[PHOTO] Faded Pride rainbow tulips at night, Church and Alexander

On my Canada Day Instagram spree I posted a photo of a row of tulips in the colours of the rainbow at Church and Maitland. The above picture is of these flowers a month later, at night.

[PHOTO] Bonded warehouse, 91 Water Street, Charlottetown

The sturdy bonded warehouse at 91 Water Street in downtown Charlottetown is a registered historic building on account of its history. The plaque across the street from the edifice, visible at the bottom of the photo, emphasizes the role of the bonded warehouse in securely housing shipments of alcoholic beverages before their destruction in the Prohibition era.

The heritage value of the Bonded Warehouse lies in its role in the history of Charlottetown, its association with chief coroner, Daniel Hodgson (1803-1883) and its importance to the Water Street streetscape.

Coroner, Daniel Hodgson had the warehouse built in 1859-1860. It was rented to the Customs Department for use as a bonded warehouse. This is a warehouse where goods are stored without excise or customs duties being charged until after they are removed from the warehouse. The shutters were made of iron and likely deterred theft of the goods inside. Built to last, it not only survived the Great Fire of 1866, it stopped the fire from moving any further.

Hodgson worked in a number of posts throughout his career. He was appointed chief coroner in 1830 and later, in 1839, he was selected to serve as Prothonotary (which meant he had the power to sign and affix the seal of the court to all applicable documents) and Clerk of the Crown. In 1853, during the absence of Judge Charles Young, Hodgson was appointed as Judge of Probate. Among his many roles, he also served as Commissioner for issuing treasury notes, Commissioner for affidavits in the Supreme Court and Clerk of the Crown for Justices of the Peace in 1864.

Merchant, Edward Kelly advertised the warehouse for rent in 1905. Kelly was a successful local merchant who owned property all over Charlottetown. Other occupants of the building include E.T. Higgs and the J.W. Windsor Company.

The warehouse has changed little since it was built. It has been renovated over the years and now houses office space rather than goods. Located on a street with a range of early to mid 19th century architecture, the Bonded Warehouse is unique and compliments the streetscape. It is an important reminder of the role Water Street played in the commercial history of the City, when many seafaring vessels brought goods to and from the Island capital.

[LINK] "How Vermont is tackling an opioid and heroin addiction crisis"

CBC's Meagan Fitzpatrick wrote last month about Vermont's escalating problem with opiate drugs, including heroin. Rolling Stone April 2013 article "The New Face of Heroin", by David Amsden, also provides more context.

One thing that worries me about this are the extensive similarities between rural areas in northern New England and eastern Canada. Is this what will happen in Canada?

Vermont is known for its quaint towns, picturesque landscapes and maple syrup, but it’s now getting national attention for far different reasons — a high rate of drug abuse and how the state is handling it.

Gov. Peter Shumlin declared in January that what began as a problem with addiction to opioid painkillers such as Oxycontin and Vicodin has grown into "a full-blown heroin crisis." The number of people seeking treatment for heroin addiction has shot up 250 per cent since 2000. Last year there were 4,000 people in state-funded treatment facilities for opioid addiction — and more sought help but were put on waiting lists. Overdoses are rising.

"In every corner of our state, heroin and opiate drug addiction threatens us," Shumlin said in his annual State of the State speech, which was entirely devoted to the drug issue.

Vermont's population is little more than 626,000 and it has the second-highest per capita rate in the U.S. for treatment admissions for opioid addictions.

Bordering on Quebec, Vermont is a microcosm of what is happening across the United States. Prescription drug abuse is considered the country’s fastest growing drug problem and heroin use has been rising, especially among young people.

People usually start off with a dependence on painkillers, then some advance to heroin because it’s cheaper and easier to get than the pills.

Drug overdose deaths have more than tripled since 1990 and have never been higher, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The agency estimates 100 people die from an overdose every day in the United States.

[LINK] "Memo to the PM: Treat Putin like Ignatieff"

Paul Wells of MacLean's writes about Russia, suggesting a potentially productive new approach for dealing with Putin. Why not mockery?

Why would Western rhetoric on Putin and Ukraine have any other result? He gets his political strength from the perception that he is willing to stand up to a monolithic, hidebound, malevolent West. Since he started moving against eastern Ukraine, Western leaders have, obligingly, played to type. Putin’s is a classic outsider stance, fuelled by resentment and a sense of historic betrayal: If all the ‘A’ students and the swells in pinstripes hate what he’s doing, he must be doing something right.

If any Western leader should be able to understand this, it’s Stephen Harper. The two men have this much in common, at least. Harper rose to power on a lower-octane variant of Putin’s populist rocket fuel, as did any number of populist outsiders before him—Richard Nixon, Margaret Thatcher, even Jean Chrétien. Harper knows what it’s like to challenge an established order run by graduates of the proper schools, with their snooty attitudes and their complacent assumptions. It’s a really good day for Harper, and for Conservative fundraising, when the Canadian Bar Association, the CBC’s “At Issue” panel, and more than 15 per cent of the University of Toronto’s faculty directory can be prodded to declare that this time, he’s gone too far. So why does he insist on sounding like them?

When the leaders of the G7, with one voice, “call upon Russia to use its influence with the separatist groups and ensure effective border control,” they are asking him to accomplish what none of them can. It’s inherently empowering rhetoric, and its message is: Putin is strong. Putin is in control. Putin provides an effective challenge to the established order, and all anyone can do is beg Putin for favours.

There’s another message, and it has the advantage of being more accurate. It’s that Putin is so weak that he has, alone among Russian leaders in over a century, already lost effective control over almost all of Ukraine. His consolation prize is the shaky allegiance of a bunch of vodka-swilling thugs who pick fights on the steps of backwater town halls and, on a really good day, manage to shoot down a passenger jet by mistake. No wonder his wife, Lyudmila, left him a year ago. He’s a loser.

There’s an arena where Harper and his advisers are masters in the art of wrapping derision around a kernel of truth. That’s domestic politics. In 2006, Harper did away with Paul Martin by announcing five simple priorities for government action, making Martin look scattershot and impulsive. In 2008, the Conservative ad machine questioned Stéphane Dion’s competence as a leader; in 2011, they questioned Michael Ignatieff’s loyalty to Canada, a country they said he was “just visiting.”

This is common practice in domestic political campaigning. In his autobiography, Tony Blair explains how he defeated a bunch of British Conservative leaders. “I defined [John] Major as weak; [William] Hague as better at jokes than judgment; [Michael] Howard as an opportunist . . . Expressed like that, these attacks seem flat, rather mundane almost, and not exactly inspiring—but that’s their appeal. Any one of those charges, if it comes to be believed, is actually fatal. Yes, it’s not like calling your opponent a liar, or a fraud, or a villain or a hypocrite, but the middle-ground floating voters kind of shrug their shoulders at those claims. They don’t chime. They’re too over the top, too heavy, and they represent an insult, not an argument. Whereas the lesser charge, because it’s more accurate and precisely because it’s more low-key, can stick. And if it does, that’s that. Because in each case, it means [he’s] not a good leader. So game over.”

[LINK] "Steppe Children"

Alicia P.Q. Wittmeyer's recent article in Foreign Policy, "Steppe Children", examining the issues facing people of mixed Tibetan and non-Tibetan ancestry in the diaspora is thoughtful. It's a matter of relevance to Toronto, actually, since Tibetan-Canadians are one of the largest diaspora communities and they're concentrated in the Toronto neighbourhood of Parkdale.

Mixed-race Tibetans coming of age in the West like Dondup and his brother are grappling with issues that an increasingly dispersed community will face more of in the future: how they fit into the Tibetan cause, how to preserve a sense of connection to a far-flung homeland now several generations removed, and how to handle the perception that they are contributing to the dissolution of a community that still feels like it must fight to preserve itself.

It's been more than 50 years since the first wave of Tibetans fled the plateau for Dharamsala, following a failed uprising against Chinese Communist Party rule and the subsequent brutal military crackdown, in which the Chinese government executed or imprisoned tens of thousands suspected of supporting a Dalai Lama-led government. As exiles, this first wave expected to return home quickly once Tibet gained its independence, said Emily Yeh, who researches Tibet at the University of Colorado, Boulder. So instead of dispersing like other diaspora communities, the roughly 85,000 people who first fled Tibet mainly clustered around a central core, built around Dharamsala and the Dalai Lama, in the mountains of India, Nepal, and Bhutan, next to their homeland.

But the past three decades have seen the start of a new chapter for Tibetans living outside of the plateau, a vast landmass of about 965,000 square miles in southwest China. As the decades in exile wear on, and the prospects of returning to the plateau have dimmed, more Tibetans are exchanging refugee life in South Asia for the West. Western countries, won over by the lobbying efforts of the Tibetan government, have arranged for large-scale resettlement programs that bring in hundreds of immigrants. Like Dondup's father, some of them -- there are no good estimates on the number -- have married Westerners and raised families with half-Tibetan children.

They're leaving at a time when a community that's always fretted about cultural preservation -- about how to maintain a strong sense of itself even though Beijing has destroyed many of the hallmarks of its culture -- faces increasing questions about what, exactly, constitutes "authentic" Tibetan-ness today.

Parents in Dharamsala worry that their Hindi-speaking children are too Indian, while new arrivals from Tibet to Dharamsala struggle to fit in, considered by their first-wave counterparts too Sinicized to be truly Tibetan. Meanwhile, Han Chinese settlers continue to flow onto the plateau, in what the Dalai Lama has called an ongoing "cultural genocide."

Amid all this, some mixed-race Tibetans have struggled to find their footing. There are enough of them asking the same questions about their collective identity that a group of about two dozen organized a conference in June in London, where they received messages from Tibetan Prime Minister Lobsang Sangay, Tibet's representative to Northern Europe, Thubten Samdup, and even the Dalai Lama himself. Intermarriage for Tibetans was "inevitable," the Dalai Lama wrote. What was important, he said, was "the preservation of the Tibetan language and culture."

[URBAN NOTE] "The Killing of Sammy Yatim"

Mary Rogan's Toronto Life article on the shooting death of teenager Sammy Yatim on a Dundas West streetcar by Toronto police has gotten quite a lot of attention online. This is not only because of the article's detailed timeline of the event but because of what many commenters think is an unduly sympathetic approach towards the policeman responsible, James Forcillo.

I've touched on the event before, most recently here noting Forcillo's arrest and charge of murder. This is an event that will not go away.

Within an hour, a cellphone video was posted to YouTube and quickly went viral. It was reposted on Facebook and ­Twitter and led every newscast across the city. Toronto was transfixed by the last 90 seconds of Sammy Yatim’s life. A city-wide consensus quickly formed: this 18-year-old didn’t have to die. The police could have held their fire and waited for the ­Taser. They could have tried to talk Yatim down instead of working him up, or shot the knife out of his hand, or used ­pepper spray. There had to be a non-lethal option available. And the question on everyone’s mind was, what kind of cop shoots a troubled teenager nine times?

In his six years on the force, James Forcillo had never fired his gun on the job until that night. He had drawn it before, during an arrest in Kensington Market, but managed to persuade two armed suspects to surrender without incident. Forcillo looks older than his 31 years. He has a square, heavyset build and a wary cast to his eyes. A second-generation Italian-Canadian, he spent his early childhood in Montreal, close to his mother’s large family. His father worked in the textile industry, moving from job to job, with long stretches of money troubles in between. A job change brought the family to Toronto when Forcillo was 12. A few years after that, his father found work in California, and Forcillo and his mom split their time between Toronto and L.A. When he was 18, he moved to ­California to live with his dad full-time, and his mother died of lung cancer shortly afterward. He enrolled in a criminal justice program, something that had interested him since high school, and graduated summa cum laude, but he wasn’t able to work without a green card. His relationship with his father soured, and at age 20 he decided to come back to Toronto to pursue a career in policing.

Forcillo met his future wife, Irina, in 2003, when he rented the basement apartment in her parents’ North York house. Like all cops, he’s prohibited from talking about any case that’s in front of the courts, including his own, but the rule doesn’t ­apply to his wife, who agreed to be interviewed for this story. A manager in a financial services firm, Irina is a stylish woman, self-possessed and yet unexpectedly girlish when she smiles. She comes from a close-knit Ukrainian family that immigrated to Israel when she was seven and then to Canada when she was 15. You can still hear the mix of hard Russian consonants and Israeli inflections in her voice.

They were an unlikely couple—Forcillo is shy and quiet, and Irina is outgoing and boisterous—but her family quickly brought him into the fold. Irina was in the last year of her business degree at U of T, and Forcillo was following a well-worn path to the police force. He worked as a security guard and studied psychology at York. In 2006 he became a court officer, escorting prisoners to and from their cells and maintaining order in the courtroom. The following year, he and Irina were married, and the year after that, when Irina was pregnant with their first child, Forcillo got the call that he had been accepted into the police-training program.

[LINK] "‘Secret’ proposal would nix citizen rights for babies born in Canada"

I read Nicholas Keung's report that the Canadian government is interested in reforming Canadian nationality law to seriously modify Jus soli, limiting Canadian citizenship at birth to persons born to citizens or permanent residents, in the morning Metro. I'm pleased to see it got picked up in the Hamilton Spectator, since this is very important stuff.

Immigration officials have recommended that Ottawa remove citizenship rights to babies born in Canada to non-citizens and non-residents even though the small number of cases doesn't justify the costs.

The proposal, marked "secret" and with inputs from various federal departments, found fewer than 500 cases of children being born to foreign nationals in Canada each year, amounting to just 0.14 per cent of the 360,000 total births per year in the country.

The issue of citizenship by birth on Canadian soil once again raises concerns among critics over the current government's policy considerations being based on ideologies rather than evidence and objective cost-benefit analyses.

"An impartial observer would conclude that the evidence supports no need for change, given the small number of cases. Yet the recommendation supports the government's public rhetoric and anecdotes on the need for change," said Andrew Griffith, a former director general for citizenship and multiculturalism at Citizenship and Immigration Canada, and author of Policy Arrogance or Innocent Bias.

[. . .]

"Eliminating birth on soil in order to ensure that everyone who obtains citizenship at birth has a strong connection to Canada would have significant cost implications," said the 17-page report prepared for former immigration minister Jason Kenney, obtained under an access to information request.

[ISL] "Independent book store turns the page"

The Charlottetown Guardian's Dave Stewart reports that Charlottetown independent book store Bookmark (official site, Yelp), along with its satellite store in Halifax, will survive. After the death of the small chain's owner in 2013, Bookmark went up for sale. It has since been bought by a pair of investors who seem committed to Bookmark's history as an excellent indie bookstore. Here's hoping!

Dan MacDonald has started another chapter in a business legacy that began in Charlottetown 42 years ago.

MacDonald and his wife Marlene recently purchased one of the few remaining independent book stores in Atlantic Canada.

Bookmark Inc. was founded in Charlottetown in 1972 and has been at its present location in the Confederation Court Mall since 1980. The business expanded into Nova Scotia in 1989, opening a location on Spring Garden Road in Halifax.

"Books are a passion of mine,'' Dan MacDonald tells The Guardian. "I'm very excited about it. Owning a book store is something I've thought about for the last 10 to 15 years.''

Dan and Marlene purchased the Bookmark from the estate of Rodney Jones, the store's long-time owner who died more than a year ago.

Gary MacLeod, president of Bookmark Inc., said Jones' daughters, Tarra Drevet and Charla Jones, wanted to ensure that the stores would have continued success in both Charlottetown and Halifax "with a new owner who would have the vision to continue operating both locations with the same passion that Rodney had''.

His daughters issued a statement to the media through the MRSB Group, which handled the sale.

"We are so proud of the business which our father established and built over the last 40 years,'' Drevet and Jones said. "We believe that Dan and Marlene will be able to maintain and grow the business based upon the successful framework established by our father.''

No changes are planned at either location and all staff have been retained.

[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto's Civic Election"

Livejournaler jsburbidge wrote an interesting post on the prospects of the major candidates in Toronto's mayoral election later this year. John Tory might actually get elected.

First, even with the latest Forum poll, it's not really clear whether John Tory has a decided lead or not. Forum adjusts its polls for likely voters, and the current rolling average calculations at ThreeHundredEight.com show Chow's "recent high" overlapping with Tory's "recent low" (31% as opposed to 28%). In other words, they're still in competition within the margin of error.

Still, Tory's weighted average is 33.9% and Chow's is 29.1%. I think it's fair to say that if trends continue as they have been Chow will be in trouble.

You can see from a breakdown in a recent poll as to why Chow has a bit of a dilemma. She has strong support (naturally) from the NDP, but also the largest block of Liberal support. If her aim is to increase her overall share of the vote, she can do one of two things -- try to peel away more Liberal - identifiers (or equivalent voters who don't identify as Liberals but whose views are generally more middle-of-the-road), or come out swinging strongly in a bid for popular support among more disaffected voters.

In a "normal" election, the latter might make sense: there are more voters who will identify with her immigrant experience and early background than with Tory's background as a scion of Tory, Tory, Deslauriers and Binnington (as it was when I was in Law School, now Torys LLP). Unfortunately, many of these potential voters are in the disaffected category on which Rob Ford has an even stronger lock -- as a number of analyses have pointed out, Ford's populist base isn't necessarily all conservative, and certainly his strength among the young and in the black community points to a strength based in pure populism. (Serious conservatives of any sort have probably given up on Ford because even if he were to win, the last several years have shown that he can't work well enough with others to make things happen; better to back a less radical conservative withe better coalition-building skills.) So Chow's growth prospects depend on not scaring off centrist voters.

That's why her campaign is so bland. She's safe pointing out her own background, but she's presenting as someone pushing minor adjustments to the system rather than major overhauls. Soknacki, who is a self-declared small-c conservative, has more radical positions than she does.

In contrast the same breakdown shows why Tory's campaign is so much closer to the fiscal position of the city government over the past four years than his background in the CivicAction Alliance might lead one to expect: if Chow basically occupies the left and centre left of the spectrum, he has little to gain from trying to compete with her there, given his background and history. Campaigning to the right is his obvious strategy.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• blogTO shares a new transit map that combines streetcar and subway routes.


• Crooked Timber's Chris Bertram notes, in light of the ongoing massacres of Iraq and the desperate plight of a party of Afghanistani Sikhs smuggled into the United Kingdom, that persecution combines with general bars on refugees to force people-smuggling.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper examining how planetesimals form.


• A Fistful of Euros' Edward Hugh writes about the imminent debt catastrophe facing the Italian economy, and Marginal Revolution picks up on it.


• The Frailest Thing's Michael Sacasas wonders how some people get the sense that the world is technophobic.


• Language Log examines how Muslims around the world learn to read the Qu'ran in Arabic. Fascinating comments.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes Russia's new problems in the Pacific Rim and notes the unseemly pro-Russian propaganda of The Nation.


• More Words, Deeper Hole's James Nicoll reviews the Niven/Pournelle collaboration Lucifer's Hammer and notes it a competent distillation of the fears of the mid-1970s.


• The New APPS Blog looks at a study examining alloparenting, the raising of a child in part or in whole by a non-parent, and notes that the most successful of these societies don't teach their children fear of the outside world.


• Peter Rukavina shares an old Prince Edward Island news article commenting on how celebrations of Confederation were postponed by the outbreak of the First World War.


• Torontoist tells the story of Toronto astronomer and popularizer Dr. Helen Sawyer Hogg.


• Towleroad celebrates the recent birthday of gay icon Madonna.


• The Volokh Conspiracy looks at the controversies of Michael Brown and Steven Salaita.


• Window on Eurasia argues that the Putin who annexed Crimea can be foudn in the Putin who tried to cover up the Kursk submarine disaster in 2000, and notes the desire of Chechnya's dictator to have North Caucasians serve in the Russian military as conscripts.