[PHOTO] Stairwell snow

It has been snowing pretty heavily in Toronto.

[URBAN NOTE] "Vintage Toronto Ads: Hudson’s Bay Centre"

Torontoist's Jamie Bradburn had a nice feature about the Hudson's Bay Centre's construction. On the northeast corner of Yonge and Bloor, at one point it was a standout complex.

“A kind of urban Rip Van Winkle” was how the Star assessed the state of Yonge and Bloor in 1970. “We let it fall asleep in the early decades of this century, then tiptoed all around it during the ensuing years building the modern face of Toronto. While glittering towers of glass and concrete and stainless steel shot up everywhere else, mid-town retained a sleepy two-storey profile.”

In terms of large-scale development, the neighbourhood was waking up. Headlines transitioned from the complaints about youth in Yorkville to announcements of new office towers and shopping complexes. By the end of 1970, over 200 storeys of new space were expected to be built within the next four years. While buildings like the Manulife Centre and 2 Bloor West materialized, other ideas, like a pedestrian walkway above Bloor Street into the Colonnade, remained on the drawing board.

Among the first projects announced was a reshaping of the northeast corner of Bloor and Yonge. Backed by affiliates of Swiss-owned developer Fidinam, Toronto architectural firm Crang and Boake revealed plans for the as-yet unnamed complex in June 1969. They called for an office tower, an apartment/hotel tower, two levels of shopping, and an 800-vehicle garage, among other features. Sitting atop a major commuter hub, the complex linked into a series of underground shopping centres stretching westward, whose foot traffic would allow landlords to charge hefty rents. The project soon secured interest from Famous Players cinemas and, vacating its old building on the corner, Royal Bank.

Two major tenants were announced in December 1971: the Workmen’s Compensation Board (WCB), which planned to rent up to 13 floors of office space, and Hudson’s Bay Company. The Bay was familiar with the neighbourhood, having operated a branch of its Morgan’s chain at the present site of Holt Renfrew. The new store would serve as the flagship for the Bay’s rapid expansion in Eastern Canada. It also lent its name to the project: the Hudson’s Bay Centre.

Political controversy soon arose at Queen’s Park. It emerged that Fidinam, which received a $15-million loan from the WCB toward construction, donated $50,000 to the ruling provincial Progressive Conservatives following the decision to move the WCB into the building. A probe by attorney-general Dalton Bales found no wrongdoing under existing laws.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• The Big Picture shares photos of aspiring K-pop stars.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly notes how being rich and being happy do not necessarily coincide.


• Centauri Dreams features a guest post from Andrew Lepage looking at the potential habitability of more than two dozen exoplanets. (Three look good.)


• Crooked Timber's John Quiggin reports on the election in the Australian state of Queensland.


• D-Brief notes the numerous surprises associated with the Rosetta comet probe.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper suggesting that near-contact binary star system ZZ Eridani might have a brown dwarf in orbit.


• The Dragon's Tales notes that Uranus' moon Ariel is warmer than expected.


• A Fistful of Euros notes the potential for change in Greece.


• Language Hat links to an Irish Times essay arguing Ireland stayed much more Irish in language than people give it credit.


• Language Log suggests in a guest post that the Chinese script is responsible for high levels of myopia.


• The Planetary Society Blog features a report by Marc Rayman on the Dawn probe's approach to Ceres.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer argues that the small Caribbean basin states which depend on Venezuela's Petrocaribe can survive that corporation's collapse.


• Savage Minds recommends that writers should read more.


• Spacing Toronto wonders what will be next for the TTC after the decision to let minors ride for free.


• The Transit Toronto blog notes the expansion of wireless Internet across the GO Transit network.


• Window on Eurasia looks at the growth of fascism in Russia, notes the politicization of the Russian diaspora, observes the launching of websites for Russophone secessionists in the Baltic States, and wonders about whether or not Putin distinguishes between lies and the truth.

[LINK] "Angry White Buddhists and the Dalai Lama"

Savage Minds has a guest post from anthropologist Ben Joffe, talking about the ways in which the conflict in the Tibetan Buddhist community between worshippers of the Dorje Shugden and followers of the Dalai Lama has been co-opted by Western converts. I don't necessarily agree with this--as Joffe himself notes, there are serious complaints to be had with the Dalai Lama's policy towards this minority sect and its practitioners--but it's an interesting viewpoint.

In November of last year, the fourteenth Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso completed an extensive lecture tour of the USA. Of the thousands who showed up for the Nobel Peace Prize winner’s talks, one group arrived without fail to each of his events: crowds of mostly white protestors in Tibetan robes who came to boycott the religious leader. Brandishing placards and shouting slogans, they accused the Dalai Lama of being a hypocrite, a liar and a denier of religious freedom. Calling the leader ‘the worst dictator in this modern day’ and a ‘false Dalai Lama’, the demonstrators seemed to be channelling the most zealous of Chinese Communist Party ideologues. Yet these were no party cadres. Rather, they were converts to the Dalai Lama’s own school of Tibetan Buddhism. As representatives of the ‘International Shugden Community’ (ISC), the protesters came to highlight their grievances over the Dalai Lama’s opposition to a Tibetan deity known as Dorje Shugden, and the discrimination and human rights violations they claim the religious leader’s rejection of this being and its followers has engendered.

The ISC is a major mouth-piece for the New Kadampa Tradition (NKT), a sect of almost exclusively non-Tibetan converts to Tibetan Buddhism that currently spearheads the global pro-Shugden, anti-Dalai Lama agenda. On the surface, the NKT’s almost two decades-long global campaign against the Dalai Lama and his supporters – that is, the overwhelming majority of the ethnic Tibetan and Tibetan Buddhist global population – appears to be primarily about a dispute hinging on opposing theological positions within a single tradition. The Dalai Lama believes that Dorje Shugden is a dangerous demon masquerading as a benign deity, the NKT believes that the being is a bona fide Buddha. What I want to argue here is that the controversy, and specifically NKT’s involvement in it, points as well to the politics of race, appropriation, and privilege involved in conversion and new religious movements, and highlights ongoing tensions between ethno-nationalist and universalist impulses in the globalization of Tibetan Buddhism and culture.

The Dalai Lama and NKT converts are all members of the Geluk school of Tibetan Buddhism, in which at least since the 19th century, Dorje Shugden has been seen by some practitioners as a particularly potent ‘protector’ (in Tibetan Buddhism protectors are powerful, yet ferocious, egotistical spirits that have been ritually converted into defenders Buddhism). Although the Dalai Lama is technically not the highest spiritual authority in the Geluk school, his line’s historical political leadership of Tibet has made him one of the school’s most prominent figures. His dual role as a national leader and sectarian authority, however, has generated some tension, and historically the Dalai Lamas’ more inclusive, nationally orientated policies have clashed with the narrower sectarian priorities of some Gelukpa elites. Himself once a Shugden propitiator in accordance with his Geluk education in Tibet, the current Dalai Lama began to voice reservations about the spirit in the 1970s. Shugden’s reputation for ruthlessly punishing (and assassinating) prominent Gelukpa practitioners who engage with teachings from other schools has made the spirit iconic of a certain brand of Geluk supremacism. Such bias is in fundamental conflict with the Dalai Lama’s particularly non-sectarian vision of Tibetan Buddhism and a Tibetan nation in exile. Thus, to protect himself and the Tibetan people from what he sees as a dangerous demon, the Dalai Lama has prohibited those with ritual commitments to the spirit from attending any of his teachings, and has purged exile monastic and government posts of anyone associated with the being.

[. . .]

NKT members have made their quarantine into something of a virtue. NKT converts claim Tibetans have become too worldly and politically-focused to be worthy of functioning as custodians of pure Buddhist teachings. Though inji monks and nuns entering the NKT rely on a Tibetan guru, adopt Tibetan names, wear traditional robes and preserve lineage practices hailing from Tibet, any direct engagement with Tibetan politics or culture is denounced as retrogressive and unnecessary. The NKT’s philosophy is one of ‘one lama, one yidam (meditational deity), one protector’ in reference to their sole reliance on Kelsang Gyatso and his particular teachings, a stance distinctly odds with how Tibetan Buddhism has historically been practiced. Today, the NKT curriculum is based exclusively on Kelsang Gyatso’s texts, and ritual activity and teaching in NKT centres worldwide happens pretty much entirely in languages other than Tibetan.

[LINK] "Russia’s Waning Soft Power in Central Asia"

The Diplomat's Stephen Blank argues that in post-Soviet Central Asia, even in Kazakhstan, the Russian language is waning. This has obvious consequences for Russian soft power on the ground in the region.

[I]t has been clear for some time, and recent news reports confirm it, that the Russian language is steadily losing ground in Central Asia in educational institutions and in much of the media throughout Central Asia. To be sure, Moscow is trying to counter this, for instance with recent attempts to saturate the Kazakh media. Yet this trend towards establishing the primacy of national cultures and languages at the expense of Russian builds on twenty years of steady nationalization of the culture of these states as a matter of deliberate policy, on their deliberate efforts to maintain an openness to the larger globalizing trends in the world economy, and on a generation of growing restrictions on Russian language use in broadcasting and other media.

Of course, Central Asian leaders will not publicly attack the use of Russian language or create situations that could tempt Moscow to intervene in Central Asia on the same pretexts as it employed in Ukraine. But while the invasion of Ukraine created and still generates considerable anxiety in Central Asia, the crisis that Russia faces as a result of its action makes intervention in Central Asia a less likely prospect for the foreseeable future. Given the steep economic decline Russia has experienced following its Ukrainian adventure a third front on top of Ukraine and the North Caucasus is the last thing Moscow seeks. Nonetheless, leaders like Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev point with pride to the growth of Kazakh as the native language and more younger students are preferring English or Chinese to Russian.

In Kyrgyzstan, a recent report showed different forces at work but similar outcomes. The poverty of the Kyrgyz school system means that despite Russian claims of large-scale support for Russian-language teaching abroad, means that only 11 percent of Kyrgyz students are going to superior Russian schools in that republic. Students otherwise are not learning Russian and competent teachers are hard to find. All this, of course, generates a vicious cycle. Similarly, in December 2013, Veniamin Kaganov, Russia’s deputy education minister, was quoted in Tass as saying that the number of Russian speakers had fallen by 100 million since the break up of the Soviet Union. Neither is this outcome unique to Kyrgyzstan or Central Asia. Although globalization certainly plays a role here, all these states have taken serious policy steps since 1991 to create a stronger sense of national identity among their peoples, a policy line that inevitably translates into privileging native languages over Russian and English and now Chinese over it as well.

This outcome strongly suggests that while state support for the propagation of he Russian language abroad is a point in Russia’s 2009 national security strategy, Moscow is apparently steadily if somewhat unobtrusively failing to achieve its goals. And this testifies to a continuing failure to actualize Russia’s soft power despite an enormous state investment. The manifestations of this failure may be quiet and not immediately visible but they do point to the steady erosion over time of Russian power of all kinds in Central Asia, although its military capabilities there remain potentially formidable.

[LINK] "Making Babies Makes a Comeback"

Bloomberg View's Noah Smith makes the argument that the fertility J-curve might yet lead to a global fertility recovery.

Japan’s government mistakenly forecast that fertility would bounce back…until 1997. Somewhere around the turn of the century, the government wised up, and realized that the fertility rate was not about to bounce back. If you look at the graph -- as many of the pundits heaping scorn on Japan’s government apparently did not -- you will see that the forecasts have been too pessimistic for more than a decade now. Fertility rates bottomed out at 1.26 children per woman in 2005, and have been rising since -- despite the sharp recession and natural disasters that happened in the meantime. The modest rise has been sustained, and the fertility rate has bounced back to 1.43 in 2013 -- a 13.5 percent rise from its low.

Now, a 13.5 percent rise isn't going to save Japan from a baby bust -- the rate would have to rise by an additional 47 percent in order to reach replacement level, the level that generates long-term population stability. Population decline has already set in, causing economic and social difficulties.

But the slight rise is encouraging, and hints that falling fertility might not be an inescapable death sentence for developed countries. Japan’s experience is part of a trend that has been appearing all across the rich world in the last few years -- fertility is rising a bit. The first study to discover this intriguing phenomenon was published in 2009 in Nature by demographers Mikko Myrskylä, Hans-Peter Kohler and Francesco Billari. They write:

Here we show, using new cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses of the total fertility rate and the human development index (HDI), a fundamental change in the well-established negative relationship between fertility and development as the global population entered the twenty-first century. Although development continues to promote fertility decline at low and medium HDI levels, our analyses show that at advanced HDI levels, further development can reverse the declining trend in fertility. The previously negative development–fertility relationship has become J-shaped, with the HDI being positively associated with fertility among highly developed countries.

Japan was one of the only exceptions they found. Now, it too has joined the trend. In some countries, such as France, Sweden and Norway, fertility has almost climbed back to replacement levels, after dipping far below it for decades. In the U.S., fertility briefly surged above the replacement rate for a few years before drifting back to just underneath it. And in New Zealand, fertility is now at the replacement level.

[URBAN NOTE] "Medical marijuana smell overwhelms other businesses"

I quite agree with the complaints reported by CBC of the other businesses in a Mississauga commercial complex about their complex's marijuana grow-op. Legalizing marijuana is a good idea, but with rights come responsibilities.

Jon and Jackie Messenger say their heating and air conditioning company, which operates out of a plaza near Royal Windsor Drive and Southdown Road, is surrounded on three sides by a medical marijuana grow op.

They say there's no escaping the smell.

"The headache throughout the day is constant," Jackie Messenger told CBC News. "These guys should be working in detached buildings."

Messenger says they don't have a problem with medical marijuana — they just think grow-ops should be located somewhere else. After 10 years in the same location, they are considering moving.

Tenants say the smell makes it almost impossible to work and that it has driven away customers.

"It's getting hard to do business ... hard to be in here for any period of time," said David Kralik, who runs a snow removal company in the same plaza.

[LINK] "Sun News on 8 week Deathwatch"

Canadaland's Jesse Brown reported late last week that the Sun News Network--Canada's indigenous right-wing television network, famed for its very low viewership--might end imminently if it can't find a buyer.

Multiple sources tell CANADALAND that Sun News Network (SNN), the Quebecor-owned cable news channel that launched in 2011, is on the verge of closing.

This follows a December report by James Bradshaw in the Globe and Mail that Moses Znaimer, the media entrepreneur who runs ZoomerMedia Ltd., held exclusive negotiations with Quebecor to buy SNN. In recent weeks, sources tell CANADALAND, negotiations between Zoomer and Quebecor have hit an impasse.

SNN Vice President Kory Teneycke declined to comment on the acquisition. Quebecor VP of Public Affairs Martin Tremblay tells CANADALAND, "It is our policy not to comment on rumors or speculations about the company's assets."

Several SNN employees have learned that Quebecor could choose to dissolve the network within as little as two months, if a deal with Zoomer is not reached. Sources inside SNN tell CANADALAND that attempts to find other interested buyers have so far yielded no serious results.

As recently as three weeks ago, sources say that SNN management told several employees that negotiations with Zoomer looked promising and that a deal was close. But a dispute over potential severance packages for SNN executives (including Teneycke) who would not continue on with the network in the event of an acquisition has led to an impasse.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the potential futures of tourism in Greece

A Tyler Cowen post at Marginal Revolution let me know that many people in the new Greek government have a problem with the all-inclusive tourist packages that play such a major role in Greece's highly tourism-dependent economy. From The New York Times' Danny Hakim and Aggelos Petropoulosjan:

David Phillips has been vacationing for over a decade at the Electra Palace Hotel on the island of Rhodes.

Everything is included. There is Chinese, Italian or Greek food. There is an endless supply of ouzo, beer and Greek wines. He can even bundle the cost of his flight as part of the package.

“I like to go somewhere a week or 10 days and not worry about where I’m going to get my next meal,” said Mr. Phillips, 52, a civil servant from South Wales, adding that he wanted “to have quiet time where I have no worries at all.”

[. . .]

The Syriza party, the upstart leftist coalition that is leading in the polls ahead of the Greek election on Jan. 25, disdains such “all-inclusive” deals as keeping tourists penned up in resorts and away from local businesses and attractions. It has proposed to limit them if it is elected. In fact, both of the top parties in the campaign are unnerving the tourism industry with proposals that would crimp hotels and resorts, even as the business has been a rare bright spot for the anemic Greek economy.

A more recent Reuters article suggests that many of the initial fears were overblown, that the Syriza-led government would instead like to incorporate more local Greek businesses into the package tours.

"There won't be any action against all-inclusive holidays," Elena Kountoura, from the right-wing Independent Greeks party in Tsipras's coalition, told reporters.

"On the contrary, further upgrading the quality of these packages will boost and extend benefits in local markets and communities."

All-inclusive deals that limit added food and bar expenses for vacationers are especially popular among the millions of foreigners who flock to Greece's islands each year. Tourism employs one in five Greeks and accounts for a fifth of the economy.

Some in the industry, including the head of Greece's tourism association Andreas Andreadis, have proposed more flexible models which could tie local restaurants and bars into the package to spread the benefits.

I know little enough about the nature of the Greek tourist economy. I do think that trying to maximize tourist revenue is a very good idea, one way in which a hard-pressed Greece can accumulate money. I also wonder about the extent to which the all-inclusive deals at present can be expanded into more expensive trips. Mediterranean tourism in Europe, as I understand it, often involves the creation of self-enclosed tourist enclaves: compare Britons and Germans in Spain, for instance. People on all-inclusive package tours may well not want to engage more with local businesses: they might just want sun and sand and the rest of it.

By trying to include more Greek businesses, and by trying to increase the spending of visiting tourists, there is a considerable risk of Greece pricing itself out of its market. Why spend more money to do things a tourist might not want to do at all, especially when there are other alternatives? (Mr. Phillips quoted in the article mentioned Turkey.) It goes without saying that the new Greek government will have to be very careful.

[DM] "Two days to save the long-form census"

Aaron Wherry of MacLean's reports.

On Wednesday evening, the House of Commons will vote on whether or not to reinstate the mandatory long-form census. Perhaps all that’s standing between Ted Hsu’s private member’s bill and approval in principle at second reading is fewer than a dozen Conservative votes.



Hsu introduced his bill last fall. It received its first hour of debate in November and its second hour last Thursday. The government has expressed its opposition, while the Liberals and New Democrats seem lined up in support and I’m told both Green MPs will vote in favour. If every other vote of the Independents and smaller parties—seven Independents, two Bloc Québécois, two Forces et Democratie—went Hsu’s way, he’d have 143 votes. And that would leave him 10 votes short of a majority—there are currently two vacancies and the Speaker only votes in the event of a tie, so there are essentially 305 total votes in play.



Of course, that imagines perfect attendance, which is not generally achieved. For reference, consider NDP MP Kennedy Stewart’s motion on e-petitions, which passed the House last January by a count of 142-140, with eight Conservatives voting in favour.



Short of that, Hsu’s bill has at least served to highlight the mess that was created when the Harper government scrapped the mandatory long-form and replaced it with the voluntary “national household survey.” In short, researchers, city planners and hospital officials says it’s more difficult to understand what’s going on in our society—as predicted, the data produced by a voluntary survey is flawed (less reliable data coming, ironically, at a higher cost). Hsu has compiled a list of endorsements that includes the Canadian Chamber of Commerce and the Canadian Medical Association and has been posting expert explanations of why reliable data is important for good governance. (For further testimony to the problems created, see here, here and here. Former chief statistician Munir Sheikh, who resigned after Tony Clement publicly suggested Sheikh had supported the government’s decision, offered his assessment of the situation in 2013.)



In addition to restoring a long-form census, Hsu’s bill makes a number of changes to the process around the long-form census, including how the chief statistician is selected. Interestingly, Hsu’s bill would do something the government hasn’t gotten around to doing: eliminating the threat of prison time for refusing to fill out a mandatory census. Whatever the Conservatives’ concerns about that threat and whatever the government’s promises to repeal the law in question, they haven’t bothered to do anything about it. Instead, the Conservatives now point to a private member’s bill, introduced last fall and not yet debated in the House, that would remove the unused stipulation.

See also the CBC's report on the matter.

Posted at Demography Matters here.