Category: Canada
Anything related to Canada or Canadians
Another sting from our terrible leaders
Our provincial Premier — head of a government which is effectively the political wing of the property development industry — now hopes to get rid of both bike lanes which I use every day: down Yonge Street and along Bloor.
Snake Island Lake, Temagami
Toronto is a bike city
A friend from the Toronto group bike ride community directed me to Jeff Allen’s intringuing and beautiful cartographic work.
One especially striking map – which supports my view that bicycling has become the best and fastest form of transport in Toronto – shows which areas it is faster to reach from Yonge-Bloor by bike than by transit during rush hour:
You can get a long way! Straight north to York Mills. Southwest past the mouth of the Humber. Southeast past Tommy Thomson Park and into Scarborough.
The map is from 2016, but I would imagine things are worse now with transit underfunding and all the slowdown zones, plus all the streets blocked up by summer construction.
Group bike rides build community
I have been getting a lot of satisfaction lately from group bike rides. Community emerges naturally when people ride bikes in groups. The contrast underscores how automobile culture is a death cult: every driver gets their own sarcophagus for the living to move them through places while keeping the driver sealed apart. The driver is isolated from nature, from community, and from life at a human scale. They begin to live at a car scale where our instincts and experiences no longer bind us to our neighbours. The car is built to move at 60, 80, 100 km per hour, and to be indifferent to anything it might need to kill to do so.
Group bike rides provide a tangible vision for an idealized future without private cars. That’s a world where people who take the same routes and live in the same neighbourhoods know each other and talk: where they are neighbours. That’s a world with flower fairy girls on lavishly decorated cruiser bikes, and with guys in motorcycle helmets and body armour riding on zippy electric unicycles.
On a bike in the city, you live with the constant awareness of being killed. When riding alone, the great majority of my attention is always directed to nearby drivers and what abrupt, dangerous, or illegal thing they may do next. For drivers in the city, they may live with a mild awareness that their every careless action threatens to kill others, but they are distracted by bluetooth calls and streaming media, alienated from their fellow residents by socially atomized affluence, and shielded by public opinion and a legal system where killing someone with your car through simple carelessness is a minor and unimportant oversight which ought not to impede your happy motoring.
Toronto’s Neon Ride
Toronto’s Neon Ride group bike ride is great fun. It leaves weekly from Nathan Philips Square, beside city hall, at 7:30pm on Thursdays. Their Facebook page is the best place to look for photos and updates.
After getting hooked again on cycling during my Vancouver visit during the summer, I got a Bikeshare Toronto pass in September and did most of the Neon Rides until I got a job in December and was too busy.
This animation shows the 9 rides I have done with them, including whatever I tacked on before and after the formal ride from Nathan Philips to Nathan Philips:
The ride is much reminiscent of Critical Mass at its best. There is an able crew that leads, corks streets when the mass is crossing, and sweeps at the back for stragglers. All the lights and boomboxes make it energetic and fun. Quite notably – and compared with Critical Mass – the fun and colour of the Neon Ride virtually always produces a positive reaction from passers-by. It’s also a large enough group that you can ride in the middle while giving little thought to cars. Much recommended.
There is also a fine community within the event. As it is assembling and at the frequent pit stops, I have had great conversations and enjoyed the feeling of community and group spirit.
Mobilizing structures in the UBC pro-Palestine encampment
Interesting from a social movement perspective:
The UBC encampment for Palestine has been going strong since April 29. Working as a horizontal organizational structure, the encampment is a leaderless, non-hierarchical space where everyone is equal. We have groups in charge of different tents related to the daily operation of the camp, including food, safety, supply, medicine, art, and library. General meetings are held as frequently as possible and are the only platform to decide the goals of the encampment. It is a process of direct democracy where everyone’s voice is heard and considered, with final decisions being made based on majority votes.
Everyone who shows up to this camp is intelligent, kind, and capable of doing great things, however, we are humans, and deep down, we all seek a sense of belonging. This whole encampment is like a community, and within it, each tent is part of the group. However, it did not always feel like a cohesive community. Before the camp reached this structure, it was run by multiple “invisible” hierarchies.
Initially, there were instances where outgoing white, cisgender, and conventionally-attractive men were automatically assumed to be smart, reliable, and worthy to make decisions, while non-conforming and marginalized individuals had to work harder to be acknowledged. I don’t think this was done purposely, but can be attributed to the mixture of pressure at the encampment and the unconscious biases ingrained in colonial ideologies. The constant struggle to have all our voices heard caused tension in the supposedly democratic structure, as well as relationship mistrust in the camp. This was not what I and a lot of comrades expected from this space, where solidarity with Palestinians against colonization demands democratic practice and decentralized decision-making.
As a young, gender-non-conforming person of color, my voice was often overshadowed in favour of white, cisgender campers. We took time to acknowledge and address these biases and hierarchical structures and we came up with alternative ways to ensure every voice was heard. I believe our camp is being managed in a more inclusive way, moving toward good causes, rather than replicating oppressive systems.
Personally, I think the progressive obsession with the identities of their messengers is counterproductive to effective political organizing. A person’s ideas are good or bad based on their content, not the demographic characteristics or group identity of the speaker. Viewing people as legitimate or illegitimate participants because of arbitrary features of their identity turns them from active thinking agents to mere group representatives. Also, this sort of privileging and de-privileging puts feelings of purity and moral superiority ahead of the question of whether the activism is having any broader societal effect.
Toronto—St. Paul’s results
Blackboard seminar on climate
Yesterday at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA) I gave a talk on humanity’s energy history, the fossil fuel energy system, and potentially climate-safe alternatives:
See also: Saving our Future from Climate Change
Humans struggle with allocating losses
Canada seems to have a weird atmosphere of being in a recession, but without that term being used and without the definition (in terms of GDP growth or contraction) being met.
This starts to make more sense when you see that the GDP growth is largely the result of population growth and growth in the labour supply – not increased output per worker. GDP per capita was $58,304 in Q1 of 2020 and $58,111 in Q4 of 2023. Meanwhile, according to the Bank of Canada’s inflation calculator, inflation has averaged 4% per year over the span, so C$100 in 2024 buys what C$85.48 would have bought in 2020. The average Canadian is getting poorer, even with all the stimulus that was given out over the pandemic and with all the new debt which has been accumulated. I personally think governments have been pulling out all stops to keep asset prices (especially stocks and houses) high since the 2008 financial crisis, with very little consideration of what those measures are doing to the non-affluent and those in future generations.
This is worrisome both in the immediate context and as a broader signifier. Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow stresses how people experience gains differently from losses, and find a loss of any size more aversive than they find a gain of that size pleasurable. He comments on the social and political implications:
If you are set to look for it, the asymmetric intensity of the motives to avoid losses and to achieve gains show up almost everywhere. It is an ever-present feature of negotiations, especially of negotiations of an existing contract, the typical situation in labor negotiations and in international discussions of trade or arms limitations. The existing terms define reference points, and a proposed change in any aspect of the agreement is inevitably viewed as a concession that one side makes to the other. Loss aversion creates an asymmetry that makes agreements difficult to reach. The concessions you make to me are my gains, but they are your losses; they cause you more pain than they give me pleasure. Inevitably, you will place a higher value on them than I do. The same is true, of course, of the very painful concessions you demand from me, which you do not appear to value sufficiently! Negotiations over a shrinking pie are especially difficult, because they require an allocation of losses. People tend to be much more easygoing when they bargain over an expanded pie. (p. 304)
Globally, this pattern is alarming too. Humanity is choosing to persist in activities which we know will cause catastrophic climate change, loss of wealth, and unprecedented damage to the natural world which sustains us. We are also massively failing to invest enough in non-fossil energy sources to retain our current standard of life. This is setting us up for brutal inter- and intra-national fights over allocating losses.
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