[PHOTO] Book abandoned on the Brighton shore, Charlottetown

Someone had abandoned a copy of How to Become a Rainmaker on the Brighton shore, leaving it to get soaked by the incoming tide.

[PHOTO] White orchids in the Galleria Italia, 2

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• Anthropology.net deals with the use of technology to save endangered languages.


• At the Broadside Blog, Caitlin Kelly starts off a discussion of high school by starting with The Breakfast Club.


• Dangerous Minds shares video of a very early performance by the Police.


• The Frailest Thing engages with the idea and importance of memory.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes Rod Dreher's anti-refugee stance.


• The Map Room Blog looks at the new Atlas Obscura book.


• The Planetary Society Weblog takes a rocket roadtrip.


• Savage Minds considers the importance of decolonization.


• Torontoist notes a Toronto Sun editorial in favour of Rail Deck Park.


• Understanding Society considers the international measurement of happiness.


• The Volokh Conspiracy argues that Gary Johnson is good for Hillary.

[URBAN NOTE] "To get the rail-deck park, Toronto needs to work with developers"

Marcus Gee's opinion piece in The Globe and Mail makes some sense to me.

[Jennifer Keesmaat] argues that with space for new parks in downtown vanishingly scarce, decking over the rail lands is Toronto’s last chance to create a grand, signature park in the heart of the city.

As condo towers sprout left and right, the number of people living downtown is expected to double over the next quarter century, reaching almost half a million. Providing more space for all those people to stroll and play and walk their dogs only makes sense.

The 21 acres the park would cover – the equivalent of four large city blocks – is the minimum Toronto needs for its soaring downtown population, Ms. Keesmaat says. “Why would we make it even smaller by putting condos on it? That is flabbergasting in its small-mindedness.”

So instead of working with developers to create the park, the city intends to soak them for the cost. A city report released on Thursday says that “staff will identify options to enhance growth-oriented revenues so that local development activity can fund a significant portion of the rail-deck park project.” In other words, fees and charges developers pay when they put up a building would rise, inevitably affecting the cost of housing in a city where it is already painfully expensive. City hall would also pass the hat to “corporate sponsors, foundations and other philanthropic organizations.”

These are less funding plans than funding hopes. With so many pressing needs, from transit to housing, it seems rash to add another project to the long list that must be paid for … somehow.

[URBAN NOTE] "Influx of Syrian refugees helps drive rise in use of food banks"

The Globe and Mail's Tavia Grant shares some sad, if unsurprising, news about Syrian refugee poverty in Toronto.

Toronto’s food banks are seeing more people come through their doors, among them, an influx of Syrian refugees who are struggling with the city’s high cost of living.

The number of people accessing the city’s food banks rose 1 per cent this year, to 905,970, from last year and is still 13 per cent higher than 2008 levels, an annual count to be released Monday shows. The increase was partly driven by hundreds of newcomers from Syria who, having fled the five-year-old civil war, are now grappling with high rental costs and limited incomes.

Demand had been stable, but the sudden increase in the first three months of the year was the most rapid since the 2008 recession, noted the Daily Bread Food Bank report. “This most recent spike is the result of a combination of stagnant incomes, rapidly rising food and housing costs and an influx of newcomers, including Syrian refugees, making the difficult transition to a new country with little income.”

Canada has admitted 30,647 Syrian newcomers since last November as both government-assisted and privately sponsored refugees, with thousands more due to arrive this year. More than 12,000 refugees from the Syrian conflict have settled in Ontario since November.

Christine Markwell, who co-ordinates the Agincourt Community Services food bank, saw a “huge increase” in demand from Syrian families this year, and cites rental costs as a major factor. She has adjusted services as a result, now offering a drop-in on Tuesday afternoons especially for Syrian families, and recruiting more Arabic-speaking volunteers.

[URBAN NOTE] "Ontario will need to implement foreign buyer tax on housing, CIBC says"

Well, yes. This CBC News report is unsurprising.

A prominent economist says that Ontario will have little choice but to implement a tax on foreign house buyers, similar to the 15 per cent surcharge recently slapped on home purchases in Vancouver.

In a recent note to clients, Benjamin Tal of CIBC says the biggest problem facing policymakers with regard to hot housing markets in Toronto and Vancouver is a limit on the supply of new homes.

In both cities, there's a lack of undeveloped land to build new real estate in the downtown core.

"The main reason behind higher prices in the [Greater Toronto Area] is a policy-driven lack of land supply," Tal said. "And with no change on that front, policymakers have to use demand tools to deal with what is essentially a supply problem."

[URBAN NOTE] "Goodbye Vancouver: Foreign buyers now flooding Seattle and Toronto real estate markets

Global News' Jill Slattery reports on how foreign buyers, disincentivized in Vancouver, seem now to be flooding into Canadian Toronto and nearby Seattle.

Foreign buyers are leaving Vancouver en masse, instead heading to cities like Seattle and Toronto to invest in real estate, according to numbers provided to Global News from Chinese realty website Juwai.com.

Juwai.com is “where Chinese find international property” according to their website. They claim to have over 2.4 million real estate listings across 58 countries and have for a long time, marketed Vancouver to their clientele as an attractive place to purchase homes.

But the allure of Vancouver may be fading, according to numbers from the company that suggest there was an 81 per cent drop in buying inquiries in Vancouver in August compared to August 2015.

The recorded drop comes the month after a 15 per cent foreign buyers tax was introduced in Metro Vancouver to thwart off the foreign demand that has helped to fuel an unprecedented rise in home prices across the region.

The demand may have shifted south of the border and to other cities across the country, according to Juwai.

[URBAN NOTE] "Class-action lawsuit filed against B.C.'s foreign buyer property tax"

CBC News' Eric Rankin reports on a class action lawsuit filed against British Columbia for its tax on foreign home buyers. This sounds like it could have some legs.

A class-action lawsuit has been filed in B.C. Supreme Court on behalf of virtually all non-Canadians who have been forced to pay an extra 15 per cent under amendments to the Property Transfer tax act.

If the lawsuit is certified by the courts and succeeds, the province could be forced to repay hundreds of millions of dollars — much of the expected revenue now earmarked to pay for affordable housing for British Columbians.

[. . .]

The lead plaintiff in the case is Jing Li, 29, a university student from the People's Republic of China, now living in Burnaby.

In August, Jing told CBC News she was caught in a financial crunch by the imposition of the additional tax.

In mid-July, she cobbled together a 10 per cent deposit on a $560,000 townhouse in Langley by borrowing from her parents and friends in China.

Twelve days later, the new levy was imposed.

The tax added $84,000 to the price of the property. If she backs out of the deal, she will lose her non-refundable deposit of $56,000.

[URBAN NOTE] "Nearly triple the number of subway trains shut down by TTC because of extreme heat"

The National Post's Victor Ferreira reports on the overheating subway cars on the Bloor-Danforth Line, still overheating on the 19th. (Believe me, I can testify to this.)

When James Ross takes the TTC to work in the morning, he’ll inevitably walk onto a Toronto subway car without air conditioning.

It’s unbearable for Ross, the TTC’s Head of Subway Transportation, but instead of following the flock of riders off onto another train car, he’ll stand inside and take the heat.

“I’ll stick it out because I’m trying to set an example, but we can’t kid ourselves,” Ross said. “It’s not pleasant.”

Between June 1 and September 13, the TTC took 63 trains out of service because of the extreme heat inside the cars, according to internal data obtained by the National Post. The number nearly tripled from 2015, when there were only 23 trains placed out of service in the same time frame due to hot cars. It took between nine and 225 minutes to repair and get each train back on the line during a summer when up to 25 per cent of subway cars were operating without working air conditioning units, causing an uproar among riders.

The chance of a train going out of service increases when the weather spikes, Ross said, because of a greater strain on the HVAC systems to keep trains cool. This August was the hottest one on record in Toronto, with temperatures rising 20 times above 29 C. In August, there were more cases of hot cars forcing trains out of service — 25 — than in the entire four-month span between June and September in 2015. Five cars were taken off the line because they were too hot on Aug. 12, when the temperature spiked to a high of 35.9 C.

But the TTC continues to place trains out of service due to hot cars, even when temperatures dip in the fall. A train on Line 2 was put out of service on Oct. 9, 2015 because it was too hot, despite temperatures only reaching 16.7 C that day. Later, on Nov. 5, 2015 — Toronto saw a high of 20.5 C — a train was taken out of service again because of hot cars.

[DM] "On the physical constraints to the independence of Statistics Canada"

I've a post up looking at the recent resignation of Statistics Canada's chief statistician Wayne Smith, prompted by the insecure data services offered by the federal government's ill-conceived platform.

[AH] WI the Mid-Canada Development Corridor was realized?

A couple of weeks ago, Tristan Hopper's National Post article "The grandiose — but failed — 1960s plan by an Ontario war hero to settle a ‘second Canada’ below the Arctic" caught my attention.

It all comes down to Richard Rohmer, a Canadian war veteran perhaps more notable to many as an author of pulp fiction (really bad technothrillers, mainly). As Hopper notes, he had an ambitious plan for the settlement of the Canadian Shield.

If things had gone Richard Rohmer’s way in the 1960s, the Canada of 2016 could have been home to as many as 70 million people.

Canada would have had a GDP rivalling that of the United Kingdom and new highways, new railways and new metropolises, all built in the sparsely populated boreal forest region that Rohmer came to call “Mid-Canada.” He would even help to spawn an entirely new type of citizen: The hearty, winter-loving “Mid-Canadian.”

Rohmer — a lawyer and decorated RCAF Wing Commander — was leading a charge to build a “second Canada” on top of the old one.

“It was a very simple concept; the country needed long range policies and plans for the future orderly development of this vast land that we have,” said Rohmer, 92, speaking by phone from his home in Collingwood, Ont.

[. . .]

In its heyday, Rohmer’s Mid-Canada plan attracted the attention of a who’s who of powerful Canadians: Captains of industry, bank CEOs, labour leaders, scientists and Aboriginal leaders and the patronage of former Prime Minister Lester Pearson and the Governor General.

“Canada’s future is inseparably linked with the development of Mid-Canada,” read a preliminary report. More zealous boosters even claimed that a Canada without the moxie to develop its boreal forest might as well meekly surrender to U.S. annexation.

The scope, as the above map indicates, was very ambitious.

There would be diagonal trans-continental railroad connecting Labrador ports to the Yukon. A highway to the Arctic. New growth centres; Flin Flon, Whitehorse, Labrador City, Thunder Bay and High Level were all pegged as settlements that could reach Calgary-esque levels of size and influence by the year 2000.

Strangely, Waterways, the precursor to Fort McMurray, was left off the list. It remains one of the few Mid-Canada cities that achieved any semblance of the growth envisioned by Rohmer.

Final infrastructure cost for a full-blown 1970s incursion into Mid-Canada? Four to five billion dollars, about $35 billion in 2016 dollars.

Governor General Roland Michener, a friend of Rohmer, arranged a meeting with Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. The idea was that Rohmer would show up, present the report, screen some slides and get the ball rolling on a Ministry of Mid-Canada or the like.

Instead, he met the disinterested eyes of the Prime Minister, who couldn’t seem to escape Rideau Hall fast enough.

“The message was ‘don’t even bother,’ but in any event we did our best,” he said.

Rohmer has long chalked up the failure to partisan considerations. The airman reeked of Tory blue, and whatever Trudeau planned to do with Canada in the 1970s, settling the North was not on the list.

I would argue that political differences were less important than the immense cost of this project. Could there have been any constituency for this sort of massive spending? To this, I would add the question of politics, not least with the First Nations. How would the indigenous peoples of the North, the last peoples not to be overwhelmed by European and Euro-Canadian settlers in their homelands, respond to this?

A September 2014 article in The Walrus, "If We Build It, They Will Stay" argued straightforwardly for this plan to be implemented now.

If the federal government had bought into Richard Rohmer’s vision from the start, the mid-Canada corridor would look very different today, beginning with infrastructure. Fifty years ago, it was still a government responsibility and, to a degree, priority. Now, it seems, there isn’t a government at any level that has the money for it. Infrastructure is incredibly expensive, and without a commercial imperative, a difficult sell.

But it’s not just infrastructure that governments have abandoned; they’ve abandoned leadership, as well. The government of Stephen Harper is a facilitator. It doesn’t spend money on northern infrastructure; its interest in policy tends to be narrow and ideological (gutting environmental law to pave the way for resource extraction, for example); and its record on Aboriginal concerns got off to an unfortunate start when it reneged on the Kelowna Accord, a Liberal initiative that had allocated $5 billion to First Nations education, housing, health services, and economic development (things haven’t improved much in the years since).

Canada was founded on bold action (David Thompson’s exploration of the West, Alexander Mackenzie’s push north) and big ideas (Confederation). But we have lost the appetite for both. The last big idea in nation-building was Clifford Sifton’s immigration policy under Wilfrid Laurier’s government a century ago, when a cheery, somewhat misleading campaign lured one million foreign settlers to the Prairies. Occasionally, we are pushed toward something larger (Expo 67, various Olympics), but for the most part we have come to settle for the “Peace, Order, and good Government” described in the British North America Act of 1867.
Good government, however, has become synonymous with good management. Courage isn’t prized, and we’ve paid a price for our caution. When it comes to infrastructure investment, planning, and urban development—activities that shaped the country at its founding—our caution has worked against us.

We are in need of a bold national vision, and the thoughtful development of the mid-Canada corridor certainly qualifies. Rohmer envisioned sustainable development, and if anything that’s even more desirable now than it was five decades ago. It would bring us prosperity. It would force us to be environmentally responsible. It would hasten the long-overdue respectful inclusion of First Peoples in Canadian society. It might even help us realize that elusive dream: meaningful national unity.

I am much less convinced of this. Scott Gilmore in MacLean's noted that, by most metrics, the Canadian North is terribly underdeveloped and that Canadians by and large are fine with this. At Vice, meanwhile, James Wilt's article "Why Scott Gilmore’s Latest Claims About the North Are Bullshit" makes the point via a series of interviews that much of what Gilmore would term development (large-scale resource exploitation, particularly) would be unwelcome among the people who actually live there.

Roger Epp, Director of UAlberta North, political science professor and author of We Are All Treaty People: Prairie Essays

VICE: What's wrong with how Gilmore approaches the North?
Epp: First, Gilmore's North is a slippery one. Sometimes it is strictly the territorial north, when he is counting people; and then, when he is counting ports, it slips down to Churchill. The question of where North begins is the subject of endless debate. Is Fort McMurray north? Labrador? Prince George? Sudbury? Chicoutimi? Or only those places where Indigenous peoples predominate?

Second, the "North" is judged entirely in terms of whether it is the site of effective sovereignty and economic development, especially of its "mineral wealth." Those are not necessarily the only criteria that Northerners would apply, though the assumption is that their perspectives are irrelevant. What matters is whether the North is genuinely "ours," meaning Southern Canadians'. As if it is up to people in Toronto and Ottawa to decide if "we" are a northern nation. People live there, and have been living there a long time.

Is this a symptom of Gilmore simply not being able to conceptualize that distinct cultural interpretations of lands/waters, economies, and societies exist? Or what's going on here?
Especially outside the territorial capitals, and in parts of the provincial norths as well, there is a complex relationship between what we might call traditional and wage economies. The latter presumably is a mark of "development." But it is not one or the other for people. Traditional land-based, water-based skills still compensate for the ridiculous price of food, for example, and the relationship between those skills and real self-determination and also the character traits required to live it out should not be discounted.

I was in the community of Deline on Great Bear Lake in late August, just before the effective date and the celebration of a self-government agreement that was almost two decades in the making. While Deline is not without its challenges, those negotiations were an incredible test of community leadership and cohesion, as well as a grounding in traditional stories and spirituality. Deline was rightly celebrated. Where was Gilmore?

For Rohmer's Mid-Canada Development Corridor to take off, or anything like it, at the very least we would need a national government willing both to engage in massively costly projects like this and to ignore the complaints of the people who actually lived there that these projects were hurting their lifestyles and communities. (In addition to First Nations, the Canadian government might well find itself in conflict with provincial government with their own plans for their portions of the Canadian Shield.) This is not impossible, but it would require some fairly significant tweaks.

Would there even be any guarantee that this plan would work? Hopper's article notes that we could well end up creating a sub-Arctic urban dystopia, with mined-out resource cities in environmental wastes. Northern Canada could look much more like post-Soviet Siberia that we Canadians would like to imagine. What would happen if funding to these vast projects was interrupted, as they were in the Soviet Union in the 1990s?

What do you think about this possibility? Was the Mid-Canada Development Corridor realizable?

Discuss.