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April 29, 2006
Mount the dais carefully
Except to Tube between airports I haven't been to London for going on seven years, so I don't know if Hyde Park's Speakers' Corner is as highly entertaining and freewheeling as it once was. Ranters and ravers about Zionist conspiracies and American oil-imperialism aren't the amusing distraction they once were, and thanks to Tony Blair's An End to Free Speech Act of 2006 they might all be de facto criminals. Anti-Semitic and anti-American vitriol wasn't all there was to find in Speakers' Corner, but let's say it was difficult to avoid.
Last week, on my way to City Hall to see a man about a parking permit, I came across Toronto's Speaker's Corner — a podium on the northeast corner of Nathan Phillips Square facing Queen Street (apologies for the quality of my phone camera).
The City of Toronto website claims it's been there since 1988, and I have no reason to doubt it — I haven't really been by Nathan Phillips Square since Ronnie Hawkins' last New Year's Eve show. I kid. Anyway, it wasn't the unoccupied podium that caught my attention, but this incredible piece of signage affixed to the front of it:
Tear-jerking, isn't it? Oh, what a glorious thing to live in freedom!
Posted by Chris Selley at 03:12 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
April 26, 2006
Cynicism, glorious cynicism
Rosie DiManno makes a very convincing argument that denying media access to military funerals is exactly the opposite sort of decision as declining to fly the flag at half mast for each and every soldier killed. Both, it could be argued, seek to shelter Canadians from visible symbols of casualties, but the flag decision was a return to a logical tradition, while the funeral decision is a break from it.
It's pretty tough to argue with this:
This isn't, narrowly, a media access issue. Most Canadians don't give a toss about the frustrations of working journalists, which is totally understandable. We have a history of whinging over the picayune and routinely insert ourselves into intimate places. But, in our finer moments, reporters are also the eyes and ears of the public, chronicling events that most people can't attend and, when done properly, invoking the feel of a thing.
By asserting a rubric — protecting loved ones from the glare of media attention — the government has fooled no one. The objective was to create a buffer between this dreadful image of multiple coffins and Canada's mission in Afghanistan — a mission that can be entirely justified on the facts and doesn't require this sort of un-image spinning. By doing so, the government has actually exploited the grief of those families it claims to be protecting.
Sheila Copps, meanwhile, admits today that she decided when to lower the flag and when not to based solely on which decision would get her less grief from the media, and is proud as all hell of it:
Years ago, another flag bureaucrat recommended against half-masting in honour of police officers killed in the line of duty. Imagine my surprise when I woke one morning to the screaming headlines in this very paper: "Copps Refuses to Honour Dead Cops" (or words to that effect). I did not even know about the request but as minister responsible for civilian flag protocol, I was blamed for the denial. I moved quickly to rectify the situation, ignoring the advice, and the flag has been lowered on an annual basis in honour of deceased police officers ever since.
I had similar advice when Princess Diana was killed in 1997. Protocol officers said we could not lower the flag for the former wife of Prince Charles because their divorce meant she was no longer on the official list of royal family honorees.
As I walked into caucus, I was swarmed by journalists demanding to know why the flag over the Parliament Buildings was not at half-staff. A quick consult with PM Jean Chretien gave me the green light. I contacted our protocol officials and advised them that, notwithstanding their advice, the prime minister had decided to honour Diana's memory.
Oh yes, that's just what he did. I've never seen a Liberal soldier admit so freely to rank cynicism, and the best part is that she seems to think it looks good on her.
Posted by Chris Selley at 11:22 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Everyone's a winner!
I've had a couple of posts (here and here) about OISE's endlessly disheartening teacher education program. Curriculum complaints aside, its most soul-sucking feature from a student's point of view (a friend of mine, who is an experienced but "unlicensed" teacher, is currently nearing the end of his nightmare) is its insistence on treating its "candidate teachers" exactly like the children they'll soon be teaching, instead of like (theoretically) grown men and women who will soon be entrusted with these children's futures.
Here is photographic evidence of the final assignment your children's future teachers were asked to complete. It's their vision of "The Ideal Classroom" brought to life with construction paper, pipe cleaners, etc.
Darling, aren't they?
I think this choice excerpt from my aforementioned friend's "evaluation" of the program (reproduced with his permission) says it all:
…very early on in the program, we were taught different ways to get students' attention. These included clapping rhythmically, striking chimes, and raising one's hand. Time was taken to practice them. I understand and appreciate how each of these techniques works. I do not doubt their efficacy. What I do not understand is why a technique our instructors feel is appropriate for students somewhere between 6- and 12-years old is appropriate for students in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and even 50s. The raised-hand technique became insulting very quickly.
Posted by Chris Selley at 12:54 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
April 25, 2006
Old time hockey
Was I the only one unaware of this part of the NHL's Rule 56(a)?
If a player penalized as an instigator of an altercation is wearing a face shield, he shall be assessed an additional Unsportsmanlike Conduct penalty.
(NOTE 4) Should the player who instigates the fight be wearing a face shield, but removes it before instigating the altercation, the additional Unsportsmanlike Conduct penalty shall not apply.
I didn't know Don Cherry was on the rules committee.
Posted by Chris Selley at 10:31 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
We don't like Mondays
The AP's Joe Resnick on the 30th anniversary of Rick Monday rescuing Old Glory from Bic-flicking hippies:
He was the first player chosen in the very first draft back in 1965 after leading Arizona State to a College World Series title. The two-time All-Star put up some impressive numbers during his 19 major league seasons. His ninth-inning home run in the fifth and deciding game of the 1981 NL Championship Series at Montreal catapulted the Dodgers into the World Series, where they beat the Yankees in six games.
But all of that pales in comparison to Monday's most famous achievement in a baseball uniform.
Not around these parts it don't!
(Cross-posted to the Shotgun.)
Posted by Chris Selley at 10:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Demons are resilient
Ken Campbell after game one: "Senators at last slay post-season demons"
Ken Campbell after game two: "the Senators are once again staring their playoff demons right in the face"
(Cross-posted to the Battle of Ontario.)
Posted by Chris Selley at 09:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Sad but true
The half-mast decision makes a lot of sense to me. To undertake a mission like Afghanistan is to accept that you can't make grandiose gestures every time a casualty occurs. Some (probably excessively) blunt perspective is provided by the Globe & Mail's page 4 of Monday, April 23, 1917.
Those two little headlines in the right-hand column read as follows: "Military situation is encouraging"; and "Boy Scout movement continues to grow." The mind boggles. Afghanistan obviously isn't World War I, but the government should be steeling its citizens' resolve nevertheless, not jerking tears from their eyes.
Posted by Chris Selley at 12:21 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
April 24, 2006
Dee-fence! Dee-fence!
Not every arena can be the Bell Centre, where the crowd starts buzzing about a Habs odd-man rush two shifts before it happens, but tonight's Montreal-Carolina tilt tonight from the RBC Center features the most bizarre crowd noise I've ever heard. There's the usual three-second delay after a goal before the celebration, the passionate booing after every stoppage and rapid shift to jubilation when it turns out to be a Habs penalty or to silence when it's an offside call. But there's just this random, fluctuating din, too. It's like every patron is watching the same very important football game on a portable television, each having been dragged to see this silly ice-based sport by a weird Canadaphilic friend.
(Cross-posted to the Battle of Ontario.)
Posted by Chris Selley at 09:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 23, 2006
Me, idiot
The words of Bill McCreary have been rattling around in my head for the better part of a week:
"For the most part, we're at the bottom of the hill, and stuff runs downhill." McCreary said. "People want to criticize us, for whatever reason."
You won't meet a referee who doesn't fully understand that. They're refs -- they expect criticism. But there are two things these referees want you to know before you start blaming them for the failings of your favorite team in 2005-06: One -- they're only the messengers. Greater minds than McCreary's and Devorksi's have defined the levels of enforcement in today's NHL. And two -- the system they are enforcing is working.
"You'd have to be an idiot to say that this hasn't improved the game of hockey."
The regular season — yeah, maybe. It was more different than it was better, but I didn't expect a transition to obstruction-free hockey to be painless. The regular season created a tolerance for calls that look like obstruction even though they don't impede the opposition player at all, and the refs now have more impunity than ever before (and/or arrogance, to hear McCreary talk). As a result, the officials are now routinely creating gamebreaking power play situations out of whole cloth. This could hardly be less in the tradition of the Stanley Cup playoffs.
It's ironic that the NHL would commit itself to making the playoffs look more like the regular season in the same year that it instituted the shootout, which is the starkest distinction there has ever been between the regular and post-seasons. Or maybe not so ironic. With the shootout, the NHL abandoned the game's integrity to American sports fans' collective attention deficit. And with every horseshit phantom tripping and hooking call, it's abandoning the playoffs — the single greatest test in pro sports and the NHL's single greatest asset — to the exact same sort of randomness the shootout represents. It's nothing to celebrate.
Posted by Chris Selley at 08:56 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
Vindication!
A while back I noted how amazing I find it that non-Torontonians think the Toronto media mollycoddles Leafs players. No, no, no, said the commenters. People just think that the Toronto media is Leafs-obsessed.
The increasingly unhinged Mark Spector to my rescue (subscribers only):
And it [the Leafs] includes a group of players so adored by the fans and caressed by the Toronto media, because of the uniform on their backs, that they inevitably fall prey to the belief that they are as good as everyone tells them they are.
Absolutely ridiculous.
(Cross-posted to the Battle of Ontario.)
Posted by Chris Selley at 07:48 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
Go go status quo
Last week, investigators said they hadn't yet found a "link" between Cape Bretoner Stephen Marshall and the two men he allegedly murdered in Maine, which suggested they might believe there's more to the story. Or it might suggest that they're desperately searching for more to the story, lest their bosses get their proverbial pants sued off.
It's obviously no coincidence that Marshall looked his victims up on Maine's sex offender registry before he set out to kill them, and so it's clear, assuming he's guilty, that the registry and the legislators in Augusta who created it facilitated those murders. Investigators now seem eager to bring convicted child molester Clark Gerwulf into the picture. Gerwulf lived near Marshall eight years ago in Idaho, see, so he might have abused him. I have no idea how that would shed any light on this case.
Ontario MPP Gerry Martiniuk wants to put the Canadian offender registry on the internet (and Peter Kormos of all people agrees with him). Says Martiniuk:
You go on a website and say "who is within three kilometers of me." That way parents can take care of their children and feel secure.
But thousands of convicted murderers and manslaughterers walk American and Canadian streets more or less freely. You can't look any of them up on any registry that I'm aware of, nor have I heard any proposals to make it so. Politicians apparently believe people would rather be murdered than sexually assaulted. I'm not sure they're wrong, but I'm sure it doesn't make any sense. Of course, William Elliott didn't really assault anyone — at 19 (20 by some reports) he had consensual sex with a nearly 16-year-old girl, and now he's dead because Marshall looked him up on a state-run website and gunned him down in front of his girlfriend.
But I'm splitting hairs. One must think of the children. I know — I'll check out that website that tells me whether any chronic drunk drivers live within three kilometres of me. Wait. There isn't one. Is that guy in 32A really a bank robber? Did that sketchy guy across the street really punch four people's lights out for no reason? No way to know. I am only entitled to know if someone in my neighbourhood did something wrong if he did it with his penis.
The reason most often cited for sex offender registries — to protect children from predators — is pretty much a complete sham. Only a tiny number of sexual assaults on children are perpetrated by strangers, same as I imagine it is with murders, and anyone who's never been caught before isn't going to show up on that website. Presently in Canada, the police notify residents when a particularly dangerous individual is being released into a neighbourhood — that is, one who would prey on random children. Absent some way to rehabilitate these offenders, this strikes me as the best approach. Jim Stephenson, one of the most reasonable victims' rights advocates you're ever going to come across, is of like mind:
"I think the only people who should access to the registry are the police," Stephenson said. "I don't think that the public should have access to it."
He said police should keep the right to warn the public, in extreme cases. However, he said an online registry could make otherwise law-abiding people violent.
"I think you'd just get too emotional with it, and do something that you'd regret, and you'd have to stand before a judge with a charge," Stephenson said.
I think it's more basic than that, though. The vast majority of people on these registries aren't dangerous, and the vast majority of people who search them online are only doing so to satisfy their own morbid curiosities. At least five Canadians have forwarded me a link in recent months to a website that gives Americans a graphical representation of where the nasties live in their neighbourhoods. I don't begrudge someone getting a sick laugh out of it, but the provision of sick laughs is not part of the justice system's mandate. We should either give the public access to a registry of all dangerous people, or we should trust the police to do their job.
[UPDATE April 24: Marshall knocked on four other registered sex offenders' doors on the day in question and found no one home. Hearings tomorrow in the Maine state legislature on the topic of whether they might have a teensy problem on their hands.]
[UPDATE not much later: "Firehead", one of the blokes who sent me the link, objects to my not begrudging him his sick laughs:
And it's not even the judgment that irks me. It's the "I don't begrudge" part of the whole thing. The whole paragraph, from "morbid curiosities" to "sick laugh" is filled with begrudgement, as I'm sure he would begrudgingly agree.
Yeah, well put, and I can't really argue with that. But I have morbid curiosities and a sick sense of humour too. I wasn't trying to claim otherwise.]
Posted by Chris Selley at 04:23 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
April 19, 2006
Cyberstupid
Stephen Harper on raising the age of consent:
It is long overdue and it is particularly important in the age of the Internet where young people are increasingly targeted by cyber-predators.
Man, I knew it had to be the internet's fault somehow. Look, I'm not against raising the age of consent (though I do think it solves a pretty much non-existent problem) but it has nothing to do with cyborg predators or whatever it is Harper's on about. You can't have sexual relations with an underage partner over the internet, and it's already illegal to "lure" anyone under 18 by way of the information superhighway with the intent to commit anything more nefarious than the consumption of coffee. (Luring by telephone is totally fine under Section 172 of the Criminal Code, just FYI.)
None of it makes any sense, but I suppose raising the age of consent to 16 is a small step in the right direction. Now there will only be two years in a young woman's life, instead of four, where an adult can have sex with her as long as he doesn't arrange the liaison by computer or take pictures of it. Let us all bathe in the healing light of sanity.
Posted by Chris Selley at 11:26 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
April 18, 2006
He knows what he hates
Bryan McCabe finished the season with 19 goals. In the dying seconds of the Leafs' win over the Pens tonight he took two shots at number 20 from behind his own goal line, on an empty net, both resulting in icing calls. After the second attempt, TSN's camera zoomed way in on Pat Quinn.
Quoth the dinosaur: "For fuck's sake."
As much as he's gotta be fired, I do like the guy.
(Cross-posted to the Battle of Ontario.)
Posted by Chris Selley at 10:55 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
Your evening frown
The Times' Richard Morrison offers talented jobhunters this special demotivational plaque:
We like to kid ourselves that 21st-century Britain is a meritocracy, a society that rewards talent and hard work. In fact we have merely replaced one sort of dim aristocracy with another. What we have created now is a ruling class of braggarts and bluffers — expert at playing the system, shamelessly claiming the credit, and proclaiming “This is What I Do”, but useless at getting the job done.
Crushingly true, but beautifully put.
Posted by Chris Selley at 09:56 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
The bridges she burns light her way
I got a rather odd e-mail this morning on the subject of Krisztina Gál, the Hungarian woman who essentially sicced immigration on herself by turning in a potential sex offender. It read as follows:
My wife and I here in the Vancouver area may be interested in sponsoring her to stay in Canada, including acquiring an education for her, our home, etc. We are in our 50's and have no children of our own, fairly affluent, it would be a tremendous gesture of humanity. How can this be made possible? I will contact Canada Immigration this week to see if this can move forward.
Well first of all I'm clearly the wrong guy to be e-mailing about this. I'm on record in support of deporting her — or rather, on record against granting someone citizenship simply because she decided to place herself in very minor peril (she risked banishment to the European Union) sooner than subject children to the risk of sexual assault.
These debates over what to do with decent, hardworking illegal immigrants inevitably beatify everyday acts of common decency, which is insulting to everyone. Indeed, the only other people on whom we shower condescending praise when they don't do the wrong thing are teenagers. What about all the other illegals in Canada who would do the same thing in the same situation but haven't had the chance? Why are they less worthy of instant citizenship? And what of those illegals who wouldn't do the right thing — our collective astonishment at Gál's selflessness suggests we think they are the majority. Shouldn't we be worried about such people roaming our streets? You simply can't rationalize these issues, because in the eyes of the law everything an illegal immigrant does is fruit of a poison tree.
And if that doesn't convince you, you should probably know that Gál wouldn't do the right thing if she had it to do over again (from the April 7 National Post, not online):
Now, the 31-year-old said she regrets helping police arrest the man, because he is free and she is being removed from the country.
"Yeah, I think I do. He's out. He spent, I don't know, a couple of months in jail and I have to go home because of him," she said. "If I had known this, I wouldn't have gone to the police. And I'm going to tell everybody I know not to go to the police, because this is what you get."
On Tuesday, she was told by immigration officials that her appeals had been rejected.
"It took 10 minutes," she said. "They said I have to go."
It's like Sonny Bono said about illegal immigration: "What's to talk about? It's illegal." And the punishment for it is deportation. No benevolent act committed on foreign soil can change the fact that the person who committed it shouldn't have been there in the first place, no matter how much treacle the newspapers try to feed us.
Posted by Chris Selley at 09:46 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
April 17, 2006
So fired
I have never agreed with Damien Cox more, nor do I ever expect to again, than when he wrote the following:
Let's be clear. Ferguson and Quinn didn't fix this team in the final three weeks of the season.
Injuries fixed it for them, essentially reversing their poor decisions.
…
Ferguson didn't believe it was sensible to buy out Ed Belfour last summer and create useful salary cap room, and Quinn blithely ignored the veteran goalie's obvious inability to carry the load of a No. 1 goalie until Belfour's season was ended by back problems.
These hockey men, understand, had younger, faster players at their disposal all season long, but instead preferred to go with an older, slower lineup featuring a broken-down goalie.
When there were personnel choices to be made, they made all the wrong ones.
Dead on. Mikael Tellqvist had his two worst games of the season against Montreal and didn't play again until tonight, which is fair enough — "stick with the hot hand" is a pretty unimpeachable strategy. If Pat Quinn had employed it throughout the season and played Tellqvist instead of Ed Belfour, the Leafs might well be getting ready for the first round of the playoffs right now. He has to go.
(Cross-posted to the Battle of Ontario.)
Posted by Chris Selley at 12:31 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
April 14, 2006
Everyone's a victim
Michele Mandel pretty much laid out the Toronto Sun's overarching editorial philosophy in yesterday's edition when she decided that because she was unable to maintain rationality in the face of a tearful victim impact statement, the $2 million payout to shooting victim Louise Russo was above reproach:
…she is the victim here. If she can live with the sentences they were given -- if they are enough to allow her to sleep at night -- then who are we to tell her otherwise?
Amazing. Look, I don't begrudge Russo in the slightest for taking the two million smackers — it would have been silly not to, especially since the sentences handed to those who crippled her seem if anything harsher than one would expect — but there are more people implicitly involved in this situation than just Russo and the convicted. These dickheads walked into a California Sandwiches location and sprayed the place with bullets in an effort to kill another dickhead who wasn't even there. You hear "it could have been anyone" a lot, but it's rarely as true as it is in this case. Fate frowned on Louis Russo on April 21, 2004, but it could just as easily have been any Torontonian with a taste for absolutely delicious Italian sandwiches.
Especially because the crime was so random, because all Torontonians were potential victims, the plea agreement should have been rejected on the basis that it inevitably encourages the perception that jail time can be offset by cash payment. The justice system isn't ever just about giving the victim what he or she wants, after all — it's about showing citizens that the right thing will be done. Other than in hopes of leniency, what possible other motivation was there for the perpetrators or their benefactors to offer this money in the context of a plea agreement? If they were truly overcome by guilt, they could have just cut Russo a cheque once the trial ran its course.
There is also the small matter of where this money came from, a rather crucial question that very few seem interested in asking. Defense lawyer Joseph Neuberger "did not say if any money involved came from criminal proceeds," the Toronto Star reported. Yikes — you'd think he might have some kind of plausible denial ready for the media. Surely it's common sense that the money came from crime. People such as those who shot up the California Sandwiches outlet don't normally have millions of virtuously begotten dollars lying about. No matter, says the Canadian Crime Victim Foundation :
[CCVF founder] Mr. [Joe] Wamback -- who noted that people convicted of manslaughter have occasionally received no jail time at all -- argued that the key to the agreement is that Ms. Russo will soon have a desperately needed financial cushion.
"We've talked to hundreds of thousands of victims and I haven't found one who wants the money; they need the money," said Mr. Wamback
…
[Lawyer] Mr. [Timothy] Danson agreed that it is irrelevant where the defendants find the money to pay restitution. In a different situation, he noted, there would be nothing to stop Ms. Russo suing and perhaps being awarded money that might have come from the proceeds of crime.
Which would be between Ms Russo and the thugs, as it should be. Like I said, it's not Russo taking the money that I have a problem with. Just as the justice system should be extremely concerned with the optics of this plea bargain, it should utterly refuse to broker the redistribution of ill-gotten money to crime victims. Each of those two million dollars has its own victim attached to it, after all, even if you can't pinpoint her identity or hear her tearful story.
(Cross-posted to the Shotgun.)
Posted by Chris Selley at 04:08 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
April 12, 2006
Miami sound machine
Every time Gary Roberts opens his mouth I like him less:
"I never thought I wouldn't stay a Maple Leaf," Roberts said yesterday before the 39-year-old forward hit the ice against the Leafs at the Air Canada Centre. "I believed up to the last minute that I would be, but unfortunately [Leafs GM] John [Ferguson Jr.] never gave me the opportunity.
Well he offered you a contract, Gary. Where I come from, that's called an opportunity. But the Injured One prattles on:
"He [Ferguson] played the `Gary'll-always-want- to-be-a-Maple-Leaf' card too long.
"By the time he decided to change his mind Florida had already offered me a two-year deal, so it was too late."
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the word "offer". Do those protein shakes kill brain cells?
I wouldn't have any hard feelings with Roberts if he'd just admit that he left for more dough and now regrets it. But instead he seems to want to outsource the blame for his Floridian ennui:
"You can't compare the environment in Florida and the environment in Toronto," he said. "I miss that part of walking into the Air Canada Centre, and you know it's game day.
"In Florida, it's not like that. I have a tough time getting in that rink unless I have ID. I get stopped at the door without my pass, and they are like, 'Who are you?' "
That must be nice for Panthers fans to read, eh? Two-and-a-quarter million for 13-or-so goals in 50-odd games from a 39-year-old, and the promise of two-and-a-quarter million more for the same from the 40-year-old version of the same player — and he's not even happy to be there.
(Cross-posted to Battle of Ontario.)
Posted by Chris Selley at 11:54 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Important clarification
Here's one for the "silly intellectual property issues" file:
The Heimlich manoeuvre is a registered service mark of the Heimlich Institute, which reserves all rights to its use.
The name, that is — not the manoeuvre itself. So please, if a friend or loved one is choking to death, go ahead and save his or her life. Just make sure you do it with an abdominal thrust, people. No point extricating that Mini Egg just to get your ass sued.
Posted by Chris Selley at 10:14 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
April 11, 2006
Seals are seafood, right?
What demonic spirit inhabits Paul Jackson's mortal frame?
Personally, I've been increasingly avoiding any meat from mammals, and turning to sea food.
I even find it unappetizing to eat duck -- for I find ducks to be beautiful little creatures.
Hunting for sport -- whether bears, moose or deer -- also increasingly disturbs me.
These animals don't stand a chance.
…
On bear hunting, a ridiculous argument is to say they are invading our land or threatening us.
In actuality, we are invading their land -- and always have.
To kill a bear simply because it attacked someone who wandered into its territory is also shameful.
Show thyself, fiend! Release our hard-hearted Republican-abroad brother! Let him have his duck!
Posted by Chris Selley at 09:43 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
Obnoxiousness perfected
How does one even begin to pick apart the story of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty marching through Rosedale, home of Toronto's oldest money?
Well, first of all, the name of the march: the We've Come to Collect Our Money Night March on Rosedale. Their money. Sorry, I have to stop for a minute. My calves are cramping.
There are two money quotes from the National Post's absolutely pitch-perfect article, written by one Zosia Bielski with equal parts unimpeachable detachment and unquantifiable dismissiveness. The first was this:
When asked if she knew whose lawn she was standing on, one OCAP spokesperson said she didn't.
"It's just random opulence," she said. OCAP founder John Clarke suspected it was not the home of "social justice activists."
And then they burned Dalton McGuinty in effigy in front of Gerry Schwartz's and Heather Reisman's, er, house. Doesn't sound very random to me.
The winner, though, came from a local shopkeep:
I don't care what the cause, people who target other individuals are wankers, total wankers. Sod them sideways with a screwdriver.
Exactly right, and God bless the Post for running with that quote. If OCAP actually wants to be the Ontario Coalition Against Wealth, then I suggest they rename themselves. Otherwise, I find myself tempted to suggest that their members get jobs.
Posted by Chris Selley at 12:22 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
April 10, 2006
Expo, exposed
I am somewhat in awe of Toronto's embryonic bid to host an Expo — it seems to be based on nothing but jealousy, sunshine and farts, and possibly a burning desire to kill the Island Airport once and for all. "We really believe it is Ontario's turn and it is Toronto's turn," says councilor and bid chairman Brian Ashton, with the unmistakable air of a seven-year-old demanding to ride another seven-year-old's Big Wheel. It's just sloganeering, but still — it's a rather petulant thing to say, and I think a little insulting to the Montreal and Vancouver events.
Expo '86 started with a reasonably concrete vision of an exhibition about transport and eventually gained the status of a World's Fair. It also coincided with Vancouver's centennial. Expo '67 was, of course, Canada's centennial. Toronto's bid thus far has little but chutzpah going for it. I mean, holy hell, we need a world's fair to find out "How can we improve urban transit?" Howard Moscoe will tell you: just throw a billion dollars at shiny new streetcars. Like, duh.
It should also be pointed out that Expos '67 and '86 were "International Registered Exhibitions", while what Toronto is vying for is in every respect a lesser event, known in the halls of the Bureau International des Expositions as, er, an "International Recognized Exhibition". I'm serious — you can look it up. So, there's strike one for Expo aught-15 in Toronto: it's confusing; nobody really knows what it is, including the bid committee:
The theme is that of the future of the city. An (sic) realistic look at what innovations can be made to help enhance the quality of life of urban space around the world. We would look at how various nations around the world are dealing with the intensification of populations, and the wonderful possibilities that exist.
Pfft.
A World's Fair has traditionally been seen as a way for a city to audition for other major events, and indeed both of Canada's have led to successful Olympic bids (one far more directly and expeditiously than the other). This hope is a big part of Toronto's bid, but as much as I think the Olympics are a worthy goal, Expos are so hackneyed, so universally associated with monorails and useless geodesic domes, that I doubt they have any modern relevance in this regard.
Surely the IOC doesn't doubt that Toronto could manage the logistics of an Olympic Games as well or better than Atlanta or Athens. It might, however, doubt Toronto's follow-through. Consider: the next time Toronto bids it will no doubt present the IOC with a plan that includes a sparkling new waterfront, one that sparkles in pretty much the same way as the ones proposed in the two previous unsuccessful bids. IOC members could be forgiven, I think, if they wondered why this fabulously wealthy metropolis refuses to boldly renew itself unless and until it is awarded a giant international event of some kind.
Toronto's inferiority complex may be a tired subject, but it's real nonetheless. Indeed, it's difficult to ascribe the city's passion for the Olympics to anything else. In domestic matters, after all, we aren't much for bold gestures — we'd rather spend 50 extra minutes a day on a bus than fund a new subway line. We'd rather eat dirt than have our tax dollars fund a new opera house. All of which is fine with me. It's actually one of the things I find genuinely ingratiating about this city, for all its weak politicians, gun violence, ubiquitous rough-sleeping panhandlers, filthy streets and public transit vehicles, and the giant deinstitutionalized mental hospital that is Parkdale, where I'm currently living.
Generally speaking, if you want to do something grand in this town, pony up. Government chips in — this is still Canada, after all — but taxpayer-funded megaprojects are so out of fashion that no one even suggests them anymore. In the case of public transit and waterfront renewal I believe this mentality is to our detriment, but hey — we're a rich, relatively safe city that's difficult to get around in, and we seem to be happy enough with that… until it's time to bid on the Olympics, at which point we seem ready to commit to building the Eiffel Tower, the Gateway Arch, Camden Yards and Queen, Eglinton and extended Sheppard subways in a ten-year spree. Whom are we trying to impress? Why don't we just go ahead and do what we want to do for our own sake?
Anyone?
Posted by Chris Selley at 11:45 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
April 06, 2006
Exclusion zones
We heard a fair bit about multiculturalism during the Muslim riots in France. This, said multiculturalism's opponents, was yet further proof that the system doesn't work. But of course the French have no conception of multiculturalism that's anything like Canada's. A Frenchman is a Frenchman, officially — his Frenchness supersedes all his other identities — even if reality tells a very different story.
So it seemed to me that the riots weren't a result of multiculturalism, but (if any one thing) of the abandonment of the alternative principle — assimilation, basically — that was theoretically in place. Perhaps that's an impracticable way to run a country full of immigrants (or certain immigrants), in which case France dropped the ball by not addressing that disconnect before the Citroens and Peugeots and carpet warehouses started burning. It's always dangerous for a country to stop aggressively pursuing the articles of its mission statement and repose on its idealized overall success.
This brings us to Ottawa, where Jean Chrétien's and Paul Martin's social and foreign policies borrowed heavily against Pearsonian and Trudeaupian ideals (or myths, depending on your viewpoint). If we claim to embrace multiculturalism but can't quite define it, which seems to be our situation, then we won't quite know if and when multiculturalism has gone wrong. Angry Muslims have a tendency towards rioting; ditto angry French people. So the Parisian suburbs present something of a perfect storm, while as a general rule Canadians both new and old disapprove of violence. But as long as there are vast groups of poor, undereducated, hope-deprived Canadians, things have the potential to go just as wrong here as they have in France. If you count the Native population we're already losing — Kashechewan would make Clichy-sous-Bois run up a tree. We shouldn't be happy with our lack of burned-out automobiles if our poorest communities still aren't on an upward trajectory. It isn't enough that they be non-violent, surely.
What got me to thinking about all this, somehow or other, was Barbara Kay's (free to read) column in last Wednesday's National Post, in which she argued for public schools to be free from hijabs, kirpans, ostentatious crucifixes, skull caps, and so on — this is, rather famously, the French model. Head coverings in particular, Kay argues, allow parents' religious ideas about modesty (at best) or outright subjugation (at worst) into a place, the classroom, that is supposed to reflect and instill "Canadian values":
Apartness can be values-neutral: Earlocks and long black coats are merely a curiosity to non-Jews; a kirpan and turban are just exotic paraphernalia to non-Sikhs; a traditional nun's wimple -- nuns are women "of cover" in their way -- represents a devotional calling freely undertaken by autonomous adult women.
Cover for underage girls, on the other hand, sends a negative message, as it runs counter to the Canadian value of gender equality. For the student's hijab does not represent her personal devotional relationship to God (otherwise she would wear it at home too, like the cross, yarmulke and turban), but is in reality the public stamp of her chattel relationship to fathers and brothers.
It's an attractive argument, but for a few things. Public schools in Canada are not federally controlled — they are administered from places as diverse as St John's, Toronto, Quebec City and Regina. This is not just a practical point. It means that the system (inasmuch as it's a single system at all) is very unsuited to promoting any "Canadian value," even if one could be positively identified. What would it accomplish for Manitoba or New Brunswick to ban head coverings in its public schools except to highlight Canada's regional differences, to underscore yet again that as much as we want to promote pan-Canadian values, they may not even exist?
I have a teacher friend whose school saw necessary to mandate that female students' shirts be in direct contact with their pants at all times. This dress code, if you want to call it that, stemmed from the fact that some parents feel comfortable with their children walking around with their bellies hanging out, while school administrators think it's... well, what? Inappropriate? Immodest? I doubt those adjectives are very helpful in this day and age. The word, I think, is "distracting": kids shouldn't be allowed to be a distraction to other kids' learning, and I think practically speaking it's probably only there that schools should bother trying to stipulate what students can and cannot wear to class.
Kay addresses this, but comes to the opposite conclusion:
School is a place where children need to learn an enormous amount in a compressed timeframe in company with randomly assigned teammates. As in the sealed environment of the armed forces, where otherwise unlikely friendships crossing racial, socio-economic and social lines can be nurtured, group bonding at school is best accelerated and reinforced by as much external sameness as possible.
The thing is, a headscarf wouldn't be distracting in the slightest in a downtown Toronto middle school. It might turn a few heads in rural Alberta, but that's nothing a three-minute presentation entitled "Why I wear this thing" couldn't clear up. Public schools should prepare children for real life, and real life presents us with people who wear headscarfs, skullcaps and crucifixes. Clearly these things are compatible with Canadian values, else we'd have some policy to discourage people wearing them instead of a policy of "respecting [every last one of] our differences" — so absent some quantifiable problem with religious paraphernalia in public schools, I just don't see a reason to lose sleep over it.
Loosely on the topic of exterior sameness, the Toronto Star's Royson James recently described a 64-point plan for addressing the problems plaguing black youth in Toronto. To me, some sounded like they originated in an alternate universe:
• Set up a black "surrogate father" or "big brother" program to provide father figures for black kids with absent fathers.
• Develop and maintain a black speakers' bureau of top speakers available to schools and organizations, and to provide expert comment to the media, governments and organizations.
• Encourage school boards to hire and promote more black teachers.
I think you could forgive a foreign reader if he concluded, based on that article, that Toronto had a segregated school system. It's certainly valuable to expose children to successful people who come from their background, but background is the key, not skin colour. Whom would you rather plunk down in front of a bunch of wayward white youth in hopes of setting them straight — Galen Weston, or Gizmo Williams? I think you'd have to go with the Giz, right? Similarly, I suspect George Chuvalo would have the black kids beating down the job centre doors long before Barry Bonds would.
Of course, if I was organizing this event I'd allow black kids, white kids, and any-other-coloured kids to be inspired together in the same auditorium. The job interviews we want formerly wayward black youth to land might be conducted by white managers; the speeding tickets they will receive driving the cars we don't want them to steal might be doled out by police officers of Asian extraction. In order to convince a young person to tough it out in school and get a job and not join a gang, you first need to convince him that success is possible, that there is nothing about his name, skin colour or background that will prevent him from landing a job or a promotion, or from just generally getting along in polite society.
Trying to make his school, his neighbourhood and his sources of motivation less diverse, which the ideas in James' article seem to propose, might very well do the opposite. Flooding the zone with successful black-skinned people might reinforce the idea that race really is the issue here — that black people born in Toronto not only have racism standing in their way, but possibly some kind of genetic predilection to unemployment and gang membership and early, violent death that the government is frantically trying to mitigate. Even if that were true it would do no good to call attention to it.
There are two "cultures" in Canada that matter, I think: people who expect great things of their children and people who don't. Children from the former group whose parents lack the means to facilitate this achievement are relatively easy to reach. Reduce crime (and thereby the appeal of a criminal lifestyle) and increase opportunities, and the chances of their aspirations going astray will naturally diminish.
Children from the latter group are the tougher nuts to crack, as public school teachers aren't supposed to be surrogate parents. But anyone lucky enough to have had a truly great teacher knows the tremendous impact such people can have. So instead of focusing on hiring and promoting more black teachers, wouldn't it make more sense to induce extraordinary (and extraordinarily motivated) teachers of all skin colours and backgrounds to take positions in Canada's most at-risk neighbourhoods? I have no idea what you'd have to offer to get someone to leave a top private school, say, for a life of vastly increased risk, stress and hours. 100 grand? 150?
Whatever it costs, I can hardly think of a better way to spend taxpayer money. Schools could become the gravitational constants in these neighbourhoods, keeping successful alumni of all stripes within their communities — whether they be plumbers, executives, athletes, small business owners, teachers, homemakers or whatever — and creating those expectations where parents haven't. They could normalize success, in other words, which is exactly what these young people need.
For all its faults, Canada's obsession with affirmative action policies and diversity targets has demonstrated one crucially important thing: no Canadian is poor, undereducated, or unemployed because of his skin colour, country of origin or religious beliefs. What's more, the most disadvantaged minority groups in this country (again with the sad exception of the Natives) have no grand historical grievance weighing down their discontent — no slavery, no Algeria.
So I see little evidence that Canadians are excluded from mainstream society for any reasons more sinister than social and economic shortcomings and inertia, but the fact that we aren't on the road to Rouen is no reason to kick back and celebrate. It is reason to steel our resolve. The war on poverty and hopelessness is like a giant boulder at the top of a hill. Politicians have been kicking at it for decades with little effect, but what it needs is one giant push towards the precipice. If any country can make it happen it's Canada, and the place to gain leverage is in the schools — hijabs, kirpans, skullcaps and all. The most important Canadian value we need to instill, and one that's clearly lacking in Canada's most troubled neighbourhoods, is that success is there for the taking.
Posted by Chris Selley at 11:19 PM | Comments (28) | TrackBack
April 04, 2006
Cheap
I'm on record against freaking out about the latest TTC fare hike, so maybe this is a little hypocritical, but here goes: It's a real prick move to ask me (and everyone else, of course) to deposit an extra ten freaking cents in the farebox along with my (second-last) "old ticket", on just the fourth day of the new fare structure. It discriminates against non-subway users, for one thing, since tokens aren't subject to the same surcharge. Would a week's grace have been too much to ask for? Will the money the TTC takes in from all those extra dimes offset the cost of printing signs that detail the policy?
Posted by Chris Selley at 11:31 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Enthusiastic, team focused, customer service oriented, 'can do' attitude…
FADE IN:
INT. TIM HORTON'S, METRO HALL FOOD COURT, TORONTO
ME: Soup-and-bagel combo, please.
SERVER: What kind of soup?
ME: I'll have the chili.
SERVER: Chili's not soup.
FADE OUT
(Cross-posted to the Shotgun.)
Posted by Chris Selley at 10:05 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
He just doesn't stop
"All in Good Time" is the new Ron Sexsmith single. I freakin' love it. His show at Massey Hall on Saturday night, for which I've had shit-hot tickets for something like a year now, now features Kathleen Edwards opening. So... yeah. Go Ron.
Posted by Chris Selley at 12:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 03, 2006
Apropos of pretty much nothing...
Few things are quite as infuriating as the sight of people blocking an intersection who, faced with a fusillade of horn blasts, throw up their hands and make wounded doe eyes at the aggrieved motorists. "What was I supposed to do?" they mean to ask. "For the sweet love of Christ, how was I supposed to know?"
I honestly wonder how these people function in society. If you enter an intersection that you can't clear immediately, then there's a possibility that you won't be able to clear it before the light changes. If Task A is dependent on Condition B, and failing to complete Task A will make others very unhappy, then do not attempt Task A without knowing that Condition B has been satisfied. That's the sort of thought process we try to instill in children at a time in their lives when they still occasionally shit themselves, yet somehow one can rise to the status of BMW owner without figuring it out.
To Lawrence Cannon, our Minister of Transport, who thinks there's "much more we need to do to understand" gridlock, I say this: until we begin addressing the drop-dead obvious ways to ameliorate it, please refrain from commissioning any studies or focus groups. To the Metro Toronto Police: please, I beg of you, crack down on people blocking intersections. You'll rake in cash for your bosses, you'll make traffic move better, and you'll get to hear all manner of hilarious entreaties that it's simply impossible to predict at one side of an intersection what's going to happen at the other.
Posted by Chris Selley at 09:47 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
April 02, 2006
Freaky deaky Siddiqui
Haroon Siddiqui, completely off the deep end:
Combined with our increasingly Americanized combat role in Afghanistan, we are abandoning Canada's traditional neutrality and recasting ourselves in a partisan role — in the service of the Bush administration.
Canada has no tradition of neutrality, full stop, and I wouldn't want to live anywhere that aspired to one.
And I wonder what an "increasingly Americanized combat role" is, exactly. Our role has become increasingly combat-oriented, that's true, but… oh wait, maybe I get it. Americans are warmongers. Ergo, when one undertakes combat where one hadn't before, one has "Americanized" one's role (unless, I suppose, one managed to find oneself fighting against the Americans).
Posted by Chris Selley at 05:27 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Though shalt not pass
Andrew Coyne on the Americans soon requiring passports of all who wish to enter:
What are we going to do?
The options are unappetizing. Passports are cumbersome to obtain and bulky to carry. Anyone who has sat through the lineup in their local passport office can imagine the chaos if suddenly they were joined by millions of would-be day trippers.
Yet what is the alternative? A national ID card? Think of the expense -- from the people who brought you the gun registry -- not to say the privacy concerns. A souped-up driver's licence or health card, using the latest biometric and other security measures? How? Reissue everyone with new ones? Or stamp a chip into the one you have now?
I'll tell you what we should do: everything possible to try to convince the Americans to back off, but failing that, not much. There's no point designing a new form of identification when we have perfectly good passports that cost all of $87. I suppose they're "bulkier to carry" than a driver's license, but in the grand scheme of things they're both pretty non-bulky. Canadians who do business in the US either own them already or they will shortly — they're not going to shut down operations sooner than drop 90 bones. And if Canadian tourists refuse to shell out, well, that's good news for the Canadian tourism industry, isn't it?
The kind of American who wouldn't dream of dropping $97 on a passport is the kind of American who wouldn't even know that this new requirement was in place. Lots of people enter the US from Canada without being asked for any identification whatsoever — I'd say I'm only asked about a third of the time, and I don't look all that respectable — and I've not heard that this new "requirement" for passports will mean that all southbound border-crossers will be asked to produce one every single time. There's certainly no reason Canada has to demand passports from northbound crossers, even officially.
Americans heading south without their passports will eventually, of course, get home. They're not just going to ship them all off to Guantanamo. And if enough of them insist on showing up armed only with their driver's licenses, while in the meantime Canadians have armed themselves with passports, then it's the Americans who are going to have the biggest logistical problem on their hands. Coyne is quite right about the burden this is going to put on the already glacial passport office, but that can be addressed by adding more staff. One way or the other, it's not the big deal some are making it out to be.
Posted by Chris Selley at 12:44 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack