[PHOTO] Rainbow at night, TD Bank, Church and Wellesley

[PHOTO] St. Columba Presbyterian Church, Marshfield PE

A Google search for St. Columba Presbyterian Church, located in the unincorporated community of Marshfield to the immediate northeast of Charlottetown, brings up nothing but links to church directories and snippets from Google Books. I know of this church from my years as a cyclist on the Island, as this church and the hill it lies on was the furthest distance from home that I would ever bike.

The church's cemetery is lovely, peaceful despite its closeness to the St. Peter's Road. The monuments to past tragedies--a woman dead at 29, a couple buried next to each other, a monument to unnamed lost children--are in a good place.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• At Antipope, Charlie Stross imagines what might become possible with cheap heavy spacelift.


• blogTO notes the vandalization of the iconic Toronto sign during Nuit Blanche.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper considering the detectability of interstellar comets.


• Language Log looks at Chinese language transcriptions for Obama, Hillary, and Trump.


• Marginal Revolution looks at impending hard Brexit and notes how the economy of Thailand is dominated by Bangkok.


• The NYRB Daily writes at length about its apparent discovery of the identity of Elena Ferrante.


• Savage Minds shares a Bolivian perspective on Donald Trump.


• Strange Maps shares a list of ten potential Jewish homelands outside of Palestine.


• Window on Eurasia looks at quiet Chechen dissidence and warns about the consequences of Putin's repressions.


• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell worries about the people soon to be in charge of the United Kingdom's Brexit negotiations.

[URBAN NOTE] "Ahmadiyya Caliph touches down in Toronto"

The Toronto Star's Azzura Lalanis reports on the arrival of the Ahmadiyya caliph on a visit to Toronto.

The leader of millions of Ahmadiyya Muslims arrived in the Greater Toronto Area this evening, touching off joyous celebrations among the faithful.

Shouts of “Allahuakbar” — God is Great — rang out in the area known as Peace Village in Vaughan Monday when Hazrat Mirza Masroor Ahmad, Caliph of the Ahmadiyya community, arrived.

Over 10,000 followers gathered as he began his six-week Canadian tour.

“Today is a very, very important day because I am seeing the Caliph for the first time,” said Waseema Khurran, 36, who was waiting with her 2-year-old son. “I am so happy I cannot describe it.”

The area was decorated festively for the Caliph’s visit. Houses were draped in strings of light and children singing songs to welcome the Caliph wore red and white and waved Canadian flags.

[URBAN NOTE] "Longing for ‘the crack days’ at a Parliament Street rooming house"

The Toronto Star's Betsy Powell reports on a grim Toronto Community Housing rooming house on Parliament Street, in the heart of Cabbagetown.

Rick Keegan uses dark humour to describe life in and outside his Cabbagetown rooming house, a fetid, bug-infested three-storey Victorian that attracts a roster of transients who gain entry by kicking in the front door.

“It went from crack to meth, and if you can believe it, I miss the crack days,” says Keegan describing the current drug of choice for visitors.

“Crack users are a little paranoid, you can get them out of the house, you just go and tell them to get lost and they go, but you try and tell that to the meth heads and they want to fight.”

Keegan, 61, says this while sitting inside a busy Tim Hortons across the street from part of a row of tall, narrow Parliament St. homes listed on the city’s Heritage Registry and owned and operated by Toronto Community Housing (TCH).

Rooming houses across the city — and what to do about them — is on the fall agenda at city hall. This month, city staff will report to executive committee on new zoning and licensing regulations for rooming houses, including 27 rooming houses operated by TCH.

Toronto has 433 licensed rooming houses. Hundreds more are unlicensed.

[URBAN NOTE] "A Brief History of SmartTrack, so Far"

Torontoist's David Fleischer explains the backstory behind SmartTrack, Toronto's latest foolishly half-hearted flirtation with ambitious mass transit plans.

As a branded proposal, SmartTrack is just over two years old, but writing a “brief history” of the transit proposal first launched in May 2014 is daunting.

What is SmartTrack? Where does it come from? Where is it going (literally and figuratively)? These are some of the great questions of our age. There’s great analysis of them here and all around by Steve Munro and others. We’re going to try to sum up the history of what is, for better and worse, Mayor John Tory’s signature transit policy.

Working backwards to find SmartTrack’s Ur-moment—the point at which it crawled out of the primordial ooze onto the land of transit-planning reality—is tricky, but it definitely doesn’t start with John Tory and the 2014 mayoral campaign.

[. . .]

Since they first hit the rails in 1967, GO trains have operated (especially outside the Lakeshore lines) as little more than one-way, rush hour-only service for commuters. That changed with the announcement of Metrolinx’s The Big Move in 2008; this included plans to replace the existing diesel GO vehicles with electric trains that would provide all-day, two-way service. It’s the sort of thing that has long existed in actual “world class” cities, like Paris and New York. It’s called—brace yourselves—Regional Express Rail! (RER for short, obviously.)

Metrolinx began studying how to turn this idea into reality a few years ago and has had a real plan [PDF] since 2014. The short-term upshot was to first electrify the Lakeshore line. New stations, twinning of rail lines, expanded parking lots (of course); it’s all happening over the next 10 years.

[URBAN NOTE] "Let’s actually talk about investing in housing"

Spacing Toronto's John Lorinc writes about Toronto's need for investment in housing, private and public.

On and off since the early 1990s, when Paul Martin and Joe Fontana concocted an impossibly progressive policy agenda that became Jean Chrétien’s Red Book, the federal Liberals have nursed a fantasy about returning to the glory days of the activist national housing policy of the 1970s, when mortgage subsidies stoked the construction of hundreds of thousands of co-op apartments across Canada.

In government, however, the party found many excuses to kick that policy can down the road. The dream has re-surfaced with Justin Trudeau’s Liberals, as evidenced most recently at last Friday’s housing confab in Regent Park, when several big city mayors, including John Tory, made a pitch to earmark $12.5 billion of the next $20 billion tranche of federal infrastructure funding to social housing.

The event, make no mistake, was one of those carefully staged-managed affairs meant to whip up political demand — and thus public pressure — for a policy that Ottawa kinda-sorta-maybe wants to implement. The asks were pre-negotiated and fit seamlessly into the “Let’s Talk Housing” fall consultation (it runs until October 21) initiated by minister Jean-Yves Duclos, who was in attendance.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m glad to see this degree of engagement, and what seems — so far — like an authentic attempt to translate a targeted election pledge into actual policy.

My concern, however, is that whatever policy and money emerges from this process won’t fully address the stubborn, but enormously important, riddle of why private investors won’t finance moderately priced rental apartment buildings in urban markets where there’s huge and growing demand for the same.

[URBAN NOTE] "TTC forging ahead with one-operator subway trains"

The Toronto Star's Ben Spurr reports on this noteworthy development. I wonder about the consequences for jobs, in the TTC and the wider job market.

The TTC is going ahead with plans to eliminate guards on its subway trains despite claims from the transit agency’s union that the decision will compromise passenger safety.

Since the TTC’s first underground line opened in 1954,the transit agency has operated all of its trains with two-person crews: an operator who drives the vehicle, and a guard who’s responsible for opening and closing the doors and ensuring passengers are clear of the train when it departs.

But starting Sunday, Oct. 9 trains on Line 4 (Sheppard) — the TTC’s least-used line — will be converted to one-person train operation (OPTO). The transit commission plans to convert trains on its busiest subway, Line 1 (Yonge-University-Spadina), by around 2019.

One-person operation is used by transit agencies around the world and on the TTC’s own Scarborough RT, but Amalgamated Transit Union Local 113 claims it’s unsafe and opposed by the public. In a Sept. 28 news release, union president Bob Kinnear went so far as to raise the spectre of terrorist attacks against trains without guards.

“(TTC CEO) Andy Byford holds up London and Madrid as examples of cities with one-person operation but obviously forgot that hundreds of people were killed and thousands injured by terrorist attacks on those two cities’ transit systems,” he said.

“TTC management tells employees: ‘If you see something, say something,’ then cuts the people who could see that something. It makes no sense.”

[URBAN NOTE] On the Vancouver real estate market, still booming

CBC News' Salma Nurmohamed reports on how, despite the foreign buyer tax, Vancouver's real estate market is still very strong and definitely a sellers' market.

The scene is pretty standard for what happens when a quality home in a good neighbourhood hits the market in Vancouver — dozens of house hunters at the open house, offers restricted to a single night, and, in the end, a property that goes well over the asking price after seven bidders fight for the title.

Earlier this year few home hopefuls in Vancouver would have thought this was unusual.

But this scene took place 10 days ago — late September, and nearly two months after the 15 per cent foreign buyer real estate tax was brought in by the B.C. Liberals in an attempt to cool the market and increase home affordability.

"After the long weekend [in September] it went crazy — 30 people in one open," said potential homebuyer Henrik Karlsson, 33. "I expected it to be less busy."

Karlsson and his wife, Emilia Gustafsson, 28, hoped it would be easier to upgrade from their 631-square-foot one-bedroom and den apartment with the tax in place.

But they lost the bidding war — the two-bed, two-bath, 1,150-square-foot townhouse in a pretty pocket of East Vancouver went for $70,000 over the asking price at $908,000.

[URBAN NOTE] "Ottawa tightens mortgage requirements and targets foreign money"

CBC News' Pete Evans wrote about Canada's new tighter restriction on foreign ownership, including regulations intended to require residency. Is it too late?

Ottawa has announced new rules aimed at limiting foreign money into Canadian real estate and ensuring that borrowers take on mortgages they can afford.

"Overall, I believe the housing market is sound, but as minister of finance, I want to make sure we are proactive in assessing and addressing the factors that could lead to excess risk," Finance Minister Bill Morneau said in making the announcement Monday in Toronto.

Reality check: Can a foreign buyer tax cool the housing market without hurting it?
They include a move to close a loophole in the tax laws that allows non-residents to buy homes in Canada, and then get a tax exemption to avoid paying capital gains when they sell the home by claiming it as a principal residence.

Starting now, "an individual who was not a resident in Canada in the year the individual acquired a residence will not be able to claim the exemption for that year," Morneau said.