Quotulatiousness

October 25, 2024

Diversity at all costs

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Health, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the National Post, Harry Rakowski explains why Toronto Generic University — sorry, I mean “Toronto Metropolitan University” — is reserving 75% of available enrolment in their new medical school for more diverse candidates, even if they wouldn’t normally qualify by their grades:

We have a critical shortage of doctors and nurses in Canada. Almost a quarter of our population can’t find a family doctor. Wait times for seeing a specialist, getting medical imaging and surgical dates continue to climb, with only Band-Aid solutions being proposed by the federal and provincial governments. We desperately need to expand medical schools and the licensing of highly qualified foreign medical graduates.

So it was welcome news to hear that 94 undergraduate medical students and 105 postgraduate students (residents) will be entering the newly established Toronto Metropolitan University School of Medicine when it opens in September 2025. The city of Brampton, Ont. donated a former civic centre along with $20 million in funding for renovations in order to make the school happen.

However, it was highly disturbing to learn that admissions to the new facility will be driven by a culture-war philosophy that will dilute the quality of medical practice.

There’s no doubt that diversity in medicine helps to optimize care and provide better outcomes for the differing needs of Canada’s highly diverse population, which includes many individuals disadvantaged by their geography as well as racial and economic inequality. But TMU is going about it the wrong way. Its admissions policy will focus on DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) rather than quality.

TMU’s plan is to reserve 75 per cent of its enrolment slots for “equity-deserving” students — Black and Indigenous applicants and others who meet “equity-deserving” criteria including students who identify as members of the 2SLGBTQ+ community, those who are “racialized” and individuals “with lived experiences of poverty or low socio-economic status.” It will accept a minimum grade point average (GPA) of 3.3 (B+) — or even less for select Black and Indigenous applicants — and then use GPA only as an application criterion, not as a selection criterion. By comparison, the University of Toronto’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine requires a minimum GPA average of 3.6 for undergraduate applicants (although average acceptance is now 3.95).

October 9, 2024

Dangling the old “high speed rail between Toronto and Montreal” proposal again

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Railways — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In what seems like an annual ritual, the attractive-to-many (but economically non-viable) idea of putting in a high speed rail line between Toronto and Montreal is getting another airing:

The closest active model to the proposed VIA “High Frequency Rail” proposal is the Brightline service in Florida.
“BrightLine – The Return of FEC passenger service” by BBT609 is licensed under CC BY 2.0

In 2021, the Government of Canada confirmed its plans to significantly upgrade VIA Rail’s passenger rail service between the Windsor and Quebec City corridor into a high-frequency rail service.

As the name suggests, this new high-frequency rail service would offer significantly higher frequencies and reduce travel times on the route linking Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal by 25 per cent.

With dedicated passenger rail tracks separate from freight operations, which greatly contribute to current service delays, this new train service would more consistently operate at increased speeds of up to 177 km/h to 200 km/h, and reliability would improve to an on-time performance by over 95 per cent.

This is quite true … the existing rail network between Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa was designed and built to carry freight traffic first and passengers only as a secondary goal — in many cases to attract government subsidies for the construction of the lines. Passenger services are, at best, marginally profitable but generally passenger service is a dead loss for the railways and only maintained thanks to ongoing government subsidies, grants, and tax breaks.

Freight trains — the profitable part of the railway network — have gotten longer and heavier over time as technology has improved (and train crews have gotten smaller, reducing labour costs) and the signal systems are optimized for freight traffic: long, slow-moving trains that take a lot of time and energy to speed up and slow down. Passenger trains travel faster (well, theoretically anyway) and make frequent stops to pick up and drop off passengers … signalling systems (which are critical to safe operations) need to be designed to optimize the usage pattern of the majority of the trains which in practice means freight with some modifications in high-population areas to accommodate passenger traffic.

This high-frequency rail service would use VIA Rail’s new and growing fleet of modern Siemens Venture trains operating on the Windsor-Quebec City corridor.

But as it turns out, the federal government is also contemplating a new service that is even better than high-frequency rail — the potential for a high-speed rail service, which would be the first of its kind in Canada.

Currently, the federal government is engaged in the Request For Proposal (RFP) process for the project. In July 2023, it shortlisted three private consortiums to participate in the RFP’s detailed bidding process, attracting international interest from major investors and some of the world’s largest passenger rail service operators.

This includes the consortium named Cadence, entailing CDPQ Infrastructure, AtkinsRealis (formerly known as SNC-Lavalin), Systra Canada, Keolis Canada, SNCF Voyageurs, and national flag carrier Air Canada.

The inclusion of Air Canada in the consortium is … interesting … as one of the goals of an actual high speed system would be to drain off a proportion of the short-haul passenger traffic that currently goes by air. A cynic might wonder if Air Canada’s interest in the project is to help or hinder.

According to a report in Toronto Star last week, each of the three consortiums was directed to create two detailed proposals, including one concept with trains that travel under 200 km/h and another concept with trains that travel faster than 200 km/h.

High-speed rail is generally defined as a train service that operates at speeds of at least 200 km/h.

It was further stated in the report that the new service could result in travel times of only three hours between Toronto and Montreal, as opposed to the current travel times of over five hours on existing VIA Rail services.

For further comparison, the travel time between Toronto and Montreal on flight services such as Air Canada is about 1.5 hours, which does not include the time spent at airports, while the driving time over this distance of over 1,000 km is about 5.5 hours — similar to VIA Rail’s existing services.

The potential holds for VIA Rail’s new service to operate at speeds over 200 km/h along select segments of the corridor.

The required costs to implement 200km/h speeds will be in eliminating as many grade crossings as possible and reconstructing some tight curves to allow the higher speed trains … and, as mentioned earlier, retrofitting the signal system for the faster passenger trains. Even those measures, which don’t really produce a true “high speed” system will be very expensive.

September 23, 2024

In Toronto, school kids are being used as pawns in political protests

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The Toronto District School Board has some serious issues if a recent high school “field trip” to a political protest is typical of how the board’s employees are allowed to insert their own political agenda into the teaching process:

There were some parents who opted out of allowing their children to participate in a Toronto District School Board (TDSB) sanctioned field trip to observe (not participate) in a public protest. Parents were informed that the event at Grange Park in Toronto involved the Grassy Narrows First Nation’s decades-long struggle with mercury contamination caused by industry. However, they should have taken this proposed field trip as a major red flag. Indeed, according to Spadina-Fort York MP Kevin Vuong, “What the TDSB teachers did was deceitful and unconscionable”.

When I was a kid, my school never attended a protest. And before last Wednesday, I’ve never heard of any school ever planning such an inappropriate field trip – that ended up being used by the ultra-woke TDSB as an excuse to indoctrinate children into social justice activism (which entails the labelling of all white/Jewish children as racists, colonizers, and settlers on stolen land). How many TDSB parents were even aware of what they were signing up for? It appears that many knew of the general shape of things – which had something to do with Grassy Narrows and mercury poisoning – but no parent could have known about the anti-Israel / anti-Semitic component (a mainstay of social justice), which appeared to be the focal point, eclipsing anything to do with Canadian First Nations.

Indeed, the email from the TDSB explained that the protest event was an “educational opportunity … to learn about Indigenous activism, environmental justice and human rights”. The red flag would have been enormous and flapping vigorously in a strong wind for those parents who are initiated into the tenets of critical social justice theory. To those parents, participation in woke activism is a hard hell no. However, many families are still oblivious, or maybe have misunderstood the intentions of the TDSB, or maybe just don’t quite get what critical social justice is. They are unaware that far too many school administrators, trustees, and teachers have decided that their priority is transforming society through a cultural revolution, not educating the young. This, of course, involves transforming children.

The letter to parents assured them that their children would not be participating in the protest. Students would be on site only to observe. However, videos have emerged on social media of middle school aged children marching alongside anti-Israel protestors. Understandably, many parents now feel betrayed. In my view, they should have seen this coming. The TDSB is literally infested with anti-Semetic black radicals and other such woke activists who follow the same identity politics playbook which entered North America through the period of violent 1960s era black radicalism. (I refer the reader to Cedric Robinson’s volume Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. And, to Dr. Scott Miller’s essay published in these pages “A Moral Chimera: Diversity, Illiberal No-White-Male Policies and the Power of the Black Radical Tradition“. And lastly, if you want to see black radicals in action, read my piece, “Exploring The Grievance Pathway Of Anti-Racism“, on a Parents of Black Children meeting I attended).

Concerning those videos of the protest which circulated social media sparking outrage amongst parents, according to the Toronto Sun, “footage showed students marching alongside flag-waving Elementary Teachers of Toronto members, while a masked woman in a white ‘Justice for Grassy Narrows’ shirt shouted anti-Israel chants into a megaphone”.

CG Idit Shamir (Consul General @IsraelinToronto) posted the following to X (I completely agree with her sentiment):

    “Shocking. 7th and 8th graders from public schools in Toronto were taken yesterday on a Toronto District School Board (TDSB) -approved field trip—not to a museum, but to march in a political protest where they chanted pro-Palestine slogans. Adults in keffiyehs and face coverings led the way, while young minds were subjected to a one-sided political narrative.

    “The @tdsb has crossed a line. Children get sent to school to learn; they should NEVER be forced to participate in political protests. It’s not just that they’ve taken a side—it’s that they have utterly disregarded the rights of pro-Israel and Jewish students and staff, along with any commitment to truth and balance. This isn’t education; it’s indoctrination—it’s an affront to the very purpose of education.”

MPP Goldie Ghamari, also had a strong reaction:

    “What the actual f**k is going on with @tdsb educators in Toronto?

    This isn’t 1944 Nazi occupied Germany.

    This is 2024 in Canada.

    This antisemitic behaviour is unacceptable.

    If you stay silent after reading this, you’re part of the problem and need to hang your head in shame.”

September 8, 2024

The last dispatch from Toronto before the catastrophe began

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Media, Politics, Wine — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Toronto, in fact all of Ontario, may no longer be there when you get up tomorrow morning. As Chris Selley explained in his brave, final communiqué from the doomed province:

Doug Ford, the form of the destructor Ontario chose.

Dear non-Toronto friends,

This city is in crisis. This may be my last communiqué before the telex goes down for good, and I feel honour-bound to tell the world of my city’s plight. If the worst should occur, which it almost certainly will, please tell our story.

The unthinkable has occurred: Doug Ford’s madmen and women at Queen’s Park have licensed hundreds upon hundreds of new locations — called “convenience stores”, in local parlance — to sell beer, wine, cider and pre-mixed cocktails.

They did this instead of fixing health care, if you can believe that. And, outrage upon outrage, the government even made a map of such locations — as if delivering fallen Ontarians one by one to Mr. Booze himself.

Why, within just a few hundred metres of where I write, through my tears, I can discern on the map more than five such new locations. There’s Mei Convenience, Mimi Variety, Lucy Grocery and Meat, Queen & Jarvis Convenience … the list goes on, and on, my God. Church attendance is reportedly soaring as Torontonians steel themselves for the forthcoming.

Ford’s government did this entirely to solicit corporate donations to his party (some say that’s actually illegal, but whatever) from his buddies at convenience-store empires 7-Eleven and Couche-Tard … and presumably from Mimi and Lucy, whoever they are. Very rich women, clearly.

Instead of fixing health care!

Until recently, some semblance of sanity prevailed: The nearest government-run liquor store to where I sit now is a 15-minute walk away; the nearest Beer Store, the privately owned former quasi-monopoly where you’re still supposed to return your bottles and cans, is nearer to 20 minutes.

And now, suddenly, a bottle or can is shockingly near to hand. And this will lead to more alcohol-related harms. Of this there is no doubt, as one expert recently told the Toronto Methodist Star: “Harm will increase in Ontario. That is straightforward.”

It is true that many jurisdictions around the world report similar or lower levels of alcohol consumption and related harms than Ontario despite having much greater access to retail alcohol — Italy, Greece, the United States — but that is not germane to this discussion. Ontarians are not like other people. Ontario is not like other places. We are worse. Or maybe better. Or some combination of the two.

It’s true! Even saintly Bowmanville has been sullied with the demon liquor thanks to Premier Ford’s diabolical plan:

August 10, 2024

The GTA job situation is dire, yet the government keeps allowing special permits to bring in foreign workers

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Cancon, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I try not to moan about my work situation here on the blog … nobody comes here for that … but despite my decades of experience in my technical field, it’s been a very long time since I had an interview (I’m ashamed to admit how long), despite all the jobs I’ve applied for. I have several strikes against me, of course, in that I’m an older slightly disabled white male, but it’s not just about me: Canadian employers in the Greater Toronto Area are still getting special permits to bring in foreign workers despite the huge numbers of un- and under-employed Canadian citizens and permanent residents in the GTA:

With job fair lineups regularly snaking around blocks and experienced professionals unable to secure roles despite applying to hundreds of them, it’s safe to say the job market is pretty terrifying right now for anyone looking for any type of work in the Toronto area.

Population growth has been outpacing employment gains, pushing the city’s unemployment rate to a dismal 7.4 per cent earlier this year (compared to Canada’s 5.8 per cent). So, it’s no wonder that residents are concerned to find how many local businesses are outsourcing labour to foreign workers.

A user-created map shared to Reddit last week shows which employers in the GTA have applied to hire overseas personnel via Labour Market Impact Assessments from 2023 on, which are supposed to be used only when there is “a need for a foreign worker to fill the job [because] no Canadian worker or permanent resident is available to do the job.”

While it seems like the above would be a rare exception given the current work crisis, the map shows quite the opposite: a shocking number of firms trying to use LMIAs to hire thousands of staffers, from food service and retail workers to engineering technicians and administrative assistants.

The data used is from Canada’s Open Government Portal, the page explains, adding that “there have also been instances where employers have illegally sold their approved LMIA positions to workers.”

The post has tacked up thousands of upvotes and a robust discussion of hundreds of comments, almost all from people who are angry and confused about why so many places are actively trying to recruit — and in many cases, successfully recruiting — people from outside of the country when so many here are desperately seeking jobs.

July 5, 2024

“Private property rights? How do they work?” (U of T students, probably)

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Law, Middle East, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Line, Josh Dehaas rounds up the concept of private property rights for the University of Toronto students (and non-student antisemitic fellow occupiers) who have been squatting for Palestinian terrorists on university property for the last while:

University College, University of Toronto, 31 July, 2008.
Photo by “SurlyDuff” via Wikimedia Commons.

After Justice Koehnen delivered his ruling Tuesday ordering the occupiers to dismantle the People’s Circle for Palestine at the University of Toronto, one of the protesters accused the school of hypocrisy.

“It’s quite interesting that a university that claims to practice decolonization is falling back on this claim of private property,” master’s student Sarah Rasikh told a journalist on the day before the students began taking down their tents.

“U of T and the Court more specifically is quite literally telling Indigenous students to leave and get off of their own land,” she added.

Rasikh has a point, sort of.

As someone who did law school relatively recently, I can attest that many university professors are downright hostile to the concept of private property. They commonly claim that all of Canada belongs to Indigenous people and that Indigenous peoples don’t believe in private property. Rather, they believe in “sharing”. Decolonization therefore requires that land be treated communally, or so the theory goes. University administrators who pay lip service to the concept of decolonization shouldn’t be surprised when students try to turn theory into action.

Thankfully the law still protects private property rights. Students who didn’t get taught how that works by their professors ought to give Justice Koehnen’s decision a read.

As Justice Koehnen explained, “in our society we have decided that the owner of property generally gets to decide what happens on the property”.

“If the protesters can take that power for themselves by seizing Front Campus, there is nothing to stop a stronger group from coming and taking the space over from the current protesters,” he went on. “That leads to chaos. Society needs an orderly way of addressing competing demands on space. The system we have agreed to is that the owner gets to decide how to use the space.”

“If it is not the owner who gets to determine what happens on the property it will become a brutal free-for-all,” Justice Koehnen added.

June 26, 2024

The Toronto-St. Paul’s by-election, part two

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Continuing on from yesterday’s initial post on the outcome of the by-election in Toronto-St. Paul’s — which until 4:30 on Tuesday morning might have been the dictionary definition of a “safe Liberal seat” — as comments from vengeful anti-Liberal and whistling-past-the-graveyard pro-Liberal commentators appear. Here’s noted anti-Liberal David Warren from Parkdale which more often elects NDP candidates over Liberal ones:

The electoral boundaries of Toronto-St. Paul’s and nearby downtown Toronto ridings.
Detail of an Elections Canada map of Toronto.

Toronto-Saint Paul’s is defined, among the political experts, as a “safe Liberal seat”. For one thing, it is in the middle of Toronto, where the Conservatives have no members. (The NDP occasionally wins ridings like Parkdale.) According to a pollster, who is (in my opinion) a Liberal party hack, if the Liberals were to lose Saint Paul’s, it would mean that there were no safe seats left for them in Canada. None is the same as zero, incidentally.

Late last night, we learned that the Liberals had lost Saint Paul’s.

It was just a by-election, however. Toronto’s electorate enjoys the kind of deep somnolence that is not permanently correctible. Its people are typical of urban voters everywhere: they are easily convinced by “progressive” fantasists, and environ-mental snake-oil salesmen. Hence, liberal-lefties control all the big-city municipal governments, and provide marionettes to all the national puppet theatres. Those who voted against them will return to snoring mode after just a moment’s consciousness.

At The Line, a rare Jen Gerson column outside the paywall:

The goose. She cooked.

The toast. It burnt.

The frog. It boiled.

[…]

Anyway, my lack of political dedication was well rewarded because I’m now refreshed and well positioned to opine on the great momentous meaning of Don Stewart’s election to the House of Commons to represent the fine people of this section of midtown Toronto. Normally I wouldn’t get too fussed over a by-election anywhere, but in this case a fuss is impossible to avoid.

Two reasons; the first is that I have — in my lovingly Albertan way — referred to this riding as the Dead Marshes. For those who are not Lord of The Rings fans, this section of land is technically considered a reeking wetland that stretches to the south-east of Emyn Muil; a terrible stretch of land that sits just outside Mordor, and final home to the preserved corpses of many Conservative candidates, staffers, volunteers, and hopes and dreams. Every once in a while, their enchanting methane soul lights flare forth, entrancing the unwary or the naïve into the swamp.

Which is a very nice way of saying that St. Paul’s is a bastion of the ruling Laurentian Consensus, a Liberal fortress long held by Carolyn Bennett, and untainted by the stain of Conservative voting intentions since 1993. And yet, Mr. Stewart ventured forth undaunted, and found his path into Mordor (a metaphorical stand in for either Toronto, or Parliament. Interpret as you see fit).

The second reason that this election cannot be ignored is that both the Liberals and the Conservatives have invested it with so much symbolic weight, that the outcome will herald political changes of one kind or another. A 43 per cent turnout rate in a by-election is healthy — even high. Nobody can chalk that outcome up to numerical wonkery. Conservatives were motivated, and progressives were not. The signal is clear.

It is now impossible for an increasingly unglued Liberal caucus to overlook that they are losing. They are losing very badly. A sustained 20-point Conservative lead has been made manifest. If St. Paul’s can crash, they are all at risk. And they can no longer wave that fact away by sniping at pollsters, or blaming misinformation. A plurality of Canadians think they suck at governmenting. This must now be addressed.

Tristin Hopper on the social media site formerly known as Twitter:

June 25, 2024

The Toronto-St. Paul’s by-election

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:34

Paul Wells uncharacteristically posted his initial reaction to the Toronto-St. Paul’s by-election after the polls closed, but before the counting was over. He chose … poorly:

[Liberal candidate Leslie] Church’s margin of victory over Conservative candidate Don Stewart bounced around 10 points all Monday night. As I get ready to hit Send on this post, it’s closer to 6 points, and I have no way of knowing whether it will shrink or expand as more results come in. But if it were 10 points, that would be 9.9-ish points more than you need for a victory. I’m especially pleased to report that the result constitutes yet another glorious victory for Wells’s First Rule, which holds that for any given situation, Canadian politics will tend toward the least exciting possible outcome. In particular, in the last several days, I’ve been telling friends that this would be a particularly solid Wells’s Rule victory if the night ended with Tyler Meredith boasting on X. Et voilà:

If you slice the returns finely enough, pace Tyler, they might yield more omens and portents. Ten points would be the Liberals’ narrowest margin in TSP (as I’ll call the riding for short) since 2011, and the second-lowest in 31 years. In 2008, when the Liberals under Stéphane Dion were reduced to 77 seats out of 308, the Liberal margin of victory was more than twice what it was in Monday’s by-election. A 10-point margin of victory in TSP is what Liberals get when there’s almost no water left in the pool.

But so what. A win’s a win. By-elections are a blunt measuring tool. Paying subscribers will fill this post’s comment board with theories to explain away the night’s results, and for all I know, some of them might even be correct. Besides, for a few weeks I’ve believed that even if the Liberals had managed to lose TSP, there would have been no public or organized effort within the party to remove Justin Trudeau as leader. You can’t teach an elephant to dance, or a Trudeau Liberal to abandon the internal loyalty that has been one of the hallmarks of his leadership.

So if I’m a Liberal MP — humour me, it’s a thought experiment — I now know what the next year looks like. Justin Trudeau has spent his adult life waiting for the rest of us to realize he was right all along, as we saw in a book that was published last month to extravagant praise. The returns from Toronto will comfort the big guy’s belief that the scales have again begun to fall from Canadians’ eyes, and that therefore this is absolutely the worst time to mess with a winning formula.

He’ll stay. Katie will stay, Ben will stay, Chrystia will stay, Mélanie and Seamus and Max and Clow and all the cats will stay, and the Trudeau team will show new spring in its step as it prepares to get, once more, off the ropes and back into the fray.

To be fair, he did add an update overnight indicating that Stewart had pulled ahead but the counting was still ongoing, and a link to the Elections Canada preliminary results, which I screencapped here just after 9am:

This morning, Mr. Wells posted a follow-up to yesterday’s ever-so-slightly misleading article:

Well, of course I saw it coming all along. What kind of fool could have imagined the Liberal in Toronto — St. Paul’s had any chance?

Hang on. I’m just getting word that I didn’t see it coming. In fact, as recently as Monday night I wrote a post I’ll be hearing about until the cows come home. Sorry about that!

Here are the actual final results, barring any recounts, which may not happen because Conservative Don Stewart’s margin of victory, while slim, is too large to trigger an automatic recount.

Congratulations, Don Stewart! I never doubted you’d win. Hang on. I’m just getting word that I doubted you’d win as recently as last night.

Things will now start to happen quickly. Expect Liberals to work their way through four of the five Kübler-Ross stages of grief before lunch. Denial will come easily, benefiting as it does from long practice. Acceptance may take longer.

In part this is because on paper there isn’t that much to accept. The day’s news is not earth-shaking and, in isolation, should not be taken as definitive. It’s true that by-elections are strange events, though if you add them together they do have some predictive power. It’s true that Leslie Church’s long service as Chrystia Freeland’s chief of staff turned out to be more of a hindrance than a help, a data point whose implications the Deputy Prime Minister won’t want to think much about today. It’s true the Liberals didn’t even try all that hard, if by “didn’t try all that hard” you mean “they tried as hard as they possibly could, my God they tried so hard, my God.”

But a single off-season defeat in a riding the Liberals have, in fact, previously lost during the Paleozoic era is not a larger thing to accept than, say, a punishing loss to Ireland and Norway in a Security Council vote at the UN. Or the loss of two senior cabinet ministers in a controversy in which the ministers who quit were radiantly, obviously in the right. Don’t take my word on that, incidentally: ask David Lametti, who agreed with Jody Wilson-Raybould but managed to keep his job anyway. For a while.

I imagine there’ll be a lot of interesting commentary from other Canadian sources as the day rolls on and the immediate horror starts to recede…

June 19, 2024

Toronto “atones for slavery” by renaming Yonge-Dundas Square. They chose … poorly.

Filed under: Africa, Cancon, History, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the never-ending quest for moral superiority, the City of Toronto decided to rename a downtown landmark — Yonge-Dundas Square — after allegations were made that British Home Secretary Henry Dundas was against the abolition of slavery in the 1790s. (In fact, it was partly his efforts to mediate between the abolitionists and their opponents that actually got the first anti-slavery bill through Parliament, but who cares about his actual work when we can issue blanket condemnations hundreds of years later?)

In a twist worthy of the Babylon Bee, it turns out that the new and improved name proposed has a much more direct connection with slavery:

The Yonge-Dundas Square sign on the southeast corner of the intersection in downtown Toronto.
Detail of an image from Google Street View.

There is a lot wrong both with the name that Toronto city council chose to replace Yonge-Dundas Square and the burden that the name change will place on taxpayers.

Originally budgeted at $335,000, the new estimate is $860,000 — and who is to say it won’t go higher? That would be a lot of money even for a desirable name, but the name the city chose, Sankofa Square, is problematic.

The term is Ghanaian and means “learning from the past.” But while it is intended to replace the name of Henry Dundas, who some blame for delaying the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, the term “Sankofa” has its own connection to the slave trade.

Slavery was rife throughout Africa, and much of the world, for centuries past, but Ghana’s version included the execution of the slaves of chiefs who died, so that they could serve him in the afterlife. […]

The basic fact, ignored by Toronto’s mayor and city councillors, is that the Gold Coast, the earlier name for Ghana, was a notorious slave society. Leading Ghanaians were prominent in the slave trade and were themselves slave owners. For years after slavery was abolished elsewhere, they fought its abolition in Ghana. It wasn’t until 1874 that the slave trade in Ghana was abolished — nearly a century after Britain.

Compare Ghana’s record with that of Ontario, where a process of gradual abolition was started in 1793, 81 years before Ghana. That, notably, was thanks to the efforts of Upper Canada’s first lieutenant governor, John Graves Simcoe, an appointee of Henry Dundas, no less.

So Dundas was not only instrumental in getting slavery abolished in Scotland, acting as a lawyer in the appeal of a case dealing with a runaway slave, he also sent a dedicated abolitionist to Upper Canada to take the top post. He deserves a better square than Yonge-Dundas!

April 3, 2024

Canada’s The Idler was intended for “a sprightly, octogenarian spinster with a drinking problem, and an ability to conceal it”

Filed under: Business, Cancon, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

David Warren had already shuttered The Idler by the time I met him, but I was an avid reader of the magazine in the late 80s and early 90s. I doubt he remembers meeting me, as I was just one of a cluster of brand-new bloggers at the occasional “VRWC pub nights” in Toronto in the early aughts, but I always felt he was one of our elder statesmen in the Canadian blogosphere. He recalls his time as the prime mover behind The Idler at The Hub:

Some late Idler covers from 1991-92. I’ve got most of the magazine’s run … somewhere. These were the ones I could lay my hands on for a quick photo.

This attitude was clinched by our motto, “For those who read.” Note that it was not for those who can read, for we were in general opposition to literacy crusades, as, instinctively, to every other “good cause”. We once described the ideal Idler reader as “a sprightly, octogenarian spinster with a drinking problem, and an ability to conceal it”.

It was to be a magazine of elevated general interest, as opposed to the despicable tabloids. We — myself and the few co-conspirators — wished to address that tiny minority of Canadians with functioning minds. These co-conspirators included people like Eric McLuhan, Paul Wilson, George Jonas, Ian Hunter, Danielle Crittenden, and artists Paul Barker and Charles Jaffe. David Frum, Andrew Coyne, Douglas Cooper, Patricia Pearson, and Barbara Amiel also graced our pages.

I was the founder and would be the first editor. I felt I had the arrogance needed for the job.

I had spent much of my life outside the country and recently returned to it from Britain and the Far East. I had left Canada when I dropped out of high school because there seemed no chance that a person of untrammelled spirit could earn a living in Canadian publishing or journalism. Canada was, as Frum wrote in an early issue of The Idler, “a country where there is one side to every question”.

But there were several young people, and possibly many, with some literary talent, kicking around in the shadows, who lacked a literary outlet. These could perhaps be co-opted. (Dr. Johnson: “Much can be made of a Scotchman, if he be caught young.”)

The notion of publishing non-Canadians also occurred to me. The idea of not publishing the A.B.C. of official CanLit (it would be invidious to name them) further appealed.

We provided elegant 18th-century design, fine but not precious typography, tastefully dangerous uncaptioned drawings, shrewd editorial judgement, and crisp wit. I hoped this would win friends and influence people over the next century or so.

We would later be described as an “elegant, brilliant and often irritating thing, proudly pretentious and nostalgic, written by philosophers, curmudgeons, pedants, intellectual dandies. … There were articles on philosophical conundrums, on opera, on unjustifiably unknown Eastern European and Chinese poets.”

We struck the pose of 18th-century gentlemen and gentlewomen and used sentences that had subordinate clauses. We reviewed heavy books, devoted long articles to subjects such as birdwatching in Kenya or the anthropic cosmological principle, and we printed mottoes in Latin or German without translating them. This left our natural ideological adversaries scratching their heads.

March 15, 2024

Toronto’s blue-uniformed surrender monkeys say … just make it easier for criminals and maybe they won’t hurt you

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Crime has been increasing lately, and Toronto’s boys, girls, and all 57 other genderbeings in blue have their very best advice for you: surrender now.

… Toronto Police have reflected on the problem. They’ve mulled it over. Thought long and hard. And they’re advising people just give up. To stay safe.

This advice came out at a community safety meeting between Toronto Police officials and concerned citizens last month. (The meeting was covered by City News Toronto, but didn’t get widespread coverage until this week, when clips went viral online. Tell me that isn’t a microcosm of the 21 century.) In remarks to the citizens at the meeting, a Toronto police constable said this: “To prevent the possibility of being attacked in your home, leave your fobs by your front door. Because they’re breaking into your homes to steal your car. They don’t want anything else. A lot of them that [the police] are arresting have guns on them. And they’re not toy guns. They’re real guns. They’re loaded.”

Oh. Okay.

Look, it’s not bad advice, in any individual circumstance. There probably are a lot of people out there who’d be relieved if someone kicked in their door, grabbed the fob and took off. And it’s certainly not novel advice from a police service. We’ve all heard variations of this before, right? “Just give up your wallet” when you’re mugged. “Just get out of the car” during a carjacking. You can always replace things. Right?

The problem is that, in the other scenarios above, you’re out and about in public. There’s no guarantee of safety in public, as much as we all wish otherwise. The advice now being given by Toronto police isn’t what to do when someone jabs a gun into your ribs in a seedy back alley, but how to avoid being harmed by bad guys in your own home. And the police advice is “Make it so easy on them that they have no reason to hurt you”.

There’s no charitable read on this, and in this case, truth isn’t a defence. I accept that the police are giving their real, best, true advice. I accept that they are being sincere. That’s the problem: the police are sincerely surrendering. They’ve given up, and they think it would be best if you gave up, too. These violent robberies are just going to continue, and it’s on us — the public — to minimize the bloodshed and risk to ourselves by … submitting.

I try to avoid hyperbole in columns, with the odd exception for comic effect. But this isn’t funny at all, so I won’t make a joke of it. Let’s be extremely serious for a moment. If this is where the Toronto Police Service has landed in terms of their best advice for the public, as a member of that public and Toronto resident, I’d like to ask this: why stop with leaving my fob by the front door? I have a laptop computer. It’s a few years old now, but still in workable condition. It’s worth a few hundred bucks. Maybe I should leave that by the door, too? I don’t keep a lot of cash on hand — who the hell does, in 2024? — but there’s usually a few bucks in my wallet, or my wife’s. Should part of our nightly routine now just be emptying our wallets into a little bowl that we can leave on the radiator by the front door, and come morning, if the door hasn’t been kicked down and the cash grabbed, we can just put the money right back into our wallets as we get the day started? I’m not really a jewelry guy, but my wedding band is worth something, I guess. Pop that into the bowl with the cash?

After all, the bad guys have guns. Real guns. Loaded guns. And there is apparently nothing to be done about this except submit and co-operate. So say the police.

<sarc>No, that can’t be right. Justin Trudeau made guns illegal, so the bad guys just can’t have guns. It would be against the law, and they might get in trouble.</sarc> Oh, and should the propitiatory offerings be placed inside or outside the door? I guess outside, to make it even easier for them, but make sure everything is protected from rain or snow … it’d be risky if they had to pick everything up soaking wet and they might take it out on you and your family.

That’s Matt Gurney from The Line, so you really should read the whole thing.

February 23, 2024

“… the very act of education is ‘a colonial structure that centres whiteness'”

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Teachers in the Toronto District School Board are being told they have to focus on the race of their students above everything else:

The Canadian education system exists exclusively to perpetuate “white supremacy” and schools must prioritize the race of their students above any other factor, reads an official guidebook distributed to all 20,000 Toronto public school teachers.

“Race matters — it is a visible and dominant identity factor in determining people’s social, political, economic, and cultural experiences,” reads one of the introductory paragraphs of Facilitating Critical Conversations, a handbook produced and distributed by the Toronto District School Board.

Teachers are told that they serve an educational system “inherently designed for the benefit of the dominant culture” and that the very act of education is “a colonial structure that centres whiteness”.

“Therefore it must be actively decolonized,” the guide says.

Authored by the TDSB’s Equity, Anti-Racism and Anti-Oppression Department, the guide is one of several new policy documents telling teachers to become agents of “decolonization”.

At multiple points, teachers are told to interact with students based primarily on their “identity group”.

“Am I thinking about the various identities students may hold, whether they are part of a group, their comfort in identifying as part of this group, and articulating/coming out as part of this group,” reads one entry in a checklist of how teachers should engage in “critical conversation”.

The “critical conversation” itself is defined as a means of conditioning students that “identity and power” is inextricable, and that the world around them is chiefly defined by “structures that privilege some at the expense of others”.

“White Supremacy is a structural reality that impacts all students and must be discussed and dismantled in classrooms, schools, and communities,” it reads.

The entire document was produced to replace a 21-year-old TDSB guidebook that was previously the standard text for addressing “controversial and sensitive issues” in the classroom.

February 13, 2024

GO Transit – North America’s BEST Commuter Rail Network

Filed under: Cancon, Railways — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Lonestar Trip Reports
Published Nov 11, 2023

Hello and Welcome to Oshawa, Ontario! Today we’re riding with GO Transit, Toronto’s commuter rail provider, from here down to Toronto Union Station.

Trip Information
Train Number: GO Lakeshore East 9015
Locomotive: MPI MP36PH-3C 609
Departure Time: 10:10am
Arrival Time: 11:11am
Journey Time: 1hr 1min
Price: $10.00

Thanks for watching and I hope you enjoyed!

January 30, 2024

York University’s CUPE local apparently cribs their homework from the Völkischer Beobachter

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Media, Middle East, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

York University’s contract and part-time instructors are represented by CUPE local 3903, who’ve distributed an eye-openingly anti-semitic document with the (implied) order to interrupt normal tutorials and replace the content with Palestinian propaganda:

Detail from an official “toolkit” distributed to York University contract and part-time faculty which claims that their employer is complicit in “genocide” by the mere tolerance of Jewish groups on campus.
Photo by A Toolkit on Teaching Palestine

A new toolkit circulated to York University teaching assistants instructs them to denounce Israel at every available opportunity, even when it has no apparent relevance to the subject being studied.

“Let us collectively divert this week’s tutorials to teaching on Palestinian liberation,” reads the 15-page document circulated by CUPE 3903, the union representing York’s contract and part-time faculty.

The document adds that tutorials should be diverted to condemnations of the “Zionist Israeli state” regardless of the course that the TA is supposed to be discussing.

“It is a medical issue. An arts issue. A feminist issue. A society issue. A political issue. A cultural issue. A geography issue. An engineering issue. An architecture issue,” it reads.

The document is filled with claims denouncing Israel as a genocidal “colonial project”. Canada is treated much the same, and is referred to alternately as the “Canadian settler state” or “Turtle Island”.

The mere presence of Jewish groups on campus is also referred to as evidence of York University’s “complicity” in genocide.

The document denounces the existence of sanctioned “Zionist cultural institutions”, making explicit reference to Hillel, the world’s go-to Jewish campus organization. York is also called an accessory to genocide because of its research links with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The pamphlet even provides a script for TAs to read as they inform students that the tutorial will be cancelled in favour of becoming a “teach-in … for liberation.”

“Today, I open up our classroom to bring our attention on Gaza, to speak up and stand in solidarity with the Palestinian liberation movement, and contribute in ending Canada’s and York’s complicity with genocide and the settler-colonial occupation of Palestinian land and life,” reads one introductory line.

January 14, 2024

Tristin Hopper imagines the thoughts of the Toronto Police Service

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Every week, Tristin Hopper helps us understand an element of the week’s news by “imagining” the diary entries of the people or organizations involved. This week, it’s the turn of Toronto’s police department:

The Toronto police have not had a good week. After receiving widespread criticism for refusing to disperse an anti-Israel blockade targeting a north Toronto Jewish neighbourhood, video emerged this week of officers delivering coffee and donuts to the blockaders.

And so, only after a cross-section of local politicians and Jewish leaders had expressed bafflement at police inaction, did Toronto police announce plans on Thursday to actually put a stop to protests at the Avenue Road bridge. They even charged one protester with incitement of hatred for allegedly carrying a hate group’s flag at a protest in downtown Toronto.

Monday
I’m sorry — is that the sound of people wanting us to enforce the law? As in, “hey there, sworn peace officer, get in your car, go identify some criminality and use force to stop it?”

Are you sure about that, Toronto? You sure you don’t want us to instead try fixing this with a solidarity flag raising? Or maybe this is something that could be diffused with one of those equity roundtables you keep forcing us to attend.

After all, enforcing the law is a messy business. People could get hurt. This isn’t like handing out a traffic ticket or a jaywalking citation: You’re asking us to confront people who may not care that their actions are illegal, and may employ additional illegal methods to dispute that.

Tuesday
I’m still trying to get my head around this new paradigm. So to refresh: when people break laws, you want us to stop that? The Criminal Code. The Highway Traffic Act. The Controlled Substances Act. You want our officers to read up on contemporary legislation, seek out violators of said legislation, and then apply appropriate sanctions?

This is a minefield, frankly. We’re talking raised voices. Mean tweets. People in handcuffs. Unflattering videos. Outraged Toronto Star columns. This is how we board an escalator that may soon make us pine for the days when our only problems were an easily ignored minority demographic having their overpass shut down.

Wednesday
When we’re enforcing these laws, are you absolutely sure you want us to do this without first checking if they’re politically acceptable? I mean, it would obviously streamline everything if roadways were only ever blockaded by white supremacist cannibal pedophiles, but that’s rarely the case.

And what if they’re doing an illegal thing that is tangentially related to something you like? I had our legal guy look into it and he said that any laws broken as a result of a public protest are still illegal – the right to protest only covers legal things, it turns out. So bear with me; this could result in a city in which graffiti, blockades and vandalism OF ANY KIND could end up banned. It’s a slippery slope.

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