[PHOTO] On the import of the spring seeds rack at Dollarama

One sure sign of spring's approach is the arrival of racks at local Dollaramas, carrying packets of seeds.

[URBAN NOTE] On the decision to deeply slash fares for the Union-Pearson Express

blogTO let me know of the planned cuts in fares, The Globe and Mail's Oliver Moore and Jane Taber going into greater detail.

The province is moving to slash fares on Toronto’s airport train and make it more of a commuter option, backing away from the “premium” business model amid mounting concern that it isn’t attracting enough riders.

The Globe and Mail has learned from multiple sources that the shift would bring the base fare -- now set at $27.50 -- to $12. For people with a Presto fare-card, the cost would drop from $19 to $9.

Under the plan, riders using the Union Pearson Express (UPX) to travel between the three stations within the city – and not going to the airport – would also see their fares decline, to the same price as the corresponding GO fares. At less than $6, this would make it about double the cost of a Toronto Transit Commission token.

“It’s a step in the right direction but it’s certainly not enough,” said Jess Bell, head of the advocacy group TTCRiders, which is calling for the train to have the same fare as the TTC. “We think it should be as cheap as possible, because we need as many people riding public transit, that’s the best way to deal with congestion.”

The new commuter fares would answer a key criticism of the train – that it doesn’t help the people whose neighbourhoods it runs through. The Kitchener GO line now has five commuter trains, each of which can carry about 1,800 people, arriving at Union station between 7 and 9 a.m. The airport trains are smaller, with space for only about 350 people each, but run more often than GO’s commuter trains. The eight UPX trains between 7 a.m. and 9 a.m. could, in theory, increase ridership along that section of the route by about one-third if all the trains were full.

The Toronto Star's Tess Kalinowski had more.

Fares on the underused Union Pearson Express (UPX) train will as of March 9 be cut by more than half — down to $9 from $19 with a Presto card, or to $12 from $27.50 without one.

Also, in a bid to fill empty seats, commuters hopping aboard the airport train at Bloor and Weston stations will pay the same as GO riders — $4.71 for a single stop, $5.02 for two stops.

[. . .]

High ticket prices have drawn the ire of government critics and transit-hungry commuters frustrated at watching empty trains (which cost $456 million in provincial funding to build) speed up and down the Kitchener GO tracks both ways every 15 minutes.

This is good. I just hope the economics will make sense. A loss-leader would be terrible for rail transit in Toronto.

[URBAN NOTE] Michael Coren (@michaelcoren) on why he will be attending Pride Toronto

In his Torontoist essay "An Epiphany, With Pride", Michael Coren explains why he will be attending Pride this year. More power to him for making his transition and being honest about it.

Yesterday I tweeted something I thought fairly bland and innocuous: I plan to attend this year’s Pride parade in Toronto. Anybody who has followed my writing and broadcasting over the past two years shouldn’t have been particularly surprised. But my goodness, the reaction certainly surprised me. There were thousands of re-tweets, likes, follows and comments. There were, of course, the usual attacks and insults too, but 90 per cent of what I saw moved me profoundly.

[. . .]

For many years I was known as a high-profile opponent of same-sex marriage and some of the aspirations of the LGBTQ community; I even won a major broadcasting award for taking the “no” side in a debate on the subject. I like to think that my arguments were never hateful, and I certainly maintained warm relationships with several gay people. But looking back, I almost certainly enabled hatred by giving an intellectual veneer to the arguments against equality. There’s no way of sugarcoating this. I was wrong, did wrong, wrote wrong, spoke wrong. I’ve apologized numerous times and although contrition can become laborious after a while, actions and consequences are as important as words.

I’m not going to play the martyr here, but after “coming out” in favour of equal marriage, particularly as a fairly prominent Christian journalist and author, I lost four regular newspaper columns, a television spot and all of my speeches; the bulk of my income. I was threatened, my children’s Facebook pages were trolled and they were insulted, I was accused of being an adulterer, a thief, a liar and of being blackmailed by my gay lover–I wish he’d tell me who he is! I’m not looking for any sympathy, but I have paid a price. That said, the discrimination and hate that I have encountered is only a fraction of what thousands of LGBTQ-identified individuals face, and the experience has given me more perspective.

The reasons why I changed my views are many, diverse, and complex. At root it was because and certainly not in spite of my Christian faith. Love triumphed over legalism, and the inclusion preached by Christ became far more important to me than the doctrines of a church. In fact I left Roman Catholicism and became a happy and content liberal Anglican. Beyond faith, however, was experience and maturity. I simply could not reconcile the joy and tolerance I saw in the gay community with the views I was supposed to hold. The more progressive I became, the more gratitude I received from gay men and women and the more visceral hatred from their opponents. It radicalized me of course; it could not do otherwise.

[URBAN NOTE] "Why architect Frank Gehry is thinking of coming back to Toronto"

Martin Knelman's Toronto Star article has much of interest: Frank Gehry, the exhibition of his works, the possibility he might come back to his native Toronto.

Frank Gehry, who turns 87 on Feb. 28 and is widely regarded as the greatest living architect in the world, was born in Toronto. But if you didn’t happen to visit the retrospective in the Pompidou Centre in Paris that ended last year, and you can’t get to the spectacular museum exhibition of his career highlights currently wowing visitors to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art until March 20, then you will miss it.

That’s especially ironic because, as Gehry told me the other day, lately he has been contemplating the idea of moving back to Toronto, which he left as a teenager in 1947 when his family moved to L.A.

That’s a stunning idea, especially since the LACMA show — which opens with a blow-up of Gehry’s handwritten love letter to his adopted city — has become an occasion for Gehry and L.A. to embrace one another.

[. . .]

The letter is touching and heartfelt, but for me there’s a subtext with a frustrating question. Isn’t it about time for our city to embrace Gehry and claim him as ours?

I’d say the answer is a resounding yes, but in that case, why isn’t this exhibit coming to Toronto?

[URBAN NOTE] "Ontario’s uncounted homeless dead"

Mary Ormsby's long-form Toronto Star article takes a look at homelessness in Toronto through the lens of the life and death of a recently dead man, a man whose death was not even counted among the many dead.

Brad Chapman collapsed in the doorway of a Walton St. nail salon in downtown Toronto just before dawn last Aug. 18.

Cocaine, opioids and amphetamines coursed through his body; they were the long-time drug user’s preferred substances. Homeless, the streets were Chapman’s haven for 20 years when he wasn’t in jail. Those dire circumstances for the father of three were a world apart from the middle-class comfort of Etobicoke, where Chapman was raised by a loving family, competed in rep hockey, learned French and played piano by ear.

A security guard making his rounds shortly before 5 a.m. at the Chelsea Hotel, just steps from the nail salon, noticed a man slumped over in an alcove. To the man’s left lay a syringe, spoon and a cigarette lighter; to his right, an empty Crown Royal bottle, a police report would later note. The concerned guard, George Plaier, called 911.

That man, later identified as Chapman, was dying. Chapman would soon become part of Ontario’s growing ghost population: The uncounted homeless dead.

A Star investigation has found that the province and most municipalities across Ontario do not track homeless deaths fully — or at all — and as a result, have no accurate understanding of the scope of the tragedy and how best to solve it. Ontario chief coroner Dr. Dirk Huyer said there is no mechanism under current legislation to track all homeless deaths.

[ISL] "Whether he walks or not, Senator Mike Duffy’s glory days are over"

David Reevely's Postmedia News article, published in the National Post, makes the obvious point that Mike Duffy's days of power and influence are irrevocably lost.

“Now it’s just a criminal trial,” Duffy’s lawyer Donald Bayne observed when court reconvened in late November after a long pause. In August, the benches had been packed with people eager to see members of Stephen Harper’s inner circle testify about Duffy and what they’d tried to do about the scandal that erupted in 2013 over his claiming his longtime home in Kanata as a residence secondary to his cottage in Prince Edward Island.

That November day a few weeks after the federal election, with the prosecutors finishing the dregs of their case, even the press seats were half-empty. They filled up again, certainly, particularly when Duffy himself took the stand a few weeks later. But Bayne was and is right. It’s a major criminal trial, but no longer anything more than that. The Tory government is done, and so is Duffy’s stint as a politician.

The results matter a lot to him personally, of course. He’s not a healthy man and could theoretically spend the rest of his life in prison if he’s convicted on even a few counts. If Judge Charles Vaillancourt acquits him entirely, he’ll celebrate an immense vindication.

But Harper is beyond being hurt, whether it’s by Duffy’s vengeful testimony about the monstrous conspiracy against him that the former prime minister supposedly oversaw, or by the incarceration of one of his proudest appointments.

If Duffy does return to the Senate, he won’t return to the prominent place he once held. Only a few elements of what he did or didn’t do are in dispute — the housing and travel claims, the office budget spent via contracts for a friend, the $90,000 he accepted from Harper’s chief of staff Nigel Wright, it’s all there on paper. What’s in question is whether he was allowed to do it all. If Vaillancourt decides he was allowed to — well, “Distasteful but not criminal” gets you out of court a free man but is not what we hope for in our politicians.

[. . .]

If Duffy rises in the Senate in a few months, it’ll be as the guy who admits he got there by selling himself out to a prime minister who’s been repudiated. Who cares what Duffy has to say about veterans or tourism or the flavourful P.E.I. potato? Stephen Harper didn’t care, and even he’s all but gone now.

[URBAN NOTE] "The Unruly Pleasures of the Mid-Manhattan Library"

Ada Calhoun's essay in The New Yorker about the pleasures of the Mid-Manhattan Library is superb. So many places to see, so little time!

The Mid-Manhattan branch of the New York Public Library is situated a block south of the majestic main branch, on the same strip of Fifth Avenue near Bryant Park, but the two buildings are night and day. The Stephen A. Schwarzman Building is an imposing marble temple, a shrine to scholarship replete with tributes to the Astors, a Sistine Chapel-like reading room, experts in every conceivable field of study, and, during the holidays, a towering Christmas tree for tourists to pose in front of. The Mid-Manhattan, by contrast, can appear to outsiders as a run-down hangout, where New Yorkers unbathed, unhinged, or just perennially unoccupied spend hours staring at the same page of a prop book or manically writing on wrinkled yellow notepads, like an army of latter-day Joe Goulds. Beneath the bleak, utilitarian architecture is an anything-goes spirit. You can plug in your power cord wherever you like, even if you have to weave it through three other people’s desks. More than once I have observed technically prohibited behavior: a man watching questionable material on his phone, a woman giving herself an improvised shower in the restroom. The only rule I’ve seen stringently enforced is the one against sleeping; the second someone nods off over his book a guard appears to say, “Excuse me, sir.”

As a freelancer whose small Brooklyn apartment was long ago colonized by Legos, I cherish each version of the library work experience. While my writer friends invest in writing rooms or loiter at cafés, I prefer to settle in at one of the New York Public Library’s myriad branches. Recently, I was granted another spell in one of the two glorious by-their-leave semi-private study rooms inside the main building. The air there is sweet, the mood calm. When you request books, they magically appear on your shelf. And yet the place can be intimidating for the uninitiated. The guards at Schwarzman do not tend to greet visitors with particular warmth. When I arrived at 10 A.M. the other day, just as the library was opening, the woman who unlocked the doors yelled, “No luggage! No luggage!” to two young women, who looked confused and then rolled their suitcases sadly away. The closing of the glorious Rose Reading Room for repairs, meanwhile, has thrown independent scholars into exile—you see them camped out with their laptops in various Schwarzman hallways and anterooms, like passengers at LaGuardia whose flight has been cancelled. (I had feared that the room would be closed forever, but the N.Y.P.L. has announced that it’s set to reopen ahead of schedule, in late fall of this year.)

My husband refuses to go to the main branch, because he says he was shamed by staff when he tried to decipher their byzantine system of ordering books. I, too, have been scolded twice there over the years, both times by fellow researchers in the Wertheim study room, where tables teem with academics toiling on books about capitalism and spies and C. S. Lewis. Once, a woman at my table leaned over and said angrily, “I can hear that!” as she pointed at my headphones, which I was using to transcribe an interview. I could barely hear the recording myself, so I think she may have been hallucinating. Another time, I was in the Wertheim Room with the “Project Runway” co-host Tim Gunn, with whom I was collaborating on a book of fashion history. We were flipping through some old fashion magazines, tracing the evolution of denim advertising. It was St. Patrick’s Day, and the windows were open, letting in the loud noise of bagpipes from the parade passing below, so we didn’t think much of our whispering. Yet soon enough we heard the sound, from the other side of a partition, of a woman clearing her throat. We didn’t think it could be for us, so we kept looking through our book. Again, the throat clearing, then a strident voice: “This is a silent workspace. Conversations should be held outside.” Tim and I looked at each other in alarm, packed up our books, and decided to go to lunch early. “Did you get a load of the crowd in there?” Tim said as we left. “It’s like being inside a Roz Chast cartoon.”

If the New York Public Library branches were colleges, the Schwarzman Building would be Harvard or Yale and the Mid-Manhattan would be a community college. And then, I suppose, the stately Society Library, on Seventy-ninth Street, where I am also a member, would be Oxford. When you’re in the Society Library (which was founded in the eighteenth century; there is a charter from King George III hanging on the wall) you are reminded of the many advantages of having money: the workspaces are clean and well-lit; there are even some desks tucked away in the stacks, which make you feel like you’re in a tree house built out of books. The upper floors of the building are open only to members who pay an annual fee, but there are no library cards: as you come into the building, you tell your name to the person at the front desk, who looks you up in the computer and then genteelly gestures you ahead. In the cozy children’s room, you can say to the friendly, wildly well-educated librarian, “My son is looking for some Harry Potter-ish audiobooks,” and you will leave with ten genius selections and an impeccably curated brochure listing the best books for children who are fans of the series.

[LINK] "Fossil Fuels Just Lost the Race Against Renewables"

Bloomberg's Tom Randall makes the point that renewables, now competitive against oil, are set to displace oil.

The race for renewable energy has passed a turning point. The world is now adding more capacity for renewable power each year than coal, natural gas, and oil combined. And there's no going back.

The shift occurred in 2013, when the world added 143 gigawatts of renewable electricity capacity, compared with 141 gigawatts in new plants that burn fossil fuels, according to an analysis presented Tuesday at the Bloomberg New Energy Finance annual summit in New York. The shift will continue to accelerate, and by 2030 more than four times as much renewable capacity will be added.

"The electricity system is shifting to clean,'' Michael Liebreich, founder of BNEF, said in his keynote address. "Despite the change in oil and gas prices there is going to be a substantial buildout of renewable energy that is likely to be an order of magnitude larger than the buildout of coal and gas."

The price of wind and solar power continues to plummet, and is now on par or cheaper than grid electricity in many areas of the world. Solar, the newest major source of energy in the mix, makes up less than 1 percent of the electricity market today but could be the world’s biggest single source by 2050, according to the International Energy Agency.

Will it? What about other sources, like nuclear?

[LINK] "A TV Network for Native Americans"

Lenika Cruz' article in The Atlantic looks at the laudable effort to create an American television channel equivalent to Canada's Aboriginal People's Television Network, indeed aided by said. This can only be a good thing.

If there’s one thing most television lovers and critics have come to agree on in the last few years, it’s that the medium has become more racially diverse. If challenged by a skeptic on this subject, I’d cheerfully rattle off the names of great and popular shows currently on air starring and created by people of color. See? Progress!

And yet, maybe not so much. I can count the number of Native American characters—not even shows—that I’ve personally seen on TV in the last year on one hand. There’s the Wamapoke Indian chief Ken Hotate, who appeared in the final season of Parks and Recreation, played by the wonderful Jonathan Joss, who is of Comanche and Apache descent. There’s the terrifying 1970s enforcer Hanzee Dent, a second-season Fargo fan favorite, played by Zahn McClarnon, who’s of Hunkpapa heritage. And then there’s the spoiled Manhattan socialite Jacqueline Voorhees from Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, played by Jane Krakowski, who’s Polish, French Canadian, and Scottish.

Which goes some way toward illustrating the need for an outlet like All Nations Network—a cable channel featuring TV programming created for and by native peoples that its creators hope to launch soon in the U.S., according to Variety. Though details are sparse at the moment, the channel will get some help from Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, a similar outlet that launched in Canada back in 1992 and that now serves 10 million households. The U.S. has seen other efforts to cater to native peoples on TV—Red Nation Television Network is an online-only streaming service that dates back to before Hulu, and the PBS affiliate FNX: First Nations Experience launched in 2011 but is currently available only in Southern California and a few other areas. If a channel like All Nations Network succeeds, it would be a way for American Indians to do something as simple but crucial as making their own stories rather than waiting for mainstream TV to catch up.

So why doesn’t the U.S. already have a widely available, dedicated TV channel for Native Americans? Heather Rae, a producer, filmmaker, and actress of Cherokee descent, told me that studio executives and financiers often balk at the idea of what they see as narrowly targeted content. “The perception is that Native Indians are a vanishing and near-extinct part of the [U.S.] population,” she said. It’s hard, in other words, to convince many distributors and carriers of the commercial viability of a project like All Nations Network.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Bad Astronomy shares a stunning photo of the Tarantula Nebula, in the Large Magellanic Cloud.


• The Boston Globe's Big Picture shares photos from the world of Chinese opera, in Thailand.


• blogTO has a humourous list of signs you've survived, and suffered, on the 29 Dufferin bus.


• Centauri Dreams reflects on the possible ancient ocean of Charon.


• Dangerous Minds shares beautiful hand-painted portraits of tattooed yakuza.


• The Dragon's Tales notes that data from Cassini sets strict limits on hypothetical Planet Nine.


• The Map Room links to a map of the Japanese Empire's rail network circa 1936.


• Steve Munro reports on demand projections for various subway relief lines.
• 
  
• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer has lost any appreciation for Marco Rubio.


• Strange Maps shares various sound maps of London.


• Window on Eurasia notes the dynamics behind the alliance of Putin and Russia with Europe's far right.

[LINK] "The Last Days of Target Canada"

The above is one of several dozen photos I took in April of last year, visiting a Target location on St. Clair just before the entire chain closed down. That whole story is a remarkable episode in Canadian economic history. In an excellent Canadian Business long-form article, Joe Castaldo examined just how--and how badly--everything went wrong from an early date.

The grand opening of Target Canada was set to begin in one month, and Tony Fisher needed to know whether the company was actually ready. In February 2013, about a dozen senior-level employees gathered at the company’s Mississauga, Ont., headquarters to offer updates on the state of their departments. Fisher, Target Canada’s president, was holding these meetings every day as the launch date crept closer. The news was rarely good. The company was having trouble moving products from its cavernous distribution centres and onto store shelves, which would leave Target outlets poorly stocked. The checkout system was glitchy and didn’t process transactions properly. Worse, the technology governing inventory and sales was new to the organization; no one seemed to fully understand how it all worked. The 750 employees at the Mississauga head office had worked furiously for a year to get up and running, and nerves were beginning to fray. Three test stores were slated to open at the beginning of March, followed shortly by another 21. A decision had to be made.

Fisher, 38 years old at the time, was regarded as a wunderkind who had quickly risen through the ranks at Target’s American command post in Minneapolis, from a lowly business analyst to leader of a team of 400 people across multiple divisions. Launching the Target brand in a new country was his biggest task to date. The news he received from his group that February afternoon should have been worrying, but if he was unnerved, Fisher didn’t let on. He listened patiently as two people in the room strongly expressed reticence about opening stores on the existing timetable. Their concern was that with severe supply chain problems and stores facing the prospect of patchy or empty shelves, Target would blow its first date with Canadian consumers. Still, neither one outright advocated that the company push back its plans. “Nobody wanted to be the one to say, ‘This is a disaster,’” says a former employee. But by highlighting the risks of opening now, the senior employees’ hope was that Fisher would tell his boss back in Minneapolis, Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel, that they needed more time.

“Nobody wanted to be the one to say, ‘This is a disaster.’”
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The magnitude of what was at stake began weighing on some of those senior officials. “I remember wanting to vomit,” recalls one participant. Nobody disagreed with the negative assessment—everyone was well aware of Target’s operational problems—but there was still a strong sense of optimism among the leaders, many of whom were U.S. expats. The mentality, according to one former employee, was, “If there’s any team in retail that can turn this thing around, it’s us.” The group was riding a wave of momentum, in fact. They had overcome seemingly endless hurdles and worked gruelling hours to get to this point, and they knew there were costs to delaying. The former employee says the meeting ultimately concerned much more than when to open the first few stores; it was about the entirety of Target’s Canadian launch. Postponement would mean pushing back even more store openings. Everyone else in attendance expressed confidence in sticking to the schedule, and by the time the meeting concluded, it was clear the doors would open as promised. “That was the biggest mistake we could have made,” says the former employee.

Roughly two years from that date, Target Canada filed for creditor protection, marking the end of its first international foray and one of the most confounding sagas in Canadian corporate history. The debacle cost the parent company billions of dollars, sullied its reputation and put roughly 17,600 people out of work. Target’s arrival was highly anticipated by consumers and feared by rival retailers. The chain, whose roots stretch back to 1902, had perfected its retail strategy and grown into a US$70-billion titan in its home country. Target was a careful, analytical and efficient organization with a highly admired corporate culture. The corporation’s entry into Canada was uncharacteristically bold—not just for Target, but for any retailer. Under Steinhafel, the company paid $1.8 billion for the leases to the entire Zellers chain in 2011 and formulated a plan to open 124 locations by the end of 2013. Not only that, but the chain expected to be profitable within its first year of operations.

Why Target Canada collapsed has been endlessly dissected by analysts, pundits and journalists. But the people who know what happened best are the employees who lived through the experience. On the first anniversary of the company’s bankruptcy filing, Canadian Business spoke to close to 30 former employees in Canada and the U.S. to find out how Target, one of the best retailers in North America, got it so wrong in Canada. (Target declined to comment on specific issues, pointing to previous statements it has made on its Canadian venture. The former employees interviewed for this story requested anonymity to preserve relationships in the industry.) Even those employees remain baffled by how Target Canada collapsed. But what emerged is a story of a company trapped by an overly ambitious launch schedule, an inexperienced leadership team expected to deal with the biggest crisis in the firm’s history, and a sophisticated retail giant felled by the most mundane, basic and embarrassing of errors.