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OBLIGATORY USA MIDTERM ELECTIONS THING

The midterm elections - what do they mean, I mean, really? What do they - okay, no, the meaning is fairly obvious. People voted for Democrats and the GOP mostly got their nuts crunched in terms of popular vote, but because of the Senate, where Democrats will most likely end up down at least one Senate seat (although recounts in Florida and Arizona make that much less certain), a lot of American media is spinning this as a mixed bag, because journalists like to sound authoritative about politics and there's no real bar for entry or penalty for being wrong, so any idiot can be a political pundit and so many of them are.

Reminder: the United States Senate is one of the least small-d democratic bodies in any ostensibly democratically elected government in the world. Wyoming, with a population of 580,000, gets as many Senators as California, which has forty million people. When you explain this, someone inevitably explains that this was the intent of the Founding Fathers, to give small states a voice in the political process. There are, however, two problems with this argument.

The first problem with this argument is that it is ahistorical: most of the Founding Fathers actually favoured pure proportional representation, but in order to get the small states on board for a compromise which let all the states agree on a number for how many people the southern states' slaves were worth, so that slaves would only count for 3/5ths of a person for determining representation in the House of Representatives instead of a full person each, forth came the Connecticut Compromise and thus the Senate was created. "Small states blackmailed big states so that slavers would only get part of their way" doesn't sound as good as "will of the Founders," though.

The second problem with this argument is so fucking what if the Founding Fathers intended it, because they have been dead for centuries and also half of them thought owning slaves was perfectly okay, and besides their perfect design for government lasted less than a hundred years before they had a brutal civil war because it's actually a terrible design for running a government. (Aside: most of the countries which copied the American governmental system over the years have themselves experienced governmental collapse - because it's a bad system.)

Anyway, the Senate empowers small, rural and majority-white states over large, urban and majority-minority states, and that's a real problem in America because this year 55% of the voters voting in Senate elections across the country voted for Democrats and 44% voted for Republicans and the Republicans won three seats anyway, which is sort of the operational definition of "antidemocratic." As a general rule, democracies where the minority is in charge aren't democracies in any meaningful sense.

The point of all this is whenever a Canadian politician tells you they want a "Triple E" Senate - elected, equal, and effective - remember that the "equal" part is garbage. (So is the "effective" part, really. Bicameral legislatures are usually an impediment to effective governance rather than an aid.)

ANDREW SCHEER SAYS SOMETHING DOPEY (VOL. XXXXXVI IN A SERIES)

On Thursday Andrew Scheer promised to crack down on gang-related crime by imposing harsher sentences, stricter bail rules and parole revocation for criminals with gang membership. These are all bad ideas!

Imposing harsher criminal penalties for gang membership or association (and it's that second one that's worrisome, because "association" is... what? What if you have a friend who's in a gang? What if your brother is in a gang? Et cetera) is not only probably ripe for a freedom of association challenge under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but it's also a policy that's been used recently in the United States and is fairly ripe for abuse. Defining a "gang," for example, is tricky, because it's hard to craft language that's both going to do what you want it to do (identify members of violent criminal gangs) and avoid doing what you don't want it to do (criminalizing circles of friends).

For example: one such bill in Mississippi passed earlier this year defines a gang as at least three people who "collectively identify themselves by adopting a group identity" and who have committed at least one crime in the state, which can include misdemeanor-level crimes. Imagine three fifteen-year-old girls who call themselves Team Friendship, and one of them gets caught shoplifting: hey presto, they're a gang now! At least, they are according to Mississippi law.

You might say "but surely the Tories will have a plan for this" and I am not a fan of "but surely," especially when it comes to civil rights. The Criminal Code has no definition of "gang" precisely because proving that an organization is a criminal organization should be the duty of crown prosecutors - and by the way, they're pretty good at it, considering our national conviction rate is 97 percent. Whatever Canada's problems with gang crime might be (and we certainly have them), none of those problems are "we have trouble catching them and jailing them when they commit crimes."

As for bail: Doug Ford opened his big fat stupid mouth about stricter bail earlier this summer, and it was a bad idea then and it's still a bad idea now when Andrew Scheer says it, because it's pointless. Understand that the motivation for "stricter bail" is the idea of criminals being allowed out of jail on bail while waiting for trial and then committing more crimes, which literally almost never happens because, it turns out, committing crimes while you're on bail is a really good way to get convicted in that first trial. Plus, if you're worried about a gang member committing a crime and getting out on bail at all? Committing a violent crime in this country means there's automatically a reverse onus for getting bail (IE: the accused has to demonstrate why they should be allowed out on bail at all). It's a meaningless make-me-look-tough policy, which explains why Andrew Scheer, a man tragically born without a chin, would adopt it.

As for parole revocation: it's unconstitutional, plain and simple (when Stephen Harper tried to cancel early parole for sentenced criminals in 2011 the Supreme Court prevented him from doing so in Canada v. Whaling, because it's effectively punishing a criminal twice), and just saying "gang" a lot doesn't make Andrew Scheer's proposal any less so.

Here is the simple truth about crime in Canada: we don't have a lot of it compared to just about anywhere else in the world, violent crime severity has been overall decreasing for the last few decades just about everywhere in the country, and the best way to drop it further is to make poor communities not be poor. Harsher criminal punishments mostly don't work at deterring criminals, and we know this because lots of countries tried them for decades and they didn't work there, and we're not magically going to end up any different. Andrew Scheer is fearmongering (and, let's be honest, appealing to racism, because when he talks about "gangs" he's using coded language), because that's honestly all he's got.

WE'RE OFF TO SEE THE CZAR, THE WONDERFUL TRANSIT CZAR

John Tory announced that the City of Toronto would hire a "transit czar" to oversee transit projects and make their processing through the city's bureaucracy more efficient. This sounds like a great idea, unless you know a fair amount about transit planning, in which case you realize: oh, wait, this is stupid.

Transit planning in Toronto isn't slowed down or prevented by bureaucrats. Various elements of transit planning (cost estimates, environmental impact reports, traffic diversion plans, et cetera) do take time, but as a general rule they happen mostly on schedule. Actual construction of transit often takes much longer than it should, but partially this is because private sector contractors get lazy when there's government money involved and partially this is because when things actually get built, people start suing the city and its contractors (who then stop working) because customers don't come to their businesses or because it's noisy and they can't enjoy their backyards or what have you. And anyway, those are just delays in building, not delays in planning, and the transit czar is supposedly going to deal with the latter.

Transit in Toronto - and most other places in the world - gets bogged down for two reasons: a lack of money and politicians who decide to cancel transit projects they don't like. The lack of money part is easy to understand: transit projects cost a lot of money and Canadians (and most other people) get suspicious whenever somebody says "hey, let's spend money on a thing that will help everybody," because as a whole we're a cheap, stingy nation.

Sometimes there are good reasons to cancel transit projects: the current Scarborough subway extension is a massive white elephant that doesn't justify its cost. Sometimes the reasons for cancelling transit projects are stupid, like when the Fords killed off Toronto's (completely planned and funded with shovels in the ground ready to go) Transit City initiative, because it wasn't subways and they hated anything that wasn't subways. But these are literally the only actual reasons transit doesn't get built anywhere, because humans figured out a long time ago how to build subways and LRT and exclusive busway lanes, and it takes a certain amount of time to plan it out safely (mostly because you have to make room for the transit and that's tricky) and spending two million dollars on a new "transit czar" office and staff who will do very little to expedite transit planning when the real issue in Toronto is that everybody wants more transit and nobody is willing to pay for it?

What a colossal waste. But, then again, expecting much more than ideological square-dancing from John Tory on this issue was probably a waste of time: the man wants to be seen as being busy, but absolutely refuses to raise taxes to pay for services. Instead, he provides the usual blather about "making government more efficient," and at this point Toronto's books have been independently audited multiple times by multiple mayors and the answer is the same every time: Toronto's government is already very efficient, and what efficiencies can still be found aren't significant enough to pay for any major project or service upgrade.

Now, if I were a mediocre human being in charge of the city who didn't want to compromise his true core value of "never raise property taxes on my rich friends who own houses," I might very well spend a couple million of the city's dollars on a new appointed position intended to solve a major problem I'm not actually really interested in solving; it would most likely buy me some peace on the issue through the rest of my term and then I could retire, pass the buck to the next poor bastard and get offended whenever any loudmouth activist called me disinterested or uncaring, because look, I put a guy in charge of the nonexistent problem I said existed.

Man, what it would be like to be that guy. I bet he'd have great hair.

QUICK HITS

New Ontario provincial guidelines for overdose prevention sites: Now, overdose prevention sites can't be within 600 meters of one another (which is a bad idea because, well, the communities most at risk for overdose tend to be geographically concentrated, which is why four sites already in Toronto are all within 400 meters of each other), and if they're within 200 meters of a school, park or licensed daycare (and in any even small city, that will include basically everything in the city), there has to be a community consultation first, which means your local NIMBY brigade will get a chance to loudly and publicly demand that the site not exist. This is a fine example of creating regulations to effectively ban the thing you pretend you don't want to ban.

Pacific coast wildfires: They're bad, but bear in mind that wildfires becoming an annual "oh shit" thing only started in 2002, and that the "wildfire season" has been steadily getting longer as the Pacific coast has been getting drier; as the coastal rains take longer and longer to arrive, the danger of massive fire increases, and... climate change, everybody! I honestly didn't want to talk about climate change at all this week but the problem is: whoops, it's an ever-present part of life now, and even when it isn't 100% the cause (like in this case, where it just makes a thing that already happened every so often a much more common occurrence), it's still an exacerbating factor.

Tanzania's homosexual surveillance squad: Homosexuality was already illegal in Tanzania and punishable by up to 30 years in jail (!) but now the country is spending millions of dollars on a "surveillance squad" designed to... hunt them down, apparently? Tanzania used to be a model for good governance in Africa, but in 2015 they elected a right-wing populist who claimed he wanted to fight corruption and instead just started making the government more authoritarian, because people literally never learn anything from history. Anyway, authorities in Tanzania claim that following the announcement of the squad, they got evidence of more than "100 suspected homosexuals" from their tip line, so get ready for a re-theming of "The Crucible" set in Tanzania and at least a small wave of LGBT refugees from the country.

ACO can't afford a place in Washington: Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, the avowed socialist who won a seat in Congress this week, got snarked at by conservative press when it became a story that she basically couldn't afford to live in Washington, DC until she was seated because she doesn't have enough money to live there independently for two months. (She says she's saved up as much money as possible and might have to couchsurf for part of the time.) I mention this because it's important to remember that most democratically elected representatives in most countries are, statistically speaking, rich people, or at least well-off upper class types, and that working-class representatives are rare and growing rarer. (A few years ago, there was a study which demonstrated that the most common former job for MPPs in Ontario was "realtor," followed by "lawyer," which makes sense, because those are the two professions where a political campaign can effectively serve as advertising for your business if you don't win the race. But, seriously: how many real estate agents would you want in charge of anything important?)

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies seen this week, out of 5:

Burning (Lee Chang-Dong, 2018, in theatre) - 5/5

Kin (Josh and Jonathan Baker, 2018, Google Play rental) - 2.5/5

Outlaw King (David Mackenzie, 2018, NetFlix) - 3/5

And that's it for this week. Stay safe, everybody. Unless you are going hang-gliding, in which case by definition you aren't staying safe.