[PHOTO] Four Impressionist paintings from the Art Gallery of Ontario

The Impressionists who were one source of inspiration for the Group of Seven are present in substantial numbers at the Art Gallery of Ontario. One of my favourites is Camille Pissarro's Poplars, Grey Weather, Éragny.



Claude Monet's From Étretat: L'Aiguille and the Porte d'Aval is evocative of the sea.



James Ensor's From Beach at Ostend also deserves praise.



Monet's Les ombres sur la mer, Fécamp hints at so much for me.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• blogTO shares the new face of the Broadview Hotel.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly writes about the joys of the unscreened life.


• Dead Things reports on a study suggesting that although humans are violent by the standards of mammals, we are among the least violent primates.


• The Dragon's Gaze reports on the discovery of five sizable planets orbiting HIP 41378.


• Language Log reports on the perils of 7 and 9 in Cantonese.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money considers the usefulness of The Battle of Algiers.


• The Planetary Society Blog reacts to the Elon Musk proposal for colonizing Mars.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer responds briefly to the question of what Mexico can do about Trump.


• Window on Eurasia notes how the Russian invasion of Ukraine has spurred new arms purchases throughout the eastern half of Europe, even in Belarus.

[URBAN NOTE] "Why Public Transit Must Be Fast, Cheap, and Convenient"

I think Tricia Wood's Torontoist post makes a valid point.

I want to talk about the morality of driving.

I own a car, but I don’t drive very much. I generally take transit or walk everywhere I need to go. I use the car to take my kids camping in the summer, to venture out to Mississauga to visit my parents, and to cart musical gear.

But day in, day out, I don’t drive. I have had funny conversations with my disbelieving insurance company about the small number of kilometres I add to the odometer each year.

I can do a lot of my shopping on foot, and I commute by subway and bus. Taking transit means it takes me longer to get to work, but it’s better for the environment, and better for my health.

My halo is blinding, isn’t it?

Those of us who don’t drive often or at all are pretty proud of ourselves, maybe even a little smug. And why not? We’re making a difference: every car off the road reduces air pollution, to which several hundred deaths are directly attributable every year in this province.

[URBAN NOTE] "Would You Want to Live in a 10-Tower Mississauga Condo Complex Developed By Rogers?"

Torontoist reports on a shiny new condo development in Mississauga.

Hold your breath, Rogers is getting into the condo game.

The Rogers Real Estate Development company, which is privately held, announced plans to build a 10-condo-tower complex billed as “M City” in Mississauga, with the tallest tower measuring in at 51 storeys. First reported by BuzzBuzzHome, the $1.5-billion, 6,000-unit, six-hectare project will be built in downtown Mississauga, a short walk from the Civic Centre.

Proposed to be built on a parcel of land reportedly purchased for $170,000 in the 1960s by the Rogers family and originally intended for a radio transmitter, the ambitious proposal is part of a larger plan for Mississauga. Over the weekend the city to the west of Toronto announced a 120-hectare proposal along its waterfront, which Finance Minister and local MPP Charles Sousa said “will be much better than Toronto.” The project will include 26 hectares of protected green space, and take seven to 10 years to build.

[URBAN NOTE] "Report sounds alarm on big TTC projects"

The Toronto Star's Ben Spurr reports on what could be a big problem for the TTC.

A review of the TTC’s procurement policies is raising red flags about the transit agency’s ability to manage expensive capital projects, detailing billions of dollars in cost overruns and oversight practices that fall below public-sector standards.

The report, which will be debated at Wednesday’s TTC board meeting, was authored by consulting firm KPMG. The company examined nine capital projects that the TTC launched over the past decade-and-a-half and had combined initial estimated costs of $5.1 billion. Of the nine, six incurred inflated expenses that together totalled $2.9 billion more than original estimates.

They included the Toronto York Spadina Subway Extension, whose cost soared over from $1.5 billion to $3.2 billion, and the Leslie Barns streetcar facility, whose price jumped from $345 million to $507 million. Three of four smaller-scale capital projects KPMG studied also saw budgets rise above initial projections.

The report, which council commissioned in March 2015, determined that the TTC is operating at a “low-standardized level of maturity” in the delivery of capital projects. That’s below KPMG’s benchmark for public-sector organizations. KPMG scored one TTC department as operating at an “informal” level, which means the consultant found that projects lacked documentation and standardized policies.

[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto library finds savings, misses council's target"

David Rider of the Toronto Star writes about the Toronto Public Library faced with cuts. Past a certain point, we're going to have to find ways to pay for the nice things we need.

Toronto’s bustling library system is the latest agency to say it can’t make city council’s directive to cut 2.6 per cent of its spending without hurting services to Torontonians.

At a meeting this week, chief librarian Vickery Bowles presented the library board with 2 per cent in proposed “efficiencies,” through increased revenue from space rentals plus lower spending, thanks to technological innovations including fine payments at self-checkout terminals.

The $3.529 million in savings includes eliminating 8.7 full-time staff positions. To hit the target approved by city council at the urging of Mayor John Tory, the library would have to cut a further $1.077 million.

Unavoidable costs for negotiated salary increases plus improved services — including expanded Sunday hours at some branches — boost the library’s 2017 operating budget request to $178.8 million, or 0.9 per cent over this year’s budget.

“If TPL is required to find equivalent savings to meet the (council-directed) target, the Library would then need to implement service reductions,” Bowles wrote in her report, adding she’ll continue hunting for efficiencies.

[ISL] "HST hike on P.E.I. coming Saturday"

CBC News' Sara Fraser notes that, Saturday, Prince Edward Island's HST--harmonized sales tax--will go up from 14 to 15%.

Islanders will soon be paying a little more for most products and services, as the P.E.I. government is about to raise the Harmonized Sales Tax by one percentage point on Saturday.

The HST will go from 14 per cent to 15 per cent, and the cost of living is expected to rise by about 0.5 per cent as a result.

"For most people that are financing and so forth they're looking at $2, $2.50 every couple of weeks," explained Ron Martin, the sales manager at Reliable Motors in Charlottetown.

The dealership advertised the tax hike, hoping it would entice customers to buy before October 1.

[. . .]

The increase will bring in an extra $11 million for this fiscal year and an additional $22 million in future years, according to the province — extra revenue that's necessary to simply maintain core services, it said.

I wonder what other options are available.

[URBAN NOTE] "After the Umbrella movement, Hong Kong now faces an identity crisis"

At Open Democracy, En Liang Khong writes about how younger Hong Kongers are starting to stop identifying as Chinese. Much may come of this in the longer run.

When I finally arrive back in Hong Kong in the early hours of a September morning, two years after the 2014 pro-democracy protests, it’s in the middle of a storm. Walking through the rain-splattered city, I see that the highways running across the heart of the finance district have been restored. It’s utterly unrecognizable from when I was last here, when activists led mass occupations, in a bold claim to redefine popular power, using umbrellas to shield themselves from waves of tear gas fired by police, and turning the heart of Hong Kong into a untamed tent city. But although public space in the city-state has been resanitised, we still need to understand the ways in which Hong Kong is entering an unprecedented identity crisis.

This has been a process. We are used to speaking of threats to the Chinese state emerging from the centre. But while that was true in the 1980s, China scholar Sebastian Veg argues that in recent years, such contestation “has increasingly come from the margins.” I went to meet one of the original founders of the 2014 Occupy protests, sociologist Chan Kinman, who is a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “For the younger generation,” Chan tells me, “there has been a very obvious trend of seeing themselves purely as Hong Kong people, not as Chinese.” This is a crucial identity shift. Hong Kongers have long enjoyed a hybrid identity, of being both Chinese and Hong Kongers.

But not this time. Chan thinks the age of dual identity is over, as Hong Kong’s millennials begin to treat it as abnormal, “as something in conflict, not something that can coexist”. The Umbrella movement, in particular, accelerated those contradictions. The failure of a strategy of nonviolent civil disobedience, and the exhaustion of attempts to initiate dialogue with Beijing, have drawn a line in the sand for Hong Kong’s youth, Chan tells me. Ironically, the Hong Kong government itself has been an unwitting driver of the ideology of Hong Kong independence, by publicly targeting and cracking down on the idea in the wake of the 2014 protests. But this strategy of tarring a wide spectrum of pro-democracy activists as separatists, when the discourse of independence was previously a fringe ideology and never central to the Umbrella movement, has been double-edged. After that, Chan “watched as the idea of independence spread massively through Hong Kong”.

What is happening in Hong Kong defies our normal political understanding. “Now you have around 40% of young people supporting Hong Kong independence,” Chan tells me. This crisis of identity is not only fuelling a political vision of Hong Kong as an independent state, but also exists on a cultural level, against Chineseness itself.

Beijing has long been dependent on a traditional sense of ‘Chinese identity’ in Hong Kong to maintain political loyalty. But the Chinese state’s enforcement of patriotism alongside a disavowal of democratic politics has come at a price. It has done little more than alienate, rather than draw closer, a whole swathe of Hong Kong youth. While the older working-class population are still bound to lines of patronage that link them to pro-mainland groups, and the elites support economic symbiosis with the mainland, a young, middle-class, educated ‘generation with no future’ are in full rebellion against both the traditions of their elders, and the state-driven popular nationalism that is rampant in mainland China.

[PHOTO] Red fire engine, Charlottetown Fire Hall

[MUSIC] Björk, "Big Time Sensuality"

"Björk - Big Time Sensuality (Official Music Video)" (Watch on YouTube)

"Big Time Sensuality" is such a joyful and enthusiastic song. I love it even today, more than two decades after I first heard it.