[PHOTO] The CN Tower as framed by trees, Toronto Islands

[PHOTO] Amphitheatre, Confederation Centre of the Arts, Charlottetown

One of the several theatre venues of Charlottetown's Confederation Centre of the Arts is the outdoor amphitheatre. Located squarely in the middle of the complex--the library is to the left (south), the art gallery to the right (north), the theatre in behind (west)--the amphitheatre is home to the Young Company.

[LINK] "$24B left Canada in 2012. Here’s what happened to it"

This June Toronto Star article by the paper's Jennifer Quinn about remittances from Canada, one of a series, does a nice job introducing the issue of remittances in Canada's immigrant economy.

The money sent overseas each year by people living in Canada could buy about 70 jumbo jets, mountains of sparkling engagement rings, or more than a third of Starbucks Corporation, depending on the day: $24 billion goes a long way.

According to the World Bank , that’s how much ordinary people living and working here sent to their home countries in 2012: The money may go to a grandmother in Beijing, a niece in Kingston or a cousin in Jaipur.

It might be for groceries, the electric bill or school fees; or it could be meant to celebrate a birthday, an anniversary or a wedding. It may be earmarked to repay a debt or help start a business. Most aren’t sending much money at any one time: $200 is an average sum.

So Sheryl Jacosalem is both typical and extraordinary.

She came to Canada from the Philippines — via Hong Kong — in 2009 and worked for more than three years as a nanny in Thornhill. Every payday, she would send at least half of her earnings, sometimes more, home to her family.

It was about $500 on the 15th of every month; if she could, and it was needed, she would send a bit more at the end. That money put four sisters and a brother through school, and now — three of her sisters have joined her here in Canada — the family is putting the finishing touches on a house they have built for their parents in Iloilo.

“We grew up with nothing, and so we want them ... we don’t want to worry,” Jacosalem, 36, says. “We just don’t want to worry that we’re here in Canada and we don’t know what’s going on with them there. We want them safe and we want to make sure they are always OK.”

[LINK] "In shadow of oil boom, North Dakota farmers fight contamination"

Al Jazeera America's Laura Gottesdenier has a nice article looking at the contamination of agricultural lands in North Dakota by wastewater from fracking.

Last summer, in a wet, remote section of farm country in Bottineau County, landowner Mike Artz and his two neighbors discovered that a ruptured pipeline was spewing contaminated wastewater into his crop fields.

“We saw all this oil on the low area, and all this salt water spread out beyond it,” said his neighbor Larry Peterson, who works as a farmer and an oil-shale contractor. “The water ran out into the wetland.”

It was August, and all across Artz’s farm the barley crop was just reaching maturity. But near the spill, the dead stalks had undeveloped kernels, which, the farmers knew, meant that the barley had been contaminated weeks earlier.

Soon after, state testing of the wetlands showed that chloride levels were so high, they exceeded the range of the test strips. The North Dakota Department of Health estimated that between 400 to 600 barrels of wastewater, the equivalent of 16,800 to 25,200 gallons, had seeped into the ground.

Wastewater, known as “saltwater” because of its high salinity, is a by-product of oil drilling, which has been a boom-and-bust industry in North Dakota since at least the 1930s. Far saltier than ocean water, this wastewater is toxic enough to sterilize land and poison animals that mistakenly drink it. “You never see a saltwater spill produce again,” Artz said, referring to the land affected by the contamination. “Maybe this will be the first, but I doubt it.”

[. . .] Bottineau County offers an unusual, decades-long test case, since the region has a long history of contamination and a plethora of aging wells, tanks, pipelines, disposal sites and other infrastructure left from North Dakota’s earlier oil booms in the 1930s, 1950s and 1980s. And the experiment’s not over yet. At a recent meeting, Lynn Helms, director of the North Dakota Industrial Commission’s Oil and Gas Division, announced that a new wave of production is headed to Bottineau in 2015.

[URBAN NOTE] "What David Soknacki's exit means for Toronto mayor's race"

CBC suggests that even though David Soknacki, a candidate in the Toronto mayoral race who left yesterday, after never polling above single-digit percentages, he helped raise the tone of the debate.

David Soknacki, who bowed out of the Toronto mayoral race yesterday, had an influence on the campaign that went well above what his low polling numbers would suggest, a city hall watcher told Metro Morning on Wednesday.

[. . .]

Torontoist editor-in-chief Hamutal Dotan said Soknacki's deep policy knowledge forced his opponents to address issues they might otherwise be able to ignore.

"He was very, very good for the race," she told host Matt Galloway. "He brought a certain kind of heft and experience that increased the tenor of the debate … because he was so policy-oriented."

She said Soknacki's ideas about economic development and ways to curtail the police budget added breadth to the campaign, even though his polling numbers remained stuck at single digits. In announcing he was pulling out, the former budget chief his support was not rising fast enough to make a difference ahead of the Oct. 27 vote.

Dotan said David Miller was able to move from single-digit support to the mayor's chair back in 2003 because his policy prowess was matched by a charisma that Soknacki lacks.

[URBAN NOTE] "Inside David Soknacki’s Last Day on the Campaign"

Torontoist's David Hains has a nice piece of inside reportage inside the David Soknacki campaign for mayor of Toronto. It leaves me thinking--correctly?--that Soknacki is the mayor this city needs. Who, I wonder, will we get?

Sitting on a downtown patio with campaign manager Brian Kelcey and spokesperson Supriya Dwivedi, the David Soknacki camp is much more relaxed than usual on a sunny Monday. All their work—a year of preparation, campaigning, and personal sacrifices—is now out of their hands. Staff, and volunteers alike have the day off: an unusual move for a campaign that should be kicking into high gear. Soknacki himself attends a mayoral forum in the morning to discuss seniors’ issues, and then spends the rest of the day at his spice business offices just outside the city.

This is not a typical day in the campaign.

It’s September 8, and Soknacki has until Friday the 12th to decide whether to withdraw his name from the ballot. He is leaning towards doing so, and the final decision hangs on the outcome of a new Forum poll. Soknacki and his advisors aren’t campaigning because they are spending the day waiting: depending on the results of that poll he’ll either carry on, or announce that he’d be bowing out on Tuesday night. He’s got a campaign event already planned—a rallying-of-the-troops to celebrate his volunteers, at the St. Lawrence Market Jack Astor’s. It’s also to mark his birthday: Soknacki turns 60 on Tuesday.

The results of that poll come in a day later: it shows him at 6 per cent support, with 78 per cent name recognition. And with that, Soknacki decides to end his bid for mayor.

[LINK] "A Cease-fire Takes Hold in Ukraine as Territorial Questions Linger"

While there are flamewars in the comments, Eve Conant's National Geographic article takes a good look at the consequences of the ceasefire. With maps and historical references aplenty, she considers whether or not the east might split.

I would note that the territory controlled by the Novorossiyan separatists in eastern Ukraine is not even most of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. Rather, the territory controlled only encompasses the major urban areas, places with dense Russian populations close to the border. Her prediction that southern Ukraine--specifically, the coastline on the northern shore of the Sea of Azov, including the city of Mariupol'--might come under threat as Russia seeks a land connection to Crimea is one that is frighteningly plausible to me.

A cease-fire has been called in embattled Ukraine, one that many world leaders are skeptical will last. Yet even as the fighting that had flared along Ukraine's strategic southeastern coast Thursday fell silent in the hours after the cease-fire was announced, larger questions about the territory of Ukraine remain, as does a vow from separatists to split from Ukraine entirely.

The details of the cease-fire, signed in Minsk by negotiators representing the Ukrainian government, the separatists, Russia, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, include amnesty for fighters who disarm and have not committed serious crimes, the disbanding of militias, the release of hostages, and a ten-kilometer buffer zone to be created along the Russian-Ukrainian border, according to news reports. The deal states that power would be decentralized—with an appointed governor to be granted control of provinces—and also includes provisions regarding the protection of the Russian language and early elections.

But realities on the ground may be different, Russian news agencies report. Igor Plotnitsky, one of the rebel leaders of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People's Republic, says, "The cease-fire does not mean a shift from our course of breaking away from Ukraine. This is a compulsory measure."

The agreement, says experts, already signals Ukraine's weakness and potential loss of territory.

"This is definitely a loss for Ukraine," says Faith Hillis, assistant professor of Russian history at the University of Chicago and author of Children of Rus': Right-Bank Ukraine and the Invention of a Russian Nation. She says the first question is whether the cease-fire will hold, but "this looks as if Ukraine will lose parts of the east, whether through a federalization scheme or some sort of autonomy reached for the region. Parts of Ukraine could end up as a 'frozen conflict.' " If so, they would join several other post-Soviet regions with unresolved political status, like South Ossetia, Abkhazia, or Transdniestria, the breakaway state located between the Dniester River and Moldova's eastern border with Ukraine.

Recent pro-Russian territorial gains included strategic territory that could hasten the forging of a land bridge to the geographically isolated Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that Russia annexed in the hastily called referendum last March, all the while occupying prized coastline along the way. The most recent fighting was centered around the southeastern port city of Mariupol on the Sea of Azov, with its potential oil and gas reserves. In nearby Novoazovsk, flags of the so-called Novorossiya (New Russia) Army were already flying.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Antipope Charlie Stross u>makes his case for Scottish independence.


• blogTO visits the new HMV Underground venue.


• The Cranky Sociologists examine the militarization of the American university campus.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper analyzing the temperature of chilly nearby brown dwarf WISE 0855-0714.


• The Dragon's Tales looks at the very confusing KIC 2856960 system.


• The Everyday Sociology Blog applies sociological theory to on-campus sexual assaults.


• The Frailest Thing looks at some rather remarkable upcoming technologies.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money as well as The Dragon's Tales notes that the population of blue whales off of the California coast has recovered to its previous level of 2200 individuals, a small population as the first blog notes.


• Marginal Revolution looks at the run against Scottish stocks and the like in the week before the referendum.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer would still bet against Scottish independence.


• The Russian Demographics Blog notes the amusing mistake made by mappers who gave Sakhalin island to Japan.


• The Search features a post made by a web archivist.


• Strange Maps looks at the changing geographical concentrations of genius in Europe.


• Towleroad shares some of the Provincetown photographs of Emil Cohen.


• The Volokh Conspiracy considers the ethics and the legal practicalities of Scottish separatism.


• Window on Eurasia notes the emergent Iranian-Russian alliance, observes that the Dalai Lama's attack on Putin has placed his followers in Russia's Kalmykia in a different place, and wonders if Tuva provides precedents for Russia's satellites.


• The Financial Times' The World notes how very different is public opinion and public policy in France and Germany.