a not-so-brief rant – Neville Park

Actually, It’s About Ethics In Canadian Journalism

David Hains, “Lessons from Rob Ford’s City Hall”:

As much as you’d like to hope that City Hall is too big and important an institution to be filtered through one man, that is not the case. Time and again, our public conversations have been distilled through Rob Ford’s ideology, preferences, and id. Rather than discussing important issues, like the funding crisis at Toronto’s social housing agency, we heard about the chief magistrate’s homophobia, racism, and misogyny. Would he apologize this time? What did he really mean, though? What would he say to Joe Warmington?

Jesse Brown:

I think that there’s a sense in the press that they don’t want to start something. They want to respond to something. I think that’s a misunderstanding of what the world of the press should be. I think the Toronto Star is the exception to the rule I’m about to describe, but I think, generally speaking, the Canadian press has strayed from its basic connection to its audience. We should be running toward things that have not broken yet. News should be what people don’t know about yet. Everybody is just sort of chewing on the same bone. To be in a completely responsive mode is not responsible journalism.

It’s been incredibly vindicating to see Jesse Brown come along and make these criticisms of the industry. Not that we haven’t been yelling our heads off, but there are an awful lot of media people who will only take it seriously if it comes from the the right sort of white guy. (I don’t think they even realize they do this.) If you are one of those media people, go play outside. Everyone else, keep reading: Continue reading Actually, It’s About Ethics In Canadian Journalism

A Very Special Cheat Sheet: #TObudget 2014

A Note: Operating Vs. Capital
First, Some Context
Operating Budget
Capital Budget
The Most Disingenuous Game

I don’t usually do Cheat Sheets for special meetings, but this one is for the 2014 budget! I love the budget!!! The entire exciting process, which started all the way back in November, is culminating this upcoming Wednesday in a meeting sure to be full of delightful surprises, dramatic reversals, procedural confusion, and petty, childish infighting. Continue reading A Very Special Cheat Sheet: #TObudget 2014

Don’t act so fucking shocked

I’ve seen a few people lamenting that the focus is on Ford smoking crack in that video and not his racist and homophobic remarks, and it’s all just too precious. The hard truth is that for the vast majority of people, using an illegal drug associated with poor black people is more scandalous, more outrageous, more offensive, more disrespectable than looking down on people for being black or gay.

Ford has said racist, homophobic and transphobic things in the past. Ford has been publicly drunk and disorderly in the past. Ford has used drugs in the past. None of this proved enough to stifle his career; none of it attracted demands to step down from such a wide range of people.

The thing is? An awful lot of the people in politics and media who are now going after Ford for smoking crack have been racist and homophobic themselves. Toronto Sun editor Lorrie Goldstein trafficking in racist stereotypes of violent, hypersexual black men, city councillor Mike Del Grande parroting “welfare queen” myths, implying that the groups overrepresented in prison just commit more crimes, etc. Councillor Denzil “Boat People” Minnan-Wong.

It’s not just about conservatives. In the original Star story Doolittle and Donovan repeated “Somali” over and over, apparently oblivious to any repercussions to using the video owners’ ethnicity as shorthand. Members of the community, like Abdi Aidid, forced the paper to revise. (The ethnicity of another key player has escaped comment.) It’s not the first time major papers have previously made a mess of covering and commenting on issues in racialized communities. And it’s not just journalists, either. Today on CP24 I heard one leftist councillor — Paula Fletcher, I think — referring to “gangbangers” as she condemned the company the mayor keeps.

All these people, they smoke pot, they drink, they drop acid, they snort coke, and it’s all right as long as you do it on your own time and don’t come to work fucked up…but stooping to crack cocaine in Rexdale…that’s something else. That’s ghetto. It transgresses the social code of this very white and middle-class sphere.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t go after Rob Ford. He is unfit for office and he’ll never be able to do his job until he tackles his personal demons. But he shields himself with the bodies of young black men and they have been collateral damage in this hunt. (Maybe soon we’ll know if that’s what happened to Anthony Smith.)

I don’t expect much worthwhile discussion of all this in the mainstream media, where the vast hordes of straight white male journalists, even if they are not overtly bigoted, tend to be clueless and deeply uncomfortable talking about things outside their experience. While they occasionally get self-righteous kicks calling out blatant racism or homophobia when it’s not one of their own, the industry of political journalism and punditry is structured in such a way that “minority” issues simply don’t get talked about, and definitely not by marginalized people themselves.

So if you want to hammer the mayor on his racism and homophobia, that’s great, but if you want the masses to care you need to take the right angle. Make it about Ford’s hypocrisy, how he pretended to care about his football team in public and then speaks of them dismissively in private, because the kids are more sympathetic if people don’t have to remember they’re black. Make it about how “fag” is a bad word, so people don’t have to confront their own feelings about male effeminacy. And don’t act so fucking shocked when a heteronormative white industry doesn’t see what the big fucking deal is.

Section 37, Affordable Housing, and Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

It’s a constant source of rage and despair for me to see glass condos and “luxury townhomes” going up around town while the affordable housing waitlist stretches to record numbers. (161,266 people total [PDF] as of January, in case you were wondering.) And, as you know, Bob, since all those new developments mean more Section 37 funds,

—oh, what’s Section 37? Basically, the zoning rules say what kind of stuff you’re allowed to build, and if they say you can only build a tower 6 storeys high, and the developer wants to build one 12 storeys high, Section 37 of the Planning Act says they have to pay some extra money that offsets the extra load on local infrastructure, or goes to benefit the community.* Like, streetscaping, or a daycare, or something.

It’s not a tax because that’s not allowed; the money doesn’t go into some citywide pot because that would make it a tax**; the exact amount, and the nature of the benefit, gets worked out with the city councillor for each development. Anyway—

I naturally wondered if we couldn’t kill two birds with one stone and use Section 37 money for affordable housing. It’s totally an approved use. They can build it elsewhere in the neighbourhood, or they can set aside units in their condo. Because the current rules about it are kind of restrictive, the Planning & Growth Management Committee asked the city planners to revise them so it’s easier to do.*** And today, yes, today, they are talking about it at the committee meeting!!!****

I went to a very interesting open house on this back in November, where the planners explained the upcoming changes. You can read the report yourself to see what bits they’ve added (bolded here). From the list of possible incentives:

i. purpose built rental housing with mid-range or affordable rents, land for housing, affordable ownership housing, or, at the discretion of the owner, cash-in-lieu of affordable rental or ownership units or land;
j. a maximum of 20 individual affordable rental units, located in a registered condominium, provided the units are owned and operated as rental housing by a registered non-profit housing provider satisfactory to the City and meet established criteria, including securing through an agreement the maintenance of affordable rents for at least 25 years and rental tenure for at least 50 years. Such units will be deemed to be rental housing notwithstanding the definition of rental housing that would otherwise exclude condominium-registered units.

(However, after public consultation they’ve decided to remove the cap on rental units, and take another look at the 25- and 50-year requirements (some people think that’s too long; others, not long enough). None of this is written in stone yet.)

So, what’s the problem here? Why aren’t we all jumping for joy? What are some of the possible drawbacks of this approach?

The York Quay Neighbourhood Association thinks that “the affordable housing shortage in Toronto is so acute that we foresee all future Sec. 37 funds flowing towards this desperate need” (PDF), which is painfully adorable, you just want to ruffle their hair. WHO’S A GOOD CONCERNED CITIZEN. YOU. YES YOU ARE. GO FETCH. As a planner present at the open house told me, affordable housing, which calls up stereotypes of bedbug-ridden welfare scroungers bringing down property values, is “poison” to developers. The councillor has to push for it, and the developer has to agree to it, and because it’s something negotiated rather than mandated, you can’t make either of them do any particular thing. Developers make less money if they have it on-site, and they think it’ll bring down the property value if it’s built off-site. Councillors are inclined to side with developers as well; nobody wants to be seen as unfriendly to business. There are a few councillors who consistently negotiate for more housing in their wards (Vaughan, Wong-Tam), but that is entirely because they feel like it. There is no way to make, say, Doug Ford get a developer to opt for affordable housing rather than daycare.

(Can’t we make rules about this stuff? you might ask. Short answer: it’s called “conditional zoning” and “inclusionary zoning” and it’s up to the province, which has taken absolutely no action on it despite the fact that they’re theoretically in favour of it and people do keep putting forward motions and such. Write your MPP.)

Similarly, you can’t say how many units have to be set aside. Nor, it seems, can you add a clause saying “not all of the crappiest units, either”. That all is settled on a building-to-building basis. There’s nothing keeping anyone from setting aside a handful of terrible condo units for the non-profit and calling it a day. It’s too scattershot an approach to help the vast numbers of people who are inadequately housed.

The even deeper problem, which City staff are totally not rushing to point out, is that “affordable”, as the city planners are using it here, doesn’t actually mean, you know, affordable. Most of us hear “affordable housing” and think something like 30% of gross income, TCHC waitlist, bedbugs, etc. LOL NO. Note the inclusion of “mid-range” rent and “affordable ownership”***** in the guidelines. And “affordable ownership” doesn’t mean, like, those programs at Regent Park. “Affordable ownership”, as we were told at that meeting, means average sale price. Dear everyone, do you think the average Toronto home’s sale price is affordable?******

And lest you think I’m just pulling shit out of my ass, ACTO (Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario), who are slightly more in touch with reality than the YQNA, also point this out in their letter (PDF). They also note that over the past sixteen years, only 1,589 “affordable” units have been secured as rental housing. And over half of those were “mid-range” rent rather than, you know, actually affordable. If you think that slightly expanded guidelines will dramatically change that…I’ve got a bridge to sell you. They’re not gonna make a dent in the affordable housing waitlist, which is sitting at about 87,300 applications.

This is the main problem with using a planning tool never intended for the purpose to secure, you know, a basic fucking human right: case-by-case negotiations relying on individual goodwill (but mostly capitalism) will never, ever, ever replace legislation, policy, and investment in infrastructure. Like, ever.

* If you’re wondering how a community benefit takes the weight off local infrastructure, the Federation of North Toronto Residents’ Associations feels your pain (PDF).

** It would be wonderful if all city councillors understood this but they don’t.

*** They mentioned two cases where condo units were set aside for affordable housing:

The Charlie, a condo near King and Spadina, where four units throughout the building are to be owned and operated by Kehilla, a Jewish affordable housing nonprofit
Artscape Triangle Lofts in Liberty Village, where 20 of the live/work artist spaces are rentals and the rest for sale

Such cases didn’t count as Section 37 benefits at the time, but under the new rules, they would. This would ideally allow more affordable housing to be created.

**** Ideally I would have finished this post in, like, November, but ehhhhhhhhhhh~

***** Who the hell is the affordable ownership lobby? Who’s in their pocket? I really want to know.

****** If your answer is “yes”, 1. fuck you and 2. shouldn’t you be reading Toronto Life?

If it’s not anti-racist, is it still responsible journalism?

Note: In my experience, you often need a period where people are encouraged to rant, share frustrations, assure each other they’re not imagining things, etc., before you can get down to working productively among each other. This is a polemic to that purpose.

Since I got involved with municipal politics I’ve met and befriended a lot of people in journalism—a profession that I didn’t really know much about before. I’m consistently impressed by their hard work, tenacity, and commitment to journalistic ethics: fact-checking, research, protecting people’s privacy, respecting “off the record” information, speaking truth to power.

But (of course there’s a “but”) journalists and editors and columnists themselves have power. They play an important role in determining what’s newsworthy and what’s boring. They can change not only the media landscape, but the way we go about making media. They can change how we see the people and events they’re covering.

I only rarely see people in Toronto political media talking about this.

Continue reading If it’s not anti-racist, is it still responsible journalism?

Too many dicks on the dancefloor

This is actually footage from a #TOpoli pub night

#TOpoli, we need to talk. This has been bothering me for a while now, and since it’s International Women’s Day I figure I may as well take this occasion to point out that our burgeoning scene is one big white dudefest. And white dudefests suck. But luckily there are small, practical things we can do to fix this, which is good, because I would hate to totally fucking snap and destroy you all with the burning rage of a thousand Nunziatas.

Continue reading Too many dicks on the dancefloor

Someone is wrong on the Internet, TTC edition

So here I am having gotten work out of the way, done laundry, cooked dinner, looking forward to a pleasant evening of photoshopping city councillors and watching horror movies, when someone on Twitter linked Matt Gurney’s analysis of the whole transit thing that just went down and I had to read it and I don’t normally do the fisking thing but it’s so profoundly out of touch with reality I just need to sit down and bang out a post on how wrong he is about nearly everything here, paragraph by paragraph.

tl:dr; LOL WUT STFU NOOB

The Ford Plan, as it’s been dubbed, involved building a light-rail line entirely underground [blah blah]…It’s a plan with a lot of merit, but was hotly contested by a faction of council that preferred building a greater number of light-rail lines into more Toronto neighbourhoods.

Reality: This light rail plan, Transit City, was introduced under Miller and was about to get going when Ford got elected and unilaterally decided to cancel it in favour of his own plan. The problem is that the province had already agreed to pay for Transit City, whereas Ford’s plan was a little more…ephemeral. Fast forward to now, when the guys doing the Eglinton crosstown line, Metrolinx, are like, “We’re super confused about what we’re supposed to be doing, can City Council clear this up?” [PDF] So the TTC chair, Councillor Karen Stintz, called a special meeting and put forward a motion that was basically “Okay, guys, let’s do Transit City.”

LRTs aren’t as good as subways

Subways are faster and bigger, yes, but they’re also hella expensive, so they’re only worth building in much denser areas. So in this case, for the densities we’re talking about (and that includes projected future growth), light rail would actually be better. For the numbers and a good explanation of the differences between the transit modes, see the Pembina report.

Mayor Ford, a sworn enemy of any transit plan that removes lanes from roads

Um yeah, so that funding already included the costs of widening roads so they wouldn’t lose lanes. Was that good enough for Ford? HELL NO, he doesn’t even want to see the LRVs.

[Ford’s plan was] expensive, but Ford won a victory when he was able to convince the government of Ontario to pick up the entire tab — better than eight-billion bucks.

Well, no. He basically pinky-swore with the Premier. Their agreement was non-binding, which means Council had to approve it first [PDF].

It’s entirely possible that Ontario might agree to allow Toronto to take that $8-billion and use some of it — the portion saved by not burying part of the Eglinton line — on other transit projects

This was the point where I was like, “He doesn’t even go here!”

What actually happened:

Dalton McGuinty: I’ll give you guys $8 billion for this Transit City you planned.
Rob Ford: DISREGARD THAT, SUBWAYS SUBWAYS SUBWAYS
Dalton McGuinty: Um, if Council’s cool with that, I guess.
Council: Nah, the Mayor’s plan blows, let’s do Transit City.
Dalton McGuinty: Sure, whatever. It’s a deal.

Gordon Chong, a former city councillor that Ford hired to prepare a plan showing how the Mayor’s plan was fiscally feasible, spent a year doing exactly that, and determined that it was, indeed, a workable plan. But some new parking fees and road tolls were going to be necessary.

In reality Chong’s report was an “unabashedly political” piece of work that relied on suspiciously low estimates, optimistic projections, and funding sources more wishful than concrete. Subways are not really “workable” in this case because subways are fucking expensive. They’re so expensive that even with (really unpopular) parking fees and road tolls and whatnot the Sheppard subway would still be a billion dollars short.

Ford’s transit plan is arguably superior to the version endorsed by his opponents in council.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAno.

Ford’s plan 1) served like a tenth of the people Transit City would, 2) was horrifically inefficient (for one, LRTs are basically wasted underground), and 3) was prohibitively expensive. In fact, “plan” is kind of a strong word, considering that Ford’s creatively named “Transportation City” was basically just (misconceived) ideas with no means of funding them.

I am genuinely curious as to where Matt Gurney has been getting his information, because I suspect it’s that parallel universe where the St. Clair right-of-way is a dystopian warzone and Bombardier takes payment in Canadian Tire money.

Fuck the Post, I’m going to take a bubble bath.

What the flying fuck happened yesterday?

Let’s do this TUMBLR STYLE.

So they kicked off the Extra Special Surprise Transit Meeting by presenting a shit-ton of petitions from all over the city, mostly for Stintz’s plan.
Mammoliti banged the drum for a subway on Finch, which no one had even been considering until today and which no one can pay for.
His argument was that the people up there are real nice and they deserve subways.
Like the transit version of the Nice Guy™.
The spectre of the St. Clair Right-of-Way Disaster was constantly raised, causing innumerable PTSD flashbacks.
Gary Webster pretty much earned his whole year’s salary patiently answering councillors’ wrong-headed questions about LRTs.
Denzil Minnan-Wong and others brought up an ’86 vote on subways, because that was the last time subways were actually a good idea. I was not even crawling by then, if that gives you any perspective.
Possibly the funniest moment: Nunziata flipping out having just realized that the Stintz “don’t call it the Stintz” plan was basically Transit City. OH SHIT GUYS, SHE’S ON TO US.
Nobody knows the fucking difference between LRTs and streetcars.
Someone had a button maker and was turning out “I ♥ Gary Webster” and “Karen Stintz Fan Club” pins, seen on the lapels of many centre/left councillors.
Rob Ford moved to defer the vote for a month for no damn good reason.
Karen Stintz extended an entire goddamn olive tree to the man and he apparently refused any compromise, even though it would make him look good. WAT.
Perruzza got all fiery and shit.
Doug Ford and Norm Kelly demonstrated their extraordinarily shaky grasp of Canadian history. No, the 2010 mayoral election was not “the largest referendum in Canadian history”, and Toronto is not actually the capital of Canada.
Berardinetti shared an impassioned plea to “depoliticize transiAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA I can’t even type that with a straight face.
The audience died of hunger and dehydration while every goddamn councillor had to stand up and have their say instead of just having the fucking vote.
They had to vote THREE TIMES.
Ford et al. (that makes them sound so much classier) threw a fit by opposing all the subsequent motions, even the routine one to end the meeting, WAT.
We won!!!

The takeaway: The same people who lectured us since last summer about “nice-to-haves” and fiscal responsibility turned around and argued for throwing away billions of dollars from the province and pouring billions more into the exorbitantly expensive and unnecessary transit option (subways) just because they can’t abide seeing public transit vehicles sharing space with CAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRSSSSSSSSS. And when they don’t get their way they’re extraordinarily petty and mean-spirited about it.

The good news: they’re no longer a majority on Council. The best-case scenario a lot of lefties were hoping for when Ford got elected seems to have come to pass — he’s staked out a position extreme enough that most of Council won’t stand with him. He’s unwilling to compromise or build consensus, and that’s finally coming back to bite him in the ass. People are pissed-off, mobilized, and — for the first goddamn time in years — paying attention.

I don’t think it’s too early to declare Rob Ford the best shitty mayor this town’s ever had.