The_Chieftain
Published on 8 Jun 2019Canadian Forces Base Borden is located about an hour’s drive North of Toronto. The base is open access, so anyone can go to the museum.
In addition to the vehicles at the museum, there are others scattered as monuments around the base. I encountered a T-72 and T-55 on my way out the gate.
During the last Ontario election, it was common to disparage Doug Ford as being “Trump-like”, and now that he’s the Premier, it turns out to be true in at least one aspect: Ford does have a Trump-like ability to induce a form of hysteria in his opponents. Ford’s crusade to liberalize Ontario’s alcohol market is a case in point. In the Toronto Star, all the old arguments against liberalization — usually portraying Alberta’s long-since liberalized market as a dystopian hell-hole of alcohol-shattered lives — are being dragged out again:
The key is that the Ford team doesn’t actually care about wine that will be sold in corner stores and more supermarkets. It’s a sop to tourists, which seems reasonable.
No, it cares about beer because beer is a social marker, a shorthand. Wine is considered urban but buck-a-beer is rural/semi-urban. Men drink it. Men with beerbellies drink it. To a government mysteriously seeking a vote that it already has, drinking beer is a signal that a man is a regular guy. But Ford is not a regular guy. He doesn’t drink. He’s not anxious. He’s not renting.
It is very much a problem that any government in power would believe this of the regular guy vote. Alcohol causes hospitalization, crime and early death. It destroys families and jobs, and eventually its victims drink to block out what they lost by drinking.
[…]
They may not know it, they may be doing it instinctively, but it is still madness. Alcoholics are costly to treat and they suffer terribly. Courting their vote comes courtesy of a report by a former health minister in Alberta where booze is sold in private liquor stores.
The problem, as Albertans know, is you’re too afraid to buy it. These stores are often shabby places that are magnets for violence. Watch out, Premier Ford, it’s Ontario and there’s going to be NIMBY.
I am aware that I’m writing like a preacher. Preach on, sister. Anyone over 30 learns to distinguish between people who drink for pleasure and those who cannot cope with it. We are horrified. We offer help.
Back in 2013, Colby Cosh neatly summarized the Ontario neo-prohibitionist rhetoric:
Albertans find it instructive to watch Ontario politicians debate the privatization of liquor retailing, which Klein’s cabinet bulldog, Dr. Stephen West, executed almost overnight in 1993. It was perhaps the representative policy move of the Klein era, the best symbol of his approach to government. Today one will hear Ontarians telling themselves the most bizarre things about Alberta in order to support the idiot belief that booze is a natural monopoly. “You can’t even get red wine there! All they have in the stores is various flavours of corn mash and antifreeze! The streets resound with the white canes of the blinded!” Talk to the saner residents and you rapidly discover the real root of Ontarians’ positive feeling for the LCBO, which is esthetic. It’s just nicer to buy a handle of Maker’s Mark from someone who makes a union wage and has a vague halo of officialdom. You leave the shop feeling okay about your vice.
Klein was liked by Albertans, not because of some mythic popular touch, but because there wasn’t an ounce of tolerance for this sort of thing in him. Alcohol was something he understood very well. (Too well.) People do not need liquor to be flogged to them any harder than the manufacturers already do; put a man in prison and he will make the stuff in the toilet starting on day two. What the old ALCB was really marketing to the public, and what the LCBO markets now, was itself — its own role as social protector/moral approver/tastemaker. Klein identified that part of the system as a parasitic growth, a vestige with no function but its own preservation; and he had West ectomize it with the swiftness of a medieval barber.
Being a tenured university professor is generally a well-paid job, even in Canada. But thanks to an unintended interaction between pension legislation and retirement policies, older tenured professors are required to draw their pensions (which are pretty damned good by themselves) and their salaries from the university, which boosts many of them well into the quarter-million a year range:
University College, University of Toronto, 31 July, 2008.
Photo by “SurlyDuff” via Wikimedia Commons.
Ontario is a weird place sometimes. One month ago, the government announced that it was implementing a performance-based funding plan which – if you took the government’s half-thought-out comments seriously – raised the possibility that hundreds of millions or perhaps even billions of dollars currently projected to be spent on institutions might be snatched away if institutions failed to hit some ill-defined targets in a type of contract-based funding system. You’d think this would be a big deal, something people would want to talk about and discuss.
But no. Somehow, this is not what is currently obsessing the Ontario university sector. Instead, apparently, we need to talk about how it’s a human rights violation for professors to be asked to enjoy their retirement on a six-figure annual pension.
Crazy? Well, yes. Here’s the deal. Time used to be that universities could tell professors to retire at age 65 or 67 or whenever. Over the course of the 2000s, provinces gradually got rid of mandatory retirement; in Ontario this occurred in 2006, when the provincial government amended the Human Rights Code to that effect. It should have surprised absolutely no one that more and more full professors, who towards the end of their career routinely make over $180,000 per year, decided to delay retirement not just past 65 but pretty much forever. In 2011, only 6.7% of professors were over 65 and 0.9% 70 or over. Just five years later in 2016, that was up to 10.2% and 3.3% respectively. At the time, I estimated that the compensation costs for the over-65s amounted to $1.3 billion, or enough to hire about 10,000 new junior faculty. The share of that going to the 70-pluses would amount to a little north of $400 million.
But here’s the thing: federal pension legislation requires individuals to start drawing down their pensions at age 71. You can’t opt-out. And so as a result you get individuals who are in what Carleton University economist Frances Woolley recently called the “quarter-million dollar club” (do read Frances’ piece – everything she does on higher education is excellent, but she is extra-excellent on this one). Even if you understand the legislative path that led us here, you probably – rightly – think this is an outrageous sum, particularly in light of the fact that research productivity tends to decline over time and teaching loads among full professors are not all that onerous.
On the other side of the pond, a recent tribunal ruling at Oxford’s St. John’s College points in a very different direction:
Oxford and Cambridge universities can force old professors to retire in order to boost diversity, a tribunal ruling suggests.
Prof John Pitcher, a leading Shakespeare scholar and fellow at St John’s College at Oxford, claimed that he had been unfairly pushed out at age 67 to make way for younger and more ethnically diverse academics.
He sued the College and university for age discrimination and unfair dismissal, claiming loss of earnings of £100,000 – but Judge Bedeau dismissed both claims.
The Ontario government created a tightly restricted retail market regime for newly legal cannabis sellers, with a tiny number of licenses issued and highly bureaucratic “safeguards” for the retailers’ guidance and control. The city of Toronto, for example, with a population in the 2.7 million range, was allocated a whopping five stores. Only one of those stores was allowed to open on the first day of legal retail sales, and today there are three in operation, despite penalties and potential loss of licenses at stake for those who haven’t opened yet. The chorus of complaints from would-be customers has not diminished much, if at all since day one:
With legalization day long come and gone (and the euphoria of being able to spark a joint in public gone with it), the turtle-paced roll-out of Toronto’s weed retail scene goes to show the government and the OCS have some work to do before purchasing legal weed can be completely glitch-free (and lineup free, too).
Here are a few of the lows of getting high, courtesy of Toronto weed stores since buying pot became legal.
Weed prices are up
According to Statistics Canada, prices for weed have steadily been on the up and up since legalization last year.While Nova Cannabis is trying to tackle its biggest competitor (illicit weed stores) with Black Market Buster deals, people who are buying their cannabis from the OCS are now paying an average of about $9.99 per gram—that’s roughly $3 more than those buying their bud from illegal stores.
Black market weed is still thriving
There’s still around 20 illegal dispensaries operating in the city, and at least 100 illegal marijuana delivery services. Why? See above: unlicensed weed stores are significantly cheaper than the legal ones, and loopholes in the city’s laws allow them to operate pretty much undisturbed, save for the occasional raids.[…]
OCS packaging
Aside from the fact every product coming out of the OCS comes triple-wrapped in excessive, sometimes non-recyclable polypropylene packaging, the containers are just plain confusing.Lack of packaging standards means your order comes in all shapes and sizes, regardless of whether you’re getting bud or pre-rolled joints, which is as confusing for buyers as it is for those behind the counter.
And that doesn’t even include the even louder chorus of complaints about the quality of the legal product…
In a rational world, a license to sell legal cannabis from a storefront where you have almost a legal monopoly would be a license to print money — the market demand is very clearly real and widespread. Yet Toronto’s legal cannabis stores are still suffering:
How much would it suck to go through all the trouble of opening a legal weed store, only to have dozens of people do the exact same thing without paying for permits, inspections or meeting any sort of government regulations?
How much would it suck to then watch these people not only get away with their illegal operations, but do so while luring your customers away with cheaper prices?
Probably as much as it would suck to sink years of your life into building a retail cannabis business and then learning that only 25 of such stores could exist in all of Ontario — and that the owners of those stores would be chosen at random.
It’s been nearly one month since Doug Ford’s PC government allowed the first wave of brick and mortar retail cannabis stores to open across Ontario. Three have launched so far in Toronto, where five licenses were issued in total, but many consumers aren’t pleased with consistently long lines and higher (than pre-legalization) prices.
So, like the rest of Canada, Toronto continues to buy black market weed.
Roughly 20 unlicensed dispensary storefronts are still up and running across the city as of April 25, in addition to more than 100 illegal marijuana delivery services.
You can find them all on WeedMaps, a popular online cannabis community that’s been listing these types of businesses for adult consumers in North America since 2008.
It’s not that police and bylaw enforcement officers can’t find these illicit dispensaries — I mean, operators are advertising their locations and menus online for all to see.
The problem is that no level of government can (or will) shut them down for very long.
“Why not?” you ask? Well, it’s complicated.
Chris Selley documents just how Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s opponents are unable to ignore the (personally teetotal) Ford’s alcohol-related proposals:
A peculiar affliction has broken out among Ontarians who think their relatively new government is devoting far too much time and attention to liberalizing alcohol laws: They can’t stop talking about it.
I don’t mean people with entirely fair public health concerns (though I think those concerns are pretty marginal, given the modest changes). And I don’t mean the pearl-clutching hordes who think allowing alcohol consumption in parks will lead to mayhem, no matter how civilized the results might demonstrably be elsewhere. (That peculiarly Ontarian crew has certainly made itself heard, though, and it seems to include a surprising number of progressive millennials.)
I mean people who didn’t have particularly strong views one way or the other about 9 a.m. mimosas, tailgate parties, drinking in parks or buying beer at the corner store, or might even have supported some legislative relaxation, but who now can’t stop railing against them even as they deplore the government’s actions on objectively more serious files.
[…]
On letters and op-ed pages, you’ll find the topic of booze popping up in all sorts of places it objectively doesn’t belong — not if one doesn’t want to be distracted, anyway. It seems to lead people down all sorts of strange blind alleys. One Toronto Star columnist noted that neither Premier Doug Ford nor Finance Minister Vic Fedeli will “touch a drop themselves,” but that “they are making it easier for you to access just in time for breakfast, happy hour, or a nightcap.” So what? Why would anyone want the premier’s or finance minister’s personal tastes and preferences influencing public policy?
Another Star columnist spent seven paragraphs sneering at the idea of tailgating in Ontario before declaring herself perfectly fine with the idea. “But,” she asked, “is tailgating what Ontario needs?” Is that the standard, then? Government shall only allow the masses such entertainments as they “need”?
Using booze as a “distraction” is not a new tactic. It became a running joke during Kathleen Wynne’s tenure that whenever things were going (especially) badly for her government, she would pop up to announce another batch of supermarkets authorized to sell beer and cider (and sometimes, though much more rarely, wine!).
Chris Selley finds himself surprised at how sane Doug Ford’s GTA subway-and-light-rail expansion plans sound:
Click map to embiggenate
I’ll say this much at least about Premier Doug Ford’s big $28.5 billion transit announcement on Wednesday morning ($11.2 billion if you only count provincial money): I never thought I would see him so enthusiastically tout a much-needed transit line to and through enemy territory in downtown Toronto. Faint praise, perhaps, but when Ford said he wanted to upload Toronto’s subways to the province, I never imagined a plan even half this superficially sane.
Crowding on the Yonge line at Bloor Street presents “a clear health and safety problem,” Ford told reporters in Etobicoke, “and without action it is only going to get worse.” Thus his number-one transit priority is the same as everyone else’s: the Downtown Relief Line, which the PC government has wisely redubbed the Ontario Line.
The most basic and essential piece of that line, which Toronto city staff are already working on, would connect City Hall with Pape station on Danforth. Passengers who live in the east end and work downtown could thus avoid the bottleneck at Yonge and Bloor, relieving the alarming rush hour situation on platforms there and — assuming new TTC signalling technology works as promised — freeing up southbound capacity for folks from York Region: Ford vows to extend the Yonge line to Richmond Hill (cost: $5.6 billion).
The order here matters more than the timeline (2027, supposedly). It is undisputed that the DRL has to happen before the extension. That’s basic knowledge. But Ford is capable of ignoring or fouling up very basic knowledge when stumping for subways. This is a man who nearly promised Pickering one. On Wednesday, he sounded remarkably well briefed.
Ford’s Ontario Line wouldn’t stop at Danforth and City Hall, either. In the east it would head north across the Don Valley, through Thorncliffe Park and up to Eglinton. This idea is nearly as old as the DRL itself. And it would jog southwest from downtown to Ontario Place — a novelty, but again, not crazy. Total cost for the line: an at least semi-plausible $11.2 billion.
Doug Ford has always been a fan of subways, but now that he’s the Premier of Ontario, he’s getting to indulge his subway fetish in a vast expansion to heavy and light rail transit in and around Toronto:
Click map to embiggenate
The plans include:
To accomplish all of this will require financial contributions from the City of Toronto, York Region, and the federal government, as the province is only funding just over one third ($11.2 billion) of the estimated $28 billion price tag.
Of course, it’s a Doug Ford plan, so none of the usual suspects in Toronto are happy about any of it.
The zeitgeist, of course, has also changed since 2002. Childhood obesity and screen addiction are now perceived as urgent matters of public health. A politician who wants those damn kids off his lawn is likely to be told “You’re a monster who is spreading diabetes and ruin, and, frankly, it’s amazing that there are kids on your lawn in 2017 and we would like to know how you accomplished this.”
Colby Cosh, “Hamilton finally ends its decades-old ban on street hockey, and it won’t actually change a thing”, National Post, 2017-03-06.
There’s that word: “investments.” That’s what Canadians — Ontarians and Quebecers, certainly — have been trained to expect in these situations: An elaborate mating dance culminating in a greasy press conference where corporate leaders hail bold new provincial and federal “investments” in the company and its workers and its world-beating widgets. Critics are assailed as uncaring and testily reminded that every jurisdiction subsidizes the widget industry.
Traditionally, this is later followed by outrage when it emerges the company has used taxpayers’ bold investment to pay out lavish bonuses or dividends. In the fullest version of the performance, the company just pulls up stakes and leaves town anyway — sometimes having fulfilled its stated obligations, sometimes not, but always leaving behind a bad taste and a per-employee subsidy rate that makes no sense in hindsight.
If the company is Bombardier, it might extract lavish subsidies from government for an airplane project on the theory the Canada needs an aerospace industry, then turn around and sell the project to a foreign competitor for basically nothing.
Chris Selley, “A reminder that governments don’t ‘invest’ in businesses. It’s just corporate welfare”, National Post, 2018-11-28.
I suspect a lot of the uproar is actually just target-of-opportunity stuff to justify criticism of Ontario premier Doug Ford. Chris Selley points out that until the announcement, there wasn’t actually a lot of support for the new university among French-speaking Ontarians:
You would never know it since Thursday, when the Ontario government cancelled plans to open a new French-language university in Toronto, but those plans were not universally beloved. A lot of people hated the location. In an op-ed in Le Droit, University of Ottawa political scientist François Charbonneau complained it was being built to serve future francophone immigrants, not proper Franco-Ontarians in a community where they’ve been established for generations.
He called it “a historic mistake that perfectly illustrates what it means to be a minority: to have no power over one’s own destiny and to be dependent on ideological rantings with no democratic legitimacy.”
Higher-education consultant Alex Usher was among many who dismissed enrollment projections for the university as “fantasy.” Writing on the Higher Education Strategies blog, Usher called a recent survey of francophone Ontario high school students the “worst piece of social science I have ever seen.” It found lots of interest in attending the new university, but didn’t bother asking about their interest in existing bilingual alternatives like Laurentian University and the U of O.
To language hawks, bilingualism is the enemy: French always loses out in a budget crunch, and it does nothing to advance the right to live one’s life solely in French. Trouble is, very few students at French-language Ontario high schools are remotely interested in living their lives solely in French.
These are all things Premier Doug Ford and his ministers might have mentioned if they hoped to leave an impression other than that Ontario francophones just aren’t worth the money. They might wisely have chosen not to axe the French Language Commissioner in the same fiscal update, transferring its complaint-resolution powers to the ombudsman but orphaning its advocacy mandate. Finance minister Vic Fedeli hasn’t even said how much of its $1.2 million budget he hopes to recoup.
But they did what they did, all at once, and they said it was all about saving money. I suspect the whirlwind they reaped came as a surprise.
Good heavens, though, what wind.
Mark Steyn devotes a column to the work of Canadian singer/songwriter Gordon Lightfoot, particularly his very well-known ballad on the loss of the Edmund Fitzgerald on Lake Superior in 1975:
Edmund Fitzgerald, 1971
Detail of a photo from Wikimedia Commons
When it comes to trains and boats and planes, Gordon Lightfoot has hymned all three, but it’s the middle mode of transportation that produced the song he’s proudest of:
The ship was the pride Of the American side
Coming back from some mill in Wisconsin
As the big freighters go
It was bigger than most
With a crew and good captain well seasoned…In November 1975 Lightfoot chanced to be reading Newsweek‘s account of the sinking of a Great Lakes freighter in Canadian waters. He’s a slow and painstaking writer, which is one reason he’s given up songwriting – because it takes too much time away from his grandkids. But that day forty-three years ago the story literally struck a chord, and he found himself scribbling away, very quickly:
The legend lives on From the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they called Gitche Gumee
The lake, it is said Never gives up her dead
When the skies of November turn gloomy…“Gitche gumee” is Ojibwe for “great sea” – ie, Lake Superior – as you’ll know if you’ve read your Longfellow, which I’m not sure anyone does these days. Evidently Hiawatha was on the curriculum back east across Lake Huron in young Gordy’s Orillia schoolhouse. The Gitche Gumee reference may be why, when I first heard “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald“, I assumed its subject had sunk long before the song was written. In fact, it sank on November 10th 1975 – just a few days before Lightfoot wrote the number. When she’d launched in 1958, the Edmund Fitzgerald was the largest ship on the Great Lakes, and, when she passed through the Soo Locks between Lakes Superior and Huron, her size always drew a crowd and her captain was always happy to entertain them with a running commentary over the loudspeakers about her history and many voyages. For seventeen years she ferried taconite ore from Minnesota to the iron works of Detroit, Toledo and the other Great Lakes ports …until one November evening of severe winds and 35-feet waves:
The wind in the wires
Made a tattle-tale sound
And a wave broke over the railin’
And every man knew
As the captain did too
‘Twas the witch of November come stealin’…And about seventeen miles from Whitefish Bay the Edmund Fitzgerald sank, with the loss of all 29 lives. It remains the largest ship ever wrecked on the Great Lakes, launched in 1958 to take advantage of the new St Lawrence Seaway (to be opened by the Queen and President Eisenhower on an inaugural voyage by the Royal Yacht Britannia the following year) and specifically constructed to be only a foot less than the maximum length permitted. Edmund Fitzgerald was the then chairman of Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance of Milwaukee, and, as far as I’m aware, the only insurance company executive to be immortalized in a song title. Fifteen thousand people showed up for the ship’s launch at River Rouge, Michigan. It took Mrs Fitzgerald three attempts to shatter the champers against the bow, and then there was a further half-hour’s delay as the shipyard workers tried to loosen the keel blocks. After which the ship flopped into the water, crashed against a pier, and sent up a huge wave to douse the crowd. One spectator promptly had a heart attack and died.
And then came seventeen happy years. Even in the twenty-first century, there is something especially awful and sobering about death at sea: it is in a certain sense a reminder of the fragility of security and modernity. Whenever I’m in, for example, St Pierre et Miquelon, the last remaining territory of French North America, I stop by the monument aux marins disparus, sculpted in 1964 and to which many names have been added in the years since – because a ship put out, and somewhere on the horizon the great primal forces rose up from the depths and snapped it in two like a matchstick.
In the Financial Post, Lawrence Solomon says Doug Ford can’t risk abandoning his promises about Ontario electricity costs, despite his cabinet’s worries about provincial reputation damage:
Ford has every reason to return the power system to some semblance of economic sanity. Ontario is now burdened by some of the highest power rates of any jurisdiction in North America, throwing households into energy poverty and forcing industries to close shop or move to the U.S. The biggest reason by far for the power sector’s dysfunction is its renewables, which account for just seven per cent of Ontario’s electricity output but consume 40 per cent of the above-market fees consumers are forced to provide. Cancelling those contracts would lower residential rates by a whopping 24 per cent, making good on Ford’s promise to aid consumers.
[…]
To date, Ford has stopped renewable developments that haven’t been completed, which will prevent things from getting worse, but he has failed to tear up the egregious contracts of completed developments, which will prevent things from getting better. Based on conversations that I and others have had with government officials, it appears that Ford is inclined to cancel the contracts and honour his signature promise, but he is being thwarted by cabinet colleagues who fear that Ontario’s reputation will take a hit in the business community if they don’t play nice.
Except, there’s nothing nice about betraying a promise to the voters who democratically put you in power in order to avoid pressure from lobby groups who think governments are entitled to hand out sweetheart deals to their favoured cronies. There’s also nothing democratic about it. It is an axiom of parliamentary government that “no government can bind another.”
Canadian governments, including Ontario governments, have in the past torn up odious contracts, including those in the energy sector. When they did, upon passing binding legislation, they were able to reset the terms, offering as little or as much compensation as they wished. Outraged business lobbies’ claims that the reputation of governments would be affected were not borne out. Moreover, such rightings of political wrongs serve the interest of small government and free markets, because businesses have always understood that there’s an inherent risk in contracting with governments that are able to unilaterally rewrite contracts. To overcome that inherent risk, businesses add a risk premium when getting in bed with government, helping to explain the rich contracts the renewables developers demanded. That risk premium acts to make business-to-business dealings more economic than business-to-government dealings.
In the Financial Post, William Watson points out the weirdness of Ontario’s decision to delay the opening of legal cannabis stores until next Spring:
For several years now, dozens of dispensaries have been operating quite openly. (They call themselves dispensaries to further the narrative that, like your grandmother’s rye, marijuana is for medicinal purposes.) Only now, with pot use becoming legal, are these dispensaries being shut down — although Toronto’s chief of police says not right away, as he doesn’t have [the] person power to do it all at once.
If they don’t shut down, they may forfeit their chance at a licence to sell pot legally once licensed retail operations do finally start in the province on (when else?) April 1st of next year — 166 days after legalization. Why would they not be granted a licence? Not because they trafficked in marijuana when its use was strictly illegal, if seldom prosecuted. But because they continued to traffic in marijuana after it became legal but before the government gave them a licence, an offence that will be prosecuted slowly, if at all.
Silly me. I thought marijuana legalization would simply say that after a certain date the police wouldn’t arrest you for having such-and-such an amount of marijuana in your possession. End of story.
[…]
Countrywide, as the Financial Post’s Vanmala Subramaniam recently reported, a big roadblock to timely legal supply has been the need to seal products with federal excise revenue stamps. But there’s only one supplier and the stamps come without adhesive. Stamps! In 2018!
In American movies of the 1930s and 1940s, moonshiners and bootleggers waged war against “revenuers,” federal agents charged with levying excise taxes on booze. It seems the revenuers have now taken charge of Canada’s marijuana industry. You might plausibly argue that the former illegal market operated in the interests of consumers. There seems little doubt the new legal market will operate in the interest of governments, their unions and their revenue departments.
When cops did enforce the country’s no-toking laws, they could plausibly tell themselves they were doing it to protect young people and other innocents. Now when they enforce the laws they’re doing it to protect legally privileged producers against producers who find themselves offside with often arbitrary licensing laws. Protecting kids was one thing. Protecting cartels is quite another.
Colby Cosh on the origins of the name of Canada’s largest city (which, surprisingly, isn’t the Mississauga name for “big stink on the water”):
Detail from a 1688 map of western New France by Vincenzo Coronelli that locates “Lac Taronto” at Lake Simcoe.
City of Toronto Culture Division/Library and Archives Canada via the National Post
By the time of Franquelin, “Tkaronto” had already become “Taronto,” a generic name for the highway between Lake Simcoe and Lake Ontario. The Humber River was called the Toronto River by the French before Gen. John Graves Simcoe and the British got hold of everything. The word, in turn, became attached to a trading settlement at the southern end of the trail — a pretty crummy place, by all accounts, but one destined for bigger things as part of a global seafaring empire.
The miracle is that it held on to the name. Simcoe insisted that “Toronto,” on being anointed as the site of the new capital of Upper Canada in 1793, be dubbed “York” in honour of Prince Frederick (1763-1827), Duke of York and second son of George III. This Duke of York is the “Grand Old Duke of York” from the satirical verse about military futility. He was also commander-in-chief of the British armies that helped to chase Napoleon out of Europe twice, and is thought to deserve genuine credit for this, so be careful who you write insulting rhymes about.
Simcoe dubbed Toronto “York” just because he was sucking up to a very identifiable future boss, and for no other reason. The people of Toronto seem to have understood this and resented it. In the decades to come, it was occasionally observed that there were something like a dozen other places in Upper Canada called “York.” Moreover, Simcoe’s “Little York,” as it was often called, seems to have presented an increasingly embarrassing parallel with the Americans’ bustling New York.
In 1834, when the Legislative Council of Upper Canada decided that the capital needed to be formally incorporated as a city, the citizenry remembered that they belonged to “Toronto” and appealed to the council to have the more musical old name restored. Over four decades their annoyance had not receded. Diehards who wanted York to remain York for imperial-grandeur reasons were outvoted, and Toronto’s formal Act of Incorporation observes that “it is desirable, for avoiding inconvenience and confusion, to designate the Capital of the Province by a name which will better distinguish it.” The appellation “Toronto,” of course, had actually been nicked from a spot some way off, but the white settlers had mislaid that information, and didn’t check with anyone who would know better.
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