How long will it take you to walk from Bloor to Queen Station - you know, if there's a major subway delay or something and you don't feel like taking a shuttle bus? Now, you no longer have to guess thanks to a handy subway Walking Distance Map.
Pavlo Kalyta, an assistant professor of accounting and sustainability at Queen's University, created the map[.]
“I feel like I’m swimming through mud here,” Steve Munro says over the phone as we near the one-hour mark of plowing through transit reports in search of answers to what should be basic questions.
Even semi-coherent transit plans are necessarily contingent on a dizzying number of variables, and Munro – the city’s pre-eminent citizen expert on the subject – is superhuman in his ability to recall and tie together such details.
But late in the evening before March 9, when city council's executive committee would meet to consider several interrelated plans (including Mayor John Tory’s signature SmartTrack) even Munro seems more than a little stumped.
About the only thing that's certain, as one report casually mentions, is that “all train services occur in space and time.”
So how often would SmartTrack trains come?
SmartTrack has always been a nebulous concept at best, something built on top of GO Transit’s Regional Express Rail (RER) plan that the province, through Metrolinx, was executing anyway. GO is already in the process of converting much of its network from a commuter rail service into an all-day, two-way transit system; SmartTrack would piggyback on this by adding new stations in Toronto.
But for a long time it remained stunningly unclear whether SmartTrack would actually be its own service with its own set of trains running on the same tracks as the RER.
In 1999, Michael Shapcott met with a federal minister to propose the government reinstate a national housing strategy. It didn’t go quite the way he hoped.
It had been a decade and a half since the feds started gradually cutting spending on social housing and three years since they stopped funding it altogether. Homelessness across Canada was spiking—since the mid 80s, new social housing infrastructure plummeted 95 per cent, and in Toronto, shelter admissions quadrupled. “I brought these issues to the minister,” says Shapcott. “He told me to fuck off—that they were out of the housing business.”
In various forms, that attitude permeated government at the federal and provincial levels for another 15 years. “The notion was that homelessness is something in the pathology of individuals,” says Shapcott, director of the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness. “They’d say it’s unfortunate, but it’s not a government issue.”
Now, after more than 35 years of pressuring governments to take responsibility for housing, Shapcott and fellow social housing advocates finally feel like they’re being heard.
Last week the Ontario government announced updates to its long-term affordable housing strategy. While most of the report was regurgitated from the provincial budget released last month, there’s one new item, inclusionary zoning, that may actually help alleviate housing insecurity.
Greenwood Secondary is close to 80 per cent full, but is facing closure because moving its students seemed less disruptive than other options in a shuffle meant to reduce unused space across the TDSB.
It’s their sanctuary, their first “home” in Canada. They consider their fellow students and teachers family.
And the teens at Greenwood Secondary School — all recently arrived refugees and immigrants — don’t want it to close and move into nearby Danforth Collegiate. They accuse the school board of stacking the deck against them and not listening to their concerns.
Of the 10 schools in the area that came under review, “Greenwood is the easy one,” said student council vice-president Tolin Abuaziza, who emigrated from Palestine little over a year ago. “We don’t know anything about Canada, about the school system. At any other school, parents would stand up and be angry — maybe even hire a lawyer — saying, ‘Keep the school open.’ But we can’t.”
With parents who don’t speak English or who work long hours and can’t attend public or accommodation review committee meetings, the Greenwood students feel they haven’t really had a chance to make their case, added Zahra Afshar, student council president.
Early one morning at the beginning of March, two black Chevy Suburbans filled with federal and state development officials left New Orleans for Louisiana's coast. Almost two hours later, they turned onto Island Road, a low spit of asphalt nearly three miles long with water on either side. At the other end was Isle de Jean Charles, a community of 25 or so families that is sinking into the Gulf of Mexico. The officials had a plan to save the town: by moving it someplace else.
Global warming presents governments the world over with two problems. One is to slow the pace of climate change. The other is to adapt to what humans have already wrought, either by protecting buildings and infrastructure from rising tides and extreme weather, or by moving people out of harm's way. The second part is harder -- so hard, in fact, that the U.S. government has never done it. At least not quite like this.
In January, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development said it would give Louisiana $48 million to resettle Isle de Jean Charles. The state won the money by promising not just to move its people, who are members of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe, but to do it in a way that creates a model that other towns and cities might share. (Most pressing are several communities in Alaska, which face similar challenges.)
"We have never done anything at this scale," said Marion McFadden, the department's deputy assistant secretary for grants. She said the project, still in the planning phase, is an attempt to learn how to explain "the value of relocating" to a community while involving its members in "designing their own new home or homeland."
In other words, how do you persuade people to abandon their town in an orderly fashion, before it becomes uninhabitable? How do you ensure their new home is one they're satisfied with, rather than a glorified refugee camp? And how do you safeguard against central planning gone berserk?
If it works, the resettlement of Isle de Jean Charles will show that government-sponsored climate migration is viable, at least on a small scale. If it fails -- if the new community never gets finished, if residents refuse to move, if the project runs far over budget -- the story of the island will be a cautionary one, demonstrating the political, financial and psychological limits of our ability to adapt to global warming.
Beneath those criteria is one of the most vexing dilemmas in the climate-change debate: How should society choose which communities get protected and which must move? Isle de Jean Charles shows how little progress the government has made in answering that question.
Central Appalachia’s history is the story of coal. At its peak in the mid-20th century, mining employed more than 150,000 people in West Virginia alone, mostly in the state’s otherwise poor and rugged counties. For decades, the United Mine Workers of America, a muscular, strike-prone union that allied itself with Franklin Roosevelt to support the New Deal, anchored the solidly Democratic highlands where West Virginia meets eastern Kentucky and Virginia’s western-most tip. In 1921, during the fight to unionize the region’s mines, ten thousand armed miners engaged strike-breakers and an anti-union militia in a five-day gun battle in which more than a hundred people were killed. The Army arrived by presidential order and dispersed the miners, dealing a decade-long setback to the UMWA.
Today, after decades of mechanization, there are only about twenty thousand coal miners in West Virginia, and another sixteen thousand between Kentucky and Virginia. The counties with the greatest coal production have some of the region’s highest unemployment rates, between 10 and 14 percent. An epidemiological study of the American opiate overdose epidemic found two epicenters where fatal drug abuse leapt more than a decade ago: one was rural New Mexico, the other coal country.
Although jobs have disappeared, Appalachia keeps producing coal. Since 1970, more than two billion tons of coal have come from the central Appalachian coalfields (A-B). West Virginians mined more in 2010 than in the early 1950s, when employment peaked at nearly six times its current level. Back then, almost all coal miners worked underground, emerging at the end of their shifts with the iconic head-lamps and black body-paint of coal dust. In the 1960s, mining companies began to bulldoze and dynamite hillsides to reach coal veins without digging. This form of strip-mining, called contour mining, caused more visible damage than traditional deep mining, leaving mountains permanently gouged and, sometimes, farmland destroyed.
Today, contour mining seems almost artisanal. Since the 1990s, half the region’s coal has come from “mountaintop removal,” a slightly too-clinical term for demolishing and redistributing mountains. Mining companies blast as much as several hundred feet of hilltop to expose layers of coal, which they then strip before blasting their way to the next layer. The giant cranes called draglines that move the blasted dirt and coal stand twenty stories high and can pick up 130 tons of rock in one shovel-load. The remaining rubble, called overburden, cannot be reassembled into mountains. Instead, miners deposit it in the surrounding valleys. The result is a massive leveling, both downward and upward, of the topography of the region. According to Appalachian Voices, an advocacy organization, mining has destroyed more than 500 mountains.
Lucio Garcia-Mansilla had long heard about the former Club Med property tucked along the Haitian Riviera, 123 acres lined with lush vegetation and a mile-long expanse of white sand.
But it wasn’t until decades later — when Haiti’s investment climate began to welcome international brands — that the Argentine founder of Colombia-based Decameron Hotels & Resorts would get there.
As Garcia-Mansilla waited, the property’s fortunes changed, usually not for the better: Club Med, the French resort chain, was boarded up in 1987 as the dual threat of an AIDS epidemic and the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship finished off what was left of Haiti’s once-thriving tourism industry and ravaged the economy. It became a virtual ghost town where weeds and algae replaced partying guests at the swimming pool, and a small maintenance crew kept watch from a utility room. Club Med tried again, reopening in 1997, only to close a year later as the economy tanked.
In 2006, the doors opened again — this time as the privately owned Club Indigo, a beach resort whose patrons were U.N. peacekeepers, locals and visitors from the Haitian diaspora. But it struggled even as it used just half of Club Med’s 400 rooms.
Then came Haiti’s monstrous earthquake in 2010, and after that, an aggressive push by Haiti’s new government to promote tourism as an important way to rebuild the shattered economy. International brands including Best Western, Marriott and Spain-based Royal Occidental Hotels & Resorts and NH Hotel Group signed on as investment opportunities beckoned.
Sweden wants a blanket ban on the importation of live North American lobsters across the European Union in an effort to prevent a possible underwater invasion.
Gunvor Ericson, the Swedish secretary of state for the Ministry of the Environment, told CBC more than 30 American lobsters have been found in the west coast of Sweden over the last few years.
The fear is the new lobster could threaten the local species. Sweden is now asking the European Union to consider an import ban on live North American lobsters.
It's something those who work in the Swedish fishing industry are keeping a close eye on.
Anders Wall works at Carapax, a fishing supply store in Sweden. He's seen a number of North American lobsters. He says the concern is they reproduce faster.
City councillor Rob Ford is sedated and receiving palliative care, according to his chief of staff Dan Jacobs.
Jacobs said that at this point there has been no change in the former mayor’s condition but added that Ford is now unconscious and has been sedated for the pain.
“At this time, the treatment that Councillor Ford is receiving is palliative in nature,” Jacobs said in a statement. “Palliative care is often administered in conjunction with other treatments, and he has in fact been receiving it almost since first becoming diagnosed, both at home and the hospital.”
On Friday, Jacobs said that Ford was alert and conscious.
It was announced last week that Ford’s cancer was not responding to treatment.
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