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.