I really don’t want this newsletter to be “what Doug did this week” for obvious reasons, but the problem is: My longstanding loathing for Doug Ford aside, his Ontario Tories are doing things that are, in a governmental sense, dramatic. Which makes for good basic policy writing. You see the problem here. Sooo…

(SOME OF) WHAT DOUG DID THIS WEEK

Probably the biggest news in a week that was mostly about Doug Ford being a stupid fuckup and trying to perform damage control on all the stupid shit he’s been doing - and sure, it’s fun to talk about Doug being a stupid fuckup, but it’s not really long-term relevant in a policy sense - is that the Tories are making a lot of very serious noise about “uploading” the TTC. What this means is: the legal entity that is the City of Toronto currently owns and operates the Toronto Transit Commission. Doug Ford, who hates Toronto and will never forgive the city for not voting him Mayor, is determined to fuck with the city and control it as much as humanly possible, and one of the things Doug is most passionate about is transit, so he’s decided to “upload” the TTC to provincial control - giving the province control of all of the TTC’s assets and operations. The general assumption seems to be that the TTC would be folded into Metrolinx, the provincial transit authority that manages the GO Train network in the Golden Horseshoe area.

(He can do this because the city of Toronto, as a legal entity, is strictly a creature of the province, so the province has always been able to do whatever the fuck it wants with its cities. This is probably a bad idea and we should change it, but getting Canadians to admit “maybe political structures invented a hundred and fifty years ago aren’t a good idea now” is an uphill battle at the best of times.)

So, is all of this a good idea? Well, that’s a very complex question! But the answer is “no. No, it is a bad idea.”

There is precedent for what happens when a municipal transit authority is uploaded to a higher level of governmental control - it’s happened a lot over the past thirty years, most notably and recently in New York City - and almost uniformly the answer is “things get worse.” It’s not really any secret as to why: constituents who live outside of the city don’t want “their tax dollars” going towards a transit system they don’t use, so the transit system’s funds get cut/reallocated towards the needs of less urban constituents - especially the rich ones. (A couple years ago in New York, Governor Cuomo used part of the New York City MTA’s budget to bail out ski resorts in upstate New York which had suffered unprofitable seasons due to a lack of snowfall.)

Less money for the transit system means it gets more expensive for its users and delivers weaker service, and eventually it gets so bad that it enters a sort of “death spiral” where it just starts losing revenue hand-over-fist because the service gets worse and worse and riders stop using it which means less revenue which means worse service which means fewer riders which means… and there you go, the only way to fix things is spend billions and billions of dollars and be patient. (Transit experts are worried that New York’s system is already in death-spiral mode.) Of course, uploading the TTC to Ontario would be even worse, for any number of reasons.

• There’s the fact that Metrolinx’s planning skills have a decade-long streak of sheer incompetence that’s honestly kind of amazing, just a track record of bad decisions and inept execution all the way from the introduction of the Presto system (which was already out of date when it was introduced) to the utter mismanagement of the Toronto transit files they’ve been assigned over the years.

• There’s the fact that Jeff Yurek, our brand new haircut in charge of the Ministry of Transportation (after former minister John Yakabuski got shuffled away from it because his sister is a transportation lobbyist), said upon announcing the plan for uploading legislation that the province’s priorities were extending the existing subway lines into York, Peel and Pickering, which is stupid because subways aren’t actually intended to serve as regional rail transit (you want actual trains for that, because they’re faster and can carry more passengers and are more durable - this isn’t rocket science), and because Toronto’s transit system is insanely overcrowded largely as a result of non-Torontonians commuting in to the ends of the system and using the TTC to commute downtown, which would be fine if the system can handle them, which it can’t.

• And, for death spiral fans: Toronto already has the lowest governmental subsidy of any major transit system in the world, and the highest farebox recovery (which means “percentage of expenses paid for via fares”), so there’s really no room to steal more from the TTC without harming its operating capacity. Not that this will stop anybody.

Oh, and all of this doesn’t even touch on the other thing, which is: the TTC isn’t just a corporation operated by the City of Toronto. It’s an asset-owning corporation, and most of the assets that aren’t trains and buses are land. Lots of land. Not just the land on which TTC stations are located, but more land besides, including land which they’ve been holding onto in case they need to buy future facilities there. Given this week’s sale of the Hearn power lands, this is suddenly much more relevant… I probably need to digress for a second about this.

The Hearn power lands - okay, so Toronto has these lands called “the Port Lands,” which are just southeast of the downtown core, on the lake, and about as big as New York City’s Central Park or about a third of Toronto’s downtown core, pick your metaphor. There is practically nothing on them; there’s a beach you can’t swim at, and movie studio backlots, and, for some reason a T&T Asian supermarket, but mostly it is barren land because it’s contaminated land which has to be cleaned before it can be built upon for commercial or residential use. But it is mostly empty land that is next to the water and next to some of the most expensive real estate in the world. Part of these lands is a property where the old Hearn coal power station used to operate - this particular power station and land is big enough for, oh, twelve Parthenons, or three major league hockey/basketball arenas. It’s a really big piece of land, and for the last few years it’s been leased by one of those movie studios because the station is a photogenic backdrop for whenever you need to shoot an industrial-looking scene. Anyway, this past week, Ontario sold it to one of Doug Ford’s old campaign contributors for $400,000 per acre, which is somewhere between “surprisingly cheap” and “the deal of the century” depending on who you ask.

…okay, digression over, but now you begin to understand why giving Doug Ford control of an entity that has tons of valuable real estate in Toronto might be… problematic.

LISA MACLEOD CUTS WELFARE IN THE LEAST SURPRISING POLITICAL NEWS OF THE YEAR, AND THEN PROVING THINGS WITH MATH

Lisa MacLeod, the Minister For Everything The Tories Don’t Actually Care About (children, community, social services, women’s issues, immigration and anti-racism, among others) announced cuts this week to Ontario Works and the Ontario Disability Support Program, the province’s welfare programs. The cuts work in two specific ways.

First, they’re changing the definition of “disabled” to match the definition that exists for the Canada Pension Plan, in one of those “we’re just trying to harmonize” excuses that conservatives love whenever they’re trying to cut social services, which is what is happening here because CPP’s definition of “disability” exists for people who will never be able to work again in their lives so they can start collecting CPP early. (Cynics sometimes call it “early nursing home pay,” since a lot of people who collect CPP disability are pre-retirement-age people who live in nursing homes because they need round-the-clock attentive caregiving.) This is different from ODSP’s definition, which recognizes that sometimes disabled people - even ones with jobs - need a little help to get by. It’s intended as a supplementary payment for people who are trying to be productive and as assistance for the early-nursing-home types all at once, and cutting back ODSP to CPP’s definition will simply cut payments to a lot of disabled people who needed those payments to get by. Which is the point.

The second cut is a change in the clawback formula on earned income. If you collect Ontario Works welfare, any income you earn is subject to a clawback on your welfare cheque - the first $200 you earn each month is exempt, and then everything up to OW’s monthly income limit is subject to a 50% clawback on your welfare cheque. So, if in a month you earn $1000, the first $200 would be exempt, and then the remaining $800 would result in $400 being clawed back from your welfare cheque - which is $722, so your total income for the month would be $1000 work plus $322 from welfare for $1322. (I’m not sure why I’m calling them “cheques,” since the system went automated ages and ages ago and just about everybody gets direct account payments now.) The Tories plan to increase the monthly exemption to $300 and increase the clawback to 75%, which means - well, less money for just about everybody. If you earn $1000 in a month, now your first $300 is exempt, but the clawback on the remaining $700 is $525, so your income from your welfare cheque (which the Tories are increasing by 1.5%) is $208, for a total of $1208 for the month from work and welfare income. If you do the math, the new formula literally encourages welfare recipients to work less, which is exactly the opposite of what the Tories say it will do.

MacLeod got really offended when some reporter asked her how she justified cutting aid for the poor, because of course she did, but cuts like these were inevitable because Ontario voters mostly refuse to deal with the realities of the Ontario budget. (WARNING: This next bit is an expansion of a rant I did on Twitter earlier this week, so if you saw that already, sorry for the rerun.) The realities of the Ontario budget are as follows: we don’t have a spending problem; rather, we have the problem that most voters in this province don’t want to pay what their services actually cost (or anywhere close to it). And I can prove this with math.

(Entire readership: “YAY MATH!” Yes, I know you love math.)

Ontario’s 2017 budget expenditures - everything we spent - were 126.384 billion dollars. The two biggest line items in the Ontario budget, every year, are healthcare ($55.945 billion) and education ($26.005 billion). Together, they account for just under sixty-five percent of all government spending in this province. And it’s not unreasonable spending, either, whatever the Heritage Foundation might complain about, because thanks to the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (the OECD) we know both what other countries spend and what their outcomes are on healthcare, education, and tons of other things, because countries like to share statistics because government wonks everywhere all know that if something works somewhere else, it’ll probably work here, because contrary to what politicians like to tell you the place you live isn’t special or magic.

Our per-pupil education spending in 2017 was $12,872. That’s below the OECD average for first-world countries and about in the middle for Canadian provinces, and for that money we get better-than-average educational outcomes among OECD countries. Our healthcare spending per capita in 2017 was $3,942, which is below average in Canada. It’s slightly above average for OECD countries, but most OECD countries don’t have the USA next door with its insane healthcare salaries driving up labour costs, so really, our healthcare spending is pretty good, all things considered - and again, we have really strong healthcare outcomes, great life expectancy etc. Basically, our healthcare and education systems aren’t perfect and there’s always room for improvement, but the truth is that we spend a very reasonable amount of money and we mostly spend it pretty efficiently.

Now, having said that, let’s go look at Northumberland County, which I am picking for two reasons: firstly, it’s a good example of a mid-level rural community in Ontario, and second, my in-laws live there so I’m familiar with it.

Via Stats Canada, we know that Northumberland County has a population as of 2016 of 85,598 (and its population has mostly been very stable over the last couple decades so it’s a safe number to use for this back-of-the-napkin stuff I’m about to do). StatsCan also tells us that 69,480 people in Northumberland paid taxes in 2016, and that the average individual income there was $44,337. Plug that into a simple tax calculator and you see that the average provincial tax paid in Northumberland County was $2,083. Multiply that by the 69,480 people who paid tax in Northumberland and you get total personal income tax revenues of $144,726,840. Now, provincial income tax only makes up about thirty percent of all of Ontario’s tax revenues, so let’s say that $144 million represents thirty percent of Northumberland’s total tax revenue: you end up with about $480 million collected.

(Obviously this number is way too high, of course. Corporate tax is concentrated in rich cities, not rural townships, and that $144 million figure only works if you pretend that literally nobody in Northumberland County has ever used a tax deduction in their life. But I like to use generous numbers whenever possible, and especially when I’m working loosely like I am here.)

Okay, so $480 million. That’s a lot of money. But Northumberland County has, as we just found out, 85,598 people in it. All of them need healthcare, and at $3,942 per person, that’s $337,427,316 spent right away. We’ve already used up almost three-quarters of Northumberland’s (estimated and too generously) tax receipts on healthcare alone.

Education is a little trickier because if we’re going with per-pupil spending we have to figure out how many students are in Northumberland County. Northumberland is part of the Kawartha Pine Ridge public school system, whose website’s annual reports helpfully tells you where all of its schools are located and how many students attend each of the schools. It has 31,502 students, and 9,041 of those students attend school in Northumberland County - which means when you multiply per-pupil spending of $12,872 comes out to $116,375,752 total for Northumberland’s public school costs. The separate school system (note to non-Canadians - as a result of an old constitutional thing we’ve never bothered to fix here, Ontario has a constitutional obligation to fund “separate schools” for Catholics - it’s a stupid and wasteful tradition, but remember what I said about Canadians and admitting how old-time political arrangements suck is difficult?) doesn’t have its budget or report on its website, but I was able to find that the Peterborough/Victoria/Northumberland/Clarington Catholic District School Board has approximately 14,600 students; if we assume that the general geographic distribution of students is about equal, that would mean about twenty percent of those Catholic school students attend in Northumberland, which would mean 2,920 students. At a cost of $12,872 per student, that’s another $37,586,240.

So, Northumberland County’s healthcare and education spending, by my (admittedly hamfisted) estimate, is $491,389,308 - eleven million dollars more than they contribute to the province in taxes, even after I generously spotted them way more tax revenue than they probably generate.

And that’s just the healthcare and education. That doesn’t count all the other services Northumberland gets from the government, like their share of the court system, or their share of the Ontario Provincial Police, or the $35 million the province transfers to their municipal budget every year. Northumberland County, which is full of hardworking farmers and blue-collar labourers, would no doubt be horrified if they understood that they are, in a strictly monetary sense, on the mooch. And this is the important part: they aren’t unique. Most of Ontario is in the same position as Northumberland County is or worse: they are net drags on the budget. Most years it’s just Toronto and its edge cities (Oshawa, Mississauga, Brampton, Vaughan, Markham, et cetera) that are net contributors to Ontario’s coffers, and really, it’s just Toronto doing the heavy lifting.

All of the mean-spirited, bitchy pruning around the edges of the budget at poor people’s needs that the Tories are doing right now? None of it is going to fix Ontario’s budgetary woes, literally none of it, because the answer to Ontario’s budgetary woes is “pay the taxes for the stuff you say you want,” and way too much of this province refuses to believe that they should do that.

FOR THE SAKE OF EQUAL TIME, HERE IS A STUPID THING THE LIBERAL PARTY DID

Justin Trudeau’s federal Liberals proposed a funding bill to help the media sector, and there are a lot of issues with it.

Parts of the bill are okay. The refundable tax credit to “support labour costs associated with producing original news content” has yet to be fully detailed, but if it’s a tax break for hiring journalists that is honestly a pretty good idea, because news media is A) something we need and B) something which hasn’t been profitable for a long time now because print journalism’s profit model broke the moment Craigslist was invented. The tax credit to encourage Canadians to subscribe to newspapers and other media outlets is also a good idea. Basically, anything that is a universal tax credit designed to encourage media organizations to hire people and designed to encourage Canadians to spend money on news is probably a better idea than not, and shaking out the issues is a matter of tax policy. None of that is bad, it’s just stumbling towards the right course of action via trial and error, which is mostly how humans govern one another most of the time.

What is bad is that the government wants to create a panel to determine who gets those tax breaks, and that’s just a terrible goddamn idea. Since the panel will effectively determine who gets federal money, it instantly creates a suspect class of news organizations who are going to be viewed as compromised (and not unfairly so, either). Journalists from across the political spectrum this past week were lining up to say “no, wait, this is stupid” because they can all see how badly it will go well in advance.

I suspect that the end result of this is that the “panel portion” of the bill will find its responsibilities greatly shrunk (grants to underfunded media organizations in rural Canada are part of the purview of the panel, I would expect those to stick around because most people realize there isn’t much propaganda value in funding the Moose Jaw Daily Whatever) and the tax incentives will become more universal in scope, because it’s simpler. Maybe a little more expensive overall, but simpler, and you want this to be as simple and transparent as possible; it’s one of those things where it’s more important to be transparent than to reach maximum fiscal effectiveness.

A COUPLE OF QUICK CLIMATE NEWSBITS

The United States officially released its most recent climate report on Friday - the Friday after American Thanksgiving, which is pretty much all the proof you need that the current government wants to bury it as much as possible - Sarah Huckabee Sanders, when asked questions about it in her most recent press conference, pretended that the report only contemplated worst-case scenarios, which it does not. The report is, big surprise, extremely bad, predicting the cost to the USA of climate change to be $500 billion per year in current dollars by 2090. (For the sake of scale: US GDP is currently about 20 trillion dollars, so $500 billion would be 2.5% of current GDP, which is insane - that’s effectively a permanent recession’s worth of cost.) The report also discusses all the ways climate change increases mortality, but I’ve talked about that before and I don’t want to bore you.

On the bright side, though, I forgot to mention a couple weeks ago about Spain’s new climate laws that are currently making their way through Parliament and are expected to pass, which are both some of the most intense anti-climate-change laws yet and… not enough on their own? That second bit sounds ominous, considering that the draft bill includes an end to all vehicle emissions by 2040, an end to fracking and full phase-out of fracking by 2040, 100% renewable energy use by 2050, divesting the public sector from fossil fuels, creating “low carbon” walkability/liveability zones in all cities with a population greater than 50,000, and dedicating 20% of the national budget to green infrastructure (among many other elements; the bill is massive), but mathematically speaking it still probably falls short of what has to be done. However, the important thing is starting to do it: like any life change, it’s easier to change your diet and get in shape and quit smoking when you start doing things, and you can add more effort later as needed. So this should be regarded as an extremely positive step overall, both for Spain (which is a decently sized country, not a dinky one like Denmark) and for the rest of the world who are being provided an example of ambitious climate law.

QUICK HITS

Switzerland’s sovereignty referendum fails: Which is what it was called even though Switzerland is already, like sovereign; it was actually a right-wing proposal from the right-wing populist Swiss People’s Party which would have forced Switzerland to renegotiate most of its treaties because they felt those treaties weren’t pro-Swiss enough. Anyway, the Swiss said “no” by about a two-thirds margin, so good on them for not letting the racist fringe run the day. (They also voted down another referendum which would have subsidized farmers who don’t de-horn their cows. That one was more popular, though, than the racist one.)

Taiwan votes down same-sex marriage: Taiwan’s referendum on same-sex marriage was “narrowly defeated” (I can’t find numbers anywhere, that’s the Asia Times‘ characterization), but the problem is that the Taiwanese courts have already found laws forbidding same-sex marriage to be unconstitutional so now nobody really knows what’s going to happen next. The country’s polarized further over it, since the Christian groups who lobbied hard against the referendum flooded the country with anti-gay disinformation and the activists who wanted it have gotten angrier. Also, these were the Taiwanese midterm elections, and President Tsai Ing-Wen stepped down as leader of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) due to a series of losses to the more Beijing-friendly Kuomintang party. The DPP repeatedly accused China of meddling in the elections Russia-style (fake news and internet trolling) but there’s no hard evidence I can find as of yet as to whether that’s true.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched/rewatched this week:

A Bridge Too Far (1977, Richard Attenborough, Hoopla) - 3/5

Scent of a Woman (1992, Martin Brest, Netflix) - 4/5

The Illusionist (2006, Neil Burger, Netflix) - 2/5

First Reformed (2018, Paul Schrader, Google Play) - 5/5

As always, further writing on all of these can be found at my Letterboxd.

We’re also rewatching a lot of Jeopardy! on Netflix, as Netflix has, as part of a deal with the show to promote its upcoming all-stars tournament, put on a few of the special tournaments featuring some of the biggest champions, and I gotta say, when you watch a lot of Jeopardy! in a row, you start to get serious opinions about the betting strategies in Final Jeopardy.

That’s all for this week. Stay frosty.