[PHOTO] Early morning, Charlottetown Airport

[PHOTO] Princes' Gates, final day of the CNE

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• The Boston Globe's The Big Picture shares some of that newspaper's best papers from last month.


• blogTO shares Nuit Blanche photos.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly talks about the divide between journalism and content creation.


• Centauri Dreams considers the Rosetta probe.


• Dangerous Minds shares photos of the suitcases left by patients at an American insane asylum.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper suggesting extraterrestrial civilizations could be discovered via leakage from the power-beaming systems of their spacecraft.


• Far Outliers notes the 19th century feminization of domestic service in the United Kingdom and describes the professionalization of nursemaids.


• Joe. My. God. notes Wikileaks' shift of its big reveal to Berlin.


• Language Log checks to see if there is any way Guiliani's statement that no woman would be a better president than Trump could be parsed in a way favourable to him.


• The Map Room Blog links to an article describing an ambitious plan to map the ocean floor.


• Marginal Revolution looks at an electoral reform proposal in Maine.


• James Nicoll links to his review of Deighton's SS-GB
.

• Torontoist reports about the Toronto food bank system.


• Towleroad features a guest article describing Donald Trump's misogyny towards his partners.


• Window on Eurasia considers the cost to Russia of hosting multiple major international sports tournaments.


• Arnold Zwicky reports on The New York Times's Spanish-language editorial.

[URBAN NOTE] "Vancouver home sales drop nearly 33% as new tax takes hold"

The Globe and Mail's Brent Jang reports on the very substantial recent drop in real estate sales in Greater Vancouver.

Property sales in Greater Vancouver totalled 2,253 last month, down 32.6 per cent from a year earlier, as the housing market adjusted to the impact from the B.C. government’s tax on foreign buyers.

The benchmark price for detached houses, condos and town homes slipped 0.1 per cent in September, compared with August. The benchmark price, a representation of the typical property in an area, is up 28.9 per cent over the past year in the region, the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver said Tuesday.

“Changing market conditions are easing upward pressure on home prices in our region,” board president Dan Morrison said in a statement.

[. . .]

Metro Vancouver includes most of Greater Vancouver and also covers parts of other suburbs such as Surrey, which belongs to the Fraser Valley Real Estate Board.

[URBAN NOTE] "There can only be one: Ajax, Pickering fight for right to host casino"

In The Globe and Mail, Jill Mahoney reports on how the suburban Toronto cities of Ajax and Pickering are competing for the right to have a casino.

Does anyone reading this have any stake in Ajax versus Pickering? I like the latter's flea market, for whatever it's worth.

The cornfield stretches as far as the eye can see. But amid the rows of stalks, there are billboards depicting an incongruous scene: a dramatic nighttime rendering of a massive entertainment complex featuring a casino, a water park, a convention centre and multiple hotels.

The signs promise that the development is “coming soon” to this patch of farmland in Pickering. But despite winning city council support, the future of the main attraction – the casino – is still very much up in the air.

Just eight kilometres away in Ajax, the owner of a 10-year-old slot-machine and horse-racing facility has also secured approval from local leaders to rezone the site for a casino expansion.

The catch? The two casino projects cannot co-exist. Under Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. rules, there can be only one casino in the geographic zone that includes Pickering and Ajax.

The high stakes have led to a battle between the mayors of the neighbouring communities, who both want the jobs, spinoff businesses and millions in hosting fees that a large casino would bring. Their embrace of gaming expansion is in sharp contrast to the reception given to a proposal to build a large downtown casino in Toronto, which was overwhelmingly rejected by city council three years ago.

[URBAN NOTE] "Salmon festival in Scarborough spawns a crowd"

The Toronto Star's Peter Edwards reports on a recent Scarborough salmon festival.

The threat of wet weather wasn’t enough to put a damper on the Highland Creek Salmon Festival on Sunday.

Some 2,000 people showed up for the annual event in Toronto’s largest green space. It has taken off in popularity since its beginning in 2009, when it drew about 30 people for guided tours along the shores of Highland Creek in Scarborough’s Morningside Park.

“We were worried about the weather,” said Cameron Richardson, a project manager with the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority. “It turned into a really beautiful day.”

The lucky ones on the tours deep into the Highland Creek Valley could see salmon splashing in the shallow waters on their way upstream to spawn.

There were chinook salmon, introduced into Great Lakes in 1960s, as well as steelhead and coho. Richardson said he expects to also see Atlantic salmon coming back, as water quality improves.

[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto buyers drive real estate prices up in Cambridge, Kitchener, Guelph"

CBC News' Colin Butler reports on how Toronto buyers are pushing up prices in the wider Golden Horseshoe.

Industry watchers predict Toronto buyers will continue to drive prices up in Waterloo Region's already red-hot real estate market, even as "for sale" listings traditionally slow in the winter.

It follows a summer that delivered month after month of record-breaking sales figures in Waterloo Region fuelled by low interest rates, a strong local economy and a steady influx of buyers from the Toronto area, priced out of an increasingly expensive big city market.

Benjamin Tal, the deputy chief economist with CIBC World Markets, said as the price real estate mushrooms in Toronto, young couples are now willing to go further afield to get themselves a slice of the Canadian dream.

"They simply go on the 401 and start driving until they find something they can afford and then they stop and we're seeing a lot of this now," he said.

[URBAN NOTE] "The Switch to Presto Could Make Life a Lot Harder for Seniors and Students"

I had intended to share this Torontoist post by Nikhil Sharma earlier. This is bad news for vulnerable TTC transit users.

Renz Gamboa uses the TTC every day. He’s a student who attends school in Toronto, and he used to purchase a Metropass for his commute.

He didn’t know about the discounted fares offered to students like him by the TTC through Presto, and when he heard about the reloadable transit card, he decided to buy one. But then he learned he had to travel to Davisville station to get his discount.

Presto is intended to make life easier for commuters in the GTA. But for students and seniors, both of whom are eligible for discounted fares, the new system could be inconvenient at best and inaccessible at worst.

The value of having Presto for seniors and students who routinely ride the TTC is that they’re able to add a concession on the self-service fare card. This is a feature that allows customers to apply discounts.

By default, the card is set to the adult fare, and in order to have their discount applied, riders only have one option: they have to visit Davisville station.

[URBAN NOTE] "Microtransit idea offers glimmer of hope in otherwise business as usual TTC meeting"

Chris Selley's article in the National Post, generally despairing of the TTC, does conclude on a note of hope. Is "microtransit" really viable?

“People think there’s no good project managers at the TTC,” Byford told commissioners. “They’re wrong.” And he credibly argued it’s unfair to compare the final cost of the Spadina line extension to the widely quoted original $1.5 billion.

It wasn’t TTC management who decided they wanted “grandiose” stations instead of modest ones. It wasn’t TTC management that shut down work at York University for half a year because of a worker’s death. And for heaven’s sake, the $1.5 billion was supposed to take the subway to York, not all the way to Vaughan.

[. . .]

One item on the agenda Wednesday did offer a glimmer of hope, however: “Implications of microtransit for TTC.” Staff are considering whether incorporating non-traditional public transit conveyances into the system might improve both customer experiences and the commission’s bottom line. Microtransit is not normally defined this broadly, but it could harness the power of taxis, Uber cars, minivans, or even Wheel-Trans vehicles.

At the beginner level, this might theoretically help with the TTC’s least profitable bus lines, which too often live and die for political reasons rather than empirical ones. Some routes are economic nightmares: in 2014, the 99 Arrow Road bus carried just 184 people a day. In some areas of the city, especially at night, transit demand would clearly be better served by smaller vehicles. Maybe they don’t have to be TTC-owned vehicles.