Category: Canada

Anything related to Canada or Canadians

Love and a city’s possibilities

‘What does love have to do with it?’ asked the late Pier Giorgio Di Cicco in his 2007 book, Municipal Mind: Manifestos for the Creative City. He was Toronto’s second poet laureate, from 2004 to 2009, and the book is his legacy project from that time. Di Cocco had a passionate, sometimes combustible-seeming connection to Toronto. A practicing Catholic priest, he wore black leather jackets and turtlenecks, smoked cigarettes, and spoke with a fantastic gravelly voice. A cool priest even, cooler than I ever knew from thirteen years of Catholic school. ‘A town that is not in love with itself is irresponsible, and civilly apt for mistakes,’ he wrote. ‘A citizenry is incited to action by the eros of mutual care, by having a common object of love — their city. A town that is not in love with itself will cut corners; lose sight of the common good.’

Love is also something you would be hard-pressed to find in official city statutes, but ask yourself if you love Toronto or whichever city you live in. Often the answer is no: cities are frustrating, but how can we care about something we don’t also love? In a section of Municipal Mind called ‘Restoring the Soul to the City,’ Di Cocco tried to conjure a Toronto that could be — something we could aspire to. ‘Developers are generally not known for their philosophical bent, but for their market enthusiasm,’ he wrote. ‘But it was a developer who told me the truest thing about cities: Speaking of Florence, a place that revitalized a civilization by a standard of civic care and design excellence, my friend remarked, “You know, Florence was already there, before a building ever went up.”

Toronto is certainly not Florence, and those with little imagination will dismiss the poetry about a city as useless, but Di Cocco was encouraging us to dream up an ideal Toronto that could be something to strive for as this place continues to grow and change. It could be about the architecture, but it also could be the sidewalks, more equitable and affordable housing, lusher parks, or ample public washrooms. Is Toronto living up to the city we dream of? From Di Cocco’s point of view, these collective ideals and visions are what make Toronto beautiful, rather than the stuff already built. It’s possible to dream of a better Toronto even while loving the current one. Perhaps it’s the only way to dream.

Micallef, Shawn. Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto. Updated Edition. Coach House Press, 2024. p. 15

Contrast with: This uncivil city

Forward to Stroll

A new, cool style of engaging and enjoying metropolitan realities has recently emerged in Toronto among certain young writers, artists, architects, and persons without portfolio. These people can be recognized by their careful gaze at things most others ignore: places off the tourist map of Toronto’s notable sights, the clutter of sidewalk signage and graffiti, the grain inscribed on the urban surface by the drift of populations and the cuts of fashion.

Their typical tactic is the stroll. The typical product of strolling is knowledge that cannot be acquired merely by studying maps, guidebooks, and statistics. Rather, it is a matter of the body, knowing the city by pacing off its streets and neighbourhoods, recovering the deep, enduring traces of our inhabitation by encountering directly the fabric of buildings and the legends we have built here during the last two centuries. Some of these strollers, including Shawn Micallef, have joined forces to make Spacing magazine. But Shawn has done more than that. He has recorded his strolls in EYE WEEKLY, and these meditations, in turn, have provided the raw material for the present book. The result you have in your hands is a new introduction to Toronto as it reveals itself to the patient walker, and an invitation to walk abroad on our own errands of discovery, uncovering the memories, codes, and messages hidden in the text that is our city.

Forward from first edition, Toronto, 2010

John Bentley Mays, 1941–2016

Micallef, Shawn. Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto. Updated Edition. Coach House Press, 2024. p. 7

Pandemic walks extentification project

My pandemic walks project has involved a lot of densification: trying to exhaustively make use of all possible routes within a geographic area, acting as a kind of human radioactive tracer running through the city’s circulatory system.

This has been interesting and has led to some nice still and animated art.

At the same time, the whole project was motivated in part by the desire to avoid visiting and re-visiting the same areas during the pandemic. That, combined with pleasant spring weather, has me thinking about reorienting from densification toward extentification, both undertaking new rides to expand the total area explored and working to add days with over 100 km of riding.

I made some maps to get a sense of how long it would take to get beyond the explored region. I added lines to show the distances to places on the outermost edges of the explored area and, in parentheses, added the Google Maps bicycle travel times there from Brentwood Towers:

(Sorry the travel times are glitched in the final map; I wanted to make all the lines the same colour and accidentally overwrote the manual Google Maps travel times labels.)

These maps show only analog / mechanical / acoustic bicycle trips, including my year on Bike Share Toronto, my Dutch bike, and the loaner I used while it was being serviced.

I need to go a long way in most directions to get beyond the network: 10–15 km in most directions. The most direct route to new kilometres is northeast, through the Bridle Path and into the areas east of the northwestern branches of the Don.

The 10,000 milli-amp-hour portable phone battery which I bought for the 2015 CUPE 3902 TA strike at U of T had started bulging, so I replaced it. I should be set for day-long extentification weekend excursions now.

P.S. I figured out how to do this in a more automated way using QGIS. First, here is the area of all the rides converted into convex hulls:

And here is a set of automatically-generated spokes radiating in all directions from the centre point of all my rides (which is predictably enough right between home and work):

The only buggy element is how it projects spokes out into the lake. Nonetheless, this provides a useful visual guide to how far I need to go to get beyond my total area explored so far by bike.

Canada and the ‘Golden Dome’

Canada’s connection to US ballistic missile defence efforts goes back a long way and is interwoven with our shared history of continental air defence.

Now, Trump is proposing a ‘Golden Dome’ to supposedly make America safer from foreign threats, and Canada is part of the discussions.

Recently, the American Physical Society released a detailed free report: “Strategic Ballistic Missile Defense: Challenges to Defending the U.S.”

The basic weaknesses of the whole concept are simple to understand: it takes drastically more expense and hardware to (possibly) stop one missile than it does for a challenger to build one more missile. As a result, the technology is inherently likely to fuel arms races, as foreign challengers fear their deterrents will lose credibility.

Related:

See also my 2005 report: “Common Threats, Joint Responses: The Report of the 2005 North American Security Cooperation Assessment Student Tour“

Carney on the carbon bubble and stranded assets

By some measures, based on science, the scale of the energy revolution required is staggering.

If we had started in 2000, we could have hit the 1.5°C objective by halving emissions every thirty years. Now, we must halve emissions every ten years. If we wait another four years, the challenge will be to halve emissions every year. If we wait another eight years, our 1.5°C carbon budget will be exhausted.

The entrepreneur and engineer Saul Griffith argues that the carbon-emitting properties of our committed physical capital mean that we are locked in to use up the residual carbon budget, even if no one buys another car with an internal combustion engine, installs a new gas-fired hot-water heater or, at a larger scale, constructs a new coal power plant. That’s because, just as we expect a new car to run for a decade or more, we expect our machines to be used until they are fully depreciated. If the committed emissions of all the machines over their useful lives will largely exhaust the 1.5°C carbon budget, going forward we will need almost all new machines, like cars, to be zero carbon. Currently, electric car sales, despite being one of the hottest segments of the market, are as a percentage in single digits. This implies that, if we are to meet society’s objective, there will be scrappage and stranded assets.

…

To meet the 1.5°C target, more than 80 per cent of current fossil fuel reserves (including three-quarters of coal, half of gas, one-third of oil) would need to stay in the ground, stranding these assets. The equivalent for less than 2°C is about 60 per cent of fossil fuel assets staying in the ground (where they would no longer be assets).

When I mentioned the prospect of stranded assets in a speech in 2015, it was met with howls of outrage from the industry. That was in part because many had refused to perform the basic reconcilliation between the objectives society had agreed in Paris (keeping temperature increases below 2°C), the carbon budgets science estimated were necessary to achieve them and the consequences this had for fossil fuel extraction. They couldn’t, or wouldn’t, undertake the basic calculations that a teenager, Greta Thunberg, would easily master and powerfully project. Now recognition is growing, even in the oil and gas industry, that some fossil fuel assets will be stranded — although, as we shall see later in the chapter, pricing in financial markets remains wholly inconsistent with the transition.

Carney, Mark. Value(s): Building a Better World for All. Penguin Random House Canada, 2021. p. 273–4, 278

Photos from the Yellowknife drive

In the summer of 2003, I broke with my long avoidance of air travel so that I could first help my brother Sasha move from Behchokǫ̀, in the Northwest Territories near Yellowknife, back to Victoria, BC.

We did the drive through a vast terrain of wildfires in three intensive days, with Sasha driving.

I had been meaning for ages to get our photos processed, but because of the financial pain of the long PhD all my computers and software are quite obselete and were unable to handle the RAW files from his specific Fuji camera.

I have finally figured a workaround using Adobe’s digital negative (DNG) format, so now the photos are up.

Living across the country and avoiding flying, I have seen far too little of my brothers in recent years. I justified it because I thought I was living my values by making lifestyle choices to reduce my climate impact, and because I still hoped humanity might be reaching a level of understanding where we take the crisis seriously and respond in a useful and adaptive way.

Now I think I need to do a complete re-evaluation of what sort of political project makes sense. Ever since I first became involved in environmentalism in the 1990s, I had thought that eventually the universal experience of how the world is changing in frightening ways would make people willing to make changes themselves. Now, I really don’t know.

Still, I am immensely grateful that I got to spend this intensive time with Sasha and that our relationship is still deep and meaningful after years of almost exclusively telecommunicating. His integrity and determination are inspirations to me, and I try to draw from his example while trying to live my own life well.

Related:

Trump ending the postwar security order

Having read extensively about international security and the post-WWII US-backed security order, it is very disturbing to see it all being smashed apart. From Foreign Affairs today:

Carrying out economic warfare on allies sows distrust and risks fracturing the transatlantic and Indo-Pacific security architectures that have underpinned global stability for decades. If Washington imposes tariffs on European and Asian allies, it will create a wedge that adversaries such as China and Russia will eagerly exploit. Beijing, for example, is seeking to drive a deeper divide between the U.S. and Europe by presenting itself as a more reliable economic partner. For its part, Moscow is capitalizing on transatlantic tensions to weaken NATO cohesion. The growing strategic partnership between these two authoritarian powers—cemented through military cooperation, economic agreements, and shared hostility toward the West—represents a direct challenge to the U.S.-led global order. By undermining trust with allies through indiscriminate economic aggression, Washington risks isolating itself at a time when maintaining strong, unified alliances is more critical than ever.

I think my work on regional nuclear weapons proliferation is going to become a lot more pertinent-seeming in the weeks, months, and years ahead.