[PHOTO] Global Village Backpackers in the afternoon sun, King and Spadina

Global Village Backpackers, at 460 King Street West on the northwest corner of King and Spadina Avenue, closed down most unexpectedly on the 20th of January of this year. This ended the heritage building's history 139 years long of hosting one hotel or another. The building remains, obviously, in all of its blue-and-white glory, and the afternoon sun projected such a pattern that I just had to take a picture with my new smartphone.

[BLOG] Some Sunday links

• James Bow wishes he had better choices in the Ontario election than to vote for the least bad party.


• Centauri Dreams shares an essay by Cameron Smith examining cultural evolution on long-duration interstellar missions, like generation starships.


• Crooked Timber continues its symposium on the ethics of immigration, arguing in favour of open borders.


• The Dragon's Tales notes that streaks on Martian dune slopes might be ephemeral sheets of water.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the continuing devastation of Louisiana by the side-effects of the oil industry.


• Marginal Revolution notes that the cap-and-trade economics of the carbon market are spreading throughout the United States.


• The New APPS Blog wonders if the boredom plausibly associated with immortality could be dealt with by a short memory--the goldfish solution, as the blog calls it.


• Peter Rukavina shares a lovely example of his printing, a short passage of Jack Layton's final address to Canada.


• The Russian Demographics blog wonders what will happen to HIV in Crimea now that it's part of Russia.


• Torontoist notes that the New Democratic Party promises many lovely things for Toronto if it wins the Ontario elections but doesn't describe how it would pay for it all.


• Towleroad notes that playing a gay man in the 1981 film Making Love destroyed his film career.


• Window on Eurasia suggests that the anti-terrorist campaign in eastern Ukraine is much less bloody than Russian campaigns in the North Caucasus, and notes that the Russian Orthodox Church isn't quite on side (losing Ukraine would hurt it).

[FORUM] What do you think of the 2014 Ontario election?

Unless something surprising happens, I've decided. In the June 2014 Ontario election, I as a voter in the riding of Davenport will vote for the Liberal candidate, Cristina Martins.

James Bow wrote earlier this weekend about how the Liberals, for all their flaws, seem less bad than their competitors the Conservatives.

One of them is Tim Hudak’s Conservatives, that are basing their campaign on a promise to use tax cuts and harrowing reductions in regulations (such as shutting down the Ontario College of Trades) to create a million jobs.

Or, are they? Soon after Hudak announced this very sexy round number, economists have come forward questioning the math. The most serious allegation is that Hudak’s team counted person-years of work rather than actual jobs, over an eight year period. Most people would assume that created jobs are permanent and multi-year, but under Hudak’s original math, a person who gets a job at the start of Hudak’s plan for eight years hasn’t worked one job, he or she has worked eight. Rather than a million jobs plan, Hudak’s team appears to have brought forward something closer to a 125,000 jobs plan.

This would seem to be a pretty open and shut case. Numbers are numbers. Either Hudak and his team counted person-years as jobs, or they haven’t. Many, many economists have said that they have, and most of these economists appear to be non-partisan. The one economist who has defended Hudak’s plan as a million jobs plan is the guy who supplied the original numbers, who is not exactly impartial when it comes to handling criticism.

But Hudak is sticking to his guns, and this is a problem. If Hudak’s team has made a mistake, I would have a lot more respect for Hudak if he owned up to that mistake, altered his plan, corrected his behaviour, and moved on. That’s how decent people should behave in all things. That’s how accountability is supposed to work.

If Hudak refuses to accept responsibility for his mistakes, just as he refused to accept responsibility for by-election losses (blaming the unions, instead), how is he likely to behave as Premier when his government’s mistakes start hurting Ontarians in their pocketbooks?

As for the NDP, the judgement of Andrea Horwath in calling for an election undermines the party's credibility for me.

I'll be voting Liberal because the Liberal Party, as a brand, is the least bad of the three options out there. Kathleen Wynne has done just good enough a job of leading her party, and her government, for the Liberals to get my vote.

What do you think about this all? How are you going to vote, if you're an Ontarian? How would you vote, if you aren't an Ontarian? Can we hope, one day, that we'll be able to vote for political parties not because they're the least bad but because they're the best? Or am I making much ado about nothing and assuming unreasonable things about democracy in Ontario?

Discuss.