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Toronto to India and Back to Toronto In a Day

31 Saturday Jan 2026

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Everybody says that the second you get off the plane in India, you know you’re somewhere different. The heat, the air. You feel it. My first time in India was my first time in Asia and the first 24 hours was an amazing joyous culture shock.

First I got picked up from the Delhi airport in a car sent by my news station. My friend and editor in chief Rohit made sure I landed softly. In fact I was staying at his home for the first few weeks of my stay. I owe him so much!

The cab ride from the airport to his home in Vasant Kunj was unbelievable. I looked wide-eyed at everything I saw, stunned. You see people. People around fires in the streets. The space between Pearson to downtown Toronto is filled with fields, parking lots, cars, strip malls, empty expanses. There, there’s stuff and the character and density shocked me.

I reached his home by midnight, and by 4am we woke up early to beat traffic en route to the Jim Corbett Tiger reserve, where Rohit owned land on which he was building a facility for researchers. The drive there was unbelievable. Emerald rice fields, banyan trees shocked me and evoked remote jungles. It was the jungle. It’s hard to state how different everything looks and feels because it was hard to process at the time. Looking out a car window was a constant rush, I couldn’t look away.

On the drive we stopped to wait at a train crossing. While our jeep blared Justin Bieber, Tanya’s music, Rohit’s daughter, a gentleman stood beside me with his cow, which suddenly started urinating in a thick stream right all over his ankles and feet. The guy didn’t move a muscle. I could hear it but it’s like he didn’t even feel it, or simply didn’t care. Hearing Bieber play while watching that felt like straddling two very different worlds.

The natural landscape was awe inspiring. We drove through dry river beds, where the traffic was quite different than I was accustomed to.

We drove through small Muslim villages on the way to Uttarakhand and even seeing things that would be common later, like tea stalls or whatever, blew my mind.

At the tiger reserve, men with very simple tools were building. Ladders of bamboo. No power tools, no electricity, I don’t think. Language barriers prevented communication. But they had a kind of small tree fort where, from that height their phones could get some reception and up there was a solar charging station. This level of old school resourcefulness for modern technology was new to me and impressed me. The funny thing is, unlike me, these humble Uttarakhand builders had data plans on their phones–I hated smartphones, still do, and never wanted one. I only got a data plan for my first time in the upcoming months, in Delhi in 2016.

The charging station and my bed for the evening

But even the construction site was nothing like it would have been in Toronto. It was less a construction site than just…people building. No signs explaining the project’s scope, approvals displayed for inspectors.

We went on a “safari,” ie a drive through the forest looking for tigers. We didn’t see any but the possibility was real, if remote, and that alone was exciting. Nearby some nomads lived, gypsies. Most of them were in the mountains then, except for one woman who spoke to Rohit and seemed friendly. They lived just a few minutes walk away.

The gypsy’s home

I had a bottle of single malt I picked up from the duty free. To add, Rohit said, “Oh, you like hash, don’t you?” Yes, I’ve been known to inhale. So he muttered something in Hindi, which to me sounded not only like a language I couldn’t understand, but like a language nobody could understand. I realized, I had never heard it before. Two seconds later a gentleman builder handed us a big hash joint. Potent, too!

Now I grasp that a bottle of Indian booze, say Old Monk rum, went for like 300 rupees, or roughly $6 Canadian. Scotch is a luxury anywhere, even duty-free, but there, imported to India, it’s coded as “Western” and the subtext of the luxury is on a higher plane.

That night I played some Bowie tunes on my travel guitar by the fire, passed the Laphroaig around, smoked some hash which I was told simply grows everywhere there like weeds. I hope the labourers liked my songs. I think they did.

It was a very cold February evening sleeping on a charpoy outdoors under an open-sided thatch hut, all snug under very thick blankets. The night sky was not only extremely brilliant and crystal clear but the stars even seemed to be positioned differently from the stars I normally saw. Imagine how strange it is to look at the countless stars in the sky and think, “these aren’t the stars I’m used to, every star has changed its position.” That I could be so far away from home that even the heavens looked and was different transcended cultural differences.

A family of elephants sometimes pass through that area, but sadly they weren’t there the next morning. Still, the possibility excited me and made me feel like I was somewhere special. We woke up at probably 4 or 5 am to beat traffic back into Delhi to witness a creature even rarer around those parts than any elephant or tiger: the premier and leader of Ontario’s Liberal party, Kathleen Wynne.

Rohit interviewed her at the Taj hotel, a posh 5-star hotel in South Delhi. I showered quickly and tried to trim my beard to look more appropriate because we weren’t in the jungle anymore, but of course the voltage was wrong and my trimmer got fried. No worries: Suhail, Rohit’s assistant, a friendly young man who I was told could shimmy up a coconut tree and split a coconut open with his bare hands, was also trained to be a barber and trimmed my beard with a comb and scissors. We’d become buds despite not really being able to talk to each other too much.

Before the interview, sitting there in the Taj, I was chewing the shit with one of Kathleen Wynee’s aide, a Toronto guy in her retinue. We talked about restaurants on Dupont Street, probably tacos at Playa Cabana or some Anthony Rose spots. Going to about the other end of the world only to come right back that quickly was super weird. Whiplash.

In hindsight, I was in a class bubble that was very hard to perceive at the time because I had in fact travelled very far and things around me were in fact very different.

Landing in India, you think you’re in “India,” and of course I was, but more specifically I was based in New Delhi, or just outside Delhi in Film City, Noida, Uttar Pradesh, working for Zee Media to launch and work for the country’s first-ever English language news TV station and website, World Is One News. WION.

I might have seen Muslim villagers in the foothills of the Himalayas, a gypsy woman, and Uttarakhand labourers after driving through a dry river to get to a teak jungle, but I couldn’t talk to them. The people in India I could talk to were much less exotic.

Such were my first 24 hours or so in India.

Amulet: The Companion to Bolaño’s 2666

27 Tuesday Jan 2026

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I just finished reading Roberto Bolaño’s Amulet, and my god is it the book I’ve been looking for. I love 2666 a lot, and since reading it I’ve read some other Bolaño novels, and while they were quite good and at times great, they didn’t seem linked directly to 2666. Thematically, perhaps in tone and subject too, but they could have been written by different authors.

Nazi Literature in the Americas is a profile of, you guessed it, Nazis (ordinary people who supported the Nazis, not politicians in the Nazi party) who could have been friends with Haas, but then again maybe not. The Third Reich seems even less connected to 2666. Of course Nazism is very present in all these works, but that’s a surface similarity.

Amulet is different.

To me, reading it, I thought it was the inverse of 2666 and in a type of secret dialogue with it. The imagery is not just similar, but linked, as if there’s a portal from one work to the other. The most obvious link between the two works is that the year “2666” is only mentioned in Amulet, not the actual novel 2666. The longer work gets its title from the shorter one. That’s what pushed me to read this one, but before reading I wondered if that’d be the only link. Thankfully, it isn’t.

My copy of Amulet by Roberto Bolaño

In Part 1 of 2666, the Critic Liz Norton is in a St. Thersa hotel in Mexico looking at the mirror and sensing a type of portal to an eerie dream world, which is later echoed in Part 4, when the congresswoman is in likely the same hotel room and feeling the same creepy sensation. In Amulet, the narrator, Auxilio Lacouture, has the same sensations when looking at a vase in chapter 1. She describes it as a window to hell and wonders if poets ever see the bottom of it. “Do poets have any idea what lurks in the bottomless maws of their vases? And if they know, why don’t they take it upon themselves to destroy them?”

If this was the only parallel I’d probably shrug it off but the connections felt deeper and linked throughout the work. Auxilio felt to me like the patron saint and protector that many, many characters in 2666 needed but never got. The epigraph of Amulet, to me, supports this reading: “In our misery we wanted to scream for help, but there was no one there to come to our aid—Petronius.”

Auxilio renders service to poets, inspiring their work, attending poetry readings and poetry parties and being one of those indispensable people who fuel culture without getting a byline or credit, but in a more basic sense she sweeps their floors and cleans their homes, just because she wants to, not for pay. She identifies as the mother of all poets repeatedly, and she very well could be.

Lest things seem too abstract or speculative or grasping, as always with Bolaño, he brings us down to earth. Auxilio survives a coup, as the army patrols the campus she works on looking for radicals, taking away students and professors, by hiding for 13 days in a bathroom stall. She survives the violence, the haunting shadows and encroaching darkness, by reading Pedro Gafias’ poetry and eating toilet paper until the hunger disappears. This becomes her time-ship, as she remembers and hallucinates things in different directions in time, but the experience is her “amulet,” which she draws on throughout her life for protection.

Thematic similarities to 2666 are numerous, but in many ways the works aren’t just different but opposite or inverted. 2666 has an omniscient third-person narrator (in interview, Bolaño says the narrator is Arturo Bolano, Roberto Bolaño’s alter ego, but we don’t know that just from reading the book), whereas Amulet is a first-person narrator, told from a woman’s perspective. Amulet is centred with a female perspective, whereas in 2666, women are literally missing from the book. Amulet is very short, while 2666 is a tome.

The Critics in 2666 travel from Europe to Mexico looking desperately for a poet they’ve never met, who it turns out under a different name fought for the Nazis in WWII and is the uncle of a suspect in the contemporary killings of women haunting St. Theresa, whereas Auxilio came to Mexico from Uruguay to fulfill her destiny as the mother of all poets. She travelled from afar to her spiritual home, while the Critics, at the end of that section, are stuck abroad in a hotel, sensing Archimboldi (Hans Reiter) is nearby but they’ll never actually meet him.

I could go on, but I think I’d need to reread Amuelt or mark up passages that for me felt similar, or echoed 2666. Auxilio Lacouture is in Bolaño’s other major, long novel, Savage Detectives. Honestly, I read that years ago and the specifics aren’t fresh at all. I could do a reread of that. I suspect it’d read differently to me now, knowing more about Bolaño, his world, and his fictional worlds. I’m going to reread Amulet too at some point, because it was a lovely lighter read that pointed to darker themes without wallowing in them. If reading 2666 is disturbing but raw and important, this felt like the negative image of that but no less raw and important. It is filled with poetry-prose and beautiful images, one that stuck out to me were eyes like a lake at sunset, but whereas 2666 had some light amid the craziness and the darkness, in Amulet these proportions are reversed. If surviving the coup is Auxilio’s amulet, or protection, she provides the bohemians and artists she encounters with the same type of protection, and maybe even for Bolaño’s readers too.

Parallax For Time, or Measuring Infinity

08 Thursday Jan 2026

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When I was young my father explained the “error of parallax” to me and today, though my memory is total garbage, that stuck with me for some reason. The error of parallax occurs when you observe something from a skewed angle and misread it accordingly. The simplest example is to imagine yourself in the passenger seat of a car, unable to gauge the speedometer accurately because you’re looking at it from an angle, not from the driver’s seat.

So that’s how parallax works in terms of physical space. I’ve been intrigued lately about how this same bias works in terms of time. When are you really looking at a moment, square and dead on? During it, or some time after?

Adults know how weird it is returning to places you spent time as a kid which seem much smaller than they used to. Physically, you were smaller too. These places were bigger, relative to your size then. I think as a person grows physically, maybe the world around them shrinks.

But also things take on mythical proportions when you’re young, and the passage of time evens this out. That’s why pro athletes seem not just like adults when you’re a kid, but giants. Men. When I was 13, nobody could have been older or more of an adult than Mats Sundin. He was 26. Now, I’m 41.

This is one way I think parallax works in terms of time. But there are other similar distortions too on different scales.

It’s common for every generation to think they had it hard, they were hardcore, and today’s contemporary whippersnappers are soft. We used to walk five kilometres to school in snow this high. There’s always some reason why adults had it rough and kids today are soft. Today’s soft kids will have had it hard as youth, but only once they grow up and see a new crop of young indulged kids.

There’s always some problem society gets fixated on solving, and people are soft because back in my day nobody cared about it. Today we have mental health diagnoses for problems nobody knew existed. This language gives us a framework for understanding behaviour previous generations lacked. Frankly, sometimes I think pseudo-psychology gets tossed around casually, and people sling therapy language around willy nilly, but by and large we understand that conditions people have can sometimes account for behaviour that would otherwise be difficult to us to understand.

This affects how people see a past time and their own. Everybody in their 40s today lived through the 80s, but not as adults. Their perception about what the 80s or 90s were like is no doubt shaped by their age. Is their sense of time skewed by their age? What exactly is the right age to perceive an era?

Today’s adults don’t know what it’s like to live in 2026 as a child. That’s how parallax works in terms of time. It’s unavoidable.  

That’s why all those fiery op-eds about what Millennials or Gen-Z or Gen-X are like seem silly to me. People are always the same. Technology changes, economic conditions change, and people adjust to this matrix of things accordingly.

Baby Boomers shat on social media when it came out, believing you had to be a vapid idiot to use it. Now it’s a cliché that they’re the first to believe the most outlandishly fake crap posted on Facebook. They were never above using social media, it just wasn’t aimed at adults initially. (Originally, you needed to have a university email to use Facebook). People didn’t use a social media platform invented in 2004 back in the 1960s and 70s for obvious reasons.

With physical space, it’s easy to understand what a straight-ahead perspective is and look at something dead on. With time, this is much less clear.

Sometimes, you don’t understand just what you’re looking at until you get a broader context than is immediately apparent. Maybe you need time to process what’s going on. That’s what the phrase “hindsight is 20-20” means. It suggests the moment itself isn’t the best time to accurately grasp what’s going on.

That’s why parallax is different for time. Novelists love thinking about this kind of stuff. This is Proust’s subject, and he called his famous novel, In Search of Lost Time. As Nabokov elegantly describes it, “it’s a treasure hunt where the treasure is time and the hiding place is the past.”

In a way, the idea of involuntary memory, where one sudden whiff of a tea biscuit can summon core memories long thought buried, contradicts the idea of hindsight being 20-20. It’s not hindsight that makes the memories come alive, but olfactory stimulation. ie, a smell. Then again, eye witnesses for crimes often remember things they witnessed very recently very incorrectly. Memory and time and perception are funny things!

People talk about the relativity of time, how it can move quickly or slowly depending on what’s going on. One new theory I semi-believe is that everybody is every age at once. Seniors carry with them many things from childhood, and have carried their childhood with them constantly, every day of their life. On the flipside, the way you treat a child today is something that can stick with them for decades, so in a way, you’re interacting with that future self too.

It’s not that they’re literally every age at once, it’s that time is only alive in memory. Sometimes people make up a memory, or misremember something that they genuinely think is real.

One funny thing people post online about macro time, epochs, is that we currently live closer to Cleopatra’s age than Cleopatra was to the Pharaoh Cheops, of Cairo’s Great Pyramid fame, Cheops. That’s how long the Egyptian dynasty was.

On the flip side of this grander scale, in music, I’ve become a much keener appreciation of rhythm. Time can be measured in millennia or measures, bars. Everything is on the one. Some jazz and hip hop beats have a lazy behind-the-beat feel I just love, a type of drawl. A hiccup. The P Funk album Funkentelechy Versus the Placebo Syndrome takes part of its name from the Greek word, entelechy, which is concerned with a being achieving its fullest potential. The way I understand it, P Funk is trying to ask the listener what the state of their funk is now, in the moment that just elapsed, and the next one, and the one after that. Are you realizing your full funk, now, and in the constant now-ness? That’s where the Funk is. It’s on the one, and it’s now. That’s one micro perspective on music I think is cool.

Some musical ideas I’ve had consider time on a small and larger scale at the same time. There are Sun Ra records where the A and B sides are from completely different sessions, perhaps years apart. Maybe this was done unintentionally, as they pressed their own albums and recorded their own music constantly and could have simply lost track of what session was what. Their discography is notoriously challenging. I prefer to think of it as Ra playing with time in a micro and macro sense. Side A is from 1962, side B from the 70s. Greatest Hits albums arguably do the same thing.

What does it mean to have an “old soul”? Usually it’s when a young precocious person likes older, more cultivated art, or seems philosophical beyond their years. But even the way we understand art is influenced by time in a major way. For one thing, older books, movies, or songs have had years of scrutiny, and if people still love them after decades, that’s a test new art can’t possibly get to take, let alone pass. It might pass that test later, but not today.

It’s not just that grandparents aren’t impressed by the music their grandchildren listen to. Louis Armstrong had nothing great to say about bebop, and today, jazz standards written by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie are a bedrock part of the jazz Canon.

It’s possible to get swept up by music because it’s current, because it responds to current events or the current moment, but this currentness can also obscure perceptions. Sometimes, topical art speaks to a moment, but isn’t remembered much after that current moment passes. Even that word, current, is great because it invokes water moving in this or that direction, just like the passage of time.  

I saw a post on twitter recently, where someone was lamenting how today’s youth are nostalgic for the 90s, which have passed. Give it up, they’re gone! That was the message. In response, a gentleman I follow posted pictures of 90s albums harkening back to music from the 70s. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill took her cover from Bob Marley’s Burnin’. Marvin Gaye’s 1976 album I Want You was the basis for Camp Lo’s Uptown Saturday Night.

Being nostalgic for a time period you didn’t live in is timeless behaviour, if you will. Musicians have always mined the past for sounds and feels, because what else can a musician know but music they’ve heard before? Norm Macdonald made the joke, that “this is a picture of me when I was younger” should be followed by “every picture of you is a picture of you when you were younger.”

Musicians can’t be influenced by music that hasn’t happened yet, so the past is the only place to look. Novelists, same thing. It’s a question of how far back you go, and in which directions. Any new art has something of the old in it too, and this is how time moves in two directions at once.

Parallax for space rightly assumes that there is one central point from which a perspective is centred, the correct one to look and measure from. This doesn’t exist for time, or if it does, it’s not straightforward. In a sense, we live in every time that has ever occurred, even if the past is buried somewhere and yet to rise, awaiting for whatever will excavate or summon it.

What is Technology For, Exactly?

11 Thursday Dec 2025

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One idea I cannot get out of my head is the notion that our technology-driven society is falling apart and technology gets none of the blame. Instead, the solution posed is always more, more, more technology!

Groceries are unaffordable and the response? Dynamic pricing, where automated technology recognizes who can afford to pay more and charges them more for the same product. This is something to celebrate?

This is one example, and I doubt the creators of this technology would frame dynamic pricing as a response to the soaring price of groceries. But that’s how I see it and don’t really care how the grocery tycoons caught red-handed colluding to raise bread prices for 1.5 decades want people to see it.

From where I’m sitting, digital technology only exists so its creators can become middlemen taking a cut from every purchase. It’s like this in every industry. I don’t see how life has improved from decades ago in any meaningful way.

Obviously we have phones now and before we didn’t. So what? Now you can tap a screen and send an errand boy to courier food to your door. Great. Increasingly, with digital culture and xenophobia on the rise, the food courier’s a young South Asian man who can’t afford city life delivering food to someone who wants them deported. Every digital service pitches itself as modern magic, when really it is just a system for dispatching disposable butlers to your door, making them deal with the horrors of traffic so you don’t have to. It’s so hard to find good help. That’s the problem digital technology answers.

Of course digital technology is interwoven through every industry, not just groceries and restaurants. There are a million digital apps for banking and commerce, and what’s the result? Service deteriorates and executives pocket money laid off employees once got. Maybe it goes to shareholders, or it’s used for stock buybacks.   

Put another way, given how everybody technology famously drives our society, and how much people love technology, you’d think that society was going well! It’s broken. Totally broken.

Everyone’s miserable and many are poor. The left know this is true because they’re the ones who are poor, and the right and far right know this too because the wealth is mostly transferring from everybody else to them. Frankly, they’re miserable too. Everyone is. The mood is very bad right now, everywhere.

The fascist right definitely knows society is hopelessly broken, they campaigned on it. Even back in 2015, Trump ran on “Make America Great Again,” the again screaming the US was no longer great. US presidential hopefuls traditionally wrap the flag as tightly around themselves as possible and campaign on three things: U-S-A, U-S-A, and U-S-A. Running on “America is not great!” is a euphemism for “America is fucked.”

Which is true, but sounds like bullshit coming from a mega-corrupt oligarch who as much as anyone else on earth represents what broke America and works everyday to break it further.

It feels like technology once served a clear cut purpose. Phones let us speak to people, they were undeniably, plainly good. Planes make travel easier, or possible. That’s good. What is all this for?

There’s a circularity to it. Technology creates jobs! OK, but what is it all for? All people want is their basics met and some time to relax with friends and loved ones without feeling like making ends meet is hopeless.

Phones make people miserable, depressed, anxious, and for this, people pay out of their own pocket! If digital technology keeps us so connected, as people assume, why are we all so disconnected? Technology is the force atomizing people, keeping us sequestered and separated. It feels to me like people are subsidizing the tech industry, keeping it afloat, with their money and misery, all to keep the economy churning without no other real benefit. The costs are numerous and enormous, the perks are mostly, at best, vulgar distractions. At worse, horrors.

I don’t see how technology helps people.

For what it’s worth, there are certain forms of technology I love. Sun Ra experimented with every new synth and keyboard he could get his hands on. He played with all kinds of strange recording techniques.

I resent that broadly criticizing Silicon Valley can be construed as being opposed to the very idea of innovation. If you want innovation, read James Joyce! Listen to John Coltrane! Those gentlemen innovated. These modern digital putzers are all looking to make money and invent pretexts pitched with elaborate marketing budgets for why their useless creations are not only useful, but essential, revolutionary. The glowing terms they use for this crap are in proportion to how useless it all is.

There’s another cycle worth describing here too. In the way that laundry machines are an unbelievable technology that save people time…OK, but where exactly does that time go? I struggle to reconcile this. It feels like anything that really does save a person time, the person never gets to keep that time. It gets allocated elsewhere before they can blink. Given all the technology surrounding us, you’d think people have nothing but spare time! They don’t.

If technology was merely useless, I could cheerily laugh at it from a distance and go on with my life. But we’re invading countries to take their minerals to keep building this stuff. The labour exploitation, the climate and ecological destruction…all of that is horrible. And on a basic level, it all strikes me as useless and profoundly boring. On a purely aesthetic sense, it’s all dogshit.

Things were fine before digital technology took over. Better! Now every company is looking to be the Uber of whatever, when really the best way to get around a city is walk or take transit or bike, and Uber’s model was only sustainable because it coasted on vast private funding from Saudi Arabia, and operated with impunity facilitated by ultra-elite lobbying (within like three days of living in New Delhi, I met ex-Obama aide David Plouffe at the Habitat Centre at a talk he was giving about Uber in his capacity as a lobbyist…he didn’t answer my question about Uber operating in legal grey zones to my satisfaction, but tried to), and for years never turned a profit.

I just want to play guitar and read some books and listen to music with people. Watch some movies. Digital technology brings nothing to my life. There are some excellent YouTube breakdowns of music and stuff like that. Of course these platforms support cool cultures: anythign that connects people is cool, because people are cool. But overall, the costs greatly outweigh the benefits. I really think it’s healthier for people to get their life’s satisfaction from artists, not the self-interested leaders of boring exploitative corporate junk. Check out Tolstoy and Gogol, not Mark fucking Zuckerberg, Peter fucking Thiel, or any of those titans of dorkdom.

I don’t care which streaming platform offer movies someone else made years ago, before Netflix even existed. For people to act like these platforms created the art, when really they’re just digital middlemen, strikes me as sad and even pathetic. Worshipping Netflix instead of people like Scorsese is like loving Fender, not Jimi Hendrix. (Actually to be fair, Fender contributed much more to Hendrix’s music than Netflix does for cinema, and I do respect and love that company. But it’s not Jimi!).

Maybe some cultural snobbery is bleeding into this, but if so, it’s because the digital world only has room to promote itself and leaves little space for others. The digital kingpins like ruling the roost, they make the country’s policies. They believe, with justification, that presidents and prime ministers work for them, and a world where people are fulfilled by something they have nothing to do with is not a world they want us to live in. And sure enough, we don’t.

So it’s hard for me to get behind digital technology. There isn’t a perspective where I care about it or respect it even a little. Nobody needs a fucking smart fridge! It’s all just excuses to increase our exposure to advertising and mine our data. Frankly somebody needs to put these fuckers in their place. If anything, I think Rogers should pay us to suffer the burdens of phone ownership, though if the Blues Jays sign Bo Bichette and Kyle Tucker I could change my view on this.

Doug Ford Scandals: Skills Development Fund, the Family Dentist

02 Tuesday Dec 2025

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Last week I wrote about Doug Ford’s Development Skills Fund scandal, mostly a brief outline. To quickly recap, Doug Ford’s $2.5-billion “Skills Development Fund” is ostensibly meant to help Ontario residents get and retain jobs by boosting their skills and training. Nobody denies that’s a good goal, not even partisan critics.

Except it’s gradually being revealed how many recipients were Doug Ford’s friends and donors, and whose applications were low enough to be disqualified, but were approved nonetheless by a hand-picked minister citing “minister authorization”, David Piccini. In October, Ontario’s Auditor General found that Ford’s political staff chose recipients in a way that wasn’t “transparent, fair, or accountable” more than half the time, concerning grants worth more than $750-million.

The latest scandal is a doozy: Ford’s family dentist received $2 million from the Skills Development Fund fund.

The relationship here is unusually close. A November 29 CP24 article noted that Ford’s dentist boasts of being the Ford’s dentist on his website. “We want you to feel as comfortable and relaxed as the Ford family has during their visits with us.”

While the wording didn’t mention Doug Ford by name, there are multiple direct connections between Doug and the primary dentist at the practice that received $2 million, Dr. John Maggirias:

  • The Conservative party posted a photo of Doug Ford and Dr. John together at an event in 2023
  • Dr. John donated just over $20,000 to Doug Ford and his candidates
  • CP24 reported that Dr. John posted photos of Rob Ford on his website (Note: it’s Dec 2, I can’t find any photos of Rob on the site)

Actually, to write this post, I clicked the link inside the CP24 article to find the dentist’s website itself, and noticed the sentence directly mentioning the Ford family had been removed, which was confirmed by Jon Woodward from CTV, the reporter who wrote the original article:

Here is how Dr. John’s website looked before media reports connected the dentist to Doug Ford, as per the Wayback Machine (which pulls up how websites used to look):

For himself, Doug Ford denies ever being there! He issued a firm denial. As of last Friday, November 29, the premier’s office didn’t say whether any of the Fords had been there. Doug said that he’d ask his family if they had, but he insisted his dentist is in Scarborough. On the opposite end of town. OK.

We have several direct connections between them, and explicit denials. Maybe they don’t know each other, maybe they do. Who can say?

Well, here is a video from a 2022 fundraiser of Doug Ford together with Dr. John, telling the audience, “I have a 1-800 number…my 1-800 number is, 1-800-CALL-DR-JOHN.”

It’s amazing how openly chummy the two were before $2 million in taxpayer money changed hands from Ford to Dr. John, and how, once this $2 million transfer was reported on, suddenly they don’t know each other.

Ford’s government has already had to refer a forensic audit about one of the companies he gave SDF money to over to the OPP, to see if a criminal investigation is warranted. He’s currently being invetigated criminally by the RCMP over the $8-billion Greenbelt scandal. Red flags abound, an MO has been clearly established, and the opposition smell blood, as they’re still calling for David Piccini to resign.

This is not the first Doug Ford friend, donor, or ally to receive millions from the Skills Development Fund, despite several of them submitting mediocre to poor applications. It doesn’t feel like a coincidence and it feels like this will get worse soon.

Doug Ford Caught Giving Your Money to Insiders

18 Tuesday Nov 2025

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Doug Ford’s latest scandal is a doozy! Ford’s government has been caught red-handed giving millions away to unqualified personal friends and relatives of government ministers.

The Skills Development Fund, a pool of $2.5 billion, is ostensibly meant to support worker training in in-demand sectors. Ford is using this lots of this money as a slush fund, handing out millions to people only because they have personal connections to the party.

Here’s how it’s supposed to work. Companies submit applications for funding, then the government ranks these applications internally according to formalized criteria, and funding is doled out based on these scores, which the companies never see. The higher the ranking, the higher and likelier the funding. Not complicated.

Except the Toronto Star acquired the government’s own data they meant to keep secret, covering the first four months of the SDF, and the picture is ugly. 26 recipients who scored 50% or lower on their application received over $36 million. Any grant over $5-million needs to be personally signed off by the Labour Minister, David Piccini, who the NDP is pushing to get fired for his role in this. When a dubious application got funding, the reasoning provided was “minister rationale,” so in their mind, Piccini owns this.

Sometimes the applications weren’t even submitted with detailed plans or budgets, but Ford’s government still approved their funding requests anyway. Let’s look at some of the dodgiest applications to get a sense of why this seems like pure, outright corruption scandal:

The church that married a Doug Ford cabinet minister received more than $2.8 million from the government, including two SDF grants.

The gurdwara that endorsed Ford in the election received $950,000. Three high-ranking members of the gurdwara supported a PC fundraiser months before the election.

Postmedia, the parent company of the National Post and Toronto Sun owned by a US-hedge fund, received over $1 million, supposedly to train staff in Artificial Intelligence

A Brampton e-scooter company, Scooty, whose application received a failing grade of 42, also received $1 million to teach 100 workers about the “transformative impact of AI in fintech.” Scooty hired David DiPaul, a former Ford staffer, as a lobbyist to “identify and assist Scooty in navigating various grant and funding opportunities that may be available for a growing Ontario business.” Sure enough, even though ministry staff said the company has “no prior experience,” a budget that “needs to be reexamined,” and that their application has “more risks than strengths,” the government still approved the funding.

The Carpenters’ Council of Ontario supported Doug Ford last election, and they received $14 million though their proposal score was only 52%.

The International Union of Operating Engineers also openly supported Doug Ford last election, and they received about $7.5 million, though their score was 43. The union denies there was any quid pro quo, and said they received the funding before endorsing Ford.

Ontario’s auditor general has called this process “troubling,” noting that as many as 64 projects ranked low or medium that the government chose to fund had hired lobbyists, creating the appearance of “real or preferential treatment.” No kidding.

Ontario used to leave impartial civil servants to allocate this funding, not a hand-picked MPP who has “minister’s rationale” authority. This very much creates the impression of a system where Ford’s government is giving money to friends and relatives and those with inside connections. It’s the same MO as the greenbelt scandal and Ontario Place.

The SDF scandal started weeks ago after a couple of high-profile incidents. One Ford-connected lobbyist for Keel Digital Solutions, which has received SDF funding twice, had a very expensive wedding in Paris near the Arc de Triomphe attended by Labour Minister David Piccini, the same duo pictured together sitting front row at a 2023 Leaf game (Willy Nylander scored a beauty in OT to help the Buds win 6-5 over Florida).

Doug Ford’s Skills Development Fund Giveaway and ‘Minister’s Rationale’

Doug Ford’s latest scandal is a doozy! Ford’s government has been caught red-handed giving millions away to unqualified personal friends and relatives of government ministers.

The Skills Development Fund, a pool of $2.5 billion, is ostensibly meant to support worker training in in-demand sectors. It appears that Ford is using this lots of this money as a slush fund, handing millions out to people only because they have personal connections to the party.

Here’s how it’s supposed to work. Companies submit applications for funding, then the government ranks these applications internally according to formalized criteria, and funding is doled out based on these scores, which the companies never see. The higher the ranking, the higher and the likelier the funding. Not complicated.

Except the Toronto Star acquired the government’s own data they meant to keep secret, covering the first four months of the SDF, and the picture described here is ugly. 26 recipients who scored 50% or lower on their application received over $36 million. Any grant over $5-million needs to be personally signed off by the Labour Minister, David Piccini, who the NDP is pushing to get fired for his role in this. When a dubious application got funding, the reasoning provided was “minister rationale,” so in their mind, Piccini owns this.

Sometimes the applications weren’t even submitted with detailed plans or budgets, but Ford’s government approved their funding requests anyway. Let’s look at some of the dodgiest applications to get a sense of why this seems like pure, outright corruption scandal.

The church that married a Doug Ford cabinet minister received more than $2.8 million from the government, including two SDF grants.

The gurdwara that endorsed Ford in the election received $950,000. Three high-ranking members of the gurdwara supported a PC fundraiser months before the election.

Postmedia, the parent company of the National Post and Toronto Sun owned by a US-hedge fund, received over $1 million to train staff in AI.

A Brampton e-scooter company, Scooty, whose application received a failing grade of 42 also received $1 million to teach 100 workers about the “transformative impact of AI in fintech.” Scooty hired David DiPaul, a former Ford staffer, as a lobbyist to “identify and assist Scooty in navigating various grant and funding opportunities that may be available for a growing Ontario business.” Sure enough, even though ministry staff said the company has “no prior experience,” a budget that “needs to be reexamined,” and said their application has “more risks than strengths,” the government approved the funding.

The Carpenters’ Council of Ontario supported Doug Ford last election, and they received $14 million though their proposal score was only 52%.

The International Union of Operating Engineers also openly supported Doug Ford last election, and they received about $7.5 million, though their score was 43. The union denies there was any quid pro quo, and they say they received the funding before endorsing Ford.

Ontario’s auditor general has called this process “troubling,” noting that as many as 64 projects ranked low or medium that the government chose to fund had hired lobbyists, creating the appearance of “real or preferential treatment.” No kidding.

Ontario used to leave it to impartial civil servants to allocate this funding, not a hand-picked MPP who has “minister’s rationale” authority. This very much creates the impression of a system where Ford’s government is giving money to friends and relatives and those with inside connections. It’s the same MO as the greenbelt scandal and Ontario Place.

This started weeks ago after a couple of high-profile incidents. One Ford-connected lobbyist for Keel Digital Solutions, which has received SDF funding twice, had a very expensive wedding in Paris near the Arc de Triomphe David Piccini attended, the same duo pictured together sitting front row at a 2023 Leaf game (Willy Nylander scored a beauty in OT to help the Buds win 6-5 over Florida).

The NDP is adamant that they believe in the idea of the program, which is meant to help retrain, retain, and generally help businesses grow. The NDP have called Piccini a “dark cloud hanging over the Doug Ford government.” True, but Doug Ford is the weather system. I’m not sure why they’d target Piccini, not Ford, especially considering that Piccini’s predecessor Monte McNaughton also doled out millions in Skills Development Funds to dubious people close to him, including his wife’s colleague, before ducking out of politics.

David Piccini isn’t the mastermind behind this.

Even this Skills Development Funds scandal comes amid the wake of another possibly larger scandal. Doug Ford’s office referred a forensic audit to the OPP over concerns that a company, Keel Digital Solutions, received millions in public dollars from more than one ministry.

The OPP Anti-Rackets Branch is assessing it now to determine whether a criminal investigation is warranted. Note, the OPP recused itself from the ongoing criminal investigation into Doug Ford’s handling of the Greenbelt scandal, passing it onto the RCMP instead.

Doug Ford has been caught giving government money to weak applicants with inside connections. That’s not in dispute. Whether Ford can outrun these scandals, and whether these scandals are actually crimes, are the only things left to determine.

David Piccini isn’t the mastermind behind this.

Even this Skills Development Funds scandal comes amid the wake of another possibly larger scandal. Doug Ford’s office referred a forensic audit to the OPP over concerns that a company, Keel Digital Solutions, received millions in public dollars from more than one ministry.

The OPP Anti-Rackets Branch is assessing it now to determine whether a criminal investigation is warranted. Note, the OPP recused itself from the ongoing criminal investigation into Doug Ford’s handling of the Greenbelt scandal, passing it onto the RCMP instead.

Doug Ford has been caught giving government money to weak applicants with inside connections. That’s not in dispute. Whether Ford can outrun these scandals, and whether these scandals are actually crimes, are the only things left to determine.

You Have a Sacred Responsibility to Blow Your Own Mind

14 Friday Nov 2025

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How do you know that there aren’t artists out there who you’d love more than the artists you currently love the most? This is a very important question people need to take seriously!

People have a sacred responsibility to blow their own minds. Who else will? Why go through life without encountering the best, coolest, most challenging stuff out there? Not what some insufferable dork at a party describes this way, but what you think. What epiphanies and revelations are you leaving on the table?

This question should frighten you into action!

One thing I keep coming back to is: how do I know when my obligations to myself are over? How does a person know when to say, “That’s enough, nothing still out there is worth seeking out!”? I get FOMO from this.

Life is largely mental; we all live inside our own heads 24/7. Literature and music are centuries old. Film is newer but what a vast rich fun world. There’s a lot out there! It feels like looking out at an endless ocean vista, only to remember the real ocean is under the water’s surface.

Obviously personal relationships are the fundamentals of life, not just this art stuff, and travel is another surefire way to blow your mind. But personal relationships are unique and complex, while travel costs time and money. In the streaming era, many great works of art have never been more accessible.

If you don’t make a genuine attempt to explore and wrestle with the deeper ends of this stuff, as far as you’re concerned, it may as well not exist. That’s sad to think of, in a way. But it’s also amazing to think that there’s such a wealth of beautiful priceless culture surrounding you, you could spend your whole life exploring it and not get to everything.

But imagine what life would be like if you had never encountered your favourite artist. Emptier. It’s like being without a best friend. Maybe you can’t really imagine never having heard of Bob Dylan because he’s just so famous, but there are artists out there just as talented and visionary whose name you don’t know. Me too! It’s true for everybody.

In my experience, blowing your mind with art comes in cycles and waves because you keep thinking, this is the best, surely it’s over now, this is as good as it’ll get, but then there’s more! It’s always in flux.

But let’s be practical here too though. Life is busy and expensive and who has time for all this? On the other hand, why even be alive only to miss so much joyful and inspiring human activity, especially when it’s potentially only a click away?

If you’re grinding and tired and saddled with major responsibilities like a demanding job and/or kids, it can be difficult to hear from somebody with spare hours to prattle on about their precious art! I get it.

The subtext of this conversation may sound like, “listen to how much free time I have!” or “look how much deep shit I know, and how cultured I am!” It may seem like the person preaching about this stuff is trying to make an exhibition of their brain or their lofty soul, rather than being driven by pure high-minded motives like love of beauty and a desire to spread it.

I urge people not to think of it this way! It’s better to endure several pompous weenies than risk not paying attention to the one person who gets it, whose tip or insight could change your life. It’s about you not them.

Of course, I have my own personal agenda here too, and I’ve yelled at friends, acquaintances, and strangers on the street to familiarize themselves with different artists I love. Personally, I really do love these writers and musicians, they mean so much to me!

I just want more people to be on that level, where they’re happy and excited and surprised by what’s out there. I can only advocate for the artists who’ve made me feel that way. (Music: Sun Ra Arkestra, Parliament Funkadelic, Miles; Literature: Bolano, Gogol). But really what I’m pushing here is not these specific artists, it’s the idea of people pushing themselves to get the most from culture.

I get why sometimes you just want to turn your brain off after a long day, rather than wrestle with Deep Shit, but to bring it back to the beginning, the obligation is to yourself. Enthusiasts like me might push this or that on you, sometimes obnoxiously and with a crazed glint in our eyes, and god knows algorithms will push their agenda on your under the guise of neutrality or serving you personally, but ultimately this is entirely in your own hands.

When you’re on your deathbed one day hopefully many years from now, talking to yourself in your final moments about the meaning of life and all that, you’ll need to be at peace with your relationships, what you’ve accomplished and left behind, but also what it was all for. You may not mentally rifle through all the highbrow art stuff you investigated in life and say to yourself, “thank god I listened to the Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, Volume 2!” But the artists we love are life companions that help us find meaning and joy, bliss and purpose and inspiration. If you look around now at how depressed, angry, anxious and sad people are, surely we could use more of that. I don’t trust algorithms. You must take it into your own hands and take it seriously, you have a responsibility to yourself.

Assessing “Socialism’s 0% Success Rate”

05 Wednesday Nov 2025

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Congrats, Zohran Mamdani! A 34-year-old Muslim socialist is now mayor of New York City, and, while they have a lot to say, one of his critic’s throwaway lines is that socialism has a 0% success rate. It’s never worked anywhere, apparently.

Forget for now that the US, capitalism’s heartland, has never been more completely and utterly broken, sold off for parts by a mafia-connected reality TV actor. I’m not even looking now at Mamdani’s platform or promised policies.

Forget all this for a moment. I want to pull back and assess the idea that socialism has never worked and that capitalism always has using a metaphor that for me explains why this criticism is not just untrue, but childish and simple.

To hear people tell it, perceived quality of life alone determines whether or not socialism/capitalism is good or bad. For many this is self-explanatory, and they don’t have to actually inspect or compare anything, because it’s self-evident that socialist countries are shitholes while capitalist countries aren’t.

I don’t see how this verdict can be reached so automatically in a country like the US, where school shootings and medical bankruptcies are routine everyday occurences, and for the first time in years the life expectancy is dropping.

Capitalism has a higher PR budget and its mythology has a stronger hold on people here, which is natural and unsurprising. Wealthy people love saying that our society is broken, but curiously none of them blame capitalism, even though all our national leaders in power have been capitalists.

But that still doesn’t get to the point. The real point is that capitalism has spread globally mostly because of the CIA, not the CEOs and all the supposed trickle-down wealth that follows in their wake.

In my view, this topic gets discussed like people watching a chess game, trying to determine who’s the stronger player solely by examining the pieces on the board. At first, it seems like a reasonable way to determine who is better at chess, right?

Maybe the observers understand the full depths of the position perfectly. Maybe they’re just middling amateurs. In either case, the pieces alone are what inform their verdict of who is stronger at chess.

In reality, if you pull back and look away from the board for a moment, you’ll see that one of the chess players is holding a loaded gun to the other’s head. Is the player holding the gun really winning the chess game because they have better tactics and skill? Or is their opponent throwing the game trying not to get killed?

Any chess analysis that ignores the gun is irrelevant, no matter how strong the chess analysis is. The observer could be Magnus Carlsen, but if he doesn’t know there’s a gun to one player’s head, his chess analysis will be missing the point.

When the US says their military exists to protect “America and her interests” they are talking about a system of global military reach that extorts or forcefully replaces duly-elected foreign governments on behalf of US tycoons across industries.

Nobody can accurately say how many foreign governments the US has undermined or replaced. The left doesn’t have the final tally because the number is very high, many coups are still secret or denied, and it’s easy to lose track of them all, while the right also doesn’t know because they seem to genuinely have no idea this is how the world actually works, and they’re very emotionally invested in believing that Western wealth is driven by the ambition and intelligence of its industrialists, not international military fuckery and subterfuge.

Capitalists act like capitalism has spread naturally because it’s so mutually beneficial, not because it was forced at gunpoint. If they were being honest and thoughtful, anybody stating that “socialism has never succeeded” would ask, “If capitalism is so wonderful, why can’t it spread without the US military forcefully intervening to spread it?”

Even economists seem to me now like grandmasters doing expert chess analysis while ignoring the guns over the board that really lead to checkmate.

So even if we allow that quality of life is better in capitalist countries like the US and Canada (which could very well be true, even if right-wing people in both places never tire of saying they’re hopelessly broken; trump ran on the US no longer being great anymore back in 2015, while Canada’s decline is assumed in political ads across parties), it’s not for the reasons most people say it is.

We’ll see if Mamdani remains committed to curbing the establishment’s influence once he’s in office. If he was a national leader in a faraway country that, say, discovered mines with valuable rare minerals Silicon Valley needed, US reps would fly over and pay him a visit, offering wealth and protection for him and his family in exchange for control of the mines. And if he refused, they’d replace him with someone who would sell out his people and cooperate with the US. But because he’s mayor of New York, the establishment will probably just undermine him at every turn and spend untold millions to smear him. Then, whether he succeeds or fails in office, they’ll say he failed very badly and deny their involvement entirely, as if his performance and not their actions are the only thing they’re assessing.

I wish him luck because he has a serious fight ahead.

Cars Take Up More Space Than They Take Up: Clear Zones

30 Friday May 2025

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When people talk about how cities can relieve congestion, it’s essential to think about our physical spaces in ways people aren’t really accustomed to thinking about them. We get used to the world around us, and things that are problems seem normal and acceptable. Cars are so ubiquitous, their presence everywhere so natural, that we seldom question just how much space they take up and how this contributes to congestion.

I’d like to explore this question more to show the problem clearly.

I recently finished a wonderful book called Killed By a Traffic Engineer, written by traffic engineer Wes Marshall, about how the underlying assumptions engineers make are the root causes of many safety problems we have on the roads and, therefore, in our cities.

The book is made up of 88 small chapters, usually four or five pages. One section I found devastating was about “clear zones,” the phrase given to the space on the road outside the laneways that needs to be cleared of any physical objects for “safety” reasons. The specifications are strict, even if the underlying assumptions are dubious.

A 1963 roadside design guidebook called the Automotive Safety Foundation (ASF) said that since so many accidents involve vehicles leaving their travel lanes, accounting for 30-35% of fatalities at the time, it was essential for roads to have a certain amount of free space outside the lanes for errant vehicles, so that a car leaving its lanes wouldn’t crash into anything.

On a certain level, this makes sense. If there’s nothing there, there’s nothing to crash into! Anyone imagining a car swerving out of its lane understands that it’s safer for there to be no physical object outside.

But the ASF determined that 25% of crashes involved trees, so what did they do? They cut down all the trees beside roads. This, even though the ASF guidebook recognized that no research proved that proximity to a fixed object increased the likelihood of a crash. In other words, in the event of a crash, it’s safer to have a clear zone than not to, but no research confirms that clear zones make a crash less likely. If anything, there’s evidence they make crashes more likely. Nonetheless, clear zones became the norm moving forward. Often, big ones.

In 1967, 30 feet of clearance space on either side of the road was considered appropriate. The engineers had a different set of fatality reduction at every 5-foot interval, so a 5-foot clear zone led to a 13% reduction in fatalities, a 10-foot 25%, 20-foot 44%.

On rural highways, this makes sense. The problem begins when cities started turning urban streets into rural highways. Do you want a city with trees in it? Because you can’t have tree-less arterial roads and an abundance of trees. How do you create a 30-foot buffer on either side of the road in a world with thousands of pedestrians and cyclists? A city without trees and human beings is sad indeed.

On a fundamental level, there’s an error in the assumptions going on here. Giving drivers an impossibly wide, undisturbed road may make them drive faster than they would if laneways were narrower, increasing the danger. That’s why the clear zones might increase the danger. If stats show there are fewer pedestrian collissions on such streets, it may be because fewer people walk around highway-like streets in cities.

Wes Marshall points out that urban roadways had a lower fatality rare than rural ones according to Traffic Quarterly data from 1959 and 1963. Crash injury rates were also double in rural environments than urban ones.

It turns out that the “hazards” alongside the road may also encourage safer driving habits. People behind the wheel tend to slow down when less room is available to them, and this leads to real increased safety. Empirically, there’s no proof that “clear zones” improve road safety.

There’s nothing innately safer about removing all potential obstacles. If cities were to make walking on city streets illegal–if Toronto outlawed walking on the sidewalks and roads–then you’d have stats showing there were no pedestrian deaths. Does this mean the city is safer for pedestrians? Causality is very murky here.

Trees are beautiful things that clean the air, absorb rainwater. We’re happier around them. Cities need them. Trees can also be deployed for safety reasons, such as to separate cyclists and pedestrians from cars. Instead, cities built streets with “clear zones” that include not just shoulders but bike lanes and auxiliary lanes in them. We have intentionally designed cities that place cyclists in precisely the space we want errant vehicles to go, for them to be “safe.”

When it comes to cars, engineers can’t just say “this is your designated space, this space is not yours.” A 5.8-foot-wide car needs a lane that’s 9-15 feet wide, for buffer. A four-lane arterial street in the city, which has say two driving lanes and another two lanes for parking, could be 30-feet wide, but then the “clear zone” adds say ten feet in each direction, totalling 50-feet. Most cars have only one person in them, the driver. The driver’s ass might only be a couple feet wide, but the city gives them 50 feet (one 15-foot lane for driving + one 15-foot lane for parking + one 10-foot clearance zone on either side)!

Car lanes take up way, way more space than cars take up.

So when the topic of congestion relief arises and we’re all looking for ways to efficiently free up space, we need to peel back some of our assumptions behind how our world is designed. Seen from this way, encouraging modes of transportation that don’t take up extra space is of critical importance.

Most bike lanes in Toronto aren’t even real bike lanes, there’s just a certain amount of buffer space or the “clear zone” between car lanes and the sidewalk that arises naturally, and we paint a stencil of a bike in there and call it a “bike lane.” Bikes are narrow! They aren’t clunky. Unlike cars they are slight and don’t need much more room than they take up, a major tactical advantage when considering how people can move quickly all at the same time.

At least three people can fit shoulder to shoulder on a sidewalk, which is much narrower than a car lane and doesn’t require a “clear zone.”

Marshall’s focus on clear zones here was about safety, and that’s pertinent too, but it also nicely illustrates the wasted space we give cars. The point is to shrink the gap between how much space a physical thing takes up and how much space cities give it.

The Most Divisive Topic Today: Priority Bus Lanes

29 Thursday May 2025

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The surest way to make somebody instantly furious? Bring up the topic of priority bus lanes. It’s unbelievable, but no topic makes more people madder quicker than taking away any space from private vehicles.

On a macro level, sure, the idea that freeing up arterial routes to move people rather than accommodate the largest vehicles not moving (ie, parking) makes perfect and total sense. The Dufferin and Bathurst bus routes move 75,000 people daily according to Shawn Micallef’s Sunday op-ed in the Star, more than the entire transit systems in many North American cities move, yet they’re extremely prone to bottlenecks.

The idea is to remove street parking along Dufferin from Eglinton down to King Street, and along Bathurst, from Eglinton down to the Lakeshore. In no sane world does a system trying to move people devote about half the available street space to the largest vehicles not moving instead of working to help the packed vehicles doing all the heavy lifting.

What’s at play here is that many people accustomed to the status quo of abundant parking are livid and mobilized. Not all–some residents are eager for proper bus lanes–but a significant number. An anonymous website pledging to “Save Dufferin” has sprung up, as if freeing up the street so riders can travel on it is a threat.

Once again, a business owner worries that the inability to park in front of their stores will harm business. This happens every time a change to parking is proposed. Studies across time and space show that business owners vastly overestimate the percentage of customers arriving by car and underestimate how many arrive by transit, bike, or foot.

That studies show this over and over is so well known by now that I literally said that out loud in a room by myself while reading Micallef’s op-ed, before I saw him write it himself in the article. On the page opposite was a different article about some fears over the bus lane, where the local councilor Dianne Saxe also repeated what Shawn wrote and what I thought and also said. But people get into patterns and habits of mind and it’s hard to shake these. No amount of very real studies can make them believe the studies are real!

I don’t want to diminish their fears or antagonize them. Their voices should be heard and their anxieties quelled, but I worry that their fear will dominate the discussion and shut down any chance of progress on a simple aspect of modernizing the city.

The tens of thousands of riders who get routinely ignored, who struggle on underfunded and neglected buses every day, should also be heard from. In fact, their needs should be addressed without them having to say anything, which is what’s happening here now.

We’re talking about two bus lanes! That’s it. Without having to utter a peep, drivers get many billions to repair old highways and build new ones nobody even asked for. The Doug Ford government wants an underground mega highway beneath North America’s widest highway, and refuses to say how many tens of billions that alone will cost. It’s insane. He’s rushing to build the 413 highway, which his donors just happen to own great swathes of property alongside that will all rise in value dramatically if a highway is built.

And somehow two bus lanes are a mega problem?

For what it’s worth, I live a 3-minute walk from Dufferin now, and for years took the 7 bus up and down Bathurst when I taught guitar lessons along that route. I still take transit and drive up these roads, so I’m quite familiar with them. I was astonished to read a business owner at Dupont and Bathurst deny that roads get congested there, because they very much do! The bottlenecks are shocking and they happen nearly every day.

Try driving north up Bathurst from Dupont to St. Clair on a week day between 3-6 pm. A 3-minute drive can take 20 minutes or more. The Bathurst bus is a nightmare, and this is the stretch between the Bloor subway and the St. Clair streetcar.

They call the Dufferin Bus the Sufferin Bus for a reason. Doug Ford radically underfunds schools and hospitals but will proudly spend billions to save drivers 30 seconds on their commute? He’s micromanaging Toronto and screwing the city on a macro level too. He went from giving fellow conservative John Tory “Strong Mayor” powers when he presided over Toronto to running roughshod over Olivia Chow. The Dufferin bus lanes were first proposed by the TTC in 2019. Tory voted to nix them.

The speed of the average TTC bus has declined from 17.2 km/h in 2024 from 20 km/h in 2013. Meanwhile, the Bathurst bus averages 13 km/h. The problem is real, dire, and growing.

If it’s government overreach to consult citizens merely before potentially removing 138 parking spaces from major arterial streets to free up space for buses, what is forcing an astronomically expensive underground mega highway nobody asked for? I don’t see why people are relatively up in arms about the first, but silent about the second.

The details are always tricky. Dufferin and Bathurst are major downtown arterials but they also have homes on them and people reasonably expect a certain amount of parking near where they live. There are also laneways behind these homes with parking potential. Congestion is the bigger problem and that needs to be addressed first.

The city is doing more consulting and outreach for bus lanes than Doug Ford is for his outlandish and obscenely expensive underground mega highway, yet I’m seeing more people angry at Chow for pushing forward on what is undeniably a much, much smaller project than Doug Ford’s.

Has Doug Ford requested feedback from the public before trying to push his outlandish mega project? 

To me this illustrates the way our government instinctively coddles and pampers motorists while forcing transit riders to beg for scraps. The funny thing is that RapidTO is considering a bus lane on these streets mostly in anticipation of hosting a few 2026 World Cup games.

How will visitors without cars get around? Of course the city isn’t planning this because it’s a sensible thing for residents—if we do something good here, it’s usually for tourists.

De-prioritizing motorists is something every sensible modern city is doing now. It’ll be a fight because people get livid at the idea of taking an inch away from cars. The city is right to consult with people about their reservations, but it needs to move ahead on this. The data is too settled.