[PHOTO] The sakura of Robarts Library in 2016

Monday evening, after I watched Captain America: Civil War at the Cineplex theatre at Yonge and Dundas, I stopped by Robarts Library to look for the cherry blossoms.

The cherry trees in Robarts lie in something of a protected microclimate, warmed and sheltered in the southwest by Fort Book. Last year, I had found that the area was so warm that the blossoms here had opened several days before High Park's blossoms. The prospects for cherry blossoms in High Park might be grim, but could the same be said of Robarts'?







Compare this last photo with the one below from my 2013 photo post, taken in a year when the cherry blossoms were in full bloom.



Maybe I came too late. I hope I didn't, but I don't think I did. Spring was too harsh all over Toronto: There will be no blossoms this year.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• At 'Apostrophen, 'Nathan Smith writes about his experiences as a gay writer at an Ottawa romance writer's festival.


• blogTO notes the impending closure of Toronto's Bar Volo, owing to condo construction.


• Centauri Dreams reports on the latest news on KIC 8462582.


• Dangerous Minds remembers the Dave Clark Five.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes a paper on using microlensing to detect far-orbiting planets.


• The Dragon's Tales notes how dust blown from the Sahara triggers bacterial growth in the Caribbean.


• Joe. My. God. looks at the gay conservatives who signed up for Trump.


• The Signal considers how to archive E-mail for future generations.


• Towleroad features Dan Savage defending Hillary Clinton from charges she did not support same-sex marriage early enough.

[NEWS] Some Wednesday links

• Bloomberg looks at the restarting of northern Alberta oil, looks at the deterioration in Sino-Taiwanese relations, reports on how Norway is using oil money to buffer its economic shocks, and suggests low ECB rates might contribute to a property boom in Germany.


• Bloomberg View notes the idea of a third party in the US, one on the right to counter Trump, will go nowhere.


• The CBC notes the settlement of a residential school case in Newfoundland and Labrador and predicts a terrible fire season.


• The Globe and Mail' Kate Taylor considers Canadian content rules in the 21st century.


• The Inter Press Service notes that planned Kenyan closures of Somali refugee camps will have terrible results.


• National Geographic looks at the scourge that is Pablo Escobar's herd of hippos in Colombia.


• The National Post notes VIA Rail's existential need for more funding and reports on Jean Chrétien's support of decriminalizing marijuana.


• Open Democracy looks at controversies over Victory Day in Georgia, and notes the general impoverishment of Venezuela.


• Vice looks at new, accurate dinosaur toys, feathers and all.


• Wired explains why Israel alone of America's clients can customize F-35s.

[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto ranked the healthiest place to live in Ontario"

blogTO's Derek Flack wrote about this report from the City of Toronto suggesting that Torontonians rank as the healthiest population in Ontario.

Toronto is a model of health, according to a new report that compares the city to the rest of the province. When major factors like life expectancy, rates of obesity, and incidence of cancer are tracked against provincial averages, the city arises as a leader when it comes to health and welfare.

Perhaps more interesting than these stats is that downtown Toronto fares better than the suburbs when it comes to health's key outcomes, including body mass index (BMI). Experts muse the discrepancy is most likely related to the higher rates of cycling and walking in the denser parts of the city.

I really want to look in-depth at this report.

[URBAN NOTE] "Japanese influence is seeping into downtown Toronto"

One interesting thing about this trend, as described by the Toronto Star's Karon Liu, is that I'm not aware of this being accompanied by extra immigration. Any Japanese diaspora to downtown Toronto is substantially one of culture, not people.

“This is the guy on the bag,” I say, pointing at 68-year-old Tetsushi Mizokami to the people queuing outside Uncle Tetsu’s cheesecake shop, next to the Toronto Coach Terminal on Bay Street, on a rainy Friday evening. Some smile out of politeness, others ignore us and just want to get inside. For a guy whose desserts — and the white paper bag it comes in — reached trophy status since the Uncle Tetsu shop opened a year ago, I would have thought cheesecake groupies would flock to him.

The soft-spoken Mizokami was in town in April to oversee the opening of his third Toronto spot, a sit-down restaurant called Uncle Tetsu’s Angel Cafe just east of University Ave. on Dundas St. W. It’s akin to a Japanese maid café where servers are dressed in cosplay maid uniforms — some of whom perform choreographed dance numbers to Japanese pop hits on a mini-stage in the dining room. The restaurateur already has plans to open a fourth restaurant, this time focusing on ramen with tomato and seafood-based broths, and he wants to keep it within walking distance of his three other shops.

“The number one location is maybe Dundas and Yonge, but it is very difficult to get that location. Second choice is Bay St. and Dundas because it is easy for beginner (businesses),” he says.

Over the last year or two, one-by-one Japanese eateries opened up along Dundas St. W. between Bay and St. Patrick Sts., creating a new culinary destination that Toronto food enthusiasts are dubbing Little Japan.

The strip, smack between Ryerson University and OCAD, reminds Mizokami of his hometown of Fukuoka in the southwest part of Japan where, in the ’70s, he managed more than a dozen restaurants catering to the youths from the nearby university.

[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto, Vancouver are creating all Canada's job growth"

This CBC News report is terribly alarming. I can't help but feel that Canada is careening towards some unpleasant fate.

Blistering hot housing markets aren't the only things setting Toronto and Vancouver apart from the rest of Canada — the two cities also accounted for all of the country's job growth, economists say.

"Yes, that means the rest of the country has created precisely no new jobs in the past year," BMO chief economist Douglas Porter said in a recent commentary.

The situation is "extremely unusual" given that two cities account for 25 per cent of total employment in Canada, Porter said.

He added that this highlights the "extreme regional divergence" in the Canadian economy, and that the strong job growth in Toronto and Vancouver "at least partly explains the strength in their housing markets."

[. . .]

Overall employment in B.C. jumped 4.9 per cent in the past year, while Ontario was second in the country, but "way back" at 1.4 per cent, [Robert Kavcic, senior economist at the bank] said.

[URBAN NOTE] "Taxi industry says it rejects surge pricing adopted by city council"

CBC News' reports on what I have to think is an effort on the part of the taxi industry in Toronto to distinguish itself, in a good way, from Uber.

An organization that represents cab companies in Toronto says its taxi drivers will not implement the surge pricing adopted by city council earlier this month because it is unfair to customers and bad for business.

City council voted on May 3 in favour of new regulations governing the taxi industry, including surge pricing on fares booked through a smartphone app.

Rita Smith, executive director of the Toronto Taxi Alliance, said Wednesday that the taxi companies "want nothing to do" with surge pricing.

"We do not consider this to be capitalism. We call it extortion," Smith told reporters on Wednesday.

Smith said surge pricing would be difficult for regular customers who set aside funds for taxis every month.

[URBAN NOTE] "The TTC is (Finally) Rolling Out Presto on Buses This Week"

At Torontoist, Chris Bateman describes how the TTC managed to install Presto card readers on its fleet of vehicles.

By the end of this year, the transit commission has pledged to complete its long-awaited switch to the electronic fare card and do away with physical tokens, tickets, day passes, and Metropasses.

Allan Foster is in charge of this largest mass deployment of new fare technology in TTC history. As the senior project manager of the TTC’s fare card system, he’s responsible for the team currently installing card readers and other electronic devices in each of the TTC’s 1,900 buses.

Every night between 9:00 p.m. and 3:00 a.m., about a dozen workers—a mix of TTC staff and Metrolinx contractors—make alterations to approximately 10 vehicles, laying wires and connecting communication antenna so that by the next morning riders with Presto cards can pay their fares electronically.

“All of the work happens typically within three or four hours,” Foster says. “It’s almost an assembly line that we have on each vehicle.”

[LINK] "Hopes for factory-led recovery dashed by bleak manufacturing outlook"

The Globe and Mail's David Parkinson reports on Canada's failure to have an economic renaissance driven by industry.

Belt-tightening Canadian manufacturers look poised to follow the battered energy sector in cutting their spending budgets in 2016, deepening the country’s business investment woes, a new Statistics Canada survey indicated.

Statscan’s annual Capital and Repair Expenditures Survey – which gauges private- and public-sector spending intentions on facility construction, machinery and equipment, and repairs – found that overall spending is expected to decline 4.4 per cent this year, to $242-billion. Private-sector businesses, which account for roughly two-thirds of the country’s capital investment, expect to cut their spending by 9.3 per cent, while public-sector organizations plan to increase spending by 6.5 per cent.

The drop in this year’s investment intentions compounds last year’s spending decline of nearly $20-billion, or 7.2 per cent, which reflected a 35-per-cent plunge in the capital-intensive oil and gas extraction sector, the single biggest source for business investment in the country. The survey indicated that oil and gas will again lead the investment declines, with another 26 per cent of cuts planned.

But unlike last year, when spending in the manufacturing sector was the bright light on the dark investment landscape, with spending up nearly 7 per cent, manufacturers are poised to deepen the country’s investment hole in 2016. The survey found that investment intentions in the sector are down 11 per cent this year.

[DM] "Theo Moudakis: Census time"

Yesterday's Toronto Star editorial cartoon by Theo Moudakis was one that I thought would appeal to readers.

That is all.

(Posted at Demography Matters for obvious reasons.)

[LINK] The statement of Kathryn Borel regarding Jian Ghomeshi

The Toronto Star carried in full complainant Kathryn Borel's statement concerning Jian Ghomeshi's decision to issue an apology andsign a peace bond in relation to Ms. Borel.

Hi everyone. Thanks for coming out and listening. My name is Kathryn Borel. In December of 2014, I pressed sexual assault charges against Jian Ghomeshi. As you know, Mr. Ghomeshi initially denied all the charges that were brought against him. But today, as you just heard, Jian Ghomeshi admitted wrongdoing and apologized to me.

It’s unfortunate, but maybe not surprising, that he chose not to say much about what exactly he was apologizing for. I’m going to provide those details for you now.

Every day, over the course of a three-year period, Mr. Ghomeshi made it clear to me that he could do what he wanted to me and my body. He made it clear that he could humiliate me repeatedly and walk away with impunity. There are at least three documented incidents of physical touching. This includes the one charge he just apologized for, when he came up behind me while I was standing near my desk, put his hands on my hips, and rammed his pelvis against my backside over and over, simulating sexual intercourse. Throughout the time that I worked with him, he framed his actions with near daily verbal assaults and emotional manipulations. These inferences felt like threats, or declarations like I deserved to have happening to me what was happening to me. It became very difficult for me to trust what I was feeling.

Up until recently, I didn’t even internalize that what he was doing to my body was sexual assault. Because when I went to the CBC for help, what I received in return was a directive that yes, he could do this, and yes, it was my job to let him. The relentless message to me, from my celebrity boss and the national institution we worked for were that his whims were more important than my humanity or my dignity. So I came to accept this. I came to believe it was his right. But when I spoke to the police at the end of 2014, and detailed my experiences with Mr. Ghomeshi, they confirmed to me what he did to me was, in fact, sexual assault.

And that’s what Jian Ghomeshi just apologized for: the crime of sexual assault. This is the story of a man who had immense power over me and my livelihood, admitting that he chronically abused his power and violated me in ways that violate the law. Mr. Ghomeshi’s constant workplace abuse of me and my many colleagues and friends has since been corroborated by multiple sources, a CBC fifth estate documentary, and a third-party investigation.

In a perfect world, people who commit sexual assault would be convicted for their crimes. Jian Ghomeshi is guilty of having done the things that I’ve outlined today. So when it was presented to me that the defence would be offering us an apology, I was prepared to forego the trial. It seemed like the clearest path to the truth. A trial would have maintained his lie, the lie that he was not guilty, and it would have further subjected me to the very same pattern of abuse that I am currently trying to stop.

Jian Ghomeshi has apologized, but only to me. There are 20 other women who have come forward to the media and made serious allegations about his violent behavior. Women who have come forward to say that he punched, and choked, and smothered and silenced them. There is no way that I would have come forward if it weren’t for their courage. And yet Mr. Ghomeshi hasn’t met any of their allegations head on, as he vowed to do in his Facebook post of 2014. He hasn’t taken the stand on any charge. All he has said about his other accusers is that they’re all lying and that he’s not guilty. And remember: that’s what he said about me.

I think we all want this to be over. But it won’t be until he admits to everything that he’s done. Thank you.

MacLean's also carries the statement. The National Post also carries other statements, including from Ghomeshi.

CBC has since apologized for its neglect of Ms. Borel's complaints and its creation of an unsafe working environment.

Toronto Life goes into more detail about the mechanics of the peace bond.