Sep. 24th, 2012

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Entering the space in the Galleria Shopping Centre where Zellers used to be, I snapped these photos.

Galleria Shopping Centre, 40th Anniversary (1)

Galleria Shopping Centre, 40th Anniversary (2)

Galleria Shopping Centre, 40th Anniversary (3)
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I've blogged a fair bit about the Galleria Shopping Centre, a neighbourhood institution on the southwestern corner of Dufferin and Dupont that has seen better days. Between the currently-grim aesthetics and the recent closure of its Zellers anchor store--I blogged about this back in June, and shared photographs of the scene this morning--it's easy to fear for the mall's future.

Joel McConvey's brief article in Toronto weekly The Grid provides an interesting corrective to the consensus view of the Galleria. In it, he covers the 40th anniversary celebrations of the mall, highlighting the extent to which the Galleria was quite innovative in its time and is even now a hub for the neighbourhood's Italian-Canadian and Portuguese-Canadian populations. The critical question as yet unanswered is whether or not, as the neighbourhood's demographics change, the mall can change with it.

“Looking for squid, octopus, prosciutto, pig’s ears, or fresh sardines?” read the piece from the August 18, 1972 Toronto Star. “You’ll find them all at North America’s first ethnic food plaza in Toronto’s west end.”

It turns out that the Galleria, infamous for its time-capsule quality (and, increasingly, as the heir to nearby Dufferin Mall’s “ghetto mall” designation), was once a trailblazer in bringing ethnic diversity to the city. More recently, the building, one of the oldest enclosed shopping centres in the GTA, has developed a reputation as a lost cause. During last Saturday’s 40th anniversary celebrations, a series of musical performances took place in front of plastered-over windows of what was, just a few weeks ago, a Zellers.

But the bash at least proved that the mall’s original function—providing a gathering place for the neighbourhood’s large Portuguese and Italian population—remains intact.

“I’ve come here for 28 years,” said Miguel Da Silva, bongo player for the band Amigos da Dundas, while warming up to perform Spanish and Brazilian tunes at the festivities. “I’d like to see it stay how it is.”

With Price Chopper currently transforming into FreshCo, a newly opened outlet of the Ontario Conservatory of Music, and ongoing discussions about what will occupy the former Zellers location, Da Silva’s likely to be disappointed. But a Dufferin-style remake isn’t in the works either, as Galleria management is trying its best to stay true to the mall’s beginnings.

“It’s a community hub,” said Cristina Jackson, the mall’s property administrator, who started working there in 1979 and hopes to see it updated without compromising its familiarity to customers. “A lot of people who were in one way or another associated with the Galleria, they come back. I know people who used to come here with their grandparents who are now bringing their own children.”
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The Toronto Star's Daniel Dale writes about the ill-thought decision of Rob Ford to attack Newstalk 1010, the radio station that hosts the weekly radio show the mayor puts on with his brother and fellow city councillor Doug Ford, while the two are in the middle of their show no less. Compare Natalie Alcoba's National Post article.

Mayor Rob Ford and Councillor Doug Ford angrily criticized Toronto’s media on their Newstalk 1010 radio show on Sunday — including Newstalk 1010.

The brothers’ latest broadside against perceived media failings follows a two-week period in which the mayor was taken off message by stories on his use of city resources for his football teams and his personal request for city repair work outside his family company’s building.

Rob Ford regularly denounces the Toronto Star. Doug Ford has lambasted the Star, the Globe and Mail and the CBC. But neither of them had publicly scolded a talk radio station that is generally sympathetic to them.

Early in the Sunday show, Rob Ford claimed again that last week’s official trip to Chicago won’t cost taxpayers “a dime” — even though taxpayers are picking up the tab for at least some of the eight councillors who attended. Newstalk ran a mid-show update that pointed out his claim was false.

Soon after, Doug Ford said unnamed members of the media are “like a bunch of little sucky little kids” who “whine and cry and moan” when the Fords stand up to them and who “sensationalize and lie through their teeth.”

Rob Ford then added: “They’re pathological liars, that’s what drives me nuts. Let me tell you: we talk about an hour on Chicago, and now these guys come out and put advertising on about expenses,” he said, referring to the Newstalk news update as advertising.

“They don’t even know what the expenses are, because the councillors said this, this is all gonna balance out at the end, and I know, I’m gonna stick to what I said: it’s not costing taxpayers a dime.”

Talk radio is Rob Ford’s preferred media venue, and he regularly calls in to Newstalk. The brothers thanked and praised the station in an attempt to make amends before the show ended.

“If they’re comin’ after me, I’m comin’ after them. I don’t care who they are. So you better make sure your chin strap is done up pretty tight,” Rob Ford said with a hint of a chuckle.
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The Tin Man has a post up reacting to US president candidate Mitt Romney's identification of 47 percent of the American population being disqualified as political actors because they don't pay income tax. He notes that there's a very real and dangerous shift in language, in the United States and elsewhere, deemphasizing the concept of the citizen in favour of the much more limited concept of "taxpayer". Here in Toronto, Rob Ford has famously talked about Toronto's inhabitants as taxpayers, promising to save them money, and not talked about citizenship very much at all. (Toronto, it should be noted, had property qualifications for voting at the municipal level into the 1960s.)

When our country was founded, most states had property qualifications for voting. In other words, you weren’t eligible to vote unless you owned property. The idea was that only stakeholders knew the relative costs and benefits of different economic policies; if you didn’t have any “skin in the game,” as it were, then you were unaffected by policy choices or couldn’t possibly be aware of the effects of those policy choices. As our society became more democratic over the first half of the nineteenth century, states reduced or even eliminated these property qualifications.

Today, the idea that there should be a property qualification for voting seems ridiculous. Under such a rule, nobody who rented an apartment would be allowed to vote.

Now, those who decry the mooching 47 percent aren’t saying that the 47 percent — which includes the elderly, the working poor, war veterans, and others — shouldn’t be allowed to vote. But the sentiment is similar. Certain people are better than others because they “produce” and pay taxes. Everyone else doesn’t count. (Except that it’s apparently all-American to try to pay as little taxes as you possibly can.)

[. . .]

There’s this subtext (and sometimes it’s not even the subtext — it’s the actual text) that certain people just shouldn’t be allowed to participate in our democracy. We got rid of property qualifications in this country sometime before the Civil War; some people seem to want to bring them back in some form.

But being a human being is about more than owning property.

And “taxpayer” is not a synonym for “citizen.”
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Ian Steadman's Wired article reporting on a genetic study suggesting that the Khoisan peoples of southern Africa diverged genetically from the rest of the human species a hundred thousand years ago, before the great human migration from Africa, points to a remarkable finding about human history.

While homo sapiens evolved roughly 200,000 years ago, it appears that the Khoe-San people branched off and went their separate way around 100,000 years ago, according to research in the journal Science. That divergence, reports Live Science, comes far earlier than the human migration out of Africa, and also predates the migration into the area of other early human branches such as the Bantu or Pygmies who now live in the surrounding regions.

The geneticists, led by Carina M Schlebusch from Uppsala University, analysed around 2.3 million single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) from a sample of 220 southern Africans from 11 ethnic groups for genetic variations. The result was a noticeable split between the group who we now know as the Khoe-San and the rest of humanity dating back 100,000 years.

The Khoe-San (also spelled Khoisan, Khoesaan and Khoesan) live mainly in southern Africa, with their own distinct cultures, lifestyles and physical characteristics compared to the Bantu ethnic groups that surround them. The Khoe-San are largely divided into two groups — foragers and keepers of livestock — and their languages include distinctive click noises that aren’t found in the languages of their neighbours. Genetic adaptations were found among the Khoe-San DNA which are associated with skeletal development — a finding which may explain why they are noticeably taller than Bantu groups.

Any reasons why the split occurred are unknown. It is however likely that the harsh, dry climate and geography of Africa during that era played a part in forcing communities into isolation from one another.


GNXP's Razib Khan has made some posts on the subject with interesting discussion threads, here and here.

GenomeWeb goes into more detail.

Based on the SNP array results followed by data analysis, the researchers were able to identify what they claim is the oldest divergence event in human history. Additional statistical analysis did not localize the origin of modern humans to a single geographic region in Africa, but instead suggested a complex population history within the continent.

"We raise the possibility that modern humans emerged from a structured population, in contrast to emerging from a homogenous and possibly small population," said corresponding author Mattias Jakobsson.

Jakobsson told BioArray News that it is often suggested that early humans originated from a small, localized population in eastern or southern Africa. But according to his team's findings, the human population has actually been structured into different subpopulations "for a long time" and "it is possible that modern humans emerged from a non-homogeneous group."

Jakobsson's team's research focused on two ethnic groups indigenous to southern Africa, the Khoi and San, that share physical and linguistic characteristics and are commonly grouped together under the name "Khoisan" to distinguish them from the Bantu-speaking majority of the region. The Khoisan populations are concentrated in arid parts of the region, especially in South Africa's Kalahari Desert, and previous studies have shown that the groups are genetically diverse, and appear to have descended from a deeply divergent human lineage.

[. . .]

As the history of sub-Saharan Africa does not conform to a simple tree-like model, Jakobsson said the group's approach was designed to capture the major flow of ancestry over time, he said. Ultimately, the group was able to use a mathematical model to estimate population divergence times.

Based on these analyses, the team concluded that Khoisan populations diverged from the rest of early human populations more than 100,000 years ago, before the migration of modern humans out of Africa, which is estimated by some to have occurred about 70,000 years ago. This event also predated the divergence of central African Pygmies from other African groups, the next lineage to diverge about 50,000 years ago.

In addition, the team found stratification among Khoisan groups. For example, the researchers estimated that the San populations from northern Namibia and Angola separated from the Khoi and San populations living in South Africa between 25,000 and 40,000 years ago.
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Tristin Hopper's National Post article "Warriors for gay rights: The Conservatives have become unlikely LGBT supporters" is somewhat disingenuous. Why would the Conservative Party have a reputation for being anti-gay? Apart from descending from mostly a Reform Party/Canadian Alliance that was not very pro-gay at all but had roots in , back in 2005 the Conservative Party voted massively against the Bill C-38, the party under then-leader and now-Prime Minister moreover going out of its way to oppose the legislation, trying to pass amendments that would neuter the law. 2005 was not a very long time ago at all, the Conservative Party has largely the same membership and leadership that it has now, and parliamentary recognition of the right to same-sex marriage was one of the biggest successes of the gay rights movement to date. Frankly, it would be more surprising if the Conservative Party wasn't still suspected, especially with stories intermittantly appearing in the press of Conservative MPs making homophobic statements and mention of gay rights being excluded from citizenship guides.

All that said, Hopper's central point--that the Conservative Party has not only come to turns with recent progress in gay rights, but is actively supporting gay rights and is likely to continue to support gay rights not least because the Conservative Party's ideological issues are more concerned with economic matters than cultural ones--is valid. For Canada's Conservative Party, there isn't necessarily a reason not to consider gay rights an issue, or to count non-heterosexuals as an important voting demographic. Glen McGregor's Ottawa Citizen article documenting how the Conservative Party did a mass E-mailing to non-heterosexual Canadians who signed a gay rights petition promoting the government's record on gay rights shows just that.

Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird stood before the Montreal Council on Foreign Relations this month and outlined his aggressive agenda to “stand up to the violent mobs that seek to criminalize homosexuality.”

“Draconian punishment and unspeakable violence are inflicted on people simply for whom they love and for who they are,” he said.

That same day, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney touted Canada as a haven for gay refugees from Iran. Working with Iranian Railroad for Queer Refugees, Mr. Kenney’s office had fast-tracked 100 gay Iranians into Canada, saving them from possible execution.

[. . .]

“I can no longer shock people in the conservative movement when I tell them I’m gay – but I can shock gay people when I tell them I’m Conservative,” said Fred Litwin, and former vice-president of the Ottawa Centre Conservatives.

In June, Mr. Litwin was one of the organizers of the Fabulous Blue Tent Party, a gathering of approximately 800 gay Conservatives at Ottawa’s Westin Hotel that went until 3 a.m.

[. . .]

“It’s no secret that the Conservative Party hasn’t always been the biggest champion of gay rights, but public pressure, and quite frankly, society evolving has changed their views,” said Jamie Ellerton, an openly gay former staffer for Mr. Kenney.

“The Conservative Party, like the rest of society, has moved to be more supportive of gay rights in recent years, and I see that trend continuing,” he said.

Mr. Baird often supported same-sex marriage in his days as a Progressive Conservative member of Ontario’s provincial parliament. As foreign affairs minister, he has taken the fight for gay rights overseas.

[. . .]

In 2009, Mr. Harper spoke out against a Ugandan bill that promised to dramatically toughen criminal sanctions against homosexuality, which were already illegal in the African country.

“When I was at the Commonwealth conference, what was [Stephen Harper] talking about? The gays,” Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni said in 2010.

[. . .]
U.K. Tories are undergoing a similar evolution. In October, U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron threatened to suspend aid to Commonwealth countries if they refused to abandon anti-gay legislation. Last summer, during a reception for LGBT representatives at 10 Downing Street, Mr. Cameron promised to legalize gay marriage by 2015. “If it’s good enough for straight people like me, it’s good enough for everybody,” he said.

Gay/conservative relations are not nearly as cordial in the United States, where large swaths of the Republican party view homosexuality as a sin. In May, Richard Grenell, an openly gay spokesman for Republican vice-president candidate Mitt Romney, stepped down after the campaign was barraged by criticism from socially conservative groups.

By focusing on free enterprise and individual liberties, instead of religious and cultural issues, Canada’s conservatives have been able to maintain a “much broader tent than the Republican Party in the United States and a stronger movement overall,” wrote Chris Reid, a gay former Conservative candidate, in an email to the Post.
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