Culture: Employed Lifestyle

TORONTO, ONTARIO - Today is not only the last day of calendar 2010, but the last day of my working for my employer of the last two months.

Regular readers of this blog may not even have been aware of the fact that I was working again. I made no announcement on this forum. Careful re-reading of the last two months of entries will reveal only a few very oblique references to e-commerce, but also a lack of references to being unemployed, which were never especially common here in the first place.

It wasn't that I wasn't proud of what I was doing, that I wasn't enjoying the customer service position, or that I was anticipating that I would be switching jobs so rapidly, which wasn't at all obvious to me until well into December. Instead, I had long structured many aspects of my life such that returning to a regular 9-to-5 job, as this one was, would have minimal impact on my activities. Sure, I wouldn't be going railfanning in winter daylight hours, or listening to daytime radio live, but little else needed to change. This blog had for many months generally been written in the late evening intentionally so that my routine would not need to change when I became employed. Sure enough, I started a job, and the impact on my blogging was nearly imperceptible.

One thing that I learned in the past two months is that, indeed, I could have a very comfortable lifestyle in Toronto working a 9-to-5 job. A look at this blog will see that I attended not only events at the CBC (a very short walk from where I was working) but also evening community events around the city. My social life, such as it is, was not suffering as a result of the position. My weekend activities had no need to change whatsoever.

I had long suspected that commuting by subway to downtown, which took me only about 45 minutes each direction, would be far more sustainable than my previous mostly-bus commute into the suburbs, which could take 80 minutes on a bad day. Even when the subway was disrupted, as happened at least three times I remember in the past two months, it never took me much more than an hour to complete the commute. During the winter, especially, it was quite nice to be mostly underground.

Fundamentally, the job that I held for my first two years in Toronto always felt unsustainable, even in the beginning. The hours and the commute were always draining; I slept in significantly on Saturday by necessity. For the last two months, I've instead been getting up earlier on Saturday for volunteer work than on weekdays. There's no way I could have done that before.

I could have kept going in my recent job for a long time; I could easily imagine staying with that employer for years. However, when one is aggressively pursued by an employer in a potentially-growing industry, it's pretty hard to ignore and turn down an attractive offer.

My cushy, predictable lifestyle is over, at least for the foreseeable future. I will now be in field service, with unpredictable travel. I have no idea what this will mean for the publishing schedule of this blog. Yet, I am satisfied that I have demonstrated that blogging can be part of a sustainable lifestyle. It's not inconceivable that I might miss that.

Economy: Putting a Very Public Face on It

TORONTO, ONTARIO - At long last, the mainstream media in the United States has started to focus occasionally on the long-term unemployed. I found it especially significant to hear a systems engineer from California as a guest on the NPR talk show On Point when it explored the topic, as that could have easily been me with slightly different life decisions. Yet, it was another radio show that provided an example that may resonate with just about anyone that's lived in northern California in the past generation.

On Brian Copeland's Sunday morning talk show on KGO in San Francisco, he took a call twenty minutes into his third hour from a Mike in Vallejo. The Mike was soon revealed to be Mike Pechner, the well-known meteorologist who worked at rival KCBS in San Francisco for forty years. I even knew Mike Pechner's name before I moved to the area from listening to the station at night from Seattle and while visiting the area--for people that grew up listening to KCBS for news, Pechner was an absolute institution. Probably nobody was more closely identified with morning weather forecasts in the Bay Area than Pechner, certainly not for as many years as Pechner was on the air.

Furthermore, I had met Mike Pechner. Besides being a radio personality, he is a railroad enthusiast, a member of many of the fan groups that I also participated in while in the Bay Area and especially active surrounding any railroad in the north bay where he made his home. He has been an outspoken advocate of the restoration of service in that region, all the while providing expert forecasts to railfans who wanted to check out train action on Donner Pass around snowstorms.

So, needless to say, I perked up when it became clear that it was Mike Pechner calling in. It turns out that since he was laid off by KCBS, he has become a member of the long-term unemployed. He described how he has unsuccessfully tried to pursue alternate careers to broadcasting but that his age--he is now 64--was proving to be a major problem. About the only way he had found to earn a partial living was substitute teaching--but with the rash of teacher layoffs in California, this was becoming less and less frequent.

Anyone that has met Mike Pechner knows that he is a hard worker--and I suspect most people who heard him on the radio don't have much difficulty imagining that. While I haven't seen him since I moved out of the area, I had heard second-hand even before this radio call that he is nearly as vigorous today as I remember him from a decade and a half ago. He is a classic example of an older worker with a lot to offer the world--but in this economy, he's just another member of the long-term unemployed.

If a man that more than a generation grew up listening to as their weatherman can end up without a job for more than two years, just about anyone can. Besides being a quality radio conversation between two pros in Pechner and Copeland, this segment of a radio program provided the most compelling example of just how bad this economy is for so many people. If everyone in northern California had been listening to the Brian Copeland program and heard the call from Mike Pechner, there would be almost nobody there left not supporting the extension of unemployment or some other assistance to the long-term unemployed. I encourage everyone to listen to it before it disappears from the KGO archives next Sunday.

Economics: The Immigrant Gap

TORONTO, ONTARIO - In theory, having a college degree should go a long way toward avoiding unemployment. According to statistics released this week, people with at least an undergraduate degree in Canada have a 3.4% unemployment rate, compared with 8% overall. However, if the unemployment rate of 8% feels too low, that's probably because you have migrated to Canada. Migrants with at least an undergraduate degree have a 13.4% unemployment rate, 4.1 times the rate for born Canadians.

Three factors seem to have been identified as leading to the large discrepancy. Language skills, problems with recognition of foreign credentials, and lack of Canadian work experience are cited. Only the last factor could possibly be at work in my case, and I suspect in this economy that it is by far the largest factor. Near as I can tell, this is a completely experience-driven market--employers will only consider candidates that were doing exactly the same job for several years at another company. Want to sell oneself on the basis of flexibility or education? Good luck. When there's no reward for taking risks in the labour market, the safest thing for an employer to do is hire someone that's already done the job.

The "immigrant gap" in the unemployment rate made the news because Canada is expected to grow only on the basis of immigration by 2030, and the figures on the surface seem to suggest that the country does not know how to integrate the educated immigrants that it will need in the future. As Amanda Lang of the CBC put it, if the current underemployed or unemployed immigrants were working at their potential, there would be $6 billion more flowing through the Canadian economy.

Yet, this may not actually be an immigrant problem; the immigrants like me may be closer to canaries in a coal mine. Because immigrants as a class almost by definition have the least Canadian work experience, they will be hurt the most in an experience-based economy. I've told the story on this blog before about a hiring manager that was so intent on finding the perfectly-matching candidate that a senior position was left open for nine months--until a corporate re-organization eliminated the whole group as under-performing. That was a Canadian hiring manager.

With unemployment high, stories like that are extremely rare right now--so many people are out of work that employers have many "perfect" résumés. When the economy starts to expand at historical averages or better in the future, successful employers will have to get over the perfect-experience mentality, take some risks in order to get rewards.

In the meantime, those of us with experience in fields that may never hire again have a pretty bleak outlook--even going back for more education doesn't help, as unless that results in a blockbuster internship, the fundamental problem hasn't changed--a lack of experience. That's true whether we are immigrants or not.

Politics: On Anger

TORONTO, ONTARIO - North America seems to be a hotbed of anger this year, at least politically. The TEA party in the United States has famously risen from voter anger at government, and here locally in Toronto, the candidate who has made anger the main theme of his campaign, Rob Ford, is leading in mayoral polls. The problem with anger is the candidates who ride waves of anger rarely have effective policies and almost never solve the problems that created the voter anger.

The TEA party's main solution is to all problems seems to be paring the size of government, and, in many cases, lowering taxes. With effective tax rates at historical lows, the faction of the TEA party favoring that idea really has no precedent to cite that this will actually lead to balanced budgets, the main driving goal of the organization. For those members of the TEA party who simply want to cut government to balance the budget, not necessarily lowering taxes, they may have a fiscal point, but cutting government means cutting government jobs. Economist Dean Baker on Sunday put it best, "I fail to see how eliminating government jobs is going to help the economy at this time."

The bottom line for most economists is that there is no simple solution to the current economic malaise and deficit problems. Solutions need to be very nuanced, with strategic tax increases, strategic cuts, and even strategic stimulus combined with a clear long-term plan to balance the budget all elements of working our way out of the problem without making it much worse in the interim. If we actually follow the TEA party prescription instead, in all likelihood things will get worse in the short term as the unemployment rates goes up, and people will only become more angry.

Locally, Rob Ford talks about reducing the size of Toronto's government, but it's quite unclear exactly what he can get through city council to actually eliminate. Even left-leaning mayor David Miller ended up with a civic worker's strike--does Ford not anticipate the same sort of thing happening if he tries to change the fundamentals of the game? In Ford's case, it is less flaws in his anger-driven policies--it's his ability to actually implement anything if elected.

I tried to go back through past politicians and find one who was elected based on angry backlash who proved to be effective in government. I couldn't find one. Arguably, the most successful proponent of the same fiscal policies that the TEA party supports was Ronald Reagan, and he wasn't about anger, but "morning in America."

Ronald Reagan--and Barack Obama, for that matter--provided a template for how to ride a wave of discontentment: Turn it into hope instead of anger. Maybe Obama monopolized that theme in the last cycle, but I'm having trouble finding any candidates trying to provide a hopeful vision on the left or the right, at any level, in this year's elections. I'm convinced it's possible even in a down economy to be hopeful and realistic. Candidates seem to be so afraid of voter anger that they can't channel it into anything positive.

There's still time before the fall elections. If any candidates finally do strike hopeful themes, I suspect they'll do well come election day.

Economy: Flexibility Key to Hiring--Right

TORONTO, ONTARIO - Sometimes, there is little to do except at laugh at employment columns in trade magazines. It's hard to blame reporters when they write things that are completely contrary to my experience in industry and those of the peers with whom I network. All the reporter can do is interview people in industry--and those that are allowed to talk will say what their employers want everyone to believe. In many cases, the leadership of those companies might well believe what they are telling their spokespeople to say, even when the reality down in the ranks of their company is different.

The one that really floored me recently was when Chemical & Engineering News focused an entire article around the concept of flexibility as a key to finding a role in the biotechnology industry. "Candidates who have [core skills] coupled with strong communication, information technology, or leadership skills, along with an affinity for teamwork 'may actually find themselves in a power position.'" Yeah, right.

Talk to most recruiters these days--certainly the ones that I talk to--and you'll get a very different story. Rather than hiring flexible employees with broad skills that can adjust to new roles as business needs change, companies these days let go of old employees and hire new ones with previous experience in the new needed areas. With so many unemployed people and a healthy recruiting industry, the new expert can be found quickly and it's actually considered the most cost-effective way of proceeding. The "old way of thinking" is expunged from the company, which is perceived as having more intangible value than people who understand where the business has been.

Granted, recruiters are most often retained by companies that want to fill a hard-to-find niche, but they are also retained to find talent, period. One of my favorite recruiters knows that I am perhaps the quintessential twenty-first century-style Renaissance worker, able to move in to fill "white spaces" in technology companies and get things done. Of the dozens of jobs related to the field in which I used to work that he has seen in the past year, only one employer would even entertain talking to "a talented generalist" at the phone screen stage. This is a job market all about experience, not about flexibility or the ability to learn and adapt. In an extreme case, I am aware of one employer that was so dead-set on finding someone with the absolutely perfect background with about six elements involved--I had four or five, depending on interpretation--that the position stayed open for more than six months, and apparently was still unfilled when a radical corporate restructuring took place.

It's not just me. The people I know that have changed positions during the recession have mostly done so on the strength of specific experience, the only exceptions being those who have started their own businesses. I can cite at least two other very flexible workers that I know who want to change positions but cannot get interviews and are effectively stuck with their present employers.

Interestingly, the Chemical and Engineering News article didn't miss this reality entirely, but just seemed to misplace its emphasis. A key "flexible" candidate they highlighted was described by her new employer as having the "correct technical background" (read "experience"). They note that "there's no substitute for technical excellence." They seem to use every euphemism for experience except the word itself.

Don't be misled by the rhetoric. Being flexible is not an asset in today's job market; being specialized in a hot niche is an asset. It's all about experience, and I really feel sorry for recent graduates who have none at all.

Economics: Bicycling for Jobs

TORONTO, ONTARIO - It happened again today. For at least the fourth time since the recession began, I was walking down a major arterial in suburban Toronto when a bicyclist stopped to talk to me. It's always a man, carrying far too little on his back to look like he's taking a long trip, but always claiming to be on one, and appearing appropriately exhausted. He always claims to have heard about work somewhere relatively far away, and asks the best way to get there. Then, after asking if I know about any work locally, he pedals on.

This time, the man said he was coming from London, Ontario (180 kilometers away), and was heading to Belleville, Ontario (another 180 kilometers away). He asked me if the street he was on, Dundas Street West, would take him to Scarborough, where he claimed to have someone to stay with for the night. He asked how far it was to downtown, and how far it was to Belleville. I tried to answer these questions. He asked if I knew of any jobs around, or if I was working. When he found out I was unemployed, he accepted my wish of good luck and continued eastbound.

I've also encountered men with similar stories on Airport Road, Bloor Street, and other places on Dundas Street. They're always riding bicycles. They're always headed east, sometimes claiming to be going not nearly as far, perhaps just to Whitby, though I've heard Belleville before. I've heard origins from Windsor to Kitchener. They always inquire about local jobs (the man on Airport Road was especially interested in hearing how to get a job at Pearson Airport). What these men never do is beg, or make any specific request of the person they have found.

I don't know what to make of this phenomenon. I've had enough encounters now, in different places around Toronto on different days of the week, that I can't pass it off as a one-time phenomenon. If the whole thing is a made-up story for begging, it's not a particularly effective one, as they haven't gotten a thing from me other than directions and a wish of good luck. If this is all for real, then there are a number of quite desperate men out there who do have a bicycle that they're willing to ride hundreds of kilometers on the rumor of a job with not much more than the clothes on their back and their wallets. They apparently don't have access to a car or any other transportation. At least one has mentioned leaving his wife behind. All claim there are no jobs where they started. All of the incidents have been since the fall of 2008 when the recession began; I lived here for more than two years before the first encounter.

I've never had an encounter like this in the United States, either. There are certainly migrant workers all over the United States, but they don't tend to move by bicycle. Is this something peculiar to men in Canada down on their economic luck? I'd certainly like to know; next time, I guess I need to ask questions.

Margin Notes: Winter, Phrases, Generations

Late afternoon shadows helped maintain the thin snow pack in the Lambton Woods of Toronto, Ontario on 11-February-2010

TORONTO, ONTARIO - Snow flurries came down for most of the day on Wednesday, so I thought I'd go out and take some legitimate snow shots on Thursday. Nature was still laughing at me, as most snow cover had sublimed or melted before I went out to take photographs; the only passable winter scene I could find was in the Lambton Woods, which had been mostly shaded. It's cold, but not white, this winter in Toronto.

* * * * * *

While taking walks lately, I've noted that even postings outside restaurants looking for waiters now universally say "Experience Required" without exception. There is no such thing as a entry-level job in the current economy.

* * * * * *

US President Barack Obama continues to mention the economy in virtually all of his weekly radio and YouTube addresses. I'm surprised that conservatives haven't jumped on him for how he ends those addresses. The boilerplate "thank you and God bless America" has been replaced with a simple "thanks." For that matter, the progressives don't seem to have noticed, either.

* * * * * *

Words and phrasing can be interesting. My US tax forms arrived with a label stating "International Surface Airlift." Surface Airlift? This seems like an oxymoron, though perhaps it designates that trans-oceanic shipments are "lifted" by air over the ocean rather than going on a ship, but are otherwise moved on the ground.

* * * * * *

Another phrase I found entertaining recently was the latest title for an automatic software update--"iLife Support". I guess it's not enough to have life support anymore, we need to have iLife Support to keep our digital lives going.

* * * * * *

I guess I must be in the iLife generation, since when I heard "Behind Blue Eyes" performed for the Superbowl (in news coverage), I was somewhat surprised that it was a song from The Who. I was only familiar with the 2003 Limp Bizkit version, which I had known was a remake, but I had never investigated what was being re-made. Somehow, I suspect promoters wanted The Who to play that Pete Townshend song precisely because it had been widely covered and would be known to younger audiences.

Media: Stating the Obvious

TORONTO, ONTARIO - Sometimes it is nice when the obvious is reported as news. In a recent issue of Chemical and Engineering News, an article cited the Chemjobber blog (right there making me wonder what passes for news these days) which noted that the number of industrial positions advertised in the mid-September issue of the trade magazine for chemists and chemical engineers had dropped from nearly 60 in 1989 and just over five in 2007 to ZERO in 2009. It had occurred to me about mid-September that I hadn't responded to an employment ad or pointed a friend to an ad the entire calendar year of 2009. During the turmoil in which the business I was working for was shutting down in 2005, I don't think a single week went by when I didn't at least forward someone a lead from the magazine's classified ads.

An interesting graph that they didn't print, and I am too lazy to generate myself, would be a graph of industrial positions advertised each month that were outside the United States and Europe. It is my impression that the number of these positions (mostly, but not exclusively in China) has remained essentially steadily since the onset of the current recession. So, when it was broadly reported recently that China's growth rate may be 8% for 2009, that didn't really strike me as big news, either. Yet, the obvious had not yet been reported.

There's no big message here. While it is true that print advertising is suffering relative to on-line job boards, in technical fields, trade journals have been relatively inert to the phenomenon compared with newspapers. The number of academic jobs advertised in Chemical & Engineering News has "slowed too" according to the magazine's director of advertising sales, but not nearly as much. (Funny how the article didn't quantitate that.) If the academic advertising decline served as a baseline for the move away from print, then the trends observed are simply reflective of the current job market. The market isn't as bad in China, so the decline in ads isn't as great. It doesn't necessarily mean that the whole chemical industry is moving to China.

We complain a lot about how the media try to sensationalize stories and try to make them mean something profound. If I did that more often (and I have done it--look through the archives), this blog would probably be more widely read. Sometimes, though, it's refreshing just to see something obvious reported at face value, for the record.

Margin Notes: Travel, Running Lean, Ford

VIA Rail Canada train #71 sat at Windsor, Ontario after its arrival from Toronto on 23-July-2009

FLINT, MICHIGAN - Quite a number of companies seem to be running way too lean during this recession. VIA Rail Canada, normally a master of customer service, couldn't seem to get enough staff people to organize a high passenger loading from the Special Olympics earlier today. At every stop from Toronto to Chatham, Ontario (except Ingersoll and Glencoe), there were Special Olympics athletes boarding the train, and getting them on board took more than ten minutes in virtually all cases. Even after making up some running time, this meant my train to Windsor, Ontario was nearly an hour late, almost completely because of increased "dwell time" at the stations.

* * * * * *

Another company clearly running lean is Enterprise Rent-A-Car. An employee at the office I visited today said, "We're not buying any cars--we don't know what's going to be around in a year, and so everything we have is out on the road." As a result, I had to wait a bit longer than desired to pick up a reserved car, but I've waited longer for less honest reasons at other rental car companies in the past, and the desk employee was clearly working hard to find one. For the incredible daily rate I was getting, that was all I asked.

* * * * * *

On board the train, VIA employees were clearly trying hard. As much as I prefer getting up and going to the café car as one usually has to do on Amtrak, it is rather nice to be served at one's seat as VIA does on its corridor trains. With the train running late, I decided to eat on-board, and purchased a "sandwich combo" and soft drink. While value for the dollar may be debated, it's hard not to view VIA food as high-quality; I've always said it is because the Quebecois will not put up with bad food so VIA has no choice. For whatever reason, the turkey sandwich was the best I've had in a long time, and it came with cheese and carrots.

* * * * * *


The salad dressing on-board my VIA Rail Canada train on 23-July-2009 had an interesting brand name

Apparently "FOB" doesn't have the same connotations in Canada as it does in immigrant communities in the United States. The dressing (actually dip for my carrots) that came with my lunch had the brand name "FOB"--I guess "fresh on board" doesn't conjure up images of "fresh off the boat" here. Maybe they were trying to evoke the political FOB--"friend of Bill" [Clinton].

* * * * * *

I don't think being a political FOB would have helped much at the border. The United States border agents were excessively rude, but more disturbingly, they seemed rather incompetent in retrospect. They never asked me if I had anything to declare (which I didn't)--if I had, unless I had offered that information on my own, they would have never known. Are they so busy worrying about terrorism that they've forgotten about commerce?

* * * * * *


Ford's global headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan were noted on 23-July-2009

Once on the United States side of the border, I was clearly in Ford country (well, after leaving the Renaissance Center and its GM offices, anyway). I drove on the Ford freeway, I found "The Henry Ford" (with its plethora of museums and attractions practically on the order of Disneyland), and while enjoying Michigan Avenue in Dearborn, I drove past Ford's world headquarters.

* * * * * *


A Joe Ricci dealership was found in Dearborn, Michigan on 23-July-2009.

The car dealerships on Michigan Avenue also don't seem to end in Dearborn. Among them, I found a familiar name--Joe Ricci, known to boat racing fans across the nation as the sponsor of an unlimited hydroplane in 1985 and 1986.

Economics: Canadian Discrimination--Of Course

TORONTO, ONTARIO - Canada was abuzz this week with the revelation that people with foreign-sounding names are discriminated against here, according to a University of British Columbia study widely reported including by CBC Online. "White-sounding" names on résumés are 40 percent more likely to be called for an interview than those with South Asian or Asian names and otherwise-identical résumés; mixed names (first name "white-sounding" and last name "foreign-sounding") fall in the middle. In fact, the magnitude of the problem is--gasp--similar to that in the United States when otherwise-identical "white-sounding" and "black-sounding" candidates are compared.

This is utterly unsurprising. No Canadian province has the kind of record-keeping laws on job applicants that are in place in the United States. I've written about this before in the context of why I don't recommend that women migrate to Canada. As pointed out in the article, this means that employers are likely in violation of human rights laws. However, without evidence, how can this ever be proven?

I'm generally not a big fan of creating bureaucracy, but this is one area in which the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has the right idea. If companies are required to compile data on how they disposition different candidates, then it not only provides a mechanism to determine if there is conscious discrimination going on, but also helps people realize if unconscious discrimination is occurring.

It's actually not that burdensome to a hiring manager, at least in my experience. It may be somewhat of a burden on human resources departments, but that's one reason why such departments exist.

Yet, in all the hand-wringing about the UBC study this week, I haven't once heard a call for increased record-keeping. If it can be done in the United States, it can be done in Canada.

Economics: This is Not the Great Depression

OROVILLE, CALIFORNIA - I have often been a critic of governments for trying to put too rosy of a spin on the economic situation. Unemployment statistics, for example, do not tell anything near the real story of how the labor market actually feels, as the count does not include those who are underemployed, have temporarily or permanently given up looking for work, or who are ineligible for unemployment (in Canada, Employment Insurance) after losing their jobs. I have never been personally counted as an unemployed person even when I have spent many months unable to find a job.

Yet, comparisons made with the Great Depression in the current situation--at least as it exists today--just don't hold up very well in terms of the state of affairs of most people. The conversations I have had in the past two days with my great aunt--who live through the Great Depression--have made this clear. While there are more "tent cities" than many governments wish to admit, the amount of "Hooverville"-type homeless encampments is apparently nowhere near what it was during the Great Depression, though hard statistics on that seem to be hard to find. There are not hobos riding trains around the nation--and not just because law enforcement on illegal train riding is better, or people are using a different mode of transportation--there simply isn't the same phenomenon of "boomers" moving from place to place.

The labor market in general hasn't taken on the volatility that occurred during the Great Depression. People aren't jumping from short-term job to short-term job to the Civilian Conservation Corps back to a short-term job again the way that was quite common in the 1930's. The pattern today is much more the recession pattern of people taking part-time and underemployment to sustain themselves, which is a step above in stability.

All this being stated, it needs to be noted that if things continue to go sour in the economy, it is entirely possible that the current situation will begin to more closely resemble the Great Depression. Just as the Swine Flu (er, H1N1 virus) has the possibility of starting a pandemic, the current downturn without proper precautions could become something much worse. Just don't try to convince me that we're already there.

Transport: Lambton Yard Closed

In a scene probably not to be seen again, a long string of power for local trains rested for the Good Friday holiday at Lambton Yard in Toronto, Ontario on 10-April-2009

TORONTO, ONTARIO - I didn't realize when I selected my current residence that I was moving walking distance from an active railroad yard, but it turns out that Canadian Pacific's Lambton Yard was located not far to the north. The base for a series of local trains and a common set-out and pick-up location for local traffic taking heat off the more modern Toronto (Agincourt) Yard to the east, Lambton has provided a nice bit of entertainment to this railfan.

All that changed on Saturday. Because of the economic downturn, Canadian Pacific has decided to close Lambton Yard. All of the local trains formerly based at Lambton have been moved to Toronto Yard, there will be no yard switch crew, and many trains that formerly worked at Lambton will just pass by on the mainline. The last run of the Lambton Transfer job pulled all of the locomotives used for local runs out of the yard on Saturday.


No longer an active office, the Canadian Pacific Lambton Yard Office stood with only inactive company vehicles around on 27-April-2009. Previously, this view would have normally been blocked by rail cars in the yard.

I headed out to see what had changed on Monday. Perhaps a transition is not complete yet, but while the yard office is definitely closed and there are no locomotives sitting nearby, the yard tracks themselves are not completely empty. Over the course of the day, the trains that normally had work at Lambton did stop to make set-outs or pick-ups. Even the local jobs came out from Toronto Yard and stopped to work at Lambton Yard before continuing on to their normal work. Had I not heard what was going on, I would not have noticed that the local trains were originating at Toronto Yard instead of Lambton.

Canadian Pacific has tried to shut down Lambton Yard before and failed. However, in the current economy and traffic downturn, they just might manage to move all its work to Toronto and also Obico Yard, to the west. The yard jobs, both the switch crews and yardmaster shifts as well as the crews of the Lambton transfer trains, may be gone forever.

All this drives home the old railfanning adage--shoot what's there, because tomorrow it might not be. In the case of Lambton Yard, what I took pictures of as recently as Easter weekend may now be impossible to see again.

Economics: Anything Can Happen

TORONTO, ONTARIO - A big trend lately seems to be the excuse that "nobody saw the financial collapse coming." A variation on the theme--much more reasonable in my opinion--was President Barack Obama's admission on 60 Minutes yesterday that he was surprised at the rate at which jobs have been lost. No, I didn't predict the financial collapse, and I certainly didn't predict its rate. However, I get very tired of people being surprised by these kinds of events. Unpredictable things happen, and especially when there's some reason to believe that some underlying fundamentals are not in order (for example, the housing market), one should not act completely surprised when they do.

Recently, I had reason to go back and listen to a portion of the Year in Review for 1991 that I produced early in 1992. I made these hour-long programs yearly for a time in the early 1990's. I closed each of the programs with a short poem on the year, and for that year it was the following (excuse the bad poetry):

At the beginning of 1991,
The world stood ready for war.
Nobody knew how soon it would be done
Nor that casualties would stay a low score.

Few dreamed that the Soviet Union would end,
That Mikhail Gorbachev would be out of work,
That to Russia foreign aid we would send
Or that for free enterprise they’d go berserk.

Who could have possibly foreseen
Abandoning a base in the Philippines,
The economy staying slow and lean
And that a judge would be accused behind the scenes.

If this past year has taught us one thing
It has taught us to respect unpredictability.
Perhaps of these events someone should sing
That the new world order requires adaptability.

So keep both eyes peeled
As you face this new year 1992,
May all your ills be healed
And, the best of luck to you.

A lot can happen in a year. The Soviet Union can cease to exist, or world financial markets can go into a free-fall. Don't say now that something unthinkable can't happen in the remainder 2009, or act surprised if it does.

Radio Pick: Bad Bank on TAL

TORONTO, ONTARIO - This week's radio pick comes from Chicago Public Radio's This American Life.

The economic crisis gripping the United States has been described as "so complicated
that anyone that claims to know how to fix it is lying." That doesn't mean that people shouldn't try to understand the complexity, and there have been remarkably few tools available to assist such attempts. NPR's Planet Money team continues to provide remarkable insights into
the realities of the situation, presenting them on a variety of public radio programming but in full form in this week's 59-minute episode of This American Life. Why isn't anyone else doing this kind of understandable reporting?

Listen to streaming MP3 of This American Life "Bad Bank"

* * * * * *

This week, I have an honorable mention to offer. CBC's Terry O'Reilly and the Age of Persuasion continues to offer considerable insight into the history of advertising and marketing, and this week offered an excellent 27-minute show on how advertisers have commandeered holidays--a fitting reminder as St. Patrick's Day and Easter approach. Follow the links on the CBC page to listen.

Politics: Lack of Vision in North America

TORONTO, ONTARIO - There is a general consensus about what is needed right now in both the United States and the Canadian economies. A stimulus package by the government is recommended that immediately injects money into the economy, stabilizes it, and allows individual consumers to start spending money again. While there is debate on what constitutes the most effective kind of stimulus, there is little question that "shovel-ready" is everyone's favorite term. So why is there an incredible lack of vision in the responses to the crisis on both sides of the border?

In the United States, where the crisis is most acute, the Republicans in the House of Representatives uniformly voted against the latest $825 billion stimulus package. Why? Sure, they wanted to see more tax cuts, but I suspect that they would have looked the other way if the spending in the package had been on things that were clearly stimulative in nature. Instead, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that only about 30% of the money in the package will be spent by the end of 2009--which would be one reasonable definition of short-term stimulation. The remaining about two-thirds of the bill could be mistaken for pork-barrel projects. What were the authors thinking?

It would appear the House Democrats--much like Republicans following the 11-September-2001 attacks--are trying to use the current crisis as an excuse to do what they've been wanting to do anyway. In the process of (for example) including money for education--a good idea, but not particularly stimulatory in the way that infrastructure projects or unemployment extensions would be--they are undermining President Obama's attempts to create bi-partisanship. Yet, Obama's administration seems to be backing the bill as-is and they are not shirking ownership, so effectively the entire Democratic Party including Obama is to blame to producing a bill that likely won't cause much harm (contrary to what some Republicans claim), but just doesn't do what it is supposed to do--stimulate the economy--with much efficiency.

Furthermore, besides not directly addressing the problem at hand, it doesn't really do anything else coherently, either. There's no grand vision for the future embedded in the longer-term provisions of the bill. Instead, it reads like a hodge-podge of Democratic Party pet projects. That may be the biggest lost opportunity here. Not only may the bill prove less effective than it should have been, but its lack of coherence doesn't move the country in a clear direction. It looks like old politics, when Obama was supposed to be about new politics. The Democrats seem to be squandering the opportunity to prove they are now about pragmatic solutions, and instead are opening themselves to the old criticism that they are just about bigger government. Read a conservative blog and it will be clear that the 2010 campaign has already started on this theme.

Meanwhile, up here in Canada where the economy is in recession but not in nearly the crisis of that in the United States, the "new" parliament has come back after prorogation and Prime Minister Harper has presented his new budget. It bears a strange resemblance to the Obama budget--not in its goals or underlying ideology, of course, but in its lack of coherence. Rather than taking bold steps on unemployment insurance or even on taxes, the proposed Conservative budget instead has a hodge-podge of various spending and tax measures that seems to have been designed to have something in it for just about everyone, and add up to be just big enough to be an adequate stimulus that the Liberal Party can't argue with, at least in terms of size. Indeed, with a simple Liberal amendment passed today to have regular progress reports on the stimulus with a confidence vote, the budget is expected to be passed tomorrow with Conservative and Liberal votes.

The shocking thing here is that Conservative Party has proposed a budget that looks like something the Liberal Party would have proposed, perhaps maybe even a bit less coherent. Clearly, the Conservatives wanted to avoid an immediate election and stay in power, even if it meant they wouldn't be able to do what they had previously planned to do in the budget. Like the stimulus package in the United States, the budget is unlikely to do harm, but again the Conservatives have lost an opportunity to present a coherent vision of how they could manage a stimulus. Old politics--winning a confidence vote--has won out in Canada, too.

The lost opportunities won't be felt much by the Democrats or the Conservatives in the short term. At some point, though, the lack of vision will catch up with them in future campaigns. The Democrats, by seeming to meet their old stereotype, likely will see more repercussions if they don't follow up with alternative actions than the Conservatives, who have mostly alienated their base. Still, can you imagine how things would be different had there been a laser-beam focus on clear stimulus spending (and tax changes) articulated in terms of a future vision? Both parties would be looking a lot better right now had they managed to pull that off, and each could have done it.

Transport: Gauging the Recession

Conrail Local CD-10 crossed the Charles River at Cambridge, Massachusetts behind B23-7 locomotive #1980 on 2-October-1997, a sight never to be seen again with the end of Conrail in 1999 and the retirement of the B23-7's soon thereafter

TORONTO, ONTARIO - Railfans often say that they know what is happening in the economy simply by looking at the traffic they are seeing in the trains that are going by. When trains start becoming more frequent and longer, and leased locomotives start supplementing those of the railroad being observed, the economy is experiencing an up-tick. When trains become fewer in number, become shorter, and locomotives start to line up in storage lines, a recession is coming or has already arrived.

Around Toronto, the railroads are showing the signs of recession. Most leased locomotives that had been supplementing Canadian Pacific power for most of 2008 have disappeared, and a series of SD9043MAC locomotives that had been regulars on transcontinental trains have been placed in storage. A number of trains no longer run, foremost the famous "frame train" from St. Thomas to Oshawa, Ontario that used to provide dedicated service for truck frames.

The most interesting report of declining traffic on the railroad has come out of my old stomping grounds in Massachusetts. According to postings on the bulletin boards at railroad.net, CSX has stopped running the Selkirk, New York to Boston, Massachusetts mixed freight trains, known in CSX days as Q420 eastbound and Q421 westbound. I was first introduced to these trains before CSX took over the "Boston Line" and these trains were still run by Conrail under the symbols SEBO and BOSE. I liked to pretend that "SE" stood for Seattle instead of Selkirk and that the trains would make a transcontinental run across the nation.

Indeed, some of the traffic in those trains was coming from the Pacific coast. Western produce (from California and Washington state) rode in refrigerator cars from western railroads on the Q420/SEBO trains into Beacon Park Yard in Boston, where they were transferred to a local train, known in Conrail days as the CD-10 ("CD" meaning Chelsea-Danvers) for the final few miles to the New England Produce Center in Chelsea, Massachusetts, where it was distributed to local grocery stores. It was this local, which became the WABP-10 (or B721) local after CSX took over in 1999, that ran through the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and provided my railfanning staple during my time there.


CSX Local B721 (WABP-10) crossed the Charles River into Cambridge, Massachusetts on 30-September-2001 behind GP40-2 #6204, bound for New England Produce in Chelsea, Massachusetts

Now, this produce traffic will instead ride train Q436 out of Selkirk to Framingham, Massachusetts, where it will be transferred to the WABP-10. Instead of going on duty at Chelsea in the afternoon, the WABP-10 will start at Framingham in the morning, drop off Boston traffic (mostly garbage containers) at Beacon Park, and then continue on the Chelsea and return to Framingham in the evening.

Ten years ago, this would have been a ridiculous operating plan. In those days, the SEBO/Q420 could have more than fifty cars, way too many for a local job to handle. The CD-10/WABP-10 itself might have upwards of 20 cars, creating a full day's work to switch the Chelsea industries and make a run out to Beacon Park and back. There was no way that the crew would have had time to run out to Framingham and back in a twelve-hour shift. That CSX thinks it can get away with this operating plan is a sign that traffic has decreased significantly.

Perhaps CSX will prove incorrect, the work won't get done on a daily basis, and the abolished train will need to be brought back. But, the changes to my old favorite train, the Chelsea Local, demonstrate that the railroad thinks the recession is real.