Author: Dave

I am happy to see Senator Lynn Beyak “kicked out” of the CPC Senate caucus. I would not however go so far as to say that it represents any moral rectitude on the part of Andrew Scheer or the CPC. They did not rebuke her, indeed they were vocally supportive of Beyak, when she humiliated herself and all Canadians by suggesting, in the House, that residential schools were a net positive if some of the children who survived were Christianized. These racist letters that she posted to her parliamentary website were letters of support for exactly that stance.

So, what has changed? Well, Ontario is having an election this year, and there is an upcoming federal election in 2019. Conservatives will want something to point at to show they are not the racists they have been for years, even if they actively court that base.

But there is another factor to consider. Lynn Beyak is a stupid white woman. The stupid and white are important, not only because her privilege has befuddled her critical thinking, but because her being white is the only reason someone so stupid could have achieved such high office. In the last CPC leadership race candidates were running on xenophobic ignorance and hate, so don’t tell me that these ideas are unique to Senator Beyak, they are common tropes both within the party and its racist base. Nope, Lynn is not especially racist for her party, but she is also a woman. And at this point in time a party that is also misogynistic has looked around for a public relations scapegoat and thrown HER under the bus.

People who want blastocysts, embryos, and fetuses to have ‘rights’ create an unreasonable dilemma.

Either women have rights, or you can require them to carry a child.
Either women can choose to terminate a pregnancy or they do not have a right to security of their person. There is no way around this.

No matter how deeply you feel about the life of an unborn child there is no practical way for it to have rights that supersede or restrict those of the mother.

No matter how distressing you find this reality there is no moral choice that assigns rights to a pregnancy where that would deprive the host of her rights as an independent human being, which blastocysts, embryos and fetuses are not.

No matter how impractical a method of birth control abortion is, disenfranchising pregnant women, and therefore by extension, sooner or later most women, is a repugnant option.

This is why it is intolerable for a political party to advance members who take an anti-abortion stance or who advocate any measure that would tend to limit women’s access to reproductive health services. It is simply not acceptable that any person in a position of authority could stand behind a policy that inevitably and so negatively diminishes women’s hard-won legal personhood and still moderate gains in equality.

But the distress and hand-wringing is entirely unnecessary. Ask, “Do women have rights.” It’s a simple question, with a simple answer that must be, “yes.”

Every so often, someone buys a shitty backpack, catches a ride to the end of some logging road, heads off into the “wilderness” with high hopes, and ends up leaving their broken corpse somewhere inaccessible for future generations to find.

No one can survive alone outside the community of people. Our species has been specializing in interdependence for hundreds of thousands of years. To survive and prosper each one of us needs the fellowship and cooperation of our community.

This allows individuals to specialize in, for instance, plumbing. You can become an excellent plumber because you can rely on bakers to bake, firefighters to extinguish fire, dentists to cause you periodic discomfort and etc. That way they can also become excellent specialists because they can rely on you to be great at plumbing for them.

And everyone cooperates. They may superficially resent or disparage this, but everyone needs help in order to move house, to hold a ladder, to let them do a lane change.

This is what society is made of. Everything about everyone’s survival and prosperity is based in social cooperation and mutual support.

Survivalist libertarian nut-job vloggers do not ride a bicycle strapped to a generator for 10 hours to make the electricity to charge their cellphone to record their latest every-one-for-themselves podcast. Not any more than they maintain a unique personal GPS satellite system so they can find their car after.

Almost every aspect of everyone’s life is intricately entwined with the efforts and good will of the members of their society. Where this breaks down, death follows.

Which is why it makes me so angry to listen to ranters deride socialism, for socialism in its fundamentals is just this cooperation and specialization of everyone, for everyone, that no one is apart from unless they are face down in a ravine waiting to die.

No matter what humans do within society we are all socialists. Humans are social animals. It is our one true strength and the source of all our adaptation. If you cannot understand this you are either eligible for the gold medal in self delusion or are alone, cold, wet and unlikely to make it til morning.

Today I saw a person praying openly and at considerable length, and I was reminded of what freedom of religion is.

I was reminded because prescribed ritual behaviour makes me quite uncomfortable. However religious freedom, freedom from religious persecution actually, means that my discomfort was my problem, not his.

Centuries of monotheists persecuting people of different faiths necessitated that secular societies advanced the principal that you should not attack anyone just because they do not conform to your views on religion.

So while I sat their and the praying continued I was not only aware of my irrelevant discomfort, but of the climate in the room as people whispered and pointed and checked to see if, in an historic context, there was something intolerant they needed to do about the “other.”

I remember IRA bombings in the news. I am belatedly aware that there are conservative senators in Canada who think the cultural genocide of my country’s first nations was not so bad if some of the victims were successfully indoctrinated to Christianity.

So, what is my point? I am not very certain. I am dismayed by the surge in public religiosity particularly among white Christian evangelicals in North America, which I can only put down to a failure in education. However what I am certain of is that the whiff of intolerance I experienced today is not a healthy response to anyone’s faith.

A couple of weeks ago my mum, 98, asked me what made men gay. To which I answered nothing makes men gay.

Consider this. About half the people in the world prefer women, and about half prefer men. And most of the people who prefer women are men and most of the people who prefer men are women. If those two statements are true then it is inevitable that some people who prefer women are women and some people who prefer men are men. These are not even different sexual preferences. If I am attracted to the same person as a female friend, we are having the same sexual preference.

Imagine if every time you did this, when you flipped a light switch off, the light stayed on and the switch asked, “Do you want to turn the light off?” requiring you to flip the switch a second time. No one would put up with that annoyance. It would be the most infuriating passive-aggressive bullshit ever. This is the kind of thing someone would implement to drive you mad.

But this strategy is commonplace in software interfaces. As an example, on a Mac the default setting for Empty Trash is to ask you if you want to empty the trash. Properly then the menu item should read, “Ask me if I want to empty the trash.” This is messed up.

You can, and should, change this particular default behavior. Putting items into the trash is a deliberate operation. The trash is not a storage location. No one would, or perhaps I should say should, ever put any file they want to keep, in the trash. And putting something in the trash and emptying the trash is already a two-step process. If you can mess that up, adding a paternalistic, “Are you sure?” dialogue is not going to help you?

And how is this useful interface design? Every time my workflow is interrupted to repeat an instruction this way, I immediately think something like, “Why would I have asked you to ‘Empty Trash’ if I did not want to?”

At the very least interfaces should allow you to disable such warnings whenever they come up. Some do, but making users repeat themselves seems to be a core strategy in interface design..

Command-shift-q opens a Log-Out dialogue on a Mac, and this is fine. However if I deliberately navigate to and choose ‘Log Out User Name’ in the menu, up pops the same dialogue, asking me if I want to do the thing I just told the machine to do.

In bizarre contrast, command-option-shift-q effectively pulls the plug on a mac shutting down unceremoniously without giving you the option to save anything. This cannot be disabled and can be very upsetting if you are working in a 3D app where command-option-shift-w is a thing.

These two examples represent diametrical strategies and are inexplicable as they occur in the same OS. On the one hand we have the passive aggressive insistence on making you repeat commands you could not have chosen accidentally. On the other hand is the impossibility of disabling a keyboard shortcut you could not possibly want to use, and could quite easily enter accidentally. These choices are both dreadful design. I would be ever so pleased if designers stopped putting such in software.

You may think that road tolls are a good idea.

You may think that, as Toronto mayor John Tory asserts, those people coming into the city use the roads paid for by local property taxes. Those commuters should have to help pay for the roads they use.

You may understand that there are too many cars producing too many emissions and imagine that tolls will work as a deterrent. People will carpool or take transit to avoid the tolls.

You may have concluded that the City needs new revenue streams and that tolls are a necessary or desirable way of raising capital to fund infrastructure investment. Toll revenue can be used to pay for the Don Valley and the Gardener. And also that same money can be used to pay for expanded transit.

Superficially these seem reasonable.

First, please explain to me how commuters working in Toronto do not contribute to the economy of the city. While they do not pay Toronto property taxes if their homes are elsewhere, the fact that they spend their working lives at Toronto businesses means that the majority of their contribution to the economy is localized in Toronto. The City is the principal beneficiary of their labour.

Moreover these people do pay property taxes where they live, often amounts similar to those paid by Torontonians on much higher valued properties in areas with much more robust services. That they should subsidize another municipality additionally is tyrannical.

This attitude is emblematic of the worst kind of us-and-them regionalism. It is petty. Moreover as a principal it means that when tens of thousands of Toronto property tax payers head out to cottage country, they should have to pay a toll to use each regional and municipal road they did not pay for in their property tax.

Now, consider commuters. I live in Ajax. I could not be better connected to Union Station and Danforth/Main by GO. Inevitably if I am going to either I take transit because that is the most practical option by a long shot. This is absolutely not true of most of the Toronto area. People driving into Toronto are mostly not doing so because they want to. They, like myself, likely live where they do because they could not possibly afford to live closer to downtown.

Most commuters who drive in on the DVP in particular are going somewhere they could not reasonably or practically go to by transit. My wife at one point considered a job that would have been quite near the Bloor GO. Can you get there from the east in the morning? No you cannot.

When I started driving gas was 22¢/L. Gas prices five and six times that have not changed when or where I have to go and the impracticality of doing so, except in specific cases, without driving. Increased cost in the form of tolls will not accomplish this either.

You cannot make anything better by making something else worse. Ideally anyone in Ontario should be able to go out their front door on foot and get anywhere else in Ontario in a reasonable time frame at a reasonable price on transit. The only way you get there from here is to consistently improve and expand transit. As part, or more often as the entirety of a transit strategy, making alternatives to transit more difficult or more costly without providing a realistic and practical transit alternative is doing nothing useful.

And finally, revenue. How is Toronto to pay for the roads that were downloaded onto it? How is the City to fund transit expansion? For transit expansion is desperately needed.

To justify the need for more transit I will just make this argument. Some time ago 20% of trips into or within Toronto were via transit. Lets say you then wanted to reduce automobile use from 80% of trips to 60% of trips, which would still leave cars the principal method of getting around. It is basic math that to increase transit trips from 20% to 40% you are likely to need twice as much transit. So, that would cost ballpark twice as much in investment.

So, are tolls going to pay for that? The 2016 TTC expenses were $1,749,274,000.00. The Gardiner/DVP tolls are projected to bring in $200,000,000.00. That is about 11% of the TTC budget and does not include funding the roads… So, no, this is not a revenue solution.

But Toronto needs a revenue solution. This is not the only area of spending where the city is not keeping up. So why does the City not have enough money? Transfer payments from the Province are not what they should be. The provincial and federal governments are underfunded. Why is that? Why is not enough money trickling down to municipalities?

Part of that can be found in Steven Harper’s firewall letter. It was his explicit purpose in going to Ottawa to impoverish and thereby diminish the government in Ottawa. But this is not only his doing. Canadian’s high-income tax rates are much lower now than they were in the 1980’s. There has been a relentless campaign to relieve the wealthy of their tax obligations. This includes far better ways for the wealthy to shelter their incomes from tax. And corporate income tax rates are at century lows. Formerly the CIT was around 40%. Today it is about 22%.

The richest Canadians and the corporations they control hold the biggest share of the country’s wealth and we keep decreasing how much of that is taxed and at what rate.

Governments do not have a spending problem. We need to double and treble transit infrastructure investment for instance. Governments have a revenue problem. And that problem has been deliberately caused by lowering income taxes for the wealthy and their corporate interests.

So what about tolls then? What are they for? What are any user fees for? This is how we put the cost of tax cuts onto the people least able to pay. Tolls exist to fund tax cuts for high-income people and corporations.

If that is what you want, lower taxes for the 1%, by all means be in favour of tolls.