Why Occupy Canada Matters

Occupy Toronto - St. James Park

What happens if the occupiers go home?

Then we accept this whole global problem was just an anomalous “bank thing” that mostly happened elsewhere. A generational crisis that we’ve past, thank goodness, and one to which Canada was just an innocent bystander. We can even be smug, if we want.

And we’ll find ourselves going through another election cycle four years from now, and we’ll do something silly like double-down on our new fighter jets and our fancy prisons. Or not. Maybe we get that fancy oil pipeline and a nice austerity programme to start a generation’s work of clearing the hundreds of billions of new debt we’ve added. The Boomer retirement will really get some momentum going and we’ll hope we can pay for that tsunami of healthcare costs on, what, Financial Services growth? Tourism? iPhone app development?

What’s the plan? How do we turn the engine of the St. Lawrence Basin back on? What does it make? How does it build real value in the world? How do we use that to educate and house and invest? How do we do it in a way that is sustainable and healthy and improves our quality of life? How do we as a nation do more than finally, barely, and belatedly achieve our commitments to carbon dioxide levels and a 0.7% of GDP to developing nations?

Will we wait and hope that a suddenly government-ready and messianic NDP will save us? A newly rejuvenated (and equally messianic) Liberal Party? Explosive growth and sudden ministerial preparedness in the Greens? How strong would any one of these parties have to be to win, hold, and get things done? None of us really believes that will happen.

The real question is how can our Canadian parliaments work without a popular movement that restores legitimacy to government.

And here we suddenly have this popular movement that is reinforcing itself globally, and is making direct connection between democracy, economy, plurality, sustainability, inclusivity and human rights. They are staying there and sharing what they learn with each other and they are changing things.

The more popular support they generate, the more they accomplish.

Everyone should go to the parks and see the occupations and the General Assemblies: the ones I've seen beggar the imagination to understand how they could ever bring about the kind of change we need.

But we know the current systems of government won’t start working again on their own. They will never bring the change we need. And we’re all mystified as to how they're going to become relevant and responsive and effective. It won’t happen inside of any one party. It won’t happen if we accept that a globalized world ends at national borders. It requires a movement that grabs the governing system itself and smartens it up. Holds it accountable. Insists it smarten itself up. Makes it work for all of us and inspires us to be active, informed participants in it.

It’s not up to the people sleeping in the parks to force the changes we all want to happen. The occupations are a manifest symbol, one unlike any I’ve seen in my life. Occupy Canada is taking space and holding it, experimenting in it. Most importantly, they are buying time for the rest of us to come out and do something. And if it’s too hard to come out and stay out - and it is, winters are cold here - then we need to build something to bring it everywhere.

Omnibus Crime Bill C-10 (Letter)

Emailed today:

Right Honourable Prime Minister Stephen Harper, 

I am deeply troubled by the omnibus bill C-10 "Safe Streets and Communities Act" being considered by Parliament. While there are parts of this bill that should become law, others are highly problematic, and run counter to the best practices asserted by the social sciences and the experience of Correctional Services in other jurisdictions. 

Given the negative outcomes that could be a direct result of some of the parts of this omnibus bill - including increased rates of crime, rapidly increasing costs of correctional services, and a grave toll in unnecessary human suffering - I urge you to ask Parliament to do the following:

1. Debate and vote upon each of the nine Bills separately,
2. Bring experts to provide a close review of the social science, and 
3. Hear from those in the legal and correctional services in the U.S. jurisdictions of Texas and Arkansas who experienced--and now advocate against--the approach laid out by Bill C-10.

Thank you for your service to Canadians,

Tal Henderson

Toronto

cc: MP Bob Rae (Toronto Centre)

Selling the Naming Rights for TTC Stations

The Globe and Mail has an article on selling the TTC station naming rights to corporations with a possible upside of raising $324 million.  

Dundas station – a busy downtown stop in need of a major facelift – will be the test case for plans by the Toronto Transit Commission to sell naming rights, and the head of nearby Ryerson University says he is keen to talk.

TTC chair Karen Stintz said the transit authority wants to use renovations at Dundas as a pilot project that can be copied at other stations in the cash-strapped system.

This is an effort to pay for station renovations and it makes sense to involve any major organizations in the region of a station in the planning and partnership for station rebuilds. Working with Ryerson to ensure the station has entrances at the north end to connect with the new student centre makes sense and if they can be motivated to contribute financially to this, do it. Advertising in that space could absolutely be committed to the patron organization for a period of time - that makes sense.

But leave the names out of it. Some things are best left in the domain of the Public.

G20 Summit Inquiry

Emailed today.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper

Premier Dalton McGuinty

Mayor Rob Ford

MP Bob Rae (Toronto Centre)

MPP Glen Murray (Toronto Centre)

Councillor Pam McConnell (Ward 28)

Right honourable leaders and honourable representatives,

As we approach the anniversary of the Toronto G20 Summit we find ourselves with as many questions as ever about what happened in the days preceding, during, and after the meeting. The patchwork of reviews is producing an incomplete and inadequate accounting. As a democratic society, we owe it to our citizens and our police officers to review the actions, decisions and outcomes of events and assess how they served us as a nation that embraces both liberty and good governance.  

I strongly urge you to call for a full public inquiry into the G20 Summit including:

• The manner of determining that the host site be located in downtown Toronto
• The counsel and intelligence that was used in assessing risk and planning response
• The manner of issue and public announcement of the regulation granted under the Public Works Protection Act
• Adequacy and quality of information to police officers and the Public prior to, during, and following the G20 
• The acquisition of and legal limits placed upon the use of new weapons for use against civilian populations including the four “sonic cannons”, which had use-prescriptions placed upon them by the Courts
• Tactics of crowd control, methods of arrest and detention used by the police to secure the event and protect the public
• An assessment of the extent and type of risk posed by agents provocateur, allegedly connected to the anarchist movement, in Canada 
• The freedoms and treatment of agents of the press as they reported on the events

The fact that the weekend saw the largest mass-arrest in Canadian history should itself require a public inquiry and it is time for our leaders to call for one. 

We as a body-politic and a national public need to reflect upon what the stresses to our systems posed by the G20 stress told us about the laws, policies, and processes that frame our civic lives. While the destruction in downtown Toronto was wholly unacceptable, the greater threat to our democracy lies not with a few disaffected individuals smashing windows and burning cars but with an over-reaction on part of our institutions to secure against this possibility. We cannot eliminate risk from a free society. Ultimately we must strike that balance between public safety and freedom of action that renews its commitment to err on the side of freedom and transparency. 

Thank you all for your dedication and your service.

Sincerely, 

Tal Henderson

[address]

Tough Love for Subway Development

Richard Gilbert in the Economy Lab writes that the subway plan could be saved by greater development around subway stations thereby increasing ridership, and by using smaller, automated trains as in Europe.

He's got some good points to consider here.

Key excerpts:

The mayor’s plan could be rescued by taking into account two factors ... 

The first overlooked factor is revenue from riders. Over the life of any subway line, most of its revenue comes from fares. In Toronto – and elsewhere in Canada – there has not usually been a surplus of fare revenue that can be used to pay down debt incurred for construction. This does not have to be the case. With more riders and lower costs there could be a surplus. 

More riders would come from development at and near new subway stations. Toronto has an astonishingly poor record of transit-related development. There are 54 heavy rail stations outside the downtown, but no more than 16 of them have substantial amounts of station-related development.  

This will mean maximizing the use of city-owned land, massive upzoning of land near the stations, generous buy-outs of landowners to achieve appropriate land assembly, and possible creation of one or more public development corporations to move things along. 

To cover the full cost of a subway line from the fare box, there must be 30,000-40,000 residents or jobs within a square kilometre of each station.

The second thing ... is whether the cost of the proposed Sheppard extensions ... Subway lines in Europe are built for about half this amount. Savings come from designing for short, fully automated, driverless trains that provide high capacity by running frequently most hours of the day.

Shorter trains mean smaller stations and thus lower costs. Automation allows closer spacing of trains and thus higher line capacity, offsetting shorter trains. Shorter trains are lighter, which can result in savings in track-bed and other infrastructure costs. Automation also reduces operating costs, creating more surplus to cover construction costs.

Green Belt replaces the Iron Curtain

Along Scar from Iron Curtain, A Green Belt Rises in Germany. Excerpts from the article follow:

A forbidding, 870-mile network of fences and guard towers once ran the length of Germany, separating East and West. Now, one of the world’s most unique nature reserves is being created along the old “Death Strip,” turning a monument to repression into a symbol of renewal.

... 

Conservationists and government officials are striving to make the Greenbelt the backbone of a German-wide system of ecological corridors. Since 1990, the Federal Agency for Nature Conservation has established more than 20 large protected areas connected to the old East-West border. Those protected areas might eventually become part of a much larger effort — proposed by The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) — to create a continuous, pan-European nature reserve stretching from northern Finland to the Black Sea along the route of the former Iron Curtain. 

... 

“We wanted to prove that this is an area of value and that it can transcend the horrors of the past,” says Riecken. In collaboration with Friends of the Earth, Riecken’s agency began a painstaking inventory of the ecosystems and species along the Green Belt. “We had teams of ornithologists, botanists, entomologists, people for many different taxa, walking for hundreds of kilometers along the former border and recording what they came across,” he recalls. Observations from local birders and plant aficionados were fed into the database as well. In the end, more than 1,000 species from Germany’s Red List of endangered species were identified.
‘We wanted to prove that his is an area of value and that it can transcend the horrors of the past,’ said one official.  

Canada Under-Investing in Green Energy

From an article on the need for Canada to invest in green energy for our economic development:

Data from a recent study shows that U.S. and China spent the equivalent of about $360 and $187 per capita respectively in climate-change-related infrastructure projects in 2009, while Canada only invested $87 per capita [my emphasis]. Canada’s failure to match U.S. clean energy investments in recent years has cost our country 66,000 jobs. 

Our failure to harness opportunities to make Canada a leader in the green economy is endangering our economic future. Furthermore, this appears to be happening against the will of Canadians, 83 per cent of whom support investments in green jobs