Margin Notes: World Cup, Perks, Blog, Media

A car was decorated with many Spanish flags on Dundas Street West near the Humber River on 7-July-2010

TORONTO, ONTARIO - Not that there weren't many Dutch fans and plenty of red, white, and blue striped flags on cars, but I have to say that the Spanish fans here really came out for their team, long before the final match yesterday. The most flags I saw on a single car before yesterday is pictured above, and I will not soon forget the Spanish flag draped across the hood of a red pizza delivery vehicle waiting for its next call at the local Pizzaiolo outlet as two Spanish-speaking individuals waxed its sides.

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Now that the World Cup is over, it would be nice if I could finally get K'naan's "Wavin' Flag" out of my head, particularly the World Cup duet version with Spaniard David Bisbal. Somehow, I suspect it's still going to take awhile.

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The World Cup helped Toronto get over its recent memories of violence during the G20 summit. Whatever one thinks about his politics, I have to give Ward 14 city councillor Gord Perks a lot of credit for the most thoughtful and surprisingly balanced views he presented on the event, in particular this essay presented in his weekly newsletter, and a subsequent follow-up. The world needs more politicians with communication skills like Perks, regardless of ideology.

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One might wonder if humans are even a thinking species considering what one did to this traffic cone on Dundas Street West in Toronto, Ontario observed on 1-July-2010

I suspect a G20 protester may have had something to do with the message on this traffic cone seen above near Dundas and Dufferin in Toronto, Ontario: "We are not the only species that can think." My question is whether the message was written by a human or a raccoon.

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The previous item seems like something that might be reported on CBC Radio One's evening news magazine As It Happens. Sometimes in the summer, the fill-in hosts really impact the quality of the show, but I have to say this week's team of Peter Armstrong and Chris Howden was absolutely first-rate. I've criticized Armstrong's work as an anchor of World Report, but he's great in an interviewing role. Perhaps when Michael Enright retires we can get him on the Sunday Edition?

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Speaking of radio people, it was quite nostalgic to have Lynn Neary fill in this weekend as host of Weekend All Things Considered on NPR (which, by the way, no longer stands for National Public Radio, but has become another acronym-turned-non-acronym that stands for nothing). I still consider Neary the quintessential host of the program, a role she held from 1984 to 1992.

Politics: Perks on Transit City

TORONTO, ONTARIO - I attended a community meeting put on by my local Member of Provincial Parliament (MPP) last night. Interestingly, I learned more about what was going on at the federal level than at the provincial level. While I went primarily to find out what my MPP had to say, the event was effectively one for the riding's New Democratic Party (NDP) at all levels, with an aligned city councillor and candidate for federal Member of Parliament in attendance. It was the city councillor, Gord Perks, who I thought stole the show with his presentation on transit.

Perks, who represents Ward 14, which is not my ward but is part of the same provincial and federal riding, has been a supporter of Mayor David Miller's Transit City proposal to bring light rail to many parts of the city currently served by buses. I learned that, at least according to Perks, the areas served by Transit City were chosen in part by identifying the low-income areas that did not have government services (things like employment offices) in their areas. I had thought they were mostly chosen for the purpose of creating a effective grid system based on where demand for transit already exists.

Where Perks really excelled was in rhetorical devices. The proposal by some mayoral candidates to privatize bus service clearly has really rankled Perks. He held up a neck tie, pointing it out as an example of a private-market item that some might call a "frill", and then held up a glass of water, clearly a publicly-delivered service. He asked the question whether transit was more like a neck tie or more like a glass of water, calling for people to treat transit as a fundamental service like water.

The only problem is that, even if one agrees with Perks on that point as I do, there's not a whole lot the city can do about transit funding. The city doesn't have the money to fund transit completely on its own, nor does it have the power to create new taxes or modify tax rates so that it can. All the action is at the provincial level, and the province just halved the money set to be spent on Transit City. While Perks pointed out that if Toronto had the same per-rider subsidy as the VIVA bus system in the adjacent York region that transit here would be free to riders, this statistic is an apples-to-oranges comparison--the whole point of VIVA is to try to drag a transit-unfriendly region into having a more transit-friendly infrastructure, and that obviously requires a big subsidy for a smaller number of riders than a system serving a dense area. Perks himself likes to draw a diagram showing the cost per rider near the center of a city as smaller than in the periphery, which in this case includes the York Region.

Yet, since this problem has to be solved by the province, not the city, it's not hard to understand his frustration. It's the same frustration experienced by every Toronto subway rider who has watched as ridership has grown over the years and the city has had no money to improve service to handle the load. The heat has to be put on the province to either put up money, or allow the city to raise the money itself. The Public Transit Coalition has been founded to do just that. Will it be enough? Time will tell whether transit in Toronto comes to be treated more like a glass of water, or a neck tie.