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.

If Bike Lanes Cause Traffic, Where is the Data?

27 Tuesday May 2025

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The frothing hatred many people have for bike lanes comes with an untrue assumption; whaters say bike lanes increase traffic for cars, without a shred of evidence. To them, seeing any unused space on the road that doesn’t have a car on it is all the proof they need. If there was no bike lane there, they could drive there! But there is, so they can’t!

On this level, it seems like anybody who can’t manage to wrap their head around this simple concept must be either a very stupid person or an ideologue, a guerilla fighting against cars in the War on Cars because they hate the freedom and innovation cars represent, or something like that.

If you’ve spent any time in these conversations you’ve heard things like this. I’m sympathetic to it! To the naked eye this is really how it all appears. To get a sense of why this isn’t how it really works, let’s consider it from a different angle.

In Toronto, somewhere between 25-30% of the city itself is devoted to car lanes and car parking. Between one quarter and one third of the city, roughly. Let’s imagine there were no bike lanes, or even that bikes didn’t exist.

The city is finite, physically speaking. It cannot grow because you cannot add more land within the same boundaries. Any additional roadways you add necessarily takes away from some other land use, whether it be residential homes, commercial properties, a park, sidewalks…whatever.

If you keep adding more and more cars within the same finite space, traffic will only get worse and worse as a result. That is the root cause of traffic: more cars.

If your task is to relieve congestion and get more people moving more efficiently, quicker, and more reliably, the last thing you’d do is any action that added private cars to the mix. Nothing is more efficient and effective than public transit. On the average work day, the TTC moves 2.5 million+ people. There are 2 million car trips a day in Toronto by commuters, as of May 2023.  

If roads seem congested now, imagine how much worse they’d be without public transit. You cannot understand this topic by looking at the problem through your windshield. You need to pull back and realize the only way to “solve” traffic is by reducing the number of cars on the road, since that what traffic is. Making other modes of transportation more attractive accomplishes that.

It seems a little paradoxical! Fixing traffic by ditching your car eliminates the benefits of fixing the traffic, since you aren’t there to benefit. So drivers hear this and assume it’s communist gobbledygook designed for some ulterior, nefarious motive. When people like me say “we need fewer drivers on our roads,” many people hear “you must stop driving.”

Let’s be clear: even the most adamant bike lane proponents understand that there will always be cars on the road and nobody is trying to remove them all. The point is to reduce reliance on cars, so people who don’t want to drive can stop driving.

You can gauge our city’s devotion to serving the private automobile by how we bend over backwards again and again, sacrificing nearly unlimited physical space and unlimited money to build roads, street, avenues, and highways for cars. If building more roads reduced traffic, Toronto wouldn’t have any traffic!

At some point, cities run out of more space for private cars because a city needs other things in it. I’ve joked in a tongue in cheek way about “fixing” traffic by razing hospitals, schools, homes, sidewalks, parks, and businesses and replacing them with roads. But actually, this is historically pretty much what we’ve done!

Entire communities were eliminated to make way for highways and onramps. Some 50s politicians were militantly opposed to sidewalks in the city, specifically because they took space away from cars to drive. This kind of blind, devouring entitlement is related to the blind spot many drivers have today, where they blame traffic woes on a streetcar carrying dozens of people, but one lone driver holding up a busy streetcar because they’re turning left is never responsible for any delays.

So what we have is an endless tussle between cars and everything else. Drivers expect infinite space and infinite money in a world that is physically and financially finite. Where will it end?

In a world where politicians spend billions to allegedly shorten a driver’s commute by 30 seconds, drivers are accustomed to this whole conversation revolving around them, so much so that they are very confident that the data from scholars and engineers is on their side.

It isn’t! Not even close!

Study after study in multiple cities across North America and elsewhere show that business improves after bike lanes are installed. Crucially, they also show that local business owners routinely overestimate how many of their customers arrive by private car and underestimate the percentage arriving by transit, bike, or foot.

In Toronto, the Bloor-Annex BIA representing 250+ local businesses is fighting to keep the bike lanes installed under John Tory, a conservative insider who is anything but a crazed bike lane guy. Doug Ford swooped in unbidden with $40 million to remove the bike lanes, which were only installed after years of studies and consultations. He’s openly defying local residents and local businesses without invoking one shred of evidence. For the Ontario premier to override the municipality and force his personal whims on the entire city is anti-democratic. For him to do it without any evidence is sheer stupidity.

If I’m wrong, please show me the data! I’ve read a few books on this lately that delved deeper into these types of questions. Killed By a Traffic Engineer; Urban Mobility: How the iPhone, Covid, and Climate Changed Everything; Shrink the City. They were great, especially the first one.

None of these books found any study claiming what Doug Ford and millions of people in Toronto assume to be true, namely that bike lanes increase traffic.

Following the data leads to the exact opposite conclusion they’ve reached: bike lanes help local businesses. Taking this logic to its natural conclusion, excess road space for cars is an attack on local business. The anti-bike lane people identify as pro-business, so hearing this point makes them go nuts. They want comfort and the intellectual high ground.

The reason congestion seems so intractable is that selling vehicles is a pillar of our economy, and it’s impossible for masses of people to both buy enough vehicles to keep the economy rolling without having to encounter each other while driving them. More cars is more traffic. The number of cars you need to sell to boost the economy is the root cause of traffic jams, not bike lanes. Put another way, our economy and our lifestyles are at odds with each other.

Think about it this way: If you think bikes clog streets, imagine how much worse they’d be if bikes were physically the size of cars or trucks! How could opposing what’s small, nimble, and effective fix congestion? To get a sense of how vehicles’ physical size and cumbersome nature is the root cause of traffic, imagine if pedestrians had to line up behind each other if one person walking in front of them was making a left turn, or even a right turn. Cars are uniquely prone to stopping and starting and creating bottlenecks.

Drivers have this idea that there’d be no traffic if only everything was optimal. If the traffic lights were set properly, if every driver drove and parked perfectly, if construction wasn’t excessive, then there’d be no traffic. There’s only traffic because some people are idiots or the city screws everything up!

Let’s be clear: it’s physically impossible for millions of cars to all drive quickly on the same roadways at the same time without crashing into each other. That’s what people expect their drive to be, and they are shocked, shocked when they never ever encounter these impossible optimal conditions. There would have been no traffic except for ___, and the ___ is never all the other cars. This blint spot is captured in the common urban planning refrain, “you’re not in traffic, you are traffic.”

“Induced demand” is the bedrock of urban planning because the phenomenon has been proven real over and over again. Basically, if you try to ease gridlock or congestion by widening the road by a lane, it will only work very briefly, until additional drivers incentivized or “induced” by the newly-built road space erase any gains made in congestion improvement, and soon you’re back where you started. This is captured by another common and funny refrain, “just one more lane, bro!”

We’ve known this for decades! Any urban planning that still ignores induced demand is fireable, shameful negligence and on a basic level doomed to fail.

Improving non-car travel options is the best way to “fix” traffic because it lets people who don’t want to drive leave their cars at home. Some people currently attached to their cars in our car-centric world may also decide to stop driving once presented with safe and attractive alternatives.

It’s a chicken and egg thing. Saying “nobody bikes in Toronto!” misses the point. Bike infrastructure here is abysmal, why would they? It’d kind of be like pointing at a forest with no roads in it, and therefore no cars, to prove that nobody likes driving. People adapt to what’s in front of them.

Want traffic to get worse? Here are some sure ways to do it. First, build a mega parking lot for 2,000+ cars beside a congested waterfront highway commuters use daily that’s also prone to flooding. Then, pour untold billions into building an underground mega highway underneath North America’s widest highway, Highway 401. Next, invest millions into destroying newly built cycling infrastructure, while also refusing to adequately fund what actually relieves traffic because it represents competition for the auto industry, public transportation.

Naturally, Doug Ford is committed to worsening car traffic in all these ways that will cost us billions of dollars and who knows how many lives. Streets will be more congested and dangerous instead of safe and vibrant. When Ford’s plans do absolutely nothing to relieve congestoin, his supporters will use Bike lanes as a scapegoat.

The Bloor bike lane was selected specifically to connect local cyclists to Canada’s busiest subway line. Ensuring safe and seamless connectivity between public transit and active transportation is sensible urban planning 101. Why wouldn’t Canada’s busiest subway line be connected to bike lanes?

The opponents of bike lanes feel no reason to read about this at a planning level at all because this bungling incompetent and corrupt premier acts on all their assumptions and desires before they can even write him a strongly-worded email. There’s no guarantee that urban planners will get all or even any of the details right and I’m not saying every recommendation they make in Toronto is automatically the right decision, but the anti-bike lane people are objectively wrong, yet feel very above needing to hear or read about any other opinion.

Maybe I’m just another crazed downtown yahoo in the war against the car! But let me ask: if we all agree planning shouldn’t be emotional and we all support following the data wherever it leads, what data justifies ripping up bike lanes? What data suggests that bike lanes worsen traffic?

When they produce real studies with real citations and not torqued, cooked numbers to merely give the appearance of relying impartially on data, I’ll shut up. I suspect I’ll be waiting forever.

Jazz On Vinyl

21 Wednesday May 2025

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For people who stream music and don’t understand all the hoopla and money spent on collecting records, few things can make you sound like a bigger douchebag faster than saying “jazz on vinyl.” It’s not a new trope. Jerry Maguire (1996) nailed it with that jazz keener babysitter character, and the phrase “hipster doofus” goes back to the days of Charlie Parker.

The way I see it, anything cool gets mocked if it’s too cool, and sometimes people lay cool things on a little heavy. I get that the trappings of a record collection are ripe for mockery, but put on a great copy of a killer album on a system with good speakers, and tell me you’re having a bad time!

If there’s one key way music sounds better on vinyl than on digital formats, it’s that the high and the low ends have more room to breathe. Those sounds are clearer. When you hear it, you notice, even if you didn’t think you would. I suspect if you were to do a test, most people would hear the difference. That’s how palpably different it is. The audio quality depends on a few things, like your speakers, the receiver or pre-amp, the album pressing, and the way the album was engineered. When all these things align, the results are magic.

I’m not sure I’d recommend anybody to start a record collection today. Records are prohibitively expensive. When I started years ago, I worked at a music store that sold used records. They were inexpensive to start with and I got 50% off.

Even a few years ago, a new reissue of an old album might cost $20-25 or so. Today, it’s more common to find them at $35-40 or more. Some brand new albums are $50. Meanwhile, vintage jazz records can be very expensive. You’re lucky to find an old Blue Note album for $80, depending on the condition.

A few years ago when I was really buying albums, I didn’t much care for whether it was an original from the period or a reissue. I didn’t have a streaming platform and the only way I could hear the album was on record, or with commercials on YouTube.

I maintain that records do sound better, but that’s not the only reason they’re worthwhile. Holding such a large thing in your hands, looking at the album cover, makes it an artifact. The tangible experience of playing the record, even flipping it half way through, adds to the ritual enjoyment. Some records really are one of a kind. Sun Ra Saturn records were individually painted by band members around their kitchen table, so if you have one of these records, it’s not just that the physical record itself is like an artifact or a part of a ritual; it very much is a piece of history.

The point isn’t to be a snob about collecting records and look down on anybody for however they listen to music, it’s just to spread some joy and maybe musical understanding.

Personally, bass was the thing I heard least in music growing up. McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones, and of course John Coltrane were recorded very prominently, but Jimmy Garrison was lower in the mix. I don’t know if this was just my ear, if I honed in on what I wanted to hear most, or if the technology itself was slanted this way.

Imagine watching a movie without seeing 20% of what should be on the screen, but without knowing you’re missing anything. This might be an oversimplification, but what digital music does is compress the high and low sounds: the less music there is, the more it can store on a file. MP4s, the common music file, are different this way than FLAC files, which are larger and truer but therefore a larger storage burden. The point isn’t that digital music can’t also be great, just that the way almost everybody listens to it isn’t.

Listen to Art Blakey on record! I really can’t emphasize how different it can be. When the different factors align, it feels like the musicians are in your living room.

Where does this leave us? If money is no issue, collect away. If you really love music, and you can’t stop yourself from getting the best version of the music you love most, do that.

It’s difficult to express how important and unimportant this conversation is! A few records I have are cherished, treasured belongings, sacred relics for a part of my life so spiritually important that owning a portion of the divine feels like a heretical lapse into idolatry. At the same time, just loving music is enough, and the difference between having an album on vinyl and streaming it is isn’t worth the money.

I don’t have all my favourite albums on vinyl (Discipline 27-ii is very rare and costs $1,200), I just stream them and don’t love that music any less. There isn’t a hobby on Earth that’s immune to being misunderstood, with people laughing at what they think it’s all about. Books aren’t for reading, they’re just rarified status symbols! Sports are just braindead macho crap for bros! Stuff in this vein.

I know the stereotypes surrounding record collecting, especially jazz. It’s funny, but now that records are popular again and sold in places like Indigo, we’re developing new stereotypes, like the vinyl nube paying $40 for a 2025 reissue of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours.

There’s nothing wrong with jazz and there’s nothing wrong with Fleetwood Mac! I don’t want to be a gatekeeper: come on in, everybody! Chill, listen to some music. Just cost it out before buying a system is all.

Secular Spirituality and Music

31 Monday Mar 2025

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To some people “secular spirituality” is an oxymoron. To them, spirituality involves the divine by definition. How can anything be said to be “spiritual” if God has no part in it?

But then to secular people like myself, none of the gods posed by various religions exist. There’s no “guy in the sky,” and any spiritual urge anybody has or ever had is by definition secular, even if it’s explicitly about God or gods.

It’s hard to talk about this important subject because it feels like just describing my spiritual views insults other people’s core religious beliefs. Maybe it seems sacrilegious. To be fair, I can see how this is so. In India, “hurting religious sentiments” is a crime enshrined in the penal code, so the phrase carries more weight than just “hurting people’s feelings,” even if it means the exact same thing. What I’m saying may sound provocative or inflammatory, but I really don’t mean it to!

I don’t know how else to describe my views aside from calmly and peacefully laying forth what I think. Not everybody is calm and measured when it comes to the topic of god or religion.

The New Atheists—writers like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins—loved to attack religion and pull the rug out from under the feet of believers. I don’t. Not exactly. Part of me thinks the New Atheists were understandably combative because they got tired of the custom of sitting back and laying off beliefs they thought were pure junk, buncombe that evil charlatans use to exploit vulnerable people and gain control in and over society.   

I’m a little torn in how to write about this topic gently, bearing in mind that, in practice, religion is both a violent international horror and the source of people’s fundamental views that give them precious comfort and strength in daily life.

I’ve started writing on a defensive note in a way people speaking about their religious views would never do for atheists. Even if they were a considerate person, would a religious person ever suppose that describing their belief in God would offend the sensibilities of atheists? In a religious world like ours, atheists defer to believers, never the reverse.  

Yet I do think it’s worth stating my intentions and reasoning explicitly about my lack of belief, even if it means making an overture that would never be reciprocated. It’s a very strange, sad, and helpless feeling to look at the world and know that many of the forces separating people are fictions only existing entirely in their own heads. On a smaller more local level, it’s also upsetting to know that even in a so-called secular society, religious people are often assumed to be on a higher spiritual plane and even morally superior too.

An atheist’s lack of belief in God is taken as a negative or a void; people assume that because we don’t believe in organized religion or the gods they’re founded on that we have no spiritual beliefs of any kind or even any system of morals!

To understand how a secular person feels culturally in a world that is only technically or legally secular but in practice isn’t, just imagine an atheist claiming they’re entitled to a paid-day off work to celebrate something spiritual. It’d seem like a student not just flagrantly skipping school, but asking their teacher for money to see a movie while they play hooky.

Of course, to an atheist, all religious belief is rooted in secularism, the world without god or gods is the one we all live in. From where I’m sitting, everybody’s religious beliefs are essentially secular since there very much is no god, God, or Gods for you, me, or anyone else. It’s all just us here! Religious and secular people all live equally under this reality, except secular people aren’t in denial about it.

Spirituality and Music

There’s a phrase which some people use lightly or half-jokingly that to me really resonates lately. “Music is my religion.” I’ve always loved music, both listening and playing it. But I’ve got to thinking lately about the role of my religion, music, in other conventional religions.

Frankly, I’m not sure any religion would have survived without music. Music is the essential component that popularized religion and made people really believe in God.

If you want to convince people to believe in God, you can’t just speak to them. You need to preach, and that takes rhythm, singing. Prayers are sung. Even better, get a choir to sing harmonies in a giant room designed to have unbelievable acoustics. Get Bach to compose organ music. What they’re hearing then, that is God. Even if Bach would often write at the end of his compositions, Soli Deo Gloria–to the glory of God alone.

Religious people couldn’t just state that they didn’t like the blues; it was the devil’s music. The drum has always had a prominent role in religious ceremonies in too many places to name. “Music is my religion” may sound like something written on a graphic t-shirt the wearer doesn’t believe in too seriously, but it’s no accident that music played an enormous role in the origins of many religions. Maybe music isn’t just my religion, but yours, too.

I just finished reading a novel by William Gaddis called The Recognitions, an extended meditation on art and religion, creative originality and imitation, and [spoiler alert] at the very end, Stanley finally gets to play the music he’s been composing, but it includes the “devil’s interval,” and when he pulls out all the organ’s stops, the bass is so overwhelming that it collapses the dilapidated church he’s inside and he dies.

God speaks the world into existence. It’s sound that creates. In Ancient Greece and Rome, the bards play and the muses sing the epic mythologies. Scientists describe the universe’s origins as a “big bang.” Sound is essential at the very start of things. That’s why it’s still so fundamental today.

It’s no accident that today music is still the main driver of many rituals that make people feel a heightened sense of togetherness. Concerts, raves, and religious ceremonies all encourage elation, euphoria. When people hear music in a room together, they feel so elevated that they’re all but compelled to move their bodies in accordance with the sounds, otherwise known as “dancing.” The trembling in your soul is from notes, soundwaves displacing the otherwise still air, not a literal god. But to me it all amounts to the same thing. Music is god.

I’ve been listening intensely to Sun Ra lately and wonder if he’d hate this essay and pity me! When asked about his early influences in music, whereas most musicians might say “Jimi Hendrix” or maybe “Duke Ellington,” Sun Ra responded, “the planets, the creator, mythical gods, real ones, people, flowers. Everything in nature…musicians get their inspiration from environmental things, and all musicians are inspiration to me, no matter what style they play in.”

This is a very beautiful answer! I never know how literally to take Sun Ra. He was an extremely mysterious, profound man. But I can’t help feel like his eccentric spirituality and my seemingly cold secular one overlap considerably, even if on the surface they’re at odds. I’m sure every Sun Ra fan who feels his music also feels like they have a shared philosophy. Who knows.

In any case, as religious fundamentalism is on the rise in North America, people talk about godlessness as if secular people are missing some vital part. I can’t speak for other secular people in general, but as far as I’m concerned, everybody has an instinct and urge for something higher.

Religious people may imagine the godless spiritual world to be empty and nonsensical. Really, again, our secular spiritual world is the exact same as theirs—everything religious people believe in religiously is believed in a godless world, the only world there is and ever will be.

The romantic poet and early atheist Percy Bysshe Shelley writes very well about the sublime, the overwhelming response people feel when they behold something in nature too grand to process or even see at once, like a mountain chain, specifically Mont Blanc. There’s God in that nature, that shiver that is felt but can’t be communicated.

There’s nothing new here exactly about the attitudes I’m describing, but I wish non-believers weren’t so badly misunderstood and even despised, or at least distrusted.

It’s a hard conversation to have because it touches on a very live wire. I don’t mean to attack what people think of as their sacred beliefs! I resent that attitude some atheists have where they seem to derive joy or meaning from mocking religious belief. The beloved comedian and noted Tolstoy reader Norm Macdonald despised this attitude too, and even if I get why atheists are tired of being disrespected, that isn’t the right approach either.

The world can be a bleak and hard place, and belief helps people get by. Atheists aren’t necessarily more rational or intelligent people, even if we tell ourselves that we are. Lots of religious people are way smarter than I am! But my beliefs about spirituality and music are my own, I think they’re correct and I believe in them, and they make me happy to think about.  

Digital-Age Hockey Fandom: The Passion That Unites Us All is Other Leaf Fans

21 Friday Mar 2025

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If you know me, you know I’m not big on technology. One major, blessed exception is how social media connects Leaf fans.

The Toronto Maple Leafs famously have the most fans and haters in the NHL. Canada produces most of the NHL players and Ontario produces more than any province. Leaf passion is a naturally occurring geographical phenomenon. But the Leafs are also a much despised corporate behemoth.

The Leafs went in 2012 from having a controlling-share owned by the giant but faceless Ontario Teacher’s Pension Plan to one of Canada’s most hated corporate faces, Edward Rogers.

Rogers own a controlling share in our team, arena, and the channel that broadcasts most games. It’s vertically-integrated mediocrity I suspect they’d call “synergy.” To be sure, complaints about Rogers aren’t merely political. Sportsnet’s hockey coverage and play-by-play both suck. Whether it’s between or during periods, their product is simply very bad. To get an idea, watch Sportsnet botch the call on Nylander’s goal to seal game 6 versus Boston, then watch Joe Bowen call the same goal.

I have no proof that the Sportsnet commentators find whatever angle irritates Leaf fans most because they have an agenda, but it sure seems that way. No team is perfect and god knows the Leafs have flaws! Leaf chokes have taken years off my life! The very last people who need to hear that the Leafs have problems is Leaf fans! Trust me…we know!

But at the same time, our roster is stacked with killers who break franchise records every other game. Just this week, Matthews overtook Sundin for goals on home ice. Last night, Nylander hit 600 points and JT hit 1,100 in their careers. Knies is the first Leaf to get 25 goals and 150 hits since they started counting it 25 years ago.

Are the Leafs a perfect team? No team is and we’re certainly not either. We’re probably a B-level contender, one tier below the top dogs. But the way Sportsnet’s writers rush to minimize the team’s success and highlight our flaws, you wouldn’t know that with 13 games left in the regular season, we have the exact same record as the defending Stanley Cup champions: 42-23-3.

That’s why it’s so nice to bypass the professional haters at Sportsnet and check out what actual fans of this team are saying after games. Twitter is breaking under Musk, but it’s still OK for this. The real treat is watching Steve Dangle videos and reading the comments to find out what real fans think. People invested in the team, who watch and care and whose sense of impending doom is natural and not contrived for click-bait, like my own.

Somehow, Nick Kypreos became a big name in hockey coverage. Kyper did a TV commercial years ago flaunting his Stanley Cup ring, punching into the camera. In 1994, the year his Rangers won the Cup, Kypreos had a grand total of 0 points in 3 playoff games. Frankly, he was better at playing hockey than covering it. He’s been there a long time now and he’s considerably more polished and assured than he was years ago, but I can’t watch Sportsnet without feeling like most of their panelists are reading a script they didn’t write. Maybe there’s no top-down corporate agenda to rile up Leaf fans for engagement, and the Sportsnet feed simply sucks organically. Ultimately, it’s a distinction without a difference. It sucks.

TSN has a way better broadcast, with O-Dog being an unapologetic Leaf fan still willing to criticize the buds when necessary. I remember when Jeff O’ Neil played for the Leafs and hearing his takes is great.

It’s as if Sportsnet wants to avoid seeming pro-Leafs because Rogers, being a cheap ass company that doesn’t care about their products, only syndicates the same nationwide broadcast for every fan base, instead of regional broadcasts. “Efficiencies.”

You’d think Leaf fans would be the target demographic of the Leaf broadcast, but we’re not. The people covering Leaf games for Sportsnet are Canucks fans. At the very least, their indifference to the Leafs is palpable. Leaf legend Joe Bowen got relegated to radio for some reason? I was re-watching highlights from the Leafs’ insane 3-goal comeback with 3 minutes left in the third against Columbus in the 2020 bubble playoff the other night, and Sportsnet botched the call on the Matthews OT winner, crediting Kapanen instead, who wasn’t on the ice. Brutal.

What’s stunned Leaf fans this year is how good the Amazon broadcast has been in only their first year. Their commentators praise the Leafs! Incredibly, they think Nylander, currently second in NHL goal scoring, is good! They think Mitch Marner, currently 6th in NHL points, is also good! Leaf fans were shocked to hear people on TV compliment our players.

Their feed has legends between periods like Mark Messier doing commentary. The stories are better, production is higher grade. Sportsnet finds reasons for hating. When they do compliment the Leafs, you can feel their reluctance. Steve Dangle was briefly on Sportsnet years ago, until he wasn’t. Amazon wisely hired Dangle to do an intermission a couple weeks ago. Sportsnet had the answer in their hands and let him walk.  

To be sure, I think it’s gross paying for Rogers cable TV doesn’t get you every Leaf game, that now you also need an Amazon Prime subscription. It’s cheap and tacky and makes me think the Rogers TV execs who sold away the rights to their own team’s games were raised by pigs. But in terms of just the coverage, Amazon has been better by a mile.

Steve Dangle is an unbelievable fan who puts himself out there. Rival fans tune in after losses to see him lose his mind, and those are his most-watched videos. But he isn’t merely trading in schaudenfraude. The entire Leaf fan base is extremely lucky to have him! Dangle has made LFR videos, short for Leaf Fan Reaction, after every game since 2007! The Sundin era, when Paul Maurice was our coach! Dangle knows the entire organization inside and out, from players, staff, even the Marlies. He’s extremely passionate, clear-eyed, and informed. Real fans trust him.

Whatever you think of his commentary, and I agree with almost every word, nobody doubts he’s only saying what he really thinks. Every fan base deserves a fun super fan that functions as a node and community hub, so I’m extremely grateful for Steve Dangle. His production is sharp, funny, knowledgeable, and has quick turn-around. Hat tip to Leaf Nations’ favourite Avs fan, Producer Drew.

Frankly, Steve Dangle’s LFR leaves Sportsnet’s coverage in the dust. TSN is wonderful compared to Sportsnet, but the days of watching 30 minutes of TV to wait for Leaf highlights are long gone, thanks to Omar at @TicTacTOmar on twitter. Amazon’s broadcast might be the best of the three, but they don’t do much post-game coverage.

YouTube has other great hockey channels too. Hockey Psychology is excellent. Being a hockey fan in the digital era means you don’t need to rely on TV giants to watch good stuff.

“The Passion That Unites Us All” is a lovely slogan, but practically speaking, our passion revolves around the Leafs, but the thing actually uniting us all is social media. That Leaf fans rely on each other to stay connected is pretty funny when you consider that our hockey team, their arena, and TV rights are owned by the country’s largest telecom company.

Blowing your own mind with art: a solemn responsibility

20 Thursday Mar 2025

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Whose art recommendations do you trust and follow up on? What informs what you read, watch, listen to? Not every influence has your best interests at heart.

People love recommending TV shows you just have to watch, and algorithms serve up songs and movies to keep us hooked, whatever their quality. People only have so much time and mental energy to devote to art after work or family obligations or whatever. Still, it’s precious and shouldn’t be wasted: the hours and days that go by are our lives going by.

Tired people need to chill, but we all need to be stimulated, challenged, and excited by art. These things can be hard to reconcile.

I get why people just want to relax and not think too hard after a long work day. Watching, listening, or reading really good stuff can take a certain amount of energy, and if you don’t have it, you don’t have it. But we only get one life and there are some invaluable treasures in art you’ll never discover if you don’t actively seek them out, because you can’t trust the algorithm or even beloved friends to put them in front of you.

So assuming there’s sufficient time and mental energy, what are you trying to get out of the art you consume? To push your own boundaries and find something cool you didn’t know about? To learn? Finally understand the popular thing or social phenomenon everyone’s talking about? Read that Canon work to see if it lives up to its reputation? Something else? So long as you’re asking the question, there are no wrong answers.

This to me is such an important but also personal and private conversation. But in a certain way it can seem hollow and artificial the more public it is. Sometimes when people talk about art, the subtext has a high-schooley feel–people say they love certain art for prestige or to signal that they’re sophisticated or cool or whatever. In this way, art isn’t something personally enjoyed or even consumed, it’s merely a flag you wave so other people can you waving it.

OK, this does happen sometimes, where the trappings of art become more important than its substance. But let’s put that aside. I’ll write this now with hope, trusting that we’re all above this kind of silly thing.

The question that interests me is: what responsibility does a person have to themselves to ensure that their own inner life is cool, fun, stimulating? For a person to ignore or neglect their inner life, or not make of it what they could…it’s sad. You never know what you’re missing out on until you find it. Lots of the stuff you need for a rousing inner life is free or close to free. The barriers aren’t financial. What are the barriers?

We’re in an attention economy where companies compete for your time. Touchscreens are designed to attach people to their devices and keep scrolling, even if the “content” sucks. Every streaming platform recommends whatever art they spent the most money to produce or acquire, as if your aesthetic sensibilities and their profit motive are aligned.

Let’s be clear: there’s no connection whatsoever between artistic worth and money. None. I’ll even allow that some expensive Netflix or MCU schlock can be OK to watch. It’s fun, mindless entertaining shit that sometimes you’re just in the mood for. Fine, but that can’t be the ceiling. It’s just too narrow.

Who knows how many billions or trillions the advertising industry is worth, and this influence machine normalizes mediocre art and obviously ads to the point some people watch advertising voluntarily, as if it’s art. Commercials often try to camouflage themselves as art.

I saw the other day on social media, a one-minute Pedro Pascal commercial was called a “short film.” This is typical. The point is to make people give up their own free time voluntarily, a trap made by people who don’t care about you. If you added up all the time you’ve spent watching ads versus, say, reading novels, or consuming whatever other form of art you like…would you like the results?

We are all exposed to countless ads a day, yet nobody really likes them. If you asked anybody “what’s better, art or advertising?,” everybody would say art. While there’s no definitive way to measure this, I suspect many people spend more time consuming ads than art.

The dominant forms of technology ram commercials down your throat. TV has commercials, the internet has pop up ads. Google is beyond broken; years ago, when you typed in a word, the dictionary definition and Wikipedia used to be the first results. Now, it’ll show you a local business with that word in it. People think of Google as a pure, uncorrupted way to get reliable unbiased information, when really companies pay to influence you. This foggy force is the kind of thing people need to cut through to find art that they’ll actually like, instead of what someone is trying to sell to them.

People who preemptively and actively avoid ads by not having screens are thought to be weirdos and freaks. We hate the guy who makes it a point to say they don’t even own a TV!

I’m not here to take a highbrow shit on people for trying to get by and enjoy what spare time they have however they want. I just hope people take agency over their own inner life and treat this responsibility seriously. You only get one life! I encourage anybody to muster up the energy and the will to explore and roam freely and deeply is all.

High brow, low brow, whatever. Follow critics or people you respect, but as you get off the beaten path you’ll also come to trust your own inclinations and tastes as a compass and follow it where it takes you. Yes, practically speaking, you can talk about popular art with other people since they’re likely to consume it too. The more personal or off the beaten path something is, the less likely you’ll be able to share it.

The flip side of this is that popular art is like buying off the rack, whereas weirdo stuff that suits your tastes more closely feels more tailor made. This is about who you are in private moments, when you’re lying in bed at night, when the world is still and you’re just thinking about stuff. When your mind is wandering when it doesn’t have anywhere to be. Lest this sound too grand, frankly, I often fall asleep watching YouTube videos, mostly people building log cabins or analyzing chess games. Last night it was incredible videos about sound waves. Just find your thing.

The internet can be an infinite, invaluable resource that connects you to other people with precisely your niche interests, but before finding that, you’ll need to actively sidestep its traps and avoid what it’s trying to sell. You can’t just choose to have a luxurious mansion then have it appear, but the decision to avoid the mediocrity shoved your way and get into some cool weirdo art that enriches your life is fully in your hands.

Amid the Outburst of Patriotism, Who is Really on Team Canada?

07 Friday Mar 2025

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Trump’s attacks against Canada have united the country in a way which hasn’t been felt in years. There have been divisions, lately! I’m sure you know what I mean.

Trump’s threats to annex Canada, “joking” about making it the 51st US state, and arbitrarily charging 25% tariffs on Canadian goods imported to the US have forced many Canadians to put aside smaller differences and come together. Quite an achievement and it’s been nice to see. And it’s needed: today, it was reported that in a phone conversation with PM Trudeau last month, Trump wants to “revise” the border between our countries.

The Molson Canadian guy is back and doing the rounds. Stores proudly display Canadian flags on products. Just like Bush said right after 9/11 when urging US citizens to keep shopping, consumerism is apparently the frontlines of patriotism. Shopping is the best way people can defend their country, the most useful expression of patriotism.

Commercially speaking, I’ve seen two significant responses from sellers, both public. The LCBO pulled US bourbon off their shelves. They had already purchased the booze, to be sure, but they only pay for it after it’s been sold [EDIT: No, turns out it is in fact fully paid for already! Richard Southern from City News reported today, ]. This isn’t a hollow gesture and, for what it’s worth, the CEO of Jack Daniels is very angry, calling removing a few of their products “worse” than Trump’s threats to our national sovereignty.

The City of Toronto also banned US companies from bidding on public contracts valued at under $353,000, an odd number to settle at. Lest anyone attribute this to left-wing/communist tendencies from Olivia Chow to Limit Freedom or something weird like that, in keeping with Canada’s newly unified front, Brampton’s mayor, the former conservative party leader Patrick Brown, also launched a Made in Canada policy. Provincially speaking, Doug Ford has also banned US companies from bidding on public contracts.

Will the private sector make any similar response, or just the public? For example, has Loblaws, Metro, or Sobey’s stopped selling California wine or US beer or coolers?

Doug Ford is grandstanding about Canadian pride and resisting Trump, which people across parties find reassuring, but he already handed millions of public dollars to Staples when he decided to close down Service Ontario locations and relocate them inside the US giant. Will he undo that deal? Doubtful.

Doug Ford has pledged, twice, to end the $100-million SpaceX contract signed in 2024, which was extremely suspicious in the first place; at this price, each rural Starlink internet connection costs $15,000. The suspicions was Doug Ford wanted to curry favour with Elon Musk, the Trump “advisor” so influential many call him the “real” president, by putting millions of tax dollars into his pockets.

I wish I could rejoice in our new unity and believe in it. To be sure, this is a genuinely chaotic time and there’s no clear blueprint for what to do now. Seeing the public sector make sacrifices while private conglomerates in Canada like Loblaws put misleading “made in Canada” stickers on US food is discouraging. If private companies here are taking a hit to their bottom line to stand up for the country, it’d be welcome, but I haven’t seen it. That doesn’t mean it’s not happening! But it feels like no accident to me that the most visible response has come from the public side of things.

Doug Ford has always been a hardcore Trump supporter, like his entire family. The family business Deco Labels that his father (Doug Ford Sr.) founded has branch facilities in Chicago, Florida, and Ohio. Doug Ford owned the Chicago division until 2022, selling it to a US investment manager, Ares Management Corporation.

Cancelling Starlink was welcome, but then Ford uncancelled it, before re-cancelling it. As of March 5, 2025, Ford says it won’t be reversed, even if there ultimately are no Trump tariffs. Ford said on Tuesday, March 4, “I want to inflict as much pain as we possibly can until we get to a deal.”

Wait…who is making a deal here, exactly?! Ontario and Trump? Ford and Musk? What deal? A deal for what? How can he say the Starlink deal is cancelled permanently if a hypothetical future deal will open it back up once again?

I have watched Makar ring the puck around the boards to Marner in OT, who played it off his foot and put it into the slot perfectly for McDavid to beat the US, hundreds if not thousands of times. I’m on Team Canada, baby. I loved cheering for Bruins super rat Marchand way more than I thought I would, and I even loved cheering for Florida Panthers Sam Bennett, previously a gutless thug who injured a surging Matthew Knies in game 2 of our 2023 second-round playoff series without even getting a minor roughing penalty.

Honorary Team Canada captain Wayne Gretzky’s patriotism is under suspicion, justifiably, amid all his historical Trump ties and more recent overt gestures to support Team USA before and after the gold medal game. (Gretzky entered the ice from the US bench without wearing a Team Canada jersey or even a pin, unlike his counterpart, Miracle on Ice legend Mike Eruzione, who proudly wore a US jersey. Then, 99 gave a thumbs up only to the US players. After the game, 99 gave Team Canada players MAGA-red hats with the word “Great” on them, and, in case there was any doubt, “47” stitched on the side, Trump being the 47th president.)

I put my considerable difference aside for Sam Bennett because that guy went hard for Team Canada. I welcome how Trump’s threats to our sovereignty have at least united Canadians across the political spectrum. But unlike Gretzky, amid this outburst of patriotism, some in Canada siding with Trump will be wrapped in a Canadian flag head to toe.

Doug Ford…I still don’t trust him.

Doug Ford’s Worst Mistakes, A Summary

26 Wednesday Feb 2025

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The provincial election is tomorrow, February 27, so let’s review some reasons why Doug Ford deserves to be voted out. I don’t want to speak in hyperbole, but he has a long list of mistakes and scandals that all deserve attention. This is more of a list or summary than a detailed description, but I encourage you to read up on any of these stories if you’d like to go deeper.

The list is incomplete and in no particular order. Whichever one I’m currently thinking about seems like the worst policy, until I think of another.

1. Greenbelt Scandal: This Ford scandal is the most notorious because it was so flagrantly corrupt and illegal he actually reversed the policy, but here’s the gist. During the 2018 election, he promised not to open up any Greenbelt land to developers to build housing. Secretly, in 2023, friendly developers told his ministers which plots they were buying, so he could secretly undo environmental protections for these plots. The timing is everything: developers paid an ultra-low price for the Greenbelt property because the land wasn’t zoned for development at the time. After Ford’s reversal, the developers’ land soared in value by more than $8-billion.

The RCMP SII unit’s criminal investigation into the Doug Ford government, referred by the OPP, in relation to the Greenbelt scandal is still underway.

2. Soaring Homelessness: Homelessness was dire when Ford took office in 2018, and has only soared since. Estimates put the number of homelessness at 80,000, a 25% rise since 2022.

The growth in homelessness is caused by many different factors, several of Doug Ford caused or worsened. Ford ended rent control for new builds, failed to build even close to enough new housing, underfunded mental health…the list goes on. Ford is even using legal shenanigans to empower police to to in effect criminalize homelessness by giving cops tools to dismantle homeless encampments and jail or fine people for drug use.

3. Therme Spa at Ontario Place: I can’t think of anything obviously less important during a housing and healthcare crisis than building a private luxury spa on A1 public land, but Doug Ford is spending a shocking amount of political capital and public money on letting a private foreign company build exactly this. The mega parking lot on the waterfront alone will cost roughly half a billion dollars. It’s a giveaway.

The government’s procurement process for redeveloping Ontario Place was secret and shady. The government bulldozed 800 mature trees in the dead of night, when nobody was around to witness it, and only the next day, when it was too late to undo the damage, made the unfavourable terms of the 95-year lease public.

A public jewel, Ontario Place, will be greatly reduced. Every person in Ontario will chip in $400 to build this private luxury mega spa.

4. Destroying the Science Centre: We’ve all been to the Ontario Science Centre on school trips or birthdays or something. It’s an iconic building not just for the nostalgia or how it makes science exciting and fun for kids, but it’s also a one-of-a-kind architectural marvel that inspired copies elsewhere.

Doug Ford is shutting it down, claiming the roof is compromised and fixing it is too expensive, even though the roof has years left in its lifetime and a private citizen offered to pay for the roof repairs himself. Ford wants to build a new, much smaller Science Centre by the waterfront…suspicions the Science Centre is only moving there to share the luxury spa’s parking lot and justify its enormity feel warranted—Therme’s estimate for how many people will visit the spa daily are absurdly high, but the lease requires a shockingly high minimum of parking spots, 2,500. If you think gridlock on the Lakeshore is bad now, just wait.

Making this shadier, a Ford-friendly developer owns 60 acres of land adjacent to the original Science Centre. Ford’s pet transit project, The Ontario Line, has a dedicated subway stop for the Science Centre that no longer services the Science Centre, since it’s being demolished, but does conveniently stop right at the door of the developer’s site.

5. Healthcare’s Collapse: This could easily be the #1 scandal, except Doug Ford isn’t the only one responsible for this. Previous Liberal governments began defunding healthcare, if not leaving the door open for privatization. 

However, under his tenure, Ontario spends the least on healthcare per resident of any Canadian province, and the number of ERs that have closed in rural areas is shocking. In a typical example of Ford’s approach to governing, the government provided twice or three times as much money to agency nurses, fueling complaints that he is deliberately funneling public money to friendly private businesses. This is his MO and is far from an isolated example.

A shocking amount of people in Ontario can’t find a family doctor. Meanwhile, private healthcare companies are on the rise.

6. Ludicrous Underground Mega Highway: In what feels like satire but is real, Doug Ford is proposing to build a tunnel underneath highway 401, a subterranean superhighway under what is literally North America’s widest highway.

He has given no costs yet but speculation pegs it in the tens of billions, possibly $100-billion. Estimates say it may be ready in the 2040s, though nobody could say for sure if it’ll ever even happen. Ontario tends to be incredibly slow when it comes to building transit, and go overbudget, and the engineering challenges in this project will be way more severe. Of all Ford’s policies, to me, this feels the most outlandish.

7. Highway 413: Doug Ford’s policies are so unjustifiable and expensive, they’re almost as disqualifying as his scandals. One bedrock principle of urban planning, demonstrated in cities worldwide, is “induced demand,” the phenomenon where when you build new roads, they moderately relieve traffic for a short time, but they also encourage more cars to drive, and soon the gains are wiped out and you have the same level of traffic you initially had. In other words, building more roads never “fixes” traffic.

Squandering billions on new highways in pristine farmland is an obscene waste of money. In my view, to reduce traffic and Co2 emissions requires improved regional and local public transit; mega car-centric infrastructure projects like this only help the auto industry by locking in the usage of private cars long-term. Along the same backward lines, Ford is investing more than $40-million to eliminate public infrastructure to make cycling safe along Toronto’s major thoroughfares, even after the bike lanes were subject to years of intense studies, approval processes, and already exist.

As always, ford donors own enormous swathes of land adjacent to the proposed 413 highway, which will soar in value if the highway gets built. So many of his policies utterly fail in the given reason for building it, yet always seem to accidentally make his donors richer.

8. Housing Crisis: Despite Doug Ford’s cozy relationships with developers, he isn’t building much new housing. Affordable housing projects are at risk of falling apart before they get built. New housing starts are down since last year.

Ford’s favours greenfield developments, ie new housing on previously undeveloped land, typically on the outside of existing suburbs. This is the least affordable way to build housing because the infrastructure needs to start from square one, driving up costs. Plumbing, electrical, roads, things like that.

Ford isn’t the only obstacle to affordable housing. The government stopped building public housing in the 90s, and anytime a proposal for a new development inside existing communities arises, there’s usually pushback from local residents worried that more people will worsen traffic or “change the neighbourhood character.” In short, NIMBYism. However, Ford’s proposed solutions are all doomed to fail by design.

9. Education in Crisis: Public education in Ontario is in a dire state. It’s not exactly new, but it’s worsened under Ford.

According to the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario, Students in public school receive on average $1,500 less than they did in 2018, when Ford’s tenure began, akin to a $3.2 billion cut. The playbook is this: gut public education so your friends can sell the replacement.

Doug Ford has used the notwithstanding clause to try to force striking high school teachers into accepting unfavourable terms for the first and second time in Ontario’s history, in 2021 and 2022, respectively.

10. Booze Deal: Doug Ford has spent a shocking amount of political capital and public money to make booze more accessible to the public at a time when wine and beer were already newly available in grocery stores and could even be delivered to your door. Getting out of the Beer Store contract one year early cost the public $200-million…even if you support the policy, and many people are understandably not in love with the Beer Store’s monopoly, why the urgency and expense?

During the election, Ford pledged to remove the legal minimum the LCBO had to charge for alcohol, saying this was akin to a tax cut. It’s not. But it also won’t happen, just like Ontario never got $1-beers, something Ford campaigned on in 2018. When you consider the rise of alcohol and online gambling and sports gambling in Ontario since Ford took office, the view is extremely dystopian.

Final Thoughts:

I didn’t go into very much detail about any of the above scandals, but I’m confident that if you research them more, the thrusts will hold and they’ll only look worse. The idea he called for an ultra-short election while his maga peer in the US threatens Canada with tariffs to obtain a “strong mandate” is ludicrous; so far, advanced voting is the second lowest ever in Ontario, the election period is extremely short, and he’s been out of the country for much of it. Voter turnout was very low in the last election he won, and he’s counting on a February election to receive the same benefit. He had a majority government and was free to respond to Trump’s threats however he pleased.

There are many other excellent reasons to vote Doug Ford out and I swear, I can’t find a single reason to vote for him, even though his poll numbers are very high. Please vote in tomorrow’s election, February 27, and encourage other people to vote as well.

Forcing Music and Novels on People Is My Love Language

27 Monday Jan 2025

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I have a recurring tendency to force art I love on people who didn’t ask for it and don’t love it…yet. Imagine from my perspective, having an epiphany about something, deriving from it joy and awe, love and genuine wonder. How could you hoard it and keep it to yourself?

The only answer I can find to this question is: I couldn’t, so I don’t.

In a world of soaring prices, the art I love doesn’t cost very much. You can probably access all the music I love on the streaming platform you pay for already. Novels you can get from a library or buy cheaply second-hand. People today commonly recommend way more expensive forms of entertainment without reservations. Even though what I enjoy is more accessible, I face resistance.

Some of the novels I like are large and maybe dense. They take time to read, not money, and time isn’t free. People are burned out from their jobs or raising families or just trying to feel OK in 2025. When they imagine reading the novels I hand them, they imagine the hours it’ll take to read them. My schedule is probably lighter than theirs, so it’s easier for me to conceive of time more broadly and abstract–not as hours it takes to read, but time as in lifetime. I can’t imagine going through life without encountering this or that novel or music.

We’re both right! Nobody’s wrong here. They can’t imagine juggling parenting and their professional lives with the time it takes to listen to avant garde jazz albums by Sun Ra or read a 900-page novel. People have precious little spare time, so why wrestle with art that seems strange or doesn’t suck them in right away?

I get it! When I try to push my longer, more challenging beloveds on my people, my secular proselytizing, I often sense people looking for the politest way to refuse. Sometimes when people say no to a critically-regarded work, they jokingly say something like, “I’m too dumb for it!” No! I don’t think they really mean it, but anybody can consume any art. Creating it is a different story! But consuming? It’s a question of patience and desire, not raw intelligence. Liking highbrow art is not a marker of intelligence, it’s just a question of character and personal temperament.

The way I’d frame the question people should ask themselves is: what responsibility do you have towards yourself to ensure you go through life and find really, really cool art? Are you doing right by yourself? Pushing yourself enough? People need to take this seriously! Don’t shortchange yourself! There are all kinds of BFFs in art you’ll never meet unless you look hard enough.

The algorithm is not your true friend and you shouldn’t outsource art discovery to Big Tech. Fine, if the algorithm serves up good music or whatever, don’t reject it. Enjoy! But it’s only a tool. You owe it to yourself to sample stuff that many serious people love a lot, or dig into some weird dank shit you never imagined yourself ever liking and come out on the other side, changed. Even if you don’t love it, the journey will be a trip. Maybe you will love it later, in time. It’s growth either way. You learn what you don’t like.

“Let people like what they like” is circular because people don’t know until they’ve tried it and really wrestled with it a bit. You might dislike it at first then warm up to it after understanding it better. Hate can become like, like may become love. Dense art is seldom understood right away and yields more and more each time you encounter it.

Reading Great Books is very obviously a good thing to do in life, but it’s also very obviously something people scoff and roll their eyes at. When someone is looking for a good read, what are you gonna do, recommend Proust’s In Search of Lost Time? In a way, no. But in a way, yes!

Art today is often a diversion, something to help people chill and wind down. I don’t say this sneeringly. Art is on different levels and people need to relax. I love chilling. That’s what I’m built for. People struggle to find the mental bandwidth to concentrate.

The trappings of highbrow art are also a barrier—people’s ideas about, say, Kafka are usually very different than what his writing is like. Many Canon novels are funny, including Franz’s! But people brace themselves for “heavy” art and enter a solemn, dusty headspace before opening the first page, misaligning their mood and the works’.

Recommending art that art critics or dirty hippies love draws suspicion because people don’t think of themselves as art critics or dirty hippies, and this conscious self-perception stops them from actually encountering some art.

On a logical level, you’d think everybody would prefer their art to be as “good” as possible, that we’re all on the same page, but that’s seldom how it happens. My view is people should try things in life, they may as well be good things, and having an adventurous spirit about finding it can only be good.

Personally, I can measure my life in terms of the musical phases I’ve been in. This art really means a lot to me! I’d be in my bedroom as a teenager, alone, listening to the Grateful Dead or Django Reinhardt or Robert Johnson or Lenny Breau or Charlie Parker, astonished and ecstatic. Of course I have to tell people about this stuff! I’ve never loved music more than I do now, at 40. Literature, too.

So yes I’ll tell you about what I’m into because I don’t know how not to be like that. I don’t mean to pester, just share my life and my loves. I can’t tell you what art to love, but you owe it to yourself to go into the deep end and don’t come back until you’ve caught something serious, cool and probably unexpected. When you have, you’ll know.