climate change activist and science communicator; photographer; mapmaker — advocate for a stable global climate, reduced nuclear weapon risks, and safe human-AI interaction
Matters of money
After an 18 day occupation of the Old Vic building, and after choosing to move their Board of Regents meeting online rather than encounter the students, Victoria University has announced that it will divest from fossil fuels by 2030.
The campaign has a statement out.
Friday was day 12 of Climate Justice U of T’s occupation at Victoria University, pressuring them to divest from fossil fuels.
They have a guide online for people wishing to visit the occupation.
They also have a petition.
Toronto’s Old Orchard Properties bills itself as a builder of “luxury custom homes” but, as a renter since the August before last, I think anyone who gets a tour and takes a detailed look will see that their self-praise is unjustified.
The bannister along our staircase has always wiggled so much that I doubt it would
hold me if I fell; the locks are cheap and the light fixtures take one bulb instead of two and are located in places too high and dangerous to reach (like above an open area for a
staircase, with a wobbly railing beside). The locks and plumbing fixtures are the irrationally cheap sort that landlords choose even when they are responsible for maintenance, and the air conditioning cuts in and out and cannot maintain a stable temperature in summer.
I know every business represents itself as premium, even if it makes discount napkins for the prison and public education systems, but it is particularly galling for a landlord which has treated us so badly as tenants.
Worrying about debt more than climate change is like being upset that someone is cutting your heart out because it is staining your clothes.
I am still trying to get them to replace the file with one that has a few minor typos corrected, but my dissertation went live on the University of Toronto’s TSpace platform today:
Please don’t buy one before asking if I was planning to make you one already, but you can buy a print copy at cost from Lulu.com. I am also ordering a batch to reduce shipping costs, so if you want to get in on that let me know.
One of the reasons why Toronto’s housing market is such a disaster is that landlords are basically immune from any mechanism for punishing them for misconduct.
They can abuse the ambiguity of the Residential Tenancy Act to baselessly refuse to assign someone new to a lease, as a way of forcing existing residents to leave or accept an illegal rent increase.
There is also widespread reporting on abuse of mechanisms that let a landlord evict a tenant for their own use of the space or similar reasons. I have personally — and had friends — threatened with eviction for a wide range of trivial or invented reasons, all as a pressure tactic to add stress and try to illegally force people from their homes.
The Landlord and Tenant Board system is completely jammed up, with even the most urgent hearings taking 8-9 months to happen (and then they may be inconclusive, leaving everyone waiting again).
One remedy that could improve things would be a criminal offence for evicting a tenant through fraud or abuse of process. Theoretically a mistreated tenant could sue for damages, but it’s hardly likely that someone scrambling for a place to survive would accept those legal fees and risks. Having a criminal offence would create a real stick to discourage and prevent landlord misconduct, slightly rebalancing power relations in order to make the law work more as written and less as words to be ignored and misused by those driven only be the desire to collect as much rent as possible.
Creating a criminal offence is justified for at least three reasons. Even good tenants who follow the law and pay their rent may face daily and severe stress from the knowledge their landlords are trying to get rid of them illegally. I have been personally and seriously stressed about housing, often to the point of losing sleep, almost every day since the crisis with my flatmate at my old place began years ago. Even with the extreme stress of a PhD program to compare with, Toronto’s housing market is worse.
Taking away someone’s home is a very serious matter, which is why we regulate housing so much in the first place. If the existing system cannot contain landlord misconduct, there must be one with more coercive power against them. Secondly, there is extensive evidence that this misconduct is widespread, if not routine. A significant change is needed to disrupt a rotten status quo. Finally, the potential monetary rewards for landlord misconduct are huge, especially when it has become normalized throughout the system. Only a strong counterbalance has a chance of blunting the incentive for landlords to profit through illegality and misconduct.
Now that I am no longer tracking media references to the movement for my dissertation, I need a thread to post stories of interest to people tracking the movement.
For example: How Change Is Actually Made on Campus
Looking for some temporary stability, the chance to get back to secure paycheques for the first time since I left the federal government in 2012, and the ability to repair the countless things that have been worn down and damaged during the PhD — I am casting a net wide for jobs I can start at soon.
Based on my own experiences and discussions with others, however, I am excluding two fields which might seem among the most obvious for me: the academic precariat and the environmental NGO precariat. I know plenty of people caught up in the low pay, overwork, and stress of postdoc positions, lecturing, adjunct professorships, and similar. The common theme seems to be coldhearted skinflint employers, intolerable working conditions, and jobs where you spend half your time fundraising for the grants to pay your own salary. I feel much the same about the eNGO sector, which is even more poorly paid and insecure, even more a game of always working to win the grant to pay your salary for the next month of grant applications, and a social culture that broadly demands ideological conformity to a theory of change and set of objectives that I do not see as very likely to produce the public policy wins sought. (Believing this, or at least pointing it out, tends to risk making one unemployable in the sector.)
I feel like the common pattern in both the junior academic and the eNGO world is to demand that employees give more than they can sustainably, provide them less material and moral support than they need to keep going long term, and then condemn them for insufficient loyalty when this combination pushes them out into other employment. I suspect I can get more done on the environmental file by getting a decent job that provides genuine time off and working as a volunteer for groups that seem to have a sound strategy.
When we think about fossil fuels, we often fixate on the trade-offs between their economic and energy utility and their damage to the climate. The case in their favour gets a whole lot weaker when you factor in toxic pollution and its effects on health.
For example, while they may have been effectively marketed as glamorous and gourmet, gas stoves can create “indoor pollution worse than car traffic” and a recent study found them linked to 1/8 US asthma cases.
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