[PHOTO] On a wintry day off Avenue Road north of Bloor (2)

On a wintry day off Avenue Road north of Bloor (2)
Originally uploaded by randyfmcdonald

Taken on the same day as the photo I posted yesterday, just a few minutes later and a bit to the south, this is a westwards-facing shot a parkette on Avenue Road.

[LINK] "The kirpan and Canada’s French-English divide"

John Ibbitson's note in the Globe and Mail is about as good a summation of the differences between English and French Canada re: multiculturalism as I can think of. In the aftermath of some Sikh men's ejection from Québec's National Assembly for wearing their kirpans--ceremonial daggers--clear thinking's important.

“Religious freedom exists but there are other values,” said Louise Beaudoin, the PQ’s designated critic for secularism. “For instance, multiculturalism is not a Quebec value. It may be a Canadian one but it is not a Quebec one.”

That there exists such a position as secularism critic boggles an English-Canadian mind. But it’s true that the two cultures often have a difficult time understanding each other.

Try spending a day at Harbord Collegiate. For almost 120 years, Harbord has graduated the brightest and best of each generation of Toronto students. Today, its halls teem with infectiously happy and ferociously bright teenagers of Chinese, Filipino, South Asian, Latino and African background. Half the student body belongs to a visible minority, except they aren’t the minority any more, at least not at Harbord.

Toronto and the other large cities of English Canada don’t think too much about reasonable accommodation. The opposition parties have no critic for secularism. Partly that’s because Quebec is a nation – a community bound by language, history and culture – while the rest of Canada is something that could best be described as postnational, worried less about protecting and more about encompassing.

Partly that’s because English and French Canadians sometimes employ different approaches when considering social challenges. As Robert and Isabelle Tombs observed in That Sweet Enemy, their fine history of Anglo-French rivalry, the French are inclined to look at the big picture. Here is a problem; what does it say about the system in which it is embedded? What changes should we make to the system to eliminate the problem? The English tradition favours ad hoc fixes, while avoiding grand designs. Each approach has its own strengths and weaknesses; each can seem perverse to the other side.

That two such disparate world views can live in the same political space remains a miracle. We should remember that on weeks like this, when everybody is yelling at everybody else.

Go, read.

[LINK] "Football Folly"

Back in November 2007 I blogged about the possibility that Toronto might acquire its own NFL, American-rules, football team, perhaps by appropriating Buffalo's. That didn't materialize. But apparently Mayor Rob Ford wants to bring a NFL team regardless.

The Brothers Ford got many Torontonians spluttering out their morning coffee today with the proclamation that they had hopes of bringing an NFL franchise to the city. Let us set aside—for a moment—the fact that the NFL has given us every indication that they aren't interested and that previous attempts to bring a team here have failed miserably. Let us set aside that the notion of finding private partners to build a one-billion-dollar stadium (the estimated cost of an arena big enough to meet the NFL's preferred seventy-five-thousand-seat threshhold) is right now only a pipe dream. Let us set aside the appearance that the Fords are conflating their personal hobbies with the city's interests. Let us set aside the uneasy feeling of hearing numbers like "one billion dollars" bandied about when this week members of the public have been asking the budget committee to please, just please, reconsider one-hundred-thousand-dollar cuts to various community services.

Instead, let us focus for a moment on this: Rob Ford has contended that an NFL franchise would be a real financial boost for the city, creating jobs and generating tourist revenue that would make the team worthwhile for everyone in Toronto, football fan or not.

Is there reason to think that might be true?

Not according to Brad Humphreys, a professor at the University of Alberta who specializes in the economics of sport. We spoke with him by phone earlier today:

Torontoist: What was your initial reaction to Mayor Ford's contention that bringing an NFL franchise to Toronto would be a clear economic win for the city?

Humphreys: That he's not very well informed of the realities about the impact of sports franchises on urban centres. I have studied this for ten years, and...I have not found one shred of evidence that suggests that the presence of a professional sports francise in a city has any tangible economic impact.

[Later, Humphreys returns to this point and adds...] He's made the claim that one of the big economic components will be that Toronto will get to host the Super Bowl. Well in fact there's no evidence that mega-events like the Super Bowl generate economic activity. Toronto is a tourist destination; people come to visit all the time. Yes, [the Super Bowl] brings tourists to the city, but those are not new tourists: it's just one group of tourists—booking hotel rooms, eating in restaurants, and so on—crowding out another group that would have been there otherwise.

Go, read the rest of Hamutal Dotan's interview with Humphreys at Torontoist.

[LINK] "Why Russian Jews are not Russian"

Martin Lewis makes this point at GeoCurrent Events. In addition to not being identified as Russian by nationality (as opposed to citizenship), I'd add that they weren't from Russia proper, but rather from the Pale of Settlement: Lithuania, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine.

[C]onfusion arises from the way Americans erroneously globalize the nation-state model. Just as all American citizens are Americans and all French citizens are French, all citizens of Russia must be Russians. What else could they be? But not all countries are nation-states. Many claim the status yet fall far from the ideal; others firmly reject it. Russia is in the latter category.

As laid out in the first article of its constitution, Russia is also known as the Russian Federation, the two terms being “equal.” A federation, strictly speaking, is not a nation-state; its constituent geographical entities and peoples remain officially distinct. This multinational state characteristic is spelled out clearly in Article Three of the Russian constitution, which states: “The bearer of sovereignty and the only source of power in the Russian Federation shall be its multinational people.”

[. . .]

The early Soviet authorities were unsure how to classify the Jewish population. Jews had always been considered a separate people from Russians, subject to disabilities and periodic pograms. But they could not be readily placed in Lenin’s tabulation of nations, as they did not have their own homeland—an essential criterion for nationhood. Stalin’s solution was to “grant” Soviet Jews their own national territory—as far away from their homes as possible. Under the Czars, Jews had been mostly restricted to the so-called Pale of Settlement in the far west, and the new Jewish autonomous area was to be in the far east, along the sparsely populated border with China.

The Jewish autonomous region experienced modest growth and development through the mid 1930s. Its nearly 18,000 Jews then constituted sixteen percent of the total population. The region’s current government boasts that Jewish settlers were enticed to migrate from “Argentina, Lithuania, France, Latvia, Germany, Belgium, the USA, Poland and even from Palestine.” Yiddish schools, publishing firms, and other institutions were established. In the late 1930s, however, Stalin began to purge Jews. Yiddish schools in the oblast were shuttered, and migration came to a virtual halt. But as Stalin’s anti-Semitism metastasized after World War II, plans were developed for wholesale Jewish relocation. Much evidence indicates that the Soviet government planned to deport virtually the entire population to the autonomous oblast and other remote regions, no doubt slaughtering a substantial number in the process. In all likelihood, Soviet Jewry was saved only by Stalin’s death in 1953.

[LINK] "We're Developing a Problem Here"

At Acts of Minor Treason, Andrew Barton is decidedly unimpressed with efforts by developers and others to undermine the southern Ontario Greenbelt limiting the expansion of suburbs deep into Toronto's hinterland. Densification is key.

I think that the Greenbelt has a valid and extremely important reason to not only be maintained, but strengthened. Not only does it protect the Oak Ridges Moraine, an ecologically important and vulnerable landform, but it provides a necessary impediment to expansion. Vancouver wouldn't be the city it is today if it wasn't hemmed in by the water and the mountains; aside from the lake, southern Ontario has no similar geographical stumbling blocks, so it's up to artificial ones to do their work. Limits encourage people to solve problems and try new avenues to success - whereas in a situation where everything is straightforward and open, the easy choice is going to be taken every single time. But we have to put in hurdles to those easy choices, or what we're going to end up with is low-density sprawl coating the land like a fungus.

The constant construction of new sprawling subdivisions of single-family residential homes is a windfall to the development industry, sure, but they're the only ones who truly profit by it in the end. Today's suburbs aren't communities but hollowed-out zones to hang one's hat and rest one's head. When I lived in Barrie, I was fortunate that I happened to live in one of the first rings of suburbs... back in 1998, I was only a forty-minute walk from my downtown high school. Thirteen years later, someone living at the fringe of Barrie would be lucky to be able to walk to downtown in twice as much time. Sprawling subdivisions are based on the idea that the automobile brings freedom, but in practice they're practically tools of oppression - if you have to use your car to get anywhere, if you're obligated to fritter away your day behind a steering wheel without any alternative... how free are you, really?

Go, read.