U of T professor agrees BIPOC is bullsh!t

Sweet vindication for the pot-addled hillbilly;  a philosophy prof at U of T has an opinion piece in the Globe and Mail today that essentially reprises something I wrote a month ago, Why BIPOC is bullsh!t. Here's a quote from Professor Joseph Heath;

... the Black population in Canada consists almost entirely of immigrants and their immediate descendants.

Exactly! They voluntarily came to Canada of their own accord. Their ancestors were not brought here against their will in the holds of slave ships. They are every bit as much "settlers" in this country as are the white settlers.

Heath goes on to suggest an alternative, more "Canadian" acronym for Canada's non-white population; FIVN, which stands for Francophone, Indigenous, and Visible Minority. I believe he's partially contradicting himself by favouring the Fs over the Is, but IFVM doesn't quite roll off the tongue as easily.

As much as I appreciate the back-up, I suspect the wokesters at U of T will soon be circulating a petition to have Professor Heath tarred, feathered, and run out of town. He will stand accused of erasing Blacks from the Canadian experience.

He is not. He is merely suggesting a more appropriate acronym.

Building a Toronto for the Beautiful People

It's been twelve years since urban planning guru Richard Florida arrived, to much fanfare, at the University of Toronto.

His arrival coincided with a great awakening among Toronto's chattering classes as to how "world class" the city had become. The city was hungry for the "creative class" baloney Florida was serving up.

He's still serving. Check out Sidewalk Labs could make Toronto a world leader in urban tech in today's Globe and Mail. Richard's got the roadmap, just released by Alphabet-Google, "that can propel Toronto to the top of the heap..."

"...Sidewalk Labs can be the propellant Toronto needs to become a world leader..." and so forth. We've got cutting edge research, we attract the world's best talent, and there's a whole lotta catalyzing going on!

It's all about "Urban Tech," dontcha know (not to be confused with Turban Tech, although there is some overlap.)

And what's that?

This new sector involves the fusing of technology and urban living and spans a plethora of emerging industries such as ride-hailing, co-living, co-working, mobility, food delivery, real estate or property tech and construction tech.

Got it? Sounds like if we play our cards right, the Port Lands could be ground zero for the global gig economy!

Colour me sceptical, but isn't this more or less the same happy-talk we've heard from Florida all along? While he's been relentlessly trumpeting the pursuit of global greatness, the average price of a home in Toronto has more than doubled from under $400K to over $800K, the social housing wait-list stretches close to ten years, "affordable" housing remains much talked about but never built, and the rate of population growth going forward is expected to double.

Sounds to me like Florida is planning a city for the beautiful people sitting court-side at a Raptor's game, not the Uber drivers or the bicycle couriers delivering your shawarma to your co-working space.

No, looks like those folks will be "co-living," at maybe four or five to a studio rental.


What's not to like?

Anti-Semitic health inspectors close Steeles Deli

Took a drive down to the city yesterday, the day a bunch of not very Canadian b-ball players were putting Toronto on the map, to have lunch with Junior. He's just finished his third year at U of T, and since I haven't had a face-to-face with him for some time I thought this would be a day well spent.

He lives downtown but subbed up to the Finch station, the last stop on the Yonge line. We headed for the Steeles Deli, which has for over thirty years been a haunt for the Jewish side of the family.

It was closed. We ended up having lunch at the Red Lobster on Yonge about a mile north of Steeles. That was something of a selfish decision, since Junior doesn't care for seafood, whereas I like a fix of lobster every now and again.

On the way back to the Finch subway station we stopped at Centre Park to let Boomer have a romp before our drive back to the boonies. Boomer is the last survivor of our hound pack. At fifteen she doesn't really "romp" that much, but she appeared to have an enjoyable waddle.

Across the park was a house with a for sale sign. We speculated as to what it might be worth. We guessed a million and a half to two million. We were a little light in our guesswork, as you can see in the link.

That property is obviously being marketed as a tear-down. Somebody will spend two and a half million to buy that house, rip it down, and then spend another million putting up a 3,000 foot McMansion. This has become the norm in that neighbourhood.

What's truly remarkable is that Yonge/Steeles is by no stretch of the imagination a "posh" neighbourhood. In fact, it was developed as a typical middle-class suburb, where teachers and nurses and the like might build their nests.

But Toronto is a "world class" city now. If press reports are to be believed, folks were paying up to $60,000 for a chair at last night's Raptors game.  I assume those would be the same kind of folks who pay two and a half million for a house just to knock it down and put up a new build.

I don't mean to fire up a fresh conspiracy theory here, but has anybody else noticed what's happened to Toronto housing costs since the U of T lured urban planning guru Richard Florida to town?

It's obviously his fault...


When I got home the Farm Manager was keen to hear how lunch went at the Steeles Deli. When she heard the sad news, she had an immediate response; obviously the health inspectors on the north side of Steeles Avenue are anti-Semites.

Corporate rule

Here's a question; why has our government worked so hard to make a "deferred prosecution agreement" (DPA) available to SNC-Lavalin?

Here's another one; why has no mainstream media outlet ever investigated how hedge fund sharpie Gerald Schwartz was able to more than double the value of Husky Injection Molding in less than four years?

And another; why was Hunter Harrison universally lauded as a hero in our mainstream Canadian media for eliminating over 5,000 excellent working class jobs at CPR?

Here are some tentative answers.

The purpose of a DPA is to allow corporate entities that engage in bribery, bid-rigging, and other nefarious business practices to get off by paying a fine instead of being charged with a crime. Corporations love it! Paying the fine becomes just another cost of doing business, just like the original bribe. The Trudeau government's rationale for having slipped a DPA provision into law last year, in the back pages of an omnibus budget bill, is that Canada needs to have a level playing field vis-a-vis our competitors. Ergo, if the UK and US go easy on corporate crooks, we must too, or we won't be competitive.

Husky was the life's passion of Robert Schad, a German immigrant who started out with a little machine shop in the mid 50's. He famously made Husky one of the most desirable workplaces in Canada by providing not only good wages, but unprecedented employee perks, from free meals to free day-care to on site gyms. Getting on in years, he sold his baby to Gerald Schwartz's Onex in 2007 for just under a billion dollars.

Less than four years later, Schwartz sold Husky on to another hedge fund for two billion. How did Schwartz add a billion dollars in value to the company that Robert Schad had spent a lifetime building up? He ripped out all that feel-good stuff that detracts from the bottom line, that's how. That's what "building value" looks like in the world of hedge fund operators. 

That's appalling, disgusting, scandalous... but Gerald Schwartz is a Very Big Deal who just donated $100,000,000 to the University of Toronto. No newspaper publisher, let alone reporter, is going to touch that story with a fifty foot pole, because it would be their last story.

Canadian news media lapped up every drop of mendacious idiocy that dripped from Hunter Harrison's lips as Harrison and his hedge fund boss Bill Ackman destroyed more than 5,000 working class jobs at the iconic railroad. Harrison was "the new sheriff in town," don't you know. He was going to "change the culture" at CPR.

And he did. He replaced a culture of collegiality with a culture of fear, and he and Ackman walked away with a cool two billion for their troubles. For that, they are regarded as business geniuses by our business press.

That's what corporate rule looks like. There are innumerable case studies to choose from. Eddie Lampert looted Sears Canada to the tune of billions, leaving 16,000 pensioners in the lurch, but our media claim the company failed because of changing consumer tastes and inept management. The same corporate media still proclaim NAFTA a resounding success, even as all evidence shows it decimated Canada's manufacturing sector.

Which brings us to our current Prime Minister. He serves as an invaluable cover for the greedbags who call the shots behind the scenes. All the talk about feminism and diversity and human rights is designed to take our eye off the fact that he's 100% committed to corporate rule.

Here's a bold prediction. SNC-Lavalin will yet get their DPA. Our media, both corporate and the state broadcaster, will keep hammering away at the credibility of JWR and the (completely bogus) claim that 9,000 jobs are at risk.


Corporate rule will prevail.

Toronto Star reveals lack of money linked to low household income

Who knew?!

I quote the enlightening paragraph in its entirety;

More than four million Canadians experience food insecurity - inadequate or insecure access to food due to a lack of money - which is linked to low household income, according to the most recent data from the PROOF Food Insecurity Policy Research team at the University of Toronto.

That's by Melanie Green, found on page A4 of today's paper.

With insightful analyses like this, it's only a matter of time before serious journalism awards start finding their way to Melanie, I'm sure. As for that research team at U of T, I'm willing to bet nobody on it is part of the food-insecure cohort.

Would you like fries with your liver and onions?

No I wouldn't.

I'm not a big fan of the long drive to the city and back. Promised myself a good feed of liver and onions at the Steeles Deli, where they've long claimed to have the best liver and onions in town, as compensation for the aggravation.

So we get Junior out of res at Margaret Addison Hall on Charles in the heart of downtown, up to his summer place at Younge and Steeles, and we pop over to the Steeles Deli, me and the Farm Manager and four of our five juniors and a couple of add-ons.

I know what I want, and I'm literally drooling in anticipation. When it's my turn to order I say liver and onions.

She says, how do you want it?

I say, on the light side.

She says, and what kind of potatoes?

Totally redundant question. There's only one kind of potatoes you have with liver 'n onion, and if you're reading this blog you already know.

Mashed potatoes.

She says, we're out of mashed, would you like fries with that?

Huh?

What the hell goes on here?

Best liver 'n onions in town but you're outta mashed potatoes?

Sorry, but that simply does not compute.

Fries? With liver and onions?

NO!

A thousand times no!

I'm the kinda guy who took decades coming to grips with the fact that pineapple on pizza is socially acceptable... but fries with your liver and onion?

No way Jose.

So I had a Reuben instead. Mediocre at best. I swear the sauerkraut came out of a jar.

By then my tablemates were gushing over their matzah-ball soup, and I didn't want to ruin the mood, so I made do.

Meanwhile, I've got the cell-phone addicts at the table furiously googling election results from France. Seems almost seven million voters opted for communism and a strategic alliance with Venezuela. Good showing but not quite enough.

France is going into the run-off with a choice between a rabid racist and a guy who met his wife when he was fifteen years old... and she was his teacher!

Not that there's anything wrong with that...  although I do imagine it would raise eyebrows at the College of Teachers were such an outrage to unfold here. In France it's never even qualified as a scandal.

Go figure.

But the highlight of our lunch date was when one of the add-ons, a guy who is just wrapping a Doctor Phil in Chem at U of T, googled the listing for the place he's been renting a basement apartment in for years. His landlady done put the place on the market just this week.

Even though it's a little threadbare, he figured a million and a half.

I figured, threadbare or not, if it's within a comfy bicycle ride of UT, it's probably over two millions.

They found the listing.

His landlady is asking 3.49 million for a tear-down that might have fetched 500 thou ten years ago.

Wynne and Tory have no clue.

U of T exposed!

Some solid investigative journalism at Canada's newspaper of record has revealed an ugly truth; Canada's leading institution of higher learning claims to respect "academic freedom!"

It's right there on page A19 of today's Globe and Mail. Unlike their truth-loving brethren a couple of hours up the 401, the heretics at the University of Toronto continue to employ an academic who preaches scepticism about the efficacy of vaccines.

In fact, the article quotes a University PR hack claiming the school is "committed to the principles of academic freedom and freedom of speech," if one can even imagine such a thing!

What's next?.. an all-out critique of Big Pharma?