THE TORONTO ISLANDS ARE FLOODING AGAIN

For the second time in three years, the Toronto Islands are flooding. It isn’t as bad yet as it was in 2017 (although city officials are warning that it is close; last week the water level was 75.74 metres, as compared to 75.93 meters in 2017 and the traditional average of 75.02 meters), but regardless, the beaches are largely dissolved and/or underwater, and this is starting to feel like a new normal. Part of the problem is that the Islands are on the Great Lakes, and because the Great Lakes are basically a series of gargantuan reservoirs connected by massive dams at this point (and to be clear, I am certainly in favour of hydroelectric energy as a rule), this means that Lake Ontario’s water level is dictated, in part, by whether the people in charge of Lake Erie dump water into it or whether the people in charge of of the St. Lawrence River say “hey, a little less water flowing in.”

Right now Lake Ontario is getting it from both ends, because Lake Erie has gotten a lot of rain lately and the water levels there are at record highs, and the water has to go somewhere and the answer to where it’s going to go is obviously Lake Ontario, because gravity. At the same time, they’ve throttled down the flow at the dam in Cornwall to avoid flooding the St. Lawrence River even more than it is already flooding, which is quite a bit because the Ottawa River has been flooding as well as it feeds into the St. Lawrence. All of this means Lake Ontario is rising dramatically because the water has to go somewhere, and if it can’t all flow into the St. Lawrence then it’s going to rise up and dampen our spirits, and also everything else.

While the Islands are the most dramatic example of lake flooding, all of Toronto’s waterfront is getting impacted by it - including the water treatment plants in Mimico and Rouge Valley, which is a problem potentially more serious than the beaches - and it would be great if there was an easy answer to this problem. Unfortunately, the easy answer was “do something about climate change twenty-five years ago so we don’t have to deal with dramatically increased amounts of rain and snow” so all that is left are much more expensive answers. (This is the point where someone you know on the internet snarkily points out that the Tories cut flood prevention flooding. I, of course, am above such things.)

LIKE A PHOENIX COVERED IN ASHES, NOT TO MIX METAPHORS

A while back, the federal government put together a team to determine what should be done about the Phoenix pay system, and while the answer “burn it to the ground and start anew” is perhaps not surprising, it is nonetheless dramatic. If you don’t know what any of this means, bear with me.

In 2009, the federal government - at that time, the Tories under Stephen Harper - decided, not entirely unreasonably, that there were efficiencies to be found in the federal worker payroll system, which was distributed among individual government departments. Would it not be cheaper, they reasoned, to have one large payroll system handling payroll for all government workers? So they hired IBM to design one. The initial contract was for about six million dollars, but the government ultimately ended up paying IBM about 185 million dollars, which is a little bit more than six million. For this money, IBM delivered a system called Phoenix, but the Tories decided that they could handle implementation of the system and training workers on its use better than IBM could. This was, in retrospect, probably a bad idea, and in fact, the Tories hired two separate independent contractors to assess whether this plan was viable. The first one said it would be tough but that the government could handle it; the second said that there was a good chance this would blow up in everybody’s face. The incoming Liberal government (who won in 2015) was never actually told about the second report.

Anyway, the government rolled out Phoenix in early 2016 and almost immediately things blew up in everybody’s face, with thousands of complaints about “underpayments,” which meant anything from “some of my pay is missing” to “where is my money?” Because the system wasn’t working properly, you see. However, the Tories had already let go most of the old payroll employees that Phoenix was intended to replace when the Liberals came in, so there was no easy “rewind” button to be metaphorically pressed here, because when you fire civil servants you can’t just go back to them six months later and say “my bad, please do your old job now.” Because the Liberals believed there was no alternative but to press on with Phoenix and try to make it work, that is what they have been doing. (With the emphasis pointedly on “try” in that last sentence.)

It has not been going well. The Liberals have been trying to fix Phoenix for nearly three years now, and at this point there’s probably enough blame to go around for IBM, the Tories and the Liberals all (although I think a fair assessment probably gives the first two of those three the lion’s share of the blame, since the Liberals were really left holding a bag of turds on this one). The money being spent to fix the system keeps increasing and the total projected cost of fixing the system has exploded, from $20 million (first estimate) to $2.6 billion (last week). There’s a class action lawsuit against the government by federal workers who have been shafted out of their pay, and the federal workers’ unions are pushing hard for recompense for their members (which they will probably end up getting because the workers really did get screwed good and hard). And the federal government’s team has suggested it would literally be much cheaper to just hire someone else to create a new system that works properly (such as SAP, a German HR software company who already provides HR services for a couple of Canadian agencies) than to spend the $2.6 billion fixing Phoenix, because it is, after all, a bag of turds.

AUSSIE AUSSIE AUSSIE, OY OY OY

So a national election in Australia has come and gone, and the voters responded to the Liberal party coalition (who are actually a group of four right-wing parties, because Australia) who were reasonably unpopular entering the election by… voting them back into office and giving them a majority government. Granted, most Australian newspapers endorsed the Liberals (because Rupert Murdoch owns most of them), but looking at the electoral maps the real answer is the same as everywhere else in politics: the cities mostly vote left-wing (Perth is the big exceptions) and the suburbs and countryside mostly vote right-wing (with the exception of a lot of rural New South Wales, where the Greens do well). Part of the Senate was up for the vote as well (but not all of it, because Australia’s scheduling for Senate elections is kind of odd that way), and the Liberals improved their position a bit there, but mostly only because they won seats that fringe conservative parties held previously.

Anyway, Scott Morrison is now getting plaudits for leading the Coalition to an upset victory, but the upset was mostly the result of different results in Queensland than everybody expected, because Labor were polling a bit better than usual there in the two-party vote polling. (Australia uses instant-runoff voting, which in most parts of the country means that most races end up being contested between the Liberal coalition candidate and the Labor candidate.) Except that Queensland mostly voted the same as Queensland usually does, looking at the last couple decades’ worth of results. And Labor’s lead in Queensland was only a bit larger than most polls’ margin of error. And really, the difference was: the Liberal coalition ended up with one more seat than they had.

Regardless, expect the Aussie press - which, again, is wholly owned by Rupert Murdoch - to trumpet the Liberal coalition getting 41.4% of the vote as a “mandate.”

(PS yes I know the chant is spelled “oi oi oi” see it is a joke, replacing the traditional “oi” with the Yiddish-style “oy” as in “oy gevalt” and - oh never mind)

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched since last week:

Pokemon: Detective Pikachu (2019, Rob Letterman, theatre) - 3/5

And yeah, we watched the series finale of Game of Thrones, and… yeah. That was certainly a show that aired on television.

See you in seven.