EVERYTHING IS TRANSITORY

The Ontario government killed Hamilton’s light rail transit project this week, and it’s worth unpacking a little because, well, public transit is really important if we want to have a survivable future.

The Tories’ central claim as to why they decided to kill the LRT project is at least partially bullshit, in that they pretended that the total construction cost of the project would in fact be $5.5 billion rather than the $1 billion that was allocated for the project. This was, of course, basically untrue. At least $2 billion of that $5.5 billion was in fact deferred maintenance and operations costs, which is like saying “that car you want to buy isn’t actually only ten thousand dollars, it actually costs you a hundred thousand dollars because you’ll own it for ten years and it’ll cost you nine thousand dollars every year for gas and tune-ups and insurance.” Except it doesn’t cost you the hundred grand up front, which is what the Tories were essentially claiming, and it doesn’t account for the revenue the car generates by letting you drive to work. (Conservatives often also use this sort of accounting when they argue for pension reduction or cancellation, by the way, or complain about “total debt obligations” with numbers that appear hugely inflated, by treating all future payment obligations like they’re owed right away.)

Still, the government’s estimate of the LRT project’s immediate capital costs - IE, the costs of actually building it in the first place - has ballooned from its original cost of $1 billion to almost $3.5 billion. Let’s assume the numbers are genuine for now. They may be exaggerated; this isn’t a partisan thing, it’s just that governments, regardless of who’s in charge, tend to overemphasize costs of things they don’t like, and in the case of Doug Ford, he doesn’t like light rail transit. Still, there’s no proof yet that the accounting is phony, so let’s give them the benefit of the doubt until it is inevitably revealed that they didn’t deserve it.

So how do projects like this balloon in cost? In a North American context, generally it ends up ballooning in cost for two reasons: contracting issues and public convenience. By “contracting issues,” I mean that in the USA and Canada, building rail transit ends up employing about four times as many people to actually build an equivalent amount of rail transit as it does in Europe or Asia. On top of that, contract bidding here is less well regulated in other jurisdictions so you end up having multiple major contractors doing essentially the same job (which is a recipe for confusion and fuckups in construction). Finally there’s just poor management of contractors contributing to all of this and making everything worse. And by “public convenience,” I mean that in North America local governments generally try to appease local residents as much as possible during the construction process. (You may not think this is true and will cite That One Project Where The Street Was Closed Down For Ever And Ever. It is, however, absolutely true, particularly with respect to land appropriation but in many other respects as well.)

The end result of this is… well, consider the recent Spadina subway extension in Toronto, which was completed in 2017, ended up being well over two years late and $600-800 million over budget, and ended up with the TTC, the contractors and the subcontractors all suing each other for enormous amounts of money. And that was a relative success (albeit one for a subway extension that was mostly a poor idea in the first place which now sees below-average ridership as compared to the rest of the system, but hey). So transit costs definitely can balloon upwards.

All of that said, let’s go back when I temporarily gave the Conservative the benefit of the doubt on their numbers. The Spadina extension went about 25-30% over budget, which is… not great at all, but that’s within the general parameters of cost overruns on major capital projects. It’s not disastrously bad, is my point; it’s within normal, albeit the shitty end of normal. (The time overrun was the outrageous bit, honestly. If you’re going over budget, it should be to make targets.) And the Hamilton LRT is using technology that is boringly proven, and is mostly just building one surface rail line along a major roadway, and is relatively cheap because it’s light rail rather than subways (which are so much more expensive).

So my point here is: how on earth can the Conservatives justify claiming that this LRT line, which gets built pretty much anywhere else in North America for about $125m CAD per kilometer at absolute most, is instead going to cost about double that?

HOW YOU SAY, LE SNAFU

The Sahel countries of Africa are some of the world’s poorest - Mali, Chad, Mauritania, Burkina Faso and Niger. (Helpful tip: remember that Niger is pronounced “Nee-ZHER.” It sort of rhymes with “Pierre.”) Just by having me list them you’re probably already thinking “oh, yeah, they’re poor” because you’ve probably realized you have not heard much about these countries outside of a charitable solicitation. (If this isn’t the case, good for you! You’re ever so worldly.) Anyway, this weekend French soldiers killed a number of Islamist militants in Mali, and the French have soldiers in all of these countries, so let’s talk about that for a bit.

The “Sahel countries” thing is a bit of a misnomer because the Sahel region basically crosses the entire width of north Africa like a tube-top; it’s the transition geographic zone between the Sahara Desert part and the Sudanian Savanna part - the stretch of land where will-probably-kill-you-desert turns into pleasant grasslands. You can live in the Sahel and indeed whole civilizations have done; it’s not the easiest place in the world to live but there’s worse. But when we talk about the “Sahel countries,” we’re talking about those five countries mentioned because they’re the ones whose lands are mostly Sahel. (Sudan is also mostly Sahel, but Sudan is bigger and richer than the others and it doesn’t want to sit at the geographical losers’ table so it doesn’t.) They’re all poor, four out of five of them are landlocked, and they all have either one or two primary exports that make up the vast majority of their economy. (Chad has oil, Niger uranium, Mauritania iron, and for both Mali and Burkina Faso it’s a combination of gold and cotton.)

The reason for the French soldiers is because the Sahel countries were all colonized by France in the great European rush to claim bits of Africa for themselves, but more importantly because the countries’ governments obliquely asked for help; the United Nations have launched a major peacekeeping mission in the region focused on Mali, and France runs an ongoing military operation headquartered in Chad which has outposts in all five countries. The reason is - and this probably will not surprise you - terrorist and militia attacks, most of which are conducted by radical Islamic groups. Boko Haram, the ones who are famous for kidnapping all those female students from school a few years ago, are somewhat active in the region although they’re much more focused in Nigeria and Cameroon, but in the Sahel it’s mostly a loosely affiliated web of Salafist jackholes - primarily the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Nusrat al-Islam and the ISIS-affiliated Islamic State in the Greater Sahara. (And remember, ISIS and Al-Qaeda hate each other quite a bit, so there’s no real alliance here.) Being radical Islamic terrorists, they’re doing mostly what you’d expect - hit-and-fade attacks, suicide bombings, the usual catalog of Things Islamic Terrorists Do To Other Muslims. Because - and it is important to remember this - “other Muslims” are always the primary target of radical Islamic terrorists.

The French troops and UN peacekeepers alike are doing the same thing, more or less: supporting the official militaries of the countries in question, partially out of a sense of responsibility and partially because they don’t want the terrorists becoming successful enough that they can start exporting terrorists to, say, France. France has been perhaps understandably touchy about this since the 2015 Paris terror attacks and the 2016 Nice truck attack. The French have now been in the Sahel for six years and counting, so this isn’t an operation that’s going to end any time soon. Boko Haram, for example, have been around for almost eighteen years and only now, after years of war with the Nigerian army, does it look like they’re in a position where they might soon be finished, because that’s the timeframe you have to talk about when you’re talking about fighting insurgencies.

SOMETHING SOMETHING JOKE ABOUT PEACHES HERE

So Donald Trump has officially been impeached, which is in fact a big deal even if nothing else happens, which probably will be the case as Senate Republicans have been quite blatant about their willingness to not even pretend to be impartial arbiters, and House Democrats’ response has been to not forward the impeachment articles to the Senate until there is a “satisfactory plan” in place for the trial, and since there most likely will not be one that is more or less that.

There really isn’t too much to talk about here and I am mentioning it for the sake of mentioning it, because Trump is obviously, wildly guilty in a way you honestly do not see with politicians often. Usually political crime is about exploiting loopholes or fudging around in gray areas, but this shit is just straight-up a cover of Shaggy’s “It Wasn’t Me” with less rhythm.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched this week:

Marriage Story (2019, Noah Baumbach, Netflix) - 4/5

Klaus (2019, Sergio Pablos, Netflix) - 4/5

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019, J.J. Abrams, theatre) - 2.5/5

No newsletter next week, because it is Christmas weekend and I will be at my in-laws’ farm. But I will be back in the new year, and hopefully the world will not explode in the interim.

See you in fourteen.