Here's Hoping the Surprise at CBC/Radio Canada Means Pleasant Surprises in Programming

The CBC/Radio-Canada got a new president and CEO yesterday, Hubert Lacroix. A Montreal corporate lawyer, he is an “unknown,” in The Globe and Mail’s opinion: certainly his appointment was a surprise since the betting money had been on Sylvain Lafrance, head of Radio-Canada’s television section. Lacroix’s media experience appears limited to serving on the boards of a couple of media companies, commenting on basketball for Radio-Canada during three Olympic games as well as appearing occasionally on a weekly radio sports show.

He professes great commitment to the public broadcaster: "I listen to it, I watch it, I use its services,” he told the Globe and Mail. “It has had relevancy in my life since I was a kid, and I really believe in it becoming a stronger independent presence in the country. It's the only place where we can protect our culture. It has a role. It has a purpose."

That is an encouraging statement. Under the Richard Rabinovitch, the last president, much programming was dumbed down in a mis-guided effort to cut costs and to appeal to wider audience. Not only was that an insult to the intelligence of Canadians, it has not proved very effective as ratings have not improved as they were expected to do.

Under Lacroix’s watch, what is needed is a recognition that the CBC/Radio Canada is a national treasure and one of the things that makes Canada different from its neighbor to the South. Will that recognition come about? Given the commitment of the Stephen Harper government to greater integration with the US, I’m not counting on it. Would that Lacroix, the surprise appointment, give us pleasant surprises when it comes to quality too!

Note: it is just possible that listeners can make a difference in CBC programming. Earlier this fall I railed against the changes which appeared to be taking place at Saturday Afternoon at the Opera—and is seems that many others did too. The format of the program has been restored more or less, and Bill Richardson—whose talents are many—now has a rather good classical music program on Sunday afternoons. Check it out.

Traffic Tragedy is Fall-Out from Urban Sprawl

So moving to the suburbs is the best thing for the kids, eh?

Eighteen year old Brandon Pardi and a 17 year old friend spent the weekend in jail. Last Wednesday, the afternoon of Halloween, the two of them—each driving separate vehicles—were involved in a collision which sent their cars ricocheting onto a nearby lawn where three year old Bianca Leduc was helping her babysitter put up Halloween decorations. The moppet was killed and the two young men have been charged with criminal negligence and dangerous driving. Pardi has a bail hearing Tuesday, and the other boy, whose name is protected because he is a minor—also has a hearing in juvenile court Tuesday.

As you might imagine, the accident has been lamented loudly. Officials on Ile Perrot, the suburban community (Population: 10,221 in 2006) west of Montreal where it occurred, are decrying the lack of police presence. Speeding is a huge problem, but there aren't enough police to crack down. The area’s population has increased 25 per cent in the last 10 years, but the number of officers patrolling hasn’t gone up, they say.

A sad situation. But there is another aspect that nobody has mentioned to my knowledge: the dependence of people in Ile Perrot on automobiles which sets the stage for traffic tragedy. You can to take a commuter train to Montreal (the same line that goes to Beaconsfield) but it does not run frequently, and there is no bus service on Ile Perrot itself. Neither young Pardi and his friend had been driving very long—Pardi had only a learner’s permit, in fact--yet they needed cars to do just about anything in their spread-out neighborhood. When we build communities like this one we should not be surprised when tragedies happen.

Saturday Photo: Last Flowers, and Tar Spot on Maples

The leaves are almost all off the trees, and today is the day to rake them up. The tall spikes of boneset and goldenrod have to be cut back too, as do the straggly stalks of the other plants that grow in my Darwinian garden whose names I have forgotten.

This year I must be more careful with my raking because the maples have tar spot disease. It apparently doesn't really hurt the trees, but they look terrible from mid-September on as big black splotches of fungus like tar spots disfigure the leaves. There is no effective cure, but the fungus overwinters in the fallen leaves, and then infests the trees during damp, cool spring weather. Supposedly getting rid of all fallen leaves will cut down on the chances of bad tar spot next year.

The photo is of the last flowers in Parc Joyce, where earlier this week I found ginkgos ready to harvest.

Fighting in Burundi: A Sort of Success Story

Fighting between factions in the last remaining rebel group in Burundi was reported last week. Several hundred people were forced to flee their village when forces of the Front national de libération attacked a breakaway group which wants to take part in implementation of a ceasefire agreement initially arrived at in 2006. Government officials reported that there were no casualties in this latest skirmish.

The situation is undoubtedly more complex than one single paragraph can convey, yet it is more than those North Americans and Europeans who follow events in the Great Lakes Region of Africa will find in conventional media. Partly that is—as IRIN, the humanitarian news and analysis service of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, reports-- because Burundi “is experiencing a period of relative calm after more than a decade of political conflict and civil war. The country held its first successful post-war democratic elections in August 2005.” Not much blood has been shed lately, that is, so not much attention has been paid by the outside world.

The IRIN country profile continues: “However, the cumulative impact of extremely low living standards and a continuous deterioration in social and economic conditions means at least half the estimated 7.5 million inhabitants live on less than US$1 a day."

Nevertheless I find this news encouraging as I plunge into the final rewrite of my novel The Violets of Usambara. It takes place in 1997 when conflict between Tutsis and Hutus had resulted in other African nations placing an embargo on Burundi in an attempt to bring the ethnic groups to peace negotiations. To some extent those pan-African efforts—which had Nelson Mandela as chief negotiator-- have worked, and therein may lie hope for the future of the continent

Living the Hundred Mile Diet: Bread Made from Locally Grown Organic Wheat Now Available in Montreal

The walls have gone up at the Jean Talon market for the winter. From May until near the end of October, producers from the Montreal region sell their fruits, vegetables, plants and flowers in outside stands at the market. But this is Quebec after all and it is supposed to be cold for five months of the year, so about now moveable partitions are put up in the central area where about 25 kiosks operate during the winter. When I was there on Tuesday, only the pumpkin and squash merchant was still outside, and he is scheduled to close this weekend.

Locally produced root vegetables, apples, other storage crops and eggs will still be available, but for the next several months it will be harder to eat locally even when shopping at a farmers’ market.

Harder, that is, for everything, except bread. Première Moisson, a local chain of excellent bakeries producing 350,000 loaves of bread a week, has recently announced that it will be using nothing but organically grown wheat from Quebec hence forward. “We're very proud to be supporting local farmers and easing the environmental burden by not using flour that travels great distances," Première Moisson founder and president Liliane Colpron told the Montreal Gazette.

A step in the right direction, and not one that is hard for the consumer to take: Première Moisson’s baguettes are excellent, and available fresh daily at many groceries, as well as at the chain’s 16 shops.

Photo: The gorgeous squashes at the Jean Talon market, with the sign for the Première Moisson bakery in the background.

Halloween: Candy, Hand-outs and Tax Policy

Elin and Lukas are going to mock me, but I have miniature chocolate bars to give out to the neighborhood kids tonight. When they were growing up, we gave out small boxes of raisins, and the rule was that the two of them could eat as much as they wanted on Halloween night, but the rest was trashed. My idea was that an occasional splurge doesn’t hurt but that weeks of eating candy was bad for teeth and bad for concentration.

But, as Emerson said, consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, and I decided to be inconsistent a couple of years ago. There will be candy for the little ones who come by, although I’ll turn off the front porch light and bring the jack o’lantern in about 7:30 p.m. when the big kids start roaming. Magic is one thing, gluttony is another.

Reading that back, I see that Lukas and Elin will laugh even harder if they read it, since in my indulgent inconsistency I still sound preachy. Fine thing to be on a pagan holiday!

I am, however, no more doctrine-driven than Stephen Harper’s Conservative government. To have huge surpluses and to put the lion’s share of that money into niggling little consumer tax cuts and paying down the debt is to ignore the real problems of Canada’s cities and Canada’s people. Better to provide more help for our aging infrastructure and for public transportation.

Note: Pumpkins at the Jean Talon market.

Moral Disorder and Margaret Atwood: Beneath the Brilliance, a Real Person

The publicity blurb for Margaret Atwood’s Moral Disorder on the US Random House website is a little coy: the short story collection is “fiction, not autobiography; it prefers emotional truths to chronological facts. Nevertheless, not since Cat’s Eye has Margaret Atwood come so close to giving us a glimpse into her own life.”

Well, there are those who say that it’s Life Before Man that one should read if one wants to see between the lines into Atwood’s life, particularly as it concerns her relationship to her partner Graeme Gibson and to Shirley Gibson, his late ex-wife. But, no matter: the stories of Moral Disorder are not only good reading, they are fuel for reflection on the ways that writers use their own lives in their fiction. There is a triangle at the heart of Moral Disorder--a man, his talented but erratic wife, and the younger woman who comes to share his bed and help raise his children—that resembles the Atwood-Gibson ménage. The resemblance is not important to judging the book though: almost all the stories are strong, satisfyingly well-imagined and would stand on their own even if you knew nothing about Atwood's own life.

As it happens, I came to them only a month or so after I read Alice Munro’s The View from Castle Rock. Munro’s short stories at their best have absolutely no equal, but in Castle Rock it seems to me she found herself too fettered by the facts of her life and family to allow herself to soar as she does so often elsewhere.

Much of Moral Disorder takes place in Munro territory—WASPish, intellectually worthy, properly modest Ontario society. Atwood, whose imagination has wandered through time and space increasingly in recent years, allows herself to focus on childhood, early womanhood and maturity as they have been lived in recent years in central Canada. This return to experiences closer to her own allows her, it seems, to write more affectingly than she has in a long time. The reader can see through cracks in Atwood’s wise-cracking, science-fiction-loving, dazzlingly brilliant persona to a real person--loving, and maybe even loveable--underneath.

Perhaps there is a lesson here for writers and critics, but I'm not sure yet what it is.

The Ginkgos of Autumn: Living Fossils, Urban Harvest

The ginkgo harvest has begun. When I was out for my walk this morning I saw one 60-ish couple of Asian origin heading home, carrying a plastic sack bulging with ginkgo nuts.

The ginkgos haven’t yet turned the gorgeous yellow they usually do in October, but, sure enough, when I crossed the park where I’ve seen people carefully looking for gingko nuts in that past, I crunched under foot the small fruit of the tree. Before I could look down to make sure what I was stepping on, the disgusting smell of the fruit rose up. Rotten garbage, vomit, durian: some places have torn out all the female ginkgos in order to avoid the smell.

The trees, however, are splendid from spring through late fall, and do very well in city pollution. Where the fruit ripens just as frost arrives—or where ginkgo lovers harvest it—the smell is not a problem. The survival of the species also is an eloquent testimony to what good can be done by humans, if they try.

The ginkgos we see today are the only representatives of a botanical order which fossil records show having about 19 members in the time of the dinosaurs. The order became extinct in North American and Europe millions of years ago, but one species survived in China and Japan. Legend has it that the Chinese emperor Shen Nung, who supposedly catalogued thousands of medicinal plants about 3,000 years ago, appreciated it and cultivated in his garden. What is certain is that it was cared for carefully in palace and monastery gardens for centuries before the German botanist Engelbert Kaempfer found it in Japan. He brought seeds back to Europe in 1691, and within 100 years it had been widely planted in botanical and royal gardens around the world.

The two ginkgos in my neighborhood park were planted around the turn of the 20th century when it was part of a private garden. Since then they’ve grown tall and beautiful—and bountiful too, if you know enough to look. Thanks are due to those who so long ago recognized the tree’s qualities and safe-guarded it.

Saturday Photo: A Sunday on the Canal

Before I left St. Catherines, Ontario, last Sunday (I’d been there for the Greenscapes conference at Brock University) Jean Duncan who runs McKenzie House, the B&B I stayed in, suggested I should check out Port Dalhousie, the historic district on the Welland Canal. It was a gorgeous morning—the temperature got into the high 20s C that afternoon (near 80 F)—and obviously the locals were enjoying this strange autumn.

Loony Classics and the Current CanLit Scene

Stephen Marche started a bit of a fire storm last week when he blasted the Giller prize list and the current CanLit scene as being stuffy and unoriginal in an article in The Toronto Star. In essence, he says that this is no country for young men (or women.) Brooklyn, where he’s been based until recently, has a much more exciting literary scene than Toronto.

George Murray posted a link to the story on his Bookninja.com website, which prompted 65 comments as of this morning, some of them quite thoughtful and some of them plain funny. My own contribution centered on the relatively generous support writers get in Canada from the Canada Council for the Arts and provincial arts councils. Herman Melville, who spent part of his life in Brooklyn, might receive a grant or two if he were writing here and now, but not if he were south of the border, I wrote.

But perhaps Marche is on to something. If he’s arguing that emerging writers sometimes see and say things differently, he may be right.

As it happens, Adam Gopnik, one of those Canadian writers who’ve got elsewhere to seek fame and fortune, (well, actually he was born in the States but grew up in Montreal) has an interesting reflection on writing and creation in the October 22 New Yorker which talks quite a bit about Melville and Moby Dick. The British publisher Orion has just started a series of abridged version of classics, among them Melville’s magnum opus. Gopnik reports that the revised novel reads like a grand adventure. Cut from it, however, are most of the bits about whaling as well as the whole chapter “The Whiteness of the Whale” in which Melville contends that white, “the natural symbol of Good,” is also, “somehow, the natural symbol of Evil.” All the cuts could be justified as moving the story along, making a tighter, more thematically unified work, Gopnik says. But the cuts remove the complexity—perhaps even the genius—from the novel. The “Whiteness” chapter, for example, I remember reading as a meditation on the United States in the decade before the start of the Civil War.

Gopnik goes on: “The real lesson of the campact editions is not that vandals shouldn’t be let loose on masterpieces but that masterpieces are inherently a little loony. They run on the engine of their own accumulated habits and weirdnesses and self-indulgent excesses. They have to, since originality is, necessarily, something still strange to us, rather than something that we already know about and approve. What makes writing matter is not a story, cleanly told, but a voice, however odd or ordinary, and a point of view, however strange or sentimental.”

A little loony, eh? I like that.

It remains to be seen, however, who among our writers—young or old—will be read 100 years from now. Will it be Heather O’Neill’s Lullabies for Little Criminals (whose heroine—no pun intended—has much in common with the hero of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn)? She’s 32 and up for the GG and the Hugh MacLennan prizes this fall. Or the many-sided, richly wrought short stories of the formerly young Alice Munro who won her first GG at 37?

It might be worth noting that Melville also was 32 when Moby Dick was published and that the book did not receive good reviews.

Rabaska Gets Go-Ahead, While California Burns

Quebec’s provincial government yesterday gave the green light to development of the Rabaska liquid natural gas port, the second such project to get official approval in six months. Rabaska will be built on the south shore of the St. Lawrence, downstream from Quebec City on prime agricultural land. Last spring the Liberal government approved the Gros Cacouna project, only a little further down river from Rabaska.

Whether Quebec needs two LNG ports is unlikely, even if much of the production is sold to the North East US. Certainly environmental groups are up in arms, and will continue their protest on Sunday with a demonstration in front of the National Assembly in Quebec City.

There is no direct link between Rabaska and the fires which have been burning in Southern California: long before talk of global warming fall was the fire season there. I remember the sky turning dark as twilight when I was a kid in San Diego as ash fell from the sky. We lived on Point Loma, at least 50 to 75 miles away from a huge fire which was scorching the country in Cleveland National Forest, but the Santa Ana winds swept the smoke to the coast, Since then the back country has been burnt many times, but people do not seem to learn. You can’t build houses in canyons and expect help when the brush catches fire. No, more than that: you can’t build cities in dry country—importing water from hundreds and hundreds of miles away—and expect to live an untroubled life. In short, you can’t mess with nature with impunity.

Quebec means “where the river narrows.” As Thomas Mulcair, former Quebec environment minister and now a federal NDP member of Parliament, points out, Rabaska is going to be built at one of the narrowest points on the St. Lawrence. Nothing, it appears, is going to stop Rabaska (and maybe Gros Cacouna,) but we can't say we haven't been warned.

Rabaska and Energy Requirements, Past and Present

The sun rose at 7:27 this morning, and I think the cereal I ate on the back porch will probably be my last breakfast outside this season: I was shivering so much I could barely hold the spoon. Despite near-record high temperatures on the weekend, the season seems to have changed definitively.

It’s about time, which brings up two points. The first is the recurrent one of climate change: this is the latest I’ve been able to breakfast while looking at my garden, and north of Montreal no killing frost has yet arrived even though it’s 18 days past the average date.

The second is the question of how we’re going to get out of this climate change mess. This morning’s Le Devoir has an interesting story about a study done by Patrick Déry, a consultant for two environmental groups in the Saguenay region. He says that past experience in Canada, Quebec, Germany and elsewhere suggests that increasing the supply of natural gas will not, in itself, bring about a greenhouse gas-fighting shift to it from the more-polluting heating oil. There may be a relative change on a short term basis, but if the supply increases the only result will be an overall increase in fuel consumption. Better to regulate what fuel is used, to provide incentives—as the Germans have done —to shift toward green energy sources, and to cut back consumption tout court.

This of course is not what the current Quebec provincial government wants to hear as it prepares to give the final green light to a liquid natural gas port at Lévis, down river from Quebec City. The Rabaska project has friends in very high places, notes Le Devoir’s Louis-Gilles Francoeur, even though to build it may require abrogating Quebec’s laws protecting agricultural lands from acquisition by foreigners: the Rabaska consortium includes Gaz de France.

The irony, of course, is that Rabaska originally was a large canoe used by First Nations around here, and later by the voyageurs when the energy expended all came from muscle power. Those guys didn't eat Cheerios for breakfast...

Fighting Sprawl: Good Urban Public Schools Mean Good Cities

It’s the season when parents start signing their children up for school next year. For the next week or two families will be attending open houses, often with much anxiety over whether the moppets will get in a "good" private school. Le Devoir last weekend had a series of stories on private schools—“One in three high school students is in the private system” read the Page One headline—and The Globe and Mail just ran a series of articles on choosing a private school which is featured on their website.

The two-tiered education system which has developed in Canada’s major cities and in many US cities in the last decades is a serious problem for social cohesiveness, for our collective economic success, and for the future of our cities. If private schools are able to skim off the most motivated and brightest kids, public schools must deal with everyone else.

Better schools is a reason often given by people choosing to live in the suburbs. While part of that may be code for “schools with people who are neither poor nor from different ethnic groups,” standardized test results frequently show better results for suburban public schools than for urban ones with private schools leading the pack. (An example can be seen in the results which current events magazine L’Actualité publishes every year: the first 35 of 485 schools in a recent year were private schools while the first public school was a “magnet” school in Montréal with stiff entrance requirements. The next public school—one from the Quebec City suburb of Lévis—was 89.)

What would happen if we could change that? If sufficient resources were given to public schools so that excellence could be rewarded while support given to those who need it? My own kids went to center city public schools, which required a lot of campaigning on the part of parents for the funds, flexibility and attention needed to produce good education. One of the reasons why houses in our corner of Montreal fetch such good prices is because the public schools continue to have good reputations. There’s indication, though, that the political climate is doing little to maintain the quality. (See Josée Boileau’s letter about the death of the public school: she’s writing, I’m sure, about the high school my son went to.)

The importance of good public schools to the future of our cities must be considered in discussion about where we are going as urbanized societies. Unfortunately, nobody seems to be talking about it.

Taxes Are What We Pay for Civilized Society Department: Collapsing Bridges and Other Woes of Getting around Urban Areas

The report on the collapse of the de la Concorde boulevard overpass in Laval north of Montreal is damning. Released last Thursday, it cites shoddy workmanship, lack of direct responsibility and probably poor maintenance for the sudden disintegration of a part of the bridge, which fell killing five persons in cars passing underneath it.

The commission was headed by a former premier of the province, Pierre-Marc Johnson, and heard hours and hours of testimony from experts and those involved. The response of the provincial government was immediate: a pledge of $3o billion over five years to rebuild and maintain the province’s highway infrastructure and the establishment of a new agency with a mandate to do just that.

All of which is probably good, because of two historical facts. First, highway infrastructure all over North America is getting old, having been built during the great construction boom of the 1960s and early 1970s. Second, this grand period of expansion was followed by budget compressions which meant that not only were funds for maintenance cut, but governments frequently slashed the departments which were supposed to make sure that maintenance work was done properly.

The conclusion is unavoidable: we don’t save money in the long run by being niggardly. Just as individuals must make sure the roof on their houses don’t leak and that surfaces are painted if they want to keep their dwellings liveable, so as societies we have to invest in maintenance. This is not waste, this is stewardship.

As it happens I was in Southern Ontario last week, in Toronto and at a conference at Brock University in St. Catherines. Driving through the area, several things struck me. Most annoying was the time it took to get around driving. The distance from Etibicoke on the western edge of Toronto where I stayed Thursday night to the center of St. Catherines is about 65 miles according to Mapquest, and should take about an hour and a quarter. On Friday afternoon, however, it took me more than three hours. Part of the snarl was due to general going-home traffic particularly around Hamilton, I suppose, but my colleagues in St. Catherines said there also had been a great deal of construction work on the Queen Elizabeth Way and the bridges over the mouth of Hamilton Harbour.

Bravo if the latter is the case: once we build roads, we must keep them safe. But once again I was struck by what a soul-killer commuting by car must be for those who do it regularly, and how urban sprawl destroys not only the landscape but also good agricultural land. The Niagara Peninsula is one of the most productive areas in the country, yet it’s clear that subdivisions are eating into it rapidly.

By the way, the reason I stayed out in Etibicoke was because I didn’t want to drive into the center of Toronto for a meeting with my publisher. Instead I took the subway (10 minutes walk from the B&B) and street car, and arrived at my appointment in less than 25 minutes for $2.75 each way. Couldn’t park for more than half an hour for that, and it probably would have taken more travel time.

There is much to think about in that comparison, it seems to me.

Saturday Photo: Home Depot's Park-and-Ride?

You’re going to have to trust me on this one: I tried every angle I could think of and this is the best I could come up with.

What you’ve have here is 7:15 a.m. on a Thursday in the parking lot at the Home Depot on the border between the Mile End and the La Petite Italie districts in Montreal. There’s a railroad line off to the left, and at one time this was a light industrial area. Home Depot came in a few years ago and built a good sized store on land which once had an old factory on it. The thing is, though, the store designers must have used plans standard on stores on the edges of urban areas because they bought too much land and put in a parking lot much bigger than necessary. Even on Saturdays when the store is crowded the parking lot is never full, since in this densely populated area, lots of people don’t have cars. They’ll walk to the hardware store and take the near-by bus or hail a cab to get home with their purchases.

There are two areas of the lot that fill up early week day mornings though—the corner nearest the railroad and the one on the opposite side which is nearest the bus lines and some light industry which lingers in the neighborhood. People who work there park in the lot for free, while others who live further out use it as a park and ride, catching the 545 bus to downtown Montreal.

Toronto: Jane Jacobs's City of Choice

I’m in Toronto at the moment, Jane Jacobs’s other city. There are several reasons: I’m going to meet with Marc Côté of Cormorant Books to talk about what needs to be done to my novel The Violets of Usambara before it’s published next spring; there are city planning folks in a suburb north of Toronto who have agreed to talk to me about how they are trying to adapt new urbanism ideas to development in their city; and I’m going to be giving a presentation at a conference at Brock Univeristy in St. Catherines called Greenscapes: Sense and Meaning.

The panel I’m on is called The Big Picture. My presentation is called “Green Cities and the Green Paradox”, and takes off where my book Green City: People, Nature and Urban Places left off. The other panelists are Ann Milovsoroff (FASLA/Horsford Gardens) who will speak on "Emerald Cities and Complexity Theory,” Nina Gerlach (Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg), on "Cinematic City Gardens;" and
Matt Feagan (Ryerson University), on "Meanings of Nature and Urban Greenspace: History, Policy and Grassroots Perspectives"

This trip should give me many chances to learn and think about cities and how we organize them, which is what I'm wrestling with for my next non-fiction book, Haussmann's Boulevards to Jane Jacobs Streets (due from Véhicule a year from now if all goes well.) It should also be fun to return to the novel, which has been set aside for some time in favour of other projects.

Jane Jacobs Would Have Loved It: "A Civic Activist Boot Camp: Working Within and Without the System."

Places I would have liked to have been: "A Civic Activist Boot Camp: Working Within and Without the System." It was held Tuesday night (October 16) at the Municipal Art Society of New York, and “different ways to open up urban planning processes and help individuals acquire the tools necessary to make their voices heard” were supposed to be discussed. The participants included Marshall Brown of Atlantic Yards Development Workshop, Alexie Torres-Fleming of the Southern Bronx Watershed River Alliance, Joshua David of Friends of the High Line, Reverend Billy and Savitri D of the Church of Stop Shopping, and moderator Richard Kahan of Urban Assembly.

The panel is just one of many activities surrounding the exhibition Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York, which opened September 26. If you’re in New York over the next few months, you must see it. If not, check out the website and/or order the catalogue, Block by Block

Canadians Really Care about the Environment, but Stephen Harper Doesn't Seem to Notice

Prime Minister Stephen Harper buried Kyoto yesterday in his Speech from the Throne, read by Governor General Michaëlle Jean at the opening of a new session of the Canadian Parliament. That was no surprise, but what was a surprise was the news from Statistics Canada’s third annual report on environmental sustainability indicators that, despite growing concern about the environment among Canadians, green house gas emissions, ozone (a component of smog) exposure, and presence of phosphorous in watercourses, aren’t getting much better.

Last month an Environmental Monitor poll said that 70 per cent of Canadians believe the country’s environmental rules are not strong enough, up from 41 per cent eleven years ago. Our governments, however, seem to be very slow in getting the message. Until they do, it appears it’s up environmental groups to translate that well-documented concern into action. One encouraging initiative: Equiterre, a Quebec-based group, has just announced teaming up nine schools and hospitals in the Montreal area with six farms in order to furnish their cafeterias and meal programs with local produce. The fruits and vegetables will only be available during the growing season—although root crops like potatoes and onions may be in stock for part of the winter—but the move is a step in the right direction.

This kind of contractual arrangement should be a win-win situation for farmers and for the institutions. Food produced locally doesn’t require big expenditures of energy for transportation, and it usually tastes better.

Pro Publica, Pasha Malla, and the Future of the Press

The New York Times Monday had a story about a group—bankrolled by two wealthy Californians and run by the former editor of the Wall Street Journal—which will set up a group of investigative journalists to provide stories to newspapers who are finding their reportorial resources reduced these days as owners cut back newsroom staffs.

The Times says Pro Publica, as the initiative is called, will “pitch each project to a newspaper or magazine (and occasionally to other media) where the group hopes the work will make the strongest impression. The plan is to do long-term projects, uncovering misdeeds in government, business and organizations.”

By concidence, shortly before I read this story, I went looking for work by Pasha Malla: I’d been impressed by an essay he’d written in a book, GreenTOpia, I was reviewing for Quill & Quire, the Canadian publishing industry magazine.

I found that he is is a contributing editor of The Morning News, a bright, well-written Internet publication that I learned to my surprise has been around since 2002. It’s a publication I’ll check regularly from now on—but written, I’m very sorry to say, by a bunch of volunteers. “We cannot pay for writing at this time.” it says on its contact information.

This is a terrible state of affairs. Reporting is being out-sourced by newspapers and magazines and some of the best writing around is being done for free.

Yet the need for many voices reporting on the world has never been more acute. We had an example here in the Outremont borough of Montreal recently, when the local weekly Le Point d’Outremont and a couple of pesky bloggers uncovered excessive (and in some cases illegal) expenses by borough officials and the borough mayor. All have resigned, but confidence in the borough council has been damaged. What happened demonstrates the importance of local journalism, the weekly’s editor Tristran Roy wrote in last week’s edition (see page 5.)

I’m sure Roy isn’t making a fortune at his job, and I know that the bloggers are doing it for reasons other than lucrative ones. How are we going to get the news reported and analyzed when big newspapers are cutting reporting staff so deeply that Pro Publica is thought necessary? How long will the attention of the citizen-commentators of the blogsphere keep active when they get nothing but glory?

And what are the Pasha Mallas of this world--young, articulate, engaged--going to do when they hit their 30s and the world comes around the corner to hit them in the face? I fear we will lose important voices.

It's about Time Department: Via Rail to Get More Money

Last week the Canadian federal govenrment announced increased funding for Via Rail, Canada’s passenger train service. The Crown corporation is supposed to get $691.9 million over the next five years, most of which will go to rebuilding Via Rail’s fleet of locomotives and rolling stock. Via Rail’s budget has been more or less frozen since 1998, but even with these troubles the train service has actually been picking up customers: last year its ridership went from 3.8 million to 4.1 million.

The heavily-traveled Windsor to Quebec City route sees most of the passenger travel, with six trains daily between Toronto and Montreal. The 504 kilometer (313 mile) trip takes between slightly more than four hours to five and a half hours. If you’re going centre-city to centre-city the fast trains take just about as much time as travel to and from the airports and flight time. As it happens, I’m going to Toronto this Thursday on the train that leaves at 6:55 a.m. from Central Station here and is scheduled to get into Union Station in downtown Toronto at 11:23 a.m. That means I can take a five minute taxi ride from home about 6:30 a.m., have several uninterrupted hours on the train to catch up on some reading I’ve got to do, and then arrive in TO with plenty of time for meetings in the afternoon. Much more civilized—and slightly cheaper—than taking the plane which would require expensive and lengthy taxi rides at either end plus the hassle of airport security. Not to mention the issue of energy conservation and reduction of green house gas emissions: intercity diesel-powered train travel takes only a third the energy that domestic airplane travel does. (See the excellent Hydro-Quebec publication Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Transportation Options.)

Of course, this is nothing like train travel in Europe where. for example, the 409 kilometer trip by TGV from Paris to Lyon, takes under two hours--hardly enough time for a good nap--with six departures a day.

But the funding promise is good news. As The Toronto Star quoted David Jeanes, president of Transport 2000, on Thursday: "VIA has been on a starvation diet. ... There is an urgent need for funding for state-of-good repair alone." He added: "We're hoping to see sufficient funds announced by the government (today) to really deal with some of these issues.”