CUTS, CUTS, CUTS

A month ago, one of the big stories was cuts to education employment funding, which the government claimed weren’t cuts to education employment. Three weeks ago, one of the big stories was cuts to interlibrary loan services, which government officials claimed weren’t happening. Two weeks ago, one of the big stories in public policy in Ontario was the government’s cuts to public health, which the government claimed weren’t cuts to public health. This past week, the big story was government cuts to childcare funding, which the government claims aren’t cuts to childcare funding. You would be forgiven for thinking this represents some sort of trend.

Basically, the reason the Tory government of Ontario claims the cuts they’re making aren’t actually cuts boils down to “we’re just taking away the money we were giving to municipalities, so it’s their fault if they choose to cut services.” This is your standard conservative argument about government spending being inefficient put into practice: if municipal governments spend too much money on things that don’t matter, then you cut their funding from the province and then they have to finally stop wasting all that money on solid gold staplers and the like.

The problem with this argument, though, is that it is willfully stupid and most cities do not have any solid gold staplers to stop buying. Municipal governments mostly deliver services extremely efficiently. In fact, just as one example: in 2012 the City of Toronto hired the accounting firm KPMG to audit the city’s books, because Doug Ford’s incompetent drunken brother Rob was Mayor at the time and strongly believed the city was wasting money because city councillors would sometimes use their discretionary budgets in ways he did not approve of. (Presumably he felt they should spend the money on crack and booze.) KPMG’s audit found only $12.5 million in wasteful spending out of a budget of $9.4 billion. That’s about 0.1 percent of the budget. KPMG was so desperate to find spending to cut - since that was what they were being paid to do - they then released a supplementary report suggesting services that could be cut to save money, like library hours and city maintenance budgets. So don’t think they wanted to find more than 0.1% of the budget to trim.

For cities, these cuts represent a major wrench thrown into their community care plans. The City of Toronto (which I keep using as an example because it’s the biggest city and therefore gets hit the hardest in terms of raw dollars, but also because it’s just easier to find the information for Toronto than other municipalities because they publish budget information faster and more comprehensively than anybody else does) will see $28.6 million in direct provincial funding for childcare cut and then another reduction of $56.2 million due to the province changing cost-sharing arrangements for subsidized childcare spaces. If the City doesn’t find the money by raising property taxes or cutting service somewhere else, it’s going to mean the loss of over 6,000 subsidized childcare spaces in Toronto. Nobody else will have that many raw spaces lost, but everybody will feel their own share of pain.

Furthermore, the province is releasing information about these cuts after most municipalities have already voted and approved their annual budgets for the year. The municipalities are understandably pissed off as fuck because they spent months putting together their budgets and, as a general rule, it is good practice for the province to tell them when they’re going to suddenly lose out on funds in advance. Clearly the province knew when municipalities were passing their annual budgets, and they knew they were planning to chop provincial transfers to municipalities for public health, child care and the share of the gas tax (among others; there may yet still be more cuts en route). It would have been simple for them to warn municipalities - but they didn’t, most likely for political reasons.

It is for political reasons that the Ford Nation flacks have come out of the woodwork hard in the past few weeks to attack anybody who plainly reports these cuts for what they are. The truly loathsome Lisa Thompson - who was obviously not fit for her job as Minister of Education - has been attacking and insulting anybody who points out that cuts to service funding are, in fact, cuts by suggesting that the media isn’t fairly reporting that the province is just cutting money and when municipalities are saying “we can’t afford to pay for these things” they’re just choosing to cut services and it isn’t the Tories’ fault they’re doing that instead of, I dunno, shuttering libraries or terminating public transit or not paving pot holes. This is a loathsome attitude, but it is, if nothing else, honest about the Conservative Party’s theory of how governments should spend money.

DON’T CALL IT A COUP BECAUSE WHAT IS IT, EVEN

Venezuela’s coup-that-wasn’t-a-coup made headlines this week and was mostly a non-starter. There was some dramatic footage of Venezuelan army assault vehicles running over protestors opposed to President Nicolas Maduro, but then pro-Maduro Venezuelans showed video on social media of Guaido supporters hijacking the vehicles, except the Guaido supporters were just wearing black riot gear exactly like the Maduro soldiers and there’s no footage showing that the footage of the first hijacking are the exact same vehicles as were in the footage of the protestors getting run over, so… what does this all mean, anyway?

Well, really, the one thing it means is that Juan Guaido’s attempt to get a majority of the army on board with regime change has failed, which is not really that surprising because the army was already generally inclined to side with Maduro, not least because Maduro pays them and the current regime gives the army a disproportionate amount of power. Guaido failing to get the army to join him was predictable because he’s been trying and failing to get the army to join him for months now, because he really only has two pathways to getting Maduro out and himself in: the army changing sides or an intervention from outside forces like the USA, and although lots of countries will make noise about how Maduro is bad, nobody really wants to spend the money to conduct what would almost certainly be a long-term occupation of Venezuela unless they can outright steal Venezuela’s oil, which they can’t do. (This is why Erik Prince, owner of Blackwater, keeps advocating for funding a private army - like his - to do it. Nation-states have trouble stealing other countries’ stuff, in an international law context. A bunch of mercenaries doing it, on the other hand, is much simpler and offers a lot of plausible deniability.)

Anyway, this is one of those “nothing is going to happen until it does” stories: until something dramatic happens there’s not going to be any change in the status quo - which incidentally is miserable for Venezuela, in case we were in danger of losing sight of that.

I LONG AGO RAN OUT OF WITTY HEADLINES ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE

New study documented in Nature published last week about permafrost thawing and how it’s making climate change worse and faster, which are of course two things we all needed to have happen. The short short version, which you have possibly heard about before, is that there is a lot of CO2 trapped in permafrost, and that when permafrost melts it releases more CO2 that previously we didn’t have to deal with, so global warming becomes at least a partially self-reinforcing cycle, making it even harder to combat. But, thanks to scientists, we already had a good idea that this was going to happen. So what is new with this study?

Well, for a start, the study’s pointing out that quite apart from the ton of CO2 that permafrost melt will release into the atmosphere, not all of it will go into the atmosphere! At this point you might say “wait, why is that bad, we don’t want it in the atmosphere” and the answer there is that if the CO2 remains within permafrost meltwater, that water will contribute to ocean and freshwater acidification, which is also bad for the planet (by which I mean “our continued survival on the planet).

On top of that, though, the paper is also trying to estimate what happens when all of this Arctic land which basically relied on being glued together with ice in order to stay stable is not, you know, glued together with ice any more. Now here the study has to stop and say “we’re not sure, but it goes from mildly bad to extremely bad.” Arctic researchers have already found areas that previously were forested which have now literally become lakes as a result of permafrost melt. Needless to say, this makes life more problematic for people who live in the far north, by which I mean potentially non-sustainable in a lot of scenarios.

Anyway, the study lays out what research needs to be done going forward, but let’s be honest, most of it won’t get done because we can’t agree to pay taxes for childcare and teachers, let alone global survival.

UBER IS NOT TRANSIT, VOL. XXVI

So two years ago Innisfil, a mid-sized town in Ontario on the shores of Lake Simcoe, had a brainstorm. “Buses are expensive,” they thought. “Why should we have buses? Let’s just have everybody take Ubers instead.” So, instead of setting up a standard bus service, they partnered with Uber and set up a system where Uber riders could pay a flat fee of $3-5 to get to various community hubs in the town, or get a $5 discount in order to travel anywhere else: in short, the town subsidized Uber rather than pay for a bus service. And this system was extremely popular, because of course it was. “People prefer being personally chauffeured rather than taking the bus” is not exactly some big revelation.

Here is the problem, though: as of last month, the town has had to increase the flat fees, reduce the discount, and introduce a monthly cap of thirty rides. Thirty rides, one might note, is not enough to use public transit as a substitute for simply driving yourself oneself, because it is not enough rides to get to work and back over the course of a month (much less do anything else, like go grocery shopping). The rationale for the cap is that people were “abusing the system” by taking too many Ubers to go places, but the entire point of a public transit system is that you can use it whenever you need it. Otherwise, it isn’t a public transit system.

Fundamentally, the problem with ride-sharing services is that they don’t scale up. When public transit works, it works because enough people use it that the cost drops downward, and it works because it is reliable, which in turn makes people use it and so on and so forth. But the thing people like about Ubers and Lyfts and so forth - being chauffeured in relative comfort - is directly at odds with scaling up, because you can only fit so many people in the back seat of a car. (Uber has tried introducing the “UberBus” - a larger minibus that can transport more people - as a response to this. It’s too early to tell if it is a successful project, but ultimately the question of “if you’re going to have buses, why do you need Uber” is one they haven’t quite answered yet.)

Of course, it is worth pointing out that Uber and Lyft and all the other ride-sharing companies are not profitable and have never been profitable, because their core business model is not profitable. Cabs are more expensive and less pleasant than ride-sharing because operating a cab is a business model founded on actual profit, not because cabbies are meaner than Uber drivers are. Uber, in comparison, is a business model founded on keeping prices artificially low via regular injections of money into the business from investors until they find a magic way of making money, most of which boil down to “be around long enough for public transit to collapse” or “maybe auto-driving cars happen and we make all the money from them.”

Anyway, what Innisfil is doing is happening all over North America as Uber tries to become a public transit option for communities too small or too cheap to afford dedicated bus routes, because the company needs to figure out a way to become profitable at some point and shoehorning a bad policy into place before anybody can say “wait, this is a bad idea” is definitely one way to do it.

MORE ON THAT BURNING MACEDONIAN QUESTION

A while back I wrote about a dipshit Greek political crisis regarding Macedonia’s name change to “North Macedonia” and how even that wasn’t good enough for some Greeks who regard the name “Macedonia” as only being Greek forever. Greece, however, is not involved in this week’s development, which is that North Macedonia had a Presidential election wherein the major issue was, yes, whether “North Macedonia” was a proper name or if the country should go back to calling itself “Macedonia” and get in another diplomatic slapfight with the Greeks.

Anyway, the pro-“North” candidate, an academic named Stevo Pendarovski, won the job of President, which in Macedonia is a primarily ceremonial position, won. This matters because one of the jobs of President is to sign bills into law, but the previous President, a Macedonian nationalist politician named Gorge Ivanov, was refusing to do so with any bills that would transition Macedonia into becoming North Macedonia, because he was sort of a prick. But, as I also wrote previously, Macedonia becoming North Macedonia is important because it lets the country finally join the EU, which it wants to do because money and trade.

Anyway, congratulations to North Macedonia on getting its shit together on a minor side issue, which most countries seem genuinely unable to do these days.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched/rewatched since last newsletter:

The Grizzlies (2019, Miranda de Pencier, theatre) - 4.5/5

The Divine Order (2017, Petra Biondina Volpe, Kanopy) - 3/5

The Silence (2019, John R. Leonetti, Netflix) - 2.5/5

Avengers: Endgame (2019, Joe and Anthony Russo, theatre) - 4/5

We’re fully caught up on the TV show adaptation of What We Do In The Shadows, which manages to be as good as the movie, which was an excellent movie. So that’s pretty great. Oh, and I finally finished Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, because shooting Nazis is always a good time.

See you in seven.