If they put a toll on political bullshit, they’d make way more money

So, this:

Toronto Mayor John Tory is set to endorse a controversial introduction of road tolls on the Gardiner Expressway and Don Valley Parkway to raise $300 million a year for his cash-starved government, the Star has learned. Tory is expected to make the daring declaration in a luncheon speech shortly after the Thursday release of city staff reports recommending highway tolling, along with other so-called revenue tools including a new tax on hotel stays.

Reminded me of this:

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I came up with www.millerhighwayrobbery.ca in 2003, when I was helping out on John Tory’s first mayoral campaign.  He thought it was a great idea, back then.  And, once elected, Miller refused to go ahead with tolls on the DVP or Gardiner.  So I guess we won that debate.

Anyway.  I like John a lot.  And I’m sure he’ll have focus-grouped talking points ready to go on this truly whiplash-inducing flip-flop – circumstances have changed, I’m not afraid to admit when I was wrong, less than a cup of coffee a day, the alternative is the apocalypse, look at me I’m finally being decisive about something, blah blah blah – and I’m sure he’ll have some cyclists who’ll buy it, hook, line and sinker.

So, I’ll leave it to other folks to get really, really pissed off about this (and there’ll be plenty of those folks, believe me).  Me, I will simply say that (a) www.ToryHighwayRobbery.ca plus (b) the fact that SmartTrack is never, ever, ever going to happen may well lead to something else entirely in 2010.

Something like this.


Donald über Alles: the Trump virus spreads to Calgary

Blood and Honour is a thirty-year-old neo-Nazi organization that started in the U.K., and was founded by Ian Stuart Donaldson of Skrewdriver. Combat 18, meanwhile, is a mainly skinhead organization that has been responsible for murders and assaults targeting non-whites around the globe (the “18” is the numbers of he alphabet representing AH – Adolf Hitler).

This recruitment sticker was spotted at the Lions Park LRT this morning in Calgary, a few blocks from where I lived during law school.

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This week’s column: pinned to the wall

My family member is pinned to my wall, like an insect.

It’s a bit clinical, perhaps, but it’s apt. Ever since Donald Trump shocked the world, and rode a wave of white resentment and rage into the Oval Office, I’ve been thinking a lot about my relative. He used to be a Canadian, and normal. But now he lives somewhere in the United States, and he doesn’t seem very normal anymore.

And he is a devoted supporter of Donald Trump.

So I have figuratively put him up there: him the bug, me the entomologist. I watch him – “pinned and wriggling to the wall,” in that celebrated T.S. Eliot stanza – and try and understand him, and those like him.

When he was still a Canadian, he was a Liberal and a liberal. He was well-educated; he was urban, urbane. Agnostic, caustic. He was funny and smart. He was born in Montreal, like most of our Irish Catholics family was, and then he ended up in Ottawa. A public servant. A bureaucrat.

The usual stuff happened: divorces, kids, job changes, upheaval. Life’s curveballs. He changed, a bit.

I’d run into him in bars in and around Ottawa. His appearance, his look, was different. He seemed angry, really angry. He was particularly angry about women, and he’d say things about women that actually shocked me. He’d say what he wanted to do to women, not with women. “Locker room talk,” Trump calls it. It was uncomfortable, so I started avoiding him.

And then, he slipped into some Bermuda Triangle, and we all lost track of him. He was in Europe, or something. Next thing I knew, he was living in the States – a battleground state – and he was married with kids. His wife wasn’t white. They went to church regularly, I heard, and he strongly disapproved of popular culture and progressive values.  

He read Mark Steyn and the like. He called himself a Republican, but he was on the outer fringes of that once-great party. When I saw him at a wedding, once, he told me what a relief it was not be a Canadian anymore, and to not have to worry about Quebec separatists or multiculturalism or any of the trivialities that preoccupy us up here.

Still seemed angry, though. It was still there, his suburban middle-America reverie notwithstanding.  

A year or so ago, we all heard he had gone full Trump. He was even working for Trump. So, I silently re-committed to avoiding him. I did not want my kids exposed to someone who supported someone who was a sexist, racist lunatic with fascistic leanings.  

My wife and I started volunteering for Hillary Clinton whenever we were in the U.S. We worked for her in three states, knocking on doors, stuffing envelopes, doing whatever was needed.

We all thought she was going to win. We never thought Donald Trump would, not for a minute.  

Since his electoral college victory, of course, things have gotten just as bad as you’d expect. Trump’s transition to power is in chaos. He’s been on the line with Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin before he’s talked to his NATO allies. He’s made a white supremacist and anti-Semite his most senior advisor. He’s scoffed at conflicts of interest. He says he will eradicate Roe v. Wade, and a woman’s right to choose. He says he will round up and deport three million people. He’s surrounded himself with conspiracy nuts. He’s going to tear up trade deals, and target Canadian exports. He has gone back on Twitter to say that “professional protestors” have been “incited by the media” against him.

And, in just a single week, the U.S. bond markets have lost a trillion dollars in value. Hate crimes have exploded, with hundreds being reported by the independent Southern Poverty Law Centre – and with attacks on Muslims up some 70 per cent. And that woman who, as a 13-year-old, says that she was raped by Trump? She dropped her case against him, because she was getting too many death threats.

I reflect on all of this, and more, as I peer at my relative on the wall. I don’t understand him, at all. But I need to, if I want to prevent something like Trump from happening again. Even up here, in the form of Kellie Leitch or someone else.

Was it anger? Racism? Sexism? Populism? What propelled a member of my own family into the arms of a monster like Donald Trump?

Reflecting on all that, it occurs to me that it isn’t my relative who is pinned to the wall, now.

 


OREA: at the #OREAPAC16 conference today

With the erudite and brilliant Chad Rogers, the charming and brilliant Kathleen Monk, and some guy brought in to refresh their water glasses.

On one point we all agreed: the outcome of the next Ontario election remains elusive.  (When cabinet ministers do stuff like this, you understand why.)

 

Chad Rogers, Kathleen Monk, some guy who walked in off the street, Val from OREA.


Ch-ch-changes: why the best candidates sometimes lose

My take, in today’s Hill Times:

Warren Kinsella, a former assistant to Mr. Chrétien and now a Hill Times columnist, said sexism played a role in both Ms. Clinton’s and Ms. Chow’s defeats, and that the campaigns of Mr. Martin and Mr. Prentice were simply “badly run.” However, he said it’s always a number of factors that lead to these star candidates losing rather than just one thing.

He said with all the noted situations of favoured candidates losing, there was a longing for change among the electorate, and they weren’t seen as the ones who were going to bring that change.

“When people want change, you’d better not be seen as the candidate of the status quo,” Mr. Kinsella said in an email. “Voters will embrace the change candidate every time, even if it’s radical change, as in the case of the shockingTrump win.”