Toronto's transit system is actually pretty good

Most Canadian media outlets and newspapers are reporting on the recently released transit report card from the Toronto Region Board of Trade. Here are a few of the headlines: City had least reliable service in 2022; Toronto transit has least reliable  in the GTA; TTC has the least reliable transit system compared to over municipalities in Ontario; TTC ranked last among GTHA transit systems in new report card; etc.

You get the idea: Toronto's transit system is rubbish, the worst of the worst. But, actually, service reliability was just one of many factors that the Board of Trade looked at. Overall, Toronto's TTC earned a solid B rating, along with Mississauga, the highest rating of any transit system tested. Hamilton and Waterloo scored a B-, Oakville and Milton a terrible D-. If Toronto were to expand its express bus service, add more streetcar routes, and address some safety issues on the TTC, it would have scored an A, says the Board of Trade.

You would never have gleaned that from a quick perusal of the headlines, or even a quick read of most most them. So much for press transparency and objectivity.

Oil companies revert to form

So, here's a depressing article: Oil giants ramp up hunt for new deposits.

Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the price of oil and gas has spiked, and the major European oil companies in particular have lost no time in pivoting (as they say) back to their old traditional oil-and-gas business. The development of new deposits, and the search for new potential reserves, is on in earnest once more. It's the Wild West all over again.

Companies like Shell and BP, which talked a good game about their transition to a more forward-looking, longer term, more environmental focus on renewable energy, have suddenly reverted back to their base business of fossil fuel extraction. Record profits, and the promise of more, will do that.

I guess it was never about doing the right thing after all; it was all a matter of chasing after short-term profits for their rapacious shareholders. If arms sales were more profitable, they would get into that too (well, actually...)

It doesn't come as a surprise. But it is, nevertheless, infinitely depressing.

Toyota solid state battery could be (another) game-changer

Over the years, I've reported many promising new developments in EV battery technology. The word "game-changer" has often been bandied around with gay abandon. Well, here's another one.

Toyota, of all companies - after single-handedly kick-starting hybrid car technology, it has been conspicuous by its absence in the full electric vehicle field - has announced it has developed a solid state battery with a range of 1,200km (745 miles) that charges in less than 10 minutes. Now, wouldn't that be nice?

I have looked into solid state batteries before, and there are several challenges still to be overcome, not least their cost. But the fact that Toyota is making this very public announcement suggests that they are making some serious progress. Yes, it's still at the prototype stage, and scaling-up is always fraught. But it could be a, well, game-changer.

The chances of a true centrist party in Canada are slim

Speaking of "yet another", there was yet another article in the paper bemoaning the divisiveness of current Canadian politics. In a time where the Conservatives have moved too far right and embraced populism, the Liberals are too divisive, too lefty, and too prone to virtue-signalling, and the NDP too anti-business and unrealistic (or so we are told), it raises the old jokey adage "Where is the Purple Party?", the party to synthesize the best of right and left, to find a place in the middle where most Canadians secretly long to be.

It's a bit of a disingenuous plea. The Liberals historically have filled that niche, swinging chameleon-like to the left and right as needed to appeal to the middle class and the middle-of-the-road. The Liberals always considered themselves the "natural governing party" of Canada, and indeed they have been very successful, forming the government for well over 70% of the last century, and over 60% since the year 2000. But with that success came a certain cockiness and sense of entitlement that many Canadians find distasteful.

At the moment, the Liberals (especially with their "confidence-and-supply" deal with the NDP), are drifting to the left - not that bad a thing in my view - in order to compensate for the Conservatives' distinct rightward list. But the chances of a bona fide centrist party arising and gaining the attention of the electorate? Slim to none, I would say. 

Meanwhile, get used to the nastiness and ad hominem attacks that characterizes modern Canadian politics. We have a long way to go before we sink to the levels of modern-day US politics, but they (particularly the Conservatives under Pierre Poilievre) are learning some of the underhand tricks that makes politics south of the border so fractured and fractious.

What's in a flag?

There's an interesting and fun article this week's Economist magazine on vexillology, the science of flag design. It's not something I've ever thought much about, except idly wonder why so many flags feature the colours red, white and blue. But flags can be powerful, and their design is important, and they can be an important rallying point for a country's people. Think of Canada's red maple leaf, or Ukraine's iconic sky-blue and wheat-yellow banner.

The article starts by noting that several American states are currently in the process of redesigning their flags, mainly because their old ones are badly design, overly busy, or just ill-advised. It then goes on to enumerate some basic principles of good flag design. Firstly, keep it simple - can a child draw it from memory? Keep its symbolism meaningful (think of Israel's Star of David, or Americas 50 stars and 13 stripes)? Avoid politics (think of Mozambique's AK-47 gun). Limit the palette to a few basic colours (South Africa is one of the few to boast six colours in its flag, two or three are much more common, and Jamaica, amazingly, is the only country that does not include the colour red in its flag). Be distinctive (e.g. Nepal's jagged double pennon is the only national flag that is not regular, and Switzerland and the Vatican are the only countries that have a square, not rectangular flag). And finally, don't just copy another country's flag, to avoid the situations of Indonesia and Monaco, and Romania and Chad, who share identical flags.

Believing that the arts are not essential is apparently a contentious viewpoint

After reading yet another article about how essential art and culture are to humanity, despite the impossibility of pinning down any economic benefits, I'm still not totally sold on the idea.

I know it's the conventional wisdom, at least in progressive liberal circles. But it just rings slightly false to me. It seems to me that art and culture are just a nice-to-haves, not a sine qua non of human life. I like music, plays and movies as much as the next guy (the plastics arts perhaps less so), but they strike me as middle (and upper) class pastimes, and hardly essential to life as we know it. 

This will perhaps be anathema to many, but is art important to a homeless guy or a cancer victim or a displaced migrant in a war zone? Surely, you'd be hard-pressed to argue that. Even during the pandemic, intellectuals were arguing that we need to keep up funding for the arts, otherwise we would, well, lose our humanity in some poorly-articulated way. But what people really needed was help with their rent, protection of their jobs, and vaccines.

So, the question has been asked before, ad nauseam, but what is the value of art? Is it a basic human right? Or can we actually do without it? A quick Google search for "is art and culture really that important?" yields a myriad links, almost all affirming that art is indeed an important, nay, essential, part of our lives. Even a more negative search for "art and culture is not essential to humanity" yields pretty much the same set of views (in fact, most of the same articles as the first search).

Among the many purported justifications of this view are things like: "It is the medium through which we process our emotions and ideas"; "it is an important tool for learning, teaching and communicating"; "art can cross cultural boundaries as it can be understood in any language and all social groups"; "art and culture can help us rethink time"; "arts and culture help create and maintain stable, peaceful societies"; "art makes life more manageable, tolerable and enjoyable"; "art is an essential part of the human experience"; "it promotes expression and creativity"; "it helps all of us develop necessary soft skills"; "it provides historical context"; "it gives us a place to gather as a society"; etc, etc. Oh, and that old chestnut, "without the arts, we are a species; with the arts, we are a civilization". Hmm.

Hell, even polls back up this impression. A 2019 Ipsos poll found that over 90% of Americans believe that the arts are an important part of the education system, that 80% say it is important for adults to continue to have access to arts education outside of school, and that 79% believe that arts education is important to society and that it will continue to be so in the future. A 2018 public opinion survey found that large pluralities believe that the arts provide meaning to our lives, that arts institutions add value to our communities, and even that most would vote for political candidates who seek to increase funding of the arts.

You get the idea. But all of this sounds distinctly woolly and unscientific to me. Much of it also sounds like self-serving propaganda from, well, artists and intellectuals. (Plus, it is a large stretch to go from believing that the arts are have a beneficial effect to asserting that they are absolutely essential.) Is there anything a bit more rigorous and objective? Even a dissenting view?

I had to try the very negative search for "no, art is not essential to humanity" before I could find anything even approaching my own views. For example, an open letter entitled,"I am an artist and I believe that art is not essential", which contains such assertions as "to have art in your life is a bonus not a necessity", "only the privileged can actively pursue the arts", and "art has no direct effect on survival". For example, an eNotes Expert Answer from a "certified educator", which includes the hard-to-refute but rather basic defences: "food, water, shelter clothing ... are arguably the only things we actually need, that are essential to our survival"; "humans are the only creatures that create art, and in the animal and plant kingdoms, they do not have art and they continue to survive just fine".

Maybe I could find more (and better) apologies if I tried hard, but it is apparent that my view that art is not essential is a contentious, minority viewpoint. But I would still contend that the reason it appears so is that only artists snd intellectuals have bothered to broach the subject online. Those homeless guys, cancer victims and war refugees didn't quite get around to it, it not being a major priority for them.

Electricity from thin air - no, really

Interesting development in renewable energy, courtesy of The Guardian: electricity from thin air, much as predicted by Nickoa Tesla almost a hundred years ago.

Well, actually, not so much thin air as thick, or more specifically, humid air. Discovered by happy accident at the University of Massachussetts Amherst, it seems that an array of microscopic tubes, or nanotubes, can generate a small but continuous electic current, as airborne water molecules bump around inside the tubes, creating a kind of small battery as one end of the tube becomes differently charged from the other.

The team is now experimenting with thin sheets of materials punched with tiny holes, or nanopores, sheets that can in principle be multiply stacked together. The Lisbon-based Catcher Project is also experimenting with the idea, establishing a start-up to try and make the technology commercially feasible.

I'm not saying that this will become the energy source of tomorrow, but it may become yet another string to our bow, which is all to the good.

Some interesting trends in poverty in Canada

I was introduced to a rather surprising factoid by an article in this weekend's Globe and Mail. It claimed that "the Chinese Canadian community experiences higher than average poverty rates, including higher than Black and South Asian Canadians".

Now, I am accustomed to thinking of Chinese Canadians as relatively successful immigrants, partly, I suppose, because you see all those smartly dressed young men and women walking around the Financial District downtown. So, of course, I checked into it.

And, lo and behold, according to StatsCan, 15.3% of Chinese Canadians lived in poverty in 2020, compared to 12.4% of Blacks and 10.8% of South Asians. Well, go figure.

Some of the other poverty factoids from that web page are also illuminating, not to say shocking (and not all in a bad way). For example, the overall poverty rate in Canada was 8.1% in 2020, but that compares to 14.5% just five years earlier, in 2015. Just as an aside, that was the year Justin Trudeau and the Liberals took over the country after ten years of Tory administrations. Coincidence? I think not.

In fact, the poverty rates of immigrants in general more than halved between 2015 and 2020, from 18.8% to 9.1%, not much above the national average. Child poverty was less than half of its 2015 levels. The poverty rate for one-person families headed by women with a small child - always the poorest family type - fell from 62.7% to 31.3% (although still five times the rate of couple-families with a small child). Transgender men (12.9%) and women (12.0%) face much more poverty than cisgender men (7.9%) and women (8.2%), but non-binary people face the highest of all at 20.6%, more than twice the national average.

Interesting stuff, even if all the rates are still shockingly high. And, although 2020 may have been an unrepresentative year, coinciding as it did with the high government transfers and temporary pandemic relief benefits resulting from the unprecedented COVID-19 outbreak, the reduction in poverty under the Liberals is quite startling.