Stephen Lautens' Calgary Sun Column Archive

Healthy Skepticism

2009-08-01T17:11:00.000-04:00

By Stephen Lautens

July 30, 2009

For a long time I have believed that government has only three main things it should do – keep its citizens healthy, safe and educated. Everything else is extra.

Of course a lot of things flow from those three main jobs. Keeping people safe means having effective police and efficient courts. It also means having an army that can defend the country and our interests from threats. It means secure borders and safe streets.

Keeping people educated means having a well-funded school system and support for students and parents. It should broaden the mind and open children’s eyes to the many possibilities out there, and help them achieve whatever goals they are capable of reaching. It means keeping higher education affordable and accessible. Educated people are generally good citizens and good taxpayers, so everyone wins when people have the ability to contribute back to society at their own personal best level.

And keeping people healthy? We made a decision as a country some time ago that it was our moral and humanitarian duty to look after our sick and hurt as best we can, and that comes with a hefty price tag, but it is the right thing to do. It’s also our biggest expense, since health care is not cheap by its very nature and made more expensive by people living longer.

But if Canada believes government has a duty to keep its citizens healthy, safe and educated, there are those in the United States who believe that government’s job is only to provide people with the opportunity to make enough money to afford to be healthy, safe and educated.

The private health care companies that get rich in America are now fighting an all out war in the U.S. against a new proposal for universal health care. They have gone so far to recruit several Canadians for TV ads to tell their own private horror stories about problems with our “socialist” health care system.

Shona Holmes, a Canadian unhappy about waiting for health care in Canada, is featured on a commercial by the “Patients United Now” a front organization for the U.S. health care industry and a “Project of Americans for Prosperity Foundation”, which supports limited government and free markets. Tellingly, they also advocate pro-tobacco industry positions.

Of course it’s unfair to feature the few people who have had serious problems accessing health care in Canada and ignore the millions it helps, but this isn’t about fairness – it’s about cutting into HMO, drug and insurance company profits, which by any standard are enormous. The profits are huge because the cornerstones of American health care are “for-profit” businesses that provide medical care or drugs not on the basis of need, but on a cost-benefit analysis, denying coverage to people who need it most.

Many Americans - both rich and poor - support the idea that they should be taxed less and be left to make their own decisions about how to spend their money, whether it is on gated communities, private schools or private health care. In other words, the chance to strike it rich in America provides some people with the opportunity to be healthy, safe and educated. It also means that 46 million Americans can’t afford health care at all.

On the other hand, in Canada we believe that making people healthy, safe and educated is what provides opportunities in the first place. We may not always do it well, but at least we are committed to doing it.

Man Trouble

2009-08-01T16:04:00.001-04:00

By Stephen Lautens

July 24, 2009

What is it with men? Why are we always doing stupid things even when we are given an out?

We may never know what happened in Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr’s house. There are competing versions of how he came to be arrested, but one thing seems to be pretty clear - either man could have just walked away with nothing more than temporarily raised blood pressures.

According to a press report, veteran police Sgt. James Crowley – who is white - confronted Henry Gates – who is black - in his home after a woman passing by called police about a possible burglary. The sergeant said he only arrested Gates after the professor “repeatedly accused him of racism and made derogatory remarks about his mother”.

I am certain that inside the prof’s house, many stupid and offensive things were said, likely on both sides. I'm sure race had a role to play in both sides making initial assumptions about the other, long after everyone had realized that no crime was being committed. I'm sure professor Gates has personally experienced racism, and was offended about being challenged in his own home.

Being a white, middle class male myself, I can’t imagine the scars that are left by being on the pointy end of discrimination. Go back far enough and my family’s heritage is Austrian, and the movie Brüno aside, the world doesn’t take too much notice of us. For a while my brother and I tried to come up with an offensive name for Austrians, and finally settled on “Schnitzel”, but as you can see, it lacks that visceral impact that other racial slurs have. Besides, I like schnitzel.

But as the facts come out, it starts to look less like the product of racism and more a product of testosterone. For one, the arresting officer, Sergeant Crowley, was chosen by a black police commissioner to teach recruits about avoiding racial profiling. I would also venture to guess that as an 11-year veteran of the Cambridge police force he would have a certain hesitation about arresting any Harvard professor in his own home.

Still, men do stupid things, and you don’t need racism to explain it. Men start and fight wars, scuffle in bars, race strangers at stop lights, and trade insults and fists rather than walk away from trouble.

I wasn’t there, but you wonder if all the fuss in Cambridge could have been avoided if either one of them had stopped and said: “This is stupid. Let’s just forget it.”

Professor Gates – after getting over his initial anger – could have said, “Sorry I was upset when you came in. I understand you were just doing your job when someone reported a break in. Now good night.”

Sergeant Crowley could have said: “Sorry I came in like gangbusters. Confronting a robber can be a dangerous thing, so you’ll understand I had to yell a lot, point a gun and secure the situation before sorting out who you are. Otherwise I could be killed. Now that I know who you are, I bid you a good night.”

But you know one or both couldn’t leave it along. Testosterone kicked in and it became a “yo mama” match.

When are we men – black and white and any other colour you care to mention – going to learn to solve our problems in a less manly way?

Space – The Boring Frontier

2009-08-01T15:01:00.000-04:00

By Stephen Lautens

July 17, 2009

Monday will be the 40th anniversary of the first man setting foot on the moon. I know – it surprised me too. You’d think such an important human achievement would be more memorable, but the truth is that a generation and a half later we have forgotten our space pioneers.

It seems that the public is not alone.

NASA threw out the plans to the Saturn V rocket that took Apollo 11 into space. That’s right – they tossed the whole thing in the trash and didn’t even keep a copy as part of their regular “housekeeping”.

Last week I also read that NASA also destroyed the original film of the first moon landing beamed back to Earth. The reported truth is sometime in the 1970s or 1980s they were running short of videotape and just decided to tape over it with something else – probably a Magnum P.I. episode. I guess it was easier to tape over historic video than running down to Radio Shack for some new ones.

I’ve kept my space mementoes longer than NASA it seems. My grandfather worked for a newspaper back when all press photos were sent in by a primitive fax machine. I saved all those pictures after the paper used them and pasted them in my “Space Album”, which I’ve kept all these years. I still get a thrill looking at them, maybe because they are so raw. In a world of megapixel cell phone movie cameras, it’s hard for today’s generation to imagine history being made in grainy and black and white, even if it was pioneering.

Edwin “Buzz”Aldrin, who became the second man on the moon after Neil Armstrong on July 20, 1969, has recently made it his mission to remind people of what an enormous achievement this was. A few weeks ago he told a British newspaper that “young people have lost any interest in space that isn’t in a video game or a movie house.”

True - at the time of the moon landing, Star Trek had already been cancelled and ran its last episode the month before. Hollywood’s space was a lot more interesting, with green alien slave girls, evil empires and blaster battles. Not only that, it was in colour at a time when all the images sent back from the moon were in scratchy black and white, with nary a green slave girl to be found.

In reality, space is quiet and mostly empty, and has a hard time competing with our crowded and noisy world. Even the current space shuttle mission with Julie Payette, who is joining fellow Canadian astronaut Robert Thirsk at the International Space Station, has trouble getting attention as we’ve come to look at the shuttle as more or less a space bus. It is after all the 127th space shuttle mission, and there is only one crew member on board under the age of forty.

Buzz Aldrin wants to make space travel sexy again and bring back the spirit of adventure. Not only has he teamed up with Snoop Dogg to make “Rocket Experience”, his own hip-hop single and video, he’s trying to promote our next logical step outside our world with a manned mission to Mars.

I hope he succeeds. Not just because I remember how exciting it was to watch forty years ago as a new frontier was being conquered by true pioneers, but because we need to be reminded humanity should have greater dreams than Twittering about the latest celebrity adoption, divorce or diet.

We can and should be better than that.

From Facebook, With Love

2009-08-01T15:00:00.000-04:00

By Stephen Lautens

July 9, 2009

One of the newspapers recently reported that England is in the middle of yet another crisis. It seems that the wife of the new head of MI6 – the British Secret Intelligence Service – posted details about her family life on her Facebook page.

For those of you who keep track of the world of espionage, Lady Shelley Sawers is the wife of Sir John Sawers, who was appointed last month to head the British Secret Service. Yes, he is James Bond’s real life “M”.

Actually, the head of MI6 was known by the codename “C”, and the British government officially denied the existence of the whole outfit until 1992, which is a long way from having your own Facebook page.

Lady Shelley apparently shared with the world through her Facebook page details of where she and the new head of the British Secret Service live and spend holidays, and apparently photos of the family including Sir John in his Speedo bathing suit, which is no doubt complete with cyanide capsule compartment and grappling hook attachment.

Now as a result, the head of the British Secret Service has to move for security reasons, as the whereabouts of England’s chief spymaster and family is actually supposed to be a secret. Revealing details of their home and friends to the estimated 200 million Facebook users from the London networks who had access to the information meant it wasn’t a very well kept secret.

Lady Shelley’s Facebook page was only taken down after a British newspaper pointed out that it could be a problem if you wanted to keep foreign spies from leaving exploding cakes on your doorstep, so you can’t “poke” her anymore (and before you get excited, a Facebook “poke” is an electronic nudge or hello).

She also had 76 Facebook friends on her homepage and eight albums of family photos, but now we won’t get to see them. You wonder what it might have been like -

Favourite things: ability to deploy knock-out gas to end boring dinner parties, car that turns into a submarine, jetpacking home to beat traffic, going shopping at sales with two large men who have a license to kill.

Least favourite things: being strapped to a table with a laser about to cut me in two, being painted gold, sharks in the swimming pool, ninjas, tarantulas in my bed.

Favourite places: Swiss alps, Monte Carlo casinos, Carribean luxury hotels.

Least favourite places: volcano secret headquarters, minefields, pilotless airplanes, voodoo graveyards, anything with a trap door and pool full of piranhas.

Turnoffs: rude people (especially if they have a blow gun and paralyzing darts), guys in Nehru jackets bent on world domination, people who throw their hats at other people, guys with steel teeth, triple agents, slow-acting poisons when the antidote is across the room, falling out of an airplane without a parachute, people with secrets.

Current friends include: 006, 005, Moneypenny, Q, F, Miss Plenty Goodstuff, the Countess Bedready, Minister of Defence.

Three (3) new people want to be your friend.

One (1) new person wants to be your nemesis.

You have a message from: Ludwig von Hammerstrike, Doctor Inferno, Salazzar the Butcher, and Aunt Sophie.

Groups: Opera Friends, Ascot Book Club, Wives of Spies, Smersh Cooking Circle, People Who Can Get Their Hands on NATO Nuclear Launch Codes.

It’s too bad they made her close her Facebook page. Some people were never meant to keep a secret.

Don’t Raise Your Voice To Me

2009-08-01T14:59:00.003-04:00

By Stephen Lautens

June 25, 2009

There is a lot of yelling in our house.

Don’t get me wrong – we’re not like the new neighbours across the street. They seem to like living in their front room with the windows wide open and describe each other’s shortcomings at the top of their lungs. My seven year old has even learned a few new, colourful words as a result. Our neighbours seem to alternate between yelling and singing the folk songs of their youth from some far off land, most fuelled by beer.

By contrast, we are a very happy household, although you wouldn’t know it if you listened at the keyhole. If you did, you’d also hear a whole lot of yelling.

Unlike our neighbours, none of the yelling questions anyone’s parentage or the personal habits of their mothers. The yelling in our house is entirely conversational.

For example, my wife can sense the very instant when I am in the bathroom with the door shut, the overhead exhaust fan on, water running in the sink and my razor up against my face. Without fail, that is when she chooses to ask me a question from two floors away.

My ears are still good enough that I know someone is speaking somewhere in the house. And because it isn’t a simple “No!”, I can safely assume it isn’t directed towards my son, who is currently intent on cloning himself using a combination of toothpaste, drool and salt mixed in an old medicine bottle. Appropriately, he refers to it as “Project Satan”.

My son has no problem being heard. He is one of the loudest kids I know. We could hire him out as a public address system or an emergency broadcast horn in case of civil unrest. He has a great future as a hog caller or auctioneer. Maybe a career in politics - although it is not as prestigious or respectable as a hog caller.

Him I have no trouble hearing from anywhere in the house. The problem is that in his case, he can’t hear my answer to any of his many questions – mostly involving a surplus of ice cream sandwiches taunting him from the freezer. I can offer an opinion on the merits of an all ice cream diet from a floor away, but somehow he never hears me. And by the time I make it down to the kitchen, the sandwich is already gone and the point is moot.

It’s not just that people will talk to me from other rooms of the house when my head is in the sink. My wife will start talking to me when she is in the basement with the dryer going full tilt – usually with four dollars in nickels going through the spin cycle. I’ll be standing in front of the dishwasher on “pots and pans” with the TV on.

For some reason, that is the perfect time to start discussing variable rate mortgages and where the new dent in the car came from.

For my part, I refuse to yell in the house. The result is that my other housemates tend to yell louder, or just keep on going until I relent. I will get up from my desk or chair and walk downstairs so no one has to raise their voice to be heard. When I ask what they wanted, the answer I get more often than not is: “Nothing important.”

That’s when it’s my turn to start yelling.

Have A Heart

2009-08-01T14:58:00.002-04:00

May 28, 2009

By Stephen Lautens

I’m amazed at all the fuss people are making about our Governor General recently snacking on a seal heart.

I have to say I don’t have any strong feelings one way or the other about seals in general or the seal hunt in particular, although I know it is a hot button for a lot of people. Passions run high here and overseas about seals, so it’s not surprising that taking a bite of a raw seal heart has given our Governor General a certain amount of indigestion.

The Europeans apparently got in a real snit about it. Regardless of where you stand on the issue, I find it particularly rich, since they have a long history of hunting stags, wild boars, rabbits and blasting the heads off grouse and other birds to put them on the table. Wild game is not only considered a delicacy, but is a staple of a lot of European diets. The last time I was in a fancy restaurant in Europe, what I was given by the waiter looked more like a zoo brochure than a menu.

The animal rights people were also up in arms at the idea of cutting open an animal and eating it. Or as the VP of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals told the papers, “It amazes us that a Canadian official would indulge in such bloodlust.” He said that the incident gives Canadians “even more Neanderthal image around the world than they already have."

While I have never worked on a farm, I am under no illusions about where the meat in my grocery store comes from. I know it doesn’t start out on a Styrofoam tray wrapped in plastic wrap. It starts out as an animal. Maybe we city folk don’t like to think too much about where that juicy steak on the barbeque comes from, but unless our school system is worse than I think, not many of us believe steaks grow on trees.

Maybe it was Governor General Michaëlle Jean’s eating the heart thing – as someone said, a little too “primitive” for our friends in Europe, who oddly have no problem snacking on force-fed goose livers, various other organs or sausages made of blood. All that is okay, but apparently the heart is wrong.

I’ve travelled a bit and have been offered a lot of things to eat that are strange by the standards of anyone who only eats fast food. I’ve had sea slug, shark and various things that crawl in the night. I didn’t enjoy most of them, but the world is a big place and people eat things out of tradition or necessity that the rest of us wouldn’t touch on a bet.

I have no problems with people who buck the evolutionary trend of our species and opt for an all vegetable diet, even though we humans have been eating meat for as long as we have been able to catch it. For the first million or so years the meat also did its best to catch us.

I remember back in college a student who did his best to make his dog into a vegetarian. I suppose it is possible to turn a dog into a rabbit, but I can tell you, that was one unhappy dog, and grateful for any hot dogs slipped accidentally to him under the picnic table.

So hats off to our GG. She’s a braver woman than me, even if only for doing what comes naturally.

R.I.P. "Toronto :: City of Dreams - Run by Morons"

2009-07-31T15:07:00.000-04:00

I feel I have to preserve this somewhere, since I really liked the title of my former blog. It will disappear during blog renovations and re-tooling to change this into my Calgary Sun column archive, so here it is one last time for posterity:

Toronto :: City of Dreams - Run by Morons
Proof that every village has more than one idiot. Stephen Lautens cracks wise about his favourite city.

There, now I feel like I can move on.

Coming soon, and not a moment too soon...

2009-07-31T13:47:00.000-04:00

Greetings all three of my readers.

I see it's been a year since my last post, so this is clearly not working. Just another dead skunk at the side of the information superhighway.

All the usual reasons:

Too busy with my real life, as I don't live in my parents' basement with my collection of DS9 action figures;
Toronto has so much crazy stuff going on at any one moment, that I would have to spend my entire day trying to record it, or even picking the dumbest thing from a large number of qualified candidates;
My Calgary Sun column takes up all my creative writing time.

So, I've decided to put this virtual real estate to good (or at least better) use by posting my weekly columns here as they come out. They used to be on my website (www.lautens.com), but all the formatting was a pain, and that was created BB - before blogging. Yes Virginia, there was a world before blogging.

So, stay tuned for my columns to start appearing here as an archive.

And Toronto - stay crazy. I know you can do it without me.

Something Nice for a Change

2008-08-13T13:30:00.003-04:00

With propane companies exploding and much wringing of hands by the mayor, Toronto has been full of bad news this week.

That's why I was tickled to see something nice for a change.

Driving down the northbound on-ramp to the DVP at Don Mills Road I saw a flash of brown at the top of a treed hill. Standing there was one of the biggest deers I've seen anywhere. It was an 8-pointer, with large fuzzy antlers, just watching the morning bottleneck just starting to form before Eglinton.

Nice to know the city can still surprise you with something nice once in a while.

Brother Richard at the Olympics

2008-08-13T13:26:00.003-04:00

I would not be a very good brother if I didn't plug my brother's Beijing Olympic blog at The Star. Little brother Richard is there for the duration and has a great eye for photos and the real, human colour of the games in his written commentary.

You can check it here: http://thestar.blogs.com/olympicphotos/2008/week33/index.html

Look Ma - No Wires!

2008-08-11T16:58:00.003-04:00

I called Rogers about the new wireless modem USB stick for laptops that has been advertised furiously in all the paper for the past few weeks.

The answer from my Rogers rep on the phone? Never heard of it.

I was passed back and forth among the service reps (as a "valued Rogers wireless customer") for 45 minutes. Yes - 45 minutes, according to my Roger's cell phone log.

I explained that there were half-page ads in all the major newspapers - posters in the subway - TV ads where the smarmy guy beats the tech doofus for playoff tickets by sniping him on eBay. No bells. I knew I was in trouble when my phone rep said she would have a look in their "Knowledge Book". That's the kiss of death, not to mention an oxymoron.

I asked to be sent to a website (because of course there is no website homepage tie-in to the major promotion). Finally she found something in her big book, and asked me the best question of the day ' "Do you have a fax?"

A fax? Why not ask me if I have access to smoke signals? The irony of asking me if I have a fax to get details about cutting-edge wireless access was lost on her. And no, she couldn't email the details to me.

This was followed by a long discussion about the mysterious world of data / voice plans, none of which would do what I wanted. We ended the conversation with her trying to sell me an iPhone, which seems to be their solution to everything, but was probably just a diversion.

Next stop - a Rogers kiosk, where I can start the conversation all over again.

Telemarketer Don't Call List

2008-08-01T10:34:00.005-04:00

It's not just a Toronto thing, but I can't resist a plug for my link to the new Canadian "do-not-call" registry for telemarketers at www.DontCallList.ca. I registered it as an easy to remember alternative route to get to the sexily-named Government of Canada's site: www.LNNTE-DNCL.gc.ca

Hamlet It Ain't

2008-07-31T11:04:00.002-04:00

Just in case you think municipal politics is too theatrical, have a look at this hammy performance from our mayor pleading his case to get you to sign a petition.

Whatever you think about the issue, I think we can all agree that there should be another petition pleading to keep politicians with the acting abilities of High School Musical from making videos like this.

http://www.toronto.ca/handgunban/handgunban.wmv

Toronto: Canada's Safest City

2008-07-18T16:07:00.002-04:00

According to a report released yesterday by Statistics Canada, Toronto is now the safest large metropolitan area in the country.

Statistics Canada figures show all Criminal Code offences in Toronto Census Metropolitan Area were down 11 per cent in 2007. Among urban areas with a population of 500,000+, there were fewer reported crimes per capita in Toronto than Montreal, Vancouver or Ottawa. Winnipeg had the highest crime rate, followed by Edmonton.

According to The Star, "Stuart Green, a spokesperson for Mayor David Miller, said he has not seen the report but it appears to be in line with local statistics."

My sincere apologies to Mayor Miller - I guess I was wrong about his decision to close the legal target pistol clubs in the city. It must have worked.

I Otta Buy Lottery Tickets

2008-06-04T09:37:00.006-04:00

Sometimes I scare myself with my predictions about how the city will seriously wrong-foot something. Either that, or our civic leaders are predictably inept.

Two days ago I wrote about a pending decision concerning a proposed Toronto Museum, which in fact is neither an museum nor about Toronto.

Today's Toronto Star confirmed my worst fears and predictions. According to The Star:

The aim is to create a "contemporary, entertainment-oriented visitor experience that will be content-rich and capable of attracting visitors who may have no particular interest in the history of Toronto," according to the business plan.

So it's going to be a fun-nasium, or a learnatorium for people who don't care about Toronto or its history. Saw that coming. So much for all the early cultural artifacts that it was supposed to be home to.

But wait, there's more...

"It isn't the Toronto story," said Councillor Joe Mihevc. "It's the Italian story in Toronto. It's the Ukrainian story in Toronto. It's the black story in Toronto."

See what I mean about it being too easy to predict the idiocies that naturally bubble to the surface? It's not about history - it's about voters.

And of course it is going to be housed at the foot of Bathurst street, that bustling hub of tourists that is so inviting by the lake in February, in the crumbling, structurally unsound malting silos for an amount no one can figure out and no idea where the money will come from.

Who put these people in charge of the city? I know it wasn't me. I didn't vote for a single one of them. Unfortunately it doesn't stop them from spending my money.

Nice Place for A Non-Museum

(except it has no transit, amenities, infrastructure
tourist traffic, and is -30 all winter with a wicked wind
that comes off the lake like the Siberian steppes)

The History of Tomorrow

2008-06-02T22:13:00.004-04:00

I've often thought it's criminal that there is nowhere to see Toronto's history. There are a series of plaques around town telling you where things used to be. Every once in a while you'll see a historical board plaque on a sterile glass office building telling you that they knocked down a founding father's birthplace to build it.

The Royal Ontario Museum has shelved a good part of its displays because all that old stuff was getting in the way of finding space for holding corporate fundraisers. There are a few places like Mackenzie House on Bond Street, but you have to look pretty hard to find much in the way of relics of Toronto's history.

So the City has been kicking around the idea of a museum dedicated to our history and artifacts. But of course in this point and click world, you can't just have glass cases full of interesting things from days gone by. The City has been thinking about a "highly interactive" learnatorium where busloads of bored kids can be dragged in to push buttons, or put on a helmet and virtually experience getting typhoid.

The site chosen is the desolate and unworkable foot of Bathurst, where the old Canada Malting silo sits mocking any useful purpose, but are in some twisted universe now considered "historical".

The rub is the City wants someone - anyone - to pay the $100 million they figure it will take to make it useful, with the obligatory mixed housing, restaurant by some obscure chef who makes everything out of moosemeat, fiddleheads and maple syrup, and an observation deck on the top, where on a clear night you will be able to see Hamilton.

The museum is already planning to "emphasize Toronto's multicultural fabric" according to the Toronto Star, which means large, shame-inducing sections on the handful of early minority settlers and virtually nothing devoted to the English, Irish and Scots who made up 99% of the population.

Speaking as if the museum has already passed the many financial and intellectual hurdles, Rita Davies, the city's executive director of culture, says: "It's not a museum that's just rooted in the past."

Say what? A museum not about the past? Let's see what the dictionary says about "museum":

museum, noun
depository for collecting and displaying objects having scientific or historical or artistic value

So Toronto's museum is going to be about the history of the future, and not about the artifacts it is being built for?

Apparently that's right - it is going to be about "looking ahead to the future of cities around the world" according to the Star. And of course Toronto is such a great example of a city with a great future due to its forward-thinking policies, sound fiscal planning and good management.

Here's an idea - how about putting the City's collection of artifacts on-line? Get a couple of summer students to photograph them and put them up on a website so we can enjoy them while the City goes cap in hand to a series of corporations for the right to sell burgers to student groups and searches for a community board that knows nothing about history but comes in all the right social flavours.

That would show a commitment to history.

Drop That Gun

2008-06-01T22:39:00.004-04:00

The mayor, at a loss for real ideas and solutions to Toronto's relatively insignificant gun problem, announced he wants to close the few existing legal gun ranges in the city.

U of T already succumbed to this idiocy by closing the Hart House range, deep in the bowels of the ancient building. My Alma Mater announced last year that there was "no place for guns on a university campus".

Oh really? Maybe they haven't walked through the Hart House bell tower and seen all the names of dead alumni who gave their lives in WWI and WWII. The University was a training ground for soldiers, and I'm sure they appreciated going to war knowing which end of a gun to point at the enemy, and being able to hit a target that was trying to hit them in return.

Besides, from my time as a member of the Hart House pistol club, I can tell you that you won't meet a nerdier bunch of guys and gals. They treated their guns like violins - no quick draw, stunt shooting or weapons of mass destruction. They did their best to make shooting boring. Most target guns actually look pretty dorky. No self-respecting Gangsta would ever pull one out to satisfy his honour or protect his turf. Everyone would laugh at him, and then pull out a gun really meant to kill someone that was smuggled across the border in someone's trunk. Something from a Quentin Tarantino movie - not a blocky .22 made for punching small holes in paper.

And the paperwork required to be a target shooter? Enough to choke an elephant. There's the acquisition permit, the restricted permit, the transportation permit, permit to buy bullets. It's much easier to buy one out of a trunk behind the 7-11.

So is there a problem with gun ranges in the city? Are their guns being misused, stolen or otherwise inconveniencing the citizens of this fair burgh?

No - but what would you expect from a city that prizes posturing and empty gestures over and above rational thinking and cause and effect?

The Horror... the horror...

2008-05-31T18:18:00.002-04:00

The Toronto Star reported on May 31st that the TTC currently has 319 "TTC drivers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder", presumably on medical disability.

This severe form of stress is typically found among survivors of combat, natural disasters and rape. But bus drivers?

Sure, they have to drive in Toronto's traffic clogged streets made worse by the city's inept roads planning. And people aren't thrilled by the TTC at the best of times, not just when they are threatening strikes in order to get an extra slice of cake on their birthdays and pet medical insurance. Plus so much money goes into their payroll there isn't much left over to maintain vehicles and clean stations.

So passengers get cranky with them. A few whackos even take a poke at them, which no one deserves. But most TTC drivers and ticket takers I've encountered lately haven't exactly been graduates of charm school. It takes a small nuclear device to get them off those stools they sit on by the cash box or inside the booths, and human communication is limited to grunts and sign language Koko the gorilla would find primative.

But over 300 of them currently suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder? I wonder how that compares to Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan?

Oh, and the TTC announced in December that it had hired the same company NASA hired after the Challenger shuttle exploded to review safety procedures. Not that the TTC is overly dramatic when it comes to the tough life its brave employees face.

Something Good For A Change

2008-05-17T12:23:00.004-04:00

Just in case you're thinking all I do is whine, just to skew the average slightly the other way, let me tell you about something really nice.

About two weeks ago I noticed on my daily drive up the DVP that someone had planted a long strip of daffodils in the middle of the grass median just south of the Eglinton cutoff. There must be 100 feet of them, about 4 feet wide.

So congratulations to someone, whether city or province or masked midnight gardener, for this random act of beauty in a city that otherwise has no sense or budget for making things look nice.

By the way, I also notice that whoever cuts the DVP grass managed to trim a foot off the edge of the daffodil field. Nice work chucklehead.

Nothing to do with Toronto

2008-05-14T22:22:00.003-04:00

Okay, it has nothing to do with Toronto, but I saw something in the paper and couldn't resist -

Apparently a security guard found an 18 month old boy wandering between the security clearance area and the departure gate early Monday morning at the Vancouver airport. His parents forgot to board with him on their flight to the Philippines, and left him behind to be found by Vancouver airport security.

All I could think on reading the story is the child, who speaks no English, is damn lucky he wasn't tasered.

Grainy Sasquach Photos

2008-05-12T22:45:00.007-04:00

Not really, but it is a rare sighting of the TTC's now defunct "Worth A Million" campaign. Trust TTC laziness to not actually pull the ads from inside the subway cars.

Considering how many of the inside ads on TTC subway cars and buses are self-promotion, I guess there isn't a lot of replacement cash to be made from real advertisers, so there's no incentive to rush to pull the ads down. Plus it would make their backs hurt.

Anyway, here are a couple of grainy phone snaps I took last week just to be sure I wasn't dreaming the whole thing up. Notice the defunct website is still shown, as well as a contest for free monthly metropasses daily until April 30th - except the website was down by then.

Worth A Million

2008-05-03T23:03:00.002-04:00

Anyone notice the lame and insulting "Worth a Million" PR campaign brought to you by the TTC union has disappeared without a trace?

Don't believe me? Click on its dedicated website link: http://www.worthamillion.ca/

Unveiled just before the "we have a deal / we have a strike" PR fiasco, ATU Local 113, which represents most TTC workers, put big bucks into the campaign, with posters, commercials and a fancy website.

But I guess people looked at the poster of ten TTC employees they had in subway stations and decided at $100,000 a year each in pay, they were indeed worth a million.

I suppose whoever was behind this campaign never heard of focus groups - that basic idea in the ad biz that you show the campaign to some ordinary joes and ask them what they think. If they had, this Rosemary's baby of a campaign would never have seen the light of day. What it really shows you is how disconnected the TTC union is from reality.

If I was a union member, I'd be asking how much of my pension fund was spent to bring this short-lived monster into this world. Of course, starting the campaign in advance of contract negotiations was probably seen by some union rep in a suit from Moores as a good way to soften up the public for the next round of extortionate pay demands - show the public why they should love and respect the TTC workers and we'll pony up. Proof they've been spending too much time in the unventilated subway tunnels.

Thanks to the wonder of the Internet, you can still read cached pieces of the pages from the site to remind us how wonderful our TTC employees are:

[Photo missing] ATU Local 113 President Bob Kinnear (centre, blue shirt) with the stars of the union’s Worth a Million television and transit advertising campaign. They come from many different areas of TTC operations, including Maintenance and Wheel-Trans. Some are here because they did something special and noteworthy while on the job. The rest are here because just in doing their daily jobs, like all their fellow ATU 113 members, they make Toronto a cleaner, safer, and more prosperous city. Read more about them here.

The Special Report by leading environmentalist and former Ontario Cabinet Minister Marilyn Churley [still available on YouTube - a must see - ed.] calculates that the economic, environmental, health and other benefits of the TTC to Toronto total at least 12 billion dollars. And that’s a conservative estimate. Many benefits of the TTC are literally incalculable, but real.

Since about 11,000 people work for the TTC, that means each contributes, on average, more than a million dollars in benefits every year. Most TTC workers are represented by ATU Local 113, the sponsor of this site. We’re proud of the work our members do, work that deserves public recognition. Each one is literally Worth a Million.

Well, at least a tenth of million.

TTC Gets Its Money's Worth for Information Technology

2008-05-03T18:55:00.004-04:00

If anyone doubts the TTC is getting its money's worth out of its Information Technology budget, just have a look at their slick website: http://www.toronto.ca/ttc/

It's amazing what the TTC can do with IT expenditures of $170.4 million.

Our Mayor in the Dark

2008-05-03T18:23:00.009-04:00

Okay - it's old news now. In politics it's positively ancient history. But still, it bears repeating often and deserves to live on in the infinite pass-along world of Internet searches.

The date was March 29, 2008. Specifically it was 8 pm.

Earth Hour - a cult-like ceremony of national hypocrisy when we feel better about our year-round Kultur of incredible excess and wastefulness by turning off our lights. We were led in this exercise by the city's high priest of hypocrisy, the Mayor.

The Mayor even posted an Earth Hour video on YouTube, where he sits by a flickering gas fireplace, wearing an earth-friendly brown suit and tie, and says:

“On March 29, at 8 p.m. for one hour, I encourage you to switch off all non-essential lighting, and watch as other cities around the globe power down as well. Just one hour of your time to help people around the world realize the difference each of us can make and what we can accomplish when we work together. Switch off for Earth Hour and see the world in a whole new light. The issue is real. Your actions will count. So join me in the dark.”

At 8 p.m. he stood on the stage in front of City Hall with Jagoda Pike, publisher of the Toronto Star, and pulled a ceremonial switch to plunge City Hall into actual and not just intellectual darkness.

“I want to ask you all to do one thing tonight,” His Worship told the crowd. “Be a leader.”

Curiously, "Leader" is defined in the dictionary as both: "a person or thing that leads" but also "a duct for conveying warm air from a hot-air furnace to a register or stack".

What happened next was reported the next day by a journalist who dared follow the Mayor off the stage. As NP writer Peter Kuitenbrouwer reported:

"At 8:15 p.m. on Saturday, Mayor David Miller got in a car and drove from City Hall to a Shoppers Drug Mart on Eglinton Avenue West. He bought a card for the bar mitzvah of a family friend. Then he got back in the car, driven by his press secretary, Don Wanagas, and went to the bar mitzvah."

Questions about this amazing display of hypocrisy where rejected by press secretary, Don Wanagas as "petty", who said there was nothing wrong with the Mayor's actions, which are after all, just "symbolic".

One question then - why haven't we been able to find the YouTube video posted by the Mayor's office? It hasn't been pulled by them, has it? Like a gun used in a hold-up thrown in the river?

If anyone can find it, let me know, and I'll post a link.

So sleepy...

2008-05-03T18:13:00.004-04:00

There are so many metaphors I could use... The poetic and heroic one is King Arthur being awoken on Avalon where he sleeps until such time as he is needed by a nation in trouble. More appropriately, I'm probably more like a bear awaking in the spring wondering what the heck has been going on during hibernation.

Okay - so its just a pretty way of saying I've neglected my blog and now I'm back, and the last thing you need is one more Blogiste opining on how hard it is to keep at one these things. After all, 12 year olds can keep a blog going, and in the words of Zap Branagan, "they seem pretty sharp".

Plus I lost my password for a while.

So what has escaped my facile interpretation and glibly snide comment in the past few months? You name it. The TTC, pool closings, yapping city councillors - the list goes on. It helps that it is the same list from before.

Read on, and all will be revealed.

Spend while you can?

2007-08-21T16:09:00.000-04:00

I've noticed for the past couple of days that some of the city services that are being cut by Mayor Miller are out in full force. I've seen a city truck with the required 3 people (driver, worker, guy who goes to Tim Horton's) parked beside a stop sign on Mortimer cutting small tufts of grass growing around the base of the sign with a weed whacker.

Next I passed a crew out picking up a few stray pieces of paper at the side of the DVP.

One of the city parking lots on the weekend had five city guys building a flower box off the Danforth.

What gives? Could it be that city departments are doing their best to spend their budgets in a hurry before the cuts come down, defeating any cost saving?

Just wondering.

Let's Go To The Ex

2007-08-20T14:12:00.000-04:00

I was at the CNE this weekend. Unfortunately I seemed to be there on Half-Price Hillbilly Saturday.

If you want to spoil a white supremacist's day, just take him to the Ex. You won't find a more disappointing collection of Aryan genetic material anywhere. I felt out of place being the only man without a blue Celtic tattoo on my neck and five children at my ankles, each kid about eight and a half months older than the next.

The least popular food there was corn on the cob, because to eat it everyone would have to line up to share the family tooth.

Somehow, everyone had cell phones and someone to speak to, since a lot of the mothers entertained themselves by staying on the phone while the children tried to climb under the tilt-a-whirl and their husbands / boyfriends checked out the passing trailer park talent in the Paris Hilton Does Walmart clothes.

And there's no better place to have a public fight with your husband than on the Midway, where you have to shout extra loud to be heard over the guy calling "Doggie, doggie" into the microphone.

At least there's one thing you can say about the crowd - it helps the carnies with their self-esteem issues.

2006 Budget Expenditures

2007-08-12T20:11:00.000-04:00

From the City's 2006 Budget document (http://www.toronto.ca/city_budget/)

Circling the Drain

2007-08-12T17:39:00.000-04:00

When I started this blog a few weeks ago I thought it was going to be a collection of minor annoyances about Toronto and its loopy governance. Little did I know that I chose Toronto's equivalent of the fall of Rome to begin my smarty pants observations.

The Toronto $575 million budget shortfall (which nobody saw coming apparently because we're now all in shock throwing together a Plan B of hasty program and service cuts like we're throwing together a pot luck dinner for unexpected guests) keeps spinning out of control.

On Friday Mayor Miller announced a round of cuts - $34 million this year, $83 million next year. The announcement wasn't made by our elected Mayor or councillors, nor were the cuts apparently thought through by any of them. That duty fell on Shirley Hoy, Toronto's city manager. There's democratic leadership.

And the cuts? Closing community centres on Mondays, stranding thousands of single moms and low income families and disrupting their work schedules. Closing libraries on Sundays - wouldn't want people getting smarter if you can save a couple of bucks.

We were also warned that city hall will stop answering the phone. You mean they actually have phones? I called three times last week and each time was touch-toned into the dumpster. Not even an answering machine or "please hold". Straight to hang up.

Most of the cancelled programs involved making Toronto clean and livable: garbage collection, litter, trees, parks, grass cutting. All things that will let the voters see the city in decline.

The one that got me to show how petulant and mean-spirited the mayor has become over his tax hike rejection - the City will not be picking up old Christmas trees in December. The Grinch would be so proud.

The 2006 Toronto Budget Document identifies where most of the city's money is spent:

"The 2006 Approved Operating Budget is detailed by major expenditure and revenue category. Salaries and Benefits, which total $3.517 billion or 46 per cent of the gross expenditure, represented the largest expenditure category. Emergency services (Fire, Police and EMS) and TTC alone totalled $1.932 billion which approximated 55 per cent of the total salary and benefit budget."

See: (http://www.toronto.ca/finance/pdf/bs06_far05_vol4.pdf, p 149.)

There you are. It is impossible to make any kind of dent in our budget without seriously looking at salaries. And I'm not someone who begrudges the mayor or city councillors their salaries. There's not enough money there to make any difference so why bother with the symbolic?

What they need is a line by line review of plans, programs and policies and see if we really need them to keep this city clean and functioning - not some clumsy, hatchet-wielding, 11th hour "that'll teach you" slash and burn to make the voters feel the pain.

City council and the Mayor have to sit in open session and put every item on the table and sharpen their pencils. No sacred cows, no vote getters, no ideological hobby horses that cost a bundle and go nowhere - just good fiscal policy. And if they can't do it they shouldn't run next time for a job they can't do.

Oh, and they should stop whining to get someone else to pay. Make your best deal with the province and the feds, and then raise the rest. Pass tax hikes, but just make sure you raise it on the backs of the people who can afford it - like the developers of the booming condo market and land transfer tax.

Jacking up property taxes blindly across the board only feeds the spending beast and doesn't encourage a culture of savings.

Find something to sell - there's a point when you have to realize you can't raise enough to get out of debt, and our city's debt of $507 million now costs about $200 million a year to service - our 2nd biggest expenditure.

(See: http://www.toronto.ca/budget2007/pdf/pres_mar7.pdf)

Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that no one is interested in saving money - not the TTC, not the police, not council nor the mayor. They're only interested in finding more so they can keep spending the same way.

Tasting the Danforth

2007-08-10T12:01:00.001-04:00

This is the weekend we mark on the calendar to make sure we leave the city. This is Taste of the Danforth weekend.

The Danforth is at the end of our street, so we get the full frontal assault of people wandering around aimlessly with greasy hunks of fat and gristle on a stick trying to figure out if there is something actually going on.

With a million people from Scarborough standing in the middle of the road trying to choose from 300 booths all selling souvlaki, it doesn't take long to flee to the side streets clogged with cars all sporting handicapped parking stickers.

I can't figure out why people will stand in a line 30 people deep to buy a $3 souvlaki or spinach pie when any other day of the year you can get the same thing on the Danforth without any crowd to speak of, and no one in a booth is trying to sell you cheap long distance or a subscription to the National Post.

Paying Loblaws to Save Money?

2007-08-07T10:55:00.000-04:00

I'm sure it makes sense somewhere, but did you know that Loblaws gets paid to save hydro?

Yep, it's true. Those lights that go off and air conditioners turned down at its 110 stores in Ontario result not only in savings to the company, but also a cash payment by the Ontario Power Authority.

As reported in the Toronto Star, something called the IESO (http://www.ieso.ca/) got the grocery giant to sign a "'demand-response' agreement with the province back in 2005 promising, in exchange for payment, to cut its electricity use by 10 megawatts when given three-hours notice by the Ontario Power Authority."

Other companies can sign up too, and the power authority hopes they do. As their spokesman says: "Unlike existing voluntary programs, participants sign a contract obliging them to reduce or shift their electricity use during a power crisis in exchange for payment."

I'm all for managing our power system. I'm without power at home at the moment myself (see below), and no one wants Toronto to get even more like the third world than it already is with regular brownouts, but do we really need to pay companies like Loblaws to save money on power?

Of course, paying people to do what is in their own and everyone else's best interests is typically Canadian, rather than simply having someone at Loblaw's switch threatening to pull it if they don't cut back.

Sitting in the dark

2007-08-07T10:26:00.000-04:00

My home is without power at the moment. It went off yesterday afternoon and then again sometime last night.

I first turned on the portable radio to see what was happening. If it was World War III, I have a bottle of booze I've been saving. It seems like it is only a few blocks around us that is affected, so I reluctantly put the bottle away.

These things happen, but it's always kind of nice to know what's going on and if I should be eating all the frozen steaks in the freezer for breakfast before they go bad.

Being a connected kind of guy, I decided to go to Toronto Hydro's website on my handheld for an update. After all, even my Internet provider has a live "system status report" page in case of trouble. Electricity has to be more important than not being able to download the latest movie trailer from iTunes.

Apparently not. On Toronto Hydro's website there is a button for "Wind Turbine Status", but nothing to let customers know about emergencies, work in progress or power outage status.

You can send their customer care centre an email, which they will respond to "within three business days", or call their power outage service number (open 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m), which I did and got the general help line that referred me back to the website.

You'd think that if Toronto Hydro wants to seriously get into the WiFi provider business, they might think about becoming their own customer and joining us in the 21st century by providing useful emergency service information in real time on their website.

The TTC - The Better (Paying) Way

2007-08-06T18:05:00.000-04:00

The National Post recently published a chart of the average wages of city workers as part of its review of why Toronto is always in debt.

According to the various collective agreements of unionized employees for the city and TTC, garbage collectors make $24.14 an hour; litter pickers make $21.14 an hour, and TTC drivers and ticket takers make $26.58 an hour. This is base salary - overtime is extra.

So the guy in the jumpsuit who picks up trash at the side of the road or in parks (possibly with an MBA), makes about $44,000 a year, without counting overtime or seniority. Being the City, on top of that they also have some of the most extensive health and other benefits available in the civilized world.

And for those of you who have gone without raises recently, its nice to know the City of Toronto's employees have had a 3% or better raise every single year since 2001 (except for 2005 when they only got 2.75% poor darlings).

Bus drivers with the TTC make over $55,000 a year, plus an incredible array of benefits. That number goes up with seniority, of which there is a great deal since no one ever leaves the cozy confines of a TTC seat.

The TTC also just published - as required - its list of employees who made more than $100,000 a year in 2006. It now has 277 employees who make more than a hundred grand. At least 17 of them were bus drivers. Makes you wonder why Ralph Kramden from the Honeymooners lived in such a shabby apartment.

But we are not to take this the wrong way, the TTC says as it contemplates service cuts to save some cash, even though salaries and benefits comprise about 75% of the TTC’s $1.1-billion budget. This is according to TTC spokeswoman Marilyn Bolton, who herself earned $101,444 in 2006.

To help us put this in perspective, Ms. Bolton was reported in the National Post to have said “$100,000 has actually depreciated in buying power”. After all, "$100,000 isn’t the $100,000 of 10 years ago, like a millionaire isn’t a millionaire anymore.”

Now I feel better. At least they have a good grasp on reality.

Aiming for Nonsense - U of T and Guns

2007-08-06T17:42:00.000-04:00

It's hard to say I'm impartial on the subject - I was a member of the Hart House Pistol Club at the University of Toronto - but the weaseliness of the decision to close the gun range in the bowels of Hart House still puts my nose out of joint.

When I was there more than 20 years ago it was already known that it was much unloved by the politically correct. It would have been even worse if anyone could find the place. It occupies an area no more than 20 feet wide and as long as a bowling alley somewhere in the sub-basement underneath Hart House, accessible only by narrow halls and stairwells. It was specifically built as a gun range.

They floated the first trial balloon, saying the university needed the space, but then admitting it really wasn't any good for anything else, except storage.

Finally someone had the guts to admit the decision to close it was simply optics and ideology - there was no place for a gun range at a university. Of course the University of Toronto was the recruiting and training ground for thousands of young men who fought in several wars, where shooting a gun often came in handy.

Fortunately, I never had to shoot a gun in anger, or had any desire to point it at any living thing, but it is a lot of fun using one to poke holes in a piece of paper 50 feet away. I even have my name as best shot on one of the club's trophies - the turkey shoot. And for the weak-kneed, let me assure you that no turkeys were hurt in the process. The turkey was the prize. (In all honesty the "best shot" thing is a bit misleading, because half the scoring was random.

The shooters at the club were far from Rambos. In fact, they were a little bit nerdy and treated their target pistols like a concert musician treats a violin.

It's no surprise that the club hasn't had an accident or incident in its 88 years. If it was a safety issue, the University would first have to close down the football team which injures students on a daily basis; rugby, which encourages hurting people on a daily basis; and track and field with all its pulled muscles and heart attacks in waiting. I think the cafeterias hurt more people than the pistol club.

No doubt there will be a call to confiscate the javelins from the track & field shed as the weapons of choice from Spartans and other gang members from 2500 years ago.

No this is politics, where reality is completely unconnected with decision-making. Seems somehow appropriate that this kind of irrational thought takes place at a university.

Remember - when javelins are criminalized, only criminals will have javelins.

Chile 'Fesses Up

2007-08-01T13:00:00.000-04:00

So Chile wanted to make a diplomatic incident out of the Toronto police doing riot control during the international soccer championship (see below)?

The news yesterday was that a member of the Chilean soccer team - remember them, the poor innocent victims of a brutal, unprovoked police assault? - admitted he watched a team mate punch a female Toronto police officer in the face.

The police's report out the other day showed that the Chilean team tore the arms off their bus seats to throw at the crowd and the cops, and then punched, kicked and threw things like little girls having a tantrum. The cops were trying to keep them under control while at the same time keep a couple hundred fans on both sides from breaking out in a testosterone-fueled, intelligence-deprived riot.

Somehow I don't think I'll hold my breath waiting for an apology from them.

Brutally Honest

2007-07-22T22:06:00.000-04:00

So the Chileans are lodging an official diplomatic protest about the fight between their soccer team and Toronto police.

They claim they were just standing there signing autographs when the police attacked. Oh yeah, that sounds like something our cops would do. Nothing makes them break out the pepper spray faster than autograph-signing South Americans.

Actually, the Chileans, hot off the field from a game marked by their belligerence and threats (not to mention pretending to be injured) in fact got into a shoving match with some big-mouthed Argentinian fans and streamed out of the team bus to deliver some Chilean goodwill on their skulls. When the police got in the middle to protect the fans, the Chilean team turned on them and got the treatment reserved for all hooligans.

The Chilean government cries these are just children - mere teenagers. Teenagers at their physical and testosterone peaks who are treated like rock stars in other countries in a sport where riots are common.

A friend of mine at the scene told me the Chilean team was aggressive, abusive, violent and out of control, and the Toronto police showed remarkable restraint in dealing with them. The pepper spray and tasers only came out when the police had to defend themselves.

"Police brutality," they sob. Wasn't Chile the country where a few decades ago their police dropped people out of helicopters into the ocean with car batteries tied to their feet?

"Racism," they yell. Isn't this the same team whose supporters throw bananas on the soccer field when playing their rival Ecuador because they consider them monkeys?

And as for the Toronto police, you won't find a police department that is more culturally sensitive, harder to provoke and slow to use force. The paperwork alone hardly makes it worth hitting someone even if they deserve it. Would they wade in and start clubbing and tasering a high profile soccer team for the fun of it? Sorry - I'm not buying it.

That's the kind of thing that happens in South America.

Feeling Lucky?

2007-07-20T12:31:00.000-04:00

Toronto's cash shortfall - which apparently no one saw coming even though it has been headed for us like a transport truck on a deserted highway - apparently has no contingency plan in case the proposed tax hikes didn't go through, which it didn't.

Nothing like having a Plan A and no thought of a Plan B, C, or D. All I can say is if you put all your eggs in one basket, you better make sure you have all the votes you need to get it passed.

So now various people are floating the idea of a downtown Toronto casino - the last refuge of the desperate, in more ways than one.

Casinos are essentially a tax on the stupid. I've been to Vegas and gambled pocket change, but you look around and know that the big shiny buildings and free drinks are being paid for by a whole bunch of suckers losing pretty reliably. Fun to watch - not so much fun to lose.

Canadian casinos are even worse - being sad, joyless affairs that suck money out of busloads of seniors. Like Vegas run by Canada Post.

Being Canada, casinos are guaranteed to not be fun, because we only believe that people should enjoy one vice at a time. You can gamble, but not drink. If you want to smoke, you can go outside. At least in Vegas you can indulge all your vices simultaneously, and even discover a few new ones.

Of course, studies show that casinos bring little economic benefit to the area. People show up, lose money and leave. They don't shop, eat or pump any money into the local economy. The only people who get rich is the provincial government, which takes 95% of the profit. That's why the mafia liked it so much.

And aside from low-paying dealer jobs, casinos don't create wealth. They don't produce anything. They are "entertainment". They just take money from some people and give it to the government.

For Toronto to agree to a casino the Province would have to agree to split the take with it. Not going to happen. For the record, the mayor has said he doesn't like casinos, at least not any more than he liked "support out troops" stickers on public vehicles, but we know that too is subject to change.

And I quote...

2007-07-19T09:26:00.000-04:00

I saw Red Skelton when he came to Toronto to do his show years ago. He opened with an old joke I'm sure told in many cities, but seemed particularly appropriate here:

"Toronto will be a nice city when you get it finished."

It encourgaed me to look for other quotes about Toronto. Oddly, a Google search only turned up car insurance quotes. Somehow it seemed appropriate on so many levels.

Invisible Jack

2007-07-18T16:55:00.000-04:00

One of the good things about living in Jack Layton's riding is it's the one place you can be guaranteed you won't run into him.

The NDP leader keeps his moustache wax next to his bed across the Don Valley in the riding of Trinity Spadina where he lives with wife and fellow MP Olivia. I can't recall hearing about him setting foot across the border into Toronto-Danforth except to accept the nomination. He probably has, but it was likely under the cover of darkness.

Before Invisible Jack, you couldn't walk down the Danforth without being accosted by Dennis Mills, former MP. Dennis seemingly lived in his constituency office on the north side of Danforth between Broadview and Chester, and was wont to hang around the sidewalk outside and drag in unsuspecting constituents to discuss government policy.

What a nice change Jack is. Not only don't you see him between elections, as NDP leader at election time he's off criss-crossing the country in his bio-diesel powered 747 mostly kept aloft by righteous indignation. Much too important to meet any of the people he represents. Busy thinking lofty thoughts about carbon credits and feeling the oppressed's pain.

In fact, Jack doesn't even mention the riding he represents (it's Toronto-Danforth, Jack) in his biography on his webpage. Ooops! In fact you have to put in a local postal code to find out he's your MP. Oddly, he does mention that he vaguely "lives in Toronto with his wife Olivia Chow, NDP Member of Parliament for Trinity-Spadina, and her mother Ho Sze." I guess home is where the heart is, not to mention the mother-in-law.

He confidently counts on the proudly unfashionable denizens of Red Riverdale and the Carrot Common with their cohorts of crystal-wearing canvassers to bring out the vote without having to bruise his alabaster knuckles on any of the half million dollar plus doors to the bastions of socialism in the riding.

The guy sitting on the sidewalk out front of Postables selling the homeless newspaper at least shows up for work every day. He doesn't take anything for granted.

Won't Someone Think of The Children?

2007-07-17T16:57:00.000-04:00

If something is working for you, why change it?

Take for example the City's favourite head-fake - closing swimming pools. Whenever the mayor or city doesn't get its way when it wants to raise takes (like a new sidewalk tax, or a tax on using a Toronto postal code on your letters), it always does the same thing. It says that there won't be enough money to keep the city's swimming pools open in the summer. Then it backs off when there is the predictable outcry. Money is found, pools stay open, life goes on.

There is a tear in the mayor or budget chief's eye when they say this - usually on a hot day - but it must sadly be done because council / the province / the feds / Santa Claus has failed to come up with the dough a hefty tax increase would create.

The pools will be drained, lifeguards laid off, and children will have to cool themselves in a bucket of warm spit, or turn to crime...

Every year that I can remember, this has been the bugle cry of the city looking for money.

Yesterday Mayor Miller lost a vote to implement new taxes on cars and land transfer taxes. What does he say today? Drum roll please...

From The Toronto Star:

"And Miller warned councillors that programs are likely to suffer as a result – such as swimming lessons for a boy he knows who lives in public housing."

If only everything in life were this predictable.

Where Are The Dinosaurs?

2007-07-17T12:26:00.000-04:00

I had a call last night from the Royal Ontario Museum selling memberships.

I loved the ROM as a kid. I was part of their "Saturday Morning Club" summer camp, and spent many happy hours looking at the rocks, bones and swords.

But I haven't been back since they crazy glued the crystal monstrosity to the side of it. Maybe it's because the ticket price for me, my wife and 5 year old is now $54 (or $25 Friday nights, or free for a quick run around after 8 pm if you don't mind feeling like a moocher).

Unfortunately, the ROM has gone out of the museum business and is now a "venue". It's for holding your socialite cocktail reception or corporate kick-off, not for marvelling at the wonders of the earth.

Critics have said the crystalline entity that is sucking the life out of the beautiful old Edwardian building also makes it difficult to display the extensive and wonderful collections gathering dust on shelves in the back rooms. The light is wonky, the walls are wonky, and the current management really wants you to look at the aluminum and glass architecture and not so much at the artifacts. I don't think there is a single photo of the front door of the old building on the website anymore. Everything looks like a set from "Space 1999".

Here's a list from their website about that they've closed:

"During our period of growth the following areas of interest will be closed:

Byzantium
Canadiana
Dinosaurs/Vertebrate Palaeontology
Earth Sciences Gem and Gold Room
Insects and Their Relatives
Islam
Mammals
Nubia
Roman World
South Asia"

So no rocks, dinosaurs, mammals, insects, Canada...

On the bright side, until November you can see "Over 250 miniature worlds of brilliant colour and style are featured in this exhibition of spectacular 19th- and 20th-century glass paperweights". That's worth my $54.

And the cafeteria now serves "earth friendly" food, whatever that is.

For me, the killer is they haven't had a dinosaur display for the past 2 years. What's a museum without dinosaurs? Just a bunch of Japanese plates and native clay pots. They promise they'll be back this winter. Maybe I will be too.

Maybe, unless I feel a real need for paperweights in the meantime.

Something to fill your toilet

2007-07-13T14:19:00.000-04:00

Don't you hate it when people forget to flush? Our Uber-mayor did that at a Michigan news conference testerday while launching his campaign to persuade other mayors to bring in water conservation programs.

Miller told the crowd that Toronto hadn't yet reached its 2011 target of a 15 per cent cut to water use, and that low-flush toilets would be the key.

Wrong.

To quote the Toronto Start article (July 14, 2007): "The city set out in 2003 to reduce average water use to 1.18 billion litres a day by 2011. Turns out the rate was down to 1.17 billion litres by the end of 2006. "We're doing awesome," said Georgopoulos."

The day before the Star reported Pamela Georgopoulos, a manager of the city’s water program, as saying Toronto is "on course to hit the 1.18 billion litre target", despite a population growth the size of Peterborough.

Of course we were on target - we had already passed it.

They went on to project the $74.3 million plan is expected to save the city around $250 million by 2011, and $4.5 million every year after that. It will also have saved the atmosphere 100,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases within the next four years, as less electricity is needed to pump water through treatment plants and then throughout the city.

So, had no one noticed we had already saved all that cash?

Makes you wonder what other decisons are made based on made-up information easily available down the hall.

Poor People Not Recycling Is All Your Fault

2007-07-10T17:13:00.000-04:00

There was an article in the Toronto Star a month or so ago about a city summit on recycling. One of the presentations was about how the recycling rate and generally eco-friendly activities of Toronto's poor was far, far below that of people in good neighbourhoods with jobs and educations.

Stupid me - I thought poor people didn't recycle because they are not as informed, educated or have the luxury of being environmentally conscious as rich people.

It turns out, according to some presenter representing I'm sure thousands of disenfranchised members of the underclass (if she only had the time to meet them), that Toronto's poor do not participate in recycling programs because the rich people purposefully exclude them. That's right - we deliberately prevent them from recycling and participating in recycling initiatives.

She even had a name for it: the "class eco-divide".

I have seen the enemy, and it is me.

Now Magazine

2007-07-10T16:35:00.000-04:00

A fixture of the black-clad, young urban hipsters in Toronto is a folded copy of Now Magazine under their skinny Vegan arms.

The publication has plenty of attitude and moral indignation over poverty, immigration, racism, housing issues, carbon credits and celebrating the gay lifestyle as superior to the rest of us breeders. From ersatz-Zen to Wiccan festivals, it promotes hyper-progressive views that its readers can smugly pretend to identify with when sipping their $7 Latte Grandes while their BMW SUVs sit double parked and idling.

So how then do they sleep at night considering their last ten pages are devoted entirely to prostitution? After all, the colour ads selling every type of sex service are the real reason people pick up Now.

As Now's website says:

"Find listings for agency and independent escorts, adult entertainers and specialists: men, women, duos and couples. Massage experts & spas, shemales, and fetish & fantasy including pro dommes and dungeons, and so much more"

I bet these sex service ads create a fair chunk of the cash that comes in so they can pay their salaries and continue to publish their high-minded, eco-indignant denunciations.

I'm no prude. At least I didn't think so until I read some of the more exotic ads. And I'm sure all the services offered are by adults with full consent and economic freedom to make healthy decisions about how they earn a living, and not some 15 year old runaway hooked on drugs or a prisoner of a snakehead or other pimping thug.

So the next time they get all high and mighty about some social issue (which they may or may not be right about), all I'll be able to think about is how they are living off the avails of the avails of prostitution.

Planning to do nothing

2007-07-10T16:20:00.000-04:00

I've often thought that city hall wants to turn Toronto in Beijing - a megacity where the roads are full of bicycles and people hanging onto the backs of buses. War has been declared on the car by the City of Toronto, even though our transit stinks (literally and figuratively), distances are great and it is fricking freezing half of the year.

Here is a statement buried deep in a City of Toronto report called "REDUCING CAR DEPENDENCE - Transportation Options for the City of Toronto" by the Transportation Planning Urban Development Services, City of Toronto (2001):

"Consistent with the overall objective of reducing auto dependency, there should only be limited plans for expanding the capacity of the City’s road system, particularly for peak period commuters."

http://www.toronto.ca/torontoplan/options.pdf

There you have it folks - the people in charge of transportation don't believe in it, as if it was any surprise.

Transportation planning is only to benefit the bike-riding Sandalistas of Riverdale and College Street West, and not anyone who has to drag children, groceries or aged parents around the city. Toronto is only for the young and strong, who leave their loft-based consulting businesses to pedal from Starbucks to Starbucks.

I'm reminded of a quote by the Duke of Wellington when asked about the first street cars: "I don't approve of it. It encourages the lower classes to travel."

Treed Off

2007-07-10T16:06:00.000-04:00

In one of the last wind storms a large branch fell off a tree the next street over.

Instead of putting it out front of their house where the city work crews were collecting all the fallen branches, for some reason they dragged it through the alley out back and left it in front of our house.

We live in a cul de sac (dead end to the rest of you), and are usually overlooked by most city services as if we don't exist. Our street's branch removal ended a few houses down where the street turns back onto a major road. So the 10-foot branch sat there.

Finally my wife called the city to come pick it up.

In the week it took to send a truck around, some neighbour decided to saw it up for us. Great, except when the city crew came by they found a convenient excuse to not do their job.

"We only take whole branches," he said. "You'll have to saw it up more and tie it with string for yard waste day."

Didn't matter it wasn't my branch, my tree, or that I didn't saw it up to begin with. Off the truck went without the branch.

I thought of dragging it into the middle of the Danforth where they couldn't refuse to take it, or back to the yard where the tree it came from grew. Or just setting fire to it right there.

But you can't fight city hall where it comes to their grudging provison of basic services, so I hacked away until the parts fit in a yard waste bag (which I had to buy as well).

It gave new meaning to the expression "stick it to them".

High Occupancy - Low Intelligence

2007-07-10T14:29:00.000-04:00

This is only the first of what will be many rants about driving in, around and out of the city.

You wonder if the people who design our highways actually ever drive on them. Take for example the DVP / 401 clusterfork. There is hardly a time of day or night when traffic doesn't bunch up in this ill-conceived monstrosity of transportation planning.

Most of the congestion started with the creation of the HOV (high occupancy vehicle) lane. on the southbound 404. The basic idea is that people wanted to leave Newmarket in such a hurry that they packed every available car.

The goal of dedicated high occupanct lanes was to mutate human DNA into making us all car-poolers. Of course it will never work. We hate to car pool. Car pooling adds even more time to an already long commute, because you have to drive around the neighbourhood picking other people up, and then taxi them all to their offices.

Oh, and when you drop everyone off at their work in Markham, Newmarket or East Gwillembury, they're prisoners at their office because you have to drive everywhere once you're there. Or you can have lunch every single day at the Timmy's in the next building which is only half a mile away. This is the same reason people don't take transit - that and the fact there really isn't any.

Then if you are carpooling, you have to pick everyone back up at their various offices (providing no one is working late, sick, or on the roof with a sniper rifle) and drive them home.

The reward for all this is you get to use the HOV lane on your ride home. Yes, you zip along at the top end, but as you get closer to the 401 overpass, six lanes turn to three, and then two, and the HOV lane brings everyone - including the car-poolers - to a dead halt since they have to jamb into the stopped two regular lanes, and no one wants to let them in.

Then as soon as you crawl through that bottleneck, the road planners funnel three more lanes of high volume traffic into the southbound DVP.

I drive this route most days, because I live in the city and work in Markham. I'm pretty sure that no one in the car beside me on a daily basis is the guy who responsible for the road design. If it was, it would get fixed pretty darned fast.

TTC Announcements

2007-07-08T22:48:00.000-04:00

I swear the TTC's loudspeaker system only works in the subway is when the TTC is advertising.

I can hear announcements as clear as a bell about why I should use a Metropass, but they never work when explaining a rush hour slowdown.

Instead you get: “Attention subway patrons, we have a buzz… crackle… lizard… flowerpot... at Pape station… run for your… crackle… major loss of... God help us all...”

Shocking!

2007-07-08T19:14:00.000-04:00

Toronto's Bloor Viaduct (actually a bridge, and actually called the Prince Edward Viaduct) has long been known as the occasional jumping off spot for people dedicated to leaving Toronto - and everywhere on earth - permanently.

Far above the Don Valley and the Parkway, and with conveniently low railings, falling bodies inconvenienced the slow-moving drivers and slightly faster-moving joggers far below since 1919. According to one group, someone used to jump off the Bloor Viaduct every 22 days (not the same someone, of course). Toronto is proud of being "world class" about everything, but didn't like the fact that the bridge was the 2nd most popular diving spot for suicide jumpers in North America (darn you, Golden Gate Bridge!).

Then in 2003 the City of Toronto spent $6 million on a system of wires around the bridge's sides to foil would-be jumpers, known to the depression-prone artistic community as a "luminous veil". Conveniently, they also put a sign up at one end over a payphone with the suicide prevention number (quarter not included). God forbid they should spend $6 million on improving mental health services in the city. Then all you have to show for it is mentally healthy people and not a landmark "luminous veil" for tourists to wonder what the heck it is. This way there's a permanent momument to remind the voters how much the good councillors of the fair city care for the suicidal.

I suppose that's all well and good, even if there is another bridge a short hike to the north with no barriers and a definitely life-shortening drop. I suppose the theory is someone intent on killing themselves won't walk a few blocks. Saying you're going to jump off the Leaside bridge apparently doesn't have the same cachet - sounds so working class.

All of this is prologue to a little item that caught my eye a few months back. It was a news story that said that due to an electrical short, the wires of the "luminous veil" were charged for a while with enough electricity to give you a jolt. That left me with the image of some poor guy throwing himself off the bridge to be saved by the web of cables, only to find they were electrified. Sort of like a big bug zapper.

There's a lesson there somewhere, but I have no idea what it is.

In The Beginning...

2007-07-08T16:32:00.001-04:00

I live in the City of Toronto - have for the past 30+ years. I love the city and living in it, which is not to say it doesn't drive me nuts most of the time.

For the past 10 years I've written a weekly comment column for the Calgary Sun (http://calsun.canoe.ca/Columnists/home.html). Over the years it has also appeared in the Winnipeg Sun, London Free Press, Toronto Sun, and I even had a 8-month stint as a columnist at the National Post.

I was "downsized" from the National Post when they decided to once again try to save themselves into prosperity by firing the freelance writers and pay pennies for US and British syndicated columns. I was at the National Post just long enough to get my own hand-carved column header art (which actually is hand-carved in a block, and not computer generated - welcome to the 16th century; next thing they'll be using moveable type). I think I was canned a week later.

Anyway, the one thing the National Post gave me was the ability to write about Toronto for a Toronto audience. I love Calgary and the people there, but I always had ideas for columns that no one in Calgary would care about because they were - well, from Calgary. Toronto is pretty much the twin city of Sodom to most Calgarians (actually, that would be Gomorrah, but I hear they have an exchange program with Toronto).

Writing for a Toronto audience gave me a chance to get a few things off my chest about some of the absurdities of the city and they way it is run - writing as therapy, and at $200 a column to boot. When that column ended, I found I still spent a lot of time fulminating about what an insane city this can be - its politicians, inhabitants, attitudes and generally just the way things work (or don't) here.

And so this Blog.

Hating Toronto is a national pastime in Canada. This Blog isn't about hating the city - I love it, but it's like the crazy girlfriend you just can't leave. You keep coming back even though she rants, raves and sets your garbage can on fire.

I know there are others out there who live in the city but wonder just what the hell is going on and who keeps thinking things up that keep this city from achieving greatness.

To those people, I dedicate this Blog.