[PHOTO] Two Five Condominium shots

This construction site just west of Yonge once block north of Wellesley is for Five Condominiums, a planned 45 story condominium tower that will, as its boosters suggest, be a very prominent addition to the neighbourhood.



Once a Second Cup coffee shop, then a Lebanese pita restaurant, this location is now the presentation centre for Five Condominiums. This building, and the other buildings immediately to the south, will apparently remain, transformed into higher-end restaurant and shop spaces.

"I would love to put in the kind of uses, relating to food, that you see on Church Street, like Cumbrae's and Pusateri," says MOD Developments' president and CEO Gary Switzer, formerly of Great Gulf Homes, of the five buildings he's bought and will completely renovate and restore. "Yonge Street has a little Sobey's up the street, but with the number of people living in the area, it could support a good fruit store."

When it is suggested that the reason Yonge Street doesn't have a fruit store is that the rents are too high to make one feasible, Switzer says that he has the "flexibility" to modulate rents to attract the sorts of businesses he'd like to see there, and that would best serve the future residents of 5 St. Joseph.

"I've walked those blocks so many times," he says, "and the buildings themselves are quite nice individually, but because the retail is so bland and unappealing, it's not like you have any landmarks that you can say, 'Let's eat over here," or "Let's go over there.' I think it's getting better, but I think it needs a lot of work."

[BRIEF NOTE] The Power and the Money on the limits of economic influence in the Bahamas

While I'm prepping the first [BLOG] roundup post in too long, I'd like to point my readers over to a Power and the Money post that takes a look at the limited benefits that the Bahamas and China will derive (economic and geopolitical, respectively) from planned massive Chinese investment in a resort complex and general infrastructure in the Bahamas' time of trouble.

What is the Free National Movement (FNM) government doing about the economy? Monetary policy, of course, is mostly out of their hands. Capital controls mean that the government also has some room to use monetary policy — it recently slashed the discount rate from 5.25% to 4.50% — but the peg to the dollar limits its freedom of action. The government has some scope for a Keynesian boost — the budget deficit is only 3.0% of GDP, and they recently sold the Bahamian Telecommunications Company for $210 million — but it is unlikely to be effective. Why? Simply put, the Bahamas is too small and too open. Imports come to 35% of GDP. Much of any stimulus, therefore, is likely to “leak” away in increased imports.

What’s left, then, besides praying for the United States to get out of the doldrums? Well, Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham has decided to try attracting as much Chinese investment as possible. The Chinese government has taken a $2.75 billion equity stake in the giant Baha Mar resort development. It also provided loans to finance stadium and road construction.

The problem? Well, the economic problem is the same as with Keynesian spending: leakage. The Bahamas is a pretty small economy. It doesn’t produce a whole lot of construction material, and while unemployment is high, it doesn’t have that many skilled construction workers. The Baha Mar construction project will bring in 6,150 Chinese construction workers, while the $70 million new airport road has involved another 200. Not all the construction labor force will be Chinese, of course, but construction is estimated to employ only 4,000 Bahamians. The developers have pledged only $200 million in contracts to Bahamian firms although that might ultimately rise higher.

The China State Construction Engineering Corporation (CSCEC) will get $1.9 billion, or 53% of the total value of the project. Some of that may stay in the Bahamas, of course, but probably not a whole lot: Chinese workers are estimated to remit roughly $12,000 per year. They do, of course, eat and drink — but the Bahamas is a large agricultural importer, and so those expenditures will like benefit American agriculturalists. The government estimates about $80 million or so in tax payments from the CSCEC but that isn’t a lot. The highest estimate is that Bahamian contractors will receive no more than $400 million, or 11% of the total project value — and they will, of course, spend a large chunk of that revenue on imported inputs. In short, at least half the stimulus will leak away and possibly as much as 90%.

This investment will benefit the Bahamas, but as a very small and very open economy with a limited ability to absorb investment it can't benefit that much. That said, this massive investment isn't going to make China the new hegemonic power in the Bahamas in place of the United States--the United States is far too embedded, far too close, and far too interested for this to happen.

As for Chinese “patronage,” well, patronage in exchange for what? The U.S. already controls large spheres of Bahamian public policy. The Chinese government isn’t about to force the Bahamas to suspend OPBAT, expel the Coast Guard, sever the link to the dollar, seize American property, restrict American imports, replace the Privy Council with a Chinese court, or station nuclear weapons off the coast of Florida. Given the overwhelming dominance of the United States, and its long-standing and multiple links with the Bahamas, I can’t for the life of me figure out what a “patronage relationship” with Beijing would even mean. In point of fact, “Senior GCOB officials privately expressed that China is not their preferred partner and acknowledge that negotiations are difficult.” Moreover, the Chinese government told the Americans that they were unhappy about the need to take the financial lead on the project: “Chinese embassy officials privately told [a U.S. official] the China Ex-Im bank would prefer another investor in the mix to diminish the financial risk.” E.g., Americans just weren’t interested. So much for the rising empire muscling out the declining one.

All this assumes that the Chinese wanted to replace the United States in the Bahamas, of course. Evidence for that is rather lacking, it need hardly be added.

[URBAN NOTE] On Ford's new deep unpopularity across Toronto

Robyn Doolittle's Toronto Star article "Massive poll shows Toronto is united against Ford’s proposed cuts" reveals that Ford is quite unpopular indeed, not only in the downtown core that has long been the focus of opposition but in the suburbs, as well. The map is stunning.

A Forum Research telephone survey of nearly 13,000 people reveals that more than three-quarters of Torontonians want their local councillor to protect services rather than comply with the mayor’s wishes. And only 27 per cent of residents say they would vote for Rob Ford if an election was held tomorrow.

More significantly, because of the poll’s size, Forum was able to provide the first authoritative assessment of support on a ward-by-ward level.

Forum’s poll, which was paid for by CUPE Local 79, one of two major unions at city hall, questioned 12,848 Toronto residents on Tuesday using a random dial, push-button response, phoning system. The margin of error is plus or minus 0.9 per cent, 19 out 20 times.

Some of the strongest opposition to the current direction at city hall is in the wards of executive committee members.

For example, in Cesar Palacio’s Davenport region, 81.2 per cent of residents want him to fight Ford on cuts. In Willowdale, 82.9 per cent of David Shiner’s constituents are against cutting services.

With a “mushy middle” of councillors emboldened by Ford’s sinking approval, losing even a handful of those previously locked-down votes could tip the scales at council against Ford.

“He’s asking these councillors to put their careers on the line,” said Forum president Lorne Bozinoff. “These councillors are potentially exposing themselves and their careers to challenge in three years from someone who comes along and says: ‘Vote for me, I’ll restore those cutbacks.’”

As for Ford’s low approval rating, Bozinoff said one theory is that the mayor is embarking on typical political strategy: get the controversial stuff out of the way fast, allowing enough time for the numbers to rebound by the next election.

“But in this case, his numbers are already low and we’re just talking about cutting services,” he said. “This is not likely to improve for him when he actually carries out some of this stuff. . . I think if the cutbacks are really of the magnitude (being discussed) it could hit him even harder.”

Hope for an emergent city-wide anti-Ford consensus isn't that unbelievable after all, it seems.

[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] On Ignatieff and intellectuals in Canada

While it's always worthwhile to be skeptical of the National Post's take on Canadian politics--I say this as someone who leans left of centre, probably; your mileage will certainly vary--I can say that Jordan Michael Smith's essay "The rise and fall of Michael Ignatieff", criticizing Michael Ignatieff's missteps as Liberal Party leader, is reasonably accurate in its argument that Michael Ignatieff failed as a politician because of his style as an intellectual.

After Ignatieff became Liberal leader, the intellect and eloquence that had catapulted him to this pinnacle would also produce his political undoing. The nakedness of his ambition, the sheer audaciousness and presumption involved, was off-putting to Canadians. In addition, stringent campaign finance laws resulted in major advantages for the Conservatives: The Tories, maintaining a superior grassroots funding initiative, were able to tap into vast reserves of cash unavailable to Ignatieff and company. The result was an endless barrage of unanswered ads targeting Ignatieff personally as a carpetbagger.

[. . .]

Ignatieff suffered avoidable self-inflicted wounds as well. In prematurely announcing his intention to force an election in September of 2009, he lost a large section of the election-weary Canadian electorate. His book True Patriot Love, released the same year, was a ham-handed attempt to establish his Canadian bona fides. “Loving a country is an act of imagination,” he wrote in the book — a line that caused one reviewer to quip: “I’m not even sure what it means, but you wouldn’t write that if you were really secretly a Harvard professor at heart. Right?”

Ignatieff never overcame the impression he was in the country only insofar as he could profit from it. He suffered from the fact intellectuals do insincerity much more clumsily than “natural” politicians. After making a major push to fight climate change in his leadership run, for instance, he quickly jettisoned the idea in favour of a toothless but more popular Liberal plan devoid of specific targets. “You’ve got to work with the grain of Canadians and not against them,” he declared weakly.

[. . .]

This is a tale with many morals. But one clear takeaway from Michael Ignatieff’s attempt to storm the citadel of power is that makeovers, particularly by intellectuals trying to transform themselves into politicians, have limits. Once Ignatieff established himself as a cosmopolitan free thinker and intellectual entrepreneur, it was difficult for him ever to posture as an ordinary Canadian pol. Most intellectuals looking to enter politics presumably would not hamstring themselves by living outside their native country for nearly three decades and then return only to aim so soon for the top job.

I do think that Smith overstretches his argument a bit. Intellectualism as such isn't obviously a problem. Let's not consider Stephen Harper's own history as a public intellectual of sorts. Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the man whose mantle Ignatieff was to take on, was himself very much a cosmopolitan free thnker and intellectual entrepreneur, if one who had the good sense to actually live in Canada for an extended period of time before his election, Even if we don't go to Trudeau, however, we can still look at Ignatieff's predecessor, the unjustly displaced Stéphane Dion. Dion's an intellectual par excellence, developing the Chrétien government's response to Québec separatism, for instance. but as a politician, Dion lacks charisma. Critically for a Canadian politician, he lacks an easy fluency in the English language. And yet despite this, back in December 2008 Dion nearly became prime minister in a Liberal-NDP coalition government. (Note that this coalition government would have had the Liberals in top position, not the other way around as would be the case now if circumstances permitted.) His initiative was stymied by, among other things, the importation of Ignatieff as the Liberal Party's golden boy by the backroom elite that ran the party.

It turns out that an ill-tempered Facebook post by Dion's wife in 2009 complaining that Ignatieff had failed to connect--that Liberal support fell from 26% under her husband to 23% under Ignatieff--if anything understated the problem. In May's election, Dion kept his riding since 1996, Montréal riding of Saint-Laurent--Cartierville, winning this time by a plurality only because he too lost vote to the NDP wave that overturned the established political order across Québec, one of the few Liberals to keep his seat. How did Ignatieff do? In his Etobicoke--Lakeshore, a riding in Toronto with a Liberal history of comparable depth to that of Saint-Laurent--Cartierville, he lost to the Conservative candidate, his status as party leader doing nothing to keep the Liberal share of the vote from plummeting just over 11%.

Dion has had much less of a history of being a public intellectual, in print and on television, than Ignatieff. Dion, however, has been a more successful politician than Ignatieff, his goals and projects being undermined by the party itself not by the hostility of the electorate. Why? My guess is that intellectual though he may be, Dion is perceived as someone much more real than Ignatieff, someone who actually cultivates a connection with his electorate. Ignatieff's failure to actually live in his riding is emblematic of his failures, of his performance as an intellectual who couldn't engage convincingly with people. Dion, at least, was human enough to seem the bumbling professor. I'd heard Ignatieff compared to an unusually unexpressive android. Even a stiff Harper came off as more relatable. Ignatieff very nearly convinced me not to bother voting. (I ended up voting NDP instead, since the NDP included personalities who presented ideas in an engaging manner.)

What does all this mean? Apart from providing a necessary post-mortem for the Liberal Party of Canada if it's to escape third-party status, it's important for Canadians to know that intellectuals as such aren't political liabilities in the Canadian political system, that anti-intellectualism should be seen as a non-starter. Any number of intellectuals have succeeded as federal party leaders and as prime ministers. It's just a matter of intellectuals who aspire to be politicians being genuine, personable even.

[DM] "Adomanis on Steyn: Eurabia as an oversimplified story"

I've a post up at Demography Matters taking a look at writer Mark Adomanis' criticism of Mark Steyn's vision of Eurabia. Steyn oversimplifies everything, you see.

Go, read.