No win

Toronto's City Council's acrimonious debate over the fate of the Gardiner Expressway seems one of utter futility. They are about to render a decision. It is the ultimate no win.

At the moment, the whole council seems completely split right down the middle. Both sides really don't know what they are talking about. Personal agendas flow into the scene. The vote took place during the writing.

The Gardiner Expressway was called the mistake by the lake when it was constructed. In high school, one teacher gave us a study in urban planning. His assessment about its construction was that once used it was going to be like an urban planning Heroin. It does what it was designed to do. Once employed it became an addiction hard to kick.

Challenging most logic, if one carefully leafs through the various projects, one finds that they are all valid. Another commonality infused in each advocacy seems laced with the blissful ignorance of winter conditions. A flaw in both sides was in the limited view these people had of the highway. One would naturally think that the highway existed for the sole convenience of the suburban commuter. Another problem is the speed of which it is constructed. The City engineers seem to believe that the structure will eventually become dangerous about the year 2020. For a major project this is not all that far off.

A lot of political capital was expended by each side. The boulevard advocates abandoned cited magical studies and polling reports. They used every euphemism for the word stupid referring to their opponents. They had studies. There were studies supporting a highway teardown, There was an equal number of myths. For many politicians of both sides, if not all, this debate will come to haunt them in the future.

For the observer this debate seemed a real life example of the no win scenario. Truly the Gardiner Expressway debate can be called the Kobayashi Maru of city politics. There were four choices. Keep it. Tear it down. Or merge the highway projects into something called a Hybrid. Each version would work. BUT

No matter the choice, it would be wrong. The people who lost the close vote vowed to continue to vocalize against it. This project isn't really worth the political fight. It was something that had to be dealt with. The losing councillors and over social media vowed to keep up the fight. The whole debate was a red herring argument.

The same people that want to tear down are also in a severe fight to prevent the island airport to expand to  accommodate jet aircraft. They have proven very poor advocates of any position. Here is a proposal that would have a far greater impact on the city than that intersection. Some of the City Mayor's Executive came out for tearing it down completely.

Basically these councillors were voting against the boss. This can only happen so many times without being forced out of their perk laden cushy appointments. Now the airport vote will be another very close vote with many of the same people sitting on the fence. Several key votes are on the Executive Committee. These councillors expended a lot of political capital and may have to hold their votes to support the expansion of the airport.

It is why this was a no win. By fighting this issue so severely, the expansion of the airport will pass because the four votes on the Executive committee will be forced to vote for the expansion. They lost a lot of their political blood on their support of another plan. Many of the councillors also prove themselves to be totally undemocratic vowing to reverse council decision. These same political hacks will not have the same persuasive power because its going to be very difficult after calling other politicians basically thoughtless idiots on this lesser issue.

Regardless, no matter the choice, every choice is wrong. And that is a very rare example of the no win situation.

Solomon's wisdom

How does Amanda Lang get away with it? The ethically challenged Canadian Boredcasting Corpseration (CBC) entered a new low.

Apparently some boob tube yapper puppy got involved with a sideline. Art dealing. Evan Solomon evidently was palsy walsy with a big time art collector, who in turn, wanted to sell some of the junk out of his collection. Solomon set up the contacts with a couple of well known buyers.

Solomon, a golden boy at the mother corpse, and air apparent to the other ethically challenged Peter Mansbridge. For those who don't know, Mansbridge is a news anchor. The linkage is a total insult to the intelligence of all anchors.

Golden boy used his high brow contacts to connect with the art dealer. The art collector and the expired tv personality had a working professional relationship with Solomon in the role of a paid broker.

The fact that Solomon worked as an agent for the collector wasn't known to the buyers. Solomon received a commission. In a latter transaction, more art moved from the collector to the repeat buyer. Solomon managed to find out and wanted a commission for transaction as the seller had originally a secret contract with said mouth piece.

The Solomon wanted a full commission which would have been over a rumored million bucks in Canadian currency. Alas, alas and rather predictably the collector offered a sum one fifth that. Solomon dug his heels in, he wanted more. A miraculous event occurred. Solomon's secret activities were leaked to the venerated ventilated Toronto Star. In turn the CBC found out.

In a sudden tightening of the ethical line in the sand, the CBC fired Solomon. Considering that the Mother Corpse had let Amanda Lang off with a slap on the back, for ethical issues far more serious than Solomon.

In brief review, a CBC reporter filed a report about the Royal Bank of Canada's (RBC) creative use of  the federal government's Temporary Foreign Worker's Program (TFW). The TFW was created to enable companies hire foreign workers to fill out vacancies that Canadians weren't able to do. Its original goal was to enable agriculture to bring in agricultural workers for harvest.  Harper's Federalis then allowed other companies to participate.

The creative part was that RBC, a bank, a bloated creation of greed, brought in temporary foreign workers, had them trained by Canadians for jobs, fired the trainers, then filled these positions with the same far cheaper TFW's. This clear cut egregious evil act was reported by a CBC reporter.

Lang, a major host on CBC's Business Program, attempted to spike or kill the story before it was aired. Lang was fucking a senior RBC executive. She tried everything to stop it even to the point of trash talking the other CBC reporter. Again another media company got a hold of this little tidbit. It hit the fan.

Further she had received speaking fees from some companies. Those companies seemed to be mentioned frequently and favorably on her television program.

The CBC hired a third party to evaluate Lang's activities. That third party, a PR firm, listed the very same companies that dealt with Lang, or screwed Lang, as their business clients. So this PR firm issued a report that Lang did nothing ethically wrong. Bizarrely the CBC accepted this report and kept Lang in their employ.

Compare the level of ethical challenge of Lang with that of Solomon's activities. Consider the fact that the mother corpse decided on Gian Gomeshi's alleged sexual assaults with a heavy swift action. Solomon's activities were severely in a grey area. His activities did not directly impact CBC. Gomeshi's did directly impact. Lang's activities not only effected the CBC it also impaired the journalistic freedom of the corpse.

The CBC seems to have a sexist double standard. If you're a female offender its okay. If you are male you're out the door.

Drop it I tell ya. Drop it buddy

Its a magnificent struggle for lunacy. Some want the Gardiner East section to be removed. Some, like the furious Mayor, want a hybrid. Sort of a highway mule with no fertility.

Like you, I could really care less. But what is distressing from a third party standpoint is that both sides are trotting out the BS. The advocates for the mule give numbers about time increases. Advocates for removal trot out minimal figures.

Worse still is the fanciful project costs. Everyone on every side seems to be giving rather low estimates of their options. Going on history, City history, I'll betcha dollars to donuts* that those are about one third to one quarter of the final real costs of each project.

Reason. That is  particularly complex topography to build anything since it is also at the mouth of a small, albeit definable river mouth. Worse still, they have to work around existing infrastructure maintaining some traffic flow.

In all the arguments, I don't think people seem to regard that section of the highway as part of the entire highway system from Montreal and Ottawa to Windsor, to Sarnia, to Fort Erie.

The debaters seem to argue about six hours out of a 24 hour period. And the removers seem to say, well everyone will have to start earlier without adding the ever so critical point of saying that people will go from work to home even later. The cherry on this little sundae gem is the fact that they are pointing to public transit the same day that the vaunted TTC subway system collapsed because it seems no one has a cell phone. 

Had all the stations were equipped with cell phone service the supervisors could have bypassed. No. Seems out of all the TTC supervisors on staff none have cell phones or use them. They could ask the customers to use those cells to move trains. Nope.

In off peak, night hours a lot of truck traffic flows down and up the DVP/Gardiner Queen Elizabeth corridor. Not all. But about 1/4 of trans-city traffic to Niagara slides down through. Trucks from up north come down the 400, 404 at night and off peak hours, they choose which way to go.

 

Some confused Ryerson puppies on the Star seem to hate the Gardiner for the most trivial reasoning. One columnist even cited how San Francisco should be the model because it no longer has its harbour expressway. The guy skirted around several things. First different geography SFO is on a peninsula. Second SFO is an end point of the ground transport system, Toronto is the major hub of the highway network in the middle of the highway network. Third, the reporter failed to give equal weight to Edmonton, Regina, Calgary, and Winnipeg which all have ring expressways to facilitate commercial traffic. Toronto has a functioning ring highway under several different names unfortunately. (401,DVP,Gardiner, 427)

Removing that section will move that commercial traffic all the way through Toronto and onto the hard pressed Hwy 427. Plus the advocates of the removal seem to believe that if they remove that part of the Gardiner, that removes all the traffic. Its just going to move it onto other streets where their precious TTC operates.

Neither side seems to stand up to the measure of reality. Its now more political than logical.

TTC in total crisis

Emerging from the mists surrounding reality seems that the Toronto Transit Commission entered a serious period of crisis without anyone noticing. This morning's sudden, unexplained total communications breakdown on the critical Subway system points to the parade of problems surrounding today's TTC.

Clearly the Chief General Manager, Andy Byford, lords over this land of disasters. If the subway breakdown was a one off, then that is the way life is. Mark this list, for it is a list, these serious service interruptions continually occur wholly under Byford's apologetic announcements. Up to this point, Byford managed to slide off the problems onto previous managers, administrations and politicians.

He's continually referring to the necessary upgrades of the Subway communications and signal systems. Yet, with every weekend shutdown seems followed by a series of major service interruptions. With each the TTC seems to minimize the effects of each service interruption. Yes 150,000 riders were affected. Beyond that number is the total failure of the TTC or its Chairman to acknowledge the real impact of TTC traffic interruptions.

Each one of those are workers or students especially at the rush hours. Rush hours rarely have shoppers or tourists by traveling by choice. Each person must arrive at work on time and faces an wage decrease due to lateness. Each working rider also faces the reality that an employer regards their tardiness as the responsibility of the worker, not the responsibility of the TTC. Each person faces justified dismissal from their employment. Each person likely has a family relying on their ability for arriving at work in a timely fashion.

Further, each employer hires people to do necessary work when the work must be done. That is why any employer pays people for tasks. Not having those tasks dealt with costs companies including the likely loss of revenue. System wide failures cost all city residents monies whether or not they actually take the TTC.

At the end of this, who remains accountable? Today's TTC planning seems a shambles. Seems, no exists in shambles. There are massive cost overruns and project delays. There are service interruptions. There is flip flopping by the operations managers as they follow the whims of city politicians into a variety of ideas, none of which are followed through on. When a City Council creates, and begins a plan, the following political incarnations cancel, reverse and adversely modify those projects.

Even with the weaknesses of the LRT plans for rapid streetcar corridors in Scarborough, those projects might have been nearing or fully completed had not the retrograde thinking of a group of thuggish politicians representing the opposite end of the city blocked and reversed planning. Those projects had been fully financed. Then they took credit for subways that do not exist using questionable funding profiles that have been proven totally false and inadequate when compared with the reality experienced with the York University subway extension project.

It should be pointed out that swift action came with the YorkU extension cost overruns with the firing of a couple of managers directly responsible for that project. But while these poor people were responsible, they weren't the people accountable. The TTC Board and its Chief General Manager are the people who are accountable. The latter group seems to have Teflon coating when it comes to accountability. The Toronto media seems to buy their excuses hook, line and net fully supporting those people.

The long list of subway failures, of project delays, of cost overruns falls within the tenure period of Andy Byford. Clearly he remains because he appeases the political delusions of the TTC Board. Byford never stood up to the political interference from the Toronto City Council. How does the City fix it? First diminish the political influence on the TTC Board. Second, insist upon the resignation of Andy Byford. Too many adverse events have occurred to smooth over the Chief General Manager's ability to politically survive that list which he is accountable for.