Toronto Council, after over a day and a half’s debate, has approved the construction of a Sheppard East LRT from Don Mills to Morningside by a vote of 24-19. This completes the rout of Mayor Ford’s subway plan and returns transit plans more or less to their position when he was elected. The Mayor vows to fight on, but now sees this as a future campaign issue.
Today’s debate was, for the most part, more civil and organized than what we heard yesterday, except for an outburst from the Mayor and a speech showing his passionate hatred for streetcars.
Now the ball is in Metrolinx’ court to come up with a construction staging plan allowing for the year-plus delay. During the debate, some members of the pro-subway faction claimed that, according to private conversations with Metrolinx, work would not start on the Sheppard LRT until 2016. My own sources tell me that this is not true, but we must await a definitive word from the Provincial agency.
The Sheppard LRT decision also ensures that the Scarborough RT extension will be part of the plan with the new LRT line running, initially, to Sheppard Avenue and using Conlins Road carhouse as a base. A motion by Councillor Cho, which passed as part of the package, seeks funding for extending the SRT/LRT northeast to Malvern Centre and the Sheppard LRT south via Morningside to UTSC campus. “Streetcars” might reach Malvern only five decades or so after the TTC’s original proposal.
[. . .]
This is an important day for Toronto. We are on track for an LRT-based plan and for a more detailed evaluation of our transit future than we have seen for decades. Talking about one line at once, about fundraising for one project at once, is no longer an accepted way of building the city. Leaving the debate to a secretive Provincial agency is no longer acceptable, and the City is clearly setting out on its own review. Co-operation is essential given the funding arrangements, but Queen’s Park must stop hiding from the transit planning and financing files.
Finally, a personal note. Throughout this debate, I have been gratified by the broad understanding of transit issues displayed by many Councillors, advocates and media. This blog and my own advocacy have helped, but there is the compound effect of so many people working with an informed sense of the topic. Congratulations to everyone who had a hand in this victory.
"People hate the St. Clair...they hate these streetcars," Ford angrily shouted during today's debate. "You can call them what you want. People want subways folks. Subways, subways." But for all the ire he expressed earlier in the session, the mayor was calmer in his final address to council and when he briefly scrummed with reporters post-vote.
By that point he must have realized that there wasn't much point in putting up a fuss. And besides, as he and his supporters have said all along, this is the type of "loss" they believe they can build a future campaign on. That might sound paradoxical, but Ford will still be able to say to Scarborough residents that he fought tooth and nail for a subway, even if all he did was blow hot air.
Given the divisiveness of the whole subways vs. LRT debate, it's almost hard to believe that the issue has been resolved once and for all, but the reality is there is very little recourse that subway proponents have to alter the decision made today. Toronto has given the province the mandate that it demanded, and it's for LRT-based transit expansion.
Can we just get down to building now?
Option A: He could view this loss as the unofficial launch of his 2014 re-election campaign. Until a rival formally registers on January 1, 2014, he’ll use some combined caricature of Stintz/Lindsay Luby/Cho/Augimeri as a proxy opponent. This medusa, Ford will tell us, is responsible for visiting the boundless horror of mulish trams on the long-suffering folk of Scarborough and North York.
Thus positioned, Ford gets himself back to his preferred stance as the principled truth-teller and the quintessential council outsider. Moreover, when he tries to press ahead with the balance of his mandate – cutting council in half; eliminating the land transfer tax, etc. – he can again claim victory in defeat. The Stintz coalition, I’m guessing, will put the brakes on these measures, and the Fords, in permanent campaign mode, will continue tilting at windmills with impunity.
Option B: If he makes a herculean effort to move beyond his normal mode, Ford could find the learning to be had in this fiasco and attempt to recast his mayoralty to respond to pointed accusations from his own supporters (e.g. Jaye Robinson) that he’s failed to lead. This realization would mean firing his senior staff and replacing them with seasoned advisors who don’t view the world – which is to say council and the city’s residents — in purely Manichean terms. And it would entail recasting his cabinet to include not just obedient allies (an ever diminishing cast of characters) but also councillors from elsewhere on the political spectrum.
[. . .]
I think we can pretty much predict which route the mayor and his brother will pursue. After all, Option B requires not just a measure of introspection, but also the ability to listen to those voices on the right who are quietly aghast by the disgraceful way the Bros. Ford have squandered the mayor’s considerable mandate.
But the point can’t be made often enough: Rob Ford is uniquely unqualified for the position he holds. He is a spectacular example of the Peter Principle at work. There’s nothing in his past to suggest he’s going to grow into this job anytime soon.
Never mind that no comprehensive poll shows that Torontonians both support subways and that they are willing to pay more to have them. Never mind that the councillors who voted in favour of light rail were elected, just as Ford was, by residents of this city who were choosing representatives to fight for their concerns and represent their interests at City Hall. Never mind that Ford hasn’t come up with a detailed funding plan for subways after 15 months in office. Never mind that the expert panel—one which, despite Rob Ford’s rhetoric, was stocked with people who have backgrounds that equip them to offer sound advice—said LRTs were preferable. Never mind that Ford ran on a campaign whose central plank had nothing to do with subways, and everything to do with gravy trains—who, if he has a mandate for anything, has a mandate to keep taxes and levies as low as possible and reduce spending wherever possible.
In recent months, Ford and his allies have floated, and then quickly retracted, ideas about any number of revenue-generating tools that would help pay for those subways. To the extent that we now seem to be over our collective childishness and are willing—left, right, centre, everyone—to discuss revenue tools without anyone threatening political death, our months-long transit debate has been a genuine advancement.
But Rob Ford was not elected with a mandate to impose new revenue tools to pay for transit. In fact, he campaigned on eliminating the last two revenue tools the City imposed under former mayor David Miller: the Vehicle Registration Tax and the Land Transfer Tax. So when Ford began to realize that he might need an actual financing proposal to pay for his subways, he couldn’t, much as he protested otherwise, just act as though he had the political backing to build those subways by any means necessary. He had to persuade his colleagues, one by one, that he had a plan worth supporting—precisely because he was venturing further afield than any mandate he might have won at the polls. In this he failed spectacularly.
One by one during debate today, Ford’s allies rose to defend subways, but also to lament the lack of leadership that has marked the battle for them. David Shiner, Peter Milczyn, Mike Del Grande, Michelle Berardinetti, Jaye Robinson, Michael Thompson: all serve on the mayor’s carefully selected Executive Committee, and all said openly they were disappointed in Ford’s failure to develop and champion a real plan for transit. When it came time to vote, they had before them only one proposal that included any kind of funding tool to pay for Rob Ford’s subway—only it didn’t come from Rob Ford, it came from budget chief Mike Del Grande. Ford himself didn’t have any proposal at all to build more than the two stops we can afford on the billion dollars the provincial and federal governments have promised us. And so even Ford’s allies had to proceed without him, to try and accomplish his goals with motions he wouldn’t put his name on. (Del Grande’s proposal failed, as it should have—you don’t pass a $100 million levy without so much as a staff report that lays out its implications.)
As a councillor, Rob Ford was always the lone wolf in City Hall—often quite literally a minority of one when it came to votes. As a mayor, he seems to be reverting to that position, with even his supporters and allies working around rather than with him. It isn’t because they haven’t tried. The mayor is increasingly isolated at City Hall, and it’s an isolation of his own making. Never one for policy details, he is trying to govern in platitudes, and increasingly, he is doing it alone.
Early in Ford’s term, I read a column from a columnist (I forget his name) who suggested that Rob Ford ran for the wrong job. Let’s pause a moment as the more left-leaning of my readers shout at their screen, “well, duh!!” But this is not what I meant. The columnist suggested that Ford’s strengths as a public figure, and his goals in pursuing public life tailored him for a job that had little to do with the day-to-day activities of the mayor’s office. As a councillor, Ford was a gadfly, but he was adept at connecting to people in his ward (people who agreed with him, anyway), and championing their causes, cutting through the bureaucratic red tape to fix a pot-hole that city workers seemed to ignore, dealing with noise complaints — small scale issues which nevertheless affect ordinary people where it matters the most: in their homes.
This assessment was reinforced by this article wherein Ford cordially told Star columnist “the Fixer” that Ford’s self-imposed ban on talking with the Toronto Star (for a controversial story that attacked the Ford family) did not extend to the Fixer himself. And, if you think about it, this is not a surprise. The Fixer’s modus operandi is to find these annoying and persistent problems in the city, find the people responsible for fixing these problems and getting the problems fixed. It’s everything that Ford loved doing while he was a councillor. And it’s what he loves doing now that he’s mayor.
But as a job, a mayor has an entirely different set of responsibilities than a simple councillor. It’s hard enough touring your ward, asking 56,000 constituents if their fridge is working or their sidewalks are in good condition. Imagine doing that for a city of 2.5 million. Also, as councillor, Ford was responsible to no one but himself. He was under no obligation to work with other councillors, and the people who were under him worked for him in a clearly defined employer-employee relationship. This does not carry over to the mayor’s office. Ford has said that he’s not a politician, he’s a businessman, but that’s not an accurate assessment of his problems here. A good mayor needs to negotiate and needs to delegate, and while a business the size of Ford’s Deco Labels & Tags (employing 250 people) may be successfully run by an energetic, tight-knit family, Ford may find that if Deco Labels & Tags increases in size substantially his inability to delegate may become more of a hinderance than a help.
Ford passed up an opportunity today to show real leadership on the subway vs light rail debate. If he had come forward with a credible plan to pay for new subways in exchange for using some of the province’s $8.4 Billion to extend the Sheppard subway to Victoria Park, many centrists (myself included) would have stood with him. Instead, he would only promise to “look at” revenue sources once “shovels were in the ground”. By that logic, Ford would go looking for a trampoline after he stepped off a cliff. Ford’s problem is that he appears to believe that true leadership is “giving the people what they want”. Unfortunately, that’s not what real leaders do, it’s what entertainers do. Ford has promised on the campaign trail that he could build the Sheppard subway and extend the Bloor-Danforth to the Scarborough Town Centre, have both lines opened by 2015, and not raise taxes in order to do it. He has stuck to variations on this plan because, as he says, “people want subways” and, as his brother says, “taxes are evil”.
[. . .]
For the past fifteen months, Ford has struggled mightily to come up with a workable funding plan for his subways, but he refuses to commit to anything that results in higher taxes. His lack of leadership on this issue has caused several Scarborough councillors to break ranks, and advocate for new subway development with new revenue tools (taxes). They’re the ones showing some real leadership on this issue. But such understanding appears to be a blindspot for Ford.
So, yes, Ford is in the wrong job, and I think that most individuals can see that this is the case. It doesn’t bode well for his political future, in spite of the bluster of his allies, either on council, or at the Toronto Sun. But the real losers are the people of Toronto who, regardless of who they voted for mayor, probably still voted for some real leadership on council. In the vacuum that the mayor’s office has established, council has little choice but to step forward to fill it, but it’s not a perfect fit. Council meetings will likely be more interesting than they should be for the next thirty months, until some sense of normalcy is restored to City Hall following the 2014 vote.
Negotiators for CUPE Local 79 and the municipal government were trying to beat a 12:01 a.m. Saturday deadline imposed by the province at the city’s request, after which workers could strike or management could impose a lockout.
Toronto’s deputy mayor and a spokesman for the 23,000-member union said they would keep their respective bargaining teams at the Sheraton Centre hotel, where talks are taking place amid a sea of orange-clad delegates in town for the NDP leadership convention.
“I wish we were a lot closer,” Cim Nunn, a CUPE spokesman, said just after 8 p.m. “My hope is that, if we’re still a ways apart but there’s a willingness on both sides to continue to talk, that bargaining will continue to take place through the deadline.”
Deputy mayor Doug Holyday, who planned to head to the hotel after 8:30 p.m., repeated his message that the mostly white-collar employees of Local 79 can’t expect a sweeter deal than the labourers of Local 416.
“I don’t think it’s reasonable for 79 to expect wild swings from what happened with 416,” he said.
However, the CUPE Local 79 negotiations are unfolding against a political backdrop that has darkened for the Ford administration since it squeezed significant concessions out of Local 416 in early February.
In that case, the city caught labour leaders off balance by threatening to unilaterally impose a new contract on a union that hadn’t sought a strike mandate from its 6,000 members.
[. . .]
Since that victory, Mr. Ford has suffered a trio of council-floor drubbings, including the crushing of his subway ambitions this week.
It’s not clear how the mayor’s weakened stature will affect talks. As of late Friday the city was taking a gentler approach than it had with Local 416, having not moved to impose a new contract.
CUPE Local 79 inoculated itself somewhat against that manoeuvre by holding a strike vote Tuesday.
Armed with the support of more than 85 per cent of voting members, Local 79’s president promised not to join library workers on the picket line unless the city unilaterally imposed a contract.
Madagascar is renowned for its unusual animals, particularly its lemurs, a group of primates extinct elsewhere on the planet. Its human population, though, is equally unusual. The island was one of the last places on Earth to be settled, receiving its earliest migrants in the middle of the first millennium AD. Moreover, despite Madagascar’s proximity to Africa (400km, or 250 miles, at the closest point) those settlers have long been suspected of having arrived from the Malay Archipelago—modern Indonesia—more than 6,000km away.
There are three reasons for this suspicion. First, it has been recognised for centuries that the Malagasy language, though distinct, borrows a lot of words from Javanese, Malay and the tongues of Borneo and Sulawesi. Second, the islanders’ culture includes artefacts ranging from boats with outriggers to xylophones, and crops such as bananas and rice, that are (or, rather, were then) characteristically Asian, not African. And third, genetic evidence has linked the modern Malagasy with people living in eastern Indonesia as well as farther off in Melanesia and Oceania.
Now, Murray Cox of Massey University in New Zealand and his colleagues have put the matter beyond doubt by showing not only where the first settlers came from, but also how many of them there were. And the answer is surprisingly few. Though Dr Cox is unable, with the method he used, to work out how many men were in the original party, the number of women was 30.
He drew this conclusion, just published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, by sampling the DNA of 266 Malagasy people and comparing it with existing samples from 2,745 Indonesians. He concentrated on DNA from mitochondria. These are cellular components involved in energy production that are descended from bacteria which became symbiotic with humanity’s ancestors almost 2 billion years ago, and thus have their own genes. People inherit mitochondria only from their mothers, which is why only the female line of descent can be tracked using them.
[. . .]
Having confirmed that Malagasy and Indonesian DNA separated about 1,200 years ago, which is statistically close to the date archaeologists suggest Madagascar was colonised, the team then asked their data how many women, drawn at random from the Malay Archipelago of that period, would have been needed to explain the variation in mitochondrial DNA in Madagascar. The answer was about 30.
That answer bears on a second question: was the colonisation of Madagascar a deliberate act or an accident? The first is possible. At the time, much of the Malay Archipelago was in the hands of the Srivijayan empire, an entity that could certainly have sent expeditions across the Indian Ocean, had it so willed. But there is no historical evidence that it did. In any case if it had, it is likely that a successful colonisation by one group would have been followed by others, as happened when Europeans discovered the Americas.
Most likely, then, the first Malagasy were accidental castaways, news of whose adventure never made it back home. But there is still a puzzle. Most ships’ crews are male. Though the number of men in the original party will remain obscure until an analysis like Dr Cox’s is done on the Y-chromosome of Malagasy men (Y-chromosomes include DNA passed exclusively down the male line in the way that mitochondrial DNA is passed down the female line), the presence of women on board a trading vessel would have been unusual. Unless, of course, the women themselves were the objects being traded. Possibly, then, Madagascar was colonised by an errant slave ship. Which would make its history even stranger than anyone had previously thought.
The area’s relative obscurity is not just name-related. With a combined population of less than 1.5 million, the Guyana Three are hardly a hotspot for news. If you know three things about French Guiana, it’s probably these: there’s a pepper (and a Porsche) named after its capital, Cayenne; the notorious French penal colony of Devil’s Island was located off its shore; and it’s the site of the European Space Agency’s spaceport, at Kourou. Suriname? Two things: the Netherlands traded it with the English for New Amsterdam, and it’s the only Dutch-speaking country outside of Europe. Guyana? The Jonestown Massacre of 1978.
But as a set, the three entities are a significant anomaly, and a case study in the way that geology and the environment can combine with geopolitics to shape a region’s history.
Since Belize won independence in 1981, French Guiana is the last territory on the American mainland controlled by a non-American power. But in fact, all three Guyanas are Fremdkörper in Latin America: they are the only territories in the region without either Spanish or Portuguese as a national language. These are coastal countries, culturally closer to the Caribbean.
Moreover, these shores are cut off from the rest of the subcontinent by dense rainforest. And that jungle remains virgin by virtue of the Guyana Shield, a collection of mountain ranges and highlands seemingly designed to conserve the interior’s impenetrability. The shield is best known for its tepuis: enormous mesas that rise dramatically from the jungle canopy and are often home to unique flora and fauna (tepuis feature prominently in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Lost World” and, more recently, the animated film “Up.”)
The Principality of Sealand is a textbook example. Literally. Open any book or Web page on micronations, and you’re likely to see its unmistakable silhouette: a two-legged marine platform. Sealand is one of the first, arguably one of the most successful, and possibly the best-known example of modern micronationalism. It’s also one of the most intriguing experiments in state-creation in history.
Start with its geography, as it were: Sealand was founded on an abandoned World War II sea fort six miles off the coast from Felixstowe, in the southern English county of Suffolk. The installation, officially known as Her Majesty’s Fort Roughs, is one of the half dozen so-called Maunsell Forts, built during World War II to provide antiaircraft defense and abandoned by the British Army in the 1950s. Predictably, the hulks of concrete and steel left to rust in the busy waterways just off the English coast were accidents waiting to happen. In the deadliest one, the Norwegian ship Baalbek collided with Nore Army Fort, in the Thames estuary between the Isle of Sheppey and Southend-on-Sea, killing four people and destroying two of the fort’s towers.
The mid-1960s saw the re-occupation of some forts, this time by pirates rather than privates. Not cutlass-and-peg-leg pirates; these were of the broadcasting variety (though some swashbuckling was involved). One of the more colorful radio pirates was Screaming Lord Sutch, who established Radio Sutch in Shivering Sands Army Fort, a collection of outlandish huts on stilts also in the Thames estuary. “Britain’s First Teenage Radio Station” was quickly rebranded Radio City by its new manager, Reginald Calvert. Other pirate stations were set up at the Red Sands Army Fort and the Sunk Head Navy Fort, all competing with the more established, ship-based pirate stations, most notably Radio Caroline.
These heady radio days were hardly halcyon. The pirates took to the sea to operate on or beyond the fringes of the law. Arguments were settled by violence. Mr. Calvert was killed in a dispute over, among other things, radio crystals. In 1965, a group of feral DJs under the command of Roy Bates ejected a rival crew from Knock John Navy Fort; it then became the base for Radio Essex, the first pirate to broadcast around the clock. The next year, a conviction for illegal broadcasting forced Mr. Bates to abandon Knock John, which was located within the three-mile radius of British territorial waters, to Fort Roughs, which was just outside.
In response, the Marine Broadcasting Act of 1967 made it illegal for pirate radios, even those outside territorial waters, to employ British citizens. Mr. Bates promptly declared independence, probably hoping to circumvent the strictures of the act. Henceforth, he would be Prince Roy, ruler of the Principality of Sealand.
Mr. Bates never got around to resurrecting his radio station. The accident of statehood turned into his core business. On the Web site, noble titles are for sale (“Lord, Lady, Baroness — from £29.99”). Until 1997 it even issued passports (Mr. Bates suspended the practice because of widespread fraud). Over the years, Sealand’s supposed sovereignty has attracted the interests of some who seek sanctuary from the law, from gambling operators to, more recently, WikiLeaks, which was examining whether to move its servers to the principality.
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