Yappa Ding Ding

Reflections on Activism

2012-01-12T18:44:00.025-05:00

People keep saying that 2012 will be the year of protest in North America - the year when ordinary people rise up and demand better treatment from government elites. For example, the Occupy movement is organizing a general strike for May 1. I'm all for that. I think it's crazy that Canada doesn't have stronger employment laws to protect employees, that we don't provide a way for the majority without pensions to save for our retirement, that we don't have lobbyists to fight for ordinary non-unionized working people, that our top tax bracket is so low that we are killing the principle of progressive taxation, that we're in a state of perpetual war. I have written about these issues many times.

But protesting effectively isn't easy. It's a well-known strategy of the far right to encourage division in order to energize their base: Mike Harris as premier of Ontario was a master of this. Thus well-intentioned activists can end up achieving the opposite of their intention.

Most public protest is organized by unions, but unions don't represent the majority of people: like corporations, they exist to fatten one particular group and the rest of the population can go hang. I can't support a movement that claims that Ontario's high school teachers are victimized by not having infinite pay raises, even more time off, and even better pension deals.

Then there are groups with hidden political agendas: when I was a student activist in the 70s, the "Trots" and anarchists showed up at every protest, trying to infiltrate and trick us into promoting their goal of violent revolution. And there are the plain old nutters, insisting on unfeasible and undesirable change: the libertarians, the anti-tax crowd, the obsessed anti-car crowd.

Another problem with trying to be an activist is that it's really difficult to trust people who organize activists. They have their own personal agendas, whether it's springboarding a political career or just getting their photo in the paper.

I recently ran into a problem with a pro-democracy movement. A couple of years ago I happened to be around during the formation of a local chapter of Canadians Advocating Political Participation (CAPP). I was never very active (the rest of the local group supports proportional representation and I don't), but I was impressed by the organizational abilities of our two Facebook admins, who set up tons of non-partisan events and got good turnouts.

Our mistake was in trusting the bosses of CAPP. Out of the blue a few months ago, one of them called Shilo Davis unilaterally shut down our group. She made it impossible for us to write on the wall of our Facebook page, stripped our two admins of their admin privileges, and parachuted in her sister Amanda Davis as the only person with any control over our Facebook site. Amanda Davis, who doesn't even live in our region, has done nothing whatsoever: not contacted anyone or updated the site. Many CAPP Waterloo members, myself included, have tried over and over to reach these people, but they ignore us.

If we can't trust national organizers and have to always operate in local, unorganized ways, it's not at all clear that we can have enough impact to effect any change. Whenever we link up into national groups, we have the problem of power-mad idjits like the crew running CAPP, who seemingly have no interest in democractic practices like accountability and transparency.

For a general strike to work for everyone, it would have to be diffuse: those participating in it would not all have one voice. That would probably be impossible. Even if we tried it, the unions or the CAPP soundrels would try to hijack the day. Even if we had a single message that everyone agreed on, the Shilo Davises would get their snouts in front of a microphone and make it all about them.

It's an age old problem, I know, but I just happen to have hit a wall with it this week: it's not easy as an individual to have a voice, because the world is full of opportunists who are always on the lookout for ways to coopt the voices of others. I'm starting to understand why many people don't speak up and don't vote.

But please, if you have any ideas for how to organize a movement, speak up here or elsewhere.

My only plea is that I not get bombarded with comments by those in favor of proportional representation, telling me that I'm ignorant and need to educate myself...

Update: It seems that Amanda Davis is not the sister of Shilo Davis, but an alias used by Shilo Davis.

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Press Release for Canadian-Americans

2012-01-10T20:54:00.004-05:00

Press Release: Isaac Brock Society

Posted by Petros — January 10, 2012

Caution to U.S. Citizens and U.S./Canada dual citizens who are residents of Canada about the IRS announcement (IR-2012-5) January 9, 2012, regarding Offshore Voluntary Disclosure

On January 9, 2012, the IRS announced a renewed Offshore Voluntary Disclosure program. This is an IRS program designed to bring tax cheats into compliance. During the last two disclosure programs in 2009 and 2011, a significant number of unsuspecting Canadian residents entered these programs to “make it right” with IRS. We strongly warn law-abiding Canadian residents of the dangers of entering this program which is intended to attract tax cheats who live in the United States but have undisclosed offshore accounts.

The United States has dusted off a long neglected, possibly unconstitutional law which requires all United States persons to file a yearly disclosure of foreign financial accounts (FBAR). There is widespread ignorance of FBAR, and up until recently, very limited compliance. A significant number of Canadians learned about the 2011 Offshore Voluntary Disclosure program from the Canadian media and entered it in fear, not realizing that the IRS had every intention of levying fines of 25% of their net worth (or in some cases 5% for those who were unaware that they were United States citizens), even though in most cases they owed no taxes to the United States, had no knowledge of the FBAR reporting requirement, and had innocent and necessary bank accounts in accordance with the laws of Canada. As a result of this crackdown by the IRS, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty went to bat for Canadian residents, insisting that the IRS get off the backs of hard working Canadian residents who had done no wrong and who were abiding by the tax and banking laws of Canada. “Canada is not a tax haven”, he insisted. As a result of Flaherty’s efforts, United States Ambassador to Canada, David Jacobson tried to assure Canadians that the IRS was not out to get grandma’s bank accounts. He said, “My message on this is to sit tight. We are not unreasonable. We are not unsympathetic. We are not irresponsible.” Law abiding residents of Canada, please do “sit tight”. Do not enter this program out of fear, and do not allow a lawyer to enter you into this program without clearly explaining why you should. If you enter the program, the IRS will surely fine you up to 27.5% of all of your monetary and non-monetary financial assets.

All residents of Canada, who may be affected by the extra-territorial reporting requirements of the United States, should also know the following points:

(1) The Canadian government has said it will not enforce the collection of FBAR fines. Thus the IRS has no means to collect fines from any accounts in Canada.

(2) The Canadian government has said it will not collect taxes for the IRS from Canadian citizens, provided that the person incurred the tax liability while a Canadian citizen.

(3) The IRS cannot be trusted. The Tax Advocate Service, the ombudsman service within the IRS, issued a rare Tax Advocate Directive rebuking the IRS and ordering them to respect the terms of the program and be more lenient, returning to the policy of the FAQ 35 which said that those who enter the program would not be fined more than they would have under existing statutes. To date the IRS has ignored the Taxpayer Advocate Directive. This suggests that the IRS has decided that Offshore Voluntary Disclosure should be a revenue generating instrument and apply the fines of 20% and 25% without regard to the innocence of the people that entered into the program. The IRS presumes that everyone who enters these programs is a tax cheat.

(4) We must stress that the Offshore Voluntary Disclosure program, which the IRS has announced, is not a mandatory law but a voluntary program. Therefore, enter it only if you wish to relinquish voluntarily 27.5% of your hard earned savings and other assets to the IRS.

(5) If you are a United States citizen or Green Card holder and are or were unaware of your filing requirements, we urge you to get sound information regarding your rights and responsibilities from reliable sources. If you are living in Canada and abiding by Canadian tax laws, you are not a criminal nor should you permit the government in Washington D. C. to treat you as one. Know also that “cross border” accountants and lawyers do not have equal standards of competency or morality. Buyer beware!

Peter W. Dunn has written this press release on behalf of the Isaac Brock Society, which is an informal group of individuals who are concerned about the treatment by the United States government of US persons who live in Canada and abroad. We have come together to fight the overreach of the IRS and to provide one another with accurate information, peer-to-peer advice and comfort. Our website is http://isaacbrocksociety.wordpress.com.

Conflicts of Interest, or: Be Careful What You Wish For

2011-11-19T10:43:00.013-05:00

There were a lot of raised eyebrows over conflicts of interest claimed by local politicians in the LRT decision. For example:

The driving force behind LRT, Regional Chair Ken Seiling, spent nearly a decade ramming LRT down our throats and then claimed a conflict just before the final debate. His children own property near the route, and they owned that property back when he was instrumental in choosing the route.
Regional Councillor Tom Galloway, who had seemed to be opposed to LRT but was reportedly under a lot of pressure from Seiling & co to support it, claimed a rather dodgy-sounding conflict: he works for the University of Waterloo, which has the proposed LRT running through it. After the main vote, Galloway decided that his conflict no longer applies.
Waterloo City Councillor Jeff Henry, an LRT supporter, decided to call conflict because he too works at UW - even though the decisions he could vote on were about the route through the uptown. Other councillors who work for UW didn't call a conflict. The uptown route was decided by just three Waterloo city councillors, with the rest in declared conflicts.

Despite our frustration about the councillors who called conflicts seemingly without needing to, I don't see how we can really complain. Regional and city council is a part time job paying barely $30,000 a year. Councillors have to pay their own fees just to get a legal opinion about conflict of interest, and in an iffy situation they would probably need at least two legal opinions to stay in the game. Imagine the legal fees if a councillor was charged with conflict of interest.

Several Ontario communities are adopting LRT, and every one has had such a lot of declared conflicts of interest that a subset of politicians is voting on the biggest expenditure of all time for their communities. The province has now decided to review its conflict of interest legislation.

Easing the conflict of interest rules is not the way to go. The Seiling example shows how easily even the current legislation can be abused - not that I have any evidence that he did abuse them, but the appearance is there. I did a little research about conflicts of interest during last year's LRT debate, and talked to a lawyer about it: it seems that even the current legislation is barely enforceable.

We don't want to hamstring politicians with legal fees or put them in situations where they could be penalized just for doing their job. At the same time, we don't want to open the door to shady characters who gain office for self-enrichment. The current legislation seems to strike a good balance.

The bigger issue is around how monumental decisions such as billion dollar LRT projects are decided. This was not the way to do it. We should have had a referendum. We should have had votes at city councils as well as regional council. We should have had real public education and a dialog about alternatives, rather than a shoddy and expensive PR job by regional staff. This sham didn't just happen in Waterloo Region: it happened all over the province. And it isn't just about the monumental burden it's putting on tax payers: it's about a fundamental change to our urban landscape.

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Canada is a Better Place with Pat Martin in Parliament

2011-11-19T10:09:00.008-05:00

I'm a Liberal, but there's a lot about the NDP that I like. Foremost is the straight talking approach of some of their MPs. In the few televised committee hearings I've watched (such as the Mulroney graft inquiries), Pat Martin stood out as someone who asks intelligent, incisive questions. Over and over on issues of the day, Martin was the reasonable voice rising above the politichatter. I don't follow him closely enough to know how widely I agree with him, but as an approach, a mind, and a brave unweasely approach to politics, I'm a fan.

This week Martin swore on Twitter, and what a kerfuffle. Our local talk radio station devoted a morning phone-in to his "foul mouth" and the local paper has written about his "profane tirade". I'm not complaining about the exposure: but what a pity that the discussions didn't touch the issue.

Swear words are a very effective part of language. They convey something that words like "extremely annoyed" cannot. What Martin was talking about was the Conservatives using closure on the budget.

Martin got the issue into the top of the media and public agenda. It's our fault for ignoring the important part and focusing on the nonessentials. The good news is that Martin's twitter followers jumped from a couple hundred to several thousand (not including me; I'm just not that interested, in general, in the mass communicated soundbite).

So here's what seems to be the problem.

NDP MP Charlie Angus: "I think what’s really offensive is what’s happening here, the continual undermining of Parliament, the shutting down of committees, the use of in-camera, the vitriolic attacks that we see the Conservatives using again and again. I think Pat Martin called it like it is."

Liberal interim leader Bob Rae: the government is coming "pretty close to being abusive in its use of time allocation."

What Martin asked was: Shouldn’t Parliament be able to debate the budget? And he drove it home with: “This is a fucking disgrace… closure again. And on the Budget! There’s not a democracy in the world that would tolerate this jackboot shit.”

I'm writing this post about Martin rather than about the closure because I'm bothered that the Conservatives have used this issue as an opportunity to try to hound him out of office. I heard a party rep on the radio making all sorts of claims beyond the swearing that Martin is unfit for office, even suggesting that his riding should rise up against him. We're familiar with that sort of tactic from the Harperites now. It's just more jackboot shit.

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Pop

2011-11-13T10:54:00.031-05:00

I went to see Jian Ghomeshi speak at Kitchener's TheMuseum last night. His topic was pop culture. It seemed a rather contentless talk (at the time the word I was thinking was "vacuous"), but he's a smart guy - he gave a funny introduction and a very interesting Q&A at the end. As examples of the low points and high points:

He used this anecdote to argue that we need to stop "siloizing" culture: He went to a Gaugin exhibit at the AGO. At the start of the exhibit there was a quote on the wall from Beaudelaire that he found off-putting, but inside the exhibit "it was all paintings of naked chicks."
Someone asked him, if he was able to interview Andy Warhol, what would he ask him, and he replied: "When you wake up in the morning, are you Andy Warhol?"

(Before I go on: my ticket also got me into the current exhibit, which was created at TheMuseum and is going to tour the world. It's worth seeing. Called Rethinking Art and Machine, it's really art made of machines, and there's some lovely interactive stuff. The new cafe is worth a visit too.)

All Ghomeshi really talked about was youth and their interest in culture. He spent a lot of time talking about how poor kids in the Phillipines know the lyrics to Justin Bieber songs. He said the goal of Q (now Canada's most successful radio show) was to attract more youth to CBC radio; he said that at the time it started, 70% of CBC listeners were over 50, and "a high percentage of them were over 70." (That's a telling statistic, as when Q started 4 years ago CBC had been dumbing itself down for decades in the vain hope to attract youth.)

Ghomeshi said that the Q team deliberately set out to not dumb down their show. CBC brass told them to keep interviews to 8 minutes because "youth have ADD" but he rejected that advice and does serious, indepth interviews up to 45 minutes long. But of course he's mostly interviewing celebrities and musicians, and his success is largely due to his viral Billy Bob Thornton interview and his movie-star good looks. (He's a very good interviewer, but Eleanor Wachtel and Ralph Benmergui are better, to name two people with lower ratings.)

Ghomeshi also said that when he was on the board of the Stratford Festival the challenge they faced was attracting people between 20 and 50, because kids tended to go to plays on school trips and then not go back till they were old. That was interesting, because the audience at TheMuseum last night fit that demographic: a lot of journalism and fine arts students, and a lot of old people who looked to be (like me) avid CBC listeners. (I have attended Stratford every year from when I was 10 to my current 54, and my prescription for attracting people would have more to do with quality and price than trying to appeal to Justin Bieber fans, but then nobody has asked me to sit on the board.)

I was too young to be a hippie and disdainful/detached (respectively) of disco and punk, so I missed falling into a pop culture stereotype. Ever since the coining of "generation X" we seem to feel a need to categorize an entire generation, when usually the categorization doesn't so much describe a generation as an advertising theme used over several years. As to the popularity of Bieber, when I lived in Africa in the mid-90s you heard Bob Marley and the Beatles everywhere; now the commercial arm of recording studios has a longer reach, is all.

The best part, for me, about Ghomeshi's disappointing talk was that it made me click a link this morning on the New York Times home page, and read this very engaging article about pop culture: Generation Sell. I recommend it - and the Comments section.

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Remember When There Wasn't So Much War

2011-11-12T09:58:00.019-05:00

I was listening to the CBC the other day (normally a benign sort of radio experience) and a newscaster was describing, with some enthusiasm, bombs being dropped by Canadians or our allies on some hapless nation. At the end of his description he threw in a comment that the bombs would reduce civilian casualties.

Of course, of course... it's alright because we're helping them. These days it seems we can commit almost any atrocity in the service of "helping" people in defenseless nations. (I notice we don't "help" people in strong countries like Iran and China.)

When did the Western countries start this constant war against the South? It's difficult to tell. The Cold War ended, bringing in a seeming era of peace, in '89 or thereabouts. The West invaded Iraq in '90 (the Gulf War) and Somalia in '92. We started bombing Bosnia and Herzegovina in '95, and Yugoslavia in '99. We invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq (again) in 2003. But it seems to be a recent phenomenon that our military is in constant action against countries we're not at war with. Recently we have bombed Sudan and Libya and Yemen and... frankly, I've lost track. I tune it out. There's a bloodthirsty enthusiasm about the killing that I can't cope with.

The Americans are the driving force behind our state of constant war, and there are lots of fancy theories about US imperialism, but I think it comes down to American people liking violence and liking to dominate. There's a Democrat in the White House now, and if not as big a buffoon as the last guy, he's as big a hawk. In the US, if you're not enthusiastic about bombing innocents abroad and executing minorities at home, then you don't get elected (or like Jimmy Carter, you're treated like a joke).

In the long run, none of it is going to lead to more stable democratic governments. Most of these countries can't even afford elections. The dictators will be replaced by new dictators or Islamic states. There are all kinds of things we could have done to force the dictators to help their people, but instead we made sure that the dictators served our corporate interests.

So I know, all of this is old hat. The thing that struck me like the proverbial diamond through the forehead was that we are at constant war - even Canada. It wasn't that many years ago that on Remembrance Day people would lament that the veterans were getting old and dying off. Now our Legion Halls are packed with new veterans. Don't ask me to celebrate that. This is not defence of our homeland. This is something far scarier.

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Devolution of the Corner Store?

2011-10-20T23:30:00.007-04:00

I'm in San Francisco (for BlackBerry DevCon) (and yes I just felt an earthquake - what a cliche - and yes it freaked me out) and I went into a CVS Pharmacy near my hotel today. They don't have checkout counters at that store: it's purely self checkout. In addition, the checkout assumes that you have a CVS credit card. You can use a different credit card, but only if you understand that you have to press "Courtesy Card" and go from there. The prices are all different for CVS card holders, as well.

Over the last five years, especially in big US cities, pharmacies have displaced the corner store. The new pharmacies have junk food, toiletries, make-up, and a few groceries and household items. They're ubiquitous: in New York and San Francisco, there's a Walgreens or CVS or Duane Reed on every block, it seems. Corner stores, family grocerers and newspaper/smoke shops have all but disappeared.

In Toronto, the immigrant-owned small grocer with a display of fresh flowers out front is still ubiquitous, although the pharmacies are getting a foothold in the financial district.

In Waterloo we never had many mom-and-pop grocers (at least in my time there, since the mid-60s); instead, we have stands at the farmer's markets. Diners used to sell candy and cigarettes at the cash, and the only place I know that still does that is The Harmony at King and Central (not cigarettes anymore, of course). Our corner stores were and are of the 7-11 variety, and I wouldn't miss the demise of their magazine racks with porn at the eye level of 11 year-olds.

My main problem with the preponderance of pharmacies is the horror of having the same company dominating every street. Outside they look the same. Inside they look the same. They all carry exactly the same stuff, and there's nothing local or individual about it. You won't find homemade butter tarts or samosas on the counter, as you do at mom-and-pop outfits, or artichokes from the home town of the Italian owners. They don't offer an array of newspapers. Now they don't even have a human being at the checkout.

It is more than nostalgia, I hope, to think that we're losing something here.

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Esperanto is Old School

2011-10-07T19:59:00.011-04:00

Wittgenstein described language as a city. Three's the Old Town with its twisted streets and the new suburbs that are neatly organized. The entire city is constantly changing and growing.

That's the way it's supposed to be, but is language evolving enough? We are adding a lot of slang and that's fun, but is it really moving us forward? We could be working to create language evolution that would enhance our understanding and bring thought to a new level.

Children can learn a language by a fairly young age, knowing all the difficult grammar and learning a very sizable vocabularly. Why stop there? Why not make basic communication a lot more difficult, so we have to keep learning? The beauty of learning language is that we internalize it, so it is more powerful than academic book learning.

Here's an idea, somewhat half-baked but I present it as a start to the conversation... The world could move to one written language, and it should not be phonetic. Different groups will interpret the written form differently, resulting in a rich collection of spoken languages. But those groupings don't have to be geographic or historical; there can be different spoken interpretations for poets and accountants and so on. Meaning has always been layered, but it will become much more so, allowing different perspectives on existence to display different strengths in insight and communication.

There was a time when scholars from all of Europe wrote in Latin. The new language would go further in that it wouldn't be just for scholars, and there wouldn't be just one verbalization of it. The same symbol, word or phrase might be interpreted by different groups as eternity, death, the sky, forgotten memory. The new language might be partly mathematical. (Math has insufficient vocabulary.)

By learning a new verison of the language, we'd be internalizing new layers of meaning. That would allow a deeper understanding of the interconnections between different perspectives: for example, it could make us aware at a deep level of the sameness of math and music, poetry and philosophy, different schools of thought in physics.

As it stands, our science is growing but our overall understanding of the world is growing less so. To move to a new level we need human evolution, not just more technology. We need to dream bigger and reach higher.

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Representative democracy, public participation and social media

2011-10-05T13:10:00.012-04:00

There was an interesting controversy in Waterloo this week. A city councillor, while sitting in Council listening to a delegation of residents who were concerned about a proposed development in their neighborhood, tweeted disparaging things about the delegation. The residents filed a complaint with the city integrity commissioner, who cleared the councillor of wrongdoing on the grounds that the tweets were ambiguous.

The delegation was from an upscale part of town and the issue was a townhouse development planned for their neighborhood. The Councillor’s tweets, apparently sent while the delegation was speaking, were:

“I am aghast. Embarrassed. Furious. #not impressed #this is not my Waterloo.”

“About to revisit my prairie girl roots, connect with Tommy Douglas and share some very honest and blunt thoughts about community.”

(The Councillor’s attempt at populist bonding seems a little weird, at best. Some quick Google searches show that she lives in a posh neighborhood with house prices comparable to the delegation's - and no townhouses. But that’s another issue.)

As someone who has made a number of delegations to local government, both at public Council meetings and in private, I know how difficult it is to provide input when you know the government official has already made up their mind. But I’ve been lucky – I have never been in the position of arguing a case before an official who sneers at my arguments just because of who I am or where I come from.

I also know how difficult it is to participate in local government. Despite calls for public involvement, transparency, and so on, Waterloo government appears to most of us as a cliquey group that is not very receptive to outsiders (even though the “outsiders” are local residents). City Council invites the public to participate on committees, but they renew membership every year and boot you off if they decide you’re too controversial. Councillors will let you tell them your concerns, but few of them (I exclude our current mayor) give the impression that their minds are at all open.

Now it seems that the situation is worse. This event – and the exoneration of the tweeter, and her declaration that she won’t change – paints a picture of City Hall as a place where councillors are playground bullies who will use their stature to publicly humiliate us if we have the temerity to say something they disagree with.

An editorial on the tweeting scandal argues that the problem is not what the Councillor said, but the fact that she tweeted during a meeting. I disagree. It was disrespectful of her to not at least hear them out, but her tweets expose her attitude - that she was never willing to give them a chance because "they're rich" - and I'm glad that's public. If it's not public, we can't deal with it.

Tweeting increases transparency, and that's a good thing. Transparency isn't easy - it can uncover some rotten stuff - and we need to look at addressing those issues. I also hope we can discourge this sort of political grandstanding.

What we need is an enhanced - or at least reaffirmed - code of conduct for city councillors that reinforces their obligation to treat the public in a respectful manner and truly engage them.

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A Failure of Leadership

2011-08-07T15:10:00.026-04:00

I am disappointed that American politicians, pundits and economists, on both the left and right, are condemning Standard & Poor's for lowering the US debt rating. It's like being arrested for a crime that you committed and then calling a press conference to say you're disappointed in the police for arresting you.

There are all kinds of valid criticisms of S&P, but they're moot. Last week, the US government came within hours of defaulting on its debt. That's enough to downgrade its credit rating. Worse, the agreement that broke the impasse in Congress is highly dubious and doesn't bode well for future economic or political well-being of the United States.

There was never any question about the US being unable to pay its debt. This crisis was wholly political and wholly manufactured, and yet very real. Hyperpartisanism and a weak president have made the US a riskier place to invest.

Obama is facing an incredibly difficult situation - an inherited economic crisis, an inherited war, a long-term slide in US fortunes, and an invigorated extremist opposition - so I'm not saying his job is easy, but he just doesn't seem up to it.

So what could the US president have done? Here are a few thoughts...

The 14th amendment, which prescribes the debt ceiling and which was passed in 1868 for very different reasons than exist today, creates a situation that is almost unique in the world: after agreeing to and implementing a budget, the US government has a separate process to agree on the amount of money it can borrow to pay for the budget. The debt ceiling doesn't prevent the government from contracting financial obligations; it prevents it from paying what it owes. It's bad government, and some constitutional scholars believe that the supreme court would overturn it if asked.

After the last midterms Obama should have seen this debt ceiling crisis coming, and taken action in advance. He could have taken steps to get it overturned. He could have taken a page from Dick Cheney's playbook and unilaterally adopted more executive power. He could have paved the way with a PR campaign. He could have bluffed, telling the Republicans that if they didn't agree to a compromise then he'd raise the debt ceiling himself. You might say that the Democrats are hoist on their petard since they voted against raising the debt ceiling in 2006, but that's all the more reason to get out in front of the issue early.

It boggles the mind why the Democrats are continuing to try to be even-handed, compromising negotiators when dealing with the tea party. Obama was reactive throughout the negotiation, and in the end he even praised the agreement that broke the impasse (which gives extraordinary budget-cutting power to 12 members of congress).

US debt could be easily curtailed by (1) rolling back the Bush tax cuts on the rich, which were supposed to expire in 2012, anyway; and (2) reducing the military budget.

Republicans have been able to paint Democrats as reckless spenders, turn the military budget into a sacred cow, and make it nearly impossible to increase taxes. The Democrats could have countered all that. They could have played hard ball. They could have provided better leadership.

It's a good thing that Standard & Poor's downgraded the US credit rating because when a country is that irresponsible and dysfunctional, there should be repercussions. Both parties need a wake-up call. And Americans should be mad as hell. If they had missed the debt ceiling deadline on August 2, it wouldn't just have been bond holders who might have suffered. Medicare, Social Security and unemployment insurance were all on the line, along with the salaries of the military, federal workers, and the rest of the US government's obligations.

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The Case for Free Transit

2011-06-06T22:49:00.015-04:00

Here's my main argument for making transit free. We have to have transit for people who can't drive or can't afford to drive. But currently, transit is worse for the environment than driving, and the reason is that transit vehicles are large, gas guzzling, and frequently nearly empty. This problem isn't specific to Waterloo: studies throughout North America show that when you compare a person taking a trip by transit or a trip in their car, the transit trip costs more, uses more fuel, and produces much more pollution and green house gas emissions. To address this environmental problem, we need to make sure our transit vehicles are fuller. A really effective way to do that would be to stop charging for transit.

Rider fares already cover only a small part of the expense of transit, but the fare is a deterrent to using transit. We need reasonably frequent service, so we can't run less buses. We could run smaller buses - an idea that's been around so long that I can't think why we aren't doing it, unless the drivers' unions have prevented it.

If you argue that transit shouldn't be free, then why is it essentially free for university and college students? They pay a nominal fee folded into their tuition and can't opt out.

Currently, if you own a car and don't live too far from work, then driving to work is cheaper than buying a transit ticket. If you have to have a car anyway, the extra $2.50 a ride or $60 a month for a pass is just an extra expense. But if transit were free, then people who own cars would be more likely to take it anyway. Sure it takes a lot longer and it can be unpleasant when the weather is bad, but they might take it sometimes. And for two car families, the next time they need to replace a car they might realize that they can use transit instead.

It could be the case that if transit were free we'd exceed our capacity. But surely that's a good thing: that's what we want. Our streets could accommodate many, many times more buses than they now do. And in fact, at this point the buses that are busy are mostly carrying high school or post-secondary students, who use different routes (by and large) than commuters.

You might say that people would take trips they otherwise wouldn't, but I doubt that's much of a consideration. When I have a monthly transit pass (which I've had many times in other cities), I haven't gone hog wild tearing around town on transit.

The only other downside I can see is that it would be very expensive - but according to the Region of Waterloo in the recent LRT debates, we would actually save money by doing it. The region claims that when we spend a billion dollars on LRT, we will save more than a billion dollars because we won't need as much road expansion. If the region is telling the truth, then we will save a lot of money by making transit free.

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Spring Floods

2011-05-10T22:13:00.006-04:00

As my Aunt Sandra from Memphis said on Sunday, "Always newsworthy is when the river gets to be one mile wide. It is now three miles wide."

Today it is wider.

Back in the days of my great-grandfather, people on each side of the river patrolled the banks at night during floods, and shot dead anyone they saw in a boat - because the easiest way to prevent flooding on your own side was to blow up the levy on the other side.

(There is some speculation that this year's flood might cause the Mississippi to change its course just north of the Louisiana border and align with the Atchafalaya River.)

The Future of King Street

2011-05-08T21:46:00.019-04:00

I spent the weekend in Toronto, and this morning I needed to head cross town in my car. I decided to take St Clair, thinking it would be quicker. Those days are gone...

The recently-completed St. Clair LRT, like other Toronto LRTs, is very different from Waterloo Region's proposed LRT: in Toronto an LRT is a streetcar that stops every two blocks, while in Waterloo the proposed LRT is a train that stops every 1.5 kilometers. But the tracks will be similar. Here's a picture I took on St. Clair today:

The LRT tracks run on a wide, raised platform in the middle of the street. Cars can't cross it, so if they want to access a parking spot, driveway, or even small street on the other side of the LRT tracks, they have to go to the next intersection and make a U-turn. The U-turns require special U-turn lights, and that means that the green lights for going straight are briefer than they would otherwise be. Today on St. Clair it was Sunday and traffic was very light, but it was painfully slow because I got stopped by a red light at every intersection.

In Waterloo region, the long distance between LRT stops means that we'll need buses to run the same route. That will compound the problem - and the current thinking is that we shouldn't have bus bays.

As this snippet of the region's map shows, the LRT prevents left turns at certain intersections, such as John and King. Cars wanting to make a left turn there will have to proceed to the next intersection and make a U-turn.

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More concerns about LRT

2011-04-21T19:10:00.013-04:00

Four skilled individuals (planning, Engineering, and legal), all of whom live locally, put together this list of comments about the proposed LRT.

K-W is a city of 350,000, not a city of 729,000, the number that is always quoted regarding the Regional population of 2031. The next largest city where a significant LRT investment has been made is three times our current size. In 25 years, based on the cities' potential growth, it will still be two times our size. There is no urgency to get this passed.
The purpose of building the LRT has nothing to do with transit, where there currently simply is no problem. It is to promote reurbanization of the core area.
The outcome regarding the LRT choice has been predetermined by Regional staff from the beginning. The cart has been put before the horse on so many issues related to planning and development prior to a decision being rendered by Council on the LRT. This forces Council with only one alternative and that is to approve.
The public has not been formally engaged in the decision. The conclusions of staff from a few public open houses do not reflect the experiences of a number of the members of Regional Council who are sharing a far different view of the acceptance of the proposal from last fall's municipal election. The only effective way to determine public support is through a referendum.
No one honestly thinks the proposal before Council will come in even remotely close to the current cost estimates. On average, from recent past experience LRT’s built in North America were 40% over budget.
Ridership numbers are fantasy. Currently there are 9,000 riders on the spine, and that is projected to go to 27,000 the day LRT opens and 56,000 by 2031, more than currently use the system in Houston, Baltimore, San Jose, Minneapolis, etc.
The Region is asking the provincial government to amend the current development charge legislation to allow charges to be collected for the LRT. This is a clear sign that there are significant concerns among Regional staff about cost overruns and that the best way to reduce tax impacts is to have available the D/C option.
The Conestoga Parkway is a common argument used in support of the LRT. In the 1960’s many were opposed because “I will never use it.” Looking back, those who built it were visionaries. There are two main differences. First, currently 3% use transit and 98% use cars, likely the same as it was in the 1960’s. Secondly, the Conestoga Parkway was built solely for one purpose, moving people in their cars, which over time it has done. The current LRT proposal has very little to do with dealing with transit needs or moving people. Its primary purpose is for reurbanization. This is a recipe for failure.
The Region claims that the review and approval of the LRT by a 3rd party “Peer Review Panel” validates that this is a sound proposal. Recently the Chair along with several other members of Council have declared a conflict because of a potential benefit received by them or their families if the system gets built. It should be noted that several members of the “3rd Party Peer Review Panel” are also in conflict as they have done work for the Region as consultants, assisting in developing the current policies towards growth and transit. It would be difficult to suggest that the opinion of this group is valid based on the obvious conflict of several of its members by doing work for the Region and by being paid by the Region to do this work.
The Region is backtracking on having the required “feeder” buses in place with the opening of the LRT. In last Friday’s Record it was reported that the LRT cost is putting pressure on the Region being able to provide buses before 2017-2018 - which will significantly limit the ability to get people to the LRT route to use it. This in turn will reduce ridership and directly affect revenues.
The Region is only showing one financial impact summary, and it is based on unrealistically low capital costs ($810M) and overly optimistic ridership targets (27K on opening day). They need to show what the impact will be for every $50M of cost overrun and every 5K of ridership reduction in a matrix which shows a range of potential likely costs. Council and more importantly the public needs to understand the risk prior to any decision being rendered. I asked this question as recently as last week and the answer I received from Thomas Schmidt was that the Region is confident with their budgeting and we need not worry.
The Region has no idea if their proposed routing will in fact be buildable. As recently as a few weeks ago Caroline Street routing was changed from one side of the street to the other because of concerns about access to underground utilities. These kinds of changes have cost impacts and draw concern as to the overall level of detail used to determine budgets to date.
Have the Cities determined that they have sufficient capacity to allow for development in the core areas?
The Region talks about increasing property values along the route as a result of LRT. Higher property values, relative to the basket of values in the overall community, simply means higher taxes for those currently living near the route. So much for a 2% tax increase if your are fortunate enough to have your property go up in value by 20%. How about a 20% tax increase? Generally when property values increase significantly over a short period of time this is referred to as inflation. I am curious as to how this phenomenon, inflation, is view by the Region as being a good thing.

They also have some questions:

Has there been a full independent study of the need and justification for the LRT?
Will Kitchener, Waterloo and Cambridge really have that much core growth that it will support an LRT??
The current proposed route doesn’t connect employment areas to residential areas – how will that be useful??
With the Region Planning industrial growth in the Townships (like around the airport and other places) how are these areas going to be connected to the LRT and won’t the time it takes to get to a destination far exceed the time by car??
Most of the population will still be far removed from the LRT Route as densities in other areas of the Cities are being planned – how will the LRT be utilized by those people??
Isn’t a fixed hard built route a real risk – what if development doesn’t occur the way Region thinks it will – isn’t a rubber tire and perhaps electric battery driven), flexible road based system (which can easily be expanded (or contracted) with dedicated lanes be much cheaper, more flexible and much less risky??
What is the breakdown of proposed costs of the LRT? – that is – how much for 1) land acquisition; 2) design and final plan; 3) route preparation (,costs of moving roads, services, etc.); 4) Construction; 5) administration... and are these just estimates?? –
Most Region projects end up costing far more than projected. Take the Fairway Road bridge over the Grand: it started at $10M and will now be $50M plus. Won’t the same thing happen to the LRT??
What are the annual operating costs? Is there an operations budget? Are shortfalls picked up by the tax payers and what will it add to our tax bills??
Where will the projected ridership come from?? Has a fully independent study been performed??
What contribution have the feds and province 100% committed to the LRT? Is that commitment still there in light of the upcoming election(s) and what if it changes due to the fiscal constraints?
The LRT is focused and predicated on high density along its route – what if this doesn’t materialize because of other building forms, slow growth or alternate transportation systems??
The Region has essentially eliminated greenfield growth and attempted to focus high density growth along the LRT. Is our community aware of the implications? – doesn’t this just make K-W another mini Toronto? Is that what we want??
Isn’t a much better road network much cheaper than a fixed LRT? Won’t we need the roads anyway for truck routes and general commerce?
What are the real costs to putting increased density along the core? New water mains and sewer mains have to replace the old – who is paying for that??

Lack of credibility, the Region, and LRT reports

2011-04-11T22:25:00.009-04:00

Chair Jim Wideman and Members of Planning and Works Committee have released the long-awaited LRT report, titled Preliminary Preferred Rapid Transit Implementation Option and dated April 12, 2011.

There is no nice way to say this. The report is another example of flagrantly biased and inaccurate public relations hooey from the Region.

The report says, "In evaluating the rapid transit implementation options and considering the recent public input, staff have identified that: Rapid transit is preferred over business-as-usual." "10 per cent [of respondents] prefer business-as-usual."

This is based on public comment sheets that asked residents to choose one of 11 options, where the only non-rapid transit option was described as "not considered feasible."

I used to work as a market research analyst and I have heard a lot of wild stories about biased surveys, but this one takes the cake.

You do a survey in which you instruct people not to choose one of the options, and then you claim the survey proves that they don't want that option.

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The Region's LRT ridership estimates: pie in the sky

2011-04-11T21:15:00.006-04:00

The figures for other cities are from Wikipedia.

This analysis was done by Dave Ramsey. Dave's conclusions:

The estimated daily boardings of 56,000 in 2031 are overstated by at least 40,000.
Just like every city in North America with a population of less than 1M, KW will not need the LRT or BRT to cope with its public transit needs now or when the population reaches 462,000 in 2031.
If LRT is installed, the numbers show it will be a financial disaster. With 15,000 daily boardings rather than the estimated 57,000, subsidies will skyrocket over those forecast. In 2002, after 24 years Edmonton’s LRT had 36,000 boardings with an annual subsidy of $13.7M (see “ETS Light Rail Transit” bulletin). With less than half the boarders, the region’s subsidy will be about $21.7M instead of the $3.8M forecast (see ‘Connecting to the Future’ Summer 2009).

The myth of the successful Calgary LRT

2011-04-11T20:49:00.010-04:00

The 30th Anniversary of the C-Train: A Critical Analysis of Calgary’s Light Rail Transit System, by Steve Lafleur
Some nuggets about the Calgary LRT (dubbed the CTrain) from this report, which was released on March 30, 2011:

The conservative estimate herein puts the cost per paying rider at roughly $2.88
[There is an assumption] that the CTrain is actually getting people out of their cars — it is not. Despite the City’s Draconian efforts to curb downtown parking, more people drive downtown than in any other Canadian city.
Calgarians travel further to work than do residents of any Canadian city with a population over one million, save Edmonton.
the CTrain has actually helped drive urban sprawl
The independent U.S. Government Accountbility Office recognizes BRT as a superior alternative to LRT.
It is slow and expensive and at best has a moderately positive impact on traffic. At worst, it has a moderately negative impact.

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Negative impact of LRT on the City of Waterloo

2011-04-09T11:25:00.003-04:00

I wrote a little report on some concerns I have about what LRT will do to the city of Waterloo. You can download it here. (Click the file name LRT_impact_on_Waterloo.pdf at the top.)

Upate: I expanded the report so that the Waterloo city impacts are just part of it.

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Support for light rail trains gets a boost

2011-04-09T10:25:00.005-04:00

During the recent public consultations, the Region distributed a survey that could be filled out on paper or online. It listed 11 options: nine were forms of LRT, one was BRT on dedicated lanes, and one was no rapid transit.

The Region has released the results of the survey, causing the Record to trumpet that 78% of respondents voted for rapid transit, proving that the public wants LRT. But let's look at the survey.

The only option that was not rapid transit was phrased like this in the survey:

"BU11 - Business as usual - no rapid transit (not considered feasible, especially because of its quality of life impacts, disruptive road expansion and because it does not align with the Council-approved Regional Official Plan and Regional Transportation Master Plan)."

Who ever heard of a survey that describes one of the options as "not feasible"? This wording is so slanted that the survey is utterly worthless.

That "not feasible" option is not only feasible; it is clearly the best. It is the option that includes aBRT.

aBRT, or adapted bus rapid transit, is a much cheaper option that BRT in that it doesn't require dedicated lanes for the entirety of the route. It does employ signal priority, queue jumping, and bus-bypassing shoulders, so it is approximately the same speed as BRT (and it's quicker than LRT for the whole route because riders don't have to transfer in the middle). It is much more flexible than LRT or BRT in that the route can easily be changed. It is also much more flexible in that it can be converted to rail in future at little cost if the ridership rises. (BRT, with fixed curbs along the whole route, is very expensive to convert to rail.)

Not only does aBRT make sense, but it is the option currently preferred by Cambridge City Council.

Other questions abound about the survey.

It appears that the Region has counted only the printed surveys, and has ignored the online submissions. The only explanation I can think of for this is that the online surveys must have been against LRT.

The Record article trumpeting the survey results pulls out all stops in slanted reporting. (Support for light rail trains gets a boost) The reporter interviewed me yesterday and I explained the problems with the survye, but he neglected to report them. The article gives the erroneous impression that high tech emloyees are clamoring for LRT, which is utter hogwash. And while the pro-LRT organization is named in full, T4ST is not mentioned. To add insult to injury, they spelled my name wrong. I am referred to as "Ruth Howarth, the spokesperson for a group opposed to the light-rail plans."

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The sheep freak out

2011-04-08T23:30:00.006-04:00

There seems to be tacit agreement among governments and media that the public must not be panicked by the Japan nuclear reactor fallout. Every step of the way we have been told that certain things can't happen... and then they do.

So we were told this wasn't Chernobyl and it wouldn't be possible to have nuclear contamination outside the reactors... and then when that happened they said it wouldn't spread... and then when that happened they said it wouldn't be harmful... and then when that happened they said it wouldn't get to North America... and now nuclear fallout has been detected (in small quantities) at the Bruce Power plant on the shores of Lake Huron. And just to be clear about this, that's really close to where I live.

I understand the rationale for this "benevolent conspiracy." Nobody wants boatloads of Japanese refugees foundering in the middle of the Pacific. Nobody wants a worldwide financial collapse caused by panic and fear.

But. I for one am starting to freak out only because of all the lies. What else aren't they telling us?

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World of debt

2011-04-08T20:24:00.016-04:00

In last month's "State of the City" address, Waterloo Mayor Brenda Halloran said that "finances remain the city's biggest challenge, with a $5-million dollar debt over RIM Park still to pay off", according to local news sources.

Not long ago, five million dollars seemed like an awful lot of money... after all, that $5M debt has restricted city spending across the board for many years and it will restrict spending for many years to come. Sports, arts, community programs, children's programs, parks... everything has taken a hit because of that RIM Park debt.

But now that LRT is on the table, a $5M debt is laughable. When the Region builds a rail route through Waterloo, the city of Waterloo is going to have to pay many times more than $5M just for downloaded capital costs. The Region expects the municipalities to pony up for:

Building parking garages next to LRT stations
Resurfacing roads torn up by LRT construction
Moving hydro vaults, utility poles, lamp posts, fire plugs as needed for LRT
Rebuilding curbs and sidewalks torn up by LRT
And who knows what else...

But wait, there's more! Cambridge Mayor Doug Craig has estimated that LRT will cost $23M per year in operating costs, all of which will be paid by regional taxpayers. Yes, that's right: that crippling RIM Park debt that it's taking Waterloo decades to pay off - Waterloo taxpayers' portion of LRT operating costs will be more than that every year... forever!

All that is in addition to increased regional taxes to pay the roughly $500M that will be the Region's portion of LRT construction costs.

Then there's the rest of the region's Master Transportation Plan, which staff estimate will cost $3.75B (yes, that's billion) over 20 years.

When I write about LRT, I tend to focus on problems with the route, inconvenience, inaccurate ridership projections, inability to meet stated goals, and things along those lines.

But cost is also a vital element of all this.

Here's one scenario that's looking pretty realistic about now: Taxes are going to rise so much in Waterloo, Kitchener and Cambridge that, far from creating flourishing downtown cores, LRT will cause masses of people to move out to the townships (which won't pay into LRT and so will have much lower taxes) and commute long distances on area highways.

Having LRT tracks running through our commercial corridor, combined with the need to run buses on the same routes because LRT stops so infrequently, will result in so much congestion that everyone will avoid the core like the plague.

The LRT won't be empty though; it will be full of University of Waterloo students who use it as a student shuttle to zip past the empty storefronts.

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Questions about rail plan go beyond money

2011-04-07T22:17:00.005-04:00

My article in the Record today:

Questions about rail plan go beyond money
In his April 1 community editorial board article, We’re More than a Collection of Taxpayers, Sean Geobey dismisses the community’s objections to light rail transit as a cynical knee-jerk reaction by people who don’t understand what community is all about. He claims all we care about is lower taxes.

Never mind that as the representative for Taxpayers for Sensible Transit (T4ST), I have written articles in this paper that express support for improved transit and detail why light rail is the wrong approach. Or that Taxpayers for Sensible Transit has made official submissions to regional council expressing our concerns about the effect of light rail on our transit system and community.

Never mind that this paper has published nearly 200 letters to the editor against light rail (all reproduced on www.t4st.com) that are proof of residents’ keen commitment to our community and deep understanding of the issues.

Had Geobey done any research into why so many citizens oppose light rail, he would have seen that this issue is about much more than cost.

Consider the devastating impact the tracks will have on Uptown Waterloo. Of all the downtowns in our region, Waterloo’s is clearly the most vibrant and functional. But the imposition of light rail on King Street and other Uptown streets will make driving chaotic, discourage shoppers and inevitably rob the area of its vitality.

Trains will run against traffic on the one-way portion of Erb Street at Albert Street. This is not only inconvenient, but also dangerous. The Erb/Bridgeport/Caroline intersection will come to a halt every 3.5 minutes for trains to cross. As a result, Erb Street will cease to be a useful east-west route. And it will be impossible to hold popular tourist events such as the Busker Festival on King Street.

More problems: Waterloo Park will be sliced in two by trains. It seems likely a fence will be required, especially since the tracks border a children’s zoo. This will leave the park looking like postwar Berlin.

As a replacement for the iXpress bus, light rail will provide service that is much less convenient. For example, the iXpress stops in the centre of the research and technology park and close to the entrances of Conestoga Mall and Fairview Mall; the light rail transit trains would stop much farther away, requiring long walks for transit riders.

Why is convenience so important? Because you won’t lure people out of their cars with inconvenient public transit.

The cost model of light rail transit assumes that we can afford to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a rail line because it will result in less money needed for road expansion. If light rail transit does not lure drivers out of their cars, then we are stuck with the unaffordable situation of paying for light rail transit and paying for road expansion.

Light rail transit is a great deal for students at the University of Waterloo, and that no doubt is why Geobey and other students are such vocal supporters. Every student gets a transit pass included in their fees (at a greatly reduced rate). Students are a major component of our transit ridership, and it is important to provide service for them. But we do not need to provide a $1-billion train so that they can live further from campus.

My point here is not to repeat every argument against light rail transit. It is important to lift the public dialogue on light rail transit out of the mindset of Geobey and some other light rail supporters who characterize the anti-rail side as backward-thinking old-timers who don’t know what’s good for the community.

The Region of Waterloo is voting on light rail in June, so we don’t have a lot of time to think through the effects of this megaproject — both financial and physical — on our community. Let’s keep the dialogue respectful.

Ruth Haworth is the spokesperson for Taxpayers for Sensible Transit. She writes the transit web site http://www.t4st.com.

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Hyperdecantenation

2011-04-03T08:28:00.004-04:00

The enitrety of info about hyperdecantenation in Incredible edibles, a recent article about molecular gastronomy in the New Yorker:

They also claim to have a way of improving wine by “hyperdecanting” it via sixty seconds in a blender—the idea being that it will benefit from the oxygenation and outgassing effects. My solemn, taking-one-for-the-team experiments with red wine have partly confirmed this for Schwarzeneggerian young reds.

I took up the gauntlet. First stop, the liquor store, where I pulled a little prank on the vintages clerk when I put on a serious face and asked for help locating a young Schwarzeneggerian red. (I imagine he's still talking about it.)

Came home with a bottle purported to be a big young Californian red: the 2008 Liberty Cab ($17), and just for fun, the cheapest Italian red I could find (year unknown, name forgotten, bottle recycled). Invited over two wine-loving friends.

Put out three glasses at each place: one for the wine straight out of the bottle, one for the hyperdecanted wine, and my Eisch "breathable" wine glasses, which I have confirmed in other wine tastings do amazing things to wine.

I hyperdecanted by blenderizing each wine for 60 seconds, starting with the Liberty.

The effect was pronounced. Right out of the bottle, the Liberty tasted stellar: rounded, layered. The hyperdecanted Liberty was good, but lost a lot of its definition. It became much more generic tasting, mellow, a bit blah. The Eisch was right in the middle: it was superb.

Some quick palate cleansing and then it was on to the Italian. (No rest for the weary.) Out of the bottle it was harsh, raw, and a bit hard to drink. (Ordinarily I'd have added a teaspoon of water to my glass to mellow it out.) The Eisch was better but still harsh. The hyperdecanted, though: oh, my. It was a transformed wine: the harshness gone.

By the way, the foaminess recedes almost immediately. The hyperdecantenation seemed to remove the "legs" from the Liberty, but added some to the Italian: I don't know if that makes any sense.

Moral of the story? Buy cheap wine and put it in the blender.

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Unknown Costs of LRT

2011-03-25T08:50:00.009-04:00

We don’t yet know the Region’s preferred option for LRT, so we don’t have final estimates of capital costs or the increases to property taxes. But we know it will result in hundreds of millions in costs to Regional taxpayers.

Recently, it has become apparent that there may be more costs that haven't been made public so far, and that there are other issues around costs that are much too unclear. In particular:

Downloading – At a March 11, 2011 meeting of municipal Directors of Engineering, it supposedly came out that the Region intends for the municipalities to pay for a portion of capital costs related to LRT. These are costs related to moving hydro vaults and poles, resurfacing roads, rebuilding curbs and sidewalks, moving light posts, and so on. I have confirmed this information with two senior sources, but don’t know if it is completely settled yet.

Tax increases – A recent article in the Waterloo Chronicle revealed that property tax increases that have been publicized have been a bit misleading. The increases are cumulative, so a $20 increase means $40 the second year, $60 the third year, and so on. See Confusion over tax impact of rapid transit, March 15.

Land acquisition costs – Some local politicians have raised concerns about land acquisition costs, which could be much higher than expected because the Region will have to acquire a lot of land at one time. I have heard this issue described as "the big cloud hanging over LRT."

Costs of alternatives not known – The Cambridge Economic Development Advisory Committee has advised Cambridge City Council that rapid transit should not proceed until comparison costs for aBRT are known. In the Region’s February 15 eleven-option report, the only bus option was a “Cadillac” version of BRT that went to St Jacob’s market. We need to be able to compare realistic options: LRT, BRT, aBRT/expanded iXpress. (Note: aBRT is like BRT but merges in with regular traffic most of the time.)

Total transit costs not known – LRT is part of a transit solution that includes a lot of other transit enhancements. The cost of the Transportation Master Plan over 20 years is estimated to be $3.75B, according to Regional staff. It is disingenuous at best to tell us the tax effect of LRT without telling us the tax effect of the total transit solution.

The effect of cost overruns – A couple of years into construction, what will the Region do if there are large cost overruns? Will it ask the townships to pitch in? Will it ask the municipalities to kick in more? If all of the overrun is paid for by the regional tax base, how much might regional taxes rise?

We need objective analysis of all these issues – not more PR.

LRT should be deferred until all these cost issues are resolved.
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Downloading LRT Capital Costs

2011-03-18T08:34:00.007-04:00

I have heard that the Regional LRT plan includes a lot of downloaded costs to the municipalities where LRT goes - Waterloo and Kitchener. Apparently this came out at a recent meeting of Regional Council. It was one of those situations where staff made a presentation and councillors, realizing that something wasn't adding up, probed until some unexpected truths came out. Or so I hear.

If true, then Kitchener and Waterloo city councils are going to have to come up with tens of millions of dollars to pay to repair the infrastructure damaged by LRT construction: moving hydro polls and lamp posts, replacing curbs and sidewalks, repaving torn-up sections of road.

Just to be clear: this is a bombshell. If true, it means that severely strained municipal budgets will be stretched past the limit.

In addition, there is a second possible set of costs to the municipalities (and this might affect Cambridge as well): What will the Region do if there are cost overruns? The provincial and regional governments have agreed to pay 2/3 the cost of LRT to a limit. We pay the other third of the budgeted cost and we pay all cost overruns. If LRT goes a few hundred million dollars over-budget (which is not uncommon), where will the region get the extra money from? Will they guarantee that they won't demand more from lower tier governments?

When people talk of the cost of LRT, they mostly talk about tax increases. It goes beyond that. It also means cuts to lots of other municipal services: the libraries, arts funding, parks maintenance, road repair, snow removal, on and on and on. We in Waterloo are already cut to the bone because of RIM Park.

I'm throwing this out there, and if anyone has evidence one way or the other, I'd like to hear it. It is not responsible to proceed with LRT if there are any uncertainties of this magnitude.

Update: I have received confirmation that this downloading of capital costs is indeed the plan. And there's more - apparently the region also intends for Kitchener and Waterloo to build parking garages for some of the stations.

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Cambridge: Getting Screwed and Dodging a Bullet

2011-03-17T19:46:00.017-04:00

On her blog, Regional councillor Jane Mitchell completely poo-poos any concerns of Cambridge residents that LRT won't extend to their city. She describes Cambridge as a bunch of whiners who had terrible transit when it was their responsibility, who don't have the ridership to justify being in on Phase 1 of the LRT, and who make a habit of complaining falsely of unfair treatment by the Region.

I was embarrassed by the post and thought it was shockingly undiplomatic, especially as it was written by someone who's making decisions for the entire region. But in addition, it's wrong. This is not about being unkind to Cambridge; it's about materially disadvantaging them.

First - The LRT is not going to be much faster than the iXpress in travelling from Conestoga Mall to Fairview Mall. But for people going on to Cambridge, the LRT requires that people get off the train and wait for a bus - which means that for people going from Cambridge to anywhere in K-W, the trip will be slower and less convenient than iXpress. They are expected to contribute over a hundred million dollars - possibly several hundred million with expected cost overruns - for a transit system that is worse than what they have now.

Second - Imagine five years from now, when a company or individual is considering relocating to Waterloo Region. What signal do they get from the region's second-largest city not being on the main transit route? This isn't just about disadvantaging transit riders: it's about disadvantaging Cambridge real estate and property values and businesses. An LRT that doesn't go to Cambridge is far worse for Cambridge than no LRT at all.

In my research I have been talking to Cambridge residents, politicians and city staff, and what I hear is that they are well aware that they both have been screwed and dodged a bullet. Screwed in the ways I mention above, but dodged a bullet in other important ways. LRT would have messed up Water Street and the lovely, growing core of Galt. In addition, it looks like the municipalities are going to have to foot the bill for a lot of LRT capital costs: for replacing pavement, sidewalks and curbs that are torn up; for moving hydro polls and street lights; and so on. This was wholly unknown until Nancy Button was asked a question about it at the last Regional Council meeting. This could be tens of millions for each of Waterloo and Kitchener: I heard that Cambridge recently had to pay $2M for such capital costs when the Region built a roundabout.

Note: I like Jane Mitchell's blog a lot. I read it regularly, and I think she does us a service by being so candid in her writing. I wish I'd written a positive post about it before writing this negative one.

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Turmoil in the Middle East

2011-03-17T09:20:00.007-04:00

This is just a sidebar, or metacomment, to the coverage of upheaval in the middle east.

I don't trust the coverage we're getting, because behind it I see a smirk - both from the people in the news rooms, and from our western governments.

Since September 11, 2001 - and before - the west has seen the Muslim states as their enemy, at least partially. Now that there are several popular upheavals against governments in those states, there seems to be a bit of smugness in our reaction. Oh, we genuinely care about the plight of people there: but we are also glad to see the comeuppance of these governments that formed oil cartels and stood against us and had the economic power to oppose our governments' worldview.

This reaction seems to be slanting our view of what's going on. I don't view the protests as primarily about democracy. I think it's more a matter of demographics.

Years ago, I heard a lecture by a demographer who said that in coming years (about now), the proportion of 18 to 25 year-olds in Arab states would result in social upheaval. He said that the proportion of young adults would be so high that they would face massive unemployment, and that historically that led to violence - and he said the only way to avoid it was to give them an outlet through emigration.

We don't hear anything like that in our current coverage. It's all about the dream of democracy. But what democracy? Toppling a dictator does not guarantee democracy. More likely it results in another dictator.

A few other thoughts:

Fair elections cost a lot: $200 million and up. Can all these countries afford them? Is democracy sustainable?
As Hannah Arendt argued, the political/economic system adopted by a country is only part of the picture: culture is the major factor. Changing the way the government is chosen is not always as much a game-changer as we assume.
How much of all this is due to problems of countries whose economies are developing on the back of oil production? There are all sorts of things at play: a dominant industry that provides relatively little employment; the interference of oil-consuming nations; the ownership of the industry by giant multinationals; the potential for corruption; etc etc.

Rail transit will not solve urban congestion

2011-03-05T09:48:00.007-05:00

I have another guest column in the Record today: Public will never give up their cars. It is printed along with an article by Tim Mollison of Tri-Tag: Rail transit an answer to urban congestion.

While I thank the Record for airing the debate, I'm not thrilled with the way they broke up my paragraphs in the print edition, which messed it up somewhat (the online version is the way I wrote it). Also, I object to the headline they put on my piece, as I neither say nor intend to say that the public will never give up their cars. I myself bought my first car at 40 and would prefer not to own one. A better headline for my piece would have been "Rail transit will not solve urban congestion."

However, reading my column again, it would have been better to put the last four paragraphs first, which would have clarified where I stand on transit. I want better transit; I want density; and I want a city that makes it easy to get around on transit - but from my analysis of the proposal, I think LRT will not only fail at achieving those goals, but will take us backwards.

Anyway, that's not the point of this post. If anyone is interested in the Jane Jacobs reference, I thought I'd supply it. She has a lot more to say about why LRT became a fad and why it's wrong. Luckily, parts of the book are available on Google books, here.

Here is the relevant excerpt:

[Paul Martin] told me that he intended to announce a program of federal grants enabling municipalities to install light-rail public transit. Now it was my turn to demur.

I told him that unfortunate experiences already showed that fixed transit routes were expensive failures when they were not preceded by evidence of sufficient demand. Underused routes not only are a drain on transit systems but are ill-suited as contributors to the needs and convenience of users. In the past, designers of transit systems had usually chosen to locate rail routes by observing which bus routes were most heavily used, a pragmatic method that worked well in Toronto and elsewhere. After it was apparently lost to transit engineers' memories in the 1960's, Toronto and a number of other cities, among them Atlanta, Buffalo, Detroit, and Chicago, tried rail routes justified by other goals and these have been unable to pull their weights, literally or figuratively. They don't have enough passengers.

I asserted that a prudent program to promote transit must be flexible enough to encourage experiments with routes, should that be what a city wanted to do, and possibly experiment with bus sizes, before settling on fixed rail routes. Why not specify grants for transit? I wondered aloud. Why specify from on high what form the transit must take?

... [Mr. Martin] pointed out that the mayors of every large city had asked for light-rail transit grants. I told him that I had attended the meetings where they arrived at this unanimity; they reasoned that asking for light-rail grants was politically more realistic than asking for other kinds of public transit equipment or more general transit help, such as grants for operating costs, the most desperate need in some municipalities.

Mr. Martin perfunctorily conceded that flexibility might be worth taking into consideration. Again I saw that our points of view were different. What he could contemplate as attractive bonanzas for clamoring cities and perhaps for complaining corporations producing rails and streetcars, I feared as foregone fiascoes.

###

Heritage, Sense of Place, Identity, Culture

2011-02-24T19:55:00.023-05:00

This is a picture from today's Record of a school that was torn down in Cambridge this week:

This is where I live (photo from Google Maps):

...so you can imagine why the loss of the school in Cambridge is very sad for me.

A decade ago, my building was saved by the skin of its teeth. After the original school closed it became an adult learning center, then offices... and then the building was condemned.

Developer Shawky Fahel bought the building and turned it into condos. But unlike almost every other historical condo development in the area, he preserved every aspect of the building that could be saved. He preserved the terrazzo floors in the wide hallways, as well as all the doors, stair railings, the little kid drinking fountains, even the original classrooms (although a couple were divided into two units). The birds-eye maple floors, still marked where desks were bolted to them a hundred years ago, were carefully numbered, pulled up, taken away for refinishing and then replaced. All the plumbing, wiring and heating ducts were replaced, but essentially the building was left its charming old self.

Compare that to the Seagram Lofts: only two walls were saved in each building, and otherwise the "lofts" are all new construction, with no historical materials inside. Or the Bauer Lofts, which is just an apartment building that happens to be built next to the old Bauer factory (which itself was completely gutted, with the only original parts being a little bit of the outside brick).

Further afield, sometimes we "save" heritage buildings in a way that doesn't save them at all. The old Toronto Stock Exchange on Bay Street, for example, was a designated building and so had to be preserved, but all that's left is the facade, swallowed up in a glass skyscraper with no attempt to even riff on the style of the original building. Of the fabulous old art deco interior with its pneumatic tubes and brass, nothing remains.

It would have been best if Uptown Waterloo had maintained enough families that the schools didn't have to close, but given the need for finding something else to do with the historic Alexandra Street School, this is about as good as it gets. (Thanks, Shawky.)

###

Galactic Ruler Xenu Hires a Lawyer

2011-02-21T19:59:00.013-05:00

There once was a guy who wrote sci-fi short stories for pulp magazines. Then one day he wrote this story:

75 million years ago, the earth was over-populated with 186 billion people, so its ruler rounded up most of the people and put them in volcanoes and blasted them with H-bombs. But their souls escaped, so he rounded up all the souls and made them watch movies that tricked them into believing they were gods or devils. After that the souls clumped up and invaded the bodies of the remaining people. The souls are still in us today, and the only way we can get rid of them is to join Scientology.

L Ron Hubbard wrote that story over 60 years ago, but the cult based on it is still in existence, and lots of nutty Californians are members. Actually, not that many - it seems that Scientology only has about 25,000 members - but when you think how ridiculous the story is that is (apparently) the basis of the entire faith, it really is a lot.

The Feb 14-21 New Yorker has a long, engrossing story about Scientology, The Apostate, and author Lawrence Wright does a brilliant job. I was glued to the page for hours. This is even more amazing given the awkward writing style which I am certain was caused by a team of lawyers scrutinizing every word to ensure that the aggressive Scientologist legal team couldn't find grounds to sue. In fact, that aspect of the writing makes the article even more engrossing: there are things not said, things teasing me from words I can just barely sense were removed.

At one point the author flies to California for an arranged meeting with the Scientology spokesman, but the guy plays games with him and utimately won't talk to him. A few paragraphs later, the spokesperson flies to New York to meet the author and his editors, and brings with him an entourage of two other executives and four lawyers, along with 48 binders of supporting documents. What did the New Yorker do to cause that about-face? An entire backstory lurks behind the tale.

In my lifetime, the three litigious heavyweights have been Brian Mulroney, Conrad Black, and the Church of Scientology. News articles about all three have had this awkward, overly scrutinized feel. I remember one article about Mulroney in the Globe & Mail (the article that broke the news of the envelopes of cash from Karlheinz Schreiber), which was almost unreadable - and the bombshell $300,000 figure was hidden in a paragraph near the end. The breakthrough of the New Yorker article is that the legal scrutiny actually made the article better.

###

History's First Palindromic Scandal?

2011-02-20T01:39:00.001-05:00

The Oda Ado.

The "New" Rapid Transit Proposal, Part 2

2011-02-14T19:24:00.010-05:00

The proposal is here: Region releases report on Rapid Transit Implementation Options.

A few weeks ago, Regional Council voted to instruct staff to consider a bus rapid transit (BRT) option. The report presents 11 options, nine of which are LRT and only one is BRT. That option is a Cadillac version of BRT. It goes all the way to the St Jacob's Farmer's Market, which is further than the original LRT proposed route went. The entire route is on dedicated lanes built up with curbs: no parts of the route merge with regular lanes of traffic or use cheaper means of creating a dedicated lane, such as painting a diamond on the road.

Why did they do this? It seems obvious that the plan is to make BRT seem more expensive so as to tilt regional councillors towards choosing LRT. In other words, this report is just more manipulation, more obfuscation, more nonsense.

We need a real debate on this issue, with numbers we can trust and honest realistic options. We are not going to get that from our Region. We need an outside arbiter or consultant or board to come in and take over transit planning.

###

The "New" Rapid Transit Proposal

2011-02-14T16:34:00.006-05:00

Only a few weeks after regional council voted to reconsider the BRT option, the Region has released its "new" transit proposal: Rapid transit implementation options.

Is it new? No. The report provides a dizzying array of 11 options, nine of which are LRT and one of which is "status quo" (AKA inflated estimates of the costs of not improving transit). Some of the options, such as the one to run LRT to St Jacobs' farmer's market, seem to be included just to set up easy targets and divert opposition from the main goal - to push through the original LRT proposal.

The report also sets up dates for new public consultation. If I had any expectation that the consultation would be any more honest than last time, when the region spent a fortune disguising a PR campaign as public consultation, I would make an effort to publicize these. As it is, what's the point.

But that, of course, is just the goal of this latest salvo in the war on Waterloo Region to force LRT on us against our wishes: confuse the issues, obfuscate the issues, wear us down. So, with a tired and heavy heart, I'll repeat a few of the reasons that the vast majority of citizens are against this crazed plan to put a train down our main streets:

LRT is a flawed transit plan that will be a costly white elephant that will bleed resources from useful transit routes, will provide inconvenient service, will create congestion on the roads, and will cause unnecessary increases in taxes.

As Jane Jacobs argues in her book Dark Age Ahead, "fixed transit routes were expensive failures when they were not preceded by evidence of sufficient demand." As John Shortreed recently showed, the demand forecast by the Region is wildly overstated. We do not have the demand sufficient to justify a fixed rail route. (I would provide a link for the Shortreed info but The Record is no longer posting certain anti-LRT articles on therecord.com, a devious tactic that should be stopped. I would be happy to discuss this with anyone interested in rectifying it.)

The report's claims that a BRT would quickly become overused are highly questionable. There are heavily used bus routes in Toronto that operate just fine with heavy use at rush hour. The report's overblown images of an endless line of bunched buses are just scare-mongering.

The LRT proposal is more about creating a flashy legacy project for departing politicians than it is about good city planning.

I am concerned that the ideology behind the LRT proposal is that the way to reduce car use is to artificially increase congestion by creating a route that disrupts traffic. That’s the only way I can think of to explain the route down King, the left turn across King at Erb Street, the disruption of intersections at Caroline-Erb and Caroline-William (in the latter case, the current map has the LRT running diagonally across the middle of the intersection).

In addition, the planned LRT would not be convenient. While the LRT will take away two lanes of traffic on our main arteries such as King Street between downtown and uptown, the stops are so infrequent that the area LRT serves will not be well-serviced. This type of infrequently stopping public transit is suitable for bringing people into downtown from the suburbs, but is not suitable for a transit line that is supposed to service the heart of the city.

If people find transit inconvenient they won’t take it, and then it will not reduce the need for roads at all.

The biggest convenience factors are frequency of arrival and total length of time of trips. Buses, which carry less people, run more frequently. Routes can be extended to require less transfers. And overall time on the iXpress route is similar between BRT and LRT. Meanwhile LRT, being an inflexible fixed route with large carriers, has less frequency and requires more transfers in the entire trip. It is much less convenient.

Buses can be short-turned (run in a loop over the busiest stops at rush hour). Buses can be moved between routes to suit demand. Buses can travel on different routes to avoid slowdowns when there are accidents or other disruptions on the road.

BRT could be an even cheaper option if the route was designated by painting diamonds on the road rather than building curbs around the BRT lanes. There could be a combination of the two techniques: buses could merge with regular traffic when going through Uptown Waterloo, for example (a proposal that was unanimously adopted by the Uptown Vision Committee).

Finally, the LRT route is overly favorable to the university of Waterloo. That helps the Region boost their ridership projections, but since university students essentially ride for free, it does little to help transit revenues. It does very little to meet the stated goals of the proposal, which is to lure commuters out of their cars and on to transit.

###

King Tut

2011-02-12T22:46:00.000-05:00

King Tut

AL | Myspace

Is Waterloo Square in Trouble?

2011-02-07T23:24:00.009-05:00

Waterloo Square, lately known as "the Shoppes at Waterloo Town Square," is not flourishing. Nearly half the shops are empty or about to be (the good shoe store and Gizmos are both having closing sales). The remaining clothing stores are not the sort of boutiques that were envisioned as attractions; they're no different from an average mall-type store. The chocolate shop can't be doing well (I never see anyone in there). The "art gallery" and barely-open condo showroom are filler.

What's going wrong?

Some of the retailers believe that business never recovered after the front parking lot was turned into the Public Square. I like the public square and I like the policy to hide parking lots, but it may well be that visible parking attracts shoppers; after all, people flock to malls, where many people walk a long distance across the huge parking lots.

Another problem could be that the mall is just too small. After all, how many malls have barely 20 establishments, including restaurants? But we just spent a pile of money reducing it to a fraction of its previous size (it was not only cut in half, but the tower and basement areas were removed).

Perhaps the stores could be the problem - too expensive and not high enough quality. The vision for Uptown was independently owned boutique stores and gift shops. We haven't had many stores as high quality as Fudge's (which closed due to retirement).

I also wonder if First Gulf, the owner of the mall, isn't setting the rents too high. I wrote a business plan a few years ago for someone who was thinking of renting the coffee shop space, and when I crunched the numbers I saw how difficult it would be to survive with the rent that First Gulf wanted. (They may have lowered it after the space was empty for some time.)

An even more troubling thought is that perhaps Waterloo Square is a bellwether for the Uptown. Uptown has its share of failed or failing stores. Other than Words Worth Books, The Old Goat, Ontario Seed and Lily White, I'm not sure there's anything worth going to Uptown for these days.

Is anyone monitoring the situation, or doing anything about this?

###

Molecular Gastronomy Part Two

2011-01-03T20:37:00.035-05:00

A recent meal at Aphrodite Restaurant.

To save writing "This tasted super!" six million times, I'll say upfront that every bite was outstanding. This was one of the best meals of my life. It was performance art. It lasted over four hours, and despite the long list of dishes, it wasn't too much food - the courses were small, some only one bite - and it wasn't very rich. Also, despite what you might think when reading the details, nothing was gratuitous or gimmicky; everything made sense, was delicious, and was edifying.

Chef: David Faure
Address: 10 bd Dubouchage, Nice, France

The Revolution menu at 98 euros each:

Tangerine-vodka cocktail with dry ice (-78 degrees). Served in a round fish bowl steaming like a science fair exhibit, with a hollowed vanilla bean as a straw.

The virtual oyster ("A la recherche de l'huitre perdue"). On a bed of kelp, an oyster shell with what looked to be a raw oyster, but turned out to be eggplant and kiwi with a pearl made out of something in gel form. Also on the plate was a small glass of sea urchin mousse, and a tiny piece of buttered bread - we were instructed what order to eat it all in.

Nitro-Dragon of Vodka and green apple, curry wrong-smoked caviar, and Rai Faure cream. The waiter prepared them at the table, and made one for himself first to demonstrate. He dipped the Vodka/green apple espuma in liquid nitrogen and then put the result on top of the rest of the ingredients in a ceramic spoon. You slide the contents of the spoon into your mouth, where they create a sort of flavor-texture explosion. Then you breathe out through your nostrils, causing two huge jets of steam to shoot out your nose (like a dragon). Much giggling ensues.

The bread without bread. Long narrow strips of breadless bread are presented in a glass vase. One is a long strip of cooked parmesan cheese. Another is a strip that is akin to a big potato chip. I couldn't identify all of them.

Illusion of meat macaroni with duck liver. The meat-truffle macaroni was an extruded gel. It was served with peas, pea mousse, and some perfectly prepared, rare liver.

Warm spherification of liquid Pissaladiere, olive oil, oregano. Pissaladiere is a Nicoise specialty of pastry with caramelized onions on top. This rendition was a deconstruction of the traditional dish in liquid/gel form.

Texture and temperature. Ravioli of "sot l'y laisse" with roasted chicken juice (+70 degrees) and morel ice cream (-20 degrees). Morel ice cream is an AMAZING accompaniment.

Plume Iberique. Spanish pork, from the back of the neck, smoked with el Gringo, grilled green asparagus, peanut juice. This was served in an upside down glass dome full of smoke. When served, the waiter lifted away the glass dome and the smoke swirled around the diner's head. The meat was flash cooked in something very hot that caramelized the outside more than I've ever tasted.

Brie cheese ice cream, gingerbread, violet jam.

Sorbet. Made in front of us with liquid nitrogen (-196 degrees). The waiter took what looked like juice, combined it with the nitrogen, and whipped it with a whisk. It was amazingly creamy and lucious. The only drawback: the cold and acidity caused my tongue to hurt for a few minutes.

Virtual fried egg. Prepared at the table in a frying pan dipped into freezing liquid nitrogen, the waiter broke an egg into the pan (the egg was faked up) and it looked just like a fried egg - but it was a mango "yolk" with an unsweetened coconut "white". Cool trick and tasty.

Deconstructed dessert: wrong caviar or Irish coffee? The waiter ran up to the table an apologised profusely that he'd forgot to bring one of our first courses. He put down what appeared to be caviar, sour cream and blinis. But the caviar turned out to be irish coffee turned into tiny gel balls, and the whipped cream was unsweetened with an intense coffee flavor. (The blinis were regular blinis.)

Sweet morphing: The final dessert of the evening was a tray with a series of little things on it. One diner was chosen to serve, and instructions were given about the order and way to eat each:

Green lemon sorbet sparkling lollipop - this crackled and popped in the mouth.
Fruit jelly without fruit.
Cornetto of strawberries and white balsamic vinegar.
Wasabi chocolate with a tube of raspberry chok to spread on it.
Solid "sex on the beach" - a tiny version of the cocktail, deconstructed.

Helium balloons to suck on and talk funny.

Here's Molecular gastronomy part 1.
###

Square Head

2011-01-02T13:56:00.024-05:00

On a recent trip to the south of France, I saw a lot of pragmatic, creative, effective transit infrastructure:

Elevators and escalators all through Monte Carlo to move residents up and down the steep streets.
Tunnels tucked away in congested areas to divert traffic underground.
Underground parking tucked away all over the place. Seven levels of parking under the old town of Monte Carlo.
A shopping zone in Nice with the street permanently blocked to cars (with an LRT running where the road was) but with lots of parking behind the stores.
Many, many trains.
Ferries.
In Nice, rental bikes. (As I noticed in Washington DC a couple of months ago, these don't seem to be used at all. I know they're popular in Holland; I don't know why they seem to be a dud in some other places.)
Buses running within and between towns that are so clearly marked that newcomers to the area can use them without trouble.
Convenient parking everywhere: street parking and parking lots.
Despite issues such as roads built by the Romans, narrow Medieval streets, huge amount of tourists, and a high cliff running through the densest areas, lots of cars moving well.

And this is off-topic, but here's an office building in Nice. God, I love France!

Alarmist statement

2010-12-16T23:07:00.003-05:00

Letter to the editor written by my dad in today's Record.

Alarmist statement

Re: Light rail: ‘A failure to move forward will doom us’ – Dec. 11

Waterloo regional Chair Ken Seiling says that “A failure to move forward (with the ‘light rail’ project) will doom us.” This is alarmist in the extreme.

Seiling knows as well as anyone that the alternatives are trains or rapid buses, not trains or doing nothing. It is an honest debate and sensible things have been said in support of both alternatives. Trains will certainly run faster. On the other hand, any sensible version of the rapid bus alternative will cost less and provide a more flexible transit system. For example, if the claim that trains will be underutilized proved true there would be nothing we could do other than watch empty trains racing up and down King Street. If a similar problem arose with rapid buses, assuming they were not running on rails, we could adapt without paying a huge price.

To suggest that adopting buses rather than trains will bring “doom” is ludicrous. Ordinarily, Seiling comes across as a very competent administrator. In this present debate we are not seeing him at his best.

Larry Haworth
St. Agatha

###

Ellsberg on Assange

2010-12-16T22:01:00.007-05:00

This post was written by the Insititute for Public Accuracy.

News Release

Ex-Intelligence Officers, Others See Plusses in WikiLeaks Disclosures

December 7, 2010

The following statement was released today, signed by Daniel Ellsberg, Frank Grevil, Katharine Gun, David MacMichael, Ray McGovern, Craig Murray, Coleen Rowley and Larry Wilkerson; all are associated with Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence.

WikiLeaks has teased the genie of transparency out of a very opaque bottle, and powerful forces in America, who thrive on secrecy, are trying desperately to stuff the genie back in. The people listed below this release would be pleased to shed light on these exciting new developments.

How far down the U.S. has slid can be seen, ironically enough, in a recent commentary in Pravda (that's right, Russia's Pravda): "What WikiLeaks has done is make people understand why so many Americans are politically apathetic ... After all, the evils committed by those in power can be suffocating, and the sense of powerlessness that erupts can be paralyzing, especially when ... government evildoers almost always get away with their crimes. ..."

So shame on Barack Obama, Eric Holder, and all those who spew platitudes about integrity, justice and accountability while allowing war criminals and torturers to walk freely upon the earth. ... the American people should be outraged that their government has transformed a nation with a reputation for freedom, justice, tolerance and respect for human rights into a backwater that revels in its criminality, cover-ups, injustices and hypocrisies.

Odd, isn't it, that it takes a Pravda commentator to drive home the point that the Obama administration is on the wrong side of history. Most of our own media are demanding that WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange be hunted down -- with some of the more bloodthirsty politicians calling for his murder. The corporate-and-government dominated media are apprehensive over the challenge that WikiLeaks presents. Perhaps deep down they know, as Dickens put it, "There is nothing so strong ... as the simple truth."

As part of their attempt to blacken WikiLeaks and Assange, pundit commentary over the weekend has tried to portray Assange's exposure of classified materials as very different from -- and far less laudable than -- what Daniel Ellsberg did in releasing the Pentagon Papers in 1971. Ellsberg strongly rejects the mantra "Pentagon Papers good; WikiLeaks material bad." He continues: "That's just a cover for people who don't want to admit that they oppose any and all exposure of even the most misguided, secretive foreign policy. The truth is that EVERY attack now made on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time."

Motivation? WikiLeaks' reported source, Army Pvt. Bradley Manning, having watched Iraqi police abuses, and having read of similar and worse incidents in official messages, reportedly concluded, "I was actively involved in something that I was completely against." Rather than simply go with the flow, Manning wrote: "I want people to see the truth ... because without information you cannot make informed decisions as a public," adding that he hoped to provoke worldwide discussion, debates, and reform.

There is nothing to suggest that WikiLeaks/Assange's motives were any different. Granted, mothers are not the most impartial observers. Yet, given what we have seen of Assange’s behavior, there was the ring of truth in Assange’s mother’s recent remarks in an interview with an Australian newspaper. She put it this way: "Living by what you believe in and standing up for something is a good thing. … He sees what he is doing as a good thing in the world, fighting baddies, if you like."

That may sound a bit quixotic, but Assange and his associates appear the opposite of benighted. Still, with the Pentagon PR man Geoff Morrell and even Attorney General Eric Holder making thinly disguised threats of extrajudicial steps, Assange may be in personal danger.

The media: again, the media is key. No one has said it better than Monseñor Romero of El Salvador, who just before he was assassinated 25 years ago warned, "The corruption of the press is part of our sad reality, and it reveals the complicity of the oligarchy." Sadly, that is also true of the media situation in America today.

The big question is not whether Americans can "handle the truth." We believe they can. The challenge is to make the truth available to them in a straightforward way so they can draw their own conclusions -- an uphill battle given the dominance of the mainstream media, most of which have mounted a hateful campaign to discredit Assange and WikiLeaks.

So far, the question of whether Americans can "handle the truth" has been an academic rather than an experience-based one, because Americans have had very little access to the truth. Now, however, with the WikiLeaks disclosures, they do. Indeed, the classified messages from the Army and the State Department released by WikiLeaks are, quite literally, "ground truth."

How to inform American citizens? As a step in that direction, on October 23 we "Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence" (see below) presented our annual award for integrity to Julian Assange. He accepted the honor "on behalf of our sources, without which WikiLeaks' contributions are of no significance." In presenting the award, we noted that many around the world are deeply indebted to truth-tellers like WikiLeaks and its sources.

Here is a brief footnote: Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence (SAAII) is a group of former CIA colleagues and other admirers of former intelligence analyst Sam Adams, who hold up his example as a model for those who would aspire to the courage to speak truth to power. (For more, please see here.)

Sam did speak truth to power on Vietnam, and in honoring his memory, SAAII confers an award each year to a truth-teller exemplifying Sam Adams' courage, persistence, and devotion to truth -- no matter the consequences. Previous recipients include:

-Coleen Rowley of the FBI
-Katharine Gun of British Intelligence
-Sibel Edmonds of the FBI
-Craig Murray, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan
-Sam Provance, former Sgt., US Army
-Frank Grevil, Maj., Danish Army Intelligence
-Larry Wilkerson, Col., US Army (ret.)
-Julian Assange, WikiLeaks

"There is nothing concealed that will not be revealed, nothing hidden that will not be made known. Everything you have said in the dark will be heard in the daylight; what you have whispered in locked rooms will be proclaimed from the rooftops."
-- Luke 12:2-3

The following former awardees and other associates have signed the above statement; some are available for interviews:

DANIEL ELLSBERG
A former government analyst, Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, a secret government history of the Vietnam War to the New York Times and other newspapers in 1971. He was an admirer of Sam Adams when they were both working on Vietnam and in March 1968 disclosed to the New York Times some of Adams' accurate analysis, helping head off reinforcement of 206,000 additional troops into South Vietnam and a widening of the war at that time to neighboring countries.

FRANK GREVIL
Grevil, a former Danish intelligence analyst, was imprisoned for giving the Danish press documents showing that Denmark's Prime Minister (now NATO Secretary General) disregarded warnings that there was no authentic evidence of WMD in Iraq; in Copenhagen, Denmark.

KATHARINE GUN
Gun is a former British government employee who faced two years imprisonment in England for leaking a U.S. intelligence memo before the invasion of Iraq. The memo indicated that the U.S. had mounted a spying "surge" against U.N. Security Council delegations in early 2003 in an effort to win approval for an Iraq war resolution. The leaked memo -- published by the British newspaper The Observer on March 2, 2003 -- was big news in parts of the world, but almost ignored in the United States. The U.S. government then failed to obtain a U.N. resolution approving war, but still proceeded with the invasion.

DAVID MacMICHAEL
MacMichael is a former CIA analyst. He resigned in the 1980s when he came to the conclusion that the CIA was slanting intelligence on Central America for political reasons. He is a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

RAY McGOVERN
McGovern was a CIA analyst for 27 years, whose duties included preparing and briefing the President's Daily Brief and chairing National Intelligence Estimates. He is on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

CRAIG MURRAY
Murray, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, was fired from his job when he objected to Uzbeks being tortured to gain "intelligence" on "terrorists." Upon receiving his Sam Adams award, Murray said, "I would rather die than let someone be tortured in an attempt to give me some increment of security." Observers have noted that Murray was subjected to similar character assassination techniques as Julian Assange is now encountering to discredit him.

COLEEN ROWLEY
Rowley, a former FBI Special Agent and Division Counsel whose May 2002 memo described some of the FBI's pre-9/11 failures, was named one of Time Magazine's "Persons of the Year" in 2002. She recently co-wrote a Los Angeles Times op-ed titled, "WikiLeaks and 9/11: What if? Frustrated investigators might have chosen to leak information that their superiors bottled up, perhaps averting the terrorism attacks."

LARRY WILKERSON
Wilkerson, Col., U.S. Army (ret.), former chief of staff to Secretary Colin Powell at the State Department, who criticized what he called the "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal." See recent interviews

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

Setting Off a Bomb of Revolutionary Ideas

2010-12-12T13:47:00.018-05:00

When WiliLeaks began releasing its latest batch of documents, 250,000 US diplomatic cables, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the act an attack on the US. Since then the US has been trying to find a way to prosecute WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange. There has been talk of using the Espionage Act. There is proposed Senate legislation targeted at Assange. The Justice department is said to be scrambling, trying to find legal grounds to get him.

The dubious Swedish sex charges appear to be part of plan - the idea being that once Assange is extradited to Sweden, it will be easier for the US to extradite him to American soil. Or maybe they're purely designed to discredit, distract and embarrass. Whatever the intent, the plan seems to be going off the rails a bit, with a Swedish police leak ironically providing proof that the charges are bogus.

But you have to wonder how clearly the Americans are thinking. If they manage to find a way to try Assange in the US, they provide a bully pulpit for him to communicate with the American people. Currently, most Americans dismiss Assange as an egotist, an anarchist, a criminal, a hacker. Even if American prosecutors managed to muzzle the man, journalists could find his voice in his published writings: his blog from 2006-2007, his articles, and a growing host of interpretations of his work.

I've been dipping into the Assange oeuvre this week, and even if his enemies killed him today, he has written enough to change the world. In fact, killing him could be the second most effective way to rapidly disseminate his thinking (not that I'm advocating it, mind you) - but trying him in the US would be the most effective dissemination method ever. That would ensure that his ideas are popularized in the country he is most targeting for change.

It's not that Assange's ideas are particularly new. I think he's brilliant, but it's not even that. He is very thoughtful, and he describes his theories in a compelling way. His importance is that he's inspiring. Assange's thoughts could form the basis of a powerful popular movement.

Assange doesn't just write about how to save the world, he writes about what it is to want to save the world. He muses about his personal valuation of idealistic activism over moral agency. He sometimes falls into a mystical way of talking, and even writes political poetry.

Assange creates new language for political analysis. Legitimate forms of government are described with the terminology of illegitimate forms, which allows us to be more objective about how they work, how they do bad things, and how to force them to change. He uses popular analogies to explain his thinking. For example, he compares the US government to a group of drug dealers in the TV show The Wire... and he does it very well.

Assange's goal is not regime change, but regime behavior change. It's not anarchy and it may just be doable. In fact, you might argue that if it's not done, the US will decline into an impoverished, despotic, desperate superpower that is ultimately the greatest threat to freedom in the world.

I can't claim to understand him yet. I'm not even sure if Assange sees the leaks as a way to force change in the behavior of governments, or whether he sees them as an end in themselves - an extension to freedom of information laws.

But I betcha we'll be hearing a lot more about what he thinks we should do. Jail is not the end of Assange; it's the beginning.

###

Rallies in the Square: A Suggestion

2010-12-05T18:21:00.005-05:00

For anyone planning a rally in the Waterloo public square, I have a suggestion: invite participants to a post-rally event at a local establishment afterwards. Whole Lotta Gelato, Symposium, Jane Bond, the Huether - all would be great spots to meet for post-rally chat. It's good for you: organizers can join in and keep the conversation going. It's good for Uptown: all those establishments could use a boost, especially on a Sunday.

Whole Lotta Gelato, in particular, seems to be struggling a bit these days. They've added lots of new food items: cakes, soup, sandwiches, salads, breakfast stuff (along with their old standbys of paninis, gelato and coffee), and it's an advantage for groups that the upstairs room is often empty. (Plus they have a sort-of all-you-can-eat policy: they won't charge you beyond $13.)

###

Rally for Rails

2010-12-05T13:50:00.022-05:00

Three local organizations held a rally for LRT today at the Waterloo public square. It was a well-attended event, especially given the temperature; one or two hundred people, I'd say, mostly students (not counting press and organizers). A number of people made (mercifully) brief remarks, including local politicians Ken Seiling, Carl Zehr, Angela Veith and Jean Haalboom.

I sat off to the side and listened, trying not to get in the way. I was struck by my agreement with almost everything that was said. The remarks mostly concerned what I would call motherhood issues, and I think there's broad public support for them: a cleaner environment, less congestion, less sprawl, and more efficient use of public funds.

That's all an argument for better public transit. The problem is that LRT is not better public transit.

You don't have to be a transit planner to know that good public transit is transit that people want to take: that goes to where people want to go and is convenient. In Waterloo, the LRT is convenient for people at the University of Waterloo and a couple of other groups (bedroom communities to the north, perhaps), but not so good for most residents. The proposed LRT doesn't stop frequently enough; the route does not benefit most of Waterloo; and taking it would involve too many transfers (unless you're going to UW).

LRT is not going to reduce congestion or create density nodes if people don't ride it; there are plenty of examples of expensive transit failures in North America, and the proposed LRT is likely to be another one. Insanely, some proponents want to create traffic jams in order to force people to take the LRT, but the carrot is a far more successful tool than the stick in transit planning, because if you make traffic impossible, people will just go somewhere else. Instead of working and shopping Uptown, they'll go to the industrial parks and big box stores on the outskirts of town.

LRT is poor transit planning in other ways, too. By running down our main street without stopping very often, it actually reduces our ability to get to places on our main artery. It disrupts car, bus and bike traffic while not providing alternative convenience.

The final nail in the coffin and biggest failure of the proposed LRT route is the left turn across King onto Erb that will cause traffic chaos in the Uptown - as well as the chaos it will cause at Erb-Bridgeport and Caroline-William in the Uptown.

The problem with the cost of LRT is not that it costs money: it's that it wastes money.

Students in support of LRT are quite cavalier about the cost to taxpayers. I'd like them to put their money where their mouth is and agree to the following. If this UW rail shuttle is to be foisted on the residents of Waterloo region, there should be:

No more cheap transit passes for university and college students - they pay the full adult fare.
Transit passes should be a compulsory ancillary fee for all students, guaranteeing revenue for the GRT/LRT.
UW students should pay an extra fee of $10/month since the LRT services them more than any other group.

But better than all that, whether it's LRT, BRT, bus, streetcar or whatever technology, the route should be changed so that Uptown Waterloo is not so severely damaged. Bottom line: LRT cannot turn left across King in Uptown. Either it is circumvented to go two-way on Caroline, or - far better - we get a transit system that goes straight down King, creating density nodes at King-University, King-Columbia and King-Weber; and we get a route that has much more frequent stops.

And let me say again that not only do I live extremely close to the proposed Uptown LRT stop, but I work (and have worked for most of the past 11 years) near the proposed UW R+T Park stop. I am not only an alumni of UW but my parents were both profs there and I grew up on campus: I love UW. My opposition to LRT is not because of any personal inconvenience or dislikes: it is because LRT, as currently planned, is very, very bad for Waterloo.

###

Bus is Best – downtown is (and will be) too small

2010-12-05T11:08:00.004-05:00

This post was written by John Shortreed.

LRT will cost over 1 billion, local taxpayers will put up 500 million – for example grade separation at tracks in Kitchener is estimated at under 10 million – will be 30-40 million
Bus Rapid Transit will be about half the cost of LRT and have lower operating costs
LRT is a commuter rail system to bring commuters from Elmira – park at mall then go to downtown Kitchener – LRT will not intensify development in the existing cities
BRT will intensify land use with more stops, will serve Sun Life (LRT has no stop there)
BRT will serve Bauer Lofts (that’s right LRT has no stop at Bauer Lofts, 144 Park and new Red condos) Where LRT will have one stop, existing King St. Bus has 10.
UpTown is one of three “Region and Provincial Growth Centers” but it will reach target population and employment before the LRT could be built
LRT, a commuter rail system, has one stop between UpTown Waterloo and downtown Kitchener –LRT can not intensify development in the prime 2.5 km redevelopment area
BRT is flexible, if there is an accident it can go around the accident, LRT sits there. Santa Clause Parade and Buskers only possible with BRT not LRT
If a station is in the wrong place or more stations are needed (they will be needed), BRT can change cheaply as no tracks, curbs, LRT involves major expense.
BRT would not have curbs and left turns into businesses on King would be possible, with LRT no left turns into Adult Rec Center from King St. north, or the 2 Funeral Parlors.
BRT can be integrated into some Cross town routes without transfers, while all LRT connections are transfers
Region’s ridership estimates are 2 to 3 times higher than ridership in Buffalo which has a better system, double the population and more than double the downtown employment
With realistic ridership the annual LRT subsidy will be at least 10 million more than forecast and few ways to reduce it other than stop running the trains
Transit expenditures have been increasing by almost 10% a year and revenue by about 2% with most of the new riders being University Students with passes (which is good)
In 2011 Transit expenditures will be about 80 million per year (operating plus capital), with about 20 million revenue – overall return on investment is 20%.

And by 2031 cars will be more energy efficient than the LRT.

Why the World Needs WikiLeaks

2010-12-01T09:21:00.004-05:00

Better Transit

2010-11-21T22:24:00.021-05:00

People give me a certain amount of guff for opposing LRT but not proposing something to replace it. I feel this is an unfair criticism: after all, I'm not a transit planner or an urban planner. I have a pretty demanding job and other stuff on my plate. I can recognize a stinker when I see it but that doesn't mean I can come up with something better. (Also, I have tried to make proposals, such as in this article in The Record.)

Nonetheless, I get the point, and also (as I've said many times), I'm uncomfortable in this ever-negative role, so I've been putting a bit of thought into this. I've decided that someone with my skill set might contribute best to a discussion of transit development by proposing requirements rather than trying to propose routes or technologies or whatever.

At some point it would be good to start organizing the requirements into categories and priorities and so on, but this is more of a brainstorming exercise (and I'm open to criticism on all these ideas), so here is a very rough start.

Public transit should first and foremost service people who have no alternatives
That's people who can't afford to drive or who are unable to drive (due to being under age, elderly, physically or mentally unable, and so on). Serving those groups means understanding where they need to go and what their special needs are in using transit.

A bit of a puzzler here is where university students fit in. University students make up something like 20% of the population of Waterloo, and the current LRT proposal is designed to service the University of Waterloo more than any other group in town. In fact, we might as well call the LRT the "UW Shuttle". UW students tend to be quite wealthy, and transit is optional for them in that they could live close to campus and walk. (When I was a grad student at UW I never took transit simply because it was expensive; I always rode my bike or walked. But that was 30 years ago.) Also, university students get a cut-rate pass to use transit. I'm undecided about this one. I have noticed that the pro-LRT forces are overwhelmingly made up of people at UW.

Public transit planning must be part of overall transit planning
It seems that part of the LRT plan is to force people to take transit by making driving inconvenient. I can't see any other reason for running a GO train down our main street, putting railway gates in Uptown Waterloo, and so on. That's needlessly destructive.

Public transit should co-exist with other transit. That means that public transit should not foul up car traffic: in Waterloo, LRT/BRT cannot turn left across King in Uptown. It also means that there should be provision for parking, where appropriate, at transit stops; intracity transit should connect seamlessly with intercity traffic; and so on.

Public transit should be convenient and go to where people want to go
Any route down King Street must have frequent stops, especially in downtown cores. If the Region wants to build a rail line with infrequent stops, it can't go down King.

Public transit needs density to be successful...
...Which is why our regional sprawl doesn't have successful transit. A really good part of the LRT plan is the attempt to create density nodes. However, we need to look more closely at the actual locations of these areas of densification. In Waterloo, will the LRT do anything to create density? I don't think so. The proposed stops are:

Uptown, which is booming without any assistance. LRT is actually a threat to the densification of uptown because it is going to make it a traffic disaster.
University of Waterloo, which has stops at Seagram Drive, the main campus, and the R+T Park on the north campus. As that is all UW land and is planned development, I'm not sure what difference transit nodes make to its development. Will LRT cause UW to enroll more students?
Northfield/Parkside - There may be some densification opportunity here. I really don't understand this stop. It's on a terribly busy road right by the entrance to the expressway. Is this a good place for a lot of development? I don't know.
Conestoga Mall - Again, is this an opportunity for density? It seems to be booming all on its own.

Some of the Waterloo stops could use better transit service, especially Uptown and Conestoga Mall, but that's a different issue (and I don't think they will be well-served by LRT in any event).

But if anyone were interested in creating density nodes in Waterloo, the main transit line would not go to UW, but would go straight down King, making Uptown north of Erb more attractive; and have stops at King-University, King-Columbia, and on King north of Weber. Or something like that.###

Is LRT Dead?

2010-10-25T12:49:00.013-04:00

When I read things like this, I'm sure LRT dead: "Mayor Brenda Halloran said she was surprised to learn how many people in Waterloo do not want to see a light-rail system going through the city. “The ‘no’ to trains, that surprised me. People are totally against having trains running up and down King Street,” Halloran said."

And this: "Jan d’Ailly, a two-term member of city council, said he was surprised to see public opinion sour on the light-rail system approved by regional council. “At almost every single door it is ‘no’ to LRT and that surprised me,” d’Ailly said."

Note that Mayor Halloran didn't say that people aren't willing to pay for LRT: she said they're telling her that they are "totally against having trains running up and down King Street." Opposition to LRT is not all about money. This is not something that's going to be fixed by rejiggering the finances.

When I read things like this, I think LRT is going to be rammed down our throats regardless of what the people want:

[Regional Chair Ken] Seiling let it slip that regional staff were trying to shave as much as $85 million off the cost.

Instead of the region’s original $235 million obligation, he suggested the total bill might be between $150 million and $175 million. And there may be new development charges to pay for it as well.

. . .

The original rail proposal required a regional tax increase of close to nine per cent to cover both operating and capital costs. Such a tax hike appears to be extremely unpopular. Seiling seems to think he will be able to get the new council to back a smaller tax increase of perhaps 5.5 per cent to 7.5 per cent. Why not ask voters directly by providing a plan?

We should also remember the current proposal is already a compromise. To save money, trains will only run from a mall in Waterloo to a mall in Kitchener. Cambridge is to get buses. So what will another $85 million in cuts look like? Cheaper trains? Fewer stations? Buggies for Cambridge?

Whatever cost-cutting manoeuvres the region adopts, it seems certain to result in a reduction in ridership and an increase in the tax subsidies necessary to keep it solvent. So as capital costs drop, operating costs may go up in step.

I'm also rather worried by this comment from Cambridge Mayor and LRT opposer Doug Craig:

What is happening right now is that the LRT debate has been deliberately submerged until after the election. The numbers regarding the 230 million dollar shortfall are being massaged, compromises on capital costs are being trimmed and in early 2011, it will in my opinion, be re-packaged and passed by the new council. The costs to all regional taxpayers will be significant because the operating costs will be 23 million dollars a year and the capital costs will exceed projected estimates. In other words, it's unsustainable.

As far as I can tell, Seiling has not heard one word of the thousands of arguments against LRT. He seems hell-bent on shoving this idea through. He is motivated by a passionate belief that growth in the region will overwhelm road capacity. What he doesn't get is that LRT will only help with that problem if people ride it. People won't ride something that is even more inconvenient than the current bus system - and LRT is much, much more inconvenient than the current buses. Further, the LRT as planned will greatly reduce road capacity and make traffic much worse. It will not solve the problem; it will greatly exacerbate it.

###

LRT Round-up

2010-10-23T10:18:00.006-04:00

To see all of my writing about LRT, click here. The list is truncated, but it provides most of the posts I've written on LRT.

Here are some highlights:

What LRT Will Do to the King-Erb Intersection

What LRT Will Do to the Erb-Bridgeport-Caroline Intersection

Jane Jacobs on LRT

Is this the region we want?

In addition, you might be interested in the 100+ letters to the editor against the Waterloo Region LRT proposal, as well as the dozens of articles published in local papers against it.

###

We need other mass transit solutions

2010-10-22T20:04:00.006-04:00

My column in the Saturday, October 23, Waterloo Region Record (link)

No: We need other mass transit solutions
Ruth Haworth

If the Great Light Rail Transit Debate has done nothing else, it has got our community talking about transit. In fact, transit may well be the issue of this election campaign.

In a recent election survey by Taxpayers for Sensible Transit (www.t4st.com), 95 per cent of responding candidates said they oppose Waterloo Region’s light rail transit proposal. It seems likely that the new regional council will vote against light rail transit and that will be the end of it.

But the survey had another, even more extreme result: over 99 per cent of candidates responded that we need to improve transit in the region.

If we’re smart, we’ll take what we’ve learned from the light rail transit proposal and debate, and use it to create a better transit plan that will serve our community into the future. I’ll take a stab at taking the arguments on both sides of the issue to see what they can tell us.

The main argument against light rail transit is that it’s unaffordable. The cost to Waterloo Region of well over $200 million is simply too much for local taxpayers to absorb — and typical cost overruns could make that burden much larger. There have also been criticisms that the service is too inconvenient. The long distance between stops means that riders would have to walk further and make more transfers. The distance from light rail stops to nearby attractions, notably from proposed light rail stops to the malls, also means that light rail transit would be less convenient than buses. And the inconvenience of light rail is not offset by any advantages in speed. Light rail transit, running on busy city streets and stopping at all traffic lights, is virtually no faster than what we have now.

By contrast, there’s a lot of room for improvement in our existing bus service, at much lower cost. If we want to woo people out of their cars and on to transit, the total transit experience must become more convenient. That means that the total time of trips is faster, with less transfers and more predictable schedules. We need more bus shelters and better snow clearance around them. And so on.

Another complaint about light rail transit is that it could cause major traffic disruption with plans such as railway gates on Erb Street in Uptown Waterloo. Transit should be integrated with, and respectful of, other uses of roads, including cars, bikes and pedestrians.

The region’s “Plan B” is rapid buses. The rapid bus proposal, which is to build dedicated bus lanes (with curbs) on a route similar to light rail transit, is almost as problematic as light rail. Like light rail transit, bus rapid transit isn’t rapid. The rapid buses are expected to travel at about the same speed as an iXpress bus. What’s the point of spending over $500 million on a single route that is already served, without greatly improving it?

In addition, the rapid bus plan has many of the same problems as light rail. By building physical barriers around bus lanes, we would be creating a route that’s inflexible and disrupts traffic.

Creating an entire route of physically demarcated lanes on major arteries may be a mistake, but we could use the idea in a modified form. We could create dedicated bus lanes in areas where congestion slows down buses, and we could do it affordably by painting diamonds on the road, a system which works well in Toronto.

A major argument for light rail transit was that increased growth in the region will require more capacity than buses can provide. There is a bit of a circular argument here. The region wanted to use light rail to create density nodes in downtown cores and then argued that the resulting large numbers of passengers would require a rail service to move them all. But if development continues to grow as it has been, employment will be scattered across many industrial parks and downtowns, and we can easily service those smaller nodes with buses. We should be identifying those nodes and improving transit service to them.

Another thing I’ve learned from the light rail debate is the importance of being fair to all parts of the region. How could we build such a large regional initiative that essentially excluded Cambridge for decades? If we’re serious about building strong commercial cores, we need to include the downtowns of Cambridge.

If we treated each downtown core as a transit hub, we could create express routes that link the downtowns of Cambridge, Kitchener and Waterloo, using the expressway where appropriate. Those linkages could also be extended to more intercity travel, with easy access to buses and trains to Guelph and Toronto.

Those are just some ideas. After we put light rail transit behind us, those of us on all sides of the debate should put our energies toward more productive and positive ideas to improve transit and our community.

###

LRT = chaos, says "No" side

2010-10-21T21:42:00.007-04:00

LRT = chaos, says "No" side
570 News
October 21, 2010
link to article

Waterloo Region's plans for light rail transit are not without critics. As the region moved forward with the project, a group of business owners, professionals and everyday taxpayers formed into Taxpayers for Sensible Transit (T4ST).

The group's spokesperson, Ruth Haworth, calls the light rail plan a case of poor transit planning and poor city planning.

"The problem with this version of LRT is that it runs right through the busiest parts of our town but it doesn't stop very often," Haworth argues. "So there's one stop between downtown Kitchener and downtown Waterloo, for example."

Haworth also describes a scene of "traffic chaos" in uptown Waterloo, given the proposed route through the core. She uses the corner of Erb and Caroline as an example, saying railway crossings that will be used at the intersection will bring traffic in all directions to a complete standstill every three and a half minutes.
Haworth says planners have also put the cart before the horse, so to speak, when it comes to development. She says rather than lay down rail lines and expect development to come to the tracks, the region should develop commercial properties and add rail later to support them.

Haworth cites the new mega mall on Ira Needles as an example of poor planning. "(It's) out there off the transit grid. You (need to) think in advance and prepare in advance," Haworth insists. "I don't know why it is that we seem to have to have sprawl and city and regional councils can't do anything about it. That just doesn't seem right."

Price is another sore spot with T4ST, although Haworth is hesitant to use that as a rallying cry for fear the group's entire message will be lost among the dollar signs. That said, Haworth does not believe anyone in the region truly thinks the $790-million system is affordable. She points to a survey of municipal election candidates by way of support.

"T4ST just did a survey of all of the candidates for the upcoming municipal election and 95% of them said they would oppose it," Haworth asserts. "And that's because of the funding shortfall."

Haworth says T4ST is very supportive of improved transit in the region but she believes there are less expensive ways to go about it. Analyzing bus routes and perhaps even using smaller buses on less travelled routes so that no more "half empty" buses will be "rattling around our subdivisions" is one suggestion she makes.

But Haworth still bristles at the mention of light rail.

"I just know that if we throw all of our resources onto one route and it's a white elephant and it causes massive traffic disruptions, then that's not good."

###

Evolution of Communication

2010-10-16T10:38:00.004-04:00

The Social Network is a very good movie. The Social Network is an especially interesting movie in that everyone seems to have come away with a different take on the Zuckerberg character. Many see him as a heartless nerd, but I thought he came off very sympathetically. He was driven to create something great, and his success was due to a single-minded commitment to his vision.

That vision was world-changing. Prior to Facebook, the paradigm for online communicaton was email. Email was based on the old business memo. Zuckerberg saw a different way for the world to connect. The reason he was able to succeed so amazingly (unlike many other social network products that fizzled) seems to be an early decision he made to let the users of Facebook determine what it would be, and then to provide the very highest quality for those features.

Thanks to Facebook, the paradigm of communication has changed. Instead of issuing memos we communicate in social networks, with our picture next to our writing and a mixture of broadcast and address. Many children use Facebook as their primary form of online communication. Who knows where it will go next.

Facebook isn't the whole story, of course. There's Twitter and texting and other variations. When historians look back at this period, they will be able to chart the rapid evolution of communication in these still-early years of the wired world. What we do now is nothing like what we will do in ten years.

There is also an evolution in how software products get created. So many of the most successful companies are newly formed, youth-run companies because the staid old companies don't seem to be able to evolve. Successful business is moving towards a much more customer-driven model, which is what Zuckerberg created as an intuitive, naive 19 year old who hadn't been taught how to "properly" develop software. Old businesses try to move towards the new model by adding customer usabilty to their development process, but that's like putting a bandaid on a broken leg.

The fact that Zuckerberg's first social network was a university site to rate the hotness of girls is not a minor point. He developed something that he thought was cool and that he thought other people would find cool, and then he tossed it into the sea and let other people pick it up. He then swam beside them, altering it according to their use of it. You couldn't do this so easily with a product that has to be released, but part of the new business model is creating a product that is fluid and adaptive. It may be why cloud computing or something in that direction is the necessary evolution of software. Downloads and upgrades and new feature lists are all so cumbersome and annoying. In five years we may look back on them as dreadfully archaic, like typewriters.

###

T4ST Press Release

2010-10-15T19:19:00.006-04:00

October 15, 2010

Most candidates in Waterloo Region disapprove of regional LRT plan

Buses favoured by a wide margin, says survey by Taxpayers for Sensible Transit

Local grassroots organization Taxpayers for Sensible Transit (T4ST) today released the results of a comprehensive candidate survey ahead of the October 25 municipal election in Waterloo Region. The results show massive disapproval for the regional government’s controversial $819 million light rail transit plan.

T4ST, which favours improved bus service over the region’s light rail transit plan, sent out 168 email transit surveys. This covered all urban and rural mayoral and regional chair candidates plus candidates for city, regional and township councils. The overall response rate was 66 percent. Excluding township council candidates, the response rate was above 80 percent.

Asked whether they supported the region’s current plan, 95 percent of the responding candidates said no. Only one candidate supported the necessary tax hike of approximately 9 percent to pay for light rail.

“These results are crystal clear,” said Ruth Haworth, spokesperson for T4ST. “Voters in Waterloo Region do not want to pay for light rail transit. And the candidates have heard this message.”

According to the survey, 89 percent of the candidates do not support permanent traffic disruptions on King Street or other roads to facilitate a permanent rail line. And asked which form of transit was most appropriate for Waterloo Region, buses were the overwhelmingly popular response: 62 said the existing iXpress system should be improved, 30 wanted a new system of rapid buses and 21 candidates said light rail is the best form of transit for our region.

Haworth said this means regional staff should immediately stop work on light rail plans and begin examining improvements to existing bus service or rapid buses. “Over 80 percent of candidates want better bus service,” says Haworth. “Buses make sense for Waterloo Region. It’s time the region recognized this and switched gears on transit.”

Haworth added, “Our reply rate was very high and we have responses from all candidates in most urban races. This means residents can use our site as a voting aid no matter where they stand on this issue.”

The survey provided a comment section and received many interesting suggestions regarding ways to improve or alter the existing transit system in Waterloo Region.

The complete survey with all candidate responses is available at the group’s website: www.t4st.com.

For more information, contact
Ruth Haworth
Taxpayers for Sensible Transit
t4stgroup@gmail.com

###

Beware Oktoberfest

2010-10-15T18:44:00.002-04:00

I was lured out to Oktoberfest events twice last week, once by free sausages
(yum) and once by free pancakes and sausages (alas, the line was too long). I had a good time at each event, but... there was the music. I enjoyed it at the time. I enjoyed watching the crowd bobbing up and down to polka time. I even enjoyed watching parents teach their kids the chicken dance.

But it's been over a week, and I still have the Pennsylvania Polka stuck in my head.

I made the mistake of emailing my brother about it, and he cruelly emailed back the lyrics.

Strike up the music the band has begun
The Pennsylvania Polka.
Pick out your partner and join in the fun
The Pennsylvania Polka.
It started in Scranton, it’s now No 1
It’s bound to entertain you
Everybody has a mania
To do the polka from Pennsylvania

I sing out of tune even in my head, and I really can't hit the notes on that last line.

I'm a little paranoid about ear worms because I once had Hail to the Chief stuck in my head for two years. That was a rough time. When the Pennsylvania Polka knocks around in my head I have tried displacing it by thinking of the scene where it's played in Groundhog Day, one of my favorite movies, but that has just made it worse.

A cautionary tale.

###

What I Learned from the Transit Survey

2010-10-13T20:58:00.014-04:00

As spokesperson for the anti-LRT group Taxpayers for Sensible Transit (T4ST), I was involved in running a survey about transit that included all candidates in the upcoming elections in Waterloo Region. While writing up the results I had to read the responses over and over, and developed some opinions that go further than the usual analysis. Here are my thoughts.

There's a bandwagon and everyone's jumping on it
We received responses from over 100 candidates, and the overwhelming response (95%) is that if elected they will oppose LRT. While knocking on doors, candidates have been hearing anger and opposition to LRT - I know this not just from the responses, but also because I've been knocking on doors and talking to people myself. The issue is going to sway a lot of voters (which is why our survey is so important). I don't know if any candidates say they oppose LRT just to appease voter anger over the proposal, but I do know that on June 24, 2009, every single Regional councillor - with the exception of Cambridge Mayor Doug Craig - voted in favor of LRT. That includes our mayors, who automatically sit on Regional council.

We need to be more concerned about fairness
As is evident from the responses of candidates in Cambridge, the proposed LRT is grossly unfair to Cambridge, essentially leaving it out of the plan for decades. In future, we need to ensure that our regional initiatives are more balanced.

If the LRT was really about beefing up downtowns, why did it go from a mall in Kitchener to a mall in Waterloo? Why not start by going from a downtown core in Cambridge to downtown Kitchener and Uptown Waterloo? Cambridge is bigger than Waterloo, for Pete's sake.

Elected officials should be open to public opinion
Some candidates chose to not respond to our survey because they thought the questions were too biased. This troubles me. Elected officials have to spend a lot of time listening to constituents on all sorts of issues, and the officials should have an open mind. All too often, citizens who make a statement to city or regional council are met with bored looks and zero interest. That's just wrong. We need representatives who listen to us, not get their backs up and freeze us out.

Saying it's a regional issue is a cop-out
Some candidates responded to our questionnaire by saying that they're running for municipal council and LRT is a regional issue, so it's not part of their mandate. I completely disagree. When something is going to have such a profound impact on the municipal landscape, city councillors should take a stand.

For example, I remain dumbfounded that Waterloo City councillors didn't examine the impact of the proposed LRT route on Uptown Waterloo. Examination of the Region's proposed route map shows three Uptown intersections (King-Erb, Erb-Caroline, and Caroline-William) that could become nightmares, and cross-town traffic on Erb could grind to a halt. (In the LRT plan, only one lane of Erb Street crosses King, and it is also a turning lane.) This would affect not only car traffic, but also buses, bikes and pedestrians. And the ensuing mess would almost certainly have a negative impact on the success of local businesses.

City councillors should also have been looking out for their constituents on accessibility issues. With an aging population who may need to rely on transit, there were significant issues such as the long distance between stops, the long distance from LRT stops to their target destinations (notably the malls), the linkages between LRT and bus transfers, and possible problems crossing the tracks with walking aids.

In my opinion the specifics of this LRT plan are bad, in part, because municipal politicians dropped the ball.

It ain't over till it's over
Many people believe that LRT is dead. After all, the whole plan was based on the feds and province paying for it, and they fell short by $250M. I agree it's unaffordable, but I have no illusions that it's over. Our Regional Chair, Ken Seiling, is still fighting for this like it's his life at stake. Sure we could vote him out, but (1) he has no real opposition and (2) he has enormous backing - I think he got about three-quarters of the vote last time.

What Cambridge Mayor Doug Craig said in our survey was, "What is happening right now is that the LRT debate has been deliberately submerged until after the election. The numbers regarding the 230 million dollar shortfall are being massaged, compromises on capital costs are being trimmed and in early 2011, it will in my opinion, be re-packaged and passed by the new council."

There are a lot of good candidates out there
I have been working on LRT for two years now, but I learned a lot from reading the comments of candidates. Many of the comments were thoughtful, insightful, and original - and I say that about comments on all sides of the issue. I was particularly impressed that within Waterloo, Kitchener and Cambridge, almost every candidate responded. What we need more than anything is a truly open, community-wide discussion about how to improve our public transit. I think our local candidates are up for the job.

For the results of the T4ST survey, see www.t4st.com.

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Find Out How the Candidates Feel About LRT

2010-10-11T22:39:00.006-04:00

The T4ST election survey asked candidates in Waterloo Region some questions about transit. We got fabulous results - over 100 responses, representing almost all of the candidates in Waterloo, Kitchener and Cambridge. (Response rates were lighter in the townships, where it's not such a burning issue.)

The responses were really interesting. I expected the results to be overwhelmingly anti-LRT (and they are), but I didn't expect all the thoughtful, insightful comments - reflecting all sides of the issue. I learned a lot from them.

There have been other transit surveys sent to candidates in this election, but ours is by far the most comprehensive.

So check it out: www.t4st.com.

Update: Someone just sent me this link, showing that all the current regional councillors except Doug Craig voted in favor of LRT. ...just something to think about while reading the responses. (link)

Update: The pro-LRT group TriTag also did a comprehensive survey. It's more comment-based. Check it out: TriTag transit survey.

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Barrels

2010-10-06T09:06:00.012-04:00

Oktoberfest is set to begin again, and with it our annual barrel race (Saturday, 10 am, Waterloo Public Square). This will be the first year we've had the barrel race since we lost our last barrels. The remaining ones were purely ceremonial, piled in a pyramid in front of the CIGI building (formerly the Seagram distillery) at Erb and Caroline. Last year City Hall said the pyramid was rotting and gave the barrels away. Now the spot is part of the new Balsillie School of International Affairs.

(A local theater group has started the Barrel Project to commemorate the barrel diaspora. "While the wooden slats and metal rings may be scattered all over the county, their memory remains..." I kid you not.)

All we have left of barrels is the name of the Barrel Yards development on Erb at Father David Bauer Drive. The Barrel Yards used to be the Canbar lands where whiskey barrels were made and stored. The land is soon to be a complex of apartments, office buildings, retail space and hotels... or at least it will be if reported water table issues can be resolved.

Canbar shut down in 1992, and I can clearly remember when barrels were part of the culture of Waterloo. When you drove down Erb you could see the barrels piled high.

The best part was that after Seagrams was done aging whiskey in them Canbar practically gave the barrels away. Cut in half, they were used in backyards all over town as planters.

If you got a fresh one it would still have whiskey soaked into the wood. When I was a grad student at UW, a popular party drink was called swish. We'd buy a barrel, add some water, let it sit a bit, swish it around, and voila - a large supply of half strength, nearly free, blecchy tasting whiskey.

My dad aged a batch of homemade peach wine in a Seagrams barrel once and brought the whole barrel out for a pig roast. The problem with the stuff was it was delicious and didn't taste nearly as lethal as it was. A large crowd of respectable people became completely blotto very rapidly. (I watched it all, completely sober, because that was my first day of work as a waitress at the Kent Hotel... once again, a story for another day.)

The distillery (and brewery) dominated Waterloo in other ways. All the time I was growing up in Waterloo, you could tell what day it was by the smell - and they were nice smells, or at least I thought so. Certain days of week we could smell the Seagrams distillery at Erb and Caroline, and other days we had the smell from the Labatt brewery (formerly Carling, and before that the Kuntz brewery) at King and William. Everyone had a different description of the smells: some days it was bread, molasses, oatmeal or Raisin Bran, and some days it was martinis.

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Travel Alert

2010-10-03T10:27:00.006-04:00

The comments this weekend on Globe & Mail articles about the US State Department's latest travel alert are unanimous in claiming that it is a fraud. They opine that the government is warning Americans away from European capitals as a way to scare the public into voting for incumbents in the upcoming election and as a way to deflect public attention from more important matters, like the economy. Many express amusement that there will be less Americans in Europe creating queues at art galleries and so on.

Canada, the US, and other countries regularly issue travel alerts, and anyone who travels should get in the habit of checking them before buying tickets. They aren't a joke, they aren't political, and they carry repercussions in terms of whether you'll be bailed out if things go wrong. See travel advisories from the US, Canada and the UK.

The current travel alert for Europe does not warn people against going to Europe; it merely describes an ongoing threat and current concerns by European governments, and suggests that US citizens register with a US travel service. I wouldn't cancel a trip because of it, but it would cause me to keep my ears open for possible developments.

There are times when you can take advantage of non-existent but perceived threats. When Reagan bombed Libya in 1986, I immediately made plans for a European holiday. American tourists were terrified of terrorism in Europe that summer and stayed away in droves. I rented a car for three weeks and did a driving tour to French 3-star restaurants. I could walk in to establishments that normally required at least a year's advance booking, and they were grateful to see me. It was quite a trip - mired only by being doused with radioactive fallout from Chernobyl. But that's another story.

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Amalgamation, Negativity, Municipal Elections and my Teeth

2010-09-22T20:53:00.017-04:00

In today's Chronicle, someone is quoted as regretting that there's no anti-amalgamation group in town.

Well, me, I'm opposed to amalgamation. I think it's a spectacularly stupid idea for Waterloo, for lots of reasons:

Amalgamation has been shown to be expensive. Union contracts bump up to the highest level; there are virtually no cost savings; and so on.
Waterloo property taxes will go up if we merge.
I like our unique identity. Kitchener is a great place but is very different from Waterloo and vive la difference.
Waterloo has an internationally known name. We should be building our brand, not diluting it.
Merging with a city that's twice as big is tantamount to throwing away our self-determination.
We already merge almost all the services that can be merged. If there are more opportunities to merge services (the only one I can think of is the libraries), then we can do that without amalgamation.

Crazy as it sounds, the main reason why some prominent Waterlooians are for amalgamation is that they think the city is currently mismanaged, and will be better run if it's part of Kitchener. They point to our chronic underfunding of the arts and library as key issues. But Jeeze Louise guys, if you want better management then vote for candidates who are qualified to do the job. If you have issues you want to influence, speak up - especially now, during an election campaign.

Despite my emphatic opposition to amalgamation, I can't get active in my opposition. For one thing, amalgamation has become The Beast That Will Not Die. It's like, every couple of years I hear someone say, "It's baaaack..." I am suffering from amalgamation fatigue. But even more than that, I have been working to oppose the LRT for two years now, and I'm sick, sick, sick of being negative. Fighting FOR something is so much more fun.

So what am I not against? Well this may be bucking the trend of popular lunacy, but I'm for fluoride in my drinking water. I think the anti-fluoride contingent is fueled by junk science, while the benefits of fluoridation are verified. I'm horrified by what has happened to my dentist, Dr. Harry Hoediono, for standing up for sanity and saying the simple truth. (People in this town play dirty: besides trashing his character, someone on the anti-fluoride side has now brought Harry up on charges for conspiring to spend money or some such thing.)

So why am I not out dressed as a giant tooth, promoting the cause of fluoridated drinking water? If I had kids, maybe I'd stand with Harry and brave the attacks of the pro-cavities crowd. But I don't, so I'm sitting this one out.

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Waterloo's Mayoral Candidates Kick Off Election 2010

2010-09-21T22:03:00.025-04:00

Tonight's Waterloo mayoral debate could be summed up like this, from left to right:

Jan d'Ailly: I bring experience, leadership ability, and a proactive approach.
Barbara Halloran: I've done a super job.
Franklin Ramsoomair: Ummmm.
Dale Ross: Slash the budget!

Actually, Ramsoomair had some interesting things to say, but he was unable to articulate a vision for his mayoralty. In fact, his ability to articulate his ideas was a problem throughout.

Ross, on the other hand, articulated his vision all too well. He wants to cut spending. Really - that's it. When asked about specific issues, he repeatedly said he'd have to get someone to tell him what to do or form a committee. His plan is to put the city through ten years of extremely restricted spending in order to pay down our debt.

The questions were excellent. Neil Acheson was a great moderator - when he asked the audience to not applaud, it created a much better debate than most. One quibble: I was disappointed by all the answers about bylaw enforcement: they all focused on unmaintained lawns and noise complaints, without mentioning the vital accessibility issue of snow clearance.

Bottom line: This is a two horse race, between Halloran and d'Ailly. I approach elections like a hiring process, and look for qualifications, experience, intelligence and vision. To my mind, d'Ailly is the best choice. But I enjoyed listening to all four of them. d'Ailly and Halloran were both refreshingly candid, and d'Ailly in particular was very detailed and informative. Good job all around.

Upcoming debates:

Wednesday, Sept 22 - Waterloo Ward 1 candidates, Hauser Haus, WMRC
Tuesday, Sept 28 - Waterloo Ward 3 candidates, Community Room, McCormick Community Center
Wed, Sept 29 - Waterloo Ward 4 candidates, Room 207, RIM Park
Thurs, Sept 30 - Waterloo Ward 5 candidates, Room 208, RIM Park
Tues, Oct 5 - Waterloo Ward 6 candidates, Hauser Haus, WMRC
Wed, Oct 6 - Waterloo Ward 7 candidates (uptown), Hauser Haus, WMRC
Thus, Oct 7 - Regional Council candidates, Adult Rec Center
Tues, Oct 19 - Public school board candidates, TBD
Wed, Oct 20 - Regional Chair candidates, TBD
Thurs, Oct 21 - Waterloo mayoral candidates (Round 2), Hauser Haus, WMRC

More info on the upcoming debates: WaterlooVotes.com

Update: The Waterloo Regional Record is also hosting its own debates. For a list of times and places, see here.

Update: Rogers TV schedule of debates on TV on Karen Scian's blog

Update: You can watch videos of debates on the Record's Vote 2010 site.

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Boom! Boom! Boom!

2010-09-19T17:58:00.026-04:00

Uptown Waterloo is booming.

Just at the corner of King and William, there are two new buildings going up. In the pie-shaped lot where Quiznos used to be, a financial services company is putting up an office building:

Across the street, the region's most expensive and luxurious condo building has been announced at 150 King:

Over at Erb Street there's the Barrelyards, nearly 13 acres in size. The details keep changing, but when it was officially announced in 2007 it was slated to have two hotels, two 25-storey condo towers, four rental apartment towers, 230,000 SF of office space, townhouses, and ten mixed retail/residential low rise buildings.

Next to the Barrelyards is the Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics, which is getting a mammoth and very exciting-looking addition:

Across the street from the Perimeter Institute is the Balsillie School of International Affairs, a complex of buildings:

And kitty-corner to the Balsillie School is the new Knox Presbyterian Church:

Then there's the 21-storey condo/townhouse complex at 144 Park, the new condo at Bridgeport and Peppler, and a proposal for a high-rise condo at 31 Alexandra. That's just what's already in the pipe. A commercial realtor told me recently that within five years he expects that King Street north of Erb will be a canyon of large new buildings. Projections of Caroline between Erb and William show all those parking lots replaced with buildings.

Minor note: None of this development has anything to do with LRT plans. Most was already in the works before the LRT proposal, and all of it is a direct result of the high rental rates in Uptown - brought about by the redeveloped Waterloo Square, new streetscape, programming in the Public Square, and general momentum of success in Uptown.

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The Embarrassing Past of a Kettle and Pot

2010-09-17T20:31:00.020-04:00

The ever-astute Elizabeth May has a theory. She thinks Harper is going to call an election this fall, even though he's down in the polls. She believes that Harper is focused on voter turnout rather than ratings, and that his strategy has been to reduce voter participation outside his base.

In the 2008 election campaign, she maintained, Mr. Harper purposely drove down voter participation in several ways. He called a snap election, he had the minimum numbers of days for a campaign, he had election day right after the long Thanksgiving weekend, he had changes in the Elections Act that meant people couldn’t vote without additional ID, and his attack ads had increased cynicism toward politics. The result was that every party’s total vote number went down, except the Green Party’s. The Liberals’ dropped the most and Mr. Harper was able to increase his minority.

. . .

Everybody thinks Mr. Harper’s right-wing manoeuvring, like his move on the census, has been disastrous, Ms. May said. "I bet he doesn’t think so. For his base, which is essentially the tea party of Canada, these are good messages."

May predicts that Harper's got a bunch of devastating attack ads to use against Michael Ignatieff, and that he'll unveil them during the campaign. They will include footage of Ignatieff before becoming Liberal party leader.

An example, she said, is some incredible statements the Liberal Leader made on torture when he appeared once on the Charlie Rose show. "The Conservatives must have a video archive of him saying things that Harper believes will make him unelectable." The Prime Minister is saving them for the campaign because "he wants the shock value."

This tactic could work if Harper gets the timing right and prevents Ignatieff from having time to respond or recover. In the 2006 election a fake scandal invented by the NDP sewered Paul Martin; Martin was bouncing back from it, but he didn't have time before the election to recover enough, and it wasn't until months after the election that the scandal was fully debunked.

Or is it possible? Harper himself has recovered from revelations of his saying far worse things than Igantieff ever said. Harper, after all, denounced Canada as a "Northern welfare state in the worst sense of the term." In that speech he also spat on universal health care, women’s rights, the unemployed, francophone Canadians and all Canadian political parties, including his own.

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Culture of Layoffs

2010-09-04T15:13:00.012-04:00

Another story about another company laying off a percentage of their workforce. This time all we're told is that 81 employees were laid off, representing 5% of the workforce, and that the company "ended production of some unprofitable products".

I wonder what would happen if companies were expected to report more information about layoffs - and by "expected" I mean by law where possible, and by convention and community standards otherwise. And if they don't provide the info, newspapers should investigate and get the goods.

The information I'm looking for has to do with the negative side of layoffs. How long, on average, had these people worked there? What percentage got a good performance ranking in their last review? What sort of severance did the company provide? What was the total direct cost to the company of the layoffs (severance, out-placement, travel and consulting fees required by the move)?

If all these details were provided, would the market automatically react as strongly to reward companies that lay off a big chunk of their workforce?

I once worked for a publicly-owned company whose management was committed to avoiding a take-over. Every time the stock price fell they laid off employees to bring it back up. There were so many layoffs that they didn't use the terminations to get rid of low performers: terminations were totally a function of what someone was working on, and the best and the brightest regularly got cut. This culture of continuous layoffs created a totally dysfunctional company with a decidedly subpar product, but it also kept it successful.

That kind of success is a market distortion. Unproductive - even antiproductive - behavior is rewarded. It's a systemic failure.

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BRT not a Viable Plan "B"

2010-09-04T10:14:00.026-04:00

Now that we know how much the federal government is willing to contribute, it’s clear that the Region of Waterloo can’t afford the proposed LRT. The combined provincial/federal contributions leaves $235M to the Region and that is too much for us to carry. LRT is dead.

Well, not really. Now there's talk of going to the Region's Plan B, Bus Rapid Transit, or shortening the LRT route.

In the BRT plan, curbs are inserted in the middle of our streets so that buses can run in dedicated lanes. The BRT has many of the disadvantages of LRT:

It costs hundreds of millions to build.
It puts a disproportionate amount of our resources on one route.
It prevents cars from turning left except at designated intersections.
It disrupts car and bike use of the street.
It disrupts other use of the street, including parades and festivals.
The route is very difficult to alter.
It is inconvenient for transit users because the stops are so infrequent.
It creates an accessibility issue for seniors with walkers, parents with baby strollers, and the like.

The iXpress, which runs high tech buses on the same route as BRT, is no slower than BRT and costs one or two percent of BRT. (The iXpress route, including marketing, cost $9M. Of that, the buses cost $4M.) There is simply no reason to spend over $500M creating curbs in the middle of our streets.

In fact, it boggles the mind how the Region could propose creating a single bus route that costs $550M. In Toronto, dedicated bus lanes have nothing more than some diamond shapes painted on the pavement.

Building a shorter LRT route sounds like it might be equally crazy, but I haven't seen a proposal yet so I can't be sure. When I was in Istanbul in the early 90s I thought their two-station subway system was quite useful, so I'll withhold judgment - but with reservations.

I dearly wish that LRT were dead, for one simple reason: we're about to embark on a municipal election season, and it would be great if we could seriously discuss how to improve transit, rather than fight over this ridiculous, over-priced, destructive plan.

We could discuss initiatives such as the following:

Running multiple iXpress routes.
Forming a fleet of minibuses that run on little-used routes.
Creating an on-demand transit system for the elderly and poor families.
Implementing marketing programs such as cheap family passes on weekends.
Running more buses to festivals, events, the Aud, and so on.
Creating a free shuttle.
Reducing fares.
And on and on...

We could take a step back and look at other issues around transit:

Transforming our sprawl into a livable city.
Making sure our transit system is adequate for the needs of people who have to take transit.
Identifying people who don't take transit but would like to, and finding how we could get them to use it.

We’re the community that got designated the world’s most intelligent. Why have we spent two years chasing the old failed trend of rapid transit? It all comes down to the way LRT was pushed on us. There were fake public consultations (I say they were fake because I went to them) and there was never any real needs assessment: someone at the top of the Region conceived this notion and forced it through the system. Here's an example: about 18 months ago a city hall committee I'm on met with rapid transit planners. At that time my committee included a former mayor, former city councillor, and former regional councillor, and we had spent a lot of time researching and discussing the issue. Over a couple of hours we discussed our concerns with the regional employees, and they didn't take a single note. They didn't even bother to get out a pen or notepad. They hedged most of our questions. It is really no wonder why we ended up with an LRT plan that would have killed uptown Waterloo, been an enormous white elephant and drained funding from the rest of the transit budget. It was a vanity project.

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Canada's Homegrown Terrorists

2010-08-26T21:32:00.005-04:00

I don't condone terrorism at all. But the western military involvement in Afghanistan is a humanitarian disaster, and Afghans who fight to end it are not necessarily in the same class as religious fundamentalists who want to punish the west for holding different values.

When a community is occupied by military forces who round up innocent citizens and transfer them to people who torture, abuse and in some cases kill them; when bombs are dropped by planes on a regular basis; when regular citizens are regularly killed; when infrastructure is destroyed; when a country turns into a chess board for foreign powers to fight over - we have to expect that people are going to fight back.

A lot of Afghan "insurgents" aren't Taliban or gangsters but just people who are protecting their homes and families. Western media presents the occupation as humanitarian, but it isn't. We are killing innocent people. Their families are fighting back. The longer we continue to kill Afghans, the more Aghans are going to become "radicalized."

There is incontrovertable proof that Canada had a policy to pass on Afghans we detained to people who would torture them. Our roundups captured a lot of innocent people. When this came out in the press, most Canadians didn't care. Our government was very clear that it didn't care. Don't you think that might be a reason for an Afghan-Canadian to become "radicalized"?

The latest terrorist plots are homegrown in that our military policy is creating them. Our government's policies appear to be breaking international law. In order to cover up their acts, Harper took extraordinary antidemocratic measures, including disrupting parliamentary committees, smearing whistle blowers and shutting down parliament. This whole situation smells very bad.

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Did You Get Pears?

2010-08-22T15:13:00.005-04:00

"Did you get pears? Did you get pears? Did you get pears?" "We'll discuss it inside."
- the last lines of last Sunday's episode of Mad Men

What the heck was that all about? Were they showing us that Don has sunk so low that his decrepit old neighbors don't trust him enough to discuss produce purchases in front of him? Were they telling us that Don has returned to his roots - left upper middle class suburbia for a low-rent dump? Was this Don observing what he might have become - a whiny, dependent old man - if his marriage hadn't ended? Were we seeing that even when he's sunk into alcoholism and isolation, Don is always observing things about people that help him be a great ad man (as opposed to the focus groups he dismissed earlier in the episode)? Was it a comment on the paranoia in America during the 60s? Or was it a coded message to the audience, with pears really being "pairs" - telling us to observe the dualities in the episode?

Could it possibly be that all those meanings were packed into that one, brief, seemingly pointless little segment? Or is this show so enigmatic that we can create our own meaning?

Sometimes Mad Men seems more like a poem than a novel.

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Waterloo's Burgeoning Club Zone

2010-08-08T18:47:00.032-04:00

On King Street in the block north of Erb, we already have two bars catering to heavy drinking: the Vault Lounge and Chainsaw. Around the corner on Regina, the patio of the Royal Canadian Legion is another noisy, boozy spot.

New Year’s Eve, 2008, I walked by the Vault with my 80 year old mother about an hour before a massive brawl broke out on the sidewalk. The police called it a riot as dozens of drunken patrons fought; people were stabbed with broken bottles and bones were broken. Last summer the Vault was the scene of another late night brawl.

Now, directly across the street from the Vault and next door to Chainsaw, the Waterloo Theater seems poised to become a nightclub.

Here's some local buzz about the plans for the Waterloo Theater, which apparently will be called Beta. I'm not sure there's anything to be done to prevent Beta at this stage. A local resident has asked the Alcohol and Gaming Commission to withhold the liquor license, but it's doubtful that that approach will work. If the City of Waterloo had funded the arts to a decent degree (and not thrown so much of available funds into the pit that is the Clay and Glass Gallery), perhaps the previous attempts to make the theater a cultural center (Theater Athena and the Waterloo Entertainment Center) would not have failed.

As a long-time Waterlooian, I'm a bit paranoid about Waterloo suffering the fate of Kitchener. When I was growing up in Waterloo in the 60s and early 70s, downtown Kitchener was a wonderful, vibrant area full of interesting shops. The main attraction was the string of movie theaters along King Street. One of the downfalls of Kitchener was when those theaters got turned into clubs, with all the drunken brawls, public urination and vandalism that goes along with nightclubs.

The core of Uptown is King Street from William to Erb. Uptown needs to expand north up King, and our new nightclub zone is the first block north. The area is slated for streetscape improvements next spring. I'm really concerned that this concentration of booze cans (as the Chronicle likes to call them) will mess up the development of other blocks to the north.

Some of our city councillors believe that any criticism of bars is due to teetotalling tendencies that must be ignored. I disagree. Local politicians may have heard out-of-line complaints about bars; that doesn't mean that all concerns about bars are invalid.

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Laurel Trail Interrupted

2010-08-08T17:54:00.018-04:00

Laurel Trail runs along Laurel Creek and the railway tracks through Uptown Waterloo, Waterloo Park, and the University of Waterloo. It's a beautiful trail and my bike route to work. Here's a particularly pretty spot:

In recent years, the city of Waterloo planted flowers where the trail used to be along the tracks from Caroline to King. From the Waterloo Square north parking lot, here's where the trail used to be, east to King:

...and where the trail used to be, west to Caroline:

I guess City Hall figured that people following the trail can walk on the tracks or in the parking lot. That's a real pain for bicyclists and roller bladers. Also, the break in continuity is a problem for what is already a poorly marked trail.

Laurel Trail should be clearly marked, be paved, and have snow removal - not be a hodgepodge of unmarked segments of path.

The Iron Horse Trail is also abandoned as it goes through Uptown, picking up as it exits each end. Trails should be showcased in Uptown, not abandoned!

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Empty Lakes and Concrete Canyons

2010-08-07T17:44:00.015-04:00

I snapped this picture of Silver Lake in Waterloo Park yesterday. I was standing on the foot bridge at the eastern edge of the lake.

In case you're wondering, that dry land is part of the "lake". Water levels in creeks and rivers around the area are fairly high now, even though it's the middle of summer. Not so with Laurel Creek in Waterloo.

A few decades ago, amid concerns that water levels would rise, the city of Waterloo lined creek beds in ghastly-looking blocks of rocks encased in chicken wire. I remember when they did that to Laurel Creek near Marshall, destroying beautiful banks, trees, and plants. You could see the wheel treads of the bulldozers for years. A beautiful burbling brook became a hideous mess.

The park behind Waterloo City Hall got the full treatment: Laurel Creek was buried at the bottom of a concrete canyon:

A block away, just across Erb Street in a less heavily travelled area, Laurel creek is in its natural banks again:

Former mayor Joan McKinnon told me that the water projections of forty years ago turned out to be incorrect, and Laurel Creek has instead dropped in volume. I wonder if there's any way to boost it.

We could have a beautiful (and cooler) uptown if we made the most of Laurel Creek. A hundred years ago Silver Lake was a popular swimming spot; we might not achieve that again, but it could be a pretty place if it had water and maybe even a fountain. Laurel Creek behind City Hall should be naturalized with willow trees hanging over it and rounded grassy banks. It may never be as spectacular as the rushing creek that runs through downtown Boulder, Colorado, but it could be a lovely urban park.

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Cleanup efforts

2010-07-01T22:25:00.004-04:00

Immediately after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig blew up and it was known that oil was gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, people around the world started offering assistance to clean up the oil. There are many countries that have skimmers that can remove oil from water far more efficiently than any US technology can do it. A great unexplained scandal is why they have not yet been allowed to help, but it seems to have to do with overly cautious US bureaucracy. Now that hurricane season has arrived (and it's predicted to be a bad one), there will not be as many opportunities for skimming oil.

The first good news has arrived in the form of a Taiwanese tanker that [it is hoped] can scoop up 21 million gallons of water a day, separate out most of the oil and siphon it to a nearby ship, then put the cleaner water back in the Gulf. However, even it needs to wait approval from the Environmental Protection Agency, as current regulations won't allow it to put dirty water back in the Gulf - even if it's cleaner.

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How much oil has spilled?

2010-07-01T22:08:00.004-04:00

Since the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig blew up on April 20 until today (July 1), various estimates put the amount of oil that has gushed into the Gulf of Mexico at between 100 million and 200 million US gallons. Some of the oil has been siphoned, burned or skimmed from the water. The current official estimate of the remaining oil in the Gulf as of Thursday was 140 million gallons. It is estimated that 1.4 to 2.7 million gallons is being added to that each day.

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Why is the Gulf Oil Spill Different Colors?

2010-07-01T19:07:00.006-04:00

When I was collecting photos of the Gulf oil spill recently, I was puzzled why some of the pictures showed red oil, while some was the usual iridescent black.

Turns out oil turns red when mixed with water. Wierd Koops, chairman of Spill Response Group Holland, says, "the red-brown color happens when oil picks up more than 60 percent water."

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What Will Happen to All that Oil From the Gulf Oil Spill?

2010-07-01T17:50:00.040-04:00

Some of the oil that has gushed into the Gulf of Mexico is being reclaimed by BP. The rule of thumb seems to be that if it has turned red, the oil is too "weathered" to be commercially viable, but if it's still black it may be salvagable with processing.

In a gigantic rescue effort, a small amount of the oil has been brought ashore manually - by boats and by people bending over and picking it up off beaches. The oil in liquid form will be put in injection wells, while contaminated solid waste will go to special landfills.

As part of the cleanup effort, some of the oil on the surface of the water has been set on fire.

The Automated Data Inquiry for Oil Spills predicts that about 35 percent of the remaining oil will evaporate, about 20 percent will find its way to the ocean, and roughly half will remain in the Gulf of Mexico - some on the surface and the rest dispersed throughout the water.

The oil that goes to the ocean will round the tip of Florida and then probably get caught up in the northward-flowing Gulf Stream. Simulations predict that that oil will flow close to the coast of North America.

The Gulf Stream eventually finds its way to the Norwegian Sea, where the cooled water becomes heavy and sinks to the bottom of the ocean. The trip from Florida to the sink will take about 18 months (based on this analysis of how long ashes dumped in Fort Lauderdale will take to get to England). After sinking in the Norwegian Sea, the Gulf Stream waters flow back south and reappear in the Pacific about 1,600 years later.

Some or all of the oil in the Gulf Stream will drop off en route. Tar balls may wash ashore. The oil may foul beaches and fisheries all up the east coast, although the simulations predict it will veer offshore long before Canada. Some of the oil will disperse in the Atlantic or sink to the bottom - which is reputedly already littered with tar balls from other oil spills and from chronic oil leakage from practices like dock degreasing.

A hurricane, tropical storm, or even plain old high winds could cause several problems.

High winds could dislodge or destroy the booms that are containing some of the oil, causing the slick to spread further. They would also likely cause large waves that will drive more oil ashore.

Storm surge could drive contaminated water up canals and rivers. (It was storm surge that caused the flooding of New Orleans in the hours and days after Katrina.) A major concern in New Orleans is that the contaminated water will reach Lake Pontchartrain.

The oil itself is a deadly carcinogen, and the tons of dispersants that have been dropped on the slick make it even more toxic. It might seem insane to add more poisons to the mix, until we get to the next hurricane problem - which requires that we get oil off the surface as quickly as possible, and which is the reason for the dispersants.

The biggest concern about hurricanes is that the toxic mess will be picked up by the wind and carried inland. It could be carried hundreds or even thousands of miles before it's dropped on crops and pastures (from which it will spread throughout the food chain) and it will contaminate lakes, rivers, reservoirs and the rest of the water supply.

Of the oil that remains in the Gulf, some will stay in the water forever. Some of it will seep onshore, especially into the salt water marshes that stretch inland for a hundred miles in places. Hurricanes, storm surges and other forces of nature will continue to carry it further inland, possibly for decades to come.

Many people seem to think that BP can pay the costs of the oil spill's damage, but this is way too big for a single company to cover.

(The comic is from xkcd.)

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Oil Spills

2010-07-01T17:49:00.006-04:00

Let's all keep in mind that the BP oil spill is a big story because it's close to home and because it's a follow-up to the even bigger (in terms of newstand revenue) story of the Katrina disaster. Oil contamination of the oceans goes on all the time, and is greatly under-reported.

Nigeria has been devastated by oil for decades. The New York Times reports that an oil spill the size of the Exxon Valdez has happened every year for 50 years in the oil fields of Nigeria, with the oil gushing into sensitive wet lands. A recent article in The Guardian is even more devastating, saying that life expectancy has plummeted in rural Nigeria as the oil spills contaminate drinking water. Protest has been brutally repressed, epitomized by the horrific execution of poet Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995. (Due to outrage at that atrocity, Shell finally paid $15M for its involvement, which was just one in a long history of human rights violations perpetrated by and for the oil companies.)

Like the Gulf spill, Nigerian oil spills don't just affect the local ecology. The oil flows out the Niger delta and into the Atlantic ocean. Also, over half of Nigerian oil wells are off-shore, and they're no safer than the ones on land.

Mexico had an oil spill in 1979-80 that held the previous record (140 million US gallons) and was only surpassed by BP today, at least according to current official estimates.

Tankers have spills at sea all the time that cause barely a ripple of notice.

Chronic oil pollution activities such as degreasing docks has also been chronicled as causing major environmental damage everywhere that oil is shipped.

Years ago I read an interview with a deep sea explorer who said that tar balls litter the floors of our oceans.

(There are also natural oil leaks, like Bush Hill in the Gulf of Mexico, but they generally become part of an ecosystem: the oil and gas is eaten by bacteria, which are in turn eaten by things like worms and mussels. Still, they sometimes result in tar balls washing on to beaches.)
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The Singularity Happened... and I Missed It!

2010-07-01T14:15:00.022-04:00

Why should we accept that transformative change can only be caused by artificial intelligence or genetic modification of the brain or encounters with aliens? What if it's something so profound that we're not able to predict it or even realize, at the time, that it's happened? What if it's something not even dreamed of by Ray Kurzweil or Charles Stross?

Old-timey sci-fi writers John Wyndham, Charles Harness and Theodore Sturgeon saw the future as human evolution. In More than Human, Sturgeon saw evolution as not just the development of psychic abilities but also the creation of multi-person organisms, leading to the next stage of man, homo gestalt.

In one of my [many] favorite sci-fi novels, Nancy Kress's Beggars in Spain, there's a sort-of singularity (arguably it's not fast or profound enough, but it's the same idea) that's a confluence of three events: breakthroughs in human genetic engineering, the invention of cold fusion, and a popular new religion that preaches libertarianism.

Female authors Margaret Atwood and P.D. James envision a future where a failed ability to reproduce is the cause of massive change. I don't see futurism as a feminist issue, but they do suggest a different direction - and the paranoia that we won't wake up to the change until it's too late. I suppose you could translate that paranoia to the singularity idea by suspecting that aliens are already among us, changing things quietly under the covers. Or maybe we simply can't comprehend the change that's happening to us personally, as I can't differentiate my personal development from the societal changes happening during my childhood in the 60s and 70s.

In Stross's worlds a singularity is akin to an apocalypse: overnight society crumbles and most people die. That's not an event that people would fail to notice. (Unless it didn't happen in the northern hemisphere, or wasn't good at selling papers?)

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Bribing Canadian Politicians

2010-06-24T09:24:00.006-04:00

Richard Fadden, the head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), is in the news this week spilling some very important information: the Chinese government is paying Canadian politicians to spy for it.

It seems clear to me that this was no mistake: he went to the CBC interview to give this information. He must have known that he was risking his career to say this. I suspect he felt it was important for the public to know. Why would he do that? Because we vote in politicians, and once in office there's little that can be done to prevent this sort of thing. The head of CSIS probably weighed his options and decided that the only way to successfully address the issue was to make it public.

The news spin has been about everything but the main issue.

On The Current this morning, Anna Maria Tremonti focused on how this is a slur on the Chinese community in Canada.

Today's Globe has a column about how heads should roll at the CBC because they delayed broadcasting the interview until the eve of the arrival of the Chinese head of state.

Maclean's attacks the whistle blower, saying that his backpedaling is "awkward" and a "ragged retreat".

Is this willful denial, or are serious news outlets - as I hope - sending out investigative journalists to follow up on this story and get us some facts?

And kudos to the CBC for airing this interview just before the G20, when it will get picked up by international media. They may have realized that Canadians wouldn't be able to see the forest for the trees.

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Photos of the Gulf Oil Spill

2010-06-23T22:13:00.014-04:00

The floor of the Gulf of Mexico, pre-spill:

The surface near the gusher:

Oil approaching a beach in June:

A graph showing where oil has hit land, June 19:

Thousands of individuals are attempting to clean the beaches by hand:

Oil seeping into a salt water marsh:

The Plan

2010-06-22T21:43:00.022-04:00

Harper's plan seemed to be this:

In early summer, host two huge prestigious international meetings (the G20 and G8 summits). Be seen on home soil as top dog among Obama, Cameron, Herkel, et al.
A few days later, host the queen. Be seen on home soil as top dog with the lady on the money.
While the queen is here, announce the new G-G. Be seen as the guy who appoints the other top dogs.
Ride the wave of national pride and personal adulation through the summer (without pesky parliament interfering).

Then, in late August or early September, dissolve parliament and call an election.

This scenario explains a lot.

It explains why Harper was so interested in the G8/20 all of a sudden. This is the guy who was publicly disdainful of these leader get-togethers. This is the guy who showed up late for photo ops and blew off an Obama speech to do a press event at a donut shop. This isn't even a regular meeting - the G20 summit is in November, and this is just an add-on.

It explains the odd wording of the Afghan detainee document deal that would allow Harper to cancel the opposition party's access to the documents if he wins a majority.

It even goes a little towards explaining why he prorogued parliament and then delayed so long on signing the agreement on release of the Afghan documents... his plan was that parliament would have very little time to see those documents before he used his majority to yank them back.

And he almost pulled it off. By now, the Canadian public was supposed to be dazzled by a sense of our growing international importance. By next month, we were supposed to adore the man who made it all happen. Last week Harper's PR team released a photo of him standing alone in the House of Commons, looking pensive. This was just the beginning of a repositioning. I have no doubt that a whole series of photos, events and ads were planned to remake Harper in the eyes of the country. It didn't have to fool everyone, and it didn't have to fool anyone for long - just long enough to win a majority.

It's lovely irony that Harper is hoist by his own petard. To get maximum political benefit from the summits, he let the organizers go hog wild on costs. If the government had managed to hide the costs of the G8/20 summits, we might have had a Conservative majority by Thanksgiving. (Gack - we still might.)

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Junk Food for Babies?

2010-06-19T19:20:00.008-04:00

Gerber has a line of junk food for babies.

The label says that by 12 months babies are ready for a wider variety of foods. Called Lil Crunchies in the Graduates line, the baby junk food includes cheese puffs, vegetable puffs and fruit puffs.

To add insult to injury, it's really expensive.

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Dedicated Bike Lanes

2010-06-18T09:13:00.004-04:00

Trendy ideas come and go. We all (myself included) have a tendency to get behind an idea that sounds good, even if we haven't completely thought it through.

The latest fad, in Waterloo Region at least, is bike lanes with curbs around them. These, it is thought, will be safer for bicyclists and so increase bike commuting. Sounds good, no? All of a sudden everyone seems to be behind the idea - you hear it all the time, proposed with great authority.

But wait. There are a few other things to consider:

Given the much higher cost of this sort of bike lane over a regular bike lane, a shift to the new lanes will almost certainly slow down the development of new bike lanes.
The new bike lanes require more space so won't be possible on many roads. This isn't a drawback unless (as I've heard) people decry the regular bike lane as unsafe - then we just end up with less bike lanes.
In winter, it will be more difficult to plough these lanes. Regular bike lanes (essentially just a white stripe down the road marking off a lane for bikes) are easier to plough. The city will have to send out a different sort of snow plough to handle the new bike lanes. They likely just won't get ploughed.
As a cylist, I don't relish the idea of a curb surrounding my lane because it makes it more difficult for me to merge with traffic to make a left hand turn or get to an address on the other side of the street. It also makes it more difficult to pass slow bike riders and other impediments.
The curb alongside the bike lane does not solve the biggest problem of bike lanes: at intersections, bike lanes tend to disappear - leaving the cyclist high and dry in the most dangerous part of the street. This problem will probably be much worse with curbed bike lanes, as the curb will have to stop at every spot where cars need to turn.
Curbed bike lanes only make sense on streets with limited car access - long stretches of road without intersections or driveways. But in those situations, a path running a few meters away from the road is a safer and more enjoyable alternative for bikes.
There is an accessibilty consideration: how do pedestrians with walkers, baby buggies or wheelchairs cross them? What about the sight impaired?

The curbed bike lane idea may be made with the best of intentions, but it may also be a very negative force on the future of urban cycling. We'd be better off itemizing the problems with regular bike lanes and thinking up better ways to solve them: motorists parking in bike lanes; lanes running close to parked cars with doors that could suddenly fling open; safe ways for bikes to make turns and cross intersections; etc. And the number one priority is just to have more trails, paths and bike lanes, and to make sure they connect.

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Maybe Not a Merger - But Cooperation, For Sure

2010-06-12T09:24:00.005-04:00

The 2008 coalition was impossible because there was no-one in place to lead it. Dion was so weak that he was ousted, and then Ignatieff was merely He Who Would Be Acclaimed. He couldn't take over as PM before a convention making him Liberal leader.

Harper and the boys spent a lot of money trying to convince Canadians that the very notion of a coalition is undemocratic, and that one in our current political environment would be doubly undemocratic because Liberals would have to join with "socialists and separatists." It was McArthyesque, but it resonated, despite the well-documented attempt at a coalition initiated by Harper himself in 2004.

The problem was how to ever get out of this hole. Many Canadians had bought the line that a coalition would be a coup d'etat - hell, The Economist even used the word coup to describe it (although that word didn't reappear in their analysis of their own country's current coalition).

Enter Jean Chretien, circa last week, musing about the possibility of a merger between the Liberals and the NDP. All of a sudden mergers and coalitions have resurged as a topic of discussion - and this time Harper isn't setting the agenda. This discussion has the potential to clear away some of the paranoia about center-left cooperation.

Harper is doing his best not to let it. This week the PMO/PCO has tried attacking the president of the Liberal party, creating a bunch of nutty fake quotes and so on. It's typical Conservative smear tactics, but it has a hint of desperation to it. And at the same time, Conservatives are slipping in the polls (not that that means much).

Perhaps I'm giving Chretien too much credit, but he may have been crazy like a fox in starting up merger talk. It may do all kinds of good for all nonCon parties.

Personally, I'm not pro-merger. I think it would be good for the Liberals (my party), not just because it would let us win a lot of ridings where the Liberals and NDP split the vote, but also because I'd like to see the Liberal party move left, and I have a lot of respect for New Democrats - especially a lot of current senior NDP MPs like Pat Martin, Olivia Chow, Thomas Mulclair and others. I'm against a merger because I don't want to see the NDP vanish.

However, maybe there are solutions to merging and not killing the NDP. Maybe the NDP could exist as a mini-caucus within the Liberal party. Or maybe a cooperation accord could be signed that was part coalition, part merger. I have no idea what sorts of arrangements are acceptable in the Westminster parliamentary system, which of course I would want to adhere to. Also - if the NDP decided it wanted to merge, then as a Liberal I would have to defer to them.

All in all I think it's an interesting and good discussion. For months the headlines have been that the Conservatives are ahead in the polls, when the same statistics could have been reported as that the government is hovering at preposterously low 30% support. The Conservatives get away with it because the rest of us are split, and the rest of us have more uniting us than dividing us. I'd prefer a coalition, but any talk that gets us closer to cooperating is fine by me.

Conservatives are in desperate attack mode because center-left cooperation is a major threat to them. It's quite possible that the Liberals can beat them on their own in the next election, but the more we present a united opposition, the more the Conservatives have to fear.

Update: Media pundits keep saying that coalition talk is something that has been done to Ignatieff. I disagree. Chretien and Romanow may be loose cannons, but Bob Rae didn't write a piece about his experience in a coalition without the approval - and probably the direction - of Michael Ignatieff.

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Measured in Millihelens

2010-06-06T13:20:00.013-04:00

The Iliad has two heroes: one nominal (Achilles) and one subversive (Hector). Achilles has to be the hero because Homer's audience was Greek and Achilles is Greek (Achaean), whereas Hector the Trojan prince was the enemy to the Greeks in the Trojan war. Achilles is certainly a hero - but he sulks in his tent and fights in blind anger. In Homer's lifetime there were no Trojans left to cheer on Hector. Just to solidify our preference for Hector over Achilles, Achilles is most unheroic in his treatment of Hector's dead body after he kills him - and Achilles' blind anger and revenge-killing of Hector is not very heroic, either.

So instead of black and white, at the center of the Illiad is an odd take on us-and-them: we are great but flawed. The unattainable standard of heroism is embodied in the other. More: we destroyed the ideal hero (Hector). The nominal hero, Achilles, lives on - an interesting ploy of Homer's, as Achilles lives only because Homer stopped the tale shortly before Achilles' death. (In other versions of the story he dies during the sacking of Troy.)

On a macro level the Iliad is also subversive. While it is a book that celebrates a great Greek victory, the prominence and glorification of Hector implies that the Greeks were wrong in fighting the war. There is great sadness in the destruction of Hector and his civilization, and the Greeks come off as brutes.

There is a humanism in the Iliad that you seldom see in historical fiction. No man dies anonymously. If a man dies in the Iliad, the means of his death is described, as is the name of his father and something of his history. This makes it a bit bloody, for sure (some might say there are endless descriptions of ghastly fatal wounds), but it is also very respectful of life.

Achilles doesn't refuse to fight because of any moral qualms; he's just mad that Agamemnon has taken his slave-girl Briseis away. Achilles didn't want any part of this expedition in the first place, but was forced to go. Hector is forced to defend his city, but wants only a peaceful life with his wife and young son. Despite the bloodiness of the story, the Iliad is profoundly anti-war.

All this makes sense when you think that Homer (or a collection of writers we call Homer) was writing at the end of the dark ages and is describing the cause of the dark ages (as I've argued before). You could see the central premise of the Iliad as: The heroic deeds of our (Greek) heroes resulted in hundreds of years when civilization died.

Okay, if you got this far, here's a little Illiad joke to reward you:

Q: What's a millihelen?
A: The amount of beauty sufficient to launch one ship.

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Snooks

2010-05-23T11:29:00.029-04:00

"Snooks" is cool-guy lingo for "sonic dematerializer," a "next-gen weapon" that provides the premise (such as it is) for the recent film The Losers. The Losers is based on graphic novels by Andy Diggle, but as far as I can tell the slang "snooks" is wholly an invention of the film.

According to the movie, snooks are the weapon of choice of modern-day bad guys because they are environmentally friendly. The film's arch-villain, played by Jason Patric, says they "produce no pollution - they're pure destruction" and so are highly sought-after by eco-terrorists. When asked about other next-gen weapons, Patric airily asks, "Have you heard of deep-space tachyons? Singularity events? No?" and he arches an eyebrow to let us know that if we don't have the science, there's no point trying to describe them to us.

Me, I'm so old school that when you put "graphic novel" and "sonic dematerializer" together I think of Madame Castiofore, the glass-shattering opera singer in Tintin. On its own, "sonic dematerializer" makes me think of that gizmo that dental hygenists use if you forget to floss. I seem to recall in the 1960s series The Prisoner that Number Six was kept in The Village by means of a sonic weapon of some sort - they make for excellent low-budget special effects because all you have to do is shake the camera a little, have the actors grab their ears, and then have something vanish. In fact, the mad scientist in Help! tries to get Ringo's ring off with a sonic dematerializer, causing his pants to fall down and fuses to blow. (When the fuse blows John Lennon says, "My god! What's your electricity bill like?" and the scientist's assistant, Algernon, says, "Well it's sort of a long counterfoil...")

All in all, the destructive power of sound seems pretty last-gen to me (maybe even retro-gen). But I like this word snooks. Snooks even sounds like a good nickname for the old prima donna.

The idea that the next generation of terrorists is going to require environmentally friendly bombs is just, well, delightful. It's a great shame that the movie was so dumbed-down that they made no attempt to explain how the arch-villain would wield a singularity event as a weapon, not to mention how he'd harness the elusive tachyon. All we see of the snook is an island that gets obliterated, and you think you could do that for less than $1 billion cash.

By the way, The Losers is a really bad film with really good acting by everyone in it. It's a great shame that so much talent wasted nearly a year creating such a bag of crap. I saw it only because I thought there would be superheroes.

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Ending Wagner

2010-05-02T19:28:00.005-04:00

At the very end of the Ring Cycle there is a brief moment when we see that the age of the gods is over and the age of humanity is beginning. It only lasts a couple of minutes but it is of vital importance to the piece - all the fighting of the gods leads to this, the making of humanity. After 17+ hours, the audience can finally exhale. The leitmotif that plays at the end makes this very clear. A production that doesn't recognize it makes a big mistake. I know - I saw one once: it was a deflating experience.

At the end of The Flying Dutchman, when the young woman Senta is shot dead, the music suddenly changes from dark and menacing to romantic and optimistic. It only lasts a moment, but that music ends the opera. It is clear that Wagner intends that Senta and the flying Dutchman are both saved by her death: he has been cursed to immortal life on the sea, and can only be saved by a woman who promises and delivers on loving him until her death. She promised him her love, and continued loving him until her death.

It is unfortunate that the COC production of The Flying Dutchman, mounted in 2000 and currently being revived at the Four Seasons Center, misses the ending - either misses it, or handles it so subtlely that the audience misses it. Senta just falls down dead, and the Dutchman walks up a staircase holding her wedding veil, but that's it.

I can see that it's difficult to do justice to these brief but monumental Wagner endings, but opera productions must.

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Meddling with the Most Vulnerable

2010-05-02T10:22:00.005-04:00

In all the newsprint spent on Harper's controversial G8 maternal health plan, I can't find mention of a very important implication of the Conservative decision to not fund abortions: how organizations that support abortion will be funded.

George Bush was explicit about it. He prohibited US funding of international groups that performed abortions or provided information about abortion. Harper's decision could have the same effect, depending on how it's implemented.

Say you have a poor country and there's an organization that provides maternal health services - it could be a clinic or a hospital or a group that covers several facilities. Say their services include family planning and/or abortion. Are they still eligible for funding under this plan?

Does someone work out what percentage of their budget is related to abortion, and then Canada asks some other country to fund that portion? That seems unlikely. But if not that sort of scenario, then it seems we must be disadvantaging organizations that support abortion. That's not just wrong; it's immoral.

It's beyond belief that a country that provides free abortions to its citizens would use its foriegn aid policies to prevent poor women in Africa from having abortions - especially since abortion is needed even more in poor African countries, where poor women have less control over their bodies and it is estimated that a third of pregnancy-related deaths are due to botched abortions.

Foreign aid is a tricky business. One of the reasons that sub-Saharan Africa is still so poor is the mess we've made with our foreign aid-slash-meddling. Just think of this scenario: there's a village with a maternal health clinic that's funded with western money, and now that clinic has been told that it won't be funded unless it ceases performing abortions - or even giving advice about them. Thanks to George Bush wooing the evangelical vote, that went on for eight years. Thanks to Stephen Harper wooing the evangelical vote, that might be about to start happening again.

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Anthony Lane Review (review)

2010-04-29T21:52:00.039-04:00

Anthony Lane's New Yorker review of Kick-Ass bugs me - not because he hated the movie and I dug it, although that's true - but because his objections are rooted in the main character being an 11 year old girl.

Lane has various problems with the character who calls herself Hit Girl. He thinks her swearing is a cheap trick to generate buzz. He thinks her presence turns the movie into "cartoon violence" and makes the movie appeal to children. He thinks that viewing it will make children mistake savagery for slapstick and so "coarsen and inflame" them. Underlying all his other criticism, he thinks she's pornographic. While not being able to provide any evidence, Lane is preoccupied with her sexuality; he even says that she is "the dream of every pedophile."

To be clear: the little girl in question doesn't dress provocatively. She doesn't act provocatively. There's nothing sexual about her. If the actress had been 12 or 13 she might have had budding sexuality, but Hit Girl is thoroughly a child.

Lane tries to argue the pornography angle by saying that that the difference between a sexualized child and a violenc-ized child is a "false dichotomy" and a "cowardly distinction". I think he's engaged in some fuzzy thinking there. There is most definitely a difference between a child who is sexualized and one who is violent: there is no child-violence-voyeur equivalent of a pedophile.

There is one major similarity between children who are sexualized and who are violenc-ized: both situations give the child a sense of empowerment but are ultimately damaging to them. But for a pulp fiction movie, the movie is very sensitive to the child's problems. The movie makes it clear that this is one very damaged little girl. She was raised by an insane revenge-obsessed father who made killing a game. When we first see father and daughter, they are standing in a culvert and he is repeatedly shooting her in the chest with a large hand gun (we then learn he's teaching her to get used to her new bullet-proof vest). At the end, she is placed in a safer environment.

The difference between a movie about a sexualized little girl (and there have been many, from Lolita to Pretty Baby to Taxi Driver and on and on) and a movie about a violenc-ized little girl, is that millions of little girls are sexualized but few in the Western world are turned into Ninja fighters. There isn't a social issue here.

There is shock/novelty value. There may have been an 11 year old pig-tailed assassin in fiction before, but I can't recall when. And Lane is right that the Hit Girl character might appeal to kids - but this is an R-rated movie. As long as a movie is rated appropriately, I don't see how you can criticize its effect on kids.

I can't believe that Lane would have had such strong objections to violenc-izing a little boy. His review, at heart, is just old-fashioned disapproval of girls being action heroes. And he's really, really bothered about it - to the point that he expresses disgust with people who disagree with him - and to the point that he misses the good stuff in the movie.

The actress who plays Hit Girl, Chloe Moretz, has an impressive resume even though she was 11 at time of filming, and she did a brilliant acting job. When she says "Oh daddy, I'm just fuckin with ya", it's a show-stopper. She doesn't swear much in the movie, but when she does it's the best swearing I ever heard. She is convincing in a role that most actors would make laughable.

On top of all this, Lane and many of the other reviewers I read just don't get the movie. It's about the yearning and futility of wanting to be more than you can be. The character who calls himself Kick-Ass wears a baggy mail-order Hallowe'en costume and makes zero progress in becoming a superhero. He has a wealthy classmate who is able to buy a more convincing costume but does no better at the superheroing. Hit Girl is the closest we get to a human superhero, but she's ultimately just a little kid who's over-eager to please her dad. Even at the closest they get, when Kick-Ass dons a jet pack and flies himself and Hit Girl across the city, they have still failed to cross the line between being a superhero and just pretending.

In the short form of the review that appears in later New Yorkers, Lane writes that Kick-Ass "has the makings of a pointed - and much needed - poke at comic book afflatus, but the satire backs away all too quickly." Again, he misses the point. Superhero movies tend to play with the edges of the genre, exploring it and examining its internal flaws, but you shouldn't expect them to satirize and criticize the genre. The superhero genre simply isn't serious enough for satire to have any relevance.

Except for her age, Hit Girl is has a lot of similarities to Uma Thurman's character in Kill Bill, and Kick-Ass owes a lot to Kill Bill. If I hadn't liked Kick-Ass I might have thought it was too derivative. But I wouldn't have blamed it on the kid.

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Misconceptions About LRT

2010-04-25T12:35:00.009-04:00

Proponents of LRT claim that the current bus system is not adequate for growing demand, and so we need a long train to meet future capacity. However, the bus on the proposed LRT route, the iXpress, runs every 15 minutes. There is plenty of opportunity for expanding the service: run every five minutes or more during peak times, and move to larger (even articulated) buses. (The iXpress is a sophisticated new transit system and it didn't cost a lot to set up: see this. Buses have the great advantage of being flexible. It's easy to change a bus route, and virtually impossible with a rail line.)

LRT is an acronym that is often taken to stand for Light Rapid Transit. However, for the trip between Fairview Mall and Conestoga Mall (the LRT route), the LRT will only be 7 minutes faster than the current bus, according to the Region's transit authorities.

In Toronto, the name LRT refers to a very different thing from the proposed Waterloo LRT. In Toronto an LRT is a streetcar that stops every couple of blocks, just like regular streetcars. The only difference from other streetcars is that the Toronto LRT runs on a raised platform, rather than running on a lane also used by cars.

In Waterloo, the proposed LRT also runs on tracks on a dedicated raised lane. However, it's not a streetcar. It's a longer train (the stations for the Waterloo LRT are planned to be 60 meters in length). Most importantly, it stops very infrequently: there are only 11 stops between Fairview Mall and Conestoga Mall (that is counting the two places where the route turns into a loop as one stop, which is fair).

Check out the map here. Between downtown Kitchener and downtown Waterloo, there is only one stop. For many residents, the LRT may run near where they want to go but it probably won't stop there.

Proponents of Waterloo's LRT have consistently painted opponents as being anti-transit. This is a tactic of demonization that is unfortunate and untrue. There are thoughtful and well-informed people on both sides of the debate. Some prominent examples:
- One of the most outspoken opponents of LRT is a professor emeritus of civil engineering at the University of Waterloo who taught and did research in transportation and transit planning for 32 years and is a well-known advocate of public transit (link).
- Here are all the anti-LRT letters to the editor that have been published in Waterloo newspapers.
- Here are all the anti-LRT articles that have been published in Waterloo newspapers.
- Here are my own writings on the topic, which mostly focus on negative implications of the LRT for Uptown Waterloo.

Bringing Pragmatism to Environmental Issues

2010-04-23T23:21:00.010-04:00

Waterloo Region health officials are agitating against a provincial initiative to allow convenience stores to sell wine and beer. Their argument is that it will lead to more drunkenness.

There is no evidence that convenient liquor sales leads to more drinking, and ample eveidence to the contrary (in Quebec and the many US states that allow it). However, common sense is all that's needed to see the benefits: less driving. Beer and wine stores are so widely spread in our area that you practically have to own a car to get to them. In all of Waterloo - a town of over 100,000 people in a massive suburban sprawl - there are only three LCBOs and two beer stores.

Having wine and beer in convenience stores will also make corner stores more profitable, which should reverse the trend of declining numbers of corner stores. That will provide even more environmental benefits as residents won't have to rely on a car to pick up milk, the newspaper, and a host of other items.

In our older neighbourhoods you can still see where convenience stores used to be. They are usually on corners, and are often either boarded up or have been converted to a residence. They are reminders of a time when families either shared a car or did without, and were able to buy many necessities on foot.

We're always talking about creating a walkable city. This is how you do it: small, pragmatic steps that consider how people really live.

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when faces called flowers

2010-04-12T18:21:00.021-04:00

The glorious spring weather makes me think of this poem by e.e. cummings:

when faces called flowers float out of the ground
and breathing is wishing and wishing is having-
but keeping is downward and doubting and never
-it's april(yes,april;my darling)it's spring!
yes the pretty birds frolic as spry as can fly
yes the little fish gambol as glad as can be
(yes the mountains are dancing together)

when every leaf opens without any sound
and wishing is having and having is giving-
but keeping is doting and nothing and nonsense
-alive;we're alive,dear:it's(kiss me now)spring!
now the pretty birds hover so she and so he
now the little fish quiver so you and so i
(now the mountains are dancing, the mountains)

when more than was lost has been found has been found
and having is giving and giving is living-
but keeping is darkness and winter and cringing
-it's spring(all our night becomes day)o,it's spring!
all the pretty birds dive to the heart of the sky
all the little fish climb through the mind of the sea
(all the mountains are dancing;are dancing)

On first reading the poem seems almost treacly sweet, but on subsequent readings there are troubling hints of darkness and derangement. Like... In the third line of every stanza, if "keeping" refers to holding on to a person, then maybe there's some guilt about how his last relationship ended? There's that enigmatic last line of every stanza that's still playful and joyful but also, maybe, a bit troubling - thinking that mountains are dancing seems a bit demented. And the rolling repetitions (yes, yes, yes, now, now, now, all, all, all)... they start out affirming, then frantic, then greedy.

I don't have anything else to say; I think it's a cool poem. It's like a spectacular sunset caused by pollution or a beautiful sheen on the ocean that may be an oil slick or a hilarious friend who's an alcoholic.

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Wasted Opportunity

2010-04-11T17:42:00.008-04:00

It was a beautiful, sunny weekend, and very little went on in our new public square. Saturday at 3 PM there was a rally protesting two women being asked not to kiss in a local restaurant - and that was it. I took this picture today (Sunday) at about 12:40; there was supposed to be skateboard classes from 11-1 but as you can see, it didn't happen. I went back about three hours later and there were some more skate boarders, plus a few people wandering around looking glum.

I'm not blaming the city - the square is new and they have a limited budget to program it. But this square needs more programming. It's not like a park where people can relax and enjoy the view. We built an expanse of white concrete that requires programming.

We could set up a citizen's committee to help program the square. In addition, organizations such as universities, schools, corporations, arts groups, sports clubs and civic groups could propose events. The Waterloo Public Square provides a lot of opportunities for Waterlooians - let's take initiative.

(link to programming info)

Update: As it happened, three weeks later on a Sunday at 12:45 I happened by Nathan Philips Square in Toronto. It was much worse!

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What's With the Harper Conservatives and the Hells Angels?

2010-04-10T09:38:00.007-04:00

The Toronto Star says that Rahim Jaffer, husband of Helena Guergis, has been in business with "a man who claims to be a former banker for the Hells Angels."

Guergis is the second member of Harper's cabinet who was ousted due to a political scandal, and the previous scandal (concerning Maxime Bernier) also involved the Hells Angels. While Minister of Foreign Affairs, Bernier left highly confidential NATO documents at the home of a girlfriend who had long-standing ties to the Hells Angels.

It seems reasonable to suspect that the motorcycle gang is attempting to infiltrate government, or at least exert influence through social connections. This is a tactic long deployed by other organized crime such as the Italian mafia. Motorcycle gangs morphed into sophisticated organized crime syndicates some time ago, but public understanding has not caught up with reality.

Many people don't comprehend the difference between groups of motorcycle enthusiasts and organized crime syndicates like the Hells Angels. It's that ignorance that allows the Hells Angels to operate in a quasi-legitimate fashion.

I don't allege that the Harper Conservatives support or condone organized crime, but this second scandal related to the same crime syndicate has got to be a wake-up call to the Conservatives to take more care. All other politicians should take note, as well.

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Just Thanking his Supporters...

2010-03-23T14:57:00.003-04:00

It seems that Harper learned something from the way the Bush government ran their invasion of Iraq: Haiti project goes to Tory-linked firm.

We Are Not the Good Guys

2010-03-14T16:49:00.003-04:00

An editorial in the March 13 Globe & Mail starts, "While Canada keeps its human-rights reports on Afghanistan... strictly secret, the U.S. state department posted its 2009 report on its website Thursday for anyone who cares to read it. The report says about its Afghan ally, in part: 'Torture and abuse methods included, but were not limited to, beating by stick, scorching bar, or iron bar; flogging by cable; battering by rod; electric shock; deprivation of sleep, water, and food; abusive language; sexual humiliation; and rape...'"

The US report certainly backs up Richard Colvin's testimony that Afghans detained by Canadian troops were routinely tortured in Afghan jails. Not long ago PMO talking points claimed that the only torture was one detainee having a shoe thrown at him. They were claiming that since Colvin hadn't seen the torture firsthand, his testimony was bogus and the torture never occurred. Plus they were claiming that all detainees were murderous terrorists, rather than Colvin's testimony (backed up by the US reports) that many detainees were just ordinary Afghans who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Conservatives also claimed these things in the Comments sections of this blog (eg here). My question is: what do you have to say now? Is the US government lying too?

It's clear now why Harper prorogued parliament. He needed to create a gap in time between all those hateful things MacKay shouted last fall and the exposure of everything MacKay said as utter, self-serving lies. It also gave him time to come up with a new strategy: try to smear the previous Liberal government as much as possible before the full truth comes out so that he can say that he wasn't the only one to blame. (Not that I oppose exposing actions by the Martin government; as Ignatieff has stated all along, the investigation should not exclude Martin.)

Harper's deceitful, undemocratic actions are shameful. But the most important part of this affair continues to be this: When we have armed troops in another country, we have an absolute obligation to respect the human rights of the people in that country - and to be seen to do so. We have failed so spectacularly that we are not only in contravention of the Geneva Convention, but our government is known to be engaged in a coverup of our abuses. We must withdraw from Afghanistan immediately, have a full investigation, and start to think about reparations.

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It's a Good Time to Buy a Toyota

2010-03-13T16:55:00.005-05:00

For the last few weeks we've been flooded with stories of out-of-control Toyotas that zoomed up to 140 km/hour without driver intent.

I'm no auto expert, but the stories don't seem credible. Braking systems are more powerful than engines so functioning brakes can stop an accelerating car; if the stories are true, then the accelerator and brakes failed at the same time - and then miraculously went back to normal. That seems impossible even with the computer malfunction explanation.

The most plausible explanation is that the drivers panicked and hit the accelerator when they thought they were braking. The more they tried to brake, the faster they went - because they were pressing the accelerator, not the brake. The panic explanation is reinforced by other things in their stories: they always seem to keep accelerating without thinking to put the car in neutral and turn it off.

This is is what I think happened: there was a problem with Toyota floor mats (the original issue) affecting the gas pedal, after which Toyota drivers with this sort of driving mistake in their past started re-remembering their mistake as a fault of the car. That whipped up a mass hysteria. And perhaps Americans who fear for their domestic car industry were happy to feed the scandal.

People who believe that Toyota has a zillion defective cars should take a look at the runaway Audi scandal of 1986. This sort of faux scandal has happened before.

Me, I drive a 13 year old Corolla that has cost me virtually nothing in repairs, and when it gives up the ghost I plan to get a Yaris. There might be some good bargains on used ones...

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Retail in Canada

2010-03-13T14:35:00.030-05:00

I sometimes like to think that it's not so much that Canada has a lousier retail environment than the United States; it's that the US has the best in the world, and Canada is not as good but is better than the rest - with the scale continuing to western Europe, eastern Europe, and so on.

But that doesn't change the fact that choices are better in the States; prices can be far better; and the customer interface (shops, web sites, sales reps and customer support) are more enjoyable to work with and more efficient.

Case in point: I need a new ceiling fan. After checking some local stores and not finding what I wanted I looked online and found two models I liked. I called some lighting stores in town and only one had the sort of thing I was looking for. I went to the store and found they couldn't get my first choice but they could get my second, this one from Fanimation:

The price they quoted was $2400 plus tax.

In an online store in the US, the exact same fan was $1143 ($681 for the fan and $462 for the curvey blades; no tax). There's a $55 shipping charge to Canada and 11% import duty (which is handled by the courier so the fan is delivered to your door), but the dollars are nearly at parity, so the total cost is still nearly half of the store's price.

You might say that's a typical store mark-up, but they don't stock any ceiling fans: they were going to order it from a catalog.

Plus, the price differential isn't even the biggest problem. The lighting store chain's web site is uninformative (it has a lot of pages but no details of the products; the only real info is the address). They don't have any fans on display (just catalogs), yet they only carry parts of three lines of fan - and this was the only fan that was different from your typical Home Depot selection. The staff seemed uninterested verging on surly. I had to stand at a cluttered counter to look at the catalogs. The staff couldn't answer any questions about the products and didn't even give me an exact price (the guy said it would be "around $2400").

In contrast, the US online store had both an 800 number and an online chat service (both of which I used to ask questions about the fans). The guy at the store said it would take six weeks to get the fan, while the customer rep at the US web site said 7-10 days. The US outfit has a tracking page where I can follow my order. At the local store, I have to go to the store to pick up the fan.

I didn't order that fan. I bought my first choice, which was much cheaper, is about the most efficient (in terms of moving the most air) and quietest fan on the market, and has a Calderesque look I like:

My fan is in the Minka Aire line, which doesn't even have a distributor in Canada. In my town, if you want an artistic ceiling fan - with the exception of waiting six weeks for that $2400 one - you don't have much choice but to import directly from elsewhere.

Is Canadian taste so stodgy that there's no point carrying Minka Aire fans? (The guy in the store said, "I think I've heard other people asking about Minka.") If markets are so efficient, why isn't Canadian retail improving to match the US?

Canada is a great untapped retail market, yet sometimes it seems that US retailers lower their quality when they sell here. For example, a couple of years ago Target (US) and Zellers (Canada) sold the same brand of clothing, but at Target the clothes were well-designed, well-made and 100% cotton, while at Zellers the clothes tended to be chintzy and synthetic. I find it hard to believe that Canadians prefer ugly clothes. A big part of the success of Walmart is that they carry simple, cheap, well-made cotton clothing - even in Canada.

For a short while I ordered books from Indigo rather than Amazon - the Amazon search engine is so much better that I would have to look up the book on Amazon, get the ISBN and then use that to find it on Indigo. I gave up and now order everything from Amazon. Heck, I was at the Information Desk at the library once and the librarian used Amazon to find information about a book. Why exactly is it a scandal that our government might let Amazon expand here?

Is the real problem that Canadians are willing to put up with lousy selection, quality, service and prices, while Americans demand better?

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Department of Eeee-yew

2010-03-01T20:56:00.002-05:00

The Globe reports,

Researchers in the United States say they have turned male frogs into females by exposing the amphibians to tiny amounts of atrazine, a weed killer widely used on corn fields in Canada and often found in water supplies in agricultural areas.

The chemically induced sex change occurred by dosing frogs at concentrations of the herbicide 50 per cent below Health Canada's guideline for drinking water.

...

The discovery that in an experimental setting atrazine induces sex changes in frogs is likely to further increase the controversy over the chemical, which has been banned in Europe because it contaminates ground water but is one of the most commonly used herbicides in North America.

...

All the atrazine sold in Canada is made by Syngenta AG, a Swiss-based seed and pesticide producer that has previously disputed findings that the herbicide hazardous. ...Atrazine has been dogged by controversy since the late 1980s, when it was found to cause mammary tumours in one strain of laboratory rats...

A part per billion is an extremely small amount, the equivalent of one second or elapsed time over a 32-year period. The experimental dose used was below Canada's drinking water guideline of 5 ppb, but above the safe wildlife exposure standard of 1.8 ppb. Figures contained in Health Canada's 2007 atrazine evaluation found concentrations in groundwater of up to 1.2 ppb.

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MSN Makes Fun of Harper

2010-03-01T12:11:00.002-05:00

This is pretty funny, and has a refreshing anti-prorogation message:

Stephen Harper's Olympic adventure

Losing Was Not an Option

2010-02-28T18:45:00.006-05:00

As I write this in my apartment, I can hear the shouting and honking in downtown Waterloo. Much of downtown Toronto is closed for the celebrating fans, as are downtowns all over the country.

I was at an opera in Toronto this afternoon from 2 to 5:30. (Unfortunate timing on the season's tickets.) I was in the ladies room during the second intermission when an elderly woman burst in, announcing, "We scored!" During the intermissions the score was broadcast above the stage, and since Canada was ahead everyone (including the orchestra) cheered.

A hokey Hollywood sports movie couldn't have made this victory more important. It wasn't like the "shot heard round the world" when we beat Russia in '72. These guys all play together on the same NHL teams; there's not the usual separation between competitors. But a series of events over the last year... Jim Balsillie being denied another attempt to move a team to southern Ontario; our loss in an early game at the Olympics, ratcheting up the anxiety; Sidney Crosby salvaging our chances in overtime of another match; having a chance, with this victory, to make a new world record for one country's gold medals... then the USA tying the score 24 seconds before the end of the game! And Crosby winning again in overtime!

As I was driving home from Toronto I heard a CBC newscaster ask the question, "But did the better team win? Was Canada better than the US?" What a dope. Of course the Canadian team wasn't better: the US team had a much smoother run at the Olympics. The difference is the fans. This is our game. This is our Olympics. Losing was not an option.

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Winter in the R+T Park

2010-02-25T19:37:00.008-05:00

I work in the Waterloo Research and Technology Park, located on the north campus of the University of Waterloo. I took these pictures out the window today...

Ice Dogs

2010-02-20T21:02:00.016-05:00

Today was our annual Ice Dogs festival, which is a bit of a goofy concept. People are invited to bring their dogs for all kinds of doggie fun, and then there's also ice carving. And once again, free food! A highlight was free hot chocolate courtesy of Starbucks.

This woman was waiting to be judged in the pet look-alike contest...

This is a kid on the ice slide (it was long and fast)...

This is a woman making an ice sculpture...

This has nothing to do with the Ice Dogs festival but I noticed that the public square has new permanent tables and chairs. Pretty cool...

btw, I'm pretty happy with my new camera. It's a Canon PowerShot SD1200 IS Digital ELPH. It's smaller than a deck of cards, easy to use, has a good zoom, and has some nifty autofocus features like the ability to detect faces and focus on multiple people. I seldom carry my big SLR but all of a sudden I'm enjoying taking pictures again.

Update: Alex Black has a good post on comparing cameras.
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Holiday in Waterloo

2010-02-15T19:31:00.008-05:00

To celebrate our new holiday Family Day today, Waterloo's new public square was a great place to be. The rink was open as usual, with music, but was ringed with tents with food and crafts. There were people handing out free pizza, popcorn, and maple sugar candy; a stand selling Thai food at $1 per item; and an espresso/hot chocolate tent. There was Cirque de Soleil face painting, craft tents, a Big Bounce, and people dressed up in wild costumes. And, of course, the highlight was watching little kids pushing chairs around while they figured out how skates work.

The public square is shaping up to be just what it was intended to be: a central attraction in the heart of uptown. There's something to do there almost every day of the year. (Programming details here.) And don't forget that next Saturday, February 20, is the Ice Dogs festival!

When Prorogation Ends

2010-02-14T10:06:00.009-05:00

For the NDP and Liberals, this is not an ideal time for an election. Jack Layton is laid up with treatments for his recently-diagnosed cancer. The Liberals (according to James Travers) are "a policy conference, an election platform and at least six months away from campaign readiness."

For Harper, an election might not look so bad. It's increasingly looking like Harper's advantage in the polls last fall was a blip brought on by Ignatieff's goof of saying he wanted an election less one year after the previous one. These current polls may be as good as Harper is going to get: Ignatieff will only get stronger over the next few months. Plus, Harper could be in big trouble once those Afghan detainee papers come out: as is frequently the case, the cover-up (and blatant lies) may be more harmful than the base issue. Some politicians would hold off on an election when a rival is getting cancer treatments, but we all know that Harper is not that kind of guy. His only concern will be to pin the blame of an election on the opposition.

Given this situation, what can we do to take a stand against Canada's rogue PM and his precedent-setting dismissal of our democracy?

We could try again to get him to release the Afghan detainee documents (perhaps with a point of privilege), and if he refused we could hold him in contempt of parliament. But that would make it hard to avoid an election - and worse, avoid having it look like we caused it.

Travers suggests that Parliament could force Harper to seek parliamentary approval to shutter the House again during March and April breaks. But doesn't that highlight the wrong issue? Harper should not be unilaterally cancelling parliamentary breaks, but his more serious transgression was shutting down parliament through prorogation.

I think the solution is to push the Afghan detainee torture papers, but stop short of holding Harper in contempt. Compromise on how they're released, if necessary, but get them into play.

Secondly, we cannot let this egregious prorogation slide. Ignatieff and Layton could propose a joint motion aimed at restoring the supremacy of parliament by restricting a PM's use of prorogation.

The trick is to hit Harper hard without letting him make an election out of it.

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