Toronto City Council, by 'Ford Nation' Membership

What a week it's been for Rob Ford, the democratically elected mayor of Toronto and his brother Doug Ford, the... wait, who is he again? Oh, yes... a councillor. One of 44 of those, who range from reliably pro-Ford to reliably anti-Ford. An awesome Google Docs spreadsheet that I saw linked on torontoist.com lays out who's voted in how since they were elected - showing the extent to which each councillor has a clear 'Ford Nation' membership.

So I put it all on a map. Here's a map of the wards, taken from toronto.ca, with a bubble over each one. The vividness of the red colour indicates the degree to which this particular councillor is allied with the mayor - thus, for example Doug's ward, number two (upper left corner, second one down) shines as brightly red as can be - as, incidentally, does most of Etobicoke. Doug is one of 13 councillors who have so far voted 100% in agreement with Rob Ford (and who says there are no political parties in municipal politics?).

Just as unexpected at the Etobicoke councillors' support is the lack of support shown in the downtown core, circles that are all but entirely black (no councillor goes down to 0%, but the lowest has agreed with Ford only 5% of the time - and that's not Mike Layton). Reminding one of the 2011 federal election returns, the whole of Scarborough and the northern part of North York are amazingly patchwork-quilt, loyal allies and staunch opponents side-by-side. What's interesting, though, is the band of Ford faithfuls in midtown, showing that the city's dynamics are not quite so simple as 'downtown vs. suburbs'.

Or rather showing that people didn't necessarily know the allegiances of the councillors they were voting for. This map bears only superficial similarities to the map of mayoral election returns, where not only the whole of Etobicoke but also the whole of Scarborough and almost the whole of North York as well voted pro-Ford, in some cases by huge majorities.

... or actually, lining up the two maps, there is in reality a lot more similarity between the two than I'd originally thought.

Woman Panhandler

Been scouring through the Toronto Archives. Lots of cool stuff to be had, and hopefully soon I'll put together a few entries based on it. In the meantime, though, here's a particular gem:

 

It's a photograph called 'Woman Panhandler', featuring a beggar on Yonge St. in 1918. She's holding a sign that reads as follows (original spelling intact):

MY OLD MAN IS
PARAILAYS. NO CHILDLEN
WE LEVE IN
TORONTO FOR FIVE YEAR
GOD BLAS YOU

She's quite well-dressed for a panhandler, and has an unknowable expression on her face that I might categorise as 'wry'. Who knows what her story was? The streets of Toronto have been tough on some for a century now.

The Atlantic Provinces in Toronto

The reality we have in Canada is that our population is really not at all evenly distributed. To say nothing of the fact that the whole northern half of the country is sparsely distributed, we have an excessive amount of our population hold up in just a few cities, really.

Most of the rest of the country has a perception that Torontonians see their city as the 'centre of the world'. Surely that's not true, but there is good reason why Toronto seems to show up in discussions or in news as often as it does: by Canadian standards, it really is huge. How huge? Well, when you consider the monoliths of Ontario and Québec to be 'central Canada', there are then four provinces to the west of them and four to the east. Four to the east, but you can fit the entire populations of the four Atlantic provinces into the city of Toronto. Not the GTA, mind you, but the city of Toronto itself. And still have room to spare.

What does it look like? Well, here's a map:

New Brunswick, which is in reality 71,450 km², fits in the 416 into an area 231 km² in size: this relatively roomy size is due to the lower population concentration of Etobicoke, which is entirely encompassed by this transplanted New Brunswick population.

Comparing the numbers on the City of Toronto's own toronto.ca map with the population estimates for provinces on Wikipedia, I get that my 'new New Brunswick', which extends as far east as Bathurst in the north of the city but then follows the 401 all the way back west to the CNR line running near Keele and then follows train lines all the way down to the Gardiner, has a population of 749,525 - close to New Brunswick's actual population of 751,273. There's still plenty of room in Rexdale for the remaining 2000 people.

Nova Scotia, the most populous Atlantic province, squeezes into a mere 199 km², since much of 'the old city' of Toronto lies within the area I've transplanted it to. Still, since the actual province is smaller than New Brunswick at 53,338 km², they might not notice the difference.

The 'new' Nova Scotia starts at Morningside, extending as far north as the 401. When it hits Victoria Park, though, the border suddenly swerves way south, going below even Eglinton. At Yonge, though, the border goes all the way back to the 401, until it meets New Brunswick at the CNR line. It then moves a little back east at Eglinton, though, following Dufferin and Winona, then Christie and Bathurst down to the Lakeshore. The very 'heart' of the City, the downtown core, is in this New Nova Scotia - let's call it 'New Halifax'? This area has a population of 956,965 - quite a bit more than the 940,482 who actually call Nouvelle-Écosse home.

The northern parts of the city belong to Newnewfoundland. Whereas the actual Newfoundland and Labrador is a mammoth 373,872 km², I've shrunk the province to a mere 128 km² - which is, what? One three-thousandth the size?

My new Newfoundland, which I would not require to set its clocks half an hour apart from the rest of the city, would only go as far west as Markham Road. Its northern boundary would be Steeles and Steeles alone, all the way to Bathurst, and the rest of its borders are explained above with Nova Scotia, really - that dip south to roundabouts-Eglinton between Yonge and Victoria Park, etc.

Most remarkably, though, if you happened to be in Toronto and woke up early one morning, you could take a quick stroll from Lakeshore to Bloor up Bathurst, before zigzagging your way northwest to Eglinton and Caledonia, before following the train tracks (which is perhaps illegal) all the way down to Dovercourt. Google Maps suggest you could get it down in about three and a half hours - call it four to factor in an ice cream break at one point. But amazingly, you'd have bounded the entire area sufficient, in Toronto, to hold a population the same size as Prince Edward Island. PEI is a baby at 5,660 km², but my New PEI is a mere 19 km² - that's right, the population of an entire province of Canada fits into a mere 19 km² in Toronto.

Less, in fact. The area I've bounded is home to 146,295 people, whereas the Land of Green Gables houses 141,551 people. But they got that cool Confederation Bridge, whereas all I can offer is some five subway stops.

There's another 65 km², and another 132,310 people, in Toronto that I didn't need: Toronto has a larger population than those four provinces. That`s the eastern third of Scarborough, where the Toronto Zoo (among other things) can be found. Let's... er, let's stick Vermont in there or something.

Toronto MPs by Place of Birth

So a few days ago I looked at the Toronto MPs by their 'favourite words', which words they said the most often in parliament. I liked putting together the map, and thought I'd try some more maps based on the Elections Canada maps. I've got something going on at my Poll Vaulting blog that uses them, and here's another Toronto-based one.

(Click to make it larger.)

This shows a map of the current Toronto MPs (both the 416 and whoever else shows up on the map - not the whole 905 but a decent chunk of it) by their place of birth. In short, if they were born in Ontario, I list the city. If they were born in Canada but not Ontario, I list the province but not the city. And if they were born abroad, I list the country with no further details. The numbers are poetic - of the MPs for the 33 ridings on this map:

• 11 were born in the city of Toronto - or to state that more precisely were born within the limists of present-day Toronto. This includes all three Etobicoke MPs (including Michael Ignatieff), and three 905 MPs. Among the ridings in 'old Toronto', only Carolyn Bennett is a native son... er, daughter.
• 11 were born somewhere else in Canada - the Markham and Pickering MPs are local, and there are three others from elsewhere in the province. Add to that two from Québec (including Jack Layton), two from Manitoba and two from the Atlantic, and you've got 11.
• 11 were born abroad. An amazing four of those are from Italy (including Julian Fantino), and two (in neighbouring ridings) are from Greece. The remaining five are from India, the UK, Portugal, Tanzania and Hong Kong.

Great numbers, eh? One-third from Toronto itself, one-third from the rest of the country,and one-third from the rest of the world. Toronto in a nutshell?

Toronto MPs and their Favourite Words

Openparliament.ca, an awesome site, has many cool features. One of the most intriguing is that it scours Hansard to come up with the word used most often in the House of Commons by any individual MP. Stephen Harper's, it turns out, is 'Liberals'. Gilles Duceppe's, it would seem, is 'Québec'. Both of these are saddening in their predictability.

So I decided to try something different. I looked at the sitting MPs (well, sitting until dissolution) for each of the 22.5 ridings in the city of Toronto - that is, in the '416' proper. And I put their 'favourite words' onto a map of the city. It creates... well, it creates a bunch of words that are ultimately meaningless, but it's fun to find meaning in them.

What do Mario Silva of Davenport and John Cannis of Scarborough Centre have in common? Well, they're both Liberals - as are all but three of these people - but in addition, they both used the word 'country' more in Commons than any other word. One wonders why - although it's interesting to note that both Silva and Cannis were born in a different one (Portugal and Greece, respectively).

What do Ken Dryden and Olivia Chow have in common? Children, apparently. Dryden has two (and four grandchildren) and Chow is stepmother to Jack Layton's kids. Perhaps it wasn't parental bragging rights that put those words at the top of the list, though.

The other two paired words are 'health', a rather obvious parliamentary theme apparently harped on about by both Kirsty Duncan and Carolyn Bennett, and 'going' a rather more esoteric word choice (suggestive of vision?) favoured by both Jack Layton and Joe Volpe.

There are some odd ones, perhaps suggestive of personal interests or at least quirks. Michelle Simson has to win for weird with 'animal', while with 'infrastructure' Gerard Kennedy tops for boring. 'Respect', 'colleague', 'conservatives' and 'question' suggest that MPs spend more time talking about parliament in parliament than anything else.

And Derek Lee of Scarborough-Rouge River says 'may' most of all. While he might be referring to his favourite month or his favourite Green Party leader, he might also be an expert at equivocation. Someone make this man the next leader of the Liberal Party...

TMI, Google Maps!

I love Google Maps. I think it's absolutely brilliant. With time they're getting so detailed and accurate that I suspect they're going to have my underwear drawer properly identified. That's great, but there's a very significant line between 'usefully detailed' and 'uselessly complicated'. I fear that Google Maps is starting to cross that line.

I present to you the immediate Yonge and St. Clair are in Toronto. St. Clair is the east-west yellow street and Yonge is the north-south one. It's stuck to the side of the image because it's the area to the east that I want to show: slightly east of Yonge on St. Clair is where the St. Clair TTC stop is.

Singular: the St. Clair TTC stop. There's just one. From there you can take buses, a streetcar and a subway going northbound or southbound. Quite obviously, the platforms you must stand on to take these various forms of transport do not physically occupy the same space, as that would create huge crowding and many an accident, especially as buses would be forced to drive on rails. Rather obviously, once you've entered through the turnstiles, you go up or down corridors and/or stairwells accordingly, following the signs to get to where you want to go. Like every subway station on the planet. Why Google Maps chooses to show the exact location of each platform is entirely beyond me (in the case of the subway platforms, these are of course subterranean and just plotted as 'roundabout there'). If I bring up Google Maps wanting to know where the St. Clair subway station is, is it not glaringly obvious that I want to know how to get there from the street? That I want to know the entrance to the station?

So where exactly is that entrance? Well, unsurprisingly, there are several. The main one that you'd access from the street, the one with a big TTC symbol in front of it, is in a building that also has a McDonald's in it. Look carefully at the map... the McDonald's is indicated on it and is the only way you'll find the entrance to the station. And... yeah, it's nowhere nearn those big letter 'M's, is it? Looking solely at this map will give you the impressions that the best way to get to the St. Clair subway station would be from Pleasant Blvd. (And note: there is a back exit, not that I'd advide taking it).

But this begs the question: while putting the subway, streetcar and bus logos in the place thye've chosen, Google Maps has undoubtedly made their service more accurate. But have they made it more useful?

The Toronto Shibboleth

How do you know if a singer is from Toronto? Because he mentions it in his songs? No -Falco mentioned Toronto in 'Vienna Calling', and no one would have ever confused him with a resident of (ahem) 'T-Dot.'

No, it's not merely saying the name 'Toronto'; it's saying it in a very particular way. Note the rhyme schemes of these two songs from Torontonians down the ages:

"Hey little Donna, I still want to
You said to ring you up when I was in Toronto"

- The Kings, "The Beat Goes On / Switchin' to Glide"

Or:

"I said a lot of things that I can't take back
But I don't really know if I want to
There've been songs about love, I sang songs about war
Since the backstreets of Toronto"

- Neil Young, "Love and War"

If you've never heard these songs sung, that might confuse you even more. How can Toronto rhyme with 'want to'? 'Want toe', perhaps. I had an English friend tell me recently that he thought 'Toronto' should be pronounced to rhyme with 'tomato', which also confuses the issue until you remember how the English pronounce that fruit/vegetable.

Anyway, in both these songs, 'want to' is pronounced as is commonly written 'wanna'. Which allows it to rhyme quite comfortably with Toronto, as pronounced by almost all Torontonians - a pronunciation that seems excessivley slangy or uneducated to non-Torontonians but that ultimately ought to be considered the correct pronunciation.

The Religion of My Youth

I`m a child of the 80s, as you might be able to notice by looking at my obsessions on this here blog. I grew up in what you could rougly call the "Greater Toronto Area" - not in Toronto, but near enough to consider the Maple Leafs the 'home team', anyway.

Now I never had any reason when I was a kid to believe that my religious beliefs or religious upbringings were in any way 'out of the ordinary' - so even though that Canadian secularism extends so thoroughly even to ten-year-olds that I don't actually know what the religious beliefs of my friends were back then (even my best of friends), I can take a stab at it. This is more or less what seemed 'normal' to me back then.

We weren't Christians, really. I think if you'd pinned down any of my friends back then and asked what religion they were, most would probably shrug and say, "Christian", or some subcategory (Catholic, Protestant, or one of the many baffling sub-sub-categories there: Presbyterian, United, whatever). I suppose I had a vague sense of my own taxonomical classification there: Christian, then Protestant, then... well, my father called himself United and my mother called herself Baptist. I can recall at different times having both of those labels affixed to me. None of it meant a single thing - no one in my family could explain what made a Baptist different from a United. Or any of those others. Catholic is what my aunt's husband was. Catholic people had a different school they might go to and perhaps they spoke French. They were all labels, that's all.

When I say, "We weren't Christians", I mean a few things. I heard the name Jesus enough when I was a kid, but it was always pretty vague. I had a good idea of what God was, and there was a decent amount of God talk, but Jesus seemed like a rather minor adjunct - like, say, Robin to God's Batman, or John Oates to God's Daryl Hall. Certainly the idea that Jesus was God seemed pretty remote - I'd heard it, but God had a white beard and Jesus had long brown hair, so obviously not.

Furthermore, we all seemed, more or less, to believe in Heaven. Hell was a bit dodgier - it seemed that Hell existed, but it was pretty much empty except for, well, Adolf Hitler and... well, other Nazis. The really, really bad Nazis. Never in my entire upbringing did I even once hear the idea expressed that only Christians went to Hell - and certainly not that the only determining factor regarding who went to Heaven and who went to Hell was who was Christian. I repeat - not once in all of my youth did I hear that idea.

I guess 'universalist' is what everyone was, more or less. It seemed like pretty much everone would go to Heaven. There was this sense that Heaven was another place - up there somewhere - where you would still live with your family and kind of carry on as you had done, except dead. Or an angel or whatever. Harp and wings strictly optional. Heaven was where your grandparents lived. Well, my grandparents lived in the Lawrence Heights housing projects at Lawrence and Allen Road... but that's frequently mistaken for Heaven.

And we were certainly all aware that there was such a thing as a Bible - some kids (none I knew personally, but they existed) went to school on Sunday just to learn about it. It was filled with stories we all vaguely knew - there was some guy and a whale, there was God parting a sea. Adam and Eve was a particularly cool one, involving a snake somehow. There was also a rabbit and a turtle who had a race with each other...

Or wait. Slight confusion of the source material. It didn't matter very much, though, because Aesop and the Bible were similar things: cool stories from days long gone by that were certainly nothing more that stories. if anyone told me that Jonah and the Whale differed from the Fox and the Grapes by being absolutely true and that anyone who questions its truth is going to go to Hell... well, I think most of us woudl have dismissed such a person as simple.

It's interesting in retrospect looking back on those days. Canada is seen as a majority Christian country, more in line with the USA than with Europe. But by any useful definition of 'Christian', I'm not sure if I knew a single one growing up. Well, I did know one, one who could actually cite Bible quotations by book and verse. But that person was very clearly a minority, and seemed very, very alien to the rest of us. Whatever statistics-gathering organisations would have labelled both that kid and me as 'Christian' was making a category that had no practical meaning at all.

Mark Dailey

Silly to get sentimental. Moses Znaimer's legendary Citytv has long since been chewed up by the new Canadian media oligarchy and launched as a spitball in the face of independent media. Citytv has been a nothing for years and years now, so long it's hard to remember when it was revolutionary.

But it was once. It was by far the best thing about Toronto television, and one of the very best things was that deadpan voice 'introducing' (or more often offering wry commentary on) the next programme about to start. His voice saying "Citytv everywhere..." was one of the most recognisable sounds of my youth. It was impossible to dislike the guy; all it took was a single sentence here or there and somehow you were convinced he was a friendly good guy.

I haven't bothered with Citytv in so long now, I didn't realise he'd become much more prominent an on-air personality. All I remember him for, really, is that stentorian voice, disembodied, in ten-second spurts between shows. Yet even that is enough for me to genuinely mourn the passing of a total stranger.

Mark Dailey, you will be missed.

Related articles

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Progressive Talking Point: Rob Ford's Davenport

Image via Wikipedia
I've been thinking a lot about the left wing in Canada lately. I think I'd like to write a comprehensive 'action plan' for the Left (not that I am vain enough to think it would be considered), but it would be a lengthy work-in-progress, obviously. Something requiring rather more time than I'm able to give. In the meantime, I thought I'd start including some 'talking points' - notes, in effect, for such a grand composition. Bite-size observations or idea relating to the Left and its role in Canada.


I'd like to start with what I believe is a widely-misunderstood phenomenon: Rob Ford's electoral victory in Toronto. I think it's every bit as newsworthy as people make it out to be. I think it says a lot about a paradigmatic shit in Toronto - and perhaps more generally in Canada. But now that the shock has faded, I'm beginning to think that Toronto is still Toronto, and Ford's victory is not the victory for urban conservatism that people would like to make it out to be.

Toronto has been a vitally important line of defence against the encroachment of Harper's Conservatives in recent years. The 2008 election brought a Conservative minority with 143 of 308 seats, but of Toronto's 22 seats, 20 went Liberal and 2 went NDP. A Torontoless Canada would have returned a rather confusing situation where the Conservatives had won exactly 50% of 286 ridings. A majority... er, I think. I don't know how that one would work.

What I want to say is that I don't believe the 416 is ready to jump onto Harper's train any time soon. I think Tim Hudak will win seats in the 416, and I think a seat or two might drift blue federally, but what I mean is that the 47% of Torontonians who voted for Ford are by no means preparing to cast their votes for formalised conservative parties any time soon. What we need to see is that the 'anger' or whatever it was that pushed Ford over the top was based more on frustration with conventional politics and with a sense of 'entitlement' (and, importantly, élitism) than any real interest in American-style small-government politics. I would bet that if Ford made half of the visible service cuts he's talked about making, Torontonians would be up in arms, even in the suburbs.


I found it interesting to consider one of the Old Toronto wards that 'went Ford': Ward 17, the northern half of Davenport. It was hardly a landslide, at 41.7% not even a majority, but clearly a plurality. As one of only a scant few (three if memory serves) Old Toronto wards to give Ford more votes than Smitherman, it seems like a useful focus for the rightward shift in Torontonian politics, right?

Well... inasmuch as you can quantify it, the leftmost candidate for councillor, Jonah Schein, lost - with a healthy percentage of votes, but a loss nevertheless. To whom? To incumbent Cesar Palacio, who supported Pantalone. That's right: the more conservative of the two main candidates supported Pantalone. That's the kind of ward we're talking about here. The third-place finisher, Tony Letra, wasn't even a Ford follower, being roughly a Smithermanesque centrist. So one of the few Old Toronto wards that supported Ford didn't even have a local candidate on the right of the spectrum. There didn't seem to be a need for one.

With its Siamese-twin southern ward, which turfed out the incumbent councillor and went for Smitherman, the federal and provincial Davenport riding is hardly a hotbed for conservatism: federally, the Liberal candidate won and the NDP candidate came second, with a combined total of 77.1% of the vote. The local Conservative candidate managed a mere 11.0%, beating the Green candidate by less than 200 votes. Provincially in 2007 the situation was even more extreme, with the Liberal winner and the NDP second-place finisher tallying a remarkably similar 77.8% of the vote and the PC candidate finishing last in the riding, scraping a mere 9.5% of the vote, and even that was a two-percent increase from the laughable 7.5% the PCs pulled in in 2003.

 This is the new urban conservatism? I mean really... trends change, but could you imagine a riding like this, which federally has been Liberal since 1962, ready to jump into Steven Harper's waiting arms?

Let's be realistic: this is not a conservative part of town. This is not a place where what appealed about Rob Ford was his commitment to laissez-faire economics. If we hope to make any sense at all of Ford's victory and what it means to the Left in Canada, we have to stop pretending that we know why people voted Ford and start trying to learn why they did. And this neighbourhood, where the final two streets on Davenport Road travelling westbound are called, respectively, Miller St. and Ford St., is the place to start.

Related articles

• What Rob Ford's victory means for Stephen Harper (theglobeandmail.com)
• Roy Green: Rob Ford's victory was no surprise to those who listen (fullcomment.nationalpost.com)
• Rob Ford Toronto Mayor Coaches Football While doing CBC Interview (nowpublic.com)
• "Toronto's right wing Rob Ford enjoys smashing win to become mayor over centre, left candidates" and related posts (billtieleman.blogspot.com)
• Federal political parties take notes on Rob Ford's strategy (theglobeandmail.com)

How I'm Going to Vote

Image by Shaun Merritt via FlickrWith just three days to go, I've finally decided how I'm going to vote.

Deep breath... I'm voting Smitherman.

Now, on the one hand, what the hell? I'm 35 and I've spent my whole life backing non-competitive horses. I have not - until now - given much thought to the probability that the horse I back could win. I have regarded as insidious the notion that I should hold my nose and back the lesser of two competitive evils. I have wondered how far the progressive voice in this country might have progressed if on election day we have consistently had the courage of our opinions.

And now I'm selling out. It's not that Joe Pantalone is any kind of saviour or George Smitherman any kind of devil. But I do believe Pantolone would make a better mayor and that he has a better vision for Toronto. How can I contemplate not voting for him?

Well, it has a lot ot do with the nature of elections. We have an ability municipally to do something we can't provincially or federally: to vote for both our local representative and the overall leader. I've never voted for Prime Minister and I've never voted for premier. There are two layers of futility there: the fact that by and large local NDP candidates haven't had a chance in hell, and on top of that additionally the fact that even if my local MP or MPP gets in (and I have lived in both Oshawa and Hamilton), the NDP will not form the government. I've been okay with that - knowing that the prime minister or premier will be decided by forces outside of my control, I can attempt to send a representative to the opposition side. And even if I can't, well, I can contribute in some intangible way to the NDP anyway. In 2007 I had an opportunity to vote against the man I've decided I'll vote for on Monday, and I cast my vote for an NDP candidate named Sandra Gonzalez. She won 19% of the vote - less than one person in five - while Smitherman cakewalked his way into the Ministry of Health. I have no regrests about that whatsoever.


But municipally my vote goes directly to the mayor, who wins in a very primitive winner-take-all way. Joe Pantolone has no chance of winning whatsoever, but it's still very much in the air whether Rob Ford or George Smitherman will take it. I don't know if the current mania we have in Canada for opinion polling is a good thing or a bad thing - it seems strange to say Pantolone has no chance, that an election can be a foregone conclusion. But it's just naïveté in extremis to view it otherwise. Or rather to see this election as no foregone conclusion at all: anything could happen Monday. Well, that's not true. Ford could win. Smitherman could win. Pantolone can't.

So at 35 for the first time in my life, I'm voting tactically. Pantolone is the better choice, but Smitherman isn't all that bad, I guess. And he's a hell of a lot better than Ford. Plus he'll have to deal with the other half of my voting card: the one where I'll tick the name of the most progressive local councillor. Whether or not that candidate has a chance, I'll feel good that I'll have attempted to do the right thing with my local candidate. If he (it's a he) gets in, I can hope he makes things difficult for Smitherman. I can hope he'll do everything to stonewall any attempts on Smitherman's part to pull Toronto to the right.

And, if that's how it goes down, if I can have used my vote for mayor to stop Ford and my vote for councillor to slow down 'Compact Ford', what more could I ask for?


Except for my principles back, that is...

Related articles

• Whether he withdraws or not, Pantalone's race is over (theglobeandmail.com)
• Former mayor David Crombie endorses Smitherman (thestar.com)
• New Pantalone endorsements on heels of labour support for Smitherman (theglobeandmail.com)
• Union backs Smitherman in place of long-time ally Pantalone (theglobeandmail.com)

I Hate Weather

Image via Wikipedia

I hate weather. I just hate it. Weather in Toronto, in particular, is just ridiculous. If it's not freezing cold, it's stinking hot, except for like a week in spring and a week in fall. Apart from that, it's "the weather will make you uncomfortable!"

Stinking hot right now. Like stupidly stinking hot, makes me not able to do anything more than sit here like a lump. Why can't the weather just be, like, a constant 25 degrees with a nice breeze? Wouldn't that be enough? And humidity... who invented that? Water belongs in seas and up in clouds, not just floating in the air we're trying to breathe. Damn that water.

Er, okay. Perhaps that's enough now. From the man with the melting brain...

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Stephen Harper's Sigh of Relief

Watching the news juxtapose images of burning cop cars with images of Stephen and Laureen shaking hands with the G20 leaders, I can't help but imagine him a huge sigh of relief. The fact that there has been violence on the streets of Toronto must have made his day.

It all could have gone so wrong for Harper today. If the non-violent protesters had managed to get their message out, if there'd been a global stage on which frustrated Canadians could have shown the world how our prime minister has defrauded us and sold us out, if we'd been able to show up all those billions wasted on security instead of where the money needs to be spent; if we'd been able to show this whole G8/G20 dog-and-pony farce as politicking at its most cynical... well, I've begun to think that Harper could kick a boatload of puppies in front of the world's press and not drop below 25% support, but perhaps we could have shaken him out of his complacency.

Instead, he has the best present ever: the opportunity to paint protesters as thugs, to ride a law-and-order wave of public opinion, to justify (and perhaps institutionalise) the shocking powers he, or rather the Ontario government, has given police, to make those with legitimate grievances look like the bad guys. A few broken windows, a burning cop car... who knew Harper could claim a victory so easily?

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