Toronto Centre Rosedale Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam says the 2.1-acre site at 11 Wellesley is the last piece of real estate of its size in an area quickly becoming crowded with soaring skyscrapers. She already has a name for the grass land, should negotiations prove fruitful: Jane Jacobs Park, in honour of the urban planning visionary.
Local residents burst into applause when the government management committee authorized city staff to use a portion of funds set aside for new parkland to negotiate the purchase of some or all of the Wellesley site. The pot of money is raised through cash in lieu contributions from developers that cannot dedicate park space.
The amount earmarked for the transaction is confidential. City council must still give final approval before negotiations begin.
The land, between Yonge and Bay streets, had been pegged as a new ballet and opera house, but the three levels of government pulled funding and the property has sat largely abandoned. The Ontario government, the owner, has put it on the market and received a number of bids. Initially, Councillor Doug Ford, a member of the committee, expressed opposition to buying a plot of land over the cost, but sided with the recommendations in the end.
[. . .]
Ms. Wong-Tam says her area has 137 development applications open now, not including the projects that are under construction. All but 10 are high-rise developments, she said. A former real estate agent, Councillor Wong-Tam believes she can secure a “sizeable” part of the park, around 1.5-acres.
“This is the very last opportunity to build a park of this significant size in a very dense urban environment and if we lose this opportunity — I would say this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity — then it’s gone forever.”
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suitablyemoname made a comment I'd like to promote to the front page. First, he linked to Sarah Boesveld's National Post article describing the hostile reaction of prominent figures in said school system to a recent statement by the education minister on abortion and misogyny.Ontario’s education minister is facing backlash from Catholic and pro-life groups after she appeared to equate anti-abortion views with “misogyny,” sparking questions of whether the provincial government seeks to restrict these teachings in publicly funded Catholic schools.
Catholics and religious groups have long worried an anti-bullying bill, now passed into law, would infringe on their constitutionally held right to teach church doctrine because it requires Catholic schools to allow students to form Gay Straight Alliance clubs.
Now, Laurel Broten’s comments at a press conference last week in her other capacity as Minister Responsible for Women’s Issues have stoked concerns the government wants to dictate what Catholics can and cannot teach.
“Bill 13 is about tackling misogyny,” she said. “Taking away a woman’s right to choose could arguably be one of the most misogynistic actions that one could take.”
[. . .]
“The right to life, from conception to natural death, is a core teaching of Catholicism,” Joanne McGarry, executive director of the Catholic Civil Rights League said in a statement Friday. “Ms. Broten reportedly said she doesn’t think there is a conflict between ‘choosing Catholic education for your children and supporting a woman’s right to choose’ so she is clearly ill-informed about the fundamentals of Catholicism.”
[. . .]
The Ontario Catholic School Trustees’ Association was more perplexed by her statements than offended, since there is no reference to abortion or misogyny in Bill 13. “Catholic parents who send children to our school expect that their children will be educated according to the tenets of the Catholic faith,” said president Marino Gazzola. “Our curriculum isn’t going to change, but this is certainly posing questions.”
suitablyemoname argues, is a shortsighted idea given public opinion.A 2012 Forum poll found that 87% of Ontarians believe that abortion should be legal in "some" or "all" cases. Only 11% share the doctrinal Catholic view that abortion should never be an option.
With that in mind, this is a spectacularly stupid fight to pick.
The GSA fight seriously weakened the very foundations of Catholic education in Ontario. Bluntly stated, a majority of Ontarians support the existence of GSAs in Catholic schools, and because the Catholics raised an enormous stink about it, they forced many of their traditional allies (including the Liberal Government, under a Catholic premier) to turn against them. Catholics lost the battle, and by drawing so much negative attention to Catholic schools, they've turned Ontarians against their existence. Polls taken this summer suggest that, in light of the GSA controversy, over 50% of Ontarians now support defunding the Catholic schools.
Abortion is even more one-sided as an issue. We're no longer talking about queer teenagers and their supporters, a relatively small constituency: we're talking about 87% of the population. We're talking about the women's movement, the unions, the social justice organizations, and countless other groups who have their fingers in all sorts of pies. Even the Hudak Conservatives won't touch abortion as an issue. (At least, not in public.)
In short: the Catholics have found an issue where they're overwhelmingly on the wrong side of popular opinion, where there are no political allies to be found, where people don't even want to discuss the matter, and which intersects directly with the existence of Catholic schools.
jsburbidge's [Bad username or site: http://jsburbidge.livejournal.com/39525.html @ livejournal.com]argument that the Roman Catholic Church under the current Pope may be preparing to withdraw from the idea of serving society in its entirety, instead retreating to a doctrinally orthodox hard core, makes more sense than ever.
At the news conference, Laughlin likened our current state to halftime at a football game. We’ve pulled out a major detection but even as we start to speculate about rocky worlds further out in the system, we’re faced with increasingly difficult observations. We can expect the Alpha Centauri story to unfold slowly, but Xavier Dumusque (Centro de Astrofísica da Universidade do Porto) pointed out how much more difficult it becomes to find planets as we move further out in the Centauri B system, adding that it would take at least twice as many measurements as the Geneva team has now made. Right now the researchers are saying the HARPS spectrograph might be limited to a planet with a lower mass limit of about four Earth masses here, but Stéphane Udry added that new ESO instrumentation was in the works that offered, in the not so distant future, good prospects for finding an Earth-mass planet in the habitable zone.
A 230-day orbit around Centauri B should put us right in the middle of the habitable zone, the place we’d most like to find a terrestrial world. Fortunately, it’s a region of orbital stability — the effects of Centauri A only become problematic as we move as much as 3 AU out from the star. Before we can find a habitable zone planet, we’ll need to confirm Centauri B b and begin to study it, which is where that useful transit could come in. The probable picture is stark — a rocky, lava-world with a surface temperature somewhere around 1500 Kelvin, surely in a tidally locked orbit. Not exactly a clement place, but the implication of other worlds in this system will urge us forward.
Voyager 1, now 17 light hours from Earth, continues to be my touchstone when asked about getting to Alpha Centauri — and in the last few days, I’ve been asked that question a lot. At 17.1 kilometers per second, Voyager 1 would need 74,000 years to reach the blistering orb we now believe to be orbiting Centauri B. Voyager 1 is not the fastest thing we’ve ever launched — New Horizons at one point in its mission was moving with greater velocity, though no longer, and the Helios II Solar probe, no longer functional, reaches about 70 kilometers per second at perihelion. But Voyager 1 will be our first craft to reach interstellar space, and it continues to be a measure of how frustratingly far even the nearest stars happen to be.
Cautionary notes are needed when a sudden burst of enthusiasm comes to these subjects, as it seems to have done with the discovery of Centauri B b. What we need to avoid, if we’ve got our eyes on long-term prospects and a sustained effort that may take centuries to succeed, is minimizing the challenges of an interstellar journey. Making it sound like a simple extension of existing interplanetary missions would create a public backlash once the real issues become clear. Better to be straightforward, to note the vast energy budget needed by an interstellar mission, the conundrum of propulsion, the breathtaking scope of the distances involved.
Sutherland decided to reopen excavations at the most promising site, a place known as Tanfield Valley on the southeast coast of Baffin Island. In the 1960s U.S. archaeologist Moreau Maxwell had excavated parts of a stone-and-sod building there, describing it as "very difficult to interpret." Sutherland suspected that Viking seafarers had built the structure.
Since 2001 Sutherland's team has been exploring Tanfield Valley and carefully excavating surviving parts of the mysterious ruins. They have discovered a wide range of evidence pointing to the presence of Viking seafarers: pelt fragments from Old World rats; a whalebone shovel similar to those used by Viking settlers in Greenland to cut sod; large stones that appear to have been cut and shaped by someone familiar with European stone masonry; and more Viking yarn and whetstones. And the stone ruins bear a striking resemblance to some Viking buildings in Greenland.
Still, some Arctic researchers remained skeptical. Most of the radiocarbon dates obtained by earlier archaeologists had suggested that Tanfield Valley was inhabited long before Vikings arrived in the New World. But as Sutherland points out, the complex site shows evidence of several occupations, and one of the radiocarbon dates indicates that the valley was occupied in the 14th century, when Viking settlers were farming along the coast of nearby Greenland.
In search of other clues to help solve the mystery, Sutherland turned to the Geological Survey of Canada. Using a technique known as energy dispersive spectroscopy, the team examined the wear grooves on more than 20 whetstones from Tanfield Valley and other sites. Sutherland and her colleagues detected microscopic streaks of bronze, brass, and smelted iron—clear evidence of European metallurgy, which she presented October 7 at a meeting of the Council for Northeast Historical Archaeology in St. John's, Canada.
Sutherland speculates that parties of Viking seafarers travelled to the Canadian Arctic to search for valuable resources. In northern Europe at the time, medieval nobles prized walrus ivory, soft Arctic furs, and other northern luxuries—and Dorset hunters and trappers could readily stockpile such products. Helluland's waters teemed with walruses, and its coasts abounded in Arctic foxes and other small fur-bearing animals. To barter for such goods, Viking traders likely offered bits of iron and pieces of wood that could be carved into figurines and other goods, Sutherland says.
If Sutherland is correct, the lines of evidence she has uncovered may point to a previously unknown chapter in New World history in which Viking seafarers and Native American hunters were partners together in a transatlantic trade network. "I think things were a lot more complex in this part of the world than most people assumed," Sutherland said. James Tuck agreed. "It's pretty convincing that there was a much larger Norse presence in the Canadian Arctic than any of us thought."
This most recent prorogation terminates an ongoing investigation of contempt against one of McGuinty’s ministers and effectively precludes anticipated motions of contempt against an additional minister and McGuinty himself until a new session of the legislature, when McGuinty will no longer be premier.
This alone renders this prorogation an abuse. Where it fits alongside past abusive prorogations will be debated (This excellent Peter Loewen piece is a good start).
Also troubling is that there are no clear timelines for when the legislature will be called back into session.
But there is something even more disconcerting afoot.
Across the country prime ministers and premiers are making it clear that they see legislatures – our elected representatives – as an undue burden. Whether as a means of managing legislative impasses or risks of losing confidence or simply to escape scrutiny, first ministers have demonstrated a predilection for simply shutting down the respective legislative assemblies in their jurisdictions.
It is worth examining the premier’s own words in explaining the prorogation. In an email sent to Liberal supporters McGuinty said: “I’ve asked the Lieutenant Governor to prorogue the legislature to allow those discussions with our labour partners and the opposition to occur in an atmosphere that is free of the heightened rancour of politics in the legislature…”
The “rancour” that Premier McGuinty is so dismissive of is an essential dynamic of public accountability within our democratic system, which sees partisan politics – institutionalized adversarialism – as the best means of securing democracy.
Liberals in Ontario and B.C. could hardly have a more tenuous hold on power. Both have been down in the polls so long that it looks like up to them. B.C. Premier Christy Clark speculates now and then about jettisoning her party’s name, which is a bit confusing anyway because the B.C. Liberals are a centre-right coalition that little resembles the federal party.
Liberals do form the official opposition in Quebec, Newfoundland and Labrador, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. But given the steady drumbeat of salacious revelations from a commission of inquiry about the financing of Jean Charest’s former government in Quebec, it is unlikely the Liberals would do as well today as they did in September’s election.
Liberal parties are in third place in Alberta, Manitoba and the Yukon, the only territory where members of the legislature have party affiliations. In Saskatchewan in the last election the provincial Liberals didn’t even win one vote in 100.
In federal politics, the Liberals have lost seats and vote share in each of the last four elections. If they lose much more support they will start to owe votes to the other parties.
The federal Liberals’ problems began long before the current slump, Carleton University journalism prof Paul Adams argues in his new book Power Trap. “Arguably the Liberal party has been in decline since the 1950s,” he writes, “and there has been no ‘natural governing party’ since.” The federal Liberals have had no real presence in the Prairie West in a half-century. They have not won a majority of Quebec seats since 1980. Since 2004, when a united Conservative party put an end to the vote-splitting that produced a decade-long near-monopoly of Liberal seats in Ontario, the Liberals have lost another bucket of Ontario seats each time they went to bat.
[. . .]
None of these trends is necessarily irreversible. Canadian political history rarely moves in straight lines for long. But the decline of Liberal parties across most of the West, Liberal-branded crises in all of the three largest provinces and the federal party’s enduring slump all suggest a robust trend.
When they get in a tight spot, Liberals like to present themselves as the only moderate solution in a field of radicals. Justin Trudeau did it again when he announced his leadership candidacy. It is a spiel that reflects Liberals’ enduring wish for an imaginary fight that would be easy to win instead of the one they’re in. In fact, Liberals’ problems would vanish if the other parties would oblige them by behaving as ideologues. Conservative and social-democratic parties have sharply moderated their messages. There is no longer anything the NDP wants to nationalize, and the party likes to brag that it has delivered more balanced budgets where it has formed governments than Liberals have. Meanwhile, Stephen Harper repeatedly votes against his own backbenchers when they propose measures that would reopen the abortion debate. If Harper and Tom Mulcair were wild-eyed freaks, there would be acres of room for a centrist party. They aren’t, so there isn’t.
There are historical precedents for the association between fracture and counterrevolution. In response to the debtor insurgencies which took place in America in the 1780s, and which threatened the interests of creditors and property, James Madison observed that in small societies it is possible for democratic majorities with clear and distinct interests (usually inimical to property) to cohere and impose their will on the minority. But ‘extend the sphere’ of society, he wrote, ‘and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.’ After the French Revolution, doctrinaires like François Guizot and Pierre Royer-Collard, and their student Tocqueville, came to similar conclusions about the counter-revolutionary value of pluralism. And in the Old South, John Calhoun formulated his theory of concurrent majorities – an already fragmented society would be further fragmented by the near impossibility of the national government’s taking concerted action on behalf of the majority – as a counter to the abolitionist North.
Fracture need not always be a counterrevolutionary device. Neither must every counter-revolution follow the path of fracture. But the fact that the two are so often twinned does cause one to ask why fracture is so threatening to revolution and reform, and so friendly to counter-revolution and retrenchment. Why are unity and cohesion a necessary if not sufficient condition for any kind of democratic movement from below?
Movements of subordinate classes require the concerted action of men and women who, individually or locally, have little power, but collectively and nationally (or internationally) have potentially a great deal. If they hope to exercise it, such movements must press for and maintain their unity against many challenges: not only divisions among themselves (such movements hardly lack for heterogeneity of gender, race, status, religion, ethnicity and ideology) but also the power of their superiors. For these movements, unity is a precious and precarious achievement, always under threat from within and without.
Counter-revolutionary movements, by contrast, are multiply served by the forces of fragmentation. Political and economic elites, with their independent command of resources, do not need to rely so much on unity and co-ordination. What they require instead is the disunity of their opponents: the reverse of Rosa Luxemburg’s dictum that ‘the most important desideratum’ in any struggle is ‘the utmost possible unity of the leading social democratic part of the proletarian masses’. That disunity, it turns out, is fairly easy to achieve. Not only does fragmentation splinter the counter-revolution’s opponents into roving bands of ineffective malcontents; it also makes it more difficult to identify any ruling class or clique. No longer is there a simple target for mass action (the Bastille, the Winter Palace); there is just a pleasing spray of power, attached to no one group or individual in particular, potentially available to one and all. This, it seems to me, is one of the great obstacles the left has faced for the last half-century or so. With the Occupy movement, and its pitch for unity, one so grand (‘99 per cent’) it makes ‘workers of the world’ seem practically poststructural, we may at last be leaving it behind.
The legitimation crisis in the economic and financial sphere is rather obvious. It ties into a crisis of legitimation in the political system not only through the popular cynicism towards political systems throughout Europe and the rise of extremism such as the Greek neo-nazi Golden Dawn. But we can see this as well from political actors themselves, from the systematic lying, an phenomenon understated by the phrase “post-truth politics” (an absurdity if there ever were one as truth remains truth and we are not beyond it. To not tell the truth does not project one into a post- state but into good old-fashioned lying), to efforts to limit voting and democratic accountability over the polity.
The massive corporate funding of politics from financiers combined with extensive and increased surveillance as well as repression of anti-systemic movements tell a story of a system where the power elite thinks it can only maintain its hegemony more bluntly, through hard power (municipal police states at home, never-ending resource wars abroad). The much-denounced 1% probably understand what is happening but, as Atrios repeatedly has told us, either through evil or incompetence, can only imagine policies that maintain their power and wealth but, by making things worse, only precipitate the crisis further.
[. . . ]
[C]heating is relatively guilt-free for students because they have adopted, following the lead from the media, probably their parents, education “experts” and the overall narrative about education, an instrumental view of education: secondary education gets you into an elite college, which will get you on Wall Street or other elite places. The point of education is the solidification of capital (cultural, economic and social) in the hands of the “1%”, not education per se. This instrumental conception trickles down but in the form of education = job training, or, to use the phrase now in vogue “workforce development” and this is justified by the idea that if education is so costly, then, there must be a visible, tangible return on investment. In that context, one can feel justify to minimize one’s investment (either through minimal investment in individual classes or through cheating).
As for the wealthy, as anyone who has read Richistan knows, there is a cutthroat competition at the very top of the social ladder so that already academically successful students are pushed hard, hence the cheating, because of the fear of falling, even if still within the top 10%.
[. . . ]
What does this all amount to? A multi-institutional legitimation crisis where a lot of people find themselves brutally and violently assigned to the precariat, but also a situation where the privileged can see how easily, in this anomic context, their privilege could be questioned and react violently to it (whether it is lashing out on Twitter, or putting out political ads and funding elections or any other privilege consolidating strategy).
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