The Liberal Party's new logo, courtesy of the Liberal Party of Canada.

The Liberal Party of Canada’s national convention in Vancouver this past weekend produced few surprises, with delegates officially crowning Toronto Member of Parliament Michael Ignatieff as leader of the once-mighty red machine. One development that did catch our attention, however, was the unveiling on Saturday of the party’s new logo, which replaces the maple-leaf-as-rising-sun insignia in use since 2004. According to the accompanying news release, the new logo “symbolizes a re-energized Liberal Party emerging from a process of renewal engaging all Liberal members.” A fascinating claim, given that the new wordmark is nothing more than the word “Liberal” in Times New Roman, emblazoned with a maple leaf that appears to have been cribbed from the cover of Maclean’s.

Perhaps the goal is to encourage voters to think of the Liberals as Canada’s default ruling party, the one you turn to when you’re too lazy to try something different. The Grits’ recent history, however, hints that stylistic ineptitude may be to blame: the death knell for December’s abortive coalition between the Liberals, New Democrats, and Bloc Québécois was then-leader Stéphane Dion’s amateurish televised pitch to voters, an attempt that, compared to Prime Minister Harper’s highly-polished appeal, seemed to have been transmitted to TV stations via Skype.

If the new Liberal regime wants to prove that they have learnt their aesthetic lesson, rebranding themselves with an insignia that could have been created in thirty seconds on Michael Ignatieff’s laptop is not the way to go. That being said, the new logo could have been far, far worse:

Image by Jerad Gallinger/Torontoist.

Originally published on Torontoist, May 4, 2009.

Photo by Clinton Bentley from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

Toronto residents, take heart: crime in your city is less severe than you have been led to believe. That’s the word from Statistics Canada, which last week released the first edition of the Police-Reported Crime Severity Index, a new ranking created at the request of the police community that takes into account both the volume and seriousness of criminal acts. According to the index, police-reported crime across Canada declined in severity between 1998 and 2007, the last year for which data is available. The index also pegs Toronto as the metropolitan area with the lowest crime severity, well below the national average and that of other major cities such as Montreal and Vancouver.

To some, the fact that both the crime rate and crime severity are dropping—and that Toronto has the lowest crime severity of any city in Canada—would be considered a sign that our country’s justice system is working, at least for the most part. Just don’t tell that to the Toronto Sun. On the very same page as the paper’s story on the Statscan report, columnist Joe Warmington tells us in no uncertain terms that facts and figures are for chumps. Despite what the “crime-decrease movement” would have us believe, he insists, criminals are “still out there and one thing for sure [sic], no report is going to stop them from choosing their next victim.”

Photo by Phil Marion from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

To be fair, the Sun’s obsession with guns and knives is not entirely without factual basis. Statscan’s measure of violent crime severity, as opposed to crime severity in general, places Toronto closer to the national average, with the twelfth-highest severity out of Canada’s metropolitan areas. But the index suggests that the seriousness of violent crime here is significantly lower than in most of Canada’s other largest cities: Winnipeg, Edmonton, Montreal, and gang-ridden Vancouver all come in well above the national average.

The type of sensationalistic reporting seen in the Sun might be a good way to sell papers, but it has also dramatically misled the public on the issue of crime. A recent Harris-Decima survey shows that nearly 60% of Canadians mistakenly believe that crime is on the rise; only 10% of individuals polled said that crime has decreased in recent years.

With the amount of fog surrounding the topic of crime in Canada, it’s no wonder that the federal Conservatives are so easily able to exploit the issue for political gain. Rather than addressing the root causes of crime—such as poverty and, specifically, child poverty—the Harper government has favoured so-called “tough-on-crime” legislation, most of which consists of increasing penalties for offenders. Whether or not such a strategy would actually make Canada safer is beside the point; when the opposition dares to question the government’s criminal justice plan, they are labelled as soft on crime. The fear-peddling continues, with no one willing to speak up for fear of electoral defeat.

To reiterate the central argument made in our Metrocide series nine months ago, Toronto is neither perfect, nor a place to fear. Let the self-serving politicians and tabloid blowhards say what they will. Our city is a great—and safe—place to live.

Originally posted on Torontoist, April 23, 2009.

Several bloggers are reporting that Jack Layton and the NDP may support the Conservative government in exchange for the Tories’ backing for a referendum on proportional representation.

For a party so unwaveringly critical of the Conservative government, this may seem like an incredibly self-serving move—and it is. But it is also the best opportunity the New Democrats may ever have to increase their influence in Parliament.

Should this turn out to be more than just a rumour, proportional representation could quickly move from the fringes of the federal political scene to the mainstream. PR has a significant chance of becoming a reality in British Columbia next month; if Jack Layton is smart, the rest of the country could soon have their say too.

Originally posted on Torontoist, April 10, 2009.

Photo of sign above i deal coffee's Kensington Market location by Michael D'Amico.

Local latte mainstay i deal coffee is about to be sold. At least that’s the plan, according to founder and resident bean-master James Fortier. But while you would be forgiven for assuming that the decision to unload the company is because of the topsy-turvy economy, Fortier says that that’s not the case. As it turns out, it’s all about making time for his family-to-be.

“We’re going to move to Costa Rica and be farmers,” Fortier told Torontoist yesterday, referring to himself and his wife-to-be, Heather Olsen-Seabourne, who runs i deal’s east-end location and creates the company’s baked goods. “We’re going to get married next year and start to have kids, and we certainly don’t want to be working fifty hours a week when we’re trying to raise kids. We love what we do, but we also acknowledge that we don’t want to have kids and have nannies raise them or anything like that.”

Fortier and Olsen-Seabourne have yet to list i deal with a broker—they plan to do so next week—but several potential buyers have already approached them to discuss taking the company off their hands. So far, though, none have passed muster. “We’ve had lots of people who’ve kind of wanted to buy it, but we haven’t necessarily wanted to sell it to them, because they’re not really a good fit.”

Inside i deal coffee's Kensington Market location. Photo by Rebecca Pinkus.

Under Fortier, i deal has made a name for itself as a purveyor of sustainable, high-quality, in-house-roasted beans. Even though he plans to leave the company behind, the continuation of i deal’s reputation for impeccably selected and prepared coffee is at the front of his mind.

“It’s our baby, you know?” said Fortier, who opened the first i deal in Kensington Market in early 1999. Olsen-Seabourne came on board five years later when the company began to expand to new locations (in addition to cafés on Nassau Street and Queen Street East, they also own shops on Ossington Avenue and in Ottawa’s Byward Market).

“You can’t spend eleven years running a business and then just [sell it to whoever]. Well, I guess you could, but we don’t want to,” Fortier said with a laugh. “We have twenty-two employees. I don’t want to sell it to somebody who’s just going to fire everybody, and I don’t want to sell it to somebody who’s going to start roasting inferior coffee and just coast on the name.”

Once Fortier and Olsen-Seabourne locate a suitable buyer, they hope to find a way to maintain ties with i deal, but as suppliers rather than operators. “We will grow some coffee” in Costa Rica, said Fortier. “We could probably grow specific, fairly esoteric varietals of coffee and have an excellent market for it here.” As the son of dairy farmers, he’s also excited to raise cattle of his family’s plot of land. “I’m interested in grass-fed beef and organic milk. We’ve been organic foodies for a long time, so we would like to get into that whole realm.”

As for the pair’s future as café proprietors, Avid surfers, so a little coffee shop and bakery on the beach is one idea. Call it i deal south—a little taste of Toronto in the tropics. Food, drink, family, and fun: maybe sometimes you can have it all.

Following on the heels of Conservative suggestions that they are preparing for an election later in 2009,  anonymous Liberal sources have told Québec newspaper Le Devoir that they expect to introduce a motion of non-confidence in Parliament early this autumn. If the motion is successful and the government is defeated, Canadians end up going to the polls in late November or early December.

From Le Devoir (translation mine):

“In 2009, for us, there is a 95 percent chance that there will be an election,” said a close advisor of Michael Ignatieff, who asked for anonymity in order to speak openly on the sensitive subject. “At a given moment, you can’t wait forever. You can’t play cat and mouse. You must have the courage to defeat the government. As the economy deteriorates, you must be able to present an alternative option; if not, you endorse the government.

In other words, prepare for a summer of government announcements and opposition denouncements. Let the games begin!

Prime Minister Stephen Harper

There are reports today (link in French) that the Conservative Party is gearing up for a possible fall election. I hear your groans now: “What? Another election already? We’ve been through three in the last half decade! What gives?”

Simply put, the federal political scene has seen a massive shift in the past few months, and not to the Tories’ benefit. By all indications, their caution is well warranted.

Immediately following December’s coalition debacle, in which the three opposition leaders (including then–Liberal chief Stéphane Dion) tried and failed to replace Stephen Harper as prime minister without going to the ballot box, the Canadian public moved firmly into the Conservative corner, with a Strategic Counsel poll showing as many as 45 percent of voters expressing support for the Tories, including about 50 percent of Ontarians.

Paradoxically, that backlash seems to have been a blessing for the Liberals. Forced into a corner, the beleaguered party swiftly replaced Dion with new leader Michael Ignatieff. The prompt leadership change and the resulting increase in confidence in the party has led to a dramatic increase in fundraising success for the Grits. According to reports, the party has nearly erased its $2-million debt, which will allow it to focus on building up an election war chest, something that was sorely lacking leading up to and during the 2008 campaign.

Overshadowing all other concerns, however, is the economy. It’s impossible to know how effective the Conservative government’s economic strategy has been thus far, but politically speaking that’s beside the point. As more and more workers lose their jobs—61,300 full-time positions disappeared in March of this year alone—it’s almost inevitable that the growing ranks of the unemployed and underemployed will focus their anger and frustration on the party in power, even if the opposition would have fared no better in their handling of the crisis. With Canadians’ financial situations becoming increasingly imperilled, the Liberals have taken a slight lead over the Conservatives in the national polls (34 percent to 32 percent, according to a recent Strategic Counsel survey) and have vaulted ahead of the Tories in seat-rich Ontario (45 percent support for the Liberals, compared to 32 percent for the Conservatives).

While the Liberals’ lead is quite tenuous, Stephen Harper seems to have changed his strategy toward the Grits and their leader, this week accusing Michael Ignatieff of having “absolutely no moral compass.” Is this a sign of more personal attacks to come? Past experience says yes: the Conservatives’ constant character attacks on Stéphane Dion were devastating, leading the public to largely view the former Liberal leader as weak-willed an ineffective.

Times have changed, however, and the Conservative strategy of old may no longer be enough to keep their grip on the reins of power. Unlike a year ago, the Liberals are raking in cash and have a leader that Canadians seem to be warming up to. If the economy keeps sinking into the muck, as it seems likely to do, Ignatieff will probably pull the trigger and move to defeat the government sooner rather than later, arguing that the prime minister has failed to protect Canadians’ jobs and livelihoods. Barring some kind of economic miracle or a huge misstep on the part of the Liberal campaign, it could well be Ignatieff’s fight to lose.

Originally posted on Torontoist, April 7, 2008.

The folks from Improv In Toronto were up to their old tricks recently, bringing some more whimsy to unsuspecting underground commuters. Those familiar with the merry band of urban pranksters know the drill: participants meet up, head to a public place, and do something unexpected to make onlookers’ days just a little more interesting. In this particular iteration, the group decided to add a public transit twist to the Discovery Channel’s “I Love the World” song (itself based on the camping tune “I Love the Mountains”), turning it into an ode to the Toronto subway system’s red seats, transfers, and door chimes.

While we at Torontoist appreciate the sentiment of Improv In Toronto’s rose-tinted lyrics, riding the rocket does have its frustrating moments as well. With that in mind, here’s our version of the subway sing-along:

The folks from Improv In Toronto were up to their old tricks recently, bringing some more whimsy to unsuspecting underground commuters. Those familiar with the merry band of urban pranksters know the drill: participants meet up, head to a public place, and do something unexpected to make onlookers’ days just a little more interesting. In this particular iteration, the group decided to add a public transit twist to the Discovery Channel’s “I Love the World” song (itself based on the camping tune “I Love the Mountains”), turning it into an ode to the Toronto subway system’s red seats, transfers, and door chimes.

While we at Torontoist appreciate the sentiment of Improv In Toronto’s rose-tinted lyrics, riding the rocket does have its frustrating moments as well. With that in mind, here’s our version of the subway sing-along:

I love the subway
Too bad it’s such a pain
The stairs at Dufferin Station
Flooded by a little rain
And how about some money
For the Downtown Relief Line?
Boom-de-ya-da
Boom-de-ya-da
Boom-de-ya-da
Boom-de-ya-da

And now about those buses
They take us to and fro
It’s just too bad that
They are so frigging slow
Since when does “frequent service”
Mean “in twenty minutes’ time”?
Boom-de-ya-da
Boom-de-ya-da
Boom-de-ya-da
Boom-de-ya-da

Okay, enough complaining
(It’s the Toronto way)
Public transit’s future
Looks much brighter than today
We’re going to take the TTC
Up until the day we die!
Boom-de-ya-da
Boom-de-ya-da
Boom-de-ya-da
Boom-de-ya-da

Originally posted on Torontoist, April 6, 2009.

Several questions come to mind upon reading the above poem found taped to the window of an east-end home. First, what happened between the author and his wife to solicit this rage-filled verse? Second, are “water skin” and “green head” meant to be insults? And lastly, what do donuts and a family of pigeons have to do with anything?

Unfortunately, other signs apparently penned by the same hand do not provide much clarity: one invites readers to “Blow up this house,” while another labels the domicile as the “First black house on Pape,” an item of local history the accuracy of which is dubious at best.

Regardless, a second cardboard-mounted poem spotted on the same house last week, entitled “Easy Woo,” proves that this local wordsmith is no one-hit wonder:

You boil shit
I am happy
You carry wok
I am relief
(2 kinds of Woo hi & lo)
(2 [is congruent to] history [is congruent to] his tory [is not equal to] story)
Air milage of Canada

Griffin Prize, here we come!

Photos by Squeakyrat from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

In the wake of the 2008 federal election and the coalition debacle that followed, public confidence in Canada’s political leaders is at an all-time low. Turnout for the October vote was the weakest in the country’s history, with less than 60 percent of the electorate casting a ballot. In the face of this ever-worsening apathy, a disparate group of activists, academics and ordinary citizens are fighting what they believe to be the root of the crisis: the electoral system itself. By replacing our antiquated system with a form of proportional representation, they hope to breathe life into Canada’s floundering democracy and ensure that everyone gets a seat at the table.

Fighting for a Fair Vote

Larry Gordon is the executive director of Fair Vote Canada, a grassroots, multi-partisan organization dedicated to raising public awareness about electoral reform at the national level. To Gordon, the fact that so many citizens are staying away from the ballot box is no surprise. “Most Canadians kind of have a gut anger about politics,” he says. “But a lot of people haven’t connected the dots between that gut feeling that politics doesn’t work for me, that I don’t really count in politics, and the fact that it’s the voting system that’s creating that dynamic.”

The problem, says Gordon, is Canada’s first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system, inherited from the United Kingdom. FPTP divides the country into single-member constituencies, each represented in the House of Commons by the person who gets the most votes in an election, regardless of whether or not they receive a majority of votes. Under this system, the number of seats political parties get in the House of Commons tends to be very different from the proportion of the popular vote those parties receive. Established parties and parties with strong regional power bases are favoured, with emerging movements and smaller, broad-based parties put at a significant disadvantage.

By contrast, electoral systems based on proportional representation are designed to ensure that the number of seats won by each party closely mirrors parties’ take of the popular vote. Types of proportional representation include single transferable vote (STV), in which each constituency is represented by multiple winners chosen by a ranked ballot, and mixed-member proportional representation (MMP), which uses a two-part ballot to elect representatives from both geographic constituencies and non-geographic party lists.

Unlike proportional representation, which tends to lead to coalition governments representing a variety of political views, the skewed nature of FPTP often leads to “phony majorities,” where a party wins a majority of seats despite receiving less than 50 percent of the popular vote. Although Canada’s most recent federal elections have yielded minority parliaments, phony majorities were the norm in the 1980s and 1990s, with Progressive Conservative Brian Mulroney and Liberal Jean Chrétien winning big despite only once winning a majority of the popular vote (Mulroney’s Tories received 50.03 percent of the national vote in 1984, resulting in an astonishing 74.8 percent of House of Commons seats).

According to University of Victoria professor Denis Pilon, phony majorities are the most undemocratic result of our current electoral system. He explains: “When we allow a minority of voters to gain a majority of the legislative seats and a hundred percent of the power, we don’t get very democratic results, we don’t get much deliberation.” Green Party strategist Chris Tindal agrees. “If your voting system is flawed or your democracy isn’t as healthy as it could be,” he says, “then that affects every single decision that a government makes.”

Phony majorities reduce governments’ responsiveness to grassroots activism as well. Says Pilon, “A government that has a phony majority can sit back and ignore ten thousand people on the lawn of the legislature. But a coalition government or a minority government, well they can’t be quite so callous to that degree of mobilization.”

Critics also argue that FPTP perpetuates the under-representation of traditionally oppressed groups, such as women and aboriginals. “Our system is a drag on diversity,” says Pilon. “If you go to a country where no one wants women to get elected, putting in a PR system isn’t going to get any women elected. But if you go to a society where the attitudes have changed and people want women elected, then a PR system will adapt and accommodate that much more quickly than a country using our system.” Pilon points to Sweden’s proportionally elected Rikstag, of which nearly half of the members are female. By comparison, only 22 percent of Canadian MPs elected in 2008 were women.

New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton summed up the frustration of reform advocates in a recent interview with news website Torontoist: “We are not a modern democracy. We’re using a system that was invented before the telephone. We’ve gone through quantum leaps to perform in other areas, but we’ve left a system of representation in place from the Gutenberg era.”

The Rocky Road to Reform

The drive to modernization has led several provinces to look into overhauling their electoral systems. Between 2004 and 2007, commissions in Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick and citizens’ assemblies in British Columbia and Ontario recommended that their provinces make the change to proportional representation, leading to hopes that the federal government might follow suit.

BC, PEI and Ontario scheduled referenda on electoral reform, but in a trend decried by critics, each government required that for the Yes side to win, it had to receive a supermajority of 60 percent overall support and a simple majority of votes in 60 percent of electoral districts. Only in BC did proportional representation come close to passing that threshold, with 57.7 percent of voters approving of the change. The referendum lost by a significant margin in both PEI and Ontario. (A vote scheduled to be held in New Brunswick was cancelled by the newly elected Liberal government in 2007.)

Fair Vote Canada believes that the biggest force holding back change, both in the provinces and at the national level, is opposition from the political elite. But despite the common perception that electoral reform would most benefit the political left—namely the NDP, which receives far fewer seats in the House of Commons under the current system than its share of the popular vote would suggest, and the Green Party, which has no MPs despite winning nearly seven percent of the vote in 2008—it’s not just centre-right politicians who are fighting against reform.

Besides the Liberals and Conservatives, the biggest winner under FPTP is the left-leaning Bloc Québécois, which in 2008 won nearly two-thirds of Québec seats with only 38.1 percent of the vote in the province. Many provincial New Democrats across Canada hesitate to support electoral reform as well, so long as the current system lets them win the occasional phony majority. Thus, says Gordon, the issue of proportional representation “is not about left versus right, or urban versus rural, or east versus west, or any of the ways we often divide ourselves politically. This is really about grassroots citizens versus [the] political elite and people who have power that they don’t deserve.”

The political elite’s resistance to change is why Fair Vote Canada wants the federal government to let ordinary Canadians decide what kind of voting system they want, rather than a commission of politicians and academics. The assemblies on electoral reform created in BC and Ontario were composed of citizens randomly selected from the provinces’ electoral districts, with mechanisms in place to ensure gender equality and representation from First Nations communities. These citizens’ assemblies could serve as a model for a future body created to debate electoral reform at the national level.

As Goes BC, So Goes the Nation

The political uproar caused by the election of late 2008 and the ensuing coalition crisis has led to an unprecedented level of support for Fair Vote Canada and its work. But there’s still a big hurdle to clear before electoral reform can enter the national limelight.

Because the British Columbia referendum on single transferable vote came so close to passing in 2005, the Liberal provincial government decided to give voters another opportunity to consider the question of reform in 2009. Activists believe that the outcome of the May 12 vote will make or break the national electoral reform movement, making this a critical time for PR supporters across Canada.

So for now, the fight for change shifts back to BC, with the entrenched political elite on high alert and STV supporters gearing up for a much tougher fight in round two. Says Pilon, “It’s going to be a different kind of referendum this time, and I think it’s going to be an uphill battle.”

But it’s a battle the pro-reform side intends to win. Fair Vote Canada is urging activists and supporters from across the country to travel west to join in the effort. With a bit of luck and a lot of hard work, victory could be within their grasp. And if change comes to BC, the rest of Canada could get its chance at a fair vote too.

It must have seemed like a good idea at the time.

During the 2006 election, Stephen Harper made fiscal accountability one of the defining tenets of the Conservative Party’s drive to unseat then–Prime Minister Paul Martin. It was a deft move. The sponsorship scandal was still fresh in Canadians’ minds, and the Liberal Party’s cries of “We can change! Honest!” were largely falling on deaf ears.

After winning the election, the Conservatives moved quickly to introduce the Federal Accountability Act, one of the components of which was the creation of the office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer, who would be tasked with providing independent analysis of Canada’s finances in order to ensure that the government is kept—here’s that word again—accountable.

When the position was finally filled by Kevin Page in March 2008, the Tories were glowing in their praise for their new watchdog. Then–Government House Leader Peter Van Loan complimented him warmly, saying, “With his expertise in economics, Mr. Page is a fine choice to fill this position.”

Fast-forward to today, when Conservative MPs appear to have had enough of the once-lauded Mr. Page. Such seemed to be the case following the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s admittedly depressing presentation to the House of Commons finance committee yesterday, in which he declared that the Canadian economy is faring much worse than the government predicted just two months ago when it tabled its budget and federal deficits over the next two years will be between $4–5 billion higher than expected. Tory MP Mike Wallace, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the budget officer is tasked with providing independent analysis and not Conservative talking points, demanded to know why Page “didn’t show us any positive stuff that Canada’s doing?” Page’s answer: because the good stuff is far, far outweighed by the bad. The real answer: because it’s not Page’s job to do public relations for the Conservative Party.

The lesson here for the Harper government is that when it comes to accountability, don’t forget to walk the walk. Independent oversight makes for a more open and accountable government, but only if you actually listen to the advice that you receive. And when an independent watchdog doesn’t say exactly what you want them to, don’t moan about it. Not only does it undermine your own credibility, it makes you sound whiny, too.