[PHOTO] Back yard peony in bloom

They are back!

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper examining how volatiles like water get transported to nascent rocky planets in circumstellar habitable zones.


• The Dragon's Tales looks at 4th and 5th generation fighter aircraft of Japan, India, and Turkey.


• Imageo shares photos of the breaking ice on the Arctic Ocean.


• Joe. My. God. notes that Russia's anti-gay Vitaly Milonov is castigating Russia's Eurovision contestant for being polite to Conchita Wurst.


• Language Hat links to a report of a gathering of poloyglots in Berlin.


• The Numerati's Stephen Baker describes why and how he got his Wikipedia biography edited.


• Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw writes about his profound interest in stories of all kinds.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer notes that there are still no good economic explanations for the scramble for Africa.


• Spacing maps Canada's various land types.


• The Transit Toronto blog shares the TTC's explanation for yesterday's transit outage.


• Window on Eurasia shares a Tatar academic's argument that Russians are fundamentally not Europeans, much like Tatars.

[LINK] "Electing Mike Harris"

Twenty years ago yesterday, Mike Harris led the Progressive Conservatives to victory in the 1995 provincial elections. Toronto's Jamie Bradburn explains what happened.

When the writ dropped on April 28, 1995, it was clear that premier Bob Rae’s NDP government was toast. Since its election in 1990, it had endured a recession, the hostility of the business community and press, and its own financial blunders in raising the provincial deficit. The implementation of the “Social Contract” of public-service wage cuts, and the ensuing “Rae Days,” alienated traditional NDP supporters among public sector and labour unions. While Rae himself maintained some respect among the public, his government sank to the bottom of Lake Ontario in opinion polls. The NDP issued few promises during the 1995 campaign, preferring to stand on their record and reputation as a party with a conscience.

As the six-week campaign began, Lyn McLeod’s Liberals were polling at over 50 per cent popularity. The mood soured quickly as McLeod avoided answering any question clearly. As the party leader with the lowest public profile, she barely mingled with the public. As Sun columnist Douglas Fisher pointed out, there may have been an unspoken feeling that voters “simply do not want a woman as premier or prime minister,” regardless of which party they belonged to. “Surely someday this largely unexpressed block or rejection will disappear,” Fisher observed. “But it’s still with us, and one gets the same hesitations and then the faint but clear damning of Lyn McLeod that I’ve heard before regarding Audrey McLaughlin and Kim Campbell, and even back to Sheila Copps and Flora MacDonald when they were would-be leaders of their parties.” Two more decades would pass before Ontarians elected Kathleen Wynne as the province’s first female premier.

But the biggest mistake the Liberals made was making the NDP their main target. It was an easy error to make. The aggressive nature of the Tory platform violated former premier William Davis’s dictum that the key to political success in Ontario was that “bland works.” Good, upstanding Ontarians would never fall prey to the upending of government services and divisive proposals for programs like “workfare,” right?

Yet something was happening to reignite the Tories. When the party collapsed in the late 1980s, much of the old backroom guard moved into the private sector or entered the federal arena. What remained was a membership who hated each other’s guts—as party official Tom Long put it, “they were mindlessly vindictive and spiteful.” In the legislature, Andy Brandt served as “interim leader” for three years. The power vacuum left room for the party to be reshaped by younger radicals who felt the Tories had drifted too far left. Drawing inspiration from neo-conservative movements in Great Britain and the United States, figures like Long, Alister Campbell, Tony Clement, and Leslie Noble gained control of party mechanisms. Harris’s natural conservative inclinations served this group well when he became Tory leader in 1990.

[URBAN NOTE] "Can families still afford Vancouver?"

Ken MacQueen of MacLean's explores, perhaps as an alarmist, the question of whether or not real estate prices in the city of Vancouver have risen so much as it make it impossible for people--including workers--to actually live there. Vancouverites, please chime in.

The city of Vancouver, with a population of about 610,000, is hemmed in by ocean, inlet, river and surrounding suburban cities of Metro Vancouver (which the rest of Canada usually assumes, incorrectly, are part of the municipality of Vancouver). The path to affordability, he said, is densifying Vancouver, dumping the “sacred single-family zoning.” He knows he’ll be accused of self-interest, “a ruse to get more condos.” But with 60 towers in the pipeline to market, he has plenty of business, he says. He knows his idea would see mayor and council impaled upon the white picket fence of the Canadian dream. But while Rennie is a political player, he is not a politician.

There are just more than 47,000 single homes hogging 56 per cent of Vancouver’s footprint. Their values have climbed past reason en route to insanity. “I think there should be a really healthy conversation about alternative forms of housing,” says the condo guy between phone calls and bites of his sandwich. “I say rezone the whole city to townhouse more as an instigator for conversation, but it’s not that stupid an idea.”

Nor is it heresy to say Vancouver may not be the place to raise your kids. Urban flight is already the logical consequence of resisting density, he says. “Nobody is talking about the consequences of our actions. ‘Not in my backyard’— fine,” he says. “ ‘[If ]I want to live in the dying commodity of a single family home . . . I have to acknowledge I am preventing my children and grandchildren from living [nearby].’ ”

[. . .]

Stoking the debate is a new study by Vancity credit union Vancity. It warns that Metro Vancouver faces a looming labour shortage as Millennials, the next generation of highly educated workers, are driven away by unaffordable housing. Between 2001 and 2014 the average wage rose by 36.2 per cent in Metro Vancouver while the average home resale value climbed by almost 63 per cent. In Vancouver city, house values jumped 211 per cent in that same period. Within five years, the Vancity report said, workers in 82 of 88 “in-demand jobs” (including industrial electricians, civil engineers and general practitioners) won’t be able to afford a single family home in the region. In 10 years only senior managers will have sufficient employment income to buy a house. “At this point, lawyers, electrical engineers and specialist physicians fall off the list.” Vancity also has its roots in east Vancouver, formed in 1946 by 14 families denied mortgages from the big banks. Today clients are shut out of the market by house values accelerating far beyond wage increase, says Vancity’s Andy Broderick, vice-president of community investment.

Children increasingly are a luxury item in a city heavy with apartments and cramped condos. Granite countertops and high-end appliances are essential selling points, but accommodating children and the square footage of second bedrooms, or exceedingly rare third bedrooms, is often seen by developers as a liability. Vancouver joins the ranks of so-called “childless” American cities like San Francisco and Seattle, where households with children have fallen below 20 per cent. Comparable data in Vancouver is hard to find but there are key indicators. Between 2007 and 2014, Vancouver public school enrolment dropped to 52,466 from 56,095, despite overall population growth. Vancouver census data between 2006 and 2011 shows 71,350 children age 14 and under, down 3.5 per cent from five years earlier. Paradoxically, schools in the wealthier west side are bursting while 33 east side schools are at less than three-quarters capacity. Clearly affordability isn’t an issue for some young families, while those buying into the east-side boom aren’t producing the legions of children of generations past.

[LINK] "Australia’s ‘Stolen Generations’ Not a Closed Chapter"

The Inter Press Service's Silvia Boarini describes how adoption remains a vexed issue for Aborigines in Australia, for reasons that people familiar with First Nations in Canada know all too well.

[I]ndigenous activists maintain that the ‘stolen generations’ is hardly an isolated chapter, let alone a closed one. “From the first few weeks of the invasion in the 1780s, they started removing our children and breaking down our families,” Sam Watson, a prominent Aboriginal leader and activist, told IPS. “And there are more children being removed now than ever before,” he added.

A recent report by the Government Productivity Commission, titled ‘Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage’, corroborates Watson’s interpretation. Indigenous children in out-of-home-care numbered 5,059 in June 2004 and 14,991 in June 2014. Barely five percent of the population under 17 is indigenous and yet, the report shows, 35 percent of all children removed are Aboriginal and Strait Islanders.

Mary Moore is founder of the Legislative Ethics Commission and has followed many cases of indigenous and non-indigenous child removal. She calls Australia the ‘child-stealing capital of the world’.

Many jobs depend on this ingrained practice and laws are passed to legitimise it, she says. “Removal and adoption are counter-intuitive strategies,” she told IPS. “They ignore the damaging lifelong consequences on children and they are far more costly than supporting families to remain united.”

Authorities justify removals in the name of ‘child protection’ and point to a context of ‘neglect’ and possible ‘risk’ as justifying factors. But the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander minority, overly represented at the bottom of most socio-economic indices, wants to know whose ‘neglect’ and racist policies have contributed to the widespread poverty, soaring incarceration numbers or high mental illness rates affecting their communities.

[PHOTO] "Google Photos and the Ideal of Passive Pervasive Documentation"

The Frailest Thing's Michael Sacasas has an extended meditation on photography in an era of superabundant memory. Is there any way, he wonders, to get around the risk that to have memories so readily preserved and invoked will be to diminish them?

(I have more than three thousand pictures on my Flickr account and hundreds on Instagram, to say nothing of the thousands more I have saved on my computers. Should I worry?)

I’ve been thinking, recently, about the past and how we remember it. That this year marks the 20th anniversary of my high school graduation accounts for some of my reflective reminiscing. Flipping through my senior yearbook, I was surprised by what I didn’t remember. Seemingly memorable events alluded to by friends in their notes and more than one of the items I myself listed as “Best Memories” have altogether faded into oblivion. “I will never forget when …” is an apparently rash vow to make.

But my mind has not been entirely washed by Lethe’s waters. Memories, assorted and varied, do persist. Many of these are sustained and summoned by stuff, much of it useless, that I’ve saved for what we derisively call sentimental reasons. My wife and I are now in the business of unsentimentally trashing as much of this stuff as possible to make room for our first child. But it can be hard parting with the detritus of our lives because it is often the only tenuous link joining who we were to who we now are. It feels as if you risk losing a part of yourself forever if you were to throw away that last delicate link.

“Life without memory,” Luis Bunuel tells us, “is no life at all.” “Our memory,” he adds, “is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing.” Perhaps this accounts for why tech criticism was born in a debate about memory. In the Phaedrus, Plato’s Socrates tells a cautionary tale about the invention of writing in which writing is framed as a technology that undermines the mind’s power to remember. What we can write down, we will no longer know for ourselves–or so Socrates worried. He was, of course, right. But, as we all know, this was an incomplete assessment of writing. Writing did weaken memory in the way Plato feared, but it did much else besides. It would not be the last time critics contemplated the effects of a new technology on memory.

I’ve not written nearly as much about memory as I once did, but it continues to be an area of deep interest. That interest was recently renewed not only by personal circumstances but also by the rollout of Google Photos, a new photo storage app with cutting edge sorting and searching capabilities. According to Steven Levy, Google hopes that it will be received as a “visual equivalent to Gmail.” On the surface, this is just another digital tool designed to store and manipulate data. But the data in question is, in this case, intimately tied up with our experience and how we remember it. It is yet another tool designed to store and manipulate memory.

[PHOTO] "Black's photography stores to close"

The Toronto Star's business reporter, Francine Kopun, reports on the impending closure of Canadian photography retail store Black's. The economics of photography just did not work in the chain's favour.

A change in how Canadians share photos has forced the closure of the remaining 59 Black’s stores in Canada, six years after the chain was purchased by wireless company Telus.

“Technology is changing the way Canadians take and share pictures,” said Luiza Staniec, a spokesperson for Black’s and Vancouver-based Telus, the wireless company that bought Black’s Photo Corp. in 2009 for $28 million.

Staniec said Canadians are sharing their pictures on social media sites like Instagram and choosing cloud storage solutions instead of printing out pictures, a primary business at Black’s.

The Canadian chain was founded in 1948 by Eddie Black. It used to sell and process film. It sold cameras and phones.

There were 113 locations when Telus purchased the company in 2009, according to a press release on the company’s website.

[URBAN NOTE] "Could Captain John's still live on?"

The Toronto Star's Susan Pigg reports on the various plans to refurbish Captain John's floating restaurant. Most, it seems, aren't well-thought-out at all.

As she sits tied up at a Port Colborne scrapping yard, Captain John’s floating restaurant is yet again drawing a crowd.

A Boston-Miami investor group has offered about $100,000 to save the former Toronto tourist attraction from being cut up into recyclable pieces. And they aren’t alone.

One person has even inquired over what it would take to get the 90-metre ship, the Jadran, a new engine and put it back in business — a $10 million to $15 million proposition.

“I’ve probably talked four or five people out of being interested, just to do them a favour, really,” says veteran ship scrapper Wayne Elliott, who oversaw the towing of the ship from Toronto’s waterfront last month after years of legal battles over its fate.

“We’ve heard from a number of people and with some, it seems to be just emotion and not really well thought-out. Many don’t even have a final plan or a final destination for the ship.”

[URBAN NOTE] "Why the Gardiner East decision, whatever it is, won’t be “evidence based”"

Philip Preville, something of a contrarian, argues in Toronto Life that the desire to tear down the Gardiner Expressway relate less to facts and more to political prejudices.

Pity the 5,200 souls who drive the eastern stretch of the Gardiner during morning rush hour. They are getting a good whipping in the name of evidence-based policy. Nearly every argument in favour of the teardown points a finger at them. Architect Paul Raff, writing in the Toronto Star, claims that the issue of the Gardiner East’s future is one “of reality versus misinformation,” then cites the 5,200 drivers as an example of “reality.” These drivers are also getting a thorough public shaming of the kind only Twitter can deliver, the crime being their excessive hoarding of tax dollars for their aging infrastructure pet. (At least they each have 5,199 pairs of shoulders to lean upon, to help cope with the mortification.)

No one has taken these 5,200 drivers to greater task for their claim upon the public purse than councillor Josh Matlow, who, in an open statement to his constituents about his decision to support the teardown, explained that “the facts got in the way” of his feelings about the Gardiner. First among those facts: 5,200. Matlow then goes down the costing rabbit hole to demonstrate the burden all taxpayers will have to bear to keep 5,200 people arriving at work on time: by his reckoning, $6.43 per minute of delay for the next 30 years.

I’m not sure I can crank up the twisty elastics of suspense on this topic any further, so now is probably the time to let the propellers fly. It turns out the figure we’re all so fixated on—these 5,200 Gardiner East vehicles at rush hour—substantially underestimates the actual amount of traffic on the Gardiner East. As evidence goes, it’s almost completely unhelpful to the Gardiner debate.

When I inquired about the source of the number with Waterfront Toronto, I was told the 5,200 figure is actually an estimate of one average hour’s worth of vehicle traffic during the morning rush. The morning peak period is three hours long; a more realistic figure, then, would be 15,600. Moreover, it counts only westbound vehicles, since they are the ones most likely to experience delays on the way downtown. When I inquired about the total daily traffic volumes on the Gardiner in both directions, Waterfront Toronto pointed me to figure 3 on page 18 of this document. The Gardiner East carries about 115,000 cars per day. The graph clearly shows a three-hour morning peak period averaging roughly 8,000 vehicles per hour, for a total nearly five times the 5,200 figure everyone keeps citing.

To say nothing of the four-hour evening peak averaging 7,000 vehicles per hour. According to Waterfront Toronto spokesperson Andrew Hilton, the Gardiner East traffic studies modeled only the morning rush hour. The rationale was that, since the morning rush has higher vehicle counts, it is the one that will yield the worst-case scenarios for traffic delays. Given the lower intensity of afternoon peak travel, Hilton says that a useful rule of thumb would be to expect afternoon delays equal to 80 per cent of the morning delays. This logic doesn’t necessarily jibe with the lived experience of many motorists. The evening rush equals the morning rush plus the additional hordes who came into town between 9:30 a.m. and 1 p.m., which explains why its total volume is larger than the morning rush. But we don’t have any traffic-model projections for the afternoon eastbound delays, so we don’t even have an official number to quibble over.

Much more at the link.