WHEN I THINK “NOT GOING TO FUCK UP PUBLIC TRANSIT” I THINK “THE PROVINCE OF ONTARIO”

One of the reasons I am quite confident that Doug Ford is a bloody idiot - other than, you know, All The Stuff He Says And Does - is because he has a lengthy track record of fucking up and then, when he gets another opportunity to take action on the same issue where previously he fucked up, he fucks up again. His government’s actions on the transit file this week are a prime example, and I say this knowing that I’m not even going to talk about the proposed upload of the TTC to provincial control, because I already talked about that a few weeks ago. (It is still bad!)

If you do not follow transit news obsessively like I do, a brief primer: in 2010, Rob and Doug Ford spearheaded an attempt at City Council to get an extensive subway plan going to replace the (fully funded, more cost-effective in the medium-to-long term, would have been built by now) Transit City plan which featured multiple LRT - light rail transit - lines. (If you don’t understand the difference between subways and LRT, basically it comes down to track gauge and carrying capacity. Subways are bigger and faster, which is great, but they’re also much more expensive to buy and operate, which is less great.) And, because it’s the Fords, they promised that they would use their Bidness Know-How to get private enterprise involved in building subway transit, talking about P3s (“public-private partnerships”) and the like as if they actually know what those are.

Anyway, it was a massive disaster, because private enterprise has exactly zero interest in public transit. Public transit is public because it is, almost by definition, not profitable. You put money into it, and you get transit. It’s simply not possible to run private mass transit on a profitable scale at anything beyond either the simplest levels or, interestingly, the most intense levels (when you have so many people that it can’t help but pay for itself). Sometimes, someone who thinks they know a lot about transit will bust in at this point and say “actually, [Insert Asian City Here] has a private transit system” but if they do that, what you can do is say “just about all of them are actually public transit systems operated by publicly owned corporations working at arm’s length from the government under strict regulations and with government funding” and then that person will feel bad, as they clearly deserve to do. (Also, Asian cities have population densities nobody in Ontario would ever accept as livable, which are, again, one of the keys to making transit systems profitable. Tokyo, Singapore and Hong Kong are all more than half again as densely populated as Toronto is.)

Anyway, it didn’t work and eventually the Fords settled for a three-stop subway extension in Scarborough which was a massive waste of money and is now only one stop because it turned out there wasn’t enough money set aside for three, because it turns out it’s really kind of expensive to drill subway tunnels underneath occupied land [surprise face emoji]. And now, seven years later, Doug Ford is doing it all over again, as this week Transportation Minister Jeff Yurek, a man who looks like an owl but not the wise kind, announced that the Ontario government is trying to involve private real estate developers in subway construction so that they will pay for the stops.

This is one of those ideas that private industry enthusiasts always get horny for, because it works in Hong Kong. But it works in Hong Kong because in Hong Kong A) nobody gets upset if they build a 60-storey tower on top of the subway station, or if they do get mad they aren’t loud about it because they don’t want to get arrested, and B) because anywhere they build a new subway station in Hong Kong has over 10,000 people per square kilometer living there. This is, to put it politely, unlikely to work anywhere in Toronto - let alone in Scarborough, a relatively low-density sprawling part of the city where people get angry with you if you stand on top of your house because you’re blocking their view.

THE SHUTDOWNIEST

It’s still going (now the longest government shutdown in American history) and this week is where the news stories started to trickle in of people really starting to feel the hurt, because this was the first week where government employees didn’t get their paycheques - but a million government workers not getting paid is, of course, not the entire story. There’s all the accounts of TSA agents, Coast Guard officers and other security/border officials calling in sick or working at negligent levels because they’re being forced to work without pay (because they’re “essential”). There’s the farmers who were relying on their quarterly farm loans to start buying seed for the 2019 planting and feed for the animals who eat all the time, including in 2019. There’s all the economic knock-on effects of what happens when a million people are effectively out of work, and all the money they were putting into the economy goes away.

And it’s not ending any time soon. (Were I a betting man, I would choose in between February 6th and February 13th in the betting pool. No inside information for this pick: I just don’t think this resolves in less than three weeks. I think the second missed paycheque for government workers, two weeks from now, will start prompting walk-offs of essential workers, and that’s when one side or the other - probably the Republicans, not Trump but the Congressional Republicans - finally cave. But it takes a week and change to get to that point even after the second paycheque.)

SPEAKING OF TRUMP, HOW ABOUT SOME TREASON

That’s not me saying it, it’s Carl Bernstein (as in “Woodward and Bernstein,” you know, the guys who uncovered Watergate). More accurately, he says he’s been told by people who have read the draft of Robert Mueller’s draft investigation report that the report says that Trump “helped Putin destabilize the United States.” Which, if true - and regardless of the fact that this highly respected journalist who is extremely unlikely to be lying, please remember this is still a guy saying “a guy I trust told me a thing says this” so that’s two steps removed at minimum - would be pretty dramatic stuff. And because it’s Bernstein, the best guess is that A) he’s not lying B) the guy who told him this is someone Bernstein trusts not to lie enough to repeat it on national television, because Bernstein doesn’t want to look like a fucking idiot later on if it turns out to not be dramatic stuff.

What does “helped destabilize the USA” mean, though? In this context, it probably means more than simply accepting information from the Russians, because although that’s certainly a violation of electoral law it’s not really “destabilizing” anything, and Robert Mueller is both a no-drama king and extremely careful and wouldn’t let his work be interpreted otherwise. If I were going to offer an observer’s guess, it would probably be “active knowledge of and/or cooperation in the spreading of disinformation” - IE, assisting/cooperating with Russia in the fake news spam epidemic that plagued the 2016 federal election. Which, yes, would likely be considered treason. Actual up-against-the-wall-with-a-final-cigarette treason. But that is speculation, not factual information, so let’s get away from this topic now as I have already overindulged.

THIS WEEK IN GREECE: [PUN INVOLVING FRIED FOOD MAYBE?]

So the Greek government is going to have a confidence vote for the absolutely most stupid fucking reason I can possibly imagine, except they’re not, except they are. Bear with me here. This one is a journey.

Okay, so in 2015 the Greek political party Syriza, led by Alexis Tsipras, won the national election. They didn’t win a majority of the seats in the Hellenic Parliament - they were short by two seats. So, with a stunning lack of good sense, they decided not to form a coalition government with the centrist To Potami party or the Marxist-Leninist KKE (both of whom could have provided Syriza with the seats for a majority coalition government), but instead with ANEL, the right-wing conservative nationalist party that got less votes and seats than either the centrists or the Commies.

ANEL is led by a fellow named Panos Kammenos, who - and you will be shocked, simply shocked to hear this - is a stupid asshole who whines about foreigners and minorities all the time, who’s got a reputation for being cheerfully willing to spend government money on himself in the lavish-junkets sort of way, and who has been connected to multiple defense spending and arms contract scandals because of course he has. Most recently, a few months ago the EU started investigating his department for misuse of EU funds allocated for food for refugees.

Anyway, Kammenos is wildly unpopular these days because he’s a stupid dipshit, which really speaks rather well of the Greeks even if many of them were silly enough to let him anywhere near a position of power. So what is he doing? Prompting a confidence vote in Tsipras (by pulling his party’s support from government) over the Greek government’s agreement with the country formerly known as Macedonia and now called North Macedonia. See, a lot of Greeks really take it personally that Macedonia wants to be called Macedonia, because Greeks feel Macedonia is their thing, their own personal thing. As a result, Greece has been blocking Macedonia from joining the EU and NATO. Macedonia, after a few decades of essentially putting out the diplomatic equivalent of “are you kidding me with this” to anybody who would listen and ultimately coming up short, negotiated in good faith with the Greeks and ultimately agreed to rename themselves “North Macedonia,” which is about as fair a compromise as you can manage when one side (cough cough it’s the Greeks in this case cough cough) is being bloody unreasonable about what is only a goddamn name anyway.

Anyway, the issue was settled and everybody was happy until The Greek Doug Ford decided to take his political party and go home in an attempt to sabotage the agreement and Tsipras’ government (and drum up political support for his flagging failure political party among the sort of Greek nationalists who are still pissed that non-Greeks are allowed to eat souvlaki). Like I said: this is fucking stupid. Except it’s politically relevant, because now Tsipras has to negotiate with other parties in order to avoid another election, and who’s waiting in the wings but the real nationalist asshole party in Greece, Golden Dawn - who we, the reasonable people of the world, do not want in charge of any fucking thing ever, full stop.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched/rewatched this week:

Bird Box (2018, Susanne Bier, Netflix) - 2.5/5

The Addams Family (1991, Barry Sonnenfeld, Amazon Prime) - 3/5

Finished reading Feed by Mira Grant, and… it’s okay, I guess? Good worldbuilding and some interesting ideas about the working of a zombie horror world, but the characterizations often felt flat to me and the plot was just kind of there.

That’s it for this week. Don’t ruin the new year too early! Wait a week at least.