When you peel away all the political spinning, the legal wrangling and the sheer spectacle of what transpired in Courtroom 6-1 at 361 University Avenue, it is difficult to overlook the fact that Rob Ford, chief magistrate of Canada’s largest city, came across yesterday as a very lonely man, in it way over his head.
Shortly before 10 a.m., he entered and sat by himself at a long table on the respondent side of the cavernous courtroom. No one spoke to him, and he stared forward with that sullen, slightly bewildered look that so often clouds his face. He didn’t look back at the spectators. Just before the proceedings began, his chief of staff Mark Towhey, who spent the day in court, came up to him, whispered something in his left ear and patted Ford’s shoulder lightly before taking his seat.
The mayor spent the rest of the day on the witness stand, seemingly adrift in a miasma of legislative language, his memory constantly cloudy and his apparent understanding of key policy concepts impaired -- it must be said -- beyond belief. There were moments when he seemed to lose the train of Clayton Ruby’s questions, and others times when the abstraction of the cross-examination defeated him.
He sort of stuck to his script, repeating over and over again his strange and non-sensical definition of a conflict of interest: “For twelve years, I’ve always considered a conflict when the city benefits and the councillor benefits…”
[. . .]
Ruby closed the day by hacking away at this odd mantra, showing, at one point, a video from a 2010 council session when Ford gamely declared a conflict because the item on the agenda was about him, i.e., one of the many integrity commissioner reports that found him in breach of council’s code of conduct.
By this point, Ruby was going hard at Ford, raising his voice and telling the judge that his intention was to show a pattern of deceit and lying.
I must say I saw something slightly different: a pattern of almost pathological inattentiveness to the more nuanced details of the job of representing the interests of public. He admitted he didn’t read the councillor handbooks; didn’t bother going to councillor orientation sessions (his father, Doug Sr., he explained, had been an MPP, therefore he, Rob, knew what it meant to serve on a municipal council); didn’t bother informing himself of the legal framework of the position; didn’t seek to understand what circumstances would prompt the city’s legal staff to remind him, unbidden, to declare conflicts. So many questions left unasked.
The day after two Ontario byelections failed to substantially alter the balance of power at Queen’s Park, Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty and Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak could both be excused for feeling a bit down. McGuinty because his gambit to get a majority by luring away a veteran Tory from a seat the Liberals thought they could win proved a bust. And Hudak because that long-time Tory seat went orange instead of staying blue.
But it is Hudak who must truly be worried. The trends don’t look good.
McGuinty didn’t have much to say on Friday. But Hudak proved a trooper and got himself before the press first thing in the morning. During that conference, he laid some of the blame for his party’s defeat in both byelections on “union muscle.” That wasn’t the case in Vaughan, a Liberal fortress that predictably went red with almost no change in voter preference since 2011. But in Waterloo, he may have been onto something.
“The (NDP) won the seat, they got a new member, but this is dangerous for our province and it’s an ominous development if the Liberals move back into bed with the public sector union bosses,” Hudak told reporters, adding, “There is a lot of strength in public service unions — we’ve got to take this seriously and I think it’s dangerous and ominous for the province to see that power on display.”
He’s not wrong. But he’s not entirely right, either. Yes, public-sector unions are powerful in Ontario — arguably too powerful. And those unions are currently rather peeved with the McGuinty Liberals. But in Waterloo, the vote shift showed more than just a migration of votes from the red to the orange column. The Tories dropped 12% from the 2011 election. The ex-Tory MPP for the riding, Elizabeth Witmer, was known to be personally popular. But it can’t be comforting that she was that much more popular than the Hudak-led PCs.
More to the point, while Hudak may be entirely right that union muscle helped the NDP get a volunteer army out onto the streets of Kitchener-Waterloo, explaining away the defeats on that basis simply doesn’t cut it. Let’s take Hudak at his word and agree that union muscle provided decisive. Well, fine. OK. What’s he going to do about it?
Because he’s right. Ontario’s unions are powerful. But they aren’t magically concentrated just in Kitchener-Waterloo. The larger, more powerful unions — teachers come to mind — are scattered across every riding in the province, and have deep pockets. If Hudak can’t solve the union problem, he can’t win government. It’s that simple.
New Democrats are planning to expand their appeal across the Greater Toronto Area while keeping an eye on proposed changes to the electoral boundaries that could affect their chances in the downtown core.
[. . .]
Eight Toronto ridings went orange during the federal election last year.
The idea was to focus efforts in the ridings along the Bloor-Danforth subway line, but the party knows the key to expanding for the next election — and any serious shot at forming government — is found in the regions surrounding the city.
It appears the proposed changes to the federal electoral boundaries may not be much help on that front, according to a study by the demographic analysis firm Pollmaps.ca that examines what would happen if the votes from the 2011 election were distributed along the proposed new boundary lines.
The poll-by-poll analysis suggests that if voting trends remain stable, the Conservatives would pick up 13 new seats in Ontario — mainly in suburban areas — and the NDP would get just two more seats in the Scarborough area and Hamilton.
From roughly 2002 to 2007, a core part of discussion-heavy fandom and writing communities existed entirely on LiveJournal. LJ was unique among social media networks for a long time because so much of fandom communication happened in a central location. Though other journaling platforms like DeadJournal, GreatestJournal (both now defunct), InsaneJournal, and JournalFen existed, LJ was the central fandom hub due to the ease of combining community discussion with fanwork.
Over the last half-decade, however, that community has eroded. LiveJournal has been mired in dysfunction and bad public relations. Especially prominent since Fitzpatrick’s departure in 2005 has been an ongoing cycle of friction between LJ and its userbase:
1) LJ makes business and site design changes without notifying or listening to its userbase.
2) When the userbase responds with outrage, LJ fails to acknowledge or respond in a timely manner; when it does respond, it often acts like nothing is wrong or fails to apologize.
3) Eventually, LJ retracts its latest decision and things go back to normal, but with the trust of the userbase decayed.
4) Repeat steps 1-3.
"It's always a work in progress,” Petrochenko offered. “I've been working for LJ almost five years, and I remember times when it was so much worse in terms of technical process. I see a huge progress. There is a user backlash, but it's more about people liking or not liking the features. I see a huge progress in terms of how increasingly successful our product releases are.”
It’s true that LiveJournal has made strides in recent years toward improving its page load times and responding to issues. But although Petrochenko believes that this cycle of dysfunction is past, the effect it has had on users is still being felt.
The most notoriously bad decision of all for LiveJournal, the one that many users see as the beginning of the end, came in 2007. LiveJournal, systematically and without warning, deleted and banned hundreds of journals for impermissible content in a PR fiasco that made national headlines and came to be known as Strikethrough.
Many fandom journals were wrongfully targeted and deleted, and although most of the journals were restored, not all fans chose to return. In protest, the community fandom_counts was created to send a visible message to LiveJournal staff that fandom was a major part of the site’s userbase. Within 24 hours, over 30,000 accounts joined.
Even worse for many users was when the same thing happened all over again just three months later, in an incident known as Boldthrough. This time the outrage was even more sustained, and it didn’t help that several LJ staff showed disdain and lack of understanding of the userbase.
[. . .]
Just as Russian company SUP, who bought the struggling platform from SixApart in 2007, began to make progress in restoring LiveJournal’s integrity, the site was crippled repeatedly in 2010 and 2011 by DDOS attacks aimed at Russian bloggers. At the precise moment when LiveJournal happened to be unusable for many people due to the DDOS attacks, the growth of Tumblr and Twitter as social platforms began to draw more users in.
LiveJournal staff had to adapt, and fast. “Our response time is so fast now that we have one of the best DDOS protections on the Internet,” Petrochenko said, “just because we have been attacked so many times. Our OS team reacts immediately and most of the time our users don't even know that something even happened, because we've improved so much.”
But despite overcoming such a huge obstacle, LiveJournal can’t seem to overcome ongoing tension with its userbase.
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