11 Tuesday Sep 2012
Posted in history, New York, photography, photowalking, politics, random, Travel, urban
03 Tuesday Jul 2012
At the end of June, Via Rail announced it was cutting service on some routes while looking to increase service on others, due to customer demand.
One of the route to see a reduction is the Montreal-Halifax train The Ocean, which would see its frequency drop to thrice weekly from its current six-day-a-week operation.
Despite eyewitness reports from one of my cousins and Via employees who say the train is very much full, especially in high-season, Via claims ridership has dwindled by about half in the last 15 years, especially with faster and cost-competitive choices from Air Canada, WestJet and Porter.
I’ve always had a soft spot for The Ocean. When I lived in Montreal, it was the primary means of transportation whenever I wanted to visit another cousin in Halifax (the one who got married, as was noted a few posts ago).
Of course, it was leisure travel for me. But every time, I’d end up meeting people on the train for whom it was a necessary and comfortable means of getting to Montreal, Moncton or Halifax for medical appointments and other such activities.
I understand that for the leisure market, three-day-a-week scheduling is of practically no consequence.
But the reduced schedule would be a terrible blow for those who live along the line and need the train as a means of conveyance, not just for a pretty picture window or the seasonal dome car.
As a means of reducing the impact of the service reduction, here are two low-cost ideas for Via to consider:
• On days when the full Ocean train is not running, use a coach-only train or a few self-propelled Budd Rail Diesel Cars to provide minimal service between Acadian towns on the Northumberland shore, say between Bathurst and Moncton.
• Stagger service between The Ocean and The Chaleur (Montreal-Gaspé) in Quebec whenever possible, so the impact of The Ocean service reduction is close to nil between Montreal and Matapedia.
I do fear, however, that this round of budget cuts has essentially carved Via into two tiers: The Montreal-Toronto-Ottawa triangle versus everywhere else.
If you live in the busiest parts of Via’s network, you will get all their attention and effort. Better infrastructure; better frequencies; nicer stations; more amenities.
If you live everywhere else, however, you don’t really need the train to travel for essential business.
It’s an inaccurate picture of the country and how we want to travel. Not everyone is able to fly; not everyone want to be stuck on a motorcoach for days on end.
And it does not bode well for attempts to maintain broad, public support for the train as a means of transportation across this country.
(This is especially true right here, in Calgary, which was amputated from Via’s network way back in 1990. As I’ve stated publicly in the past, that’s a whole generation of people for whom passenger trains are a non-entity in their lives. Not cool.)
On a more basic level, the cuts speak to the financial inequality between this country’s three major modes of transportation.
Via’s competition, airlines and bus companies, are allowed to use public goods (the air and public roads) as a means of moving people, pretty much free of charge.
Via Rail, however, must pay a mint to use infrastructure (rails) owned by private firms. (It’s the perfect kind of public-private partnership, really.)
I seriously wonder if the price points for bus and air service would rise if they actually had to pay fair-market value to use the public good they need to do business. It would be cool if some economist somewhere could actually do the math and see if my suspicions are correct on this point.
Images from top: A Budd stainless steel HEP1 car at the Halifax train station (June 2012); a westbound Ocean during a stop in Moncton (November 2003); the busy concourse inside Montreal Central Station (March 2009).
02 Monday Jul 2012
Posted in broadcasting, Canada, journalism, media, politics, radio, world
Tags
broadcasting, canada, CBC, censorship, Internet, politics, radio, Radio Canada International, RCI, shortwave
As of last weekend, Radio Canada International no longer resembles an international broadcaster.
CBC slashed RCI’s budget from an austere $12-million to a paltry crippling $2-million. The result was the laying off of most of its staff and the elimination of all shortwave, satellite and Internet broadcasting services.
(Above is a view of RCI’s main shortwave transmission site in Sackville, N.B., as it was in 2003.)
It’s hard to get taxpayers too upset about the change. After all, the whole point of RCI was to provide radio services outside of Canada.
Its impact on the domestic radio market was pretty much nil, apart from the handful of hours a week it used to fill during late-night and overnight hours on Radio One and Première Chaîne. There was also a short-lived, ill-fated radio channel on Sirius for a few years.
And as the argument goes, everyone’s using the Internet, so who needs a radio service specifically for international consumption anyway? CBC offers all of its radio services as live streams on the Internet, 24 hours a day. Canada’s private TV broadcasters produce ethnic programs daily that are also viewable on the Internet.
As it was, RCI was only producing a few hours of original programming a day in English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, Russian and Ukrainian. It produced even fewer hours per week in Portuguese.
I can understand why international broadcasters stopped beaming their programs to the developed world. We can listen, read and watch damn near anything we want.
Here, censorship and other limits to viewing/listening are less a matter of political control and more a matter of content producers trying to protect their distribution rights.
But overseas, it’s another matter.
Just before I started typing this, I read an article about how Bloomberg News had its website blocked in China, after it reported on the vast wealth on its leader-in-waiting. Soon after, all searches on his name were blocked.
Although international radio broadcasts can be jammed, it would take a little more effort than blocking the Internet.
The same goes for places like Syria, where it’s been almost impossible to get news in or out of that country since people there began their revolt against the regime of President Bashir Al-Assad.
The big boys — BBC World Service and the Voice of America — are still doing actual radio broadcasts but it seems sad that those two will be the only main points of view English speakers across the world will have access to.
Canada is left with an RCI that’s a shell of its former self, producing blogs and weekly audio programs for consumption online.
No more telling Canada’s stories to the world in an accessible analog radio format.
Sadly, it’s a trend that other countries have adopted.
June 2012 also marked the end of broadcasting services for Radio Nederlands, which was seen (as RCI was) as a respected voice of a world middle-power.
This is not the sort of thing where you’ll see private interests picking up the slack, as there’s no way to accurately measure the audience and no simple way to make money.
Bringing light to the oppressed peoples of the world needs to be the function of the world’s public broadcasters.
And if done right, it shouldn’t cost very much to do it.
I really do wish RCI will make a comeback, some way and somehow.
But failing that, in an era of worldwide budget cuts and navel-gazing, I can only hope the free world’s remaining international radio voices — Britain, America, Australia, New Zealand, Germany and Japan, to name a few — continue to retain the financial and political support necessary to stay alive.
23 Wednesday May 2012
When I took the photo above, back in November, Quebec’s student demonstrations were lively, orderly and non-violent.
Not so much these days, sadly, as nightly demonstrations seem to degenerate into disorder.
As Quebec’s student protest movement against tuition hikes reaches Day 101 on May 23, every side has been accusing the other of being at fault.
Well let me congratulate you, as you’ve been all correct, all along.
Here’s how I figure it.
The Quebec government has been at fault for trying to use this dispute as a means of boosting the popularity of the provincial Liberal party. Up until the scandal-plagued Jean Charest government passed Law 78, which places severe restrictions on demonstrations, their polling numbers were inexplicably up. They perhaps overestimated the public’s appetite on limiting freedoms, though, as the latest poll numbers show things are swinging back the other way.
University administrators have a part in this: If they’d been fully transparent from the start about how they spend the millions of public dollars they receive, justifying why they absolutely need a tuition increase, it would address one of the student demonstrators’ main grievances.
The police have been at fault for overextending their authority. Nothing new here: The presence of police officers at Quebec student demos has had a instigative effect for as long as I can remember. (I got my first taste of tear gas courtesy of Sûreté du Québec riot officers in Quebec City, while covering a student demonstration way back in 2000.)
The students, too, have their share of blame. Hungry for political effect, they’ve allowed their movement to be commandeered by causes that have a tangential connection to tuition fees. In at least one newspaper interview, the folks at Occupy Montreal were proudly showing off the success of their re-invigorated movement, thanks to daily student protests.
Great, but what’s your solution? It’s too simplistic to say that you want low tuition fees because everyone preceding you paid low tuition fees. It’s too simplistic to say that the rich and the big, bad corporation aren’t paying enough taxes. It’s too simplistic to say all students are poor and need a financial break, because that’s simply not true. We need something more realistic on the table.
And their collective failure to prevent and to condemn violent acts during their demos does much to harm their legitimacy in my eyes.
The result of this public head-butting is a whole bunch of angry people on all sides, heels dug in based on their ideological beliefs, unable to make any kind of constructive move.
Caught in the middle are students who didn’t vote to strike, who actually want to go to school and get their spring semester over with; people whose businesses are directly and indirectly suffering from the disruptions; and Quebec taxpayers (and indirectly, all Canadian taxpayers), whose money is at the heart of this dispute and who are also stuck with having to pay the bill for day after day of police deployments.
That being said, I am sympathetic to those who truly have financial barriers to post-secondary education. As I wrote in my column in Tuesday’s Calgary Sun, someone’s financial or social situation should not impede their access to college or university. Scholarships and bursaries must be made available to those who deserve them, and loans made accessible to all.
But constant protests and the resulting police interventions are not helping in any way. The current situation in untenable. All sides need to concede that no one has it completely right, make some kind of gesture of goodwill and get this resolved soonest — lest this dispute drag on, disrupting the summer and fall semesters for thousands of students at Quebec’s post-secondary institutions and doing irreparable harm to everyone involved.
23 Monday Apr 2012
26 Monday Mar 2012
Tags
It seems silly that an article of clothing I’m wearing would make me more susceptible to being profiled by authorities or by random people on the street.
But that’s what’s being suggested by the accused and several commentators in the killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida.
Nonsense.
I own several hoodies. One of them was a gift from my student association at University.
They’ve kept me warm through many Canadian winters. They’ve helped make it bearable to run outside in the cold. They’ve provided comfort on long drives, flights and train rides.
Wearing a hoodie does not instantly turn me into a criminal.
To distill the cause of a horrible crime to a lone article of clothing is simply facile.
16 Friday Mar 2012
Calgary’s catholic school board voted this week to shutter St. John’s fine arts school in Hillhurst, pictured here. This fall, its students will be moved to a building in Dalhousie, farther out toward suburbia.
While I respect the idea of wanting to have kids study in schools closer to where they live, this annual shuffling of student populations unmasks an interesting problem facing our school boards and governments, not just in Calgary but continent-wide: For how long will we be able to afford to abandon existing schools in and near city cores, all the while spending millions putting up so many new school buildings in suburbia?
Of course, it’s one thing if a school is so old and decrepit it’s not worth renovating. It’s wholly another to abandon a school simply because its location is inconvenient, or because the neighbourhoods around them have fewer school-age children.
An interesting side effect of shifting educational services out of city cores, is that it becomes a hard sell to attract young families to older, central neighbourhoods because we’ve moved services for children out in the boonies.
It turns into a vicious cycle: With not enough children in inner-city neighbourhoods, we gradually shut their schools. But by losing the facilities to serve the needs of children, fewer families with kids (or kids on the way) will be tempted to move into the neighbourhood and keep them vibrant.
Nobody wins and it ends up costing everyone a bundle.
As much as the words “school bus” make some parents cringe, would it not be more logical to have our kids bused to existing facilities in older neighbourhoods, if they are still structurally suitable?
We should quit spending as much precious public resources on bricks and mortar and use the funds instead to pay for other kinds of infrastructure or enhanced programs. No point having so many new, pretty buildings if we won’t be able to pay for the teaching that’s supposed to happen inside.
28 Tuesday Jun 2011
Posted in politics
Calgary’s city budget, that’s what.
It’s really easy to come to the taxpayer and have us fork over more cash to cover the shortfall.
It’s really hard to take a long look at the corporation that is our city and figure out whether it’s doing everything properly.
As of now, we have no way of knowing because there hasn’t been a deep soul-searching at city hall about what services it must provide, versus what services are nice to have.
Trimming administration a little here, while nipping and tucking at services a little there just won’t cut it.
Calgary needs a top-to-bottom accounting of what it does and whether we really need the city involved in all the activities it currently funds.
Do we need municipal golf courses? What about municipal cemeteries?
Are there savings by having the private sector collecting trash and recycling? Ditto for snow clearing and parks maintenance.
Are user fees too low? Too high?
Can we provide the same level of service while cutting city spending?
I wish I could tell you, but no one has asked those tough questions.
We chose instead to ask what Calgarians would like to have, as I explained in my Calgary Sun column.
Our City. Our Budget. Our Future. focuses mainly on which services we find important and which services we’d like to improve.
There is a portion of the report that explains how we’d like city department budgets to look like, but the original survey was devoid of the context of an imminent tax hike and unavoidable budget deficits. You can’t really get a proper answer without providing survey participants with this information.
As former Calgary alderman Sue Higgins told the Sun’s Rick Bell a few weeks ago, we need to bring back aggressive auditing to the city.
That’s the only way we can know if the huge sums of money we’re funnelling to city hall are being used properly — and whether the city deserves the extra taxes it desires to collect from taxpayers.
02 Thursday Jun 2011
Posted in politics
In the process of electing a new speaker of the House of Commons, first-past-the-post isn’t good enough.
MPs will continue voting until someone wins with more than 50% of the vote.
Why can’t we have the same standard to elect our MPs?
10 Monday Jan 2011
Posted in Uncategorized
Tags
After this weekend’s assassination attempt on Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, which resulted in six other being shot to death and about a dozen more injured, some voices in the political wilderness appealed for a moderation in the political debate.
The suggestion was met with something less than moderation by a few commentators, who suggested that the Tucson tragedy was being manipulated to silence free speech and political opposition.
I humbly posit it’s possible to have a full and open political debate without a free-for-all.
Calling people names, making fun of their cultural or political heritage or making veiled threats are absolutely unnecessary.
However, I would also suggest it is someone’s right to be a jackass if they so choose.
The words extremist and compromise and rarely uttered in the same breath.
It would be a good bet to expect the extreme elements in all parts of the political spectrum will continue to spew their vitriol, regardless of whatever appeal to calm is extended to them.
It might be better to call on to the ordinary person’s good sense to ignore those errant voices.
Ricky Leong 