Category Archives: Politics

Caste: My Comfortable Perspective on a Horror

16 Thursday Apr 2026

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When I first got to India, I knew nothing about caste. Nothing. This is embarrassing to say now, because it’s a monstrous plague woven throughout Earth’s most populated country. There are over 200 million Dalits, or “untouchables.” Yet many North Americans know nothing about it. Many Indians don’t, either.

I confess: In my first weeks in India, I told a colleague that, not knowing what caste was, I suspended my judgement about it. She looked at me in horror. I get my reluctance to comment, but understand the horror in her face more. “Dalit” may be a vague term but “untouchables”?

I learned more about caste by observing, gradually. It didn’t dawn on me right away. The compound security guards, the night watchmen, my company’s drivers, my friend’s gardener Hera who sometimes pedalled me to work on his bike rickshaw…weren’t they all of lower caste, if not Dalits? At work, at the English-language news station, I was surrounded by English speakers. None of these people spoke English. I couldn’t talk to them.

I also read about caste from a couple devastating books. The first was Annihilation of Caste by the great B.R. Ambedkar, a Dalit jurist, economist, and activist who was the chief architect of India’s Constitution. This book is actually a speech Ambedkar was supposed to deliver in Lahore about uprooting caste. The speech and long introductory essay by novelist Arundhati Roy do a thing that will shock many: criticize Mahatma Gandhi. Who was after all a politician, not just a martyr or saint.

The other book was Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent by Pulitzer-winning journalist, Isabel Wilkerson. This 2020 book compares India’s caste system to racist structures in the US and Nazi Germany. As a Jewish North American who spent time in India, the explicit links between these three things shocked me. My ignorance made me shudder. I get that, on one level, why would I know about caste when it isn’t talked about here? But that’s precisely what made me shudder.

I recommend reading these books but won’t get into either here too much. They’re quite overwhelming. For example, Arundhati Roy claims in her intro (page 24) there are about 4,000 endogamous castes and sub-castes in Hindu society, each with its own specified hereditary occupation. I knew about Brahmins and Dalits, but nearly 4,000 castes?

A funny thing happens to white people who spend time in India: you see and learn about many things so shocking you feel the need to discuss them, but there’s the overwhelming sense that you can’t fully understand what you’re seeing, which makes discussing it all difficult.

I can only scratch the surface when it comes to describing caste. This is anything but a full account, but I hope the following is accurate. With that in mind, here are some reflections based on my time there.

Seeing But Not Recognizing Caste

I didn’t explicitly hear about “caste” when I was first exposed to it, so I didn’t categorize it that way. My friend told me that the people ironing clothes in his sector with coal-filled charcoal irons descended from a long line of ironers.

I didn’t grasp that he had no choice. Caste seemed, naively, like parents here passing on the family business to their kids. Many young people struggle to find a vocation and this seemed to have solved that—Indian society is so ordered because it’s predetermined. When people say that caste is the glue that binds the country, they must mean something like that.

Caste is practical, and does serve a purpose. That doesn’t make it ethical or acceptable! Far from! Ambedkar’s metaphor for caste was of a tower with no stairs or front door; residents live forever on whatever floor they’re born to. They can’t move up or leave. That the very thing taking away people’s basic freedoms is also the very glue holding the country together is what’s so troubling, and helps explain why so many people refuse to uproot it.

I got my shirts ironed for probably something like 10 rupees, 20 cents Canadian then. Dress clothes aside, I had never had my shirts ironed by someone else. To many, this arrangement is good.

My Radical Editor, T

When I think about caste I recall a conversation I had months later with my editor, still a very dear friend, Tathagata Bhattacharya. He’s a Brahmin, the highest caste, but he told me he doesn’t go for all that shit. “That’s easy for you to say!” I told him.

I thought I was being real. In my mind, nobody was pushing T to become a manual scavenger, cleaning feces in sewers without gloves or protective equipment. What I thought then was: caste is easy to denounce when nobody’s forcing it on you.

Of course it’s not that simple, I was dead wrong. Many upper caste Hindus genuinely don’t see that they benefit from systemic discrimination. They’ve fully internalized the caste system like fish who don’t know what water is because it’s so omnipresent. It’s what they breathe. It’s not necessarily that they’re going along with it, it’s that they think there’s nothing to go along with.

Like in many places, Indian society hides discrimination’s ugliest parts from sight, so its beneficiaries can enjoy it guilt-free. Caste is so baked into every aspect of society that pushing back against it is what’s considered radical because that means seeing it. Renouncing it and rejecting its privileges are rare. Going along with caste, refusing to acknowledge it, means going with the flow.

So now I appreciate how rare and great it was for an Indian editor to denounce caste. I was wrong to chirp T, even lightheartedly.

How did I land among an anti-caste editor in Zee Media, basically India’s Fox News? T is the son of the iconic and radical Bengali novelist, Nabarun Bhattacharya (Harbart is so excellent!), and the grandson of Mahasweta Devi, a legendary writer and activist. T’s radical pedigree helps explain his views on caste, even if he shares them with millions of Indians.

India’s political spectrum is vast, complex, and intensely regional. I was in New Delhi, the political capital in the North, which is nothing like Kerala, incidentally where Arundhati Roy is from, or Kolkata to the East, where T is from. Though upper castes do generally dominate discourse. My newsroom, like basically all newsrooms in India, was disproportionately composed of upper caste Indians.

WION, the international, English-language station where I worked, was extremely different in culture from Zee Hindi, especially the web desk where I was stationed. Liberal. Delhi journalists go through a revolving door of Film City news desks: News-18, NewsX, India Today, and NDTV. Apparently, WION was rare for having much less screaming at juniors. We were a tight knit group that had a very good time!

T had backbone about work matters, but never treated subordinates like he was above them. Personally, while growing up outside of India made me blind and distant to many aspects of caste, sometimes the distance makes you see things with clearer eyes, too.

Caste in the Office

Still, caste was far from eliminated. “Office boys” cleared away our glasses and mugs and ran newsroom errands. The systemic discrimination of caste exists alongside even the rosiest personal relationships; caste is about power, not how two people may get along. My attitude to the “office boys” was always laughing, despite the language barrier, but that isn’t the point.

One time at an office party, which I hosted when I lived in the office guest house, I poured the “office boy” some whiskey and showed him some tunes on guitar. He was there to work, but still, it was a party in my home. For me that was ordinary, but I had the sense like I violated something. To my surprise, he gave me a friendly peck on the cheek! You see things like this in India. It’s also common for two guys to walk around holding hands platonically. It’s very surprising in this virulently homophobic country, and sweet!

None of this changes the fact that when I waltzed into this gentleman’s country, people saw me very differently than they did him. Power and personal dynamics are always distinct things. The point was never that everybody was mean or belittled them; it’s that if you had to bet on which caste the editor and the “office boys” came from, it’d be easy money.

You could just tell. “Office boys,” like many lower caste people, tended to be short, slight, and dark skinned. Last names signify caste, too. There are signs if you know how to see and hear them.

Caste dynamics weren’t only at play in the office among “office boys,” security guards, manual labourers, or drivers. Sometimes in the newsroom you’d hear someone rip into a younger journalist in a way that felt like it went beyond differences of opinion and reeked of caste, even if there was a professional pretext for the disagreement.

Maybe the caste system encourages clashes in other types of hierarchies, or makes people apt to adopt hierarchy in general. Some Indians bring unyielding caste attitudes to their workplace (which is anything but unrelated to caste) and look down on those below them in the pecking order, while being absolutely subservient to those above.

Of course non-Indians do this too! I don’t mean to single out Hindu Indians for being snobs or ass kissers. Caste also exists outside of Hinduism and India. It’s all quite complicated and hard to pin down.

Yashica Dutt is a Dalit and Dalit activist who writes for the New York Times. She’s great on this topic. A few years ago, California was considering being the first US state to explicitly ban caste discrimination. They didn’t. Caste moves with the diaspora. Anyone interested in understanding Caste more should read Dalits on the subject, or at least actual experts.

Undoing Caste

What should be done about caste, exactly? I’m not the person to speak to about the state of contemporary developments, I’ll just say people have disagreed for a long time. Indeed, Annihilation of Caste is Ambedkar disagreeing with Gandhi back in 1936, years before India became an independent country in 1947.

Ambedkar thought that caste needed to be entirely uprooted, unlike Gandhi and many others, who believed it could be accommodated for within the system. The liberal tendency is to believe in quotas or “scheduled castes,” basically affirmative action for historically disadvantaged groups. Upper caste conservatives want all affirmative action abolished for numerous reasons: tradition, identity, and “merit,” but in a way they conveniently seldom mention is self-serving—they are the “merit.” Radicals like Ambedkar want something outside of this equation entirely.

This echoes political discourse in the West and surely many other places. The root of just about all political disagreement is class, and caste is basically class, but actively formalized and forced. Annihilating caste requires a mental revolution, a mental backflip, in hundreds of millions of people. No wonder it’s so hard to bring about.

Cities vs Villages

It’s a cliché that caste is different in cities than in villages. I spent almost all my time in Delhi and can’t speak to it in rural contexts at all. But caste discrimination is found across India and even beyond, whether in subtle or grotesque form.

Arundhati Roy makes this point in her introductory essay (page 98) to Annihilation of Caste:

“Ambedkar believed that it was not just the stigma, the pollution—purity issues around untouchability, but caste itself that must be dismantled. The practice of untouchability, cruel as it was—the broom tied to the waist…was the performative ritualistic end of the practice of caste. The real violence of caste was the denial of entitlement: to land, to wealth, to knowledge, to equal opportunity.”

Roy references here the shocking practice of Dalits being forced to wear brooms around their waists, to sweep away their footsteps with each step lest someone of a higher caste foul themselves by walking in them. Yes, caste discrimination can really be that blatant! Some Western readers or those unfamiliar with caste may think opposing caste is only for a do-gooder trying to make an exhibition of their oh so lofty soul, when really, the discrimination can be so monstrously flagrant, they’d be in utter disbelief and up in arms too.

But Roy’s point, or really Ambedkar’s, is that caste must be dismantled because the heart of the scourge of caste is internal, even when the discrimination is this jaw-droppingly outrageous. For one thing, caste discrimination, the “denial of entitlement” mentioned above, is often internalized in both parties. It’s the air everyone breathes, even the victims. 

Ambedkar’s Status Today

Roy observed that Ambedkar statues usually depict him holding a book, but it’s the Constitution of India, not Annihilation of Caste. Another of Roy’s observations has stuck with me, that the Brahmin Gandhi traded his suit for the dhoti to dress like the poorest of the poor, while the born-poor Dalit Ambedkar did the opposite, always donning a three-piece suit. Being born into wealth and power can makes a person feel inwardly assured of their role in society. They feel less of a need to look the part because they feel it. For Dalits, it’s the opposite.

I saw this myself. In Shimla in 2017, in addition to a very enormous Hanuman, I saw a large noble-looking statue of Gandhi, glorified as the “Father of the Nation.” Note, the statue didn’t need to actually say “Mahatma Gandhi.” In a less prominent location I found a smaller, less grand statue of “Baba Sahib Bhimrao Ambedkar” still surrounded by scaffolding.

Is that not typical?

The modern cover of Annihilation of Caste reflects this same idea, Ambedkar in Gandhi’s shadow pointing an accusatory finger, contained within the image of Gandhi and all his overwhelming mythic power and global stature. Everybody knows who Gandhi is, even if they don’t really know his actual politics. In contrast, to put it lightly, Ben Kingsley didn’t win the Academy Award for Best Actor for portraying BR Ambedkar. Nehru and Jinnah were depicted in that three hour movie, but Ambedkar was left out altogether. He wasn’t even a supporting character.

My former ignorance about caste is sadly still all too common. I really hope that changes! I wish nothing but the best to anybody inside or outside India raising awareness about the great Ambedkar, and, of course, working to finally annihilate caste.

Doug Ford Exempts Himself From Freedom of Information Requests

17 Tuesday Mar 2026

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It’s hard for a headline to be shocking in 2026, but Doug Ford making himself exempt from Freedom of Information requests genuinely stunned me. It’s so flagrant! MAGA coined “fake news,” and now Maple MAGA just eliminated the very bedrock of fact-finding for journalists.

The new law will mean that the records of Premier Doug Ford, his cabinet ministers, and parliamentary assistants will no longer be subject to freedom-of-information laws. The public could still file an FOI to obtain the records of public servants in government ministries. But who’d want to?

Ford waited until late last Friday afternoon to announce his government was “modernizing” FOI laws, and will do so retroactively. The records that journalists already filed FOIs for years ago would remain secret under the new law.

Doug Ford, pictured November 14, 2023. Credit: Office of the Lieutenant Governor of Ontario

This isn’t “modernization”…this is a cover-up.

I wrote here last week about Doug Ford losing a court battle initially launched in 2022 and resolved in December 2025 to keep his government records hidden from the public. The gist of that was simple: Ford tried claiming that releasing his phone records pertaining to government business would violate his personal privacy because he used his personal phone for government business, contrary to policy.

That’s why politicians get government-issued phones, to separate their personal and professional communications. Ford could have easily protected his personal privacy by complying with policy.

The Information and Privacy Commission rejected Ford’s argument. Ford planned to appeal, determined to keep his records secret, but now the appeal is moot because he’s simply rewriting privacy laws to put himself above releasing records. The IPC released a statement yesterday, refusing to beat around the bush: “By changing the law retroactively, the government’s message is plain: if oversight bodies get in the way, just change the rules.”

We wouldn’t know about the Greenbelt scandal without the diligent work of Emma McIntosh and Fatima Syed at the Narwhal, who filed FOIs and learned that senior Ford staffers were discussing Greenbelt changes long before the government made the policy public. The timeline and who knew what mattered. Now the RCMP is investigating whether Doug Ford tipped off friendly developers thanks to them.

It reeks of crime. The Bradford Bypass and Highway 413 are sketchy too.

The Greenbelt isn’t the only scandal where Ford insider’s phone records were shielded from scrutiny. Doug Ford’s chief of staff failed to disclose his phone records in conversations with high-level Metrolinx officials—they were gone, wiped, because he got a new personal phone, which he was using to conduct government business.

Noticing a pattern?

FOIs are how journalists and also everyday concerned citizens (which should be emphasized! Anybody can file an FOI request) get raw information, the politician’s own words. It’s one of the best tools for learning what’s discussed in backrooms, behind closed doors, where decisions get made.

In an era of distrust, division and rampant corruption, obliterating how residents and reporters get reliable facts is an open declaration of war against transparency. Indeed, Ford was blasted for what people are calling freedom from information from across the political spectrum. Naturally, the Liberals, NDP, and Greens criticized the move, but so did the Canadian Taxpayers Federation:

“Premier Doug Ford is trying to hide records from the public and roll back the ability of everyday taxpayers from holding the government accountable,” said Noah Jarvis CTF Ontario Director. “What is Ford and his cabinet trying to hide?”

For good measure, the Ford government didn’t just make himself exempt from FOIs, he also doubled the amount of time FOIs will take to process for the few people still subject to them, from 30 days to 60.

The calculation is simple: Ford must have anticipated that this move would draw widespread condemnation and fury, so what he’s hiding from the public would surely draw even more.

Last night, on March 16, Doug Ford gave a very different justification for increased secrecy: “We’ve got to protect ourselves against the communist Chinese that are infiltrating our country, Canada, the US, everything into our education system, into high tech companies.”

I’d love to be measured and sober here, but this is a buffoonish, laughably thin pretext for a Canadian premier to shroud himself in secrecy.  It’s more than a little self-serving and convenient. For one thing, the US very much isn’t our country: the US is the “economic uncertainty” Ford is supposedly trying to “Protect Ontario” from. Even putting the xenophobic boogeyman aside, what would Chinese spies even hope to uncover from this provincial politician, how to sell beers in gas stations and not build transit?

Here’s one example of real things more FOIs could help shine a light on:

Mega donor De Gasperis’ TACC Group bought 60.5 acres of property across the street from the original Ontario Science Centre in March, 2019. Then, in April 2019, Doug Ford ripped up the Downtown Relief Line plans and replaced them with his signature Ontario Line, which featured a shiny new subway station for the Ontario Science Centre. Next, of course, Ford abruptly closed the Science Centre, leaving his developer friend with his own personal subway station.

Every neighbourhood deserves access to public transit, but surely the presence of the Ontario Science Centre impacted the decision to create an Ontario Science Centre subway station.

Now, I don’t mean to cast aspersions. Maybe De Gasperis got lucky here, like he did with the Greenbelt! But anybody looking to dig up what really happened and get beyond suspicions and partisan talking points would need FOIs, which Doug Ford just cancelled.

Ford is currently under ongoing criminal RCMP investigation. He shut down the legislature to avoid scrutiny as news broke of his Minister of Labour giving millions from the Skills Development Funds to underqualified personal friends instead of high-scoring applicants. So really, I can’t think of anybody who deserves the benefit of the doubt less than Doug Ford.

And let’s be real…is there even any doubt?

Doug Ford’s Science Centre Heist, Contextualized

11 Wednesday Mar 2026

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In June 2024, Doug Ford abruptly shuttered the Ontario Science Centre, a one-of-a-kind architectural gem and heritage building that delighted generations of kids. The pretext was extremely flimsy: Ford claimed the roof was structurally unsound and the $22-40 million to fix it wasn’t worth the cost.

Structural engineers disagreed. It could use some repairs, sure, but was designed to last 200 years. Toronto has experienced several massive snowfalls since, and of course the Science Centre roof has not collapsed. It was never about money.

Keep in mind, to quit the Beer Store license one year before it was already set to expire, letting private grocery stores and retailers sell beer and coolers one year sooner, Doug Ford spent $200-million in taxpayer dollars. Concerned citizens voluntarily ponied up the millions to fix the roof, but Ford wouldn’t accept the free money.

People are upset, livid, that Ford is demolishing the Science Centre.

He plans to build a new Science Centre on the waterfront for $1.04-billion, a way larger bill than repairing the old one cost. Note, the “0.4” after the billion is what the old Science Centre cost to fix. The new Science Centre will be half the size, and have none of the iconic original’s character, whose location mattered because the building was integrated beautifully into its ravine setting. Not only did it enrich an underserved area, the trees kissed the windows just so.

I suspect something much worse is afoot and people aren’t close to angry enough. Let’s pull back and look at what’s going on here.

Transit Hijacked

In 2019, Doug Ford rerouted the designs of the subway line Toronto was planning, which he dubbed the “Ontario Line,” changing the tracks to connect Ontario Place, at one end, to the Science Centre at the other. This seemed reasonable, even to Ford critics like myself: soon, students, parents, and science enthusiasts would have easy access to the Science Centre. That area of the city is hungry for infrastructure, and it was always sad public transit didn’t connect a gem like the Science Centre properly.

From 2026’s vantage, the start and end of this subway line are altogether different.

Now, Ford’s plans for “Ontario Place” include a private mega spa owned by Therme, an extremely dubious foreign company connected to Ford insiders. In 2024, Ontario’s auditor general found several glaring red flags in the procurement process Ford actively ignored, and once made public in a scathing New York Times article, minimized. Therme got a non-competitive secret 95-year-lease forcing taxpayers to pay for, among other things, a 5-storey mega parking lot on the waterfront that’ll cost roughly $600-million. The total bill will be billions, all for a spa. I could go on about Therme, but this is only one end of the new subway and not the focus of this write up.

The other is the Science Centre subway station, which was renamed “Don Valley Station” since Ford is demolishing the actual Science Centre. With the Science Centre gone, what’s still there?

Doug Ford mega-donor De Gasperis just so happens to have bought a 60-acre housing development across the street from the original Science Centre just before Ford intervened to change the subway route. You may remember De Gasperis from the Greenbelt Scandal the RCMP has, supposedly, been criminally investigating since October 2023.

Map of the old Science Centre and De Gasperis’ planned development: Credit Corruptario Twitter account

Now, De Gasperis’ development has its own personal subway stop right at its door, and bought the land right before the subway made its value soar. How convenient! The man sure keeps getting lucky.

If this was still 2018, and people knew and accepted that the Science Centre wouldn’t be there, would anyone recommend prioritizing redirecting the subway to that ravine? Or did Doug Ford merely use the Science Centre as a pretext to reroute the subway line to serve his mega donor? It certainly looks this way.  

Of course the Science Centre roof is holding strong after several historic dumps of snow, while Doug Ford abruptly paused the legislature for three months, just as he was being grilled by the opposition and the Ontario Provincial Police for distributing tens of millions to undeserving friends and insiders from the $2.2-billion Skills Development Funds, essentially a slush fund.

Doug Ford’s Cover Up

Ford is taking extreme steps to avoid transparency and run a cover up. Non-Disclosure Agreements are keeping many particulars about the Ontario Place deal secret, which is very unusual and suspicious.

On January 5, 2026, an Ontario divisional court ruled Ford’s personal phone was subject to freedom of information laws when used for government or Cabinet business. Basically, government records are obviously supposed to be public, so instead of using his government phone for government business, Doug Ford used his personal phone, then tried claiming publicizing his government dealings would compromise his personal privacy.

Ford failed to comply with the law by using his private phone for public business, then tried using this failing to cover up his tracks. Pathetic.

Global News fought Ford on this in 2022. Ford responded by challenging this ruling too. This all looks like a cover up.

So where are we? Clearly I’m suspicious and this whole thing reeks, but what other explanation could there be but mega theft? That’s not a rhetorical question. If anybody reading this has a theory please let me know in the comments. Hey, I’d love to be wrong!  

ICE is Executing Innocent Americans in the Streets…Now What?

25 Sunday Jan 2026

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It feels like we’re at a turning point now, with many MAGA sympathizers and even MAGA supporters finally realizing that Donald Trump is the straight up fascist his critics have always said he was.

I’m not going to recap the two recent ICE murders because they were captured on multiple videos from different angles which you’ve no doubt seen already. They’re straightforward snuff films, with government agents playing judge, jury and executioner for people who very, very clearly are 100% innocent.

What is there to say, exactly? Between Trump threatening the US’ historical allies, like Canada, Denmark and Greenland, and him launching lethal attacks against American citizens, not to mention the ongoing Epstein cover-up, people who have railed against things like “wokeness” have finally found their red line. Good! That should be welcomed.

In one sense, the ICE murders are a shocking escalation, but they resemble police murders we have been seeing footage of for years. In 2016, Minnesota police murdered Philando Castile, who like Alex Pretti, also had a license for the gun he had on him. During his interaction with the cops, Castile calmly made police aware of the licensed gun he had in his glovebox, and the cops murdered him right in front of his girlfriend and 4-year-old son. We know this because the whole sequence is also on video.

So what’s different about this, ten years later? Trump increased ICE’s budget exponentially last year, from the $10-billion range to about $75 billion. It’s true that Trump is recruiting new ICE members from MAGA gangs like the Proud Boys and other violently deranged anti-woke January-6 militia, but the two agents who killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti were members of ICE for 10 and 8 years, respectively.

Obama increased ICE’s funding and Biden didn’t abolish ICE when he had the chance, so why is this different? Because judging from the way Trump and his sycophants have not just excused the murders but praised them, framing this as Ameican authorities valiantly defending the heartland against terrorism rather than murderous hooligans satiating their bloodlust, this is clearly what Trump wanted to happen. He has been stoking violence for years, from famously attempting a coup and orchestrating an attack on the Capital to praising dozens of his voters for violently attacking democrats and critics.

Minnesota is in a state of siege, with even everyday, non-political residents hunkered down in terror while Trump’s militia goes door to door looking for non-white people. “Ghost cars” are a thing now, empty vehicles on the roads, left stranded there after ICE kidnapped the drivers’ and took them to god knows where. Residents with citizenship are trying to help immigants, who are too scared to leave their home to buy food, by buying the food for them, but ICE are following their movements. ICE are also circling schools, locking up students and even children as young as five, using food as bait to lure hungry people they can then kidnap. Despite what ICE says they’re doing, they’re using facial-recognition Palantir technology, partially to create a database of activists and designate them all “terrorists,” and to hunt non-white people.

Minnesota has been on Trump’s radar for years because it’s a progressive city, whose senator is Democratic rival and 2024 vice president nominee Tim Walz. There’s a community of established anti-MAGA activists, but this is radicalizing people in real time.

ICE is disappearing and murdering people. White Americans. This is important, because while absolutely nobody should be treated this way, it’s very telling that MAGA goons think they can simply kill or kidnap any American they want to. They’re not even pretending to follow their stated beliefs. Trump has given them impunity, and they very clearly want to kill and kidnap people. They don’t show remorse after killing innocent people, they seem proud and threaten to do it again. They’re not following any laws whatsoever. Nobody is safe, and it’s beyond naive, just extremely stupid, to think that MAGA will limit their reign of terror to the people they say they’re pursuing. That’s already been proven false.

People are noting how hypocritical libertarian don’t-tread-on-me types seem right now; their entire persona was based around owning guns to defend themselves from government tyranny. Many are watching their president’s paramilitary hooligans kidnap and kill people and responding, “Comply!” “Be servile!” “Do what the government tells you!”

Whatever your stance on gun ownership is, Alex Pretty, like Philando Castile, broke no laws. Renee Good clearly was unarmed. And they were murdered all the same. That they were murdered by lavishly-paid government agents who say they oppose Big Government and government tyranny would be ironic, but only if you expected the murderers to be coherent and logically consistent. Murderers usually aren’t.

“This is what people voted for!” is one excuse some Republicans are making now. It’s moot and frankly silly: there’s no rule saying that something can’t be fascist if people voted for it! I don’t need to remind you who else was voted in.

And yes, this is Project 2025. This is precisely what Trump critics said was going to happen. Most people criticizing it now criticized it right from the start. Now it’s here and it’s terrifying. Minnesota looks like they’re going to simply respond to this by going on a general strike, with nobody showing up for work until this stops. Because this can’t continue. On Friday, tens of thousands of protesters already braved freezing temperatures to denounce ICE in the streets and this will likely only grow and get worse.

MAGA’s prime directive–their stated support for rights relating to liberty, freedom, and gun ownership–has been shown to be a complete sham. It’s not that I personally think these beliefs were right or that these beliefs are wrong, it’s that all this time MAGA never believed in them. Even if it was extremely obvious that this is where things were heading, written out in Project 2025 and forecast for years by Trump’s words and actions, I hope his supporters can finally accept that he was lying and this can’t continue and they stop supporting him.

ICE needs to be abolished, yesterday, and all the people responsible for this should be held on trial. This is the moderate position.

I worry that, while typing safely on social media from my hometown of Toronto, I will encourage somebody to join the protests, and that person will be murdered by ICE. I want this violence to stop and I want people to stop it, but that’s the whole thing. If unarmed, innocent people can simply be murdered by the state in their own neighbourhoods, what are hopeful words going to achieve?

Toronto Election 101: Chow, Brown, or Matlow?

20 Tuesday Jun 2023

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Who are you voting for, Olivia Chow, Chloe Brown, or Josh Matlow? That’s the question on the docket. Technically there are 102 mayoral candidates. They are not exactly viable.

In these three candidates, we have a centrist (Matlow), centre-left (Chow), and a leftist (Chloe Brown). I’ll just describe my sense of these candidates and do some basic background stuff.

Matlow was a first-time councilor in the Rob Ford era. His ward covers Yonge-Eglinton. He was a thorn in John Tory’s side, and seems to have evolved from a milquetoast TO councilor serving the status quo to a man who can change his mind on positions. It’s a rare case of a popular Toronto politician moving leftwards. His tendency to go a bit rogue can be refreshing and, sometimes, alienate people he needs to work with.

Olivia Chow was a city councilor too, albeit longer ago, and was married to NDP leader Jack Layton (RIP). By far the most high-profile candidate, she has been leading the polls by a wide margin all along, which has conservatives voters, and especially lobbyists and strategists, freaking out. They’ve become accustom to being pampered by city hall under rob ford and john tory, and can’t bear the the idea of a Toronto leader outside the Conservative Machine. Chow was on the budget committee for a decade and has a solid grasp of the city’s nuts and bolts.

Chloe Brown finished third last election behind second place Gil Penalosa and Tory. She is a policy analyst who graduated from Toronto Metropolitan University and has worked for different levels of government. Unlike every other major political candidate, she doesn’t have a war room of party professionals and lobbyists backing her.

Her performance last election turned heads and got attention, rightfully so. She got 10% of Tory’s votes on a shoestring budget and no corporate backing. Her supporters insist she is being excluded from high-profile debates by the establishment who let three separate john tory clones (bailao, saunders, bradford) debate, but not Brown, who, again, finished third last election. The criteria for getting on stage shifts in such a way as to juuuuust include brad bradford but juuuust exclude Chloe Brown.

Her goal of poverty reduction is not exactly a historic priority in the cold, austerity city Toronto has become.

John Tory absolutely decimated Toronto by refusing to modernize the city. He took over from Rob Ford’s backwards approach to taxation, which determined the rate of property taxation before deciding what services to fund. Historically, Toronto did the reverse, assessing what services we needed to fund, and then setting property taxes accordingly.

Today, we have an absurd situation where Toronto property costs more than any city in Canada, except maybe Vancouver, but our property taxes are the lowest of any city in Ontario. You read that right! If you live in any other Ontario city, you pay a higher rate.

It’s funny and illustrative to me that “high demand” only applies to private sector prices rising, but is completely divorced from taxation rates. Put another way, conservatives expect the government to forcefully intervene and lower their property taxes by arbitrarily tying it to inflation, not the Free Market. And no wonder they expect it, that’s what Toronto has done for them for over ten years.

As a direct result of this approach, we have a situation where rent has basically doubled in the past decade, but property taxes have, to put it lightly, not. Yes, home prices have surged, but the idea that half of Toronto is subjected to shocking rents coupled with the decimation of rent control while homeowners invoke “affordability” to have government forcefully intervene on their behalf simply doesn’t make any logical sense.

A person can decide they want to vote for whoever will keep their taxes lowest, that’s their prerogative. But they can’t say subjecting the poorer half of Toronto to skyrocketing housing costs while homeowners watch their asset grow and taxation stays relatively flat makes sense.

The three candidates I named seem to understand this is what’s going on and are trying to address it in differently. The tory clones are absolute hacks using PR firms and polls to copy/paste platitudes into power for the backroom sharks who were the beneficiaries and architects of Toronto’s destruction. I know this sounds overblown and melodramatic, but it’s true!

I live downtown, and when people say garbage is overflowing onto streets, it’s not exaggeration. City garbages regularly spill onto sidewalks. I saw a bus shelter smashed by a car months ago, shattered glass all over the street and sidewalk. Months later, there’s just “caution” tape where the glass panel should be. I’ve seen literal duct tape on a TTC sign telling people when to expect the streetcar, which is coming increasingly late and is increasingly packed and potentially violent.

My specific view of the city crumbling is relatively privileged. People can’t afford groceries or housing. The city is rejecting more people from shelters and providing no alternatives for them to live, despite the city’s PR flaks.

It’d be easy to assume critics are overstating the extent of the damage. They’re not! The city’s basics are in pathetic shape and we’re in a $1-billion hole, and the previous mayor/Rogers adviser was more focused on spending $300 million to host a few World Cup games.

The Ontario premier has an astonishingly heinous and palpably corrupt plan to spend over half a billion dollars on a lakefront underground mega parking lot for a luxury spa that has more than a few conservative insiders on the board. Even a bullet list of his mega scandals would take up too much room here.

Doug Ford is a vulture picking off Toronto’s bones, yet he got re-elected. This is the first Toronto mayoral election in years where a staunch conservative isn’t the front-runner, and progressives have a few viable candidates. (Right-leaning Soknacki had good, original ideas in 2014 but, reading the polls, backed out before election day and Keesmaat in 2018 didn’t live up to expectations.)

The question is: will we elect someone who will fight Ford or cave? The establishment right ran on Toronto needing steady leadership only months ago when Tory won his third election. Now, jarringly, every mayoral candidate is running on the correct assumption that the city is on the cusp of collapse. The right wants to pin the blame on, you guessed it, someone else! This is their mess and voters seem to get that. Their usual PR feels transparently cheap this time around.

Olivia Chow is well ahead and, barring something wild last-minute, seems poised to win. Chloe Brown has worked hard to increase her profile and brought substance to the few debates and appearances that welcomed her. The establishment should be scared of her. It feels odd to have any viable candidate in an election, let alone three. I’ve been grateful for Matlow’s voice and position on high profile issues like the Gardiner.

I hope the next mayor, unlike our previous two, is open to sensible ideas that were modern in the late 20th century, like not sacrificing every single square inch of public space to cars. I don’t mean to jinx it, but I feel like conservative strategists anticipate losing their privileged place at the trough after dominating it uncontested for over a decade and are frantically making private post-trough arrangements. I hope the shady, uber-connected backroom hustlers suffer as the city thrives.

For this to happen, Chow will need substantial plans to build housing and realize her promises. That would be hard enough in neutral circumstances, but ford conservatives will stymie her ruthlessly and Postmedia will blame her, especially if she does a wonderful job. Hopefully she has enough energy to keep fighting after the election is over, because not being connected to Tory or Ford is enough for now, but the real war hasn’t begun yet.

TTC “Fare Enforcers” Are Absurd and Backwards

01 Wednesday Mar 2023

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Toronto faces multiple crises at the same time. In the immediate term, gridlock-traffic is agonizing and drivers pose lethal risks. It’s infuriating day to day, the city loses billions in productivity, and people get injured or killed. Housing is also obscenely overpriced and hard to find. In the middle distance, the pandemic continues and climate change looms.

The reasonable response to this is vastly improving public transit to reduce congestion, the parking burden, and air pollution. For every $1 the government spends on transit, it spends $9 on the infrastructure private cars require. That means that even if a TTC passenger doesn’t pay a fare, they cost the city less than private cars do.

Yet the city is poised to send “fare enforcers” back throughout its transit system in late March 2023 to give tickets as high as $425 to people sidestepping $3.25 fares, fares which are set to increase yet again, even as service is cut. The TTC is eliminating some bus routes and there will be longer waits for existing buses, and even subways.

These TTC cuts come at the worst time possible: violence has increased, ridership is significantly down. TTC Board Chair Jon Burnside’s views are so upside down, he may as well be an executive for Uber or a car company rather than work for the TTC.

So how does the TTC have money to circulate over 100 fare enforcers to inspect its own riders when facing a $336 million-dollar shortfall? The TTC boasts that fare enforcers will wear body cameras, as if equipping these less-than-useless patrols with expensive gear is good! If fare enforcers require body cameras because they pose that level of risk, they shouldn’t exist.

The point is to end racist enforcement in public space, not videotape it. We already have 2018 footage of three TTC fare enforcers physically assaulting a Black teenager on a streetcar at St. Clair and Bathurst, just outside my old apartment while I lived there. It’s a well-established pattern that doesn’t need to be confirmed yet again. The inspectors were suspended, with pay.

The way this conversation is framed, even people sympathetic to TTC passengers think “fare evaders” deprive the public transit system of money. People on both sides see it that way, wrongly.

And OK, in an obvious and basic sense, people who don’t pay a TTC fare clearly don’t contribute that money to the TTC. But almost nobody accuses drivers of personal cars of getting a free ride, even though they also don’t pay to access public roads that cost vastly more tax dollars to maintain than public transit does.

Let me repeat this because car-brain has hopelessly warped this public conversation. Every private car on Toronto streets is a considerably larger burden on the city than TTC “fare evaders.” Private cars create financial problems, the space they take up cause bottlenecks, we breathe poisoned air that creates trickle-down health problems, which we pay for too.

A modern, sensible city would encourage people to take public transit, and nothing is less welcoming or pleasant than “fare enforcers”! They have a tendency to grill marginalized people and their entire job description is absurd. They shouldn’t exist on the TTC even if their very generous salaries cost us nothing. That we pay for this “service” is fiscal nonsense.

One reason I think the motivation behind “fare enforcement” is motivated purely by cruel and punitive punishment and not any actual philosophical or economic principle is the difference in how people perceive safety enforcement for drivers.

Enough people think speed cameras are just a “cash-grab,” even if they really do catch people breaking the law and posing danger to the public. Let’s be real, cars injure, maim, and kill people every day despite “Vision Zero,” and measures to enforce safety are widely publicly rejected, rather than embraced the way “fare enforcers” are.

Unlike speeding cars, TTC “fare evaders” pose no physical danger to anybody! Toronto drivers transcend stupid or even dangerous; drivers here regularly crash into houses, condominiums, telephone poles, fences, laundromats, bus shelters, and, of course, other cars and people on the road. This is a much bigger problem than people moving efficiently, affordably, and cleanly through the city. In fact, far from a problem, the latter is the goal! It’s what we hope to achieve and we are investing money in punishing it!

The alternative to the person not paying a TTC fare (among North America’s most expensive transit fare) is them not riding, which also doesn’t add money to TTC coffers. If someone doesn’t have the money to pay, then they can’t go to appointments, see people, get groceries.

Anyone saving money by riding the TTC isn’t the type of person this city should depend on to keep the system afloat. Anyone saving money by not paying a TTC fare is even less suitable. If someone who doesn’t pay transit fares chooses to drive their car to get somewhere instead, how is that a better result for the city?

Let’s be clear again: the TTC isn’t short of funds because riders aren’t paying enough–it’s the exact opposite. TTC riders put vastly more money into our transit system than riders from other cities, which enjoy more public subsidies. Toronto riders fund roughly 2/3rds of our transit system. No other North American city this size depends on fares to fund its system, but Toronto does. That is the wellspring of our financial difficulties, not riders cheating the city. If anything, the city is cheating TTC riders, then giving itself a moral pat on the back for harassing the people they do wrong by.

That’s the reason it’s broke, which obviously predates the pandemic. 10 years ago, a TTC token cost I believe $2.25. Now, tapping Presto costs $3.25. Prices have risen roughly 50%. Overreliance on TTC passengers, using their wallets as a crutch while austerity politicians like John Tory defied experts to pour billions he didn’t have into the crumbling Gardiner Expressway is, frankly, stupid.

To hear these officious and ignorant arguments portraying the backwards and barbaric “fare enforcement” of poor people as if it’s moral, rational, and fiscally sensible is maddening and sad.

John Tory spent millions of dollars on police to violently push homeless people out of public parks. Those people have nowhere to go, so some may try to survive the Canadian winter by riding TTC vehicles overnight. Now we’re paying another tier of patrol to harass them there, too.

Letting drivers access public streets for free while subjecting TTC passengers to rising fares, reduced service, and increased enforcement is ignorant and hypocritical, and is a flagrantly irrational response to the multiple crises we face. More than that: the crises we face exist mostly because this city asks people with less to spend more and vice versa.

It’s unsustainable, which is why things feel like they’re breaking more fundamentally, not just worsening at their usual rate. We need to look at this conversation holistically and ask what the goal of the TTC really is, and how we accomplish that goal by actively investing sorely-needed money into creating new barriers that make the riding experience a lot worse for many people.

“Fare enforcers” are a puritanical vestige of Toronto the Good who have absolutely no place in a safe, functional, modern and fiscally responsible public transit system everyone can ride.

Solve the problem by addressing root causes: redirect a lot of the billions we’re wasting on private car infrastructure (widening old highways, building new ones, paving farmland) and invest it in public transit at the rate normal North American cities do, and the problem the city created will gradually vanish. Blaming and stigmatizing innocent poor people, and investing in their increased harassment, is self-defeating, intellectually indefensible, and morally unconscionable.

What Exactly Do You Mean By “Woke” ?

23 Thursday Feb 2023

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I’m probably making a huge mistake weighing on a fraught term people use and understand differently. Well, let’s make a huge mistake then!

“Woke” was originally a term some Black people used to describe the need to be vigilant about the dangers of racism they face in our deeply racist society. It still means this, but it also means so many other things that whoever once used its original definition must know it’s been obscured. Often deliberately so.

Today, depending on the person, “woke” means quite different things. Some well-meaning centrists say it to disparage those on their left they feel lay on the anti-racism a little too thick. In their minds, Western society isn’t particularly racist, it’s just as racist as any other place because (as they’ll say begrudgingly, but with a shrug) nowhere is perfect, so anybody speaking to the need to transform society instead of reform or tinker with it is by definition going too far. The self-satisfaction this person advocating for transformative change seems to feel, the pat you can feel them giving themselves on the back, is summed up in the word “woke.” This is a confused position but a relatively innocent one that makes space for one more vile and willfully-deranged.

Basically, today’s most slobbering racists use “woke” as a euphemism for the n-word. When Marjorie Taylor Greene and that ilk say “woke,” the sentence would read the same if you replaced that word with the slur. When MTG praises Chris Stapleton’s rendition of the national anthem before the Super Bowl but says, “we could have done without the rest of the wokeness,” you can feel the word she really wants to say. She all but said it.

While some confusion around the word “woke” arises naturally, organically, and innocently, the word itself is also under attack by racists using it to obscure things and advance racism. Once they start using it in many different ways, by the time you add the new context to the old one, the old one feels outdated. It’s impossible to say “woke” now without associating the term with the far-right who co-opted it.

That’s what’s tough when talking about this word: the casual political people will roll their eyes at being lumped in with the slobbering racists, while the slobbering racists are violently irrational and act in terrible faith no matter what you say or how you act. The rabid right appeals to centrists and anybody who isn’t steadfastly opposed to them by insinuating “we might be crazy fucks, I mean look at us, but the alt-left and Antifa are crazy too, and you and I have fundamental things in common.”

The liberal who means well but doesn’t grasp how intertwined racism and our social institutions are may find common cause with the rabid racist, even if it’s to their private dismay and embarrassment. The centrist will often be rightly disgusted by MAGA’s violent demented freaks, but they can’t totally disagree with them altogether, either. The far-right doesn’t threaten the centrist’s national mythology, whereas the so-called alt-left does. Centrists enjoy being reassured this country isn’t on stolen land and doesn’t owe its foundational wealth to crimes, and the far-right are more than happy to give them this reassurance, one the left is adamantly opposed to giving them.

One pernicious trick the right does is spread these comforting illusions in the name of being critical, hard-eyed realists! They get to believe the most self-serving explanations for their comforts possible for supposedly impartial intellectual reasons. It’s kind of like children claiming they read Will to Power and Nietzsche clearly states they can have all the cookies and juice they want before bed time.

Did you really do the reading? Is this just what you want to believe, or what the text actually says?

The far-right’s “Free Market” beliefs also have more in common with liberalism/centrism than with any leftist view.

So on one hand, liberals and centrists are hugely embarrassed by the far-right, but not by their underlying beliefs. It’s mostly the illiterate clown show antics of the Ford brothers and Donald Trump. John Tory was a fiscal conservative austerity mayor whose economic and cultural views line up with the Ford and Trumps of this world, but he was polished enough to conceal this similarity, or even housebroken enough. On a basic level, Tory, unlike Trump and sometimes the Fords, could talk to the media without causing apolitical people around the world to simultaneously laugh and shudder.

The far-right can’t be denounced enough.

MAGA freaks in Florida are banning Toni Morrison novels, which is akin to a modern book burning. What could be a more hostile act of war against Western Culture than banning the best Western literature? I won’t defend Toni Morrison, the author of Sula, Beloved, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, and other masterpieces, because that would suggest her status as a writer could be in doubt.

But that’s what so confusing about the “Culture War”…it’s a war against culture led by people using culture as a mask for racism. The word “woke” is wrapped up in this.

Years after police murdered George Floyd, “defund the police” might be a mainstream position with lots of support across society, but the mayor of New York is currently a cop. John Tory defunded everything in Toronto except police, and now that he has resigned, the new race for mayor has not one but two cops.

Don’t make the mistake of assuming that because the backlash to racism is louder than usual that it means racism is over. If this wasn’t such a deeply racist society, I’d be making fun of the do-gooders too! I think that’s why people are so eager to use the term “woke” as a casual, jocular insult: it comforts them, because they don’t want to confront the fact that racism is real and rampant. They get to be in denial while enjoying the satisfaction of feeling like they are boldly, critically looking truth eyeball to eyeball.

There’s a circular, self-perpetuating kind of logic: they don’t identify as racists (they genuinely do oppose flagrant racism!), so how can society be racist if they are joking about the racism? If racism was a real problem, they wouldn’t be joking about it, so their jokes are in a way held as proof that everything is fine.

In my experience, this conversation is way more likely to examine the intentions of the person saying “woke” than any academic or critical work about racism or society. The white person saying “woke” is more likely to focus on their innocence rather than society’s guilt. Because again, in a way, if they are innocent, so is society.

“Woke” is a very reasonable thing to be in a racist society, so it’s only used pejoratively under the assumption racism doesn’t exist or barely exists, and do-gooders say it to appear superhumanly good, by overcompensating and demanding excessive justice.

This is not what’s happening! I promise you, the harder and more carefully you look at society, the more racism you’ll find. That racism exists in Canada but not that much is the dreamy and naïve position, not the cynical and critical one!

At this point it’s much easier to just avoid saying the word altogether because either you’re preaching to the choir or people’s understandings of it are likely caught somewhere in the middle of all this. The point isn’t to go out and use “woke” correctly. I just think it’s worth reflecting on what other people really mean by it.

I don’t want to tell anyone how to live, but if you only used the word “woke” innocently enough to give liberal do-gooders a hard time, you should probably stop using it too. I’m sure the alt-right will repeat the cycle by co-opting more Black lingo. If you aren’t using the term to race-bait (and why would you be?), there are lots of other words you can use. Write around it.

One ironic, sorry thing about modern life is that it’s sometimes necessary to give this much time and thought to a single word in the context of the alt-right, people who don’t exactly have a literary love of language.

Bye Tory! Actually, Let the Door Hit You on the Way Out

17 Friday Feb 2023

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For years, Tory was known as a total political loser. Why recount all his losses? There were many. Today he is a loser again despite eking out a W against the crack mayor’s bro in 2014 and sleep walking to two more victories in quiet elections against low-profile candidates, the last of which in 2022 had the lowest voter turnout in any election since the 1996 Megacity amalgamation.

His out-of-nowhere resignation mere months after being handed “strong mayor” powers seems unthinkable. Usually, Kouvalis-led Conservatives operate an elaborate digital ratfuckery machine to brainwash and play dirty tricks, then cling to power afterwards at all costs, and even change the laws while in office to increase the likelihood of keeping it later. The idea that someone in 2023 would resign once having this power over an issue so small as “integrity” is astonishing.

Sure enough, Tory didn’t resign right away. No wonder some in his circle advised against resigning after he made the initial announcement. Ford, who privately arranged for Tory’s “strong mayor” power during the mayoral election but said nothing about it until his candidate won, took this occasion to support Tory and insult “leftists,” typical of that corrupt, illiterate and belligerent ape.

Apparently some closest to Tory insisted he step down, which is so incredible to consider that it makes me wonder if there’s more to this they didn’t want known. How can sex, even with a subordinate, be resign-worthy in 2023? People are dying in every direction, ecological collapse is gradually taking hold or worsening, and this ends a political career of a guy who had been pretty squeaky clean?

I knew Tory was a prude and repressed wasp, but is he really more prude than he is hungry for political power? Can anyone be that prude? I guess it’s possible!

The former city staffer he slept with went on to work for Rogers-owned MLSE to help get the city to host five games of the 2026 World Cup tournament, which Toronto will pay $300 million to host. MLSE insists she was hired on a merit basis, that Tory didn’t get her the job. Either way, the optics are not great, and Tory must have worried it’d look unkosher even if it wasn’t.

Tory refused to step down as a Rogers special adviser on the family trust, a position paying $100k annually. Rogers’ tentacles are so long, their involvement in the city so wide and entrenched, it was impossible for Tory to be mayor and work for Rogers without the appearance of many conflicts of interest. When questioned how he could be mayor and still collect a giant cheque for advising a telecom giant, he told a story about honouring the promise he made to old-time family friend Ted Rogers–essentially, he said loyalty to ruling class connections trumped his public obligations, in so many words.

To his supporters, he was the adult in the room who upheld the status quo in a palatable way for media and apolitical people who only follow politics distantly, if at all. Wealthy people loved him because he artificially engineered keeping their property taxes extra low, while making it seem like this sleight of hand was just the natural order of things, like the sun rising and setting every day and night. Plus, if they called 311 to complain about a pothole or anything, someone was dispatched right away to clean it up. The city did work for them, so no wonder they mostly loved him. I suspect they vastly underestimate how dysfunctional the rest of the city is.

Ford and Tory are both the elite of the elite, but Ford is comparably a coarse uncouth street brawler while Tory has always been posh and polished and groomed all along for this work. Ford is the bad cop, Tory the good cop. They may position themselves differently in their own PR, but both ultimately work for the same force and advance mutual interests, even if they have also seriously butted heads over the years. (The Ford family has serious rifts among themselves and with Tory that go beyond the scope of this article.)

Ford took federal money meant for public healthcare and used it to pay down the deficit for political purposes during a pandemic. It’s hard to say how many people in the city Tory presided over died needlessly so the provincial conservatives could torque the numbers and show economic indicators their base loves. Maybe the increased power he gave Tory helped smooth things over between them. I’m genuinely not sure. Just speculating.

Whereas Doug Ford was the Ford brother who lacked the people skills of his racist and misogynistic brother Rob, Tory seemed to be at least a normal person. He seems to embody the modern struggle between the personal and political in that one-on-one, maybe he was a nice guy. That there’s a gap, a chasm, between the goodness of his heart and the misery of his policy is not impossible to believe.

Galen Weston is reportedly a kind and chatty fellow when he encounters employees in the elevators. Maybe Tory is “nice” in this vein. Personally, I ran into John Tory of all places in New Delhi. I was supposed to interview him for TV but, like much at WION, things got botched. I wrote the questions my friend and colleague Daniele asked, and when I met Tory after and he realized he was unprepared to meet a journalist from Toronto that might ask him something, he looked instantly petrified and fled like Homer floating backwards through the bushes GIF. He could fake being normal better on camera and in person, and I think he had more capacity than Ford to be a normal human being. But what is that saying?

Tory adamantly supported police throughout their violent and super expensive crackdowns on homeless people in public parks. Tory spent millions forcing people with nowhere else to go to go elsewhere. The city falsely claimed most “evicted” people got safe shelter indoors elsewhere, but of course they didn’t. Most went to other parks or under bridges, others simply, tragically, and needlessly died. Tory was OK suing Khaleel Seivwright in 2021, a local carpenter who heroically took it upon himself to build tiny shelters for people trying to survive the Canadian winter during a global pandemic.

Tory spent money to ensure homeless people didn’t have somewhere to stay. If Tory was so concerned the “Tiny Shelters” were dangerous, as the city claimed, why was he so supportive of the city’s dangerous and over-crowded shelters?

Tory wasted millions to worsen desperate people’s crises at a time he was also crying poor. He arbitrarily set the property tax rate too low first, then worked backwards to set the budget, an old Rob Ford trick that makes defunding society seem fiscally inevitable, or at least prudent and wise, rather than what it really is, opting to be cruel and withholding.

Ultimately, John Tory governed badly by 1960s standards, but in 2023. If anything good happened in Toronto during his tenure, he resisted it, and it happened largely against his will. CafeTO and ActiveTO would never have been approved without the pandemic occurring, and even with it, the patio application is expensive and lengthy while many “bike lanes” are either car lanes with a bike painted in them, or they have plastic “bollards” designed to prevent cars from getting damaged by the bollards rather than cyclists from getting killed by the cars and their drivers.

Was he really the milquetoast, middle-of-the-road, sensible man he presented himself as? Only if we accept what he said about himself at face value. I don’t. Tory was more ferociously right-wing than people here claimed, but he was more media polished and better able to hide it.

Torontonians watching him resign wondered about his legacy. In 2014, “Smart Track” was the central plank of Tory’s mayoral campaign. Today, it doesn’t exist. No mega, or even minor, projects bear his signature. He paid for artificially low property taxes for homeowners by actively neglecting basic services non-wealthy parts of Toronto rely on, from Scarborough to Etobicoke to throughout the downtown core.

Last election, Tory critics made the incumbent mayor synonymous with uncollected garbage spilling out of city garbage cans. I took a picture of a TTC bus stop duct taped to a pole and countless people found similar forms of urban decay. The crumbling under Tory was that palpable. It’d be funny if it wasn’t depressing and sad. Sure enough, after years of austerity, the TTC is overcrowded and people understandably fear violence. Fares are rising, service is worsening. The city is broke and there’s no plan for improvement apart from asking higher levels of government for money and concealing the extent of the decay with gimmicky but elaborate and expensive PR.

Tory’s final act, to defy his own promise to resign to push through one more austerity budget, is the symbol and substance of everything wrong with him and his politics.

I’m thrilled he’s gone! It happens that after months of not writing here, I happened to write an anti-Tory post only the night before he resigned. The night he initially shocked everyone by announcing his intention to resign, the Leafs had a 3-0 shutout and the vibes in Toronto were, as they say, immaculate. Nights later when he listed the date of his formal resignation, Auston Matthews had an extremely sexy goal and assist in his first game back after three weeks of injury.

There are questions about the circumstances of Tory’s departure, but there’s no doubt he torched his reputation on the way out and I’m glad about that too. He never deserved a good reputation. We could have avoided all this by electing Soknacki in 2014! I love Toronto and hope the city turns around, but I hope Tory is associated with its current demise, and hope that Tory’s few late-era victories don’t obscure the reputation he developed over years as a total loser.

Homelessness: John Tory’s Humanitarian Crisis

09 Thursday Feb 2023

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Toronto’s City Council voted yesterday, February 8, against funding 24-hour warming centres to help people experiencing homelessness survive the winter. Buildings like the Scarborough Civic Centre or Metro Hall only open when the weather drops to -15.

They voted to “study” the issue, which is what they say to avoid sounding cheap when they don’t want to fund something straightforward. In voting against funding the warming centres, council rejected recommendations from the city’s own Board of Health.

What should homeless people do if it’s -14? Wait to see if temperatures drop another degree? There are no spots in shelters. City officials dispute that, but of course they do. The reality is people get denied entry at shelters every single night because there’s no space.

People slip through the cracks in lots of ways, but here is one. Let’s say a nearby shelter has a space for you, but you have a partner, and it’s not co-ed, or a pet they refuse to allow in. What do you? Even if there is a spot at a shelter across town that would fit all your needs, what good is it if you don’t know it’s there? And say you do know there might be such a spot, would you pay the rising TTC fare to trek across the city to check?

That many people feel safer not in a shelter, in their own tent, is a scathing indictment of our shelter system, which after all isn’t supposed to exist! It’s only meant as a last resort. Ideally, shelters should be phased out as people move from the streets into homes. Instead, we’re phasing shelters and even warming centres out while homelessness is rapidly increasing.

I covered Toronto City Hall for a pretty bleh/low-quality online outlet in 2013, Toronto Standard. I didn’t really know fuck-all about politics, but I’ll never forget attending my first city council meeting, when OPAC protesters unfurled a banner accusing city council of having blood on its hands for failing to provide ample shelters. They weren’t just being hyperbolic; they had recently returned from funerals of friends who died.

When people make charged claims like “this council has blood on its hands” or “people are dying,” it’s liable to sound like exaggeration, or like a heavy-handed rhetorical device designed to illicit response in an argument or debate. But it’s a neutral, accurate description of what’s going on. This was in 2013, well before John Tory or the pandemic.

When this city would like money to fund, for example, hosting five World Cup soccer games in 2026, $300 million suddenly appears out of thin air from local, provincial, and federal governments. Magic! Modern, sensible cities everywhere are freeing up real estate, beautifying prominent spaces, improving street safety, reducing pollution, and improving public health and joy by removing obsolete urban highways; instead, John Tory has chosen to pour over $1 billion to repair the crumbling Gardiner Highway. The city had money, but he wasted it.

We’ve seen huge increases in the costs of housing and food, while austerity budgets phase out or severely reduce public services. TTC fares are rising yet again, while bus routes are axed and passengers wait longer for subways. Yes, the pandemic hasn’t improved anybody’s mental health, but the conditions John Tory opted for are not exactly boosting public morale. Unsurprisingly, there’s been a rise in violence. How did Tory respond? By finding $8 million dollars so 80 cops can circulate the TTC system. This comes after giving Toronto cops an additional $50 million.

The self-proclaimed fiscally-responsible Strong Mayor looked astonished when asked point blank by a representative from the organization TTC Riders to justify the increased spending, given the $50 million price tag and the disconnect between the crisis Torontonians face and the police’s total inability to address the problems’ root causes. The squirming, terrified, what-do-I-do-now? look on his face is that of a person unaccustomed to actual questions, who often speaks in public but never without a script, a script they know is total horseshit.

In what felt like mere minutes after the 2022 mayoral election, Doug Ford, the belligerent ex-city councilor, who in vengeance in 2018 cut council in half mid-election, suddenly gave John Tory “strong mayor” powers. In 2018, Toronto city council had 45 members. Now it has 25. A few months ago, a two-thirds majority was required to pass bylaws. Now, it’s 1/3rd. In other words, instead of needing the support of 30 councillors, now it’s merely eight. (Fewer people for Vaughan condo developers to bribe?)

The argument that this would help Tory bypass “red tape” or other hurdles interfering with Getting Things Done doesn’t really make sense, since nobody could point to a major vote he lost in his two prior tenures as mayor. He was never held back, he just wanted more power. The current conservative party leader gave the former conservative party leader more power. Favours. (These two politicians also hate each other considerably, as Ford lost the 2018 mayoral race to Tory, before winning the provincial election Tory lost when he led the party.)

Homelessness predates Tory. In 2019, Nicholas Hune-Brown’s devastating account of Toronto homelessness serves as a reminder that the crisis we’re facing isn’t caused by the pandemic, even if things have worsened enormously since. In 2018, I received a visitor from India stunned by the homelessness she saw in downtown Toronto. As gut-wrenching as homelessness is, when your country has the complicated colonial history of India, and a host of problems we don’t have in Toronto, perhaps people living on the street feels tragic but inevitably. But in a wealthy city like Toronto? What’s the excuse? There was no excuse then and there still isn’t one.

John Tory himself said his “strong mayor” powers would make him more accountable to voters. Let that be the case, then. City council is gradually shrinking to do his bidding, so this is John Tory’s humanitarian crisis.

Tax Evasion vs TTC Fare Evasion: Selective Enforcement

01 Tuesday Sep 2020

Posted by in Politics

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Society ignores tax haven criminals dealing in many millions of dollars but hounds poor people over pennies. This is one example of an infinitely-recurring pattern, where the ultra wealthy essentially rig society in their favour at the expense of society’s poorest people.

Let’s see one manifestation of this dynamic in action.

Canada loses $4 billion a year to tax evasion, because Canada’s wealthiest have more than $200 billion in offshore accounts, and these funds don’t get taxed. $4 billion.

The general public is not demanding blood. In fact, nothing is happening!

In Canada, over the past few years, the CRA has been financially hobbled in just such a way that it can’t really pursue the tax returns of society’s wealthiest people, who necessarily have the most complex, unwieldy paperwork. As a result, apparently it is more efficient for the agency to invest in assessing small- and medium-level tax returns…

How convenient!

Effectively, tax evasion is legal for the very wealthiest people in society.

Compare this lax treatment against how everyday TTC riders are grilled.

TTC riders face TTC Fare Enforcers, a subsection of police there specifically to ensure “the integrity” of $3.25 fares. All this, though more than 97% of TTC riders pay a fare, and the 2.7% who don’t includes people who can’t because a Presto machine was broken.

So, “fare evasion” is a rarity, what evasion there is is tiny, and “fare evasion” isn’t one person greedily draining the broader society of wealth, it’s just them traveling around their city, which is what the TTC exists to do. If the TTC received 5 times the amount or revenue supposedly lost to “fare evasion” annually, it’d still be critically underfunded! “Fare Evasion” is not the root cause of the TTC’s problem.

Still, we send patrols out because the idea of a poor person getting away with anything is cannot be tolerated.

The TTC is basically broke because unlike any other North American city this size, about 80% of its funding comes from the till box–ie, riders pay for it mostly, not government. Yet the TTC found the money to take out ads to shame and humiliate their own riders and plastered them on TTC vehicles!

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Similar ads were on the insides of buses and subways, and the outsides of streetcars.

The outrageous fine for “evading” an outrageously high $3.25 TTC fee is $425 or criminal charges. The smaller the crime, the more it is enforced and the higher the penalty.

When considering this backwards enforcement, is it really coincidence that John Tory, Doug Ford, and Justin Trudeau are more likely to have personal and professional connections with tax evaders than TTC fare evaders?

Look how they chase poor people.

Toronto’s mayor proudly sent fare enforcers on public transit into a global pandemic in March! Imagine paying $3+ to take a shitty public transportation system to a minimum-wage job during a deadly pandemic, hoping nobody is on your bus so you don’t get COVID, and still seeing Fare Enforcers circulate through the system. Public schools are crumbling, hopefully we have enough PPE for frontline healthcare workers, but this we have money for? This is our society?

Our indifference to poor people is evident from the TTC’s “plan” at the time for social distancing, which was this: Fare Enforcers exit the vehicle once 50 people are on board. Can you imagine society risking the lives of wealthy people to ensure financial accountability over any sum of money, never mind $3.25?

Unsurprisingly, a system built on a foundation of violence against poor people is also racist.

Statistically, Fare Enforcers issue tickets disproportionately to Black people. Fare Enforcers assaulted an unarmed Black teenager on a streetcar just down the street from my apartment. The enforcers were found to have committed no wrongdoing, which is not an exoneration of their conduct but a total indictment of the entire system.

Can you even imagine one scenario where an authority would ever physically tackle a tax-evading investment banker, and upon formal review it’d be deemed acceptable?

This charade of enforcement-theatre which lets mega criminality operate freely in broad daylight while violently hounding poor people out of a fake concern for Law and Order is grotesque, yet very typical. Indeed, if you look carefully, you’ll see this underlying dynamic repeated ad infinitum with only minor variations.

If TTC riders face humiliating ad campaigns suggesting they’re criminals and a dedicated team of armed enforcers over $3 fares, what would it look like to see proportionate enforcement against people stealing many, many millions of dollars?

The tax haven class would be cavity searched upon leaving their home in the morning. Growling bloodhounds would bark after them in the street. Billboards targeting the super rich would proclaim, “You unpatriotic dogs think you can swindle Canada? Think again!” and the super rich would be billed for these undermining billboards.

The TTC is a public good that only exists to affordably get people around the city. People have jobs and appointments to get to: The TTC is not there to generate profit, nor should it be!

Comparing the relative treatment of Class Haven Criminals versus TTC riders illustrates clearly that poor people are the ones paying for collective society, that “trickle-down-economics” is BS because in reality the money trickles down to Switzerland or Panama to be privately hoarded.

If our politicians were actually concerned with enforcing the laws on the books evenly and sensibly, rather than waging a war on the poor to benefit their friends and donors, they’d immediately send TTC Fare Enforcers away from public transit and into the Board Rooms, where all the real criminals and “evaders” are.