[PHOTO] Don't boycott the 2014 Ontario elections

I photographed this poster this morning, pasted on a utility pole on the southwest corner of Dupont and Dufferin, while I was waiting for the Dufferin bus to come take me to work.

Today's provincial elections here in Ontario are controversial. There's much to be frustrated with in the workings of Ontario's political parties. None of these frustrations will be dealt with by not turning out.

I'll be reporting to my voting station this evening after work to cast my ballot. Please, if you're reading this and you live in Ontario and you are eligible, do the same. Democracy can only be improved if we actually try to improve it.

[LINK] "Final Ontario projection: Likely Liberal, possible PC victory"

Over at Canadian politics blog Three Hundred Eight, Éric Grenier notes that, while not much seems likely to change as a result of this election, small fluctuations are possible. (A Liberal majority is possible, as is a Conservative minority.)

Kathleen Wynne's Liberals stand the best chance of forming government in today's Ontario provincial election, with a likely return to a minority legislature. Tim Hudak's Progressive Conservatives will likely form the Official Opposition again, though they stand an outside shot of taking power themselves. Andrea Horwath's New Democrats should retain their role as third party in Queen's Park.

The Liberals are projected to win between 42 and 55 seats, putting them just in range of a majority government (54 are needed), with between 35.4% and 40.6% of the popular vote. While this would be their fourth consecutive election victory, it could also be the least decisive of the four. The precise projection gives the Liberals 49 seats and 36.9% of the vote. That is little different from the 48 seats the party had at dissolution and the 37.7% the party took in 2011.

The Progressive Conservatives are projected win between 33 and 44 seats with between 34.3% and 39% of the popular vote. This does make a minority victory by the PCs possible. The precise projection gives the party 36 seats and 35.8% of the popular, again little different from dissolution (37 seats) and their electoral performance in 2011.

The New Democrats are projected to win between 18 and 22 seats with between 20.4% and 23.8% of the popular vote. There is a chance, then, that the NDP could put up their best numbers since 1990. The precise projection gives them one more seat than they had at dissolution with 22, and slightly less of the vote than they earned in 2011 at 22.2%.

The Greens flirted with a seat for a period in the campaign, but in the end are projected to remain shutout of the legislature with between 2.9% and 5.1% of the vote. The precise projection gives them 4% support, which would represent their second best performance.

[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto Library offers store-quality book printing to customers"

CBC observes that the Toronto Reference Library now offers a book printing service. While I don't see any indication that the library will offer more technical and non-prining services like registering an ISBN and the like, this is a decided advance.

You typically go to the library to take out a book, but now you can go to a Toronto library and make one.

The Toronto Reference Library unveiled its newest form of technology at its Digital Innovation Hub — a book printing machine.

[. . .]

What’s new is the ability to self-publish books – whether your own piece of literature, a cook book, dissertation or whatever you choose for a relatively reasonable price of $145 for 10 copies of a 150-page book.

"It's like watching a birthing,” said Toronto author Nina Munteanu. She was one of the first people to use the machine.

The Asquith Press, costing about $68,000, sounds like a photocopier while it works, but the Plexiglas sides reveal each stage of the book making process.

"You can literally see the cover being made and all the pages being trimmed and glued together and being bound,” she said.

[URBAN NOTE] "Stuck in Condoland"

Toronto Life's Philip Preville has a feature article noting that, between the condo boom downtown and the high price of real estate across Toronto, many people are having to live with homes that are smaller than they expected. Often much smaller.

Shannon Bury was 27, with a marketing job in the 905 and her own condo in Burlington, when the big city came to fetch her. The company she worked for was acquired by a larger firm, Pareto Marketing, which moved her job to Toronto. She moved along with it and traded up, selling her place in Burlington and buying a 607-square-foot, one-bedroom-plus-den unit in Charlie, a 36-storey tower proposed for Charlotte Street near King and Spadina. She got the unit pre-construction for less than $300,000, which was a steal, because really she’d purchased much more than space: she bought the dream Toronto and its developers have been selling throughout this decade-long boom. She was single in the city, blonde and svelte, with a well-paying career-track job and, soon, a condo on the edge of clubland. Toronto would be at her feet and at her service. It was the spring of 2008.

Then she met a guy. A great guy, Paul LeBrun, a Winnipeg native who’d landed in Toronto with a Bay Street securities job. They met at a mutual friend’s condo in February 2010, at a party to watch the Vancouver Olympics men’s gold medal hockey game. (The running joke among their friends is that Paul still doesn’t know who won; he was too busy wooing Shannon.) Before long they were living together at Yonge and St. Clair, with an eye to moving into her condo later that year, once it was finished. But the construction fell behind schedule, and their life together began to outpace the cranes. They got married in the ­summer of 2012, and when they moved into Charlie that November, they were already planning their family. “We figured it would take eight months or so to get pregnant,” she says. “Then there’d be nine months of pregnancy, so we’d have time to enjoy condo life before the baby arrived.” She conceived by Christmas.

Jacob, now 10 months old, is busy teaching his parents the true meaning of square footage. To make room for all the baby equipment, Shannon and Paul relegated to storage an armchair, an end table, a coffee table and, most recently, a loveseat. A lone couch remains from their brief childless-couple condo life. “Our time is spent in play dates, and play dates are spent with everyone sitting on the floor anyway,” Shannon says. Jacob’s playtime inevitably spills out into the hallway. The neighbours don’t complain, and neither does Shannon when, for instance, her 20-something party-boy neighbour has friends over for pre-drinks on the balcony before heading out clubbing. “I can’t hold it against him,” she says. “I’d be doing the same thing in his position. I’m jealous, really.”

Everything that happened to Shannon and Paul in the last few years is also happening to the city itself, shaped by forces greater than any of them. Toronto has been swept up in a maelstrom of human and economic migration that has swelled its population in the core. Shannon and Paul bought into the New Toronto brand: the vertical city of luxury living, cultural experience, Momofuku food and trendy boutiques. That’s how the lifestyle is marketed by politicians and developers alike, and it’s incredibly appealing to young adults in all their forms: staid professionals, graduating millennials, hipsters.

Now their lives are changing, in a wave that could turn out to be as big as the one that herded them downtown: they are becoming parents. Downtown Toronto is being reshaped by the latest baby boom. The total number of ­preschool-age kids is rising fastest where condo towers are going up, and nowhere is the demographic shift happening more intensely than in the crane-addled area south of Queen from University to Dufferin; there, the number of kids under age five has increased since 2006 by a whopping 65 per cent. Toronto is bearing witness to the birth of a new generational phenomenon: the Condo Kid.

And the city is welcoming its Condo Kids, in essence, by putting their cribs in the alcove nursery that condo marketers call a “den.” The real estate tracking firm Urbanation says that, as of last March, there are more than 25,000 condo units under construction in the former City of Toronto, and few of them will have more than two bedrooms. Only 21 of the 50 projects in pre-construction will have three-bedroom units. Even the units with two bedrooms are getting smaller: the average size of a condo in the GTA has dropped precipitously since 2009, from well over 900 square feet to 797 square feet today. Singles in the city are coupling up, having kids and looking for bigger homes, yet developers continue to flood the landscape with ever-tinier units—a situation abetted by a lack of planning and enabled by politicians. A quiet revolution is underway in how Toronto raises kids, one that was perfectly predictable but for which the city has failed to prepare. A whole generation of families are finding themselves stuck in their starter homes.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• The Dragon's Gaze examines the very complicated history of the formation of the trinary system of Fomalhaut.


• The Dragon's Tales links to a report on the study claiming to find chemical evidence of the impact that created the Moon out of moon rocks.


• Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money notes that no plausible American intervention could have prevented the fall of Mosul to ISIS.


• Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen notes the predictions of economists that Brazil will win the World Cup.


• Out of Ambit's Diane Duane shares a photo of people scavenging from a hundred thousand books dumped out of a bankrupt bookstore in Ireland.


• Livejournaler pollotenchegg maps fertility rates in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts.


• The Transit Toronto blog notes the arrest of a half-dozen TTC workers on charges of embezzling from their organization.


• Towleroad notes opposite-sex married but bisexual Anna Paquin's Twitter posting for pride.


• The Volokh Conspiracy's David Bernstein takes issue with the idea that Jewish Republicans are rare. (Representation is, as a consequence of their distribution.)


• Window on Eurasia links to an analyst's concern that the Donbas area of eastern Ukraine, currently seeing fighting, might end up becoming alienated from the rest of Ukraine on the model of Northern Ireland.

[LINK] Four links on the new Liberal majority government in Ontario

CBC broke the news of the new Liberal majority government.

Despite being hounded on both sides by rivals who harped on Liberal government scandals during the longer-than-normal campaign, Liberal Leader Kathleen Wynne has steered her party to a majority and a commanding electoral victory, based largely on major gains in the Toronto area, while PC Leader Tim Hudak declared he is resigning.

With all ridings reporting some results, Liberals were elected or leading in 59 constituencies to 27 for the Progressive Conservatives and 21 for the NDP.

The strong Liberal showing has its roots in the Greater Toronto Area, where eight seats are poised to change hands — seven of those going to the Liberals. Overall, the results mean the Liberals will be even more concentrated in the GTA.

The Liberals also picked up seats from the Tories in the Kitchener-Waterloo area, Barrie and Northumberland, while they were only poised to lose two: Sudbury and Windsor West.

The outcome was also rosier for the NDP under Leader Andrea Horwath, who was the first of the major party leaders to be declared elected in their home riding tonight. The NDP vote share was at 25 per cent, up from the 23 per cent they achieved in the 2011 campaign.

The NDP vote gains, too, came mostly at the expense of the PCs, with the New Democrats picking up the Tory seat in Oshawa.

The PC share of the popular vote was down more than four percentage points from the last election, as the party dropped eight seats to the Liberals. PC Leader Hudak is keeping his seat, however he announced at 10:45 p.m. ET in his concession speech that he resigning as party leader.

Hudak, as the Hamilton Spectator notes at length, did at least keep his seat.

Conservative Leader Tim Hudak is still king of Niagara West-Glanbrook, if not the province.

Hudak, party leader since 2009, handily took the riding despite spending very little time campaigning on home turf.

"We really benefit from the accumulated credit Tim has built up through his hard work over the nearly 20 years he has represented this area," Tony Kamphuis, Hudak's local campaign manager said by email on Thursday night.

"You can't really take anything for granted, we still worked hard to knock on more doors (and) put up more signs than the other campaigns."

[. . . I]n Niagara West-Glanbrook, it's hard to remember a provincial representative other than Hudak. He has held a seat since 1995, before he'd hit the tender age of 30.

Hudak, 46, was first elected in a riding that hadn't voted Conservative in decades. Electoral boundaries have been redrawn twice since then, but these days Niagara West-Glanbrook runs deep blue. About 50 per cent of about 50,000 voters choose Hudak in 2011. The next closest candidate was Liberal Katie Trombetta at 25 per cent support.

The National Post's Chris Selley dealt with likely infighting in the NDP after losing so many urban ridings in Toronto, including my own riding of Davenport. (I voted Liberal.)

The Toronto Star's Robert Benzie commented on the issues of the opposition, focusing on the NDP and Andrea Horwath.

The NDP leader triggered the vote, which Elections Ontario estimates will cost around $90 million, when she said May 2 that her party, which propped up the Liberals in 2012 and 2013, could not support a left-leaning budget.

Wynne caught the New Democrats flat-footed when hours after Horwath’s gambit she asked Lt.-Gov. David Onley to dissolve the legislature, plunging Ontario into an election.

The Liberals had two campaign buses — wrapped at a cost of $100,000 apiece — ready to go and staged a large downtown Toronto pep rally for staffers that night while the NDP stumbled out of the gate.

Even though Horwath first proposed an Ontario pension plan since 2010 — and ran on it in the 2011 election — she inexplicably dropped it from the New Democrats’ policy handbook after the Liberals included a similar scheme in their left-leaning budget.

It was the most visible example of her distancing herself from the party’s past.

In a debilitating midcampaign move, 34 past and present NDP supporters wrote a letter proclaiming that she was “abandoning” progressive principles in a desperate, populist appeal for votes.

At the same time, a flaccid NDP platform, unimaginatively entitled “Andrea Horwath’s Plan That Makes Sense,” failed to capture the voting public’s imagination.

A free concert Sunday night with world-famous performer K’naan and other artists at Toronto’s Berkeley Theatre was a bust, attracting just 100 people when the NDP had hoped it would propel their campaign in the final days.

[LINK] "Blame the nerds for low voter turnout"

Voter turnout in the advance polls, CBC noted, was down 6% over the 2011 polls. I've not yet found any reports of turnout in this election, but the general feeling is that voter turnout will continue to remain low, with only a minority of eligible voters actually voting. The argument of Charlie Willis of MacLean's is that the growing dependence of the political parties on statistical methods which seek to increase turnout of their supporters, rather than trying to convince people of the merits of their argument, help contribute to this disengagement of the electorate.

I blame the nerds. Over the past two decades, campaigns have become increasingly data-driven, by which I mean parties have become a lot more interested in identifying their existing supporters and making sure they vote than they are in winning new ones. A couple of weeks ago, senior campaign aides with both the NDP and the Tories described to me the astounding depth of their voter databanks, which help them tailor policy in ways that will motivate their support base to go mark an X beside their candidates’ names. Following the lead of U.S. parties, they’ve increasingly turned to consumer data—what kind of car a voter drives; what magazines she reads—to identify loci of probable support.

It’s smart politicking, but the effect has been to short-circuit the political conversation that, at least notionally, is the reason we have campaigns. Over the weekend, for example, I received calls from all three parties in my west Toronto riding asking if they could “count on” my support. When I (politely) said no, all three cheerfully rang off. No request to explain why. No offer of a follow-up call. Not so much as an expression of regret.

Clearly, the big brains in the campaigns figure their time is better spent getting sure votes to the polls than trying to persuade a Jeez-I-dunno. That is especially true in the three-party race, when a mere plurality of votes—as opposed to a proper majority—can win you a riding.

But it means the quaint practice of talking policy on the doorstep is dying. And while that spares us the risk of missing key moments of the Stanley Cup playoffs, it deprives us of a useful democratic exercise—namely, face-to-face conversations with those who might not share our views. Instead, the parties prefer to direct narrow, carefully calibrated messages at their most reliable supporters. Then they dispatch ground armies of volunteers out to make sure that minority votes. Recent history suggests that’s the most efficient path to victory.

[MUSIC] Röyksopp and Robyn, "Sayit"

In September 2010 I remarked how I liked "The Girl and the Robot", a collaboration between Norwegian electronic music duo Röyksopp and Swedish recording artist Robyn. This year, as I noted at the end of April, they've embarked on another project, the album Do It Again and a world tour of the same name. (Seeing them in Toronto is August is not a bad idea.)

The electronic song "Sayit" is another one I rather like. (The video's good, too.)

"Röyksopp & Robyn - Sayit - H&M Life" (Watch on YouTube)