Robert Lepage Wrecked the Ring Cycle

He had help.

Costumes
Throughout, the costumes were an unfortunate distraction. They didn't enhance the characterization or help to set a tone or place. They were unflattering. Poor Waltraud Meier, who played a thrilling Waltraute in Gotterdammerung, had a bodice about three inches too low for her age, and the typically over-close Met HD camera work never let us look away from her huge cleavage wrinkles. I don't even want to remember Wotan's giant leather pants or the faux-leather codpiece-bedecked gods in Das Rheingold.

Lighting
At times, the harsh white lighting made the filming look like a 1970s era sitcom. I'm a fan of well-lit operas (the Toronto Ring was so dark that I couldn't see whole chunks from my seat at the back of Ring 3), but this production was at times ridiculous.

Cinematography
Good god, when will the Met HD get it together in the filming department?

• In Valkyrie, Jonas Kaufmann was brilliant as Siegmund, but the poor man drools, and the camera relentlessly zoomed in on those great gobs of drool falling out of his mouth, down his chin, and off in gobby strands to the floor. It was icky and embarrassing and completely unnecessary - he didn't drool continuously, and they could have changed to a long shot when he did.
  
• In Gotterdammerung, Deborah Voigt wore running shoes under her long dress, and kudos to her for doing that: she's on stage for the better part of six hours, after all. Nobody needed to ever see those running shoes, but the Met HD cinematography department made sure we saw them several times.
  
• The Ring is a grandiose piece of art describing the destruction of the gods, but it is built around intimate, one-on-one moments. When two people are interacting, it removes the effectiveness to focus on only one face at a time. The cinema has a huge screen: they don't need to zoom in on people so much.

The cast
There were a lot of geniuses in the cast, but in Met performances you expect them all to be great: great singers and great actors. This Ring had too many weak links. At its center, Deborah Voigt's middle register is not pleasant to listen to: it has a strained sharpness. In addition, she mugged and aped without creating a believable Brunnhilde. The problem with her acting could have been one of scale; she was acting for the back row and it didn't work on the big screen. But surely the director should have figured that out. This was Voigt's first Brunnhilde and she clearly wasn't ready.

The other main characters were superb, as you'd expect, but there were problems with some of the small parts. Patricia Bardon was an embarrassment as Erda in Siegfried (and you had to wonder if her dress threw her off: it clung tightly to her full body including her hands and was covered with sharp-edged pieces of broken mirror). In the broadcast of Gotterdammerung, Iain Paterson as Gunther was very uneven: his acting was wonderful but his voice was at times warbly and weird. There were little glitches like that throughout, and that just shouldn't happen in a Met Ring Cycle.

Special effects
Siegfried establishes himself as a hero by killing the terrifying dragon (and giant) Fafner. Lepage's dragon looked like a big, silly muppet. It was hands down the worst special effect I have seen in a Ring cycle - and this from Lepage, the supposed master of FX. When special effects failed (as also happened with the horse and on several occasions with The Machine), I kept suspecting that what we saw was an incomplete idea or a last-minute substitution.

And then, of course there was The Machine, which dominated every single goddamn scene - that's four operas: 15 hours of looking at a giant xylaphone. It had its advantages: it served as a screen for some good animation; it was nice that there was never any need for scene changes; and some scenes worked. But ultimately it was a failure. It was there all the time, and three-quarters of the time it shouldn't have been. It was a distraction from the opera. It forced the singers to do most of their performing on a thin strip at the front of the stage. And we spent half the opera staring at the castors on the end of the planks - how I came to hate those castors! After all the deficiencies and flaws in the four operas, the really unforgiving thing about Lepage's Ring Cycle was the ending. Or should I say non-ending. The ending of the Ring Cycle is paramount. After all the emotional highs of the series of operas, the ending should be a great emotional release. The final bars of the score are the lietmotif of humanity: the coming of a new era after the age of the gods. What did Lepage show us, after Brunnhilde sat on a fake horse and rolled towards an underwhelming funeral pyre? --Some statue heads exploded and then there was nothing for the last several moments: just the ugly xylaphone. It meant nothing and it emoted nothing, except disappointment.

I'm a huge Lepage fan, having seen several other operas he's directed (Damnation of Faust, Erwartung, Bluebeard's Castle, The Nightingale and Other Short Fables). In a 2009 post I reviewed his 9 hour play Lipsynch. I'm a huge Ring Cycle fan, having seen the 2006 Toronto production, Otto Schenk's previous Met production, Francesca Zambello's 2011 San Francisco Opera production, and others. In fact, I'm hard to disappoint on either count, but Lepage did it... and I think that calls into question his approach of theater as experimentation. It's one thing to create a play like Lipsynch in an iterative process over several years. It's another thing to present a half-assed, unfinished Ring Cycle at Lincoln Center.

Update: This post was quoted in Macleans. Update 2: I went to New York to see this production remounted in 2019. The problems with is were all resolved to my satisfaction--or at least there were fewer so I didn't mind them--and it was fabulous.

Reflections on Activism

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. 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.
   
2. 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.
   
3. 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.
   
4. 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.
   
5. 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.
   
6. 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.
   
7. 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.
   
8. 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.
   
9. 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.
   
10. 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.
    
11. 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.
    
12. 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.
    
13. Have the Cities determined that they have sufficient capacity to allow for development in the core areas?
    
14. 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

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

The figures for other cities are from Wikipedia.

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

1. The estimated daily boardings of 56,000 in 2031 are overstated by at least 40,000.
   
2. 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.
   
3. 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

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

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

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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