STRONG THRONG IN HONG KONG

Hong Kong is, legally speaking, "kind of weird." (That is a direct quote from an international law professor from my law school days.) It is part of China, there is no question about that, but because A) China wants Hong Kong to remain super-wealthy and generate money for the Chinese government and B) Hongkongers spent a century not being Chinese citizens and a lot of them are still not really enthusiastic about the prospect, it has all sorts of special arrangements in place that let it operate very distinctly from China: it still has its own separate currency and its own legislature and its own distinct legal system and separate borders and its own Olympic team and basically operates as much as a separate country as China lets it, because China wants the money and would rather avoid having to suppress riots (if only because it's simpler to not bother).

I mention all of this because this weekend's protests in Hong Kong were enormous: in between several hundred thousand (the city's estimate, probably on the low side because authorities never want the protest to seem big) and 1.2 million people (the estimate of protest organizers, probably generous as protestor estimates of their own numbers usually are) took to the streets and marched and chanted slogans and waved signs. If you split the difference and call it about 700,000 people, that's still about ten percent of the entire population of the city protesting, which is ridiculously huge for a protest.

The protests were against a new bill currently before Hong Kong's legislature (which is controlled by the pro-Beijing coalition of parties, as it has been since Hong Kong was reclaimed by China in 1997) which would create a standing criminal extradition process for governments with whom Hong Kong does not have a formal criminal extradition agreement, which would be determined on a case-by-case basis. This all sounds fairly banal, and the alleged cause for the bill (a case where a Hong Kong man murdered his girlfriend while they were on vacation in Taiwan together, and then fled Taiwan to return to Hong Kong) makes it sound eminently reasonable, and it would be, except for one important factor: Hong Kong does not have a formal criminal extradition agreement with the Chinese government.

I know this sounds like a weird thing to not have in place, because it is sort of weird that Hong Kong doesn't have a process for extraditing criminals to China when China both surrounds and owns Hong Kong, but this is the case, and it's the case because pro-democracy politicians in Hong Kong have prevented any such law or arrangement from passing for decades, because they believe (probably quite correctly) that the Chinese government will just use an extradition arrangement to effectively legally kidnap pro-democracy/anti-Beijing activists. The pro-Beijing majority in the legislature, however, seems committed to pushing this law through.

AIN'T NO PARTY LIKE A DEVELOPER PARTY

The Ontario Tories - before they took a five-month vacation to hopefully keep Doug Ford from becoming even less popular and making Andrew Scheer lose the federal election - dropped one more bill, Bill 108, which is an omnibus bill which incorporates a bunch of things I've written about before (like the amendments to the Crown Liabilities and Proceedings Act about which I wrote on April 14th). But, because this is Doug Ford and there's always something worse, the special surprise this time around was that Dougie has taken yet another opportunity to micromanage the City of Toronto for the worse.

The City spent the better part of a decade working on a development plan for downtown Toronto - which is the fastest growing urban centre in North America - because, well, when you have people constantly moving in you need to make sure that new condo builds don't make the place unliveable. There are all sorts of things to consider - how much shadow tall buildings can leave on parkland, how many buildings have to be rental buildings, how much developers have to contribute to the cost of building community centers and parks, how wide sidewalks have to be, how much setback condos have to incorporate into their towers.

(This last one is a little obscure for most people but actually important so I want to explain it a bit. "Setback" loosely refers to "how far away from the street is the actual building," which is of course important, but in a condo building context it has specifically come to mean "how far back the condo tower recedes from the podium of the building." See, if your condo building has a broad podium at the base, and then a skinnier tower on top of the podium, the result is a serious reduction in the wind-tunnel effect that a corridor of tall buildings creates - at least at street level - which is safer for everybody.)

Oh, and of course on top of all that the development plan mandated how many units in these buildings had to be family-sized units - larger units with more bedrooms. This is important, because experience has taught the city of Toronto (and most other cities) that developers mostly won't build family-sized units unless they are forced to build them. (The exception: penthouse and sub-penthouse apartments, which are larger and vastly more expensive, and which are insufficient to meet demand.) The math is really simple: one family-sized apartment can almost never make a developer as much money as two smaller apartments (one-bedroom or bachelors), and since demand for any type of housing in large, rich cities is sky-high even if they're not livable for families - both because people will live there and because the rich consider city real estate to be a safe investment vehicle (or, alternately, a good place to park/launder money as needed) - the two apartments will always sell.

Anyway, all of this is really important and the Ontario government just scrapped literally all of it with no consultation whatsoever because Ontario elected a bunch of morons into office and those morons owe the real estate developers who helped fund their campaigns, and the real estate developers just want to make as much money as possible. The end.

(Aside: the Tories' clever plan to try to keep Doug out of the news cycle won't work, because he has to negotiate a new contract with the public school teacher's union by August 31st, and he's declared war on Ontario unions multiple times already, so just before the federal election he has to seamlessly negotiate a new agreement that won't anger the teachers - who already fucking hate him - or his base. This is, to put it politely, very unlikely.)

THE WEEKLY BAD ENVIRONMENT NEWS

Periodically I get a DM or email from someone wondering if I focus on environmental/climate news too much (since I mention it maybe not every week, but certainly a majority overall of these newsletters discuss it), and my response is always the same: whether you like it or not, climate change is what's going to affect your life over the next thirty years (minimum, and probably much more than that) than anything else, and the ripple effects are just going to keep coming and they're all going to be bad. So let's do it.

First off, this past week saw a heatwave in many places across the planet - just south of the Arctic Circle in Finland, they measured temperatures of more than 30 degrees Celsius, which isn't just a high but the sort of recordbreaking high that shatters previous records - but the important one was in India, where temperatures surpassed 45-48 degrees in many places and in at least one place surpassed 50 degrees Celsius, which is a temperature high enough to cause heatstroke in children and senior citizens within minutes. (You know how you're not supposed to leave vulnerable people or pets inside a car in summer? Like that, except the car isn't necessary any more.) Granted, that place was Churu, which is literally in a desert, but before you get all "oh, come on, Chris, of course the desert is going to be hot" maybe remember that much of the rest of India was only a couple of degrees cooler than a frigging desert.

There were, of course, dozens of deaths reported (and probably many more not officially determined as of yet to be heatstroke deaths, because this is India and it's very large and very busy and not every town has forensic examiners), but as awful as heatstroke deaths are, the even worse problem is water. The state of Maharashtra - which is where Mumbai is, and which has about 114 million people in it - was severely rationing farmers' water supply, and Chennai (the biggest city in southern India) has been rationing water for over a year now and their reservoirs are at approximately 0.5% of total capacity, and citizens are starting (only just starting, in a trickle) to flee the fourth-biggest city in India because they understand that if there's no water then you die.

What's happening in India right now is going to happen elsewhere. There are plenty of places all over the world where extreme heat is causing death and ruining freshwater supplies that human beings have built civilizations around for literally millennia. (Google "Arizona fresh water crisis" if you want to see some of the worst of it in North America. Last summer it was so hot at points that planes couldn't take off - because hot air is less dense, and if the air is too hot it's not dense enough to support a plane.) At this point, this sort of weather and its ensuing effects are basically unavoidable in the short to medium term; the real question is whether or not we, as a species, decide to allow it to get worse.

This was the same week, of course, that the White House prevented the State Department from testifying before Congress that climate change is "possibly catastrophic," and the same week that Lisa Raitt tweeted in support of a climate denier (before deleting the tweet after the inevitable shitstorm ensued). So, if we decide to allow it to get worse, it will, and when people don't have water in their home any more, they're going to run to where the water is. Which is... oh, right, Canada.

COMING SOON

Canadian media have been talking about the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls report all week, mostly because the report describes what has been happening to indigenous women in Canada as a "genocide," because the term is a defined one in international law and what has been happening meets those criteria, but "genocide" is also an emotionally loaded term and a lot of journalists are very upset about the use of the term. This of course neatly obscures what the report actually is about, because if you are a mediocre pundit in a Canadian newspaper (and there are many such) it is much easier to whine about terminology than actually grapple with the meat of a complex report.

I am not gonna do that this week, because I am... still reading it! Cut me some slack, it's over seven hundred pages long. So instead I'm going to try to read it this week and discuss it a little bit next week.

(Spoiler: It's really critical of the *Indian Act.)

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

We didn't see any movies this week! It happens sometimes.

But I did finish playing Assassin's Creed: Origins, which is a pretty good Assassin's Creed game - the Ptolemaic Egypt setting is really neat, but also cleverly emphasizes how old most of the stuff in Egypt actually is (because, after all, by the time of Cleopatra - when the game is set - Egypt was on its thirty-second dynasty of rulers, spanning three thousand plus years, so there had been a lot of time for older iterations of Egypt to build tombs and then forget about those tombs, and then do it again, and again - I mean, the Great Pyramid was built twenty-five hundred years before the game begins). And also, of course, there is a lot of climbing tall things and stabbing baddies, which is really the entire point of these games, but it's good to have a fun story and nice scenery.

See you in seven.