Tag: a brief rant

Recap: The Nov. 2 Munk Debate Protest

Organizers No One Is Illegal:

We gathered to reject the narrowing of the political spectrum of action provided to us by institutions like The Munk Debates. Institutions like The Munk Debates—funded by notorious Canadian mining company Barrick Gold1—continue to tell us that the ideologies on either end of the spectrum are white supremacist/ white-nationalism-fueled by right wing extremism like Bannon, and extreme conservatism like David Frum. Continue reading Recap: The Nov. 2 Munk Debate Protest

Not Another Fucking Budget Overview

I’ve lost my passion for covering the City budget. Partly the clinical depression, I think, but also—it just never changes. There’s only so many times you can write another fucking “after the City Manager warns Council they can no longer ‘kick the can down the road’ for another year, Council votes to kick the can down the road” piece. It’s all too predictable. Continue reading Not Another Fucking Budget Overview

Just a Little Sunday Afternoon Rant About Racism In the Media

Because I’m really tired of the clever arguments and coy dancing around double standards, even from my own “side”:

These are the facts as I see them. I am not here to “start a conversation” or provide balance or engage in debate. These are the principles that guide my thinking.

The leading lights of Canadian media are obnoxiously racist. Continue reading Just a Little Sunday Afternoon Rant About Racism In the Media

On the Campaign Trail in Lake Wobegon

First things first: I hate elections. Suddenly people you could have a normal, genuine conversation with start saying nothing but party talking points. You have to pretend to take debates and campaign promises and interviews seriously, as if they could tell you anything about how the candidate will actually govern in real life. And you can just speculate about any old bullshit that comes into your head and pass it off as serious political analysis. It’s insultingly easy to be an expert on things that haven’t happened yet.

So this is my caveat: 100% of this post is my completely unfounded opinion and by spending energy writing it all I have done is bring the universe infinitesimally closer to heat death. Continue reading On the Campaign Trail in Lake Wobegon

Poverty infrastructure

In Desmond Cole’s story on the City staff report on homelessness, he concludes,

Toronto’s shelter system was never designed to meet the needs it now struggles to address. According to the report, shelters now sometimes serve as permanent or semi-permanent housing for people who should ideally be in some form of assisted-living housing.

And it occurred to me, not for the first time, that this is a defining feature of our poverty infrastructure, a. k. a. the social safety net. Homeless shelters, food banks, and distress lines were only ever meant to be emergency measures. But all of these services have regular users because there is nothing else there to meet people’s basic needs. Instead of permanent affordable housing, people use shelters. Rent is so high that people are chronically unable to afford food, so they rely on food banks. Because adequate preventative mental health care is inaccessible, they call the distress line number posted up by the Bloor Street viaduct for suicidal jumpers.

It is a strained and unsustainable system that various levels of government, which ostensibly want to wipe out poverty, are slowly divesting themselves of, and “downloading” to private enterprises or individuals.

We have essentially refused to hire family doctors, and if anyone gets sick there is no help until you are in such critical condition you need to go to the emergency room. And because the emergency room is only designed to get you out of emergencies, no one will help you get healthy enough so that you don’t need a doctor at all.

You may now return to your regularly scheduled wankery about transit funding. Good night.

Diary of a councilspotter: Plastic bags

Wednesday, June 6, City Council meeting 24

Recap of this morning:

A bunch of councillors throwing hissy fits over the injustice of paying 5¢ for a plastic bag in a perfect microcosm of how conservative governments dismantle themselves by becoming so inefficient they’re not worth having around.

How this got started:

Berardinetti proposed having businesses donate the proceeds from the plastic bag fee to suitable groups, like environmental organizations.

This wasn’t a total dick move, so other people on the Executive Committee added a bit about rescinding the fee altogether.

(So wait, you may say. Are they proposing to get rid of the fee and donating the profits from the fee, in the same motion? Isn’t that kind of confusing? Yes, yes it is.)

And then Perruzza floated the idea of going in the other direction and banning plastic bags (as some cities have done), which made everyone freak the fuck out.

Ridonkulous arguments floated so far:

  • Scrapping the bag fee kills jobs at plastic recycling plants (Del Grande)
  • Dog poop!!1!!11 (Lindsay Luby)
  • If fee proceeds are donated to charity, people will buy EVEN MORE bags (Shiner)
  • Grocery stores aren’t giving out paper bags, so… (Di Giorgio?)
  • The bag fee is bankrupting corner stores and enriching big chains like Loblaws

As I type, the debate is still going on. FUCK EVERYTHING I’M GOING OUTSIDE.

Diary of a councilspotter: In which the politicians take over City Hall

Monday, March 5, City Council meeting 19

The Story So Far:

  • January 17, 2012: In an unprecedented victory, left-wing and centrist councillors get together and vote to reverse most of Ford’s proposed budget cuts. Getting cocky, they think about bringing back Transit City, the previous mayor’s transit plan that Ford strongly opposes.

  • February 8, 2012: At a special council meeting, TTC chair and (up till now) Ford loyalist Karen Stintz spearheads a motion to basically reinstate Transit City, which passes with a decent majority. Team Ford would fire Stintz if they could, but the rules say they can’t.

  • February 21, 2012: Five Ford-friendly members of the TTC board call a special meeting and fire the TTC general manager Gary Webster instead. This is a bad move, and the other four councillors on the board are pissed.

  • March 5, 2012: Council votes to dissolve the TTC board and put together a new one, which happens to include the minority of TTC board members who voted not to fire Webster (this includes Stintz), plus some centrist and left-wing councillors. Council then votes Stintz back in as TTC chair.

For those keeping track at home, this is the third failed attempt by Team Ford to get back at Stintz for Transit City. But there’s more: there’s another special council meeting on the 21st where they’ll be making decisions about transit on Sheppard. (The mayor and others want subways; the plan calls for light rail.)

The title of the post refers to what Cllr Giorgio Mammoliti actually said at some point yesterday. Yes, that apparently came out of his mouth with no irony. It’s only a slightly more fucking ridiculous version of what Cllr Denzil Minnan-Wong and Cllr Michael Thompson have said at various points in the past few months: they believe transit should be depoliticized. Which, I mean, I live and die by “the personal is political”, so you can guess how I feel about that. It’s horrible because everything is fucking political, and “depoliticize” basically just means “pretend it’s not political” or “our politics don’t count as politics”, which is bullshit—

—and if it’s not that, it’s some kind of libertarian shit, like, the government shouldn’t be in this business, which is also bullshit. Doug Ford said as much during last Sunday’s radio show when he was spouting off about how “taxes are evil” (yes, another thing that actually crawled out of someone’s mouth)—he said the government should be providing services, not creating jobs (damn the economy!). But apparently those services don’t even include transit. These people’s ideal government is basically a glorified utility company. No wonder they lack long-term vision.

And I realize the entire point of this enterprise is to get inside government and tear it down but I can’t help remembering another feminist soundbite: “Don’t like abortions? Don’t have one.”

Don’t like politics?

DON’T. FUCKING. BECOME. A. POLITICIAN.

“Poor people will be with us forever”

says budget chief Mike Del Grande in this horrifying chat from last summer, echoing that famous line from the Gospels,

The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them any time you want. But you will not always have me.

It’s a reference to this verse from Deuteronomy outlining economic policies:

There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your fellow Israelites who are poor and needy in your land.

Note the subtle difference between the two verses. In the Deuteronomy version, the ubiquity of poverty is in itself a rationale for caring for the poor. (Our budget chief’s somewhat unorthodox interpretation inverts this reading: the ubiquity of poverty means we shoud not care for the poor.)

In the Gospels, however, Jesus puts his own spin on it. Context, beautiful context: he and the crew are in Bethany and a woman anoints him with expensive perfume, and the disciples are outraged because they think she should have sold it and given the money to the poor. Jesus, however, knows that it’s only a couple days away from the Last Supper and he’s totally about to die. So he says, it’s not a big deal, after I’m gone, you can take care of the poor (in place of me). It’s an echo of the parable of the sheep and the goats:

‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

where service to the poor is considered service to God by proxy.

In Del Grande’s interpretation, however, Jesus doesn’t deserve food or shelter or care. Jesus is not worthy of unconditional love — unjudgmental service for its own sake — because whatever state he’s in is probably his own damn fault. Tough love, man. Sometimes love is impatient and unkind, remembers wrongs, and dishonours and humiliates people.

Take it from a true Christian.

In the News: Social Assistance and Affordable Housing

A few interesting articles in the papers recently:

Globe and Mail: “To end poverty, guarantee everyone $20,000 a year. But are you willing to trust the poor?

This week, a House of Commons committee on poverty released a report proposing a guaranteed basic income for Canadians with disabilities, on the model already available to seniors. The Senate released a similar report this spring calling for a study of how it would work for all low-income Canadians.

In Quebec, a government task force went further, recommending a minimum guaranteed income starting at $12,000 for everyone in the province.

The article covers several promising case studies from all over the world. As a pessimist, I expect the moralistic middle class to react by shooting itself in the foot. Bootstraps!!1!!1, etc.

Globe and Mail: “Health of 400,000 ‘nearly homeless’ as dire as those on streets: study”

So far, [the researchers have] concluded that the biggest gulf in health outcomes is not between the homeless and the housed. Rather, it’s between those who have adequate housing and those who don’t.

Their lifespans are about seven to 10 years shorter than the general Canadian population, the study points out, citing previous research done in 2009.

Men in vulnerable housing situations have the same chance of living to age 75 as an average man in 1921 – before antibiotics were around. They’re more than twice as likely as the average Canadian to commit suicide.

Women in similar situations are as likely to survive to the age of 75 as an average woman living in Guatemala. They’re six times more likely to commit suicide than the average Canadian.

Toronto Star: Porter: “Linda Chamberlain’s job was making her broke”

As I mentioned on Twitter, even a part-time minimum wage job pays substantially more than social assistance. The “welfare trap” comes into play when someone’s on social assistance and working: half your pay is subtracted from your social assistance payments. And if you’re in subsidized housing, your rent is geared to your income—your gross income. Such is the case of Linda Chamberlain.

After three decades of battling schizophrenia and homelessness and poverty, Chamberlain finally got a job. She worked 2 ½ days a week as a peer support worker on the very floor where she once lived at the Centre for Mental Health and Addiction. It’d be hard to find a better success story.

Except, under the antediluvian web of provincial rules, she lost half of her paycheque to the government, while her rent-geared-to-income skyrocketed by 471 per cent.

The article notes that, when a panel of welfare experts recommended—among many other things—that rent-geared-to-income be calculated from net and not gross income, the Community and Social Services Minister shot it down. Because we’re in a recession. And we have to cut expenses—inevitably at the cost of the poorest, most vulnerable, and most marginalized.