[PHOTO] Abandoned house by the lighthouse, North Rustico

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• blogTO notes a projection suggesting there will be nearly seven million Torontonians by 2025.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper examining how
  
• The Dragon's Tales links to a paper examining a very unusual planetary system around a subdwarf B star and fears the Russo-Ukrainian war will heat up again.


• Language Hat examines the nearly extinct dialect of Missouri French.


• Marginal Revolution wonders about the impact of big data on the criminal justice system and argues New Zealand might have the best-designed government in the world.


• Torontoist shares the 125 years of history of the Gladstone Hotel.


• Towleroad notes that gay asylum seekers in Australia might be resettled in anti-gay Papua New Guinea.


• Transit Toronto notes the expansion of wireless Internet to College station.


• Window on Eurasia predicts that the European Union and the United States will try to engage Belarus while accepting the dictatorship.

[URBAN NOTE] "Notes on the municipal election"

Livejournaler jsburbidge notes things that Torontonians are talking about regarding the municipal election, and notes many more things that Torontonians aren't talking about but should.

1) I have seen tweets this morning regarding waiting for space on trains downtown. (In particular: a complaint about Chester Station and one about Bloor/Yonge).

Chester is a good example of what a DRL would fix; the DRL as usually planned would cross the Bloor-Danforth Line at Pape, and would draw off at least a portion of the flow downtown (it would also allow a one-station jog against flow to Pape from Chester) relieving stations between Pape and Yonge.

Bloor/Yonge would also obviously benefit from a DRL; but I'm less sympathetic to complaints about waiting 20 minutes for a free train there. I've sometimes been in a potentially similar position, but if I'm starting from Bloor/Yonge, or even have reached it on a heavy morning, I just choose to walk: I know from experience that it's about 25 minutes from there to Downtown (Downtown being defined as King/Bay).

Now there are lots of people for whom a walk from Bloor to King is unreasonable -- the elderly, the very young, those with mobility problems -- but I'm willing to bet that most rush-hour commuters would both be capable of and would benefit from a 25-minute walk downtown -- at least on a day like this (clear, not cold, not too hot).

2) I hate to be cynical about this but I'm going to be cynical about this: the reason that John Tory continues to have a significantly higher level of support than Chow or Ford despite the manifest problems surrounding SmartTrack (there was an article in Torontoist this morning by Steve Munro taking it apart: torontoist.com/2014/09/john-torys-transit-vision-is-short-sighted/) is that nobody actually believes that Tory would have a snowball's chance in hell of pushing it through in any case. The rail lines belong to Metrolinx, the financing would have to go through vetting by the city staff (which it wouldn't get), real power resides here with the province (which is pushing ahead with RER in any case, which saves the scheme from being a complete fantasy the way the Ford subway scheme is), and Council will be all over the map.

Transit is by far the highest profile issue in this election (other than the Ford identity itself), but it poses a real challenge for the candidates: just about everything that can be done is either already being done or being studied. It's been so over-analyzed that the chance of a genuinely new positive contribution is nil. The financial and management power lies, by and large, with the province and Metrolinx, except for smallish TTC improvements (smallish because large TTC-only improvements require money which is not currently there, and nobody to the right of Ari Goldkind -- and that includes Olivia Chow -- wants to talk about large general tax increases) which were pretty well all covered in the report passed by the TTC board in August. Even Chow's deliberately small-scale bus-oriented plan is impractical as it currently stands, running up against limits in the TTC capacity.

[ISL] "The Rise and Fall of Japan's Most Densely Populated Island"

Bloomberg's Ken Jennings writes about Japan's Hashima Island, a now abandoned territory that at its mid-20th century peak was one of the densest settlements in the world.

At Japan's westernmost tip, 505 uninhabited islands dot the Sea of Japan. One of them, Hashima Island, was purchased by Mitsubishi Motors in 1890 when coal was discovered there. The company built a giant rectangular seawall around the island, to protect it from typhoons, and as a result, the island is still called Gunkanjima in Japanese—"Battleship Island."

Huge apartment towers, Japan's first big concrete buildings, were built to house the army of workers that Hashima's mine required. By 1959, there were 5,259 people living there, on a footprint smaller than many sports stadiums. That gave the island a population density of over 216,000 residents per square mile, more crowded than any other island in the world.

In 1974, Mitsubishi shut down the mine. Japan's coal industry had collapsed due to the country's switch to petroleum. Within a few months, the entire island was completely deserted: a vertical concrete ghost town where desks still sat in schoolrooms, furniture and TV sets still in apartments.

[URBAN NOTE] "Hasidic Townhouse Foes Seek to Dissolve Catskills Village"

Bloomberg's Freeman Klopott takes a look at the unpleasant conflict in the New York village of Bloomingburg between Hasidim and non-Hasidim over development in the community. Tension between fast-growing Hasidic populations looking for inexpensive places to live--cheaper places than Brooklyn--and non-Hasidic populations disliking rapid change has occurred elsewhere.

A plan to build 396 townhouses for ultra-orthodox Jews in a rural New York village is pitting residents and local officials against a developer who says he’s a victim of an anti-Semitic plot.

Opposition to the project is so strong that Bloomingburg, the village in the Catskills, is considering dissolving its local government, which could allow the larger surrounding town to block the development. Voters will decide Sept. 30 whether to fold their municipal government into the Town of Mamakating, whose population is 30 times larger.

Shalom Lamm, the developer seeking to build townhouses and amenities meant to draw Hasidim, accused officials in a federal lawsuit of misusing building codes to keep Jews from moving to the area and violating the rights of the plaintiffs under the U.S. Constitution. Town officials say the issue is about preserving Bloomingburg’s rural character, not about religion.

“I want the village to be like it was eight years ago when I moved up here,” said Mayor Frank Gerardi, who signed a petition calling for the dissolution. “It was a quiet place, a nice little town. Now everything has changed. There’s hustle and bustle, a lot of housing changes.”

Bloomingburg, home to about 420 residents 78 miles (126 kilometers) northwest of Manhattan, sits in the farthest reaches of a culture war raging in New York City’s exurbs as the largest Hasidic community outside of Israel leaves gentrifying Brooklyn in search of lower-cost housing. The fight has increasingly entangled state agencies and Governor Andrew Cuomo, a 56-year-old Democrat facing re-election in November.

[LINK] "Visa obstacle looms as Harper heralds end of Canada EU free-trade talks"

Mike Blanch field at MacLean's reports that Romanian and Bulgarian upset with Canadian visa policies might hinder the passage of the Canada-EU free trade agreement.

As Prime Minister Stephen Harper prepares to celebrate the end of Canada’s free-trade negotiations with Europe on Friday, there is persistent concern that two unhappy eastern European countries could still derail the deal.

Canada requires a visa for travellers from Romania and Bulgaria and some European diplomats worry that one or both of the countries could block ratification of the agreement if the requirement is not lifted, The Canadian Press has learned.

Harper is to host European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and European Council President Herman Van Rompuy for a Canada-EU summit Friday in Ottawa.

The event is being touted as a victory lap in what has been a protracted five years of negotiation of the wide-ranging trade and investment pact with Europe, known as CETA.

But one western diplomat, close to the talks, says the Romanian and Bulgarian visa issue remains an irritant.

“There is still a problem with the Romanians and Bulgarians. Canada requires a visa for them, which upsets them a lot,” said the diplomat, who agreed to discuss the matter on the condition they not be identified.

[URBAN NOTE] "Tina Fontaine last seen leaving with man in West End, says friend"

CBC reports on the testimony of a teenage friend of Tina Fontaine, a recently murdered teenage girl of First Nations background fifteen years old who has come to stand in for the myriads of murdered and missing native women across Canada. She recounts, among other things, how police knowing that Fontaine was missing did nothing to bring her in. These officers have since been placed on leave.

Tina Fontaine's final days are being recalled by a friend who was one of the last people to see the 15-year-old girl alive.

Fontaine's body was recovered from the Red River on Aug. 17, over a week after she was last reported missing.

​The teen had run away from her home on the Sagkeeng First Nation on July 1 and ended up in the care of a Winnipeg child and family services (CFS) agency. But she ran away from her placements numerous times.

The 18-year-old girl, who CBC News is calling "Katrina," says she met Fontaine while she was heading to a West End Winnipeg convenience store sometime between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. on Aug. 7.

"I just seen her sitting there and she looked young, so I just started talking to her, and she was under the influence," she told the CBC's Caroline Barghout.

"We just hung out for a bit and that's just how I met her."

Katrina said they hit it off right away and they spent most of the next three days together. She said both of them knew what it was like to be in CFS care.

"I knew the feeling of being alone — like emotionally and mentally when you, like, have nobody — and I guess that's where we connected," she said.

[LINK] "Signs in B.C. point to earliest human habitation"

The Toronto Star shares Dene Moore's article suggesting that an archeological site dating back to the Ice Age has been found just off the British Columbian coast.

An archeologist who has studied the Haida Gwaii archipelago in British Columbia for 15 years believes his research team may have found underwater clues pointing to the world’s oldest human habitation.

Quentin Mackie from the University of Victoria and his team returned earlier this month from a research trip to the archipelago, where they used an autonomous underwater vehicle to scan the sea floor in search of evidence of ancient civilization.

The evidence they found, lying beneath more than 100 metres of sea water, could date back almost 14,000 years.

“We’re not quite ready to say for sure that we found something,” he said. “We have really interesting-looking targets on the sea floor that, as an archeologist, they look like they could be cultural.”

Mackie’s studies have led him to believe that ancient residents would have harvested salmon near the coast of what was then a single island that stretched well across Hecate Strait toward the mainland.

At the time, the sea level was about 100 metres lower than it is today and the main island of the archipelago was twice as large.

Stone tools or evidence of campfires would not be possible to see on the ocean bottom. They’re too small.

“But we had this idea that if people were harvesting salmon in the rivers . . . they might have been building fish weirs,” Mackie said.

[LINK] "B.C. First Nations vow to ‘work together’ with resource industries ..."

The Province carries Jeff Lee's Postmedia News article reporting on the interest of First Nations groups in British Columbia--and likely elsewhere--in getting economic benefit from their new land claims.

The landmark Supreme Court of Canada decision involving the Tsilhqot’in First Nation fundamentally alters the relationship between native bands and all forms of government, municipal leaders were told Tuesday.

But rather than inject uncertainty into how governments deal with native governments, the ruling helps define for the first time how they can work together, Tsilhqot’in leaders told the Union of B.C. Municipalities convention.

“The Supreme Court of Canada decision only encourages strong relationships with our neighbours,” Chief Percy Guichon of Alexis Creek First Nation told a packed audience of nearly 1,000.

Referring to the many resource-based industries that want access to their lands, Guichon said his community wants to support economic development. “We need to find ways to work together, to work together on these difficult topics. We live side by side,” he said.

The June 26 court decision finding that the Tsihlqot’in Nation has rights and title to 1,740 square kilometres of land west of Williams Lake has opened questions about how this affects local governments.

“Don’t be fooled by the brevity of the decision. I think this is the most significant legal case ever decided in British Columbia,” lawyer Gregg Cockrill told the UBCM convention. “It has big implications for B.C., and big implications for the rest of Canada as well.”

[MUSIC] On Tanya Tagaq winning the 2014 Polaris Music Prize

Nunavut throat singer Tanya Tagaq won the 2014 Polaris Music Prize Tuesday.

She speaks hard truths, and though her music is far from easy listening, Nunavut throat singer Tanya Tagaq has the country's attention. Last night, she won the 2014 Polaris Music Prize for her album Animism, beating out Canadian competitors like Drake and Arcade Fire.

"It felt calm when it happened but I'm getting excited now," Tagaq tells CBC Radio's As It Happens host Carol Off of her win. "I think it won't be until I'm sitting at home in Manitoba, cooking for my daughters and my family, that I'll really start jumping up and down."
As the winner, Tagaq takes home a $30,000 prize, which is awarded to Canadian recording artists, and judged by a panel of music critics.

"To be totally honest, I think that they're just excited to hear something that they've never heard before," she says about why she beat out higher profile competition for the prize. "Traditional throat singing is done with two women and it's not typically... improvised. I think what we're doing in sense of improvisation is very strong."

Many of the songs on Animism were improvisational.

"There are a couple of songs on the album that are one take, untouched improvisation," she says. "Other tracks on the album have a little bit of embellishment, and some have a lot. There's a full spectrum and I think that's what makes things interesting. Like if you're sitting down for a meal and you have different foods with different flavours and different consistencies, it kind of excites the palette. I think we had a good spectrum of preconceived notions and pure improvisation within the album."

"Tanya Tagaq in Puebla Mexico" (Watch on YouTube)

I liked Aubrey Jax's take on Tagaq's victory at blogTO.

There's no way to describe Tagaq's music without the risk of making it sound dull. Throat singing, contemporary-traditional, experimental, vocal explorations - yo, most Canadians are like "change the channel" right here. But as it is when you see any artist who breaks away from known generic constraints and sounds to create a force that is uniquely driven by the power of her own vision, Bjork-collaborating Tagaq has to be experienced to be understood.

And this, not the $30K, is the greatness of Tagaq's Polaris win: now the grunting, screaming, Francis-Bacon-painting emulating diva (you might entice your friends by linking "death metal" with "r&b"), more mainstream-famous for supporting the seal hunt than as an indie musician, will have her unique artistry thrust into the spotlight. Pitchfork wrote their first entry tagged Tanya Tagaq last night, and the Polaris Prize legitimately lived up to its claims that it cares only about an album's "artistic merit."

And for all the rock&roll-light swagger of "STFU" notices and creative interpretations of the blazer being thrown around at the gala, there was the actually bad-ass move of projecting name after name of missing Aboriginal woman for the duration of Tagaq's set. As our country fucks up left and right, the Polaris gala actually served as a reminder that Canada could lead not only in the arts, but in the arena of trying to be good human beings.