Hilton Beach is the smaller of two villages on this island, possessed of a general store, LCBO, a large, modern marina, and a couple of waterfront patios that cater to island cottagers who come in for a meal, and the big-city crowd that boats down for the day. The big city is Sault Ste. Marie. This is where we are.

The flag at the crossroads is at half-mast for Jack Layton. It’s hardly the only flag at half-mast up here. I’m not even counting the poor Legion Hall in town, whose flag barely gets a chance to reach the top these days. The Husky truck stop at the edge of Sault Ste. Marie – a truck stop! – the kind with the flag the size of a football field, has lowered theirs too.

I want to shake these people. I want to say: Do you have any idea who you’ve lowered this flag for? Do you know where he lived? Do you know how close that place was to the CN Tower? Have you lost all sense of parochial grievance? If so, what do you have left that qualifies you as Canadians?

The fact that Layton achieved a national breakthrough in life while coming from exactly the wrong place for electoral credibility is just as remarkable as the outpouring of national emotion after his death. It’s worth remembering that his success this spring came – perhaps not despite, but at least while being – exactly the kind of person who is not supposed to win elections in 2011.

Never mind the fact that the guy was from Toronto, that great receptacle of negative emotions. The guy was from downtown Toronto. The guy was a socialist from downtown Toronto. The guy was a socialist who lived in a brick house in downtown Toronto with his socialist wife and spent his time pursuing a day-to-day socialist agenda of eating Chinese food and installing solar panels and worrying about the homeless. He rode a bike, for crying out loud. A bike! He wanted other people to ride bikes. He put little places to park bikes on the sidewalks and run bike lanes down the roads. He was a fussy downtowner who fussed about downtown.

Twenty-two years ago, U of T was trying to do one of those things it does, and demolish some stately Victorian houses so it could build a luxury hotel on campus. A group of students – some of whom lived in those houses – decided to try to put a stop to it, so they called Jack Layton.

Layton had an idea. To rally the community to their cause, the students needed to give a sense of what a tower would do to the area. So, at his urging, a group of students congregated on what was then a field south of Bloor, and started blowing up black balloons filled with helium. They tied the balloons to 150-foot long tethers, and tied them at intervals around the perimeter of the proposed tower, creating a virtual tower, billowing in the sky. Then they called the media.

If you dig through the archives of the student newspaper at that college, you’ll find a special edition they printed when city council killed the project, a picture of a young Layton on the cover, holding forth in chambers. (The OMB eventually overturned council’s decision, but by that point the market had soured and the deal fell through.)

It’s a small-potatoes story, but I’m fond of it because years later it would become my college, and my college paper. And all small potatoes are very big potatoes indeed for the people who own them.

Jack Layton was a city councilor. Maybe he never stopped being a city councilor. Even once he was leading the NDP, you could still get him to call you for an earful about U of T or the industrial zoning snafu in Riverdale.

And this is the stuff a national leader is made of?

Well, yes.

Somehow, Jack rolled on past the tiresome identity politics that define this and every other country. As he became a national figure, nobody was ever able to tag him as a Toronto Elite, even as everyone south of Eglinton got tarred with that brush. Even as he remained proudly and intimately entwined not just in his city’s affairs, but in its way of life.

He was a downtowner. He lived the way that people live in downtown Toronto. We know what this means; it involves bike helmets and whatnot. In the last year, there’s been all kinds of political sport made of demonizing people who live like this, in goofier and goofier terms: Socialists became Toronto Elites became “not real” Torontonians became bike-riding pinkos became communists became communists who are plotting a takeover. And as easy as it is to write this all off as unhinged grandstanding, rhetoric seeps its way into reality. There was a warning beneath the silliness: Downtowers can’t connect with real people, and certainly won’t win elections.

Well, sucks to that.

Jack never ran away from his downtown background; neither did he run on it. He wasn’t an obnoxious urbanite (and we all know the breed). He didn’t go to Ottawa as the Honourable Member for Universe-Centre. For all of his activism for cities, the urban agenda – perhaps frustratingly – wasn’t at the core of his electoral pitch. I’d like to think he represented the best of downtown, not its occasionally-myopic worst. He was cosmopolitan in the sense that he wasn’t just a citizen of the whole world, but also of his whole country. Downtown Toronto was the place he came from, not the place he wanted to turn the country into.

What he did was remind us that if you want to put your fingers to the pulse of the country, to understand what makes its people tick, and work to capture their imaginations and their votes, then you can come from a fishing village; you can come from a prairie homestead; you can make it in Calgary, or represent the low-lying beauty of Lake Huron’s north shore, where I sit now.

Or, you can make your home in Chinatown in the shadow of the tower and in the midst of all that is good and great about the city, and work from there.

Everyone comes from somewhere. Jack came from downtown. The flags are at half-mast across the country, and for a moment, it’s almost as if we’re Canadians.

Welcome, everyone, to Toronto.

Here in Toronto, the citizenry are being treated to a three-ring circus of municipal upheaval, in which the self-professed guardians of taxpayer dollars are busy throwing said dollars away for reasons that seem to range from ideology to spite, which really isn’t that far of a walk.

The howling today is over the misbegotten Jarvis bike lanes, who received their death sentence today, as did already-completed bike lanes in Scarborough and putative lanes elsewhere.

Theirs, admittedly, was never a considered life. They were slapped onto the road without a proper process in the first place, at a cost of about $70,000. Once there, though, cyclists loved them. But the lanes quickly became an irritant for drivers who used the road, some of whom swore up and down that it was derailing their lives. Well-to-do Moore Park residents were incensed. In the mayoral election, Rocco Rossi was the first to scream blue murder about them, vowing their removal. Just today, councilor Karen Stintz told council a story about a mother who said the bike lanes were keeping her from family dinners. City staff had reported that the bike lanes had increased travel time on Jarvis by an average of about 4 minutes. Maybe they were a Swanson’s family.

That said, the lanes are there, and they’re being used by 900 cyclists a day—a number that would have surely grown. (It takes time for people to adjust their daily habits, after all.) The traffic slowdowns, meanwhile, were on their way to being addressed with some left-hand turn jiggery-pokery. There was never a clear case that they were a detriment to the city, as opposed to a political opportunity.
No matter. It takes a certain bloody-mindedness to de-accomplish a fait accompli at enormous expense and rebuild it one street over. Turning Jarvis back into a car-crammed five-lane arterial throws out years of planning work around making it friendlier. It will cost at least $200,000 to remove the brand-new bike lanes, and even more to build a new bikeway exactly one street over. It was incompetent to build a bike lane without proper consultation. It is uncompetent—deliberately, opportunistically misguided—to tear it up, waste the money, alienate the neighbourhood, radicalize an important community, and end up with a lousy, crammed road to show for it.

Meanwhile, in the next circus ring over, the consultants the Fords hired at great expense to hunt down all the waste in the city’s budget are reporting back this week. The results are being dribbled out day by day. So far, we’re on day three.
The surprising results are not surprising at all: The gravy is a lie. While the reports from the consultants at KPMG suggest nips and tucks, the fact remains that the city has to deliver a lot of services that are required by the province, and it’s already running a fairly tight operation. Cuts will be tough.

The week may yet turn up a surprise—the discovery, say, of a spare fire department that the city put in the closet and completely forgot it splurged for on eBay, or the realization that the planning division spends $150 million a year to Febreze the carpets—but so far, juicy targets are few and far between.

KPMG tells us we could defund the Economic Development department, which brings new business to town. Or, we could cut all arts funding. Or recycle less. Or we could stop cleaning the streets so much. (Oh, come on. It’s not like you were eating dinner off them anyway.) The mayor may have been hoping to discover piles of fru-fru to heroically cut, but so far KPMG is turning up cost-saving opportunities like this: “Funds to help Elderly and Disabled Torontonians Purchase Critical Medical Supplies.”
Incompetence is mismanaging city departments and letting costs get out of hand in the first place. Uncompetence is running on a bogus platform. Uncompetence is cutting taxes in a budget crisis, mandating deep service cuts. Uncompetence is having a better option to fix the situation, but ignoring it because it’s not your style.

(Uncompetence is distinct from hypocrisy, though they do go great together: Uncompetence is creating a consultation process that will give bogus or skewed data, and trying to stack it with your supporters. Hypocrisy is later claiming the results are invalid because they’re skewed towards your opponents, as Denzil Minnan-Wong did this week.)

And in the third, adjoining ring, the city has announced a plan to reduce staffing by offering buyouts to 17,000 employees. The ranks of the city’s 50,000-odd employees are about to get thinned in a blowout “Everyone Must Go!” sale. Ford feels that the city employs too many people, though, with regards to his civic priorities, he pronounced that “we have more than enough staff, no matter how many staff leave the city, to remove graffiti.”

Is a mass-buyout a good idea? It’s hard enough for the public sector to attract top talent in the first place, let alone at a time when the municipality is in decline, the politicians are hostile to the bureaucracy, and the leadership determined to dismantle work that so many civil servants have spent years on. The enterprising, ambitious and talented will be the first to go.

It’s a bad idea by design. That’s the nature of uncompetence: It’s a form of studied callousness employed by people who want—on some level—to dismantle the thing they govern. In the case of Rob Ford, that represents the institution of the municipality, which, he believes, shouldn’t do the bulk of the work it does.

Uncompetence holds a studied disregard for planning, for process, for advice, for consultation. Uncompetence says that if you steer from the gut and set a direction, the beast of government will moan and roar but eventually come to heel. Incompetence is the mistakes that people make while building. Uncompetence is a willful abandon, the decision that competence is really someone else’s bag of tricks. And uncompetence is useful—more useful than anything—when you’re busy trying to tear something down.

Unfortunately, the visual parallels between the Vancouver riots and the G20 in Toronto – the broken glass, the smoking street, the smoldering police cars – are leading observers to make all kinds of spurious connections between the two events. The insinuation is that they represent two sides of the same coin, or two book-ends of trans-continental mob violence.

“Looking at Vancouver, thinking about the G20. I wonder if it’s time we just accepted that this is what a lot of Canadians are like,” wrote a friend on Facebook.

“Torontonians bashing Vancouver rioters? That’s rich. We had G20 last yr & would likely have riots if our team lost in Stanley Cup finals,” read one of many similarly-themed tweets coursing through the Internet.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The comparisons spring from visual comparisons, as well as persistent misunderstandings about what happened at the G20. The spate of vandalism that happened at the G20 was perpetrated by a small group over a short period of time. The rest was a rowdy, but relatively damage-free political protest that was the subject of an astounding police crackdown. The two events were different as apples and oranges.

This isn’t about Toronto vs. Vancouver. There could well be a drunken hockey mob in waiting here, too. By the same token, the G20 vandals, the G20 protestors, and the G20 police all came to Toronto from across the country. No, this is about two events that look similar on TV, but in reality have far less to do with each other than many seem to think.

Here’s why:

“It was just a handful of hooligans” is a myth in Vancouver, but a reality at the G20.

It’s always nice to blame an “outside” influence for this kind of thing. Today, Vancouver is in a tussle about whether or not there was “anarchist” involvement in the riots there.

Whether or not there were radicals in the mix in Vancouver – and surely there were – the critical distinction is that the crowd joined in, and hooliganism became a mob action.

At the G20, on the other hand, the violence was premeditated, targeted, and isolated. Moreover, the brief spate of property damage perpetrated by a few did not generate any interest in the thousands of protestors nearby.

Perhaps ironically, the bulk of the G20 protestors who were around at the time of the vandalism were far less interested in being drawn into a riot than hockey crowds were. For one thing, most were invested in the idea of peaceful protest. For another, they were sober.

There was almost no looting, and relatively little property damage at the G20.

TV images made the G20 property damage look widespread. In reality, the only major outbreak of property damage was by a group of “black bloc” vandals who waited until the end of the protest parade, and went on a quick parade of their own, breaking off in the opposite direction for a bit of infantile smash-and-run that followed a linear route.

They started near Queen and Spadina, moving east and dipping into the financial district, where a police car was torched (a disturbed, half-naked man, who I’d witnessed earlier in the day perched almost suicidally atop a war memorial, was charged), then headed north on Yonge to around College and west to Queen’s Park, where they changed clothes and dispersed. Along the way, they smashed windows of franchises that offended their sensibilities, and moved on. (The Toronto Star’s excellent report, written by reporters who followed the vandals, explains how they worked.)

I followed the vandals’ route myself, 15 minutes later. It was a mess, but there was no riot and no mob. Bystanders stood, a little dazed, some taking photos. There was no looting to be seen.

The police actions at the G20 had (sadly) little to do with the vandalism.

The G20 vandalism happened independently of the police actions that defined the event. The vandalism happened in the late-afternoon; the police violence and mass arrests only got underway after the damage was done and the vandals were gone. In fact, the police let the vandals act and disperse without lifting a finger against them.

The protestors who remained scattered across the city into the evening were certainly angry, and sometimes rowdy, but largely didn’t engage in property damage or vandalism. They gathered, they chanted, they sat on city streets where police didn’t want them. And for that, they were beaten and hauled away.

The police started deploying ever-more aggressive tactics against people on the streets, including mass arrests, kettling, riot-line charges and beatings, in the service of secret laws and spurious “breach of peace” charges. To reiterate, these were not directed at vandals, who were long gone, or even at particularly unruly protestors. Journalists were detained. People out to get groceries were detained. People out walking their dogs got detained. People who took the wrong turn on their bike were detained.

Protest is legitimate.

At the G20, it’s important to distinguish between “vandals” and “protestors.” The two are not synonymous: One is illegal and loathsome; the other is utterly necessary.

Not all of the protestors were “peaceful protestors.” There were plenty of protestors who were angry, rowdy, obnoxious, difficult, thoughtless, ill-informed, in-your-face and totally dislikeable. That doesn’t mean they ran around smashing things, or breaking the law. Whatever you make of their politics, their presence was entirely legitimate.

There was no single motive shared by the G20 protestors, just like there is no single incentive that drove the Vancouver mobs to do what they did. But let’s be clear: Protest is a legitimate thing to do on the streets of a city.

To compare a seething mob of drunken douchebags who took the chance to run amuck at the Robson St. Sears, beating those who stood against them while taking cellphone snaps of themselves going “woo hoo!”, with a group of vandals who did a run through Toronto and dispersed is inaccurate.

However, to compare a seething mob of drunken douchebags with those who protested what happened at the G20 is simply wrong.

Surveying the Port Lands, still a bleak sight despite years of diligent toil to renew them, the mayor’s older brother, right-hand man, and occasional mouthpiece decided that neighbourhood-building was taking too long, and the time had come to do something different instead. Something fun.

For starters, an NFL stadium, built on the foundations of the historic power station he’d demolish. Then there would be high-end retail outlets. “The Nordstrom, the Macy’s, the Guccis,” he told the Globe and Mail. “Something different. Plus, some green space — something nice.”

Linking the whole thing together: A genuine, bona fide, electrified monorail. Something that would give the city a bit of pizzazz, some razzle-dazzle, something that would make this pleasantly dull town worth visiting for a change.

Making sense of this vision is a stumper. It would, of course, mean throwing out years of work and scrapping the elaborate machinery of urban redevelopment. It would mean losing the new neighbourhoods of living and working space that were in the works. Far from speeding things up, it would mean setting the clock back on the waterfront. So what was he up to?

It’s hard to say whether Doug Ford’s pronouncements came from the heart, or were carefully calibrated to make urbanist heads explode. Possibly both.

It is true that his urban planning style doesn’t mesh with the years of methodical consultation and remediation that have already been sunk into the waterfront. The Fords seem to prefer that other kind of planning, which consists of coming up with interesting endings to sentences that start with “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?”

In defence of this way of doing business, let me be the first to say: SimCity is a lot of fun to play. You have your little bulldozer, and you can’t really consider your city a success till you’ve built a big galoot of a stadium on the waterfront. (If you’re wondering how this American ideal turns out in real life, just look at downtown Cincinnati.)

A couple of caveats are in order here. First, there’s Ford’s disclaimer that his plan was “just Doug Ford’s opinion,” representing nobody but himself, except possibly the mayor he advises every day, and maybe also the delegation of Rogers executives – known to be angling for a new stadium – who recently stopped by his office.

Second, there’s the caveat that the whole thing is insane. Where to start? Ford says his putative NFL stadium could be built on the cheap by reusing the foundations of the beautiful old Hearn generating station, which could work great if the NFL wants a stadium that’s shaped like a generating station. If you think the stadium is majestic, wait till you see the parking lot. And if you think the parking lot is majestic, wait till you see the traffic jam.

The rest of the waterfront-as-theme-park vision just gets odder. Attracting that high-end retail would be a neat trick. There is a certain kind of chain that likes building warehouse-sized outlets in the middle of nowhere, but I don’t think Ikea is Doug Ford’s idea of a good time. By the same token, I’m trying to picture Gucci advertising “the Grand Opening of Our New Wasteland Location,” but they might prefer to sell goods to customers, instead.

And then there’s the monorail. Do we, as a society, need to talk more about monorails? Ford says he was sold on the idea by an unnamed developer, leaving open the very real possibility that it was Lyle Lanley himself. There are reasons that, in the real world, you find monorails in Las Vegas, Disney World, or connecting the terminals at Newark Airport to the parking lot. A monorail is what you get when you think of transit as a ride. They’re fun, as long are you’re not trying to get anywhere at the same time as more than seven other people.

There are a few undercurrents beneath this goofiness. One is the distinction between the city as a place that people visit, and a place that people live. Urbanists want to turn the Port Lands into a breathable (and maybe even breedable) habitat for those who enjoy city living. The middle of a city is a pretty good place to do that. The Fords seem to want downtown to be a fun destination for weekend visits.

And to be fair, Doug’s not all wrong when he suggests that Toronto’s waterfront developments are short on pizzazz. With its wave-decks and little urban beaches, our new waterfront areas have a wry, liveable whimsy. But they need to be cut with some outright, brash, unapologetic attractions that draw the locals and the general public alike. Work these attractions into living, vital parts of the city, and you’ll have a success. Scrap the city and build the attractions, and the results will be like Ontario Place in February.

But I don’t sense that the Fords are here to talk urban theory. The more troubling undercurrent is shock-and-awe, the same strategy we saw when (for good or for ill) they scrapped Transit City, and as when they forcibly ejected the management and board of the Toronto Community Housing Corporation.

Doug Ford might have been sketching out his mental picture of the perfect waterfront. But it’s just as likely that his cartoony scheme was a bird flipped at the institutions of city-building: The corporations and commissions, the boards and agencies, the lawyers and consultants and renderings and reports, the residents and stakeholders and landscape architects and charettes, the hopes and years and the millions of taxpayers’ money.

The unspoken message: All of this is moot. Wait till next year, when the budget crisis hits and it’s time to start selling things. Then we’ll see who wants a monorail ride.

This article originally appeared in The Toronto Standard.

Nobody ever accused social media of suffering from low expectations. This month, we’ve been hearing a lot of keening over whether this is Canada’s “social media election.” Everybody’s waiting for the thing, but like Godot, nobody knows quite what it looks like, and it stubbornly refuses to show up. Every election since 2006 has been pegged as the one the Internet was really going to shake up.

Yet here we are, and the political landscape is still the same bog as far as the eye can see. Nor has the great democratic awakening of the youth materialized just yet. Feckless youth! Still young, after all these years.

It’s tempting to write off the “social media election” as an object of media fascination, but the question is genuinely curious. The marriage between social media and campaigns should be perfect: on one hand, a technology that’s used by tens of millions of Canadians, and which engages users in conversation by its very nature. On the other, a social process that’s supposed to be the very centrepiece of citizen engagement. Yet the two hardly seem to talk.

Why? Bashing social media as vapid is too easy. Social media is less persuasive than we’d like to imagine it.

And more to the point, elections may have less to do with persuasion than we’d like to think.

By now, we’re all fairly familiar with social media’s foibles. This year, Twitter has become mainstream enough to be viewed as a saleable campaign tool.

This has had at least one democratizing effect: Previously, only the media got to receive soul-crushing press releases. Now every lucky citizen can get them. If you’re curious about whether your local candidate had a great day of door-knocking in your riding, Twitter is here to tell you that they did.

There are other blips on the radar. Jack Layton has released an iPhone app. There is a movement afoot to send university students to the polls in “vote mobs,” but as The Globe’s Gloria Galloway has reported, there are good reasons to ask whether a vote mob will have a measurable effect. (Student activism is not a new concept.) And let us not forget the power of Facebook as a way to weed the undesirables from your Conservative rally.

We bump up against social media everywhere, because it’s a part of everything. But it’s not a media of mass persuasion, the way broadcast media such as radio and television were. It’s a vast cauldron in which ideas bubble and foam, and movements take shape and coalesce. It defies most attempts to manipulate it. It’s fickle and slow, but for its moments of lightening-fast resolution. It’s a great place to gauge mass opinion, but a lousy place to sway it.

Elections get far too much credit as agoras of conversation. We play at being cynical, but at the heart of it, Westerners have invested a great deal in the notion that an election is a time for debate and decision-making, and our attachment to the idea of the “social media election” springs from it.

When it proves not to be the case, yet again, we complain that politics these days – all attack ads and spin! – have ruined the ideal campaign we deserve. I’m not sure what people imagine that ideal to look like. I suspect it involves suddenly becoming interested in monetary policy and discussing it with your local candidate over brandy to the theme of Masterpiece Theatre, instead of ignoring the campaign until the last minute and then voting for the party that freaks you out the least.

Less popular is the notion that the ideal election may not actually exist. It could be that elections are in fact no time to have a serious conversation.

It’s nice to think that elections are about persuasion but, on the ground, persuasion is a surprisingly peripheral part of the process. Local elections are remarkably mechanical things. They consist chiefly of compiling lists of voters who say they’ll vote for a candidate, and then – come hell or high water – getting those voters to the polls on election day.

If technology has a role to play in elections today, it’s here. In Toronto, Mayor Rob Ford’s team decided they wanted nothing to do with iPhone apps and similar elitist whizbangery. Instead, they kept it simple, and used text messages and automated phone calls to round up supporters, get signs on lawns and harangue people on election day until they went to the polls. They stuck to the mechanics of elections, and they won.

Social media and elections go together if we imagine that they’re about persuading and being persuaded, but they’re not. By the time an election is called, the conversation has already happened, and it’s time to get to the polls. The real “social media election” begins the day after the polls close and the winner is announced, and it goes on, every day, from there. That’s where to look for it.

This article originally appeared in The Globe and Mail.

Now, at last, we know what our new mayor has arranged replace Transit City with: One great, honking, $8.7 billion tunnel beneath Eglinton, all the way from Kennedy to Jane, built and paid for by the province. (Ford would also like to finish the Sheppard subway line — but he’s got no concrete plan to pay for it, and the drawing board is blank, so it’s not a prospect to bank on.)

Years of work, and at least $49 million in local consultations, environmental assessments, engineering work and broken contracts have gone down the drain. That provincial $8.7 billion would have bought 52 km of LRT track, whereas now it’s buying 25 km of subway. The progressive left is screaming blue murder.

But is the result all bad? Heresy alert: Maybe not. Rob Ford, a man who has no love for transit, might have gone and done the right thing for the wrong reasons.

Transit City wasn’t just a transit plan; it was an article of faith for the left. The plan would have pushed a handful of light-rail lines down — for the most part — the middle arterial roads, creating something like the St. Clair right-of-way, but with fewer stops and larger trains. It was sold as “subways lite” — cheap and practical transit. Not only was it to be the most tangible legacy of the Miller administration, but it embodied some of their most cherished precepts about city-building.

In fact, the city-building upsides seemed to trump the idea of transit itself. One priority was casting transit as a social service: Its various branches would have reached needy neighbourhoods like Malvern and Jane/Finch, promising opportunity for local residents through transit.

Transit City also promised to remake the suburban landscape. Light rail, it was hoped, would render wide suburban roads less bleak, and attract the kind of attractive, medium-height development that Toronto planners crave (even if Toronto developers haven’t exactly matched their enthusiasm).

Transit City’s public-outreach material featured endless pictures of trams running through carefully manicured, generically European streets. The idea seemed to be that if we built enough European-style trams, our streets might turn into a bit of European-style Europe.

It was a nice thought. The problem is these upsides are all just collateral benefits of transit. What about transit for the sake of, well, transit — the act of moving people quickly around the city? Transit City might have been a genuine boon to its neighbourhoods. But it gave every indication of being a lousy way to get across town.

For one thing, it’s slow. Advocates like the Toronto Environmental Alliance claim that, on average, Toronto’s street-level LRTs would be only slightly slower than subways. But these numbers, like Ford’s fundraising schemes for the Sheppard line, live in the gauzily optimistic land of theory.

LRT design can be finessed in a number of ways, but there’s no getting around the fact that streetcars have to stop at cross-streets so cars can get through. Jiggery-pokery involving meticulous control of traffic lights can help, but it doesn’t always get implemented by reluctant traffic departments. Then there’s the process of extracting fares from customers, which subways don’t face. In San Francisco and Boston, similarly-planned LRTs grind their way, stop by stop, through the city. At MIT, students sell “I Hate the Green Line” T-shirts, after the local LRT — the busiest in America, and whose excursions are, shall we say, leisurely. (I saw these shirts myself, while quietly hating the Green Line.)

Even more troublesome was the fact that Transit City was a patchwork of stubs. Instead of running across town and connecting nodes, Transit City lines dangled off of existing subway lines like little vestigial organs. (The Eglinton Crosstown line — which Ford has preserved — was the one promising exception.)

This setup might have been workable for riders who just wanted to get downtown. But what if downtown isn’t the centre of your universe?
What if a commuter needed, for instance, to get from a house in a suburb near Sheppard East to a job near Finch West? With Transit City — deep breath! — the trip would have gone like this: Bus to Sheppard LRT, LRT to Sheppard subway, subway to Sheppard bus, bus to University subway, subway up one stop, subway to Finch LRT.

Try doing that twice a day, every day. Wouldn’t you just rather get on a bus and go west, then up? Or, you know, buy a car? Transfers, connections and commuting times pile up, and have a significant effect on quality of life. There’s a reason that Transit City’s detractors called it “Transfer City” from the outset.

An effective transit network needs big pipes and small pipes, arteries as well as capillaries. It takes big pipes to get to the right end of town quickly, and small pipes to get to where you’re going. What’s more, they all need to connect. Transit City skipped the arteries and went straight to the capillaries. Why? Because, Torontonians were told, capillaries are so much cheaper, and offer great value for money.

But in the long run, cheapness doesn’t pay. Yes, for the price of one subway megaproject, we could run twice as many kilometers of light rail. But if that light rail, chopped up across the map, isn’t fast or connected enough to offer Torontonians a real choice in navigating the city, then what’s the point?

Rob Ford’s plan builds just one artery, at immense cost, but it builds it fully. When building a network, one complete project is better than a handful of half-projects. The new Eglinton subway will go from the heart of Scarborough all the way to the edge of Etobicoke. It will do it at full speed. It will take riders that whole way without a transfer. We haven’t built anything this significant since the late 1970’s.

Ford’s new plan is heavy-handed, short on nuance, and doesn’t give a fig about city-building or whether the streetscape above looks like Milan or Sudbury. It’s an expensive, essential artery that the left, hoping to do it all, couldn’t commit to. It will simply let people move, quickly and effectively, from one densely populated part of the city to another.

And maybe that’s not such a bad way to think about what transit ought to do.

This article was originally published at The Toronto Standard.

It’s a Q&A site where people ask questions and receive answers – or something – from the crowd. Most of the questions seem driven by insecurity, desperation or middle-school assignments.

At the moment, my personal favourite reads: “When i first moved into my house 12 years ago there was a small lemon tree that now grew to be a massive one that produces a lot of lemons. How can this symbolize me other than growth.”

Question-and-answer sites have a long heritage, but the quest to perfect the model keeps yielding lemons. Some, like Yahoo, are great big sour ones. Others are small and maybe even sweet, but restricted in scale and not terrifically lucrative. Right now, though, two services are competing to reinvent the model.

One is called Quora, a site that was the subject of unrelenting hype this year. The other, launched two weeks ago, comes from Facebook itself: It’s called Facebook Questions, and as such, is on the fast track to ubiquity, whether or not anyone asked for it.

There are some worthy precedents for the Q&A concept. One long-running site, Ask MetaFilter, takes a time-worn approach, simply throwing questions open to its thousands-strong community of users, regulated only by a $5 joining fee to keep the ruffians out and the diligence of its handful of moderators. It’s a successful and thoughtful site, but its simple model allows it to get only so big. And size raises the spectre of the spammy Yahoo Answers, which seems to exist more to drive page views than to help readers.

Quora suggests one way to make quality and quantity co-exist: Give users a sorting-and-categorizing apparatus so elaborate that it seems to be the product of a bureaucrat’s fevered fantasy.

Open for 10 months now, it’s a hopeful website with the kind of name that smacks of civic ambition while technically meaning nothing. In recent months, it has achieved the critical mass of users to edge it into the mainstream.

Like other Q&A sites, Quora wants to connect questions with expert answers. It takes its mission very, very seriously. It asks users to provide their real names, along with their subjects of expertise and areas of interest. Then, it pipes them a feed of questions that it thinks they would be interested in answering.

Plenty of expertise is on display. Questions range from the practical (Where is a good place to eat after a Canucks game in Vancouver?) to the experiential (“What does it feel like to be schizophrenic?”). On the whole, the answers tend to be erudite and considerate.

But good luck getting into it. To achieve this high-quality matching, Quora is full of fiddly widgets and little moving parts. Every question and answer get tagged and rated. Everywhere you turn, there are rating buttons, friends lists, notifications, feeds and suggestions, and bits and pieces lifted from social networks and wikis. Not only is it overwhelming and abstruse, it’s pointed: Quora seems to distrust users’ ability to sort themselves out organically and tries to order them into line.

No such worries beset Facebook. Its own project, Facebook Questions, is just starting to work its way through the network. Facebook says Questions (as it would have us call it) is designed to help users who compulsively poll around for suggestions: What movie should we watch tonight? Which Ben & Jerry’s flavour is the best? What should we name our daughter?

To facilitate this process, Facebook Questions literally lets users set up polls, so your Facebook friends can click to choose between “Crystal,” “Krystal,” “Kristall,” and “Jamantha.” Once a friend answers your question, their friends also can see it, so the questions spread virally through the network.

The theory is that the polls will serve this kind of utilitarian purpose. In practice, Facebook users have been using it to conduct various forms of a preening popularity contest: Who would you vote for in the next election? Do you support my pet political cause and/or social gripe? Who’s your favourite character from Buffy the Vampire Slayer?

The model has sharp drawbacks. Keeping questions confined to friends’ lists severely limits the chance of finding information that is not immediately at hand, since you’re asking such a narrow set of people. It’s just as hard to glean much information about social opinion this way, unless you’re prepared to be surprised that the majority of your self-selected friends happen to agree with you.

The futility is almost endearing: Looking for the solution to one Internet scourge – let’s call it the Asinine Question and Answer Site – Facebook has managed to blunder directly into another: the Entirely Bogus Internet Poll.

Facebook Questions will have its uses (I suspect it will work well when confined to matters of taste), and Quora could outgrow its zealous adolescent ungainliness. But the perfect Q&A site – the one that’s big, accessible, useful and reliable – is probably a mirage. If you want human answers to a question, you’re going to need to have humans on your website. They’re a hassle, I grant you, but there’s no engineering them away.

This article originally appeared in The Globe and Mail.

Pine Point was an insta-bake lead and zinc mining town, a pre-fab suburban subdivision plunked down in the middle of nowhere in the 1960s. It was a thriving place in its day, and it was inhabited just long enough for one full generation to pass through it.

People were born there and schooled there. People came of age there. It was a northern party town of mullets and tinted glasses and foolhardy backlot exploits. Its residents formed clubs and played in bands and did their banking. They photographed themselves in tight, terrible swimsuits in the sun and snowsuits in the cold and drank at the hotel bar, and at the legion hall, and, by many indications, pretty much anywhere else they could. And then the mine closed, and Pine Point, quite simply, was razed.

But the town didn’t vanish, exactly. You can’t demolish a community without leaving debris, debris of many sorts, and it turns out that that debris has been preserved in a most poignant and remarkable way.

“Welcome to Pine Point” is a documentary website that tells the story of Pine Point, its “Pine Pointers,” its big wooden water tower, and the challenges of remembering a place that’s ceased to exist. Part memoir, part research project, it’s an understated work of stupefying grace. Since its release in late January, it’s been quietly breaking hearts around the world.

Pine Point’s story is told by Michael Simons, who never lived there, but visited as a child to play hockey at its nifty ice rink.

Mr. Simons grew up to be a successful creative director, and one half of The Goggles, a Vancouver duo who, among other projects, were responsible for the art direction of AdBusters magazine. Remembering Pine Point one day, a few years ago, he wondered what had become of the place, and decided to consult the Internet. He discovered that the town was gone, but that former residents had gone to remarkable pains to memorialize it, both online and off.

Coming from a print background, Mr. Simons and his creative partner, Paul Shoebridge, originally planned to make a book with what they’d found. But a conversation with a friend at the National Film Board convinced them to turn it into a digital project. The result, a collaboration between The Goggles and the NFB’s Vancouver-based interactive team, is a website that looks sort of like a narrated scrapbook, replete with photos and movies that come to life like Harry Potter pictures.

As much as its creators are interested in the iconography of bygone years, this isn’t just a Douglas Coupland-esque exercise in fetishizing the past.

It’s a story, carefully spun, and crafted to unwind in ways I wouldn’t dare spoil.

There are no tricks here: Everyone knows what happens to Pine Point in the end ¬– the documentary says so upfront, and besides, it’s right there in Wikipedia. Yet the beauty of this story is in the details, and these unfold in such a way that, in big ways and small, only at the end do you fully realize what you’ve been seeing and hearing the whole time.

You can click through Welcome to Pine Point in 10 minutes, but a full viewing can take an hour or more; like any good show, it pays to linger and think, to let the photos and videos draw you into its world. The entire piece is set to haunting ambient music (or, at least, what seems like ambient music) by The Besnard Lakes; I found some of it so compelling I lingered on pages just to hear it loop.

Beyond the story of Pine Point and its aftermath, the documentary is a meditation on the nature of photography and the foibles of memory. Pine Point isn’t just a vanished place in the Northwest Territories, nor just a placeholder for a certain vision of small-town Canada in the 60s and 70s and 80s, where everyone looks a little bit like a hoser.

It’s a stand-in for every place lost to time, cut off from the present, which now only exists through faded period pictures. Pine Point is the land where the photos have rounded corners are slightly oversaturated. It’s a place where the photos fade and sag along with their subjects, instead of remaining artificially, digitally fresh. We all came from that place, and there’s no going back.

As Mr. Shoebrige and Mr. Simons are fond of pointing out, Pine Point’s photos “aren’t Facebook.” They’re “crunchy,” rough, un-pruned and imperfect, and that’s the only way the town will ever be remembered. Pine Point is gone – and photos don’t fade any more.

This piece originally appeared in The Globe and Mail

He didn’t rebuild the Distillery, or build the opera house, or plan Dundas Square and fill it with tens of thousands of revellers over and over again. He didn’t even start Spacing Magazine, even though he kept showing up at their parties.

In fact, the list of things that David Miller didn’t personally do is really very long. (Also: founding Rome; colonizing Australia; writing Dan Brown’s novels.) Yet when one thinks of David Miller’s Toronto, these are the things that come to mind: A city bigger, a city fairer, a city covered in the tokens of prosperity and the evidence of enthusiasm.

We’ve just come through an election campaign that was fought on the premise that Toronto is broken, its leaders on the wrong track, its citizens divided by class. But the fact that Rob Ford won, and won big, doesn’t necessarily make that an immutable truth. Because the contradictory fact remains that, between 2003 and 2010, Toronto flowered.

Of course, anything would look like a blossom next to the atomic winter of the late Lastman years, when Toronto’s post-amalgamation governance was giving gong shows a good name. Mel Lastman was at the height of his weirdness. The police were bouncing from one corruption scandal to the next. Millions of tax dollars had been bilked in a computer-leasing intrigue that unravelled with the saddest-sack love affair ever to have its cell-phone records read in court. The city was littered with the decaying corpses of fiberglass moose.

It seemed, at the time, that the only power driving the city was its unweildy system itself. The city belonged to neither downtowners or suburbanites back then, but rather to opportunists who had stepped up to take advantage of it.

This was why the bridge to the island airport, of all the parochial squabbles, became an winning issue for Miller in 2003. The public imagination was not ignited by an airport few cared about, on an island full of uppity cottagers even fewer had much sympathy for. But a candidate willing to halt a bridge being rammed through by an unpleasant agency on behalf of a private company – well, now you’re cooking with gas.

So we stepped into the Miller era, an era that abandoned rudderless damage-control in favour of earnest city-building. We know what David Miller did do: Re-equip the TTC and rebuild the waterfront, fix the city’s waste fiasco and preside over bold new plans to revitalize the city’s low-income, high-risk neighborhoods. He installed a police board and chief that – until the heartbreak of 2010 – restored public trust in the force.

He set up a 311 service to provide better (yes) customer service to Torontonians. He won us the Pan-Am games. He rewrote the City of Toronto act, and used his new powers to plug the city’s budget gap with taxes that – surprise! – turned out to be less than crowd-pleasers.

He established an integrity commissioner, and ran his office with integrity. Million-dollar scandals became a thing of the past. By 2010, Kyle Rae’s $12,000 cash bar seemed a ripe target (and fair enough). It is not too much to say that David Miller cleaned up City Hall. But this laundry list – obscured as it often was by Miller’s oftentimes furrowed, droning performance as a communicator – doesn’t capture the essence of the 2000’s as we lived them.

David Miller was as much a product of his era as he was responsible for it. He presided over a time of intense interest in Toronto, by the people who live in it and who love it. Toronto in the 2000’s was a place not just to be inhabited, but celebrated; a place not just to be managed, but an immense public work, a never-ending project of commerce and community.

A city that had survived decades of architectural self-immolation followed by political self-destruction had emerged into an era of celebrating itself. David Miller’s Toronto was a place where millions thronged the streets on a regular schedule of public festivals through the year. A place where people who wanted to work for progressive ideals weren’t tacking into the wind. A place where people who write about cities and think about cities and talk about cities flourished at small presses and business schools alike. Say what you will about Richard Florida; he’s here.

These were high-falutin’ ideas. They might not have had much resonance with those who just wanted to get to work and back with a minumum of traffic, taxes, and waste-management complications. But these citizens came out winners too, from their property values to the thriving city at their children’s feet.

There will always be a large and reasonable swath of the population for whom the municipality is a service-delivery organization, no matter how it fancies itself. And Miller’s administration, in asking Torontonians to adapt in the name of progress, managed to bungle the execution of its plans enough to overstep those bounds.

Does the 2010 election amount to a rejection of what came before? Rob Ford won his election fair and square. But he didn’t run against David Miller; he ran against two uninspired and inchoate politicians. He blew the horn for populists and small-c conservatives, he blew it exceedingly well, and his people followed him to the polls. (His opponents only managed a few forlorn blarts.)

You can fairly grouse that the garbage bin outside is one size too small; you might complain that the bike lanes are in shambles, which they most certainly are. You might have been hit with a tax on your car, a tax on your house. You might reasonably observe that St. Clair endured unending misery, and that the Bloor St. redo has turned into, if you’ll excuse me, a monsterous clusterfuck.

But that is to lose perspective. Toronto is a safe, prosperous, growing, and profoundly beautiful city. Since 2003, it has become more so. The past seven years have been in Toronto’s best tradition, not its worst. I cannot speak for 2.5 million people, but I know I speak for more than myself. Life in David Miller’s Toronto was good.

The site has had limited uptake amongst the general public, but it seems to have succeeded at raising mass ire. People who use Twitter might say it’s a useful, sometimes amazing way to meet people and stay in touch. But people who don’t, think it’s full of self-promoting navel-gazers who embody the worst excesses of the “Me” generation.

Habouring a grumble against it is fashionable. I hear it on the radio, I get it at the dinner table. I’ve learned to read the subtle hints: The glassy stare, the derisive snort, the guy waving his hands over his head and yelling “Oh God, not Twitter again!”

I sense a disconnect here.

What has Twitter done to generate so much animus? Is it getting what it deserves as a media-hyped implement of narccisim? Or is it just attracting a backlash from stick-in-the muds who don’t get the proverbial it?

The answer is neither. Rather, Twitter is a remarkable service that’s given the general public some good reasons to think poorly of it. You might not dislike the service. But if you do, I’m going to venture four reasons why you hate Twitter – whether you know it or not.

1. It drives off newcomers

For the newcomer, Twitter is a terrible, disconsolate place. Its landscape is strewn with the dead accounts of people who signed up, made one utterance into the void – “Trying this Twitter thing out” – and never went back. Unless you already have friends using the service, there’s not much to see except for celebrities and spam-bots. Twitter will encourage you to follow big-name celebrities, which is a lousy idea. For one thing, many of them write on about the same level as the spam-bots. For another thing, you are not going to have a productive networking experience with LeBron James. The experience gets better as you add real contacts, but

2. It looks dull from the outside

It’s true: People do say inane things on Twitter. They say lots of neat, trenchant things too, but never mind that. I, for one, reject the notion that someone else’s lunch is never interesting.

What keeps the inane stuff interesting is Twitter’s way of mixing all these little updates from different people into one stream. But users and non-users access the site in different ways. Non-users can only see one user’s feed at a time.

“I’m always amused by web-cartoonists with Twitter accounts,” a comic-loving friend told me, when I asked about her reticence to join. “Most of them are collections of the most mundane things. ‘Finished writing script. Going to walk the dog, then it’s DRAWING TIME.’”

A long list of updates like this from one single person is iffy reading. But in practice, Twitter users seldom look at just one user’s updates. Instead, they choose an assortment of people to follow, and have their updates delivered in real-time, all mixed in together. A blow-by-blow of a single person’s average day, read days after the fact, isn’t much to see. But a live cross section of hundreds of peoples’ days, all at once, is a fascinating thing. A pity you wouldn’t know it from the outside in.

3. Twitter people can be kind of insufferable

The fact that Twitter builds tight communities is a double-edged sword. Twitter people will talk at friends and family about the jokes they read on Twitter, the people they talked to on Twitter, the C-list public figure they prodded some terse response out of. You may, as previously noted, yell “Not Twitter again!” It’s warranted.

Worse, Twitter has flourished in certain professional spheres, especially technology, public relations, arts, politics and media (which won’t shut up about it). But it’s been slow to make inroads into other fields. Twitter reinforces social bubbles, so it’s attractive to people who live in bubbles. Bubbles, in turn, are attractive to people who hold pins.

4. It’s all a performance

If the idea of online friendship still threatens a lot of people, the idea of online performance troubles even more. If it seems odd to think that anyone would go online to read about other peoples’ mundane details, it must seem like the height of arrogance to go online and write out your own. The ego of it all!

Of course it’s a performance. People create personas for themselves all the time. They buy clothes and paint cars and sculpt topiaries and write books and mortify people at local open mics. All the world’s a stage: How much sense does it make to cordon off the corner with Twitter and say, “sorry, that’s crass”?

Ultimately, Twitter scares people because its concept plays to contemporary fears. The idea of millions of people writing very short notes about things that may or may not be profound sparks worries about things like the dumbing-down of media, the fragmentation of attention spans, and the loss of authentic offline interactions, whatever those were.

It’s mostly nonsense. Twitter doesn’t actually behave like that. It can pay off with real conversation, real learning, and real-life socialization – but this is almost impossible to see without joining, and ploughing through the initial slog. And as long as its upsides stay hidden while its downsides hang out, Twitter is likely to remain adored by its devotees, and roundly derided by the rest.