Following up on last week’s transit clown show (Is “clown” too kind a description? Think of those scary clowns that inspire children’s nightmares—think this guy), I wanted to touch on something that’s been a preoccupation of mine for a while, something Matt Elliott at Metro touched on early this month and that Councillor Chin Lee hinted at in his speech to council. It’s this: if Metrolinx and the TTC got together to use them right, the existing GO Train lines in Toronto could be the high-speed, high-capacity mass transit solution we’re often looking for when we cry out for new subway construction.

First look at the existing GO network in Toronto:

And for reference, look at the exitsing subway network (the thin black lines) along with the planned LRT routes already scheduled for construction over the next 10 years:

It’s a bit hard to visualize, exactly, how those maps go together—and my incompetency at Photoshopping together an amalgam of the two at appropriate scale doesn’t help. But when I do start to visualize how the two work together—or could work together—an interesting network emerges. In Scarborough right now, for example, we have a couple of subway stops in the western and west-central area of Scarborough in the south end along St. Clair and Eglinton. When LRT construction is complete, we’ll have high-speed service with a reasonable number of local stops along Eglinton in the west end leading to the existing Kennedy subway; along Sheppard across the north end of the area from the far west to the east-central area; and another one stretching northeast from Kennedy along the route of the existing RT, but with more stops, and faster and more reliable. That handily serves, in my opinion as a Scarborough-raised boy, the needs of people who live nearish to those routes in both feeding them into the existing subway line and getting them around Scarborough (to the mall, parks, etc.). Many more people will be within a short bus ride of transit that can efficiently and quickly move them around Scarborough and into Toronto. This will be more true if plans ever expand—as they once did and could again—to take those RT routes further north and east to Malvern, Kingston Galloway, U of T’s Scarborough Campus, and the Zoo.

But the big complaint some people still have is not about medium-distance travel around Scarborough, or along Sheppard and Eglinton to other points in the city. The rallying purpose of those trying to revive a Scarborough subway, along Sheppard or in the existing RT corridor, is about getting downtown quickly, into the Toronto core. That’s where the existing GO network comes in.

There are already GO stops in Scarborough on the Lakeshore line at Midland and St. Clair, Bellamy and Eglinton (a few kilometres east of Kennedy station), Guildwood, and Rouge Hill. From Rouge Hill to Union is a 36-minute trip by GO Train, which is astoundingly fast. That’s how quickly you could make the trip in a car assuming there was no traffic—during rush hour, that trip in a car might take an hour and a half.

On the Stouffville line, GO already has stops at Kennedy and Eglinton (near Kennedy subway), in Agincourt (near Kennedy and Sheppard), and at Kennedy and Steeles (the Milliken stop). Again, it moves fast into the city: To use the subway from Kennedy and Eglinton to get to Union station would take about 45 minutes. The GO train makes the trip in 19 minutes. The transit trip from Kennedy and Steeles to Union on the TTC right now takes about 70 minutes, according to Google (though in my experience possibly much longer), while the GO trip is about 34 minutes.

What’s more, the GO network is already seemingly integrated with the existing and planned system: Agincourt station is very close to the planned Sheppard LRT, Kennedy GO is a short distance from the Kennedy subway (and LRT hub), etc. And more importantly, though the stations are spaced far apart (which is why the trip times are so quick), they give real coverage of Scaborough’s geography—from Rouge Hill in the far east to Milliken and Agincourt in the north and to Scarborough and Eglinton in the Southwest-ish. The vast majority of people in Scarborough live much closer to a GO Station than they do to a subway station—and this would remain true even if the multi-billion-dollar Scarborough subway expansion plans went forward.

So why, if this already exists, is it not a silver bullet for Scarborough commuters already? Well, for a few, it is. But there are several things keeping it from being more of a practical everyday-transportation option:

1. The trains run very infrequently. Right now, on weekdays, there are six trains that leave Milliken station towards Union every day. The first is at 6:36 a.m. and the last is a couple hours later, at 9:21 a.m. Then, in the evening, there are a similar number of trips returning from Union back out to Milliken, all of them between 2:18 and 7:18 p.m. So if you work odd hours, or work late one day on a big project, or if you’re trying to get to a Jays game or go out for dinner or a club rather than to work, you are right out of luck. And even if the train schedule does fit your own, the infrequent departure times mean you need to carefully plan your trip. If you miss the 3:18 p.m. train, you’re stuck hanging around Union station sniffing Cinnabons for an hour before the next train. Unlike a car or most TTC subway and streetcar routes, you need to match your schedule to the transportation method’s, rather than just finding it available when you happen to need it.

2. The TTC does not feed these stations with local bus routes—and they aren’t integrated in places the TTC and GO do intersect. Across Scarborough, and the entire city, the TTC feeds the subway system with a vast bus network that directly feeds bus stations. Not so with the GO stations. And even where there are GO Stations and subway stations close together, they aren’t really integrated in any way at all. The Kennedy GO station and Kennedy subway station are right next to each other—and yet the entire 15 years or so, on and off, that I was living in Scarborough and using Kennedy subway station, I didn’t even know the GO station was there. No tunnel. No easy connection. The same is true at Main and Danforth (where there is a subway station and GO station) and at Dundas West and Bloor. Transit hubs are completely separated between TTC and GO, with no effort to make connecting between the two easy for riders.

3. It’s expensive and there’s no fare integration at all. Let’s say you live near Kingston Road and Eglinton. You take the Eglinton East bus westbound to start your trip—that costs you $3. You have a choice. You can get off at Bellamy and get on the westbound GO train, which will get you to Union in 25 minutes. Or you can continue another 10 minutes on the bus to Kennedy, get on a westbound subway, then transfer at Yonge to a southbound subway that will get you to Union. (Total time from Bellamy and Eglinton: 50-55 minutes.) Obviously the GO trip, if the timing was right, is preferable. But staying on the TTC  is free, since you’ve already paid your three bucks, while transferring to the GO costs an additional $5. So making the transfer to save a combined return-trip total of almost an hour a day will cost you as much as an additional $50 a week. If you buy a Metropass and just stick with the TTC, your work commute will cost you $128.50 a month. If you use the Metropass and get a Presto card to take the GO Train every day, too, your total commute cost multiplies to $338.26.

So, getting to a place where the GO trains in Scarborough actually function as a high-speed connection to downtown—to complete the network we’ll have by the early 2020s—means running trains all day in both directions, frequently (ideally every 10 minutes or less), feeding them with TTC bus routes, rebuilding the station infrastructure so there are easy connections with the TTC, and integrating the fares with the TTC (ideally, so you could just use a Metropass to transfer seamlessly, as you can now between buses and subways and streetcars). You might also want to electrify the rail lines so that you don’t get the increase in diesel-fuel pollution that would come with the increase in service.

That’s what it would take. It would be expensive, and would require a lot of logistical work. As Elliott points out in his post, there are some other obstacles, including that “in many cases, the rail lines are still shared with freight companies who demand exclusive access during parts of the day.”

But really, this cannot be more expensive than trying to dig subway tunnels and building entirely new electric lines in them and buying new trains for them and then running those trains at subway-style frequency (every five minutes). The logistics of negotiating access with freight companies cannot be more complicated than the logistics of tunnelling under a developed city. Can they?

One of the big obstacles is just getting GO and the TTC to start thinking of themselves as part of the same network. The existence of Metrolinx, which now runs GO, as a regional transit coordinator should help here, and the fact that Metrolinx will own the new LRT lines that are being built (though they’ll be run by the TTC) should move us towards the kind of cooperation we need. Furthermore, with the Presto card, GO and the TTC are already moving towards fare integration with a one-payment system, and the province is already moving to full-day, two-way service along Lakeshore (every half-hour) and will do so on the airport line through Weston soon. So they’ve started—slowly, tentatively—in the right direction.

I wonder how much pressure it would take to move more aggressively this way? If, say, a bunch of Scarborough councillors and the mayor made this a big push in the next provincial election, instead of fixating on the subway-construction plan?

I’ve been focussing on Scarborough, since Scarborough transit has been such a big topic lately. But as Chin Lee points out, the existing GO network that has a stop at Dundas and Bloor (Bloor station) and one at Main and Danforth (Danforth Station) also starts to look a lot like the Downtown Relief Line we may need, too. A lot of under-explored potential lies in those rail lines.

PHOTO: STEVE RUSSELL/TORONTO STAR

There were two long days of debate at City Hall on the question of transit this week. It got complicated, and messy. So I have taken the liberty of editing the video footage of council down to a single 45-second clip that I think sums up what happened:

In an orgy of petulance, childish selfishness, cowardice, and spite, this city council jumped the shark. It’s been an entertaining up-and-down drama over the past two and a half years since Rob Ford was elected but, over the course of the meeting this week, our elected officials showed they are pretty much not worth paying attention to.

Here’s the set up: After two generations of stupid neglect of the need for transit construction to meet the needs of our growing city (and region), the provincial government’s Metrolinx transit agency finally has a 20-year plan to start catching up by building a host of new subway, LRT, heavy rail, and bus rapid-transit lines. And they have a rough price tag for all that construction that comes to about $50 billion. They are about to decide, on May 27, how they recommend the provincial government pay for it. So they asked local cities to consider some options and report on which ones they thought might work.

City council asked the city manager, Joe Pennachetti, and the planning department to consult residents about the question. So they did, over the course of months. At public meetings, and in extensive telephone polls, more than 85 per cent of respondents agreed we need new revenues dedicated to building transit, and they expressed opinions on which kinds of taxes and fees would be appropriate. The city manager prepared a report so city council could weigh in in time to influence Metrolinx’s decision.

But then, the mayor of Toronto tried to block the report at his executive committee, in a bald-faced move to shrug off any responsibility for the most important item under city council’s purview. So once again, as it did last year, city council had to decide to overrule the mayor on transit and force a debate. The now-familiar suspects—Adam Vaughan, John Parker, and especially Karen Stintz—charged in to make it happen. They said we needed to have an “adult conversation” about this important issue, and they lined up the required two thirds of council who would be needed to vote to overrule the mayor and have that conversation. That’s where we ran into problems.

It seems that some of the many members of council you need to get to a two thirds majority aren’t so good at focussing on things or having adult conversations or actually taking any account of the needs of the city beyond their own short-sighted political interests. Glenn De Baeremaeker, in particular, views every life-and-death issue for the city as an opportunity to make a greedy grab to score points with his local constituents. So, it appears, if he was going to consent to having a discussion about raising revenue, that same discussion would also have to be about scrapping years of negotiation and planning so a subway could be built in his ward. No matter that trying to do so risked the entire under-construction transit plan. No matter that doing so is actually an entirely separate topic from the urgent matter of paying for transit construction. And since there were political points to be scored, it wasn’t hard to persuade some other Scarborough councillors to join in his cynical crusade.

And guess who went along with it? Karen Stintz, reputed leader of the sane “adult conversation” forces. She threw away a year or so of supporting evidence-based transit planning and hard-earned leadership capital by joining the subway-reopening discussion in order to get the votes she needed for the funding debate. And once those hands were in the cookie jar, the grab-fest was on.

The city manager tried to plead with councillors at the start of the meeting to stay on the topic of funding, and to save any discussion of transit-line planning for a scheduled report in the fall. TTC CEO Andy Byford advised strongly against any suggestion that the master agreement on existing construction projects be reopened—opening negotiations on this stuff would delay everything, he said. And jeopardize it, we all knew. Ha!

Glenn De Baeremaeker would not be dissuaded from derailing the discussion! And then it seemed every other member of council decided if he was doing so, they were going to speed their own engines into the smouldering wreckage, too: James Pasternak wants a useless, monumentally expensive boutique subway line in his ward, too! Doug Ford still wants a subway on Sheppard! Giorgio Mammoliti wants one on Finch! And so hows about an LRT extension to the zoo, while we’re at it? And a Jane LRT? And an extension of the Bloor line to the west? And so on, everyone with their little pet project.

Which, since council was making the stupid leap into demanding tens of billions of dollars in increased spending from the province, would seem to make the revenue portion of the conversation—the reason for the debate, remember—all the more important. You might think that, but you would be wrong. The vast majority of councillors wanted nothing to do with supporting new taxes or revenue tools or whatever you want to call them. Some, like Mayor Rob Ford and his dwindling band of allies, want nothing to do with taxes of any kind and don’t care if the city goes to hell as a result—and they want nothing more than to see Kathleen Wynne, the premier sticking her neck out for Toronto by backing these tools, to be defeated by Tim Hudak. Others, like the nonsensical wind machine Anthony Peruzza, are carrying water for the provincial NDP and so blather on about corporate taxes and refuse to back any other source of revenue that might be associated with Premier Wynne—all the better to defeat her at the provincial polls, even if it means screwing the people of Toronto in the process. Still, others are just outright cowards, afraid to stand up and acknowledge that Toronto is a city worth investing in.

Councillor Chin Lee—a one-time Ford ally from Scarborough—was among the voices of reason in the tax debate. “I will put my neck on the line,” he said, “to lead. And not be a coward and hide behind the province.” He said he’d be proud to defend new taxes door-to-door in his ward because they were needed. There were others: Josh Matlow, Paul Ainslie, Janet Davis, Ana Bailão. Mary Margaret McMahon, generally one of the most sheepish of councillors—known for bringing cookies and acknowledging birthdays in the chamber—told her fellow councillors it was time to “grow a spine.”

But vertebrae were in short supply. And so motions piled up, full of innovative new ways of opposing any new taxes. Josh Colle, who just over a year ago found himself at the front of the parade trampling over the mayor on the budget, crafted a slippery non-endorsement his colleagues could slither into: a motion that explicitly rejected a bunch of the proposed revenue tools without endorsing any, so that councillors could say they had not voted in favour of any new taxes. And then others proposed even more of the proposed taxes be add to that not-endorsed list. Which eventually led to votes in which a “yes” vote meant a tax was added to a list of no-nos—so voting “yes” on any tax was to vote against it, and voting “no” was voting to… not stridently oppose it.

The voting was every bit as much a crapshow as you’d expect two hours of wrangling weasels would be. People didn’t know what was going on. But few of them had shown they really cared.

And throughout this two-day display, the style was every bit as disgraceful as the substance. Doug Ford suggested Janet Davis should be shot with a tranquilizer gun. Adam Vaughan actually put forward a prank motion to specifically tax the vinyl labels the Ford brothers manufacture at their company. There was shouting at various points. And hugging at others.

Often, looking at the mess of a council debate, we can stand back and say that at least it happens out in the open—no backroom deals, no party system, so we get to see the sausage made in public. Sometimes that’s a source of solace. But in this case, the sausage itself didn’t really get made, and the malformed, unfinished glob of entrails and mystery meat that did result was an unappetizing dish. Steve Munro sums up the mess over at his blog: the broad strokes are that every councillor’s pet transit project should be made a priority, but so should our existing projects, and we don’t support any new revenue streams, though we don’t support some more than others. And, on top of that, we want the province to send us way more money, and to put the mayor on the transit-planning board.

If you’re Tim Hudak, this is excellent news: undercutting the premier and signalling transit chaos and opposition to new taxes in Toronto—a perfect condition under which to try to force an election and then just cancel all the construction. If you’re Kathleen Wynne, you get the message that sticking your neck out for Toronto will not go unpunished, and we might expect her to learn her lesson and adjust her priorities accordingly.

If you’re a citizen of Toronto, the news is less good. The leadership vacuum at city hall has descended into an incoherent free-for-all. Karen Stintz, her reputation for potential leadership severely damaged, was reduced to trying to call this some kind of win. “Although the debate may have been messy, the outcome of yesterday’s Toronto City Council votes on Metrolinx’s revenue tools does allow the Province, through Metrolinx, to proceed with how it intends to pay for the transit our region needs.”

Rob Ford, who spent much of the debate absent from the chamber, and who has long been the chief clown in this circus production, seemed more genuine in his appreciation of the fiasco. “I couldn’t be happier,” he said. “This is one of the greatest days in Toronto’s history right now.” Perhaps he has reason to celebrate. Finally, council is following his leadership—in that it has been reduced to the level of coherence, discipline, and vision that have been his trademarks as mayor.

He’s been thinking hard about the next election for a long time. Maybe it’s time for the voters of the city to start following his lead on that.

PHOTO: DAVID RIDER/TORONTO STAR

Guest post by David Hains

If you’ve ever struggled to steal a neighbourhood street sign at 2 a.m., there could soon be an easier way to decorate your room.

After a year of study and review by city staff, a motion by Adam Vaughan to sell the city’s inventory of disused street signs to the public is now going forward to the Public Works committee. In 2007, council passed a harmonized-streets bylaw to transition to the more legible reflective blue-and-white signs, and the City was left with thousands of old street signs that were going to be sold for scrap metal, at a price of $15 for each sign.

However, 975 of the signs are still in good condition and appropriate for sale, and 90-180 will be added for sale each year as more street signs get decommissioned. There’s demand for the sale, too—the transportations-services division has already received 675 requests to purchase the signs. If the the motion is passed as is, the signs will be sold on a first come-first serve basis for $30 ($15 to cover what the City would get for scrap metal, and $15 to run the program). So if you really want your childhood street sign or are super forgetful and can’t remember the one you currently live on, now you can fill that void in your life.

If there are no hiccups at either May’s Public Works meeting or June’s council meeting, the signs are expected to be available sometime around early August through the city’s website.

Guest post by David Hains

Two of the more contentious issues at the ongoing city council meeting involve requests from private companies to change the terms of their existing agreements with the City. In this case it’s Porter Airlines and BIXI Toronto, and both argue they need a different deal that would ensure profitability for themselves and expand service for Torontonians.

Porter would like to amend the 1982 tripartite agreement that restricts jets from the island airport (so as to reach more destinations and grow their business). BIXI Toronto would like to change the terms of their financial agreement with the city, presumably in order to expand the limited service area they feel keeps it from profitability.

To an outside observer, these might seem like very similar issues. After all, the surface principles are the same in terms of honouring contracts and letting businesses succeed or fail based on the environment into which they entered, a point that politicians often speak about in lofty terms. That outside observer would be surprised, however, by the fact that different factions at City Hall have different opinions about each issue. Left-wing councillor Adam Vaughan supports BIXI but not Porter, and right-wing mayor Rob Ford supports Porter but not BIXI.

It’s tempting to say that these are mere preferences, but they speak to different worldviews for the two politicians: the left-wing Trinity-Spadina councillor is council’s resident planning nerd, and the mayor is the chamber’s consummate nuisance and private-enterprise troubleshooter. For Adam Vaughan, BIXI and Porter are planning issues. He believes cycling as a transportation mode builds and connects communities, whereas expanding the island airport does the opposite for that community. Rob Ford believes cyclists are generally an inconvenience to getting around the city and do not benefit private business, while Porter Airlines’ strength is providing great convenience in travel, often for business travellers.

So when we hear the debates about these two issues at council, let’s not think they’re based upon some kind of Lockean discussion about contract law, property rights, and the free market. Instead, it’s about people like Vaughan and Ford and the filter through which they see their city.

The recently revived talk of a Scarborough subway, I wrote this week, is a stupid political play that fetishizes a transit technology in a way that will hurt riders. That’s not even the beginning of the trouble with Karen Stintz and Glenn De Baeremaeker’s brazen populist revival, though—re-opening the signed agreement with Metrolinx at a moment when we could see a Premier Hudak thundering into town looking to bust shit up is, in my opinion, inviting disaster. I suspect both Stintz and De Baeremaeker know that. But hey! There are votes in Scarborough, and Glenn and Karen have an election to think about next year, and if they have to completely derail transit planning for the whole city for another generation or two to find an edge in the polls, so be it, I guess.

Anyhow, that’s how I see it. Glenn De Baerermaeker has a different angle on it, obviously, which he shared with constituents in a letter today. I have reproduced it below unedited to allow him to make his case:

(from left to right: Councillor Michael Thompson, Councillor Michelle Berardinetti, Councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker and Councillor Gary Crawford are lobbying other Toronto Councillors in the hopes of securing the required majority of 23 votes on Toronto Council that are needed to approve a Scarborough subway.)

Dear Neighbour:

I wanted to update you on my continuing efforts to get a Scarborough subway built in Scarborough.

Councillor Berardinetti and I have written a letter (see attached letter) to our Toronto Council colleagues urging them to support building a Scarborough subway from Kennedy station, north to the Scarborough Town Centre and then ending at Sheppard and McCowan. I believe this is the right subway, at the right location, at the right price, that would help the greatest number of Scarborough residents.
The benefits of my subway proposal include:

• requiring only an additional $0.5 billion in funding (a relatively smaller amount compared to the $3.5 billion to $4.73 billion for the Sheppard subway or the $3.5 billion for the downtown relief line).
• bringing mass transit to hundreds of thousands of Scarborough residents for the first time ever.
• eliminating the transfer at Kennedy subway system for the 32,000 people a day who transfer from the SRT to subway.
• eliminating the need to shut down the current SRT line for 5 years, thus avoiding massive inconvenience for passengers who would have to use shuttle buses.

It is my hope that my more reasonable, lower cost, more efficient proposal will win a majority of votes on Toronto Council. Councillor Berardinetti and I – and many of our Scarborough and Toronto colleagues – are working hard to convince the required majority of 23 City Councillors to vote in favour of our motion. Both Mayor Ford and TTC Chair Karen Stintz have pledged support for our motion. I hope that with their help we will indeed be successful at Toronto Council.

As you may know, my subway proposal differs from the Mayor’s Sheppard subway proposal. Mayor Ford promised a Sheppard subway that would be built at no cost to taxpayers and be delivered before the Pan Am games begin in 2015. This $3.5 – 4.73 billion proposal is extremely expensive, would have very low ridership (meaning it would lose large amounts of money every year), and does not provide quick and convenient access to downtown Toronto (the place where many of us work or travel to in order to watch sporting events, etc.). The Mayor has failed to find any private sector investors willing to take on this money-losing project and therefore the Sheppard subway proposal is, for all intents and purposes, dead.

While my project is a much more reasonable proposal than the Sheppard plan, much work needs to be done and there are individuals who are strongly opposed to our Scarborough subway proposal.
As of today I cannot guarantee that we will win the vote, but I want to assure that I and many others are working hard to ensure Scarborough gets the subway it needs and deserves.
Cheers,
Glenn

Glenn De Baeremaeker
Councillor, Ward 38
Scarborough  Centre
Tel: 416-392-0204
Fax: 416-392-7428
E-mail: councillor_debaeremaeker@toronto.ca

 

Guest post by David Hains

File this under “debt should not be a four letter word,” item #774929281. The National Post reports that Waterfront Toronto, the arms-length tripartite government agency responsible for developing the city’s waterfront, is asking for the ability to take on debt to finance its operations.

At City Hall, we’ve been conditioned to think of debt as some kind of evil sorcery out of Game of Thrones, when in reality it can be a good financing mechanism. Even Apple is planning to take on $17 billion in debt, confident that this is the best and cheapest way to raise capital over the next few years. The fact that Apple is well-run and regarded helps, as this indicates the money raised will be well-used and have a positive long-term effect. 

Similarly, Waterfront Toronto has won accolades and awards for its projects so far, but they have now spent or committed to spend their $1.5 billion of seed money (with an apparent economic impact of $3.2 billion). So to realize their full vision, they need to invest more—a realization that anyone could have foreseen from the beginning. And before the idea gets raised, no, don’t expect the private sector to graciously chip in $600 million for flood protection without selling some of Canada’s most valuable undeveloped real estate for pennies on the dollar. (Let’s call that the Doug Ford option.)

So now we have to get over it. Debt, if spent wisely, is not always bad—like that time your parents bought a house with a mortgage and it turned out to be the best investment they ever made. It’s true, developing the waterfront costs a lot of money, but this is a project that needs to be done right, and halting it because we’re afraid to do it that way isn’t the way to go. After all, let’s try and learn from our monthly transit travesties.

I don’t like the new money. I’m not talking about Bitcoin—I don’t know enough about that to form an opinion. I mean the polymer notes with the little peekaboo panel in them that the Royal Canadian Mint Bank of Canada has been gradually introducing. They started with the $100 bill a while back, then the $50, and then began making their way towards the denominations people in my income bracket actually get to handle regularly—the $20 a few months ago, and now the $10 and the $5.

At the risk of sounding like someone who just hates change and thinks that Mister we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again, I do not like the new bills. Why? Allow me to count the ways:

1. They are kind of ugly. Okay, that’s subjective, and may just be “I don’t like change” crankiness. But look at that portrait of Wilfred Laurier on the new $5 and tell me if it isn’t just a little less Spock-cool and a little more Stephen-Harper-robot-eyes than you really want it to be.

2. They melt. (UPDATE: Or, as Justin Cozens points out on Twitter, the probably do not melt unless you put them in an oven with the explicit purpose of melting them! The melting bills in dryers and car windows may well have been a hoax! The mint tested the bills to 140 degrees celsius, which is hotter than your pocket or car will ever get. So don’t bake your money.)

3. They stick to each other. I like to know by feeling the wad of bills in my pocket how much money I have. But the plastic ones stick to each other—I don’t know if it’s static or what—which makes it tricky. I don’t know how many times I’ve caught myself handing a cashier two twenties thinking it was one, only to notice at the last second. I really don’t know how many times I haven’t caught myself doing that.

4. They don’t stick to other things. Because they’re frictionless plastic, they’re all slippery against other types of surfaces. They slide around in the middle of a stack of bills in your hand, and worse, they slide out of your pocket and fly away in the breeze when you’re just trying to take your phone out. That’s a bad quality in money.

5. Because of 3. and 4., they are difficult to count. I used to work as an office controller in a bingo hall. I had to count stacks and stacks and stacks of money. I got quite good at it—you sometimes need to lick your finger or wear one of those rubber thimbles, but the paper money behaved in a way that meant you could count it quickly. The plastic money, which is always getting stuck to itself and refusing to stick to the paper bills around it, makes counting even a small little pile of bills difficult. I find myself re-counting multiple times to be sure I haven’t missed something.

6.  They are taking hockey off the bills. As pointed out on Twitter by @velocipietonne, they are taking the hockey scene off the back of the $5 bill. Boo.

7. It feels too fancy—somehow too valuable to spend. As Jaime says, somehow the fancy plasticness of it, with its shiny foil elements, holograms, transparencies and photorealism makes it seem like an object you’re supposed to keep instead of spending. I suppose that could be an asset for some.

8. It don’t fold easy. And then it stays folded in odd places if you crumple it. Another reason it’s terrible for stacking with other bills to keep in your pocket.

This is a list of my grievances. I demand the mint cease this experiment in making the currency appear more and more like something you’d find in a children’s board game, and go back to the money we used when Glenn Miller played those songs that made the hit parade. Wait. I don’t remember that money. If we could go back to the paper money we were using a year ago or so, that would be fine too.

In protest of the mint’s folly, I will be collecting as much of this new money as I can and spending it. Unless it melts first.

PHOTO: BANK OF CANADA via CBC

Toronto City Councillor Doug Ford—the mayor’s brother, enabler, best friend and worst enemy—took to the pages of the National Post and (!) the Globe and Mail today (UPDATE: I also hear reports the same thing is in the Sun, too! Hat trick!) to give everyone a message about transit funding. And that message is:

ARGLE BARGLE ARGLE BARGLE ARGLE BARGLE ARGLE BARGLE ARGLE BARGLE ARGLE BARGLE ARGLE BARGLE ARGLE BARGLE ARGLE BARGLE ARGLE BARGLE ARGLE BARGLE ARGLE BARGLE ARGLE BARGLE ARGLE BARGLE ARGLE BARGLE ARGLE BARGLE ARGLE BARGLE ARGLE BARGLE ARGLE BARGLE ARGLE BARGLE…

Wait. There’s more:

This is not about visions of city building, or transit expansion. Folks, don’t be misled, this is about finding new ways to raise your taxes. They want a sales tax, a vehicle tax, a gas tax, a parking tax, a payroll tax, toll lanes — the list goes on and on, and on.Tax, tax, tax, spend, spend, spend.

Hmmm. Interesting argument. But as a city councillor, what is his plan? Beyond the shouty taxaphobia, what’s the argument?

I call the Premier to take her plan to the people, and let them decide if they trust this government with another $50-billion of their hard-earned money.

Oh right. This is about a provincial election. I see. He was acting in his capacity as the Conservative candidate for Etobicoke North. I should have known—he told us himself this wasn’t about visions of city building or transit expansion. It’s about election propaganda. Good job those major newspapers picked it up.

Guest post by David Hains

So Rob Ford made a speech yesterday, which, as Edward Keenan writes, was not exactly his finest moment.

But there were some core ideas in the mayor’s statement that are worth unpacking, if only because they get to the heart of his worldview and are repeated so often they are truisms to many.

Take this portion (transcript from Torontoist —I wasn’t in attendance):

You look, every single day almost, there’s something going on. $275-million scandal at the gas plant; millions—and we still don’t know the number—on Ornge helicopters; the eHealth billions of dollars; in our own backyard here just a few days ago thousands in hand sanitizer. And you’re going to turn around to the working person in the city and say, “You know what, we don’t have enough money to spend on transit. We’re going to take the easy way out and implement new taxes.”

Talk about legacies—that’s a complete disaster. Let’s get every level of government in line and efficient and running like a well-oiled machine, and then you can go to the taxpayers and say, “You know what, we’ve tightened up every single screw on this car. There’s no more tightening.” Folks, we’re far from that. We’re far from that.

On Twitter I referred to this argument as “RoFo’s paradox.” In Zeno’s paradox, named after the ancient Greek philosopher, you continually cut a distance in half before you can begin a journey. But since there’s an infinite number of steps—even the smallest distance can still be halved—the journey can never begin. Thus, the given framework provides an argument that motion is an illusion, and progress cannot be made. This, too, is the Fordian argument about waste in government. (That Zeno’s paradox contains questionable assumptions about the nature of space and time is a different subject, and one which we have not yet broached at council.)

The thing is, inefficiency is a feature of everything we do. It’s true of anything from decisions in football games to how SUVs are engineered. I wouldn’t refuse to ride in a car that is less than perfectly efficient, because I still have to get where I’m going, and you do the best with what you have. Sure, you try to make better choices, but standing still isn’t the way to get things done.

These principles are true of complex bureaucracies, too. It is true: there is inefficiency at all levels of government, and the mayor cites strong examples of failed projects (ORNGE, eHealth) to prove his point. But this type of inefficiency is not unique to the city or province, but the by-product of any organization with tens of thousands of employees.

The mayor often speaks about the vaunted expertise and efficiency of the private sector and argues this is a model for the city to follow. Well, I’ve worked for the private sector for a top bank, and I can tell you that the same problems and failures exist. There are failures to communicate between sprawling departments, and when I left the company they had just shut down a $100 million systems-improvement project that wasn’t delivering results. Failure and inefficiency are parts of any complex system. The thing is, the CEO and managing directors of the company I worked for didn’t panic. They studied their mistakes, assessed how they could improve and moved on with the business of banking. You still keep investing and taking calculated risks, because those are the necessary mechanisms of progress, and you don’t let small obstacles get in the way of bigger goals.

If your starting point in a conversation—whether it be banking or investing in transit—is that we’re not going to start making progress until every existing inefficiency is taken care of, then you’re just saying that you don’t have an interest in seeing progress made. Good management is about doing both at the same time, and the mayor would do well to take his cues on that from the private sector. Paradoxically, for all the business expertise the mayor says he brings to the table, I’m guessing he’s not willing to take that step.

So here’s what just happened at the meeting of Mayor Rob Ford’s Executive Committee, moments ago as I write this: a slim majority (6-4) voted to defer voting on recommending new transit funding tools until later. How much later? A day after Metrolinx’s meeting where they’ll decide which revenue tools to recommend. The recommendations that will go to the province days later in order to decide how the GTA will pay for transit for a generation.

Rob Ford, Frank Di Giorgio, Norm Kelly, David Shiner, Cesar Palacio, and Gary Crawford. Those are the six who voted to remain silent on what might be the biggest quality of life decision the province will make on our behalf this year, or in many, many years. What a sad sack bunch that is. Michael Thompson, among others, was absent.

They didn’t vote to recommend some other set of tools, of course (say, a bake-sales and talent shows plan—which could work because Gary Crawford has spent more time playing music in front of political crowds in the past year than he has saying anything of substance). They didn’t vote to reject the idea of funding transit altogether. At least if they had done one of those things, they’d have been making a decision—putting their ideas out there in front of council and the voters so they can be judged for them. I would have criticized them if they had done that, because they’d still have been wrong, but I could at least muster some bit of respect for their integrity. If they decided to stand for something.

Instead, they decided to stand for nothing. They just voted to do nothing until it will be too late. The mayor, getting handed the ball with a minute left on the clock, down by two points, decided to just kneel down with the ball. Pathetic.

Mayor Ford gave a speech, of course: he said the whole process was “ass-backwards.” He said a provincial election might be coming right up, and who knows what will happen then? He said hell would freeze over before he supported these tools. And then he took a knee. Because why make a tough decision when you don’t have to? Why try to steer the provincial discussion when you can wait to see what they do and then complain about it, and blame them for any fallout? Why lead?

It is pathetic. This is our mayor. And this is his team of pet jellyfish, all five who remain on his own executive.

Council can fix it, of course, and most likely will. They could, at the next council meeting, revive the item for debate with 30 council votes—votes those who want to have this talk about transit funding probably have. Or they could, with the signatures of just 23 councillors, call a special meeting on this. Which is what Adam Vaughan is talking about doing now.

And so for the second year in a row, the mayor will see council respond to his lack of leadership by calling a special meeting over his objections, at which they’ll do what needs doing for the city on public transit. They can do it, and probably will. But they shouldn’t have to.

Of course, the mayor wants them to do that. His Chief of Staff, Mark Towhey, was apparently telling reporters today how exciting he finds the prospect of the mayor’s opponents calling a special meeting to implement taxes. You can see why: in next year’s election campaign, Rob Ford can blame those guys for raising taxes!

Now, if you actually care about the city, about governing, about doing what you can to make the city a better place, then the prospect of your opponents repeatedly humiliating you is not exciting. What’s exciting if you care about those things is implementing your plans. But if you have essentially given up on doing the job the people of Toronto elected you to do, the job they pay you to do, then it’s all a fun game of seeing what might turn into a wedge issue in the next election campaign. Rob Ford, mayor of Toronto, thinks he gets to run again on the anti-government, these-guys-running-this-place-are-incompetent load of hooey he ran on before. Neat trick. Who knows, it could work. It worked for him last time. It’s the only political point he’s ever known how to make, and the only one he’s ever had to make.

But it’s not leadership. It is beneath his office, beneath this city, beneath the trust of the voters and taxpayers who elected him. Instead of doing his job, he’s playing a cynical, cowardly, political game. Let someone else make the difficult decisions so he can complain about them.

Does he wonder why almost all of the strong coalition of supporters he had on council to begin with has abandoned him? Does he wonder why even on his executive committee—his cabinet—forty per cent vote against him on a key issue? Maybe he doesn’t. He won the mayor’s office in the first place by being an ineffectual ranting loner who lost every vote 44-1. He’s on schedule to work himself back into that position in time to run that way again. That may be where Rob Ford is comfortable. That may what he does best. But it is not leadership.

PHOTO: STEVE RUSSELL/TORONTO STAR