[PHOTO] Union Station under renovation, at track level

[LINK] "Court hears challenge to Ontario Catholic school funding"

The latest challenge to the Ontario publically-funded Roman Catholic school system has gotten a fair amount of coverage--see 610 CKTB, Metro Toronto, the Toronto Star, and Xtra!.

It seems likely that the case will be dismissed on the grounds that Reva Landau, the woman who launched the suit, doesn't have standing. Whatever the exact outcome of Landau's case, though, I expect that the ongoing struggles over the funding of denominational schools in Ontario will continue for some time: the status quo is unjust, but no one save the NDP seems interested in enacting the constitutional changes necessary to defund the system as it currently exists.

A Toronto woman is asking Ontario's Superior Court to order the government to stop funding Catholic schools because as a taxpayer who doesn't share the church's beliefs, she says it infringes her freedom of religion.

[. . .]

Judge David Corbett, questioning the government lawyers, noted that section of the constitution was put in place at the time of Confederation to protect the rights of the Catholic minority, when the Protestant majority had the benefit of a Protestant school system.

Today the school system is secular and yet Catholic schools remain publicly funded, turning a law that was once intended to protect minority rights into one that confers a privilege, Corbett said.

[. . .]

"Someone who's Buddhist or Muslim or Jewish or atheist who wants to send a child to a school that promotes their particular philosophy has to pay for it fully out of their own pocket," [Reva] Landau said outside court Wednesday.

"Only Roman Catholics get the chance to send their children to a school that promotes their philosophy without having to pay any extra out of their pocket. So if we live in a multicultural society does that seem fair? Does that seem just?"

[. . .]

Landau is asking the Ontario Superior Court of Justice to order that the government stop funding Catholic high schools and only fund Catholic elementary schools to the extent they were funded in 1867 at the time of Confederation.

That would amount to being funded with "only property taxes from Catholics who declare themselves to be separate school supporters and who live within three miles of a separate school, and property taxes from wholly Catholic owned businesses," Landau wrote in her challenge.

[LINK] Two notes about Canadian soccer

Briefly? Things aren't good.

CBC carried the Canadian Press story reporting on the national team's loss 8-1 to Honduras. Coach Stephen Hart did lose his job, but the long-term prospects for the national team, as Richard Starnes noted in the Ottawa Citizen, are newly grim.

[I]the wake of a humiliating 8-1 defeat in Honduras, [Canadian soccer officials]find themselves forced to do yet another post-mortem on the men's soccer program.

In the past, Canadian soccer has been used to one step forward, two steps back. This time, it may take a while to get out of reverse.

Coach Stephen Hart is likely gone. A decent man who holds the affection and respect of his players, Hart will no doubt pay the price for what happened at Estadio Olimpico Metropolitano in Honduras.

The embarrassing qualifying exit will also no doubt trigger the retirement of some key players on the Canadian squad. With the next World Cup qualifying cycle years away, players based in Europe or nearing the end of their club career are unlikely to go through the rigours of international football for a team that has nothing to play for.

Players like Junior Hoilett and Jonathan de Guzman, who have other international options, will no doubt continue to turn their back on Canada.

[. . .]

After a 15-year absence from the final round of qualifying in the region, Canada seemed poised to return to CONCACAF's elite level.

A small but well-balanced pool of talent offered experience and youth. One of the teams in their group, Cuba, was a weak sister. Hart correctly pointed to Panama as the strongest side in the group but Honduras seemed a possible target.

More locally, the Toronto Star reports that, to compensate for a series of losses, Toronto FC has dropped its prices sharply.

Season ticket holders for the soccer team will be paying prices the team offered them six years ago in 2013.

Prices will be dropping an average of 20 per cent, with cheap seats dropping as much as 40 per cent.

Seats in the south end zone will go from $19 a game to $10. Prime red zone seats will go from $68 to $53.

Despite initial great fan support, Toronto FC has struggled since it started in 2007 and has never made the MLS playoffs. They are 5-20-7 this year in league play and in last place overall.

“The fans have done their job, we haven’t done ours,” said Tom Anselmi, president of MLSE. “We’ve got to get this thing right.”

[LINK] "10 Planets from the Alpha Centauri System, According to Science Fiction"

For today's Alpha Centauri fix, go to io9's Annalee Newitz's list of fictional planets in the Alpha Centauri system taken from all over science fiction (TV and movies, computer games, prose). Everything from Lost in Space to Neuromancer to Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri comes up.

(Me, I'm a SMAC fan. Hail Planet!)

[URBAN NOTE] On the proposed Downtown Relief Line

CBC reports that the Toronto Transit Commission wants to build a Downtown Relief Line, a subway line reaching from the central downtown to points east.

(I use the map provided to the CBC below. Other variants on the Downtown Relief Line have gone further south, intersecting at Union Station for instance, or even gone to make a complete loop reaching down from the Bloor-Danforth corridor.)

The TTC says that without a downtown relief line — a subway line to take some of the pressure off the Yonge and Bloor-Danforth lines — overcrowding on Toronto's subways will become the new normal.

A report to be presented at the TTC board meeting next week says that ridership in the downtown will grow by more than 50 per cent between now and 2031 and that the city and the province have to make a downtown relief line a priority.

Right now Metrolinx has a plan to address the problem — but not for 25 years.

The report, which was paid for by City Council and the TTC, says the Metrolinx timetable needs to be moved ahead by at least a decade.

The relief line would, according to the report, initially run from St. Andrew station on King Street West, along King and then swing north to connect with the Bloor-Danforth line at Pape station.

The estimated cost for the first section of line: $3.2 billion.

Currently there is no money set aside for a downtown relief line.

Steve Munro and Torontoist's Steve Kupferman both analyze the analyses. Munro makes the point that this is much needed, given decades of sustained underinvestment in fixed mass transit routes. Kupferman, though, fears that cost could kill the project.

The reason the DRL continues to be discussed is that it’s badly needed. The Yonge-University subway line can’t carry enough passengers to deal with Toronto’s ever-increasing demand for public transit. The TTC expects the line to be beyond capacity by 2031. Bloor-Yonge and Union stations are both having similar capacity problems. As things stand, your crowded morning commute is only going to get worse.

A downtown relief line would, in theory, siphon off some Yonge-University passengers, making things more pleasant for everybody and reducing wait times.

The problem, of course, is that subways are unbelievably expensive, as this latest report from the TTC reminds us.

The commission’s analysts think just building the first half of a DRL, between Pape and Union stations, would cost a staggering $3.2 billion. By any city’s standards, that’s an enormous amount of money.

The TTC report also presents a number of better, but more expensive, downtown-relief options. Want a west-end segment to go with that Pape-to-Union line? That’s an extra $3 billion. Want all that, plus a leg that goes all the way up to Eglinton? That’ll be a total of $8.3 billion.

How much is $8.3 billion, relatively speaking? Well, if you had that much on hand, you could afford to pay for every single one of the light-rail projects Toronto has on the go right now. An $8.3 billion project would effectively double what’s currently being spent on transit expansion in this city.

[MUSIC] Azealia Banks, "212" feat. Lazy Jay

New York City rapper Azealia Banks' 2012 song "212" is brilliant.

Let's leave aside the music, a brilliantly skronky track by one Lazy Jay that's itself an achievement. Banks' astonishingly adept delivery in multiple voices (sung, rapped) of her wonderfully complex and alternatively clever and crude lyrics--see Rapgenius.com's detailed line-by-line analysis of "212"--makes the song one I keep revisiting. Banks is on the verge of becoming a superstar; certainly Lana del Rey and Lady Gaga, both of whom have collaborated with Banks on tracks, recognize it. I hear the song on radio in Toronto, though with certain of choicer words bleeped out. (The staccato delivery of Banks' "cunt" helps make the song, I think.)

"212" is one of the queerest songs I've heard. Banks herself, as Xtra!'s Lisa Foad noted, is out as bisexual.

It was in February that Banks breezily came out during an interview with John Ortved, of The New York Times. Ortved positioned the queer reveal in relation to “212” – in which Banks taunts a male rival with the fact that his girlfriend would rather be fucking Banks: “Kick it with ya bitch who come from Parisian / She know where I get mine from, and the season / Now she wanna lick my plum in the evening / And fit that ton-tongue d-deep in / I guess that cunt gettin’ eaten.”

Wrote Ortved, “Ms. Banks considers herself bisexual, but, she said: ‘I’m not trying to be, like, the bisexual, lesbian rapper. I don’t live on other people’s terms.’”

Critics and fans were left goggle-eyed by her revelation. Suddenly, Banks’s name came with a built-in hashtag (#bisexual), “is-she-or-isn’t-she” inquiry (Banks was dating a boy), and the notion of “conundrum” (her sexuality as both riddle and dilemma).

Even now, there’s a gap in how Banks’s sexuality is understood. Her queer sensibility has been called “innovative” – but it’s also been misread as “hag mode.”

This inability to understand bisexuality is, as Huffington Post’s Amy Andre points out, in part due to the “monosexual” eye with which we’re “train[ed]” to understand sexuality.

“Monosexuality,” says Andre, “conflates the idea of being and doing” – who someone does becomes who someone is (same-sex couplings = homo; opposite-sex couplings = straight). Within this paradigm, bisexuality is rendered invisible and, therefore, invalid.

Witness the oddity, notes Andre, in “describ[ing Banks] as someone who ‘considers herself’ bisexual, rather than just as someone who is bisexual.” Indeed, this phrasing suggests Banks’s claim to bisexuality is speculative, inconclusive and to that end, debatable.

A recent Bitch Magazine article by Lindsay Zoladz notes Banks' usage of "cunt" as a landmark for its particularly queer contexts.

Banks is right: For at least two decades, in the queer subculture centered around voguing, drag houses, and ball culture, “cunt” (and its variant, “kunt”) has been used as a slang term meant to describe something beautiful, delicate, and soft. Recently, underground rappers like Cakes Da Killa and Antonio Blair have begun to use “cunt”/“kunt” to describe the music they make: a gritty-yet-glossy, sexually charged microgenre of queer rap. (A search on Soundcloud for tracks tagged “kunt” yields more than 500 unique results.) In music and in life, queering “cunt” expands and redefines the word’s meaning once again—it becomes an embrace of the liberating notion that one needn’t have a biological cunt to be feminine or female. Banks has repeatedly noted ball culture’s influence on her music and style, which means that the most famous lines of “212” showcase a young artist not responding to the word’s derogatory meaning so much as sidestepping it completely; “212” is perhaps the first example of the queer definition of “cunt” going mainstream.

I like it that this song is a global hit, opening up Banks' career and spawning a video that has received over 36 million views. I like this mainstreaming of queer content and culture.

[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto Rising"

Thanks to Facebook's Erik for pointing me to the Toronto Standard's linkage to this remarkable time-lapse video of the Toronto skyline by local photographer Tom Ryaboi

Tom Ryaboi's rooftop photographs have been stunning Toronto's online urbanist community for years. Well known to Urban Toronto forum members as tomms, Ryaboi's dizzying photos - which have been featured in BlogTO and Toronto Star - are taken from some of the highest vantages in the city: rooftops, cranes and skyscraper construction sites. The extreme views offer a whole new perspective of the city. Ryaboi's latest project "City Rising" goes beyond photography and puts his sky high images in motion. The time-lapse video can only be described as gorgeous. On his Vimeo page, the daredevil photographer explains what compels him to climb so high to capture and share these images:

With City Rising I wanted to bring others up to this perspective, and from here, show them the city as they have never seen it before — where the boundary between earth and sky is unclear and the placid beauty of the city lays spread out below, quietly humming along. City Rising takes the viewer straight through rush hour traffic to the highest urban peaks and the clouds above it all, all in under four minutes.