[PHOTO] #lovewins

This chalked slogan on a wall on Church Street just north of Carlton expresses my sentiments entirely. Love's not the only thing, of course, but it's definitely something.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Beyond the Beyond's Bruce Sterling mourns the death of Alvin Toffler.


• The Big Picture shares images of the Istanbul airport attack.


• blogTO notes Toronto's recent Trans March was the largest in world history.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly interviews memoirist Plum Johnson.


• Centauri Dreams considers the determination of distances to dim stars and looks at the total energies likely to be used in interstellar travel and interplanetary colonization.


• Crooked Timber notes the ordered recount in Austria's presidential elections and advocates for anti-militarism.


• D-Brief notes the exciting discoveries of Ceres, and observes that ancient tombs may have doubled as astronomical observatories.


• The Dragon's Gaze considers where warm Jupiters form, considers the stability of complex exoplanet systems, and notes a high-precision analysis of solar twin HIP 100963.


• The Dragon's Tales wonders if the shape of Martian sand dunes indicate a denser Martian atmosphere a bit more than four billion years ago.


• The Everyday Sociology Blog considers evictions and poverty in the United States.


• Inkfish notes that different honeybees seem to have different personalities.


• Language Hat notes the import of Maltese in Mediterranean history.


• Language Log talks about Sino-Japanese.


• Lovesick Cyborg shares the doubts of polled Americans with the viability of virtual lovers.


• The LRB Blog shares an article supporting Corbyn.


• The Map Room Blog notes that San Francisco was literally built on buried ships.


• Marginal Revolution notes the collapse of Greek savings and looks at Euroskepticism's history in the United Kingdom.


• Steve Munro updates readers on Union-Pearson Express ridership.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer thinks the Netherlands Antilles offer useful models to the United Kingdom, and is confused by a claim that that bias against Mexican immigrants does not exist when the data seems to suggest it does.


• Torontoist goes into the life of conservative Protestant newspaper publishing Black Jack Robinson.


• Transit Toronto notes that in a decade, GO Trains will connect Hamilton to Niagara Falls.


• The Volokh Conspiracy argues against using the Brexit vote to argue against referenda.


• Window on Eurasia notes the Russian deployment of military forces to the Belarus border, looks at Tatarstan's concern for its autonomy, observes the changing demographics of Ukraine, and notes the Russian debate over what sort of European Union collapse they would like.


• Arnold Zwicky remembers his father through ephemera.

[NEWS] Some Monday links

• Bloomberg notes the rail boom in Bangladesh, looks at the fall in the value of the pound, notes a German proposal to give young Britons German citizenship and observes Spanish concern over giving Scotland a voice, looks at competition between Paris and Frankfurt to get jobs from the City of London, looks at how a Chinese takeover of an American ham company worked well, and observes that revised statistics show a much rockier economic history in Argentina.


• Bloomberg View notes that Merkel is Britain's best hope for lenient terms and compares Brexit to the Baltic break from the Soviet Union.


• The Globe and Mail notes continuing problems with the implementation of tidal turbines on the Bay of Fundy.


• MacLean's notes that pride marchers in the Manitoba city of Steinbach can walk on the street, and looks at the impact of immigrant investment on Vancouver's housing market.


• National Geographic notes the endangerment of Antarctica's penguins.


• Open Democracy compares Brexit and the breakup of the former Soviet Union, looks at water shortages in Armenia, and examines the impact of Brexit on Ireland.


• The Chicago Tribune looks at urban violence.


• Universe Today notes the Dutch will be going to the Moon with the Chinese.

[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto Pride parade brings fun tinged with sorrow over Orlando"

Eric Andrew-Gee's article in The Globe and Mail describes Pride weekend this year in Toronto.

“Pride is political,” shouted a protester atop the Black Lives Matter float at Sunday’s Pride parade in Toronto, and this year it would have been hard to disagree.

The annual celebration of the LGBTQ community took over a portion of downtown Toronto on Sunday in a rainbow-clad display of defiance just weeks after a homophobic shooting rampage claimed dozens of lives in a gay Orlando nightclub.

Justin Trudeau’s raucously received appearance marked the first time a Canadian prime minister has marched in the parade, a milestone that prompted some to reflect on the progress North American society has made on gay rights in recent years.

Mr. Trudeau said the Florida tragedy is a reminder that “we can’t let hate go by … We have to speak up any time there is intolerance or discrimination.”

This year, the parade’s fun-filled atmosphere vied with moments of poignancy, sorrow and anger, as the historic tension at Pride between politics and partying tilted in favour of the politically minded.

[URBAN NOTE] "An Oral History of Toronto’s Pride Parade"

Torontoist interviews some of the people behind the birth of Toronto Pride in the 1970s.

On a warm summer day in August 1971, dozens of gay and lesbian activists headed to the Toronto Islands to celebrate a gay picnic, the first iteration of Pride in the city. The gathering was very different than the corporate party that Pride is today: political at its core, the group assembled to demonstrate gay solidarity just two years after then-prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau decriminalized homosexuality.

The picnics eventually became annual celebrations. It was only a decade after the bathhouse raids of 1981 that the City officially recognized Pride.

[. . .]

Amy Gottlieb (founding member of Lesbians Against the Right, Gays and Lesbians Against the Right Everywhere and the Toronto Lesbian and Gay Pride Committee): The first [official] Pride was the first celebration was organized in conjunction with the marking of the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots [in 1969], which is why we now celebrate Pride at the end of June. But there were other gatherings since 1971: something called gay days at Hanlan’s Point.

Tim McCaskell (Toronto AIDS activist, member of the Body Politic collective): There was one [gathering] in 1971, a number in ’72, and I don’t think there was anything in ’73, and I came out at the one in ’74. Then nothing happened until after the bath raids in ’81. When a lot of people talk about Pride they obliterate the ancient history and talk about ’81 on.

Gerald Hannon (journalist, member of the Body Politic collective): I’ve been in every one since ’72 essentially. That one I remember well, including the Hanlan’s Point crazy, youthful fooling around. Building a gay and lesbian pyramid. People on backs and on top of each other. It was fun.

Peter Zorzi (founder of Toronto Area Gays): I was a street messenger in downtown Toronto in 1971 when I discovered gay liberation, and I met my lover, Charlie, at a Toronto Gay Action [activist organization] meeting in July of that year. In the 1970s when we took part in Pride events it was very much with a feeling of kinship with the people we were among, a ragtag group sharing a sense of mission. We all wanted a future where people would not have to deal with the things we’d had to deal with.

[URBAN NOTE] "Officers angry about possible ban on police floats at Toronto Pride parades"

The Globe and Mail carries a brief Canadian Press article engaging with the only significant controversy around Pride.

Members of the Toronto police force say they’re angry that Pride organizers agreed to a list of demands set out by Black Lives Matter during Sunday’s parade.

The list includes nine demands that range from banning police floats in future parades to increasing funding for spaces for racialized communities.

Members of Black Lives Matter Toronto held a sit in part way through the city’s 36th annual Pride Parade, stopping it from moving forward for about a half hour, until Pride organizers signed the list of demands.

The president for the union representing the city’s police officers says he’s outraged at the demands.

[. . .]

And while Pride Toronto’s executive director signed the document during the parade, organizers are now saying that they were really just committing to “having a conversation” about the list.

[URBAN NOTE] "Ombudsman’s report slams police training as the problem"

The Toronto Star's Wendy Gillis reports on the findigns of the ombusdsman's report into the training of police in the use of force.
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Nabil Yatim believes that if police officers in Ontario received more training on how to use words instead of weapons, his son Sammy would be alive today.

“I’m almost positive he would be,” Yatim told reporters at Queen’s Park Wednesday, after the release of a much-anticipated investigation by Ontario’s ombudsman into how the provincial government trains and directs police on use of force.

Sammy Yatim’s high-profile death in July 2013 at the hands of Toronto police Const. James Forcillo prompted ombudsman Paul Dubé’s investigation. Since Yatim’s death, 19 more people have been shot dead by police in Ontario. In many cases, they were people in crisis, Dubé writes in his report.

In a biting indictment of police training, Dubé’s report concludes that people in crisis are dying at the hands of police not because officers aren’t following their training. “It’s because they are.”

His 90-page report makes 22 recommendations, ranging from ramping up training to calling on the province to create a regulation requiring police to use de-escalation techniques in all possible conflict situations — before resorting to force. The report calls for that regulation to be in place by this time next year.

[URBAN NOTE] "Goodwill to return to Toronto"

The Toronto Star's Holly Honderich notes the return of the Goodwill chain to Toronto, though perhaps too late for many of the workers formerly employed there.

Just five months after Goodwill Industries of Toronto, Eastern, Central and Northern Ontario filed for bankruptcy, shutting down 28 facilities, Goodwill Ontario Great Lakes has announced its plan to bring the thrift-shop social enterprise back to the city.

After receiving approval from Goodwill International, Goodwill Ontario Great Lakes CEO Michelle Quintyn told the Star plans have been initiated to bring back 600 jobs to the Toronto area through various Goodwill establishments.

The expansion will be a “fresh start” for Goodwill, Quintyn told the Star, and will not involve any of the infrastructure or management structure of the former operation in Toronto.

But this announcement won’t bring relief to the more than 400 employees who were thrown out of work in January, many of whom were owed thousands of dollars by the bankrupt chapter, according to Goodwill’s bankruptcy documents.

“It was traumatic,” Moe Rutherford, former union business representative for Goodwill TECNO, said of the closure.

Rutherford, who said he maintains contact with many of the former Goodwill employees, estimated that 80 percent of them are still out of work.

[URBAN NOTE] Two more links on the Scarborough subway extension

Spacing Toronto's Fatima Syed wonders why Tory introduced the race card into his discussion of the Scarborough extension.

“[M]any of the subway’s loudest critics do not live or work in Scarborough, where more than half the population is born outside of Canada,” wrote Tory. “When they say this is too much to spend on a subway, the inference seems to be that it’s too much to spend on this part of the city.”

These two lines, near the end of the editorial, read like seemingly nonchalant remarks, sandwiched between comments about how to pay for transit and the city’s greater transit expansion strategy that includes the Scarborough subway.

You can almost bypass his comment, until you realize what he didn’t address: what does immigration have to do with transit? And why is the mayor of a city with the world’s highest proportion of foreign-born residents making such a comment in an op-ed about a subway system the municipality keeps failing to fund properly?

I don’t doubt these sentiments exist — actually, I’m positive they do. But as mayor, Tory shouldn’t have left his statement hanging. As a self-styled advocate of Toronto’s much-vaunted diversity, he has a responsibility to strongly oppose those who claim that anti-immigrant sentiments are driving in transit policy. He had a responsibility to prove those arguments wrong.

Instead, his silence reads like a betrayal to immigrant communities across the city. He is allowing the transit debate to turn into a very ugly matter of race and identity. That it hasn’t is a testament to the city itself, and makes me question how many anti-immigrant transit opponents there even are among us.

Edward Keenan in the Toronto Star notes that there is a case for the extension, but also notes that the politicians in support of the extension aren't big on the sorts of long-term thinking needed.

[W]hat the city’s staff were saying — emphatically — on Tuesday is that the subway stop is not a plan that can or should be considered in isolation. [City planner Jennifer] Keesmaat emphasized that the extension is part of a proposed network, and if you removed any single part of it, you’d need to scrap everything and go back to planning square one.

That network includes the SmartTrack version of GO’s express rail plan, with five stops in Scarborough (including one in a neighbourhood the LRT would have served), with trains arriving every 8.6 minutes during rush hour. And there’s the 19-stop Eglinton East LRT extension from Kennedy station to U of T Scarborough, which will provide good, high-order local service to central Scarborough. There’s also the relief subway line Byford insisted remains the TTC’s highest priority, necessary to open up space on downtown-bound trains across the whole system.

If you build that network to serve a variety of local neighbourhoods and open up subway capacity, then the main job — the one job — of the Scarborough subway extension is to provide fast travel to and from one neighbourhood. And more precisely, to re-invent that neighbourhood.

Scarborough Town Centre is a mall with easy highway access, bus connections to other cities and some nearby government administrative buildings. It has a lot of parking. But there are only a few residential and office buildings within what you could call walking distance.

As Keesmaat said, the existing streetscape is full of flyovers and highway off-ramps and wide high-speed roads. The formerly industrial area doesn’t right now offer property values that make it worth developing. “The market isn’t yet ready for intensification,” she said.

[URBAN NOTE] On next year's shift of the Toronto Fringe Club to Scadding Court

blogTO was one of the several news sites to note the impending shift of the Toronto Fringe Club from its location nestled between the buildings of Honest Ed's down to Bathurst and Dundas, down to the Scadding Court Community Centre. The Toronto Star's Karen Fricker has more.

Following a seventh and final festive year in Honest Ed’s Alley, the Fringe Club — the indie theatre festival’s social headquarters — will be located from 2017 on at Scadding Court Community Centre at Bathurst and Dundas Sts., which will be transformed, in the Fringe’s words, into an “urban playground.”

The move is necessary because of the upcoming closure of Honest Ed’s discount store, part of the transformation of the southwest corner of Bloor and Bathurst into a new large-scale commercial-residential project.

For Fringe executive director Kelly Straughan, the move is also an inevitable result of the 28-year-old festival’s ongoing growth: “one step further” in the progress from its early social headquarters at the Tranzac Club on Brunswick Ave. to the parking lot behind Honest Ed’s where the club has been held since 2010 and now to Scadding Court, which include a large parking lot and a dry pad (in winter, an ice rink).

This larger location — the biggest footprint ever for a Fringe Club — will mean an expansion of its beer gardens, which after dark become a major hangout for the arts community or, as Straughan calls them, “hardcore Fringers.” Shipping containers will double as the bars themselves, an approach that builds on Scadding Court’s Market 707 along Dundas St., at which community vendors sell food out of converted containers.

Straughan underlines that the move keeps the club relatively close to the festival’s Annex origins and on the Bathurst St. corridor where its major traditional venues (Factory and Tarragon theatres and Theatre Passe Muraille) are located, and that Scadding Court also resonates with the Fringe’s identity as a community festival.

NOW Toronto's theatre critic Glenn Sumi notes the change that will occur.

The current Fringe Club, located right on Bloor West, fits right into the student-fed liveliness of the Annex. While Dundas West is becoming more popular – and hey, there’s a 24-hour Mickey Dee’s there – it doesn’t have the same vibrancy. For now, anyway.

It’ll also be harder to get to by subway, although there are streetcars on Bathurst, Dundas and Queen.

The ever-popular beer gardens will take up residence in the SCCC parking lot, and the outdoor hockey rink will house an arts market, complete with performance stage. There’s no word yet on whether those shipping container-style eateries along the south side of Dundas will take part or extend their hours. They’ve done a lot to transform the neighbourhood.

The festival is looking to integrate the Scadding Court Drama Interact program for youth and young adults who are physically or developmentally challenged into the fest. And it will be working with Scadding Court’s Newcomer Integration Program to provide work and volunteer opportunities. All good things.