[PHOTO] Registered to vote

I am registered to vote in the upcoming federal election. Are you?

[URBAN NOTE] Jonathan Goldsbie in Now on #elxn42 in Toronto

In "A Day at the Races", Jonathan Goldsbie looks at five different election races in Toronto ridings. Thus, Eglinton-Lawrence:

RECENT HISTORY Eglinton-Lawrence was solidly Liberal from its 1979 inception until the last general election, and the party very much hopes to reclaim it as rightfully theirs. Joe Volpe won the seat seven times, but his margins against Conservative candidates gradually shrank through the post-Chrétien era, the backslide culminating with retired investment banker Joe Oliver trouncing him 46.8 per cent to 38.4 in 2011. The NDP candidate, Justin Chatwin, took an 11.6 per cent share of the vote, one of their better showings here.

DYNAMICS Oliver was the Harper government’s minister of natural resources, the point man on tar sands economics, until he succeeded Jim Flaherty as finance minister in 2014. Yet any rundown of this riding’s dynamics has to begin with a discussion of the recent shitshow on the Liberals’ side. The short version: in a wild mess, Eve Adams, the controversial Conservative MP for Mississauga-Brampton South, had tried and spectacularly failed to win her party’s nomination for the new riding of Oakville North-Burlington. So she and fiancé Dimitri Soudas – the PM’s former head of communications, who was fired from his job as Conservative Party of Canada executive director because of improper interference in the nomination – decamped to the Liberals. Leader Justin Trudeau was happy to receive the radioactive pair, and when Adams chose to run in Eglinton-Lawrence despite having no ties to the area, the riding’s loyal Liberals were, unsurprisingly, upset; they rallied around her opponent, lawyer Marco Mendocino. On July 26, he defeated Adams in a nomination meeting that received rare national attention.

For an election ostensibly being fought on the economy, finance minister Oliver has been weirdly absent. When Maclean’s went looking for him earlier this month, his campaign spokesperson said that he was just out canvassing the neighbourhood. Bloomberg News, however, discovered that he was actually attending a G20 meeting in Ankara, Turkey, which would have been much less remarkable had his team not lied about it. Canada’s finance minister is apparently being restrained from discussing Canada’s finances within Canada itself.

The NDP is running former Saskatchewan finance minister Andrew Thomson, who they repeatedly assure us is a star candidate. The Huffington Post called the race A Clash Of Finance Ministers; surely that’s the sort of headline the party was hoping for when they recruited the waterfront-dwelling Cisco executive.

[URBAN NOTE] "Mulcair's Outremont, Trudeau's Papineau: A tale of two Montreal ridings"

CBC News' Nancy Wood takes a look at the adjacent ridings of the NDP's Thomas Mulcair and the Liberals' Justin Trudeau. Each riding, it seems, turns out to be suited for each man contra first impressions.

The border between Justin Trudeau's riding and Tom Mulcair's sits on a desolate strip of railroad track in the north end of Montreal. It's a no-man's land lined by broken-down fences and overgrown weeds.

North of the tracks is the Trudeau riding of Papineau, one of the poorest, most densely populated ridings in the country.

To the south, Mulcair's riding of Outremont. It has pockets of poverty, but overall is wealthy, with stately homes and exclusive private schools.

At first glance, the ridings seem an awkward fit for the men who represent them.

In fact, Justin Trudeau had his eye on Mulcair's Outremont when he first considered entering politics. His roots there were deep. He had gone to school at prestigious Brébeuf College, was married at Sainte-Madeleine d'Outremont Church and was living in the borough with his wife Sophie Grégoire.

[URBAN NOTE] "Detroit’s white population up after decades of decline"

Louis Aguilar and Christine MacDonald of The Detroit News report on a new trend in Detroit. I am uncomfortable with the idea of a specifically white population being a sign of revival.

Detroit’s white population rose by nearly 8,000 residents last year, the first significant increase since 1950, according to a Detroit News analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data.

The data, made public Wednesday, mark the first time census numbers have validated the perception that whites are returning to a city that is overwhelmingly black and one where the overall population continues to shrink.

Many local leaders contend halting Detroit’s population loss is crucial, and the new census data shows that policies to lure people back to the city may be helping stem the city’s decline.

“It verifies the energy you see in so many parts of Detroit and it’s great to hear,” said Kevin Boyle, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian who studies the intersection of class, race, and politics in 20th-century America. The Northwestern University professor grew up on Detroit’s east side.

“The last thing I want to do is dampen the good news, but the problem is Detroit is still the poorest city in the U.S. The city hasn’t turned the corner until that changes,” Boyle said.

[URBAN NOTE] "America’s loneliest grocer takes a stand"

The Toronto Star's Daniel Dale looks at the engaging story of a New Orleans man, one Burnell Cotlon, who is trying to set up a grocery store in the Lower Ninth Ward. His GoFundMe page is a worthy cause.

In the decade between Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the opening of Burnell Cotlon’s Lower 9th Ward Market last November, the isolated, impoverished neighbourhood most devastated by the storm had no grocery store and no fresh produce.

The nearest Wal-Mart was an easy 10-minute drive for residents with a car. For those without, a milk run was a 50-minute bus expedition.

Cotlon’s bowls of fruits and vegetables are a lifeline. And a symbol, however modest, of returning normalcy.

“People have come in here and cried,” Cotlon said. “I’ve had total strangers high-fiving me.”

The Lower 9th Ward Market was an abandoned apartment building before Cotlon bought the property for $4,000. In truth, it looks more like a low-budget convenience store than a grocery. The entire produce section fits on one table. The only breeze comes from portable floor fans set to high. Cotlon stuffs his small supply of milk into a fridge Coca-Cola gave him strictly for its soft drinks.

Cotlon confessed his violation unprompted, with an unapologetic smile. He was making a point.

“You have to make this work,” he said. “No matter what.”

[LINK] "Oklahoma Pre-K teacher allegedly calls being left-handed ‘evil’ and ‘sinister’"

This news item is remarkable. That such stupidity can persist!

Alisha asked [her son Zayde] why he was writing with his right hand, not his left.

“I just asked ‘Is there anything his teachers ever asked about his hands?’ And he raises this one and says this one’s bad,” Sands said.

Alisha sent the teacher a note and got a strong response.

It was an article calling left-handedness “unlucky,” “evil,” and “sinister.”

It even says “for example, the devil is often portrayed as left-handed.”

Alisha couldn’t believe it.

“It breaks my heart for him because someone actually believes that, believes my child is evil because he’s left handed, it’s crazy,” Sands said.

She went to the superintendent with the article.

“There was no suspension of any kind. There was basically nothing done to this teacher,” Sands says, “She told them she thought I needed literature on it.”

[LINK] "Japan Dumbs Down Its Universities"

Bloomberg View's Noah Smith argues that Japan's turn against social sciences and the humanities in public education augurs worrying things.

Japan’s government just ordered all of the country’s public universities to end education in the social sciences, the humanities and law.

The order, issued in the form of a letter from Hakubun Shimomura, Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, is non-binding. The country’s two top public universities have refused to comply. But dozens of public schools are doing as the government has urged. At most of these universities, there will be no more economics majors, no more law students, no more literature or sociology or political science students. It’s a stunning, dramatic shift, and it deserves more attention than it’s receiving.

It is also a very bad sign for Japan, for a number of reasons.

First of all, eliminating social science could signal a return to a failing and outdated industrial policy. Many observers interpret the change as an economic policy, intended to move the Japanese populace toward engineering and other technical skills and away from fuzzy disciplines. But if this is indeed the aim, it’s a terrible direction for Japan to be going.

Japan’s rapid catch-up growth in the 1960s and 1970s was based on manufacturing industries. This is common for developing countries. But when countries get rich, they typically shift toward service industries. Finance, consulting, insurance, marketing and other service industries don’t produce material goods, but they help organize the patterns of production more efficiently -- something Japan desperately needs. Since it's a country with a shrinking population, it can only grow by increasing productivity.

But Japanese productivity has grown very slowly since the early 1990s, and has fallen far behind that of the U.S. If Japan is going to turn this situation around, it will need more than a workforce of skilled engineers. It will need managers who can communicate with those engineers and with each other. It will need conceptual thinkers who can formulate business plans and strategic vision. It will need marketers who can establish and increase Japanese brand recognition. It will need financiers who can channel savings away from old, fading industries and toward productive new ones. It will need lawyers to sort out intellectual property cases and help businesses navigate international legal systems. It will need consultants to evaluate the operations of unprofitable, stagnant companies and help those companies become profitable again.

In other words, it will need a bunch of social science and humanities students.

[URBAN NOTE] "Modernizing Ethiopia Opens $475-Million, China-Built Urban Rail"

Bloomberg's William Davison notes the continuing China-aided modernization of Ethiopia.

Tekle Negash’s days of riding a battered minibus to work in Ethiopia’s capital are over. Boarding Addis Ababa’s $475-million, Chinese-built and funded Light Rail, he can slash his one-hour commute by two-thirds and still save money.

The 50-year-old trader was one of thousands who queued Sunday for the opening of the first phase of the state-owned urban railway, which comprises 34 kilometers (21.1 miles) of lines across the city. In a ceremony that featured a Chinese delegate’s impromptu singing and an Ethiopian dance troupe, Transport Minister Workneh Gebeyu described the project, one of the first of its kind in sub-Saharan Africa, as a milestone in the nation’s journey out of poverty.

The Light Rail is the first in a raft of Chinese-funded infrastructure projects that Ethiopia’s government says will come online in the next few months and help maintain annual economic growth of more than 10 percent. Another railway along the main trade route to neighboring Djibouti may begin early in 2016, while the Gibe III hydropower dam’s reservoir has started filling, with its 1,870 megawatts capable of almost doubling Ethiopia’s generating capacity.

The operational track, which includes elevated sections and tunnels, runs from Addis Ababa’s main industrial area on its southern fringe, through the trading district of Merkato to the historic center of Piazza. An east-west line skirts the African Union’s headquarters, soars past the main government district and out to modern housing developments.

The Ethiopian Railways Corp. service, which will be run and maintained by Shenzhen Metro Group and China Railway Engineering Corp. for five years, may eventually carry 60,000 passengers an hour, according to project manager Behailu Sintayehu. The second line will start running when China Electric Power Equipment Technology Co., another state-owned company, finishes connecting it to a dedicated electricity supply, he said in a text message on Monday.

[LINK] "The PM, the Pig and musings on Power"

Rob Fahey's post analyzing the bizarre scandal surrounding David Cameron's alleged actions with a pig is a must-read.

I suspect that David Cameron will limp on in 10 Downing Street, not least because he will understand the historic shame of being the Prime Minister who resigned over the thing with the pig, but his authority will be weakened to the point where a leadership challenge over a rather less intimate issue in the relatively near future will give him an opportunity to bow out with some grace. Whether this scandal is ultimately his undoing or not, it is clearly a calculated attack. Lord Ashcroft feels snubbed and sidelined by Cameron, who seemingly declined to offer him the cabinet position to which he felt entitled; the billionaire’s revenge is to dig up this singularly humiliating moment from the prime minister’s past and ensure that it is splashed on the front page of the Daily Mail, the preferred scurrilous tabloid rag of the very heartland of Conservative voters.

Lord Ashcroft, pollster and political guru in his own right, knows as well as anyone else what this will do. This is not a playful aside in a fun little unauthorised biography that he’s putting together as a hobby with his journalist pal, Oakeshott; this is a carefully targeted, focused attack designed to wreak career havoc upon, and cause huge personal embarrassment for, a man whom Ashcroft sees as disloyal, or as having stepped out of line. And here, I think, is something much bigger and more interesting than the scurrilous details of Cameron’s vivid indiscretion; here is a rare public example of how power is wielded by Britain’s elite, of how control is exerted over those they wish to manipulate, and of how those groomed for success from a young age can be destroyed should they be seen to diverge from the steps they’re told to dance.

Initiation ceremonies or “hazing” rituals, often of a painful, humiliating, transgressive or sexual nature, are a well-documented part of the culture of many organisations run by and for young men, especially those from positions of privilege or in elite institutions. Hazing is a fixture, albeit usually in less extreme form than many might imagine, of “greek life” at US colleges; initiation rituals of some description are relatively common in elite societies at top educational institutions elsewhere. Such rituals seem to be an especially important part of extremely disciplined groups such as certain military units. The primary social function served by these rituals is to accelerate and deepen the bonds shared by members of the group, and the sense of loyalty to the group each person holds. By committing transgressive acts together, members develop a sense of sharing in a mutual secret, thus instantly creating trust; by overcoming some humiliation or pain, new members deepen their commitment to the group, as their internal logic reasons that if they are willing to endure such an ordeal, it must mean that the group is important and deserving of loyalty (otherwise, they would have made a terrible mistake and gone through all of that suffering for nothing). Through these acts bonds are forged, networks established; the “old school tie”, used as a metaphor for Britain’s elite networks, is also a metaphor for the actions and rituals, transgressive or otherwise, which created those networks during the formative years of their members.

That much is somewhat understandable; in truth, few of us are not part of a “network” based in some way on the same psychology, even if our networks are perhaps less likely to involve prime ministers and billionaires. Bearing witness to one another doing embarrassing things, usually if not always under the influence of alcohol, is a fairly standard part of the socialisation process, especially for young men; it may not be quite as ritualised or organised as ceremonial events which require very specific orders from local butchers, but moments of embarrassment or transgression shared with close friends are a basic building block of many of our relationships.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• blogTO notes that Toronto has been ranked the 12th most expensive city in the world.


• Centauri Dreams is impressed by Pluto's diverse landscapes.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes that the debris disk of AU Microscopii hints at planetary formation.


• The Dragon's Tales observes Russia's fear of American hypersonic weapons.


• Joe. My. God. notes a GoFundMe campaign for a man who was harassing a lesbian colleague.


• Language Hat notes the adaptation of the Cherokee language to the modern world.


• Language Log examines the complexity of the language used by Republican candidates in a CNN debate.


• Marginal Revolution notes a major difference between national and international markets is the latter's lack of regulation.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at how migrant labourers in California can be cheated out of their pay.


• Registan notes the likely sustained unpleasantness in the Donbas.


• Peter Rukavina quite likes the new Island musical Evangeline.


• The Russian Demographics Blog shares photos of Lithuanian castles in Ukraine.


• Spacing notes the cycling infrastructure of Toronto.


• Towleroad observes that the new constitution of Nepal explicitly protects LGBT people.


• Window on Eurasia wonders if Syrian Circassians will go to Russia as refugees and examines the complexities of Karabakh.

[URBAN NOTE] "French new wave: A cultural shift for Toronto as ‘invisible francophones’ settle in"

Selena Ross' article in The Globe and Mail earlier this month, mirrored at 24news.ca, looks at the growing number of French-medium schools in Toronto. As Francophones continues to immigrate to Ontario and older-established Francophones start to make use of these facilities, the numbers of students keep rising.

Despite guarantees in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, French-only schools in Toronto have historically been few and far between. For decades, a real fear for many francophones settling in Hogtown has been that they would fail to pass on their language and culture to their offspring.

A once-in-a-generation opportunity is starting to change that, and it promises a bigger cultural shift in Toronto. As enrolment in English-language schools declines, a crop of school properties is being put up for sale and the region’s two French school boards have jumped to buy. What no one predicted is the snowball effect that has followed each new school opening, drawing “invisible francophones” out of a reluctant assimilation and making new connections between them.

Lianne Doucet, a mother of three in Toronto’s Leslieville neighbourhood, laughs and lowers her voice to a spooky register. “We always say, ‘We’re all around you.’”

The cultural isolation of Toronto-area francophones – whether by mother tongue or schooling – can be so extreme that many don’t know that Section 23 of the Charter promises French-language K-12 education for their children. The Toronto area’s first French-language school board was created in 1988, and there are now two serving the region, one public and one Catholic. Still, nearly 30 years later, the secular board, the Conseil Scolaire Viamonde, must diligently advertise its schools to get the word out, superintendent Sylvie Longo said.

It has had a lot of ads to put out lately: 12 new schools in the past eight years, with four more under construction. The board’s Catholic counterpart, the Conseil Scolaire de District Catholique Centre-Sud, has opened 10 in the same time span. The two boards’ enrolment rose respectively by 33 and 16 per cent from 2008 to 2014.

That’s in sharp contrast with the shrinking English system. The Toronto District School Board’s enrolment dropped by nearly 5 per cent in the same period.

And still, French schools consistently fill up faster than predicted. École Élémentaire La Mosaïque opened in Toronto’s Danforth area in 2008 and has already had to rezone, unable to fit in all the eligible children. École Ronald-Marion in Pickering opened in 2013 and now needs portable classrooms to meet demand, while a French Catholic school in Stouffville is at full capacity and hasn’t even opened yet.

“When we build schools, they come,” Ms. Longo said.

Toronto may be one of the world’s most diverse cities, but within Canada, it’s also a bastion of English – and Quebec, a more obvious destination for francophone immigrants, is just a few hours away. Who are the tens of thousands of Toronto-area residents itching for all-French education?

[DM] "On francophone immigration to Toronto and Ontario"

I have a post up at Demography Matters taking a quick look at Francophone immigration in Toronto and Ontario.