 416-707-4744

For info on Sunnybrook ICES Bicycle Users Group Brandon - 647-887-0633 brandon.zagorski@gmail.com

The ICES BUG is advocating for a Bayview Avenue bikelane from Sheppard to Eglinton and is actively engaged with Councillor Jenkins as part of the of the Ward 25 Cycling Advisory Committee.

ARC (Advocacy for Respect for Cyclists) www.respect.to is a group which formalizes the principle of cyclists standing up for each other.