Connect the dots: two articles by Miro Cernetig and Bob Ransford that should be read together

The Vancouver Sun published two articles, nearly back-to-back, which make a lot of sense when read in conjunction: on March 22, we read Bob Ransford’s As cities become more complex, our taxes keep rising and on March 24 we read Milo Cernetig’s Approach to social woes a moral failure by all three main B.C. parties.

These two articles have to be comprehended together. One (Ransford’s) wants people to understand the economics of taxation that underlie municipal finance, while the other (Cernetig’s) wants people to understand how a certain kind of underfunding has produced the horrible social problems we see in our (BC) cities today. Cernetig references Vancouver, but Victoria has similar problems.

I have for some months now picked up on the criticisms of municipal infrastructure funding in Canada — even going so far as to publish a short piece on Vibrant Victoria on Dec.3/07, Victoria’s Choice: to be or not to be …is not the question. The gist of Ransford’s article elaborates on the theme I also addressed in my piece: cities (in my opinion, Canadian cities especially, although Ransford argues that it’s a Western/ First World global problem) are too dependent on single sources of income, primarily property taxes, while so-called senior levels of government (state or provincial, and federal) receive funding from many diverse sources of income: consumption taxes, income taxes, and so on. At the same time, cities are in the front line of having to provide services on every level.

This is lunacy, especially when you take into account the fact that cities generate most of a nation’s economic activity and wealth, and that they also will typically attract the largest populations of people dependent on what is collectively referred to as “services”: supported housing, addiction treatment, food banks, welfare, etc. Poor people come to cities because this is where the services are. Very often, they are in a city’s downtown, which is why you’ll find neighbourhoods in downtowns that become magnets for the visibly needy.

The problem is that these services are underfunded or even non-existent, some having once been funded by one of the two senior levels of government, but now having been off- or downloaded to municipalities.

And there we are, connecting the dots.

The Feds “downloaded” to the Provinces those services that used to be Federally-funded. The Provinces in turn have downloaded Provincially-funded services to the municipalities.

And, …well, the municipalities have no one to download to …except us. And that, in a nutshell, is my argument: citizens — people who live in cities — are shouldering the downloaded costs of all the stuff that all the other levels of government, including the municipalities, used to handle. Beggars on the streets; addicts shooting up in broad daylight; mentally ill people freaking out on corners; homeless people in every nook and cranny of public and private spaces; human feces on the sidewalks and in doorways; used needles in parks and on sidewalks; drug deals transacted openly on downtown streets… The list goes on.

The police refer to the mentally ill who openly use illegal drugs and defecate on the street and sleep in doorways as their “clients.” It seems to have gone by the board that the police shouldn’t be dealing with people on that end of the spectrum of social disorder in the first place — the police should be dealing with criminals and with law enforcement. When the people on that end of the spectrum engage in criminal activity — and they do, because they steal to stay alive and to feed their addictions — the police act like social workers …because that’s the role that has been downloaded to them, too.

Criminals exploit this.

My neighbours, who came home at 11pm on a recent weekend night to find that their basement door had been kicked in by thieves while they were away, thieves who robbed them of various items and who apparently fled just as the family returned home, had to wait for over 12 hours before the police could come over. And why was that? Perhaps they were too busy taking care of “clients”…

We — citizens — are the bottom of the food chain in this story. We — citizens — are the last link to off- or download to. We — citizens — are supposed to feel guilty if we don’t express or display the appropriate level of compassion toward the marginalized. But the citizen might ask herself, “Whatever happened to the idea that I pay my taxes, and that they pay for services intended to ameliorate these conditions?” The citizen still pays her taxes — and pays and pays and pays, if she lives in Canada — and the senior levels of government boast of surpluses. The municipalities, meanwhile, relying almost solely on the property taxes she and the many other citizens in the urban area pay, find themselves shouldering the cost of upgrading ancient infrastructure (sewage, roads, parks, recreation centres, etc.), plus the cost of “helping” the growing pool of service seekers.

But there are no provincial mental hospitals anymore, there is no affordable housing or supportive housing being built by the province or the feds, and all the damage that accrues from this out-casting has been downloaded to Joe and Jane Schmuck, i.e., you and me Citizen Jim and Citizen Jill.

That’s the dot.

Let me just present a couple of extract from the above-mentioned articles. Here’s Ransford:

Am I getting value for dollar for the property taxes I pay to local government? Politicians and bureaucrats at city hall would argue that I am getting more for my dollar than I ever have. Despite the fact that the number of employees at my city hall has grown faster than the rate of local population growth, the people that work there will tell you they are doing much more with fewer resources.

The fact is that cities across the country have become much more complex organizations than they were in the past and they have taken on more and more responsibilities. The federal and provincial governments have downloaded a long list of responsibilities on municipal governments. They have also stopped doing things that they once did as governments and the municipalities have stepped in and taken over where a need had to be met.

Social or non-market housing is a good example. Providing housing for the truly needy used to be almost the sole responsibility of the federal government. They started backing out of this area in the late 1980s and have next to no involvement today in funding what most are identifying is a desperate social need in our urban centres
(…)

The role of municipal governments has evolved. No longer do you look to your municipality merely to fix the potholes in the road in front of your house or to build and maintain the pipes that dispose of the sewage when you flush your toilet..

As Ransford points out (on page 2 of the article), a key problem here is aging populations:

The concept of a tax tied to the value of your home is beginning to make less practical sense with an aging urban population that will soon be dominated by retirees on fixed retirement incomes with all of their equity tied up in relatively expensive homes.

There’s only one kind of civic taxpayer and one source of civic revenue. There is a looming danger that taxpayer will soon no longer be able to fund the full cost of what it takes to run a city.

I would further add to Ransford’s excellent summing-up that Victoria’s troubles are uniquely compounded by our balkanized political system, which splits Victoria into many separate un-amalgamated municipalities (the Capital Regional District, which is all of Victoria, is 13 municipalities, each with its own mayor and council, fire chief, police department, and so on). At the same time, the City of Victoria holds the region’s downtown, the place where everyone comes for services — social services that range from food banks, charities, needle “exchanges,” and plain old week-end partying — many of which require policing and various levels of clean-up. Who pays? The City of Victoria, not the surrounding municipalities, which merely take advantage of what the City offers.

Let’s look at Milo Cernetig’s article now. He gets a gold star (in my book) for slamming all the BC provincial parties — too often and for too long, the problems we’re facing have been presented in partisan terms: it’s the BC Liberals’ fault (note to non-BC readers: the BC Liberals are sort of neo-conservative, and have little in common with the Federal Liberals); or it’s the NDP’s fault, and so on. Yadda yadda yadda. Blah blah blah.

Forget about it. That partisan shit has to stop, because it’s obvious that none of the parties have covered themselves in glory here, and that whole partisan shtick is old beyond words.

Here are some excerpts from Cernetig’s piece:

…here’s the fast-rewind of the amazing arc of policy blunders — given to us by a melange of Social Credit, New Democratic and Liberal governments — that I tried to explain.

First, imagine progressively shrinking the province’s major psychiatric hospital, Riverview, to save money. Then, in a cruel twist, offer no safe harbour for many of those psychiatric patients, who politicians told us would benefit from being “deinstitutionalized” and put back into society.

Instead, let large numbers of these truly desperate souls fend for themselves on our streets. Let them line up for a room in those bedbug-infested flophouses our health inspectors, for reasons that mystify, somehow allow to stay open. While we’re at it, we’ll also slow down the construction of new social housing, too, since it’s too expensive.

(…)
So now we’ve got all these lost souls begging and wandering the city’s downtown, often in a schizophrenic or crystal meth haze.

But we really haven’t done much about it. We’re not good at the tough job of distinguishing between vagrants (who should be moved on by the cops), or chronic criminals (who should be put in jail by judges) and the truly sick (who should be taken to shelters or hospitals by good beat cops, if we had enough of them).

Nope. We somehow got used to the sight of people sprawled on sidewalks and inside the doorways of the world’s “most livable” city.

There it is: another dot: We somehow got used to the sight of people sprawled on sidewalks and inside the doorways of the world’s “most livable” city.

The “somehow” in that sentence is “downloading.” We have been worn down by senior levels of government absenting themselves from the business of governing (a big piece of which includes providing services in exchange for all the money we fork over), and in the British tradition (within which we exist here), we have taken it uncomplainingly up the rear end, “muddling through” and accepting it all as if it were an inevitability.

That’s why we put up with the sight of what Cernetig describes, put up with open drug use, criminal transactions in plain daylight, and lunatics on our streets. In the British tradition, we are, after all, but subjects of these governments, not its master. Just as every level has downloaded — until there’s no one left to download to except to you and me, so every level absolves itself of accountability, because of course there’s always a higher level to defer to. In the last instance, the senior levels can defer to “the Crown,” a cruel joke referencing Canadian impotence.

The emancipation of Canadian cities is a project so inextricably tied to emancipation from old ways of tutelage and subjugation that it will amount to a revolution if it is ever to happen.

Unfortunately, since there has never been a Canadian revolution, I don’t hold out much hope for the emancipation / empowerment of Canadian cities. Perhaps — counter to my current pessimism — we’ll eventually strike some sort of paternalistic bargain with the “higher” levels of government after all. Since they hold the power already, they might grok the problem and step up, if only to maintain their hold.

At this point, I almost don’t care as long as the downloading stops.

Photograph by Ian Lindsay, from Milo Cernetig’s article.

The caption reads “A homeless person sleeps on a Cordova Street sidewalk in February. Figures show that investing in social housing would save B.C. $211 million annually.”

Is “balance” enough?

Just a quick post, as I’m still in catch-up mode. This morning I read an article in the local paper about a man who has 250 charges against him for public drunkenness, causing disturbances, aggressive panhandling, harassing people, and so on. “Red,” as he’s called in the article, is not homeless, according to police, and they do not believe that he has a mental health problem (although that’s debatable, given his behavior). See Persistent panhandler gets summons under a section of community charter.

Now the city will use a new community charter bylaw to haul this individual before court, where they hope the judge will sentence him to stay away from the downtown core. The intent is to ban Red from panhandling and from “socializing” downtown.

One city council member, quoted in the article, says, “There’s always got to be a balanced approach in dealing with all the issues.”

This bothers me, maybe because we hear too much about “balance” these days. The councilor is concerned that Red’s rights to be downtown on the street to panhandle (which isn’t illegal as such) aren’t infringed upon, and that the way to address the problems caused by the behaviors of people like Red is to seek balance. It somehow makes me think that balance is starting to become a sort of mantra which doesn’t allow valuation. And if that’s the case, you have to ask: Is “balance” stasis? If so, it’s death.

What about judgement? Are we (especially in Canada) so afraid of judging (as my daughter pointed out to me a couple of years ago, in Canada judges need to take workshops to learn how to be non-judgemental…) that we opt for balance (stasis), versus embracing quick, nimble, intellectually aware and alert change? And besides, isn’t our supposed balance often enough just an appearance of balance? All sorts of stuff is still out of whack beneath the surface and in other domains, and the fervent wish for balance is …well, just a wish. Perhaps a wish to get out of making judgements and decisions?

It’s ironic that the US should be full of religious evangelists, whose mantra on the Christian side of the register is not to judge, lest ye be judged, and yet it’s we in Canada, supposedly secular, who are holier than thou in being non-judgemental.

So here’s the deal: I have a problem with being non-judgemental, especially since I’m not a Christian or religious. Being non-judgemental might work fine in your spiritual life, but it sucks when it comes to ethics and politics and economics and policy. You know, it’s like that old shibboleth about rendering unto Caesar what’s Caesar’s and onto god what’s god’s.

Which finally makes me wonder if politicians, when they talk about “seeking balance,” are refusing to judge, …which makes me wonder whether focusing on “balance” is replacing decision-making. I also wonder whether balance in the spiritual sense was ever intended to be a sort of placeholder for anything, whether painful or pleasurable.

As an atheist, I object to any strategy or philosophy that introduces religion into politics. When people talk about “balance,” they usually mean something quasi-religious (or at least “spiritual,” whatever that horse of a different color means to all the riders out there).  Whether the councilor in question is religious or not is moot for me at this point.  I’m concerned with the discourse of “balance,” which is starting to sound like religion.  I object to religion whenever and wherever it worms its way into places where it doesn’t belong.

Daily Diigo Public Link 01/29/2008

Boogie: Bleak Street Lifes (PingMag – The Tokyo-based magazine about “Design and Making Things”) Annotated

tags: boogie, brooklyn, drug_addiction, gangs, interview, nyc, photography, ping_mag, street_life

Interview with “Serbian photographer Boogie [who] grew up in the war-torn region of former Yugoslavia, documenting protests and the disturbing portraits of skinheads. After moving from Belgrade to Brooklyn in 1998, he started observing New York’s bleak street side of life with monochrome shots. Distinctively, his work isn’t emphatic. He doesn’t judge. He is more reporting on a not so distant universe with a fine eye for detail – and a lot of guts. He showed PingMag his depiction of Brooklyn gang life and junkies.” Boogie notes: “‘This whole life is a bunch of choices you make and they just made a couple of wrong ones,’ says photographer Boogie about his series on junkies in Brooklyn.”

About consequences

A slight departure from matters of urbanism, if you will.

When the spouse & I became a parents, we were compelled to re-examine all sorts of ideological beliefs, opting instead for principles and for what works (vs. principles and what we’d like to have work, or should work, or would be nice if it worked… etc.). I realize this makes us sound like perfect jerks, but that’s what biology will do to a body. The spouse even took a parenting workshop called “Redirecting your child’s behavior,” which at its core was all about natural consequences and how to implement them.

I sometimes joke that I’m a “permissive parent,” but that’s just a way of differentiating myself from a mainstream that seems to me increasingly suspect: I’m not permissive, because for starters I don’t believe that I’m in control of everything, which leads to two fundamental insights. First, I do not tolerate being treated like a doormat or made responsible for things beyond my control. Second, that first insight lends focus to the things I can control, including not overprotecting my kids from natural consequences. I permit natural consequences to take place. I have discovered that this is becoming a rare principle in the increasingly professionalized world of managed parenting.

Let’s take that as a sort of preamble to this: an editorial in our daily newspaper, which prompted me to write a letter to the editor (which actually got published, with relatively minor editing). First, the editorial:

Freedom rests on responsibility
Times Colonist

Sunday, January 13, 2008
We pride ourselves on being a tolerant and liberated society. And certainly we enjoy a degree of freedom unknown in earlier times. But has our sense of personal latitude come too far?Let’s start with the notion of a responsible adult. Increasingly, it’s hard to find anyone, at least in public life, who fills that description. In government, senior officials used to resign if errors were committed on their watch. Now we have buck-passing and displays of contrition. In the last few months, there have been three major events where resignations would once have been likely.

There was the Taser incident at Vancouver airport, in which Polish passenger Robert Dziekanski died. The RCMP inflicted more harm on Canada’s international image in a few minutes than anyone has caused in decades. But no one has stepped forward to shoulder the blame.

Then came the admission by Premier Gordon Campbell that the Vancouver convention centre is massively over budget. No minister has accepted responsibility.

On the heels of those two blunders came the medical isotopes fiasco. In November the Chalk River nuclear reactor in Ontario closed after failing to meet licensing standards. The plant produces two-thirds of the world’s supply of radioactive materials for medical imaging. Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. gave no warning of the shutdown. Hospitals around the globe were scrambling and the affair blackened Canada’s other eye. Yet the minister in charge, Saanich-Gulf Islands MP Gary Lunn, has not accepted responsibility. Instead, he’s threatening to fire the nuclear regulator.

It’s not just in politics that personal responsibility is becoming a rarity. In sports, serious doping allegations have been made against some of the best-known athletes. None have left the game and fans still turn out in record numbers. In the celebrity world, scarcely a week goes by without some outrageous antics. But a few days in rehab clinic, a talk-show apology and all is forgiven.

Even in the workplace, employees are excused for egregious misconduct. Here in Victoria, a few members of the Liquor Distribution Branch staff became falling-down drunk at a Government House ceremony. One had to crawl up the stairs to receive his award; another tried to steal the cutlery; and a third heckled then Lt.-Gov. Iona Campagnolo. But no one lost his job.

While we’re increasingly unwilling to accept responsibility for our own actions, we’re quick to force our sensitivities on other people’s ideas. Four students at Ontario’s Osgoode Hall law school have launched a complaint against Maclean’s. They charge that an article in the magazine was offensive to Muslims. Three human rights commissions across the country, including B.C.’s, have agreed to hear this complaint. A plainer attack on freedom of speech would be hard to imagine. The magazine must now hire lawyers and defend itself in three separate tribunals.

In 2006, when the Calgary-based Western Standard printed cartoons that had provoked outrage in Denmark, it was summoned before the Alberta Human Rights Commission.

Many Canadian universities have adopted harassment policies that impose sweeping limitations on freedom of speech. The University of British Columbia, for example, prohibits statements of opinion that “burden” anyone on the basis of “age, race, colour, ancestry, place of origin, political belief, religion, marital status, family status, physical or mental disability, sex, sexual orientation, and unrelated criminal convictions.” The “burdening” doesn’t even have to be intentional.

Civic life requires responsibility. Hiding from it, or waiting for someone else to impose it, is self-indulgent. So is turning a difference of opinion into a legal confrontation.

When the complaint was filed against Maclean’s, civil libertarians who had pressed for the appointment of human rights commissions were aghast. “During the years when my colleagues and I were labouring to create such commissions, we never imagined that they might ultimately be used against freedom of speech,” said Alan Borovoy, who was general counsel for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

We need to restore some measure of self-restraint, personal responsibility and accountability in our daily lives.

© Times Colonist (Victoria) 2008

Next, my letter to the editor, in response:

Use your judgment and think critically
Times Colonist

Published: Monday, January 21, 2008

Re: “Freedom rests on responsibility,” Jan. 13.

Thank you for an important, thought-provoking editorial. To understand why Canadians can get away with “buck-passing and displays of contrition,” look at how you or your neighbours raise children. If there are no natural consequences for bad behaviour, and missteps are ignored because criticism allegedly inhibits “self-esteem,” is it any wonder that personal responsibility shrivels or that narcissism is normal?

The 30-something Cobble Hill real-estate agent currently facing charges in Colorado for drunkenness and sexual harassment on a plane would probably have avoided the prospect of a $500,000 fine and years in prison had he learned earlier there are significant consequences for gross misbehaviour.

Why should union officials or people in government take responsibility when it’s easy to avoid consequences, provided you say the right words of contrition, versus going to jail or paying biting fines?

If you substitute groupthink for consequences, you’ll dig an even deeper hole, which the example of Maclean’s being charged for offensiveness to Muslims illustrates well. Robert Latimer isn’t “contrite,” so the Orwellian parole board denies him parole (as if he would ever reoffend by murdering another’s daughter). But drunk drivers who kill cyclists practically walk away unpunished. Why? Their “displays of contrition” appease the thought police.

Collectively, our obligation to be “non-judgmental” overrides critical thinking. The latter is a far bigger human right and duty than not offending anyone or mouthing mealy words of contrition.

My only gripe is that the paper edited my second to last sentence, which read “Collectively, we are dumbing ourselves down into sheep whose obligation to be ‘non-judgmental’ overrides critical thinking,” and the edited version fails to convey that meaning.

Hand-made links (for a change)

Why is it that some of the most salient material presents itself — and in the greatest quantities — when one already has a mountain of mental meal on one’s plate, with nary a cranial cranny remaining into which the new material may be stuffed?

I’m at the point where even bookmarking to Diigo isn’t good enough, because I can’t summon the energy to write a cogent annotation!

Therefore, in no particular order, some links of prime importance (in my world, anyway):
Regine at We Make Money Not Art posts two entries (Part I and Part II) on the DLD (Digital, Life, Design) conference held last month in Munich. Not only that, she includes specific references to other bloggers (Ulrike Reinhard, for example) who have posted more information (more than what’s already on DLD’s websites? Muss das sein?! …sigh…) and projects (like 192021) that I definitely need to follow up.

Part II includes way too much stuff for me to process right now — just this little picture/ diagram from one of the pages she references has me spinning:

Alert, alert: I’m thinking local local local, which starts to sound like “loco loco loco” after a while….

…Gawd, and don’t even get me started on Regine’s references to Patrick Schumacher (just a taste from WMMNA:

Patrik Schumacher mentioned that the challenge today for architects is to be able to comprehend and reflect in their work the increase in society complexity. Order and lack of complexity bring disorientation. A quick look at the way urban areas were built in the 50s brought us makes the case clearer.

“Order and lack of complexity bring disorientation.” Vraiment! It’s fatal to confuse order with “un-complex” organization. What our brains want is “ordered complexity” or “complex order,” which appeals to every person’s innate sense of pattern recognition (which, pace, is more than only “a subtopic of machine learning”).

…All this, and I haven’t even touched on several entries that rocked my world yesterday — outside.in’s announcement of a brilliant win-win deal with the Washington Post, or their VC’s most interesting blog post, Rethinking The Local Paper…

…All this, and this being the mere tip of the iceberg. Let’s not forget the links my husband sends — he tells me I have to watch Paulo Coelho (brilliant, from what I’ve heard, absolutely paradigm shifting) as well as Edward Tufte (ditto), and more… My inbox is overflowing…

High rents = mamma’s boys?

And some other comments on creative societies…

Let’s start with this interesting item from Ananova, which I bookmarked several months ago:

Help for mummys’ boys

The Italian government is handing out grants to help mummys’ boys leave home.

The move comes after economists warned almost 60% of young adult Italians stayed at home and were not marrying, having children or building up homes of their own.

Economy Minister Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa says part of a two billion euro provision in the 2008 state budget will be used to help young people move out of family homes.

He said: “Let’s get these big babies out of the home. We’re encouraging young people to leave home.

“If they don’t, they just stay with their parents, they don’t get married and they don’t become independent. This is an important idea.”

Many young people say they cannot afford to move out of home so the government has announced plans to make more affordable accommodation available and build more public housing.

EU figures show that 56% of 25 to 29 year-olds still live with their parents in Italy, compared to 21% of Germans and just five per cent of Swedes.
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_2540354.html?menu=

The relevance this has for all cities/ societies, it seems to me, is that issues around housing affordability have social consequences that go beyond the usual markers of economic disparity in cities. From the statistics, the Swedes are coming out way ahead of the game, with only 5% of Swedes aged 25 to 29 years old living at home with their parents. The Swedes are known, of course, for their advanced social programs, including solutions around housing affordability. This closes the gap in economic disparity, which in turn lets that society reap competitive rewards and capture innovation gains that elude other societies. Grown children living with their parents is clearly a step backwards, whereas independence at young adulthood (just before middle age, in fact) is an indicator of social strength and resilience.

Underscoring this idea is an article in yesterday’s Globe & Mail by Richard Florida, called Pity the tri-city Toronto. (The article continues on page 2 here.) Florida describes the economic divide that fractures American cities in particular, and that data indicate that Toronto is in danger of breaking apart along similar lines. To date, Canada, Australia, and the Scandinavian countries had managed to …well, manage their economic disparities effectively, a trait that gave these countries an edge.

A new study by the University of Toronto’s J. David Hulchanski of the Centre for Urban and Community Studies, The Three Cities within Toronto: Income Polarization among Toronto Neighbourhoods, 1970-2000, however, sends a warning signal that things could go sideways here. Florida sees this in a “big picture” frame, historically linked to previous periods of social and economic innovation and upheaval (eg., the Industrial Revolution). As he writes on page 2:

We need to understand the tremendous economic and social polarization produced by the shift to a global creative economy. The same things happened with the Industrial Revolution. It took the leading nations of the world 50 or more years to understand it – a period punctuated by depression, epic class struggles, and two world wars – and finally for progressive leaders to enact new deals that would spread the productive capacity of the industrial engine and allow working people to benefit from the productivity improvements their work helped create.

It’s time to wake up and act on these striking new realities. The key task of our time is to build new institutions to spread the gains of the creative economy. If not, it will continue to concentrate those gains geographically and socially.

This is Toronto’s and Canada’s great opportunity. It’s also a major part of the reason why I moved to Toronto. Absent a major miracle, the level of economic and social polarization is so deep in the United States that it may well prohibit the kind of concerted action required to overcome that class divide and build a more cohesive and shared creative economy.

In my view there are at best three economies worldwide that have the social capacity to navigate and lead in this change. Canada is one, Australia another, the Scandinavian nations still another. And that leadership, given the absence of awareness of these issues at the national level, will have to come from the major cities in these nations.

In a sense, I’d argue that big kids living at home with their parents is another indicator of badly managed, possibly crippling socio-economic disparity. It’s not just a case, simply, of “mummy’s boys,” but also of lost horizons, nowhere to go, and most especially: an inability to afford to move out to be independent. What a waste!

***

That ends my commentary on this issue, but since Globe & Mail articles tend to disappear off the web quite quickly, I’ll append a chunk of the article from page 1 for context (and see also Florida’s blog entry on this topic). In the Globe & Mail, he introduces the topic as follows:

For decades we’ve heard that new transport and communication technologies – from the street car to the Internet – would make geography and place irrelevant. We could all spread out and locate wherever we liked. The suburbs would boom, edge cities would predominate and the urban core would fade away into irrelevance. Some told us that the future of the centre of cities was to become little more than a “sandbox” or “reservation” – a holding pen for the urban poor.

It turns out that these prognostications were dead wrong. A close look at the real data shows that the world is quite spiky, defined by surging mega-regions, declining hills (like the Clevelands and St. Louises of the world) and sinking valleys (the poor mega-cities and even poorer rural areas of the emerging economies and developing world).

Florida then quickly moves on to summarize what Hulchanski’s data indicates:

The three Torontos are defined by an increasingly rich and advantaged core, a shrinking middle-class zone, and low-income earners and immigrants at the outskirts. In some ways this is a good thing: Toronto is the opposite of hollowed-out American cities like Detroit and Cleveland. And the pattern is strikingly similar to what is happening in places that are becoming the epicentres of the creative economy. The gentrification of the urban core, with out-of-sight housing prices, is occurring in London, New York, San Francisco, even in Washington, D.C.

From here, he looks at the findings from the perspective of the creative economy:

What we are witnessing in Toronto is the rise of a new set of economic, demographic and social patterns being set in motion by the global creative economy. There is a mass migration of highly educated and highly skilled people to a smaller and smaller number of cities. Harvard economist Edward Glaeser has documented the sorting of highly educated, high human-capital households in the United States. Thirty years ago, most cities had a similar proportion of educated and less educated people; now highly educated people are concentrated in just a handful of major metropolitan regions like New York, Washington, San Francisco and Seattle.

They have gravitated to the cores of these metros to take advantage of clustered work, gain access to amenities, and reduce their time costs spent on travel. In the five-year period from 2000 to 2005, New York City took in 285,000 recent college graduates – a number roughly equivalent to the entire population of the city of Buffalo. Driving this is the benefits of economic clustering long ago identified by Jane Jacobs. It is the clustering of people, even more so than the clustering of business and industry, that today is the motor force of economic growth.

Left to its own devices, this clustering is causing the sorting of people by economic class. Not just across cities but within them, as the U of T report demonstrates.

Florida adds that “the leading U.S. creative regions (San Francisco, Austin, the North Carolina Research Triangle, and Washington) also have the highest levels of income inequality.” Obviously, if you want the creative economy to have longer-term sustainability, you have to work against destructive economic inequality. Over the long run, cities won’t be well-served by incredibly high housing prices in the trendier centre, serviced by an underclass that lives on the outskirts of town.

That would put a whole new spin on Jane Jacobs’s definition of oversuccess.

On Robert Dziekanski’s death by Taser at the hands of the RCMP at Vancouver International Airport

Below, several articles that report on this matter. I watched the video two days ago, it’s shocking on several levels. It’s a record of stupidity aggregating into calamity — the endless prattle of the moron in the background, insisting that Dziekanski is speaking Russian, alerting us to every detail (”he threw a chair” blah blah blah), and who is clearly chomping at the bit for action of some sort: that is the sound of the devil’s lowest minion hissing into your ear. Frightening, that people can be so stupid. When the RCMP arrives, the stupidity is complete, and thoroughly evil.

Where’s the accountability? In one of the articles, RCMP Cpl. Dale Carr actually has the gall to complain that people are being mean to him by complaining about the RCMP officers’ actions. (Boo-hoo, Cpl. Carr.) Oh, so this is what we do in Canada, eh? We don’t take responsibility, we whine about being picked on? And as for the airport staff — they’ve got their union to protect their hide. No one there will step up, no manager is going to go and commit seppuko on the runway for having a staff that lets a passenger wait, unattended, for nearly 10 hours in a holding area (after what was probably a 15-hour journey), dehydrated, sleep-deprived, and disoriented. Oh no, heaven forbid anyone should step up and actually admit that he or she fucked up.

It’s not just the RCMP, everybody was in on this one.

It’s also very interesting to see how individuality and reason break down in a group dynamic like this. The woman who approaches Dziekanski and tries to talk to him is the only one showing compassion. For the others, it looks like it’s just …spectacle.

From UPI: Report: Cops broke rules in Taser death

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Nov. 16 (UPI) — Police officers involved in the Taser death of a man at the Vancouver airport appear to have violated recommendations in a 2005 report.

Robert Dziekanski, an immigrant from Poland, died Oct. 14 after being stunned with the electric shock weapon. The incident was recorded on video.

The video shows that Dziekanski, who apparently became agitated after waiting at the airport for several hours for his mother to meet him, was not a danger to anyone else. Dziekanski was shocked twice and the four Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers then restrained him face down, with two of them kneeling on his neck and back.

The British Columbia police complaint commissioner said in 2005 that police should only use Tasers on people who pose a threat to others or were actively resisting arrest, The Vancouver Province reported. The report said there should be no multiple shocks, and after using a Taser police should be careful not to restrain subjects in any way that would impede their breathing.

A woman who witnessed the incident told the Toronto Globe & Mail that Dziekanski’s agitation appeared to be a product of language difficulties and that an interpreter would have been able to calm him down.

From the Canadian Press: Victoria man who shot airport Taser video says experience changing his life:

VICTORIA – Paul Pritchard was on an emergency flight home to Victoria to help his ailing father when he was confronted by another real-life emergency at Vancouver airport that changed his life.

The 25-year-old teacher arrived on a flight from China and stumbled into a deadly drama, recording with his video camera the final moments of a Polish immigrant who died after being shot by an RCMP Taser stun gun.

Pritchard says the video has helped him realize it’s time to get serious about his future and his proud father says his son has always had his feet squarely planted on the ground and a deep sense of what’s right.

Pritchard’s video of events leading up to the death of Robert Dziekanski on Oct. 14 raced around the world on the Internet and on TV broadcasts after it was released Wednesday.

The Mounties themselves called it the single best record they had of what happened early that Sunday morning in a near empty international arrivals area, though investigators insist it doesn’t tell the whole story.

Still, the emotional public reaction to the video and the furious political debate surrounding the police’s use of Tasers convinces Pritchard changes are afoot when it comes to the current use of weapons by police.

“Something good is going to come out of it,” Pritchard said in an interview with The Canadian Press.

“For me, to have a part in changing something at a national level is huge. This is definitely … changing my life.”

Pritchard’s father John, who is dying of an illness neither he nor his son would discuss, said he’s proud of how his son handled the battle to regain control of the video from police and the intense spotlight he’s been under for a month as a result.

“He’s always had a sense of fairness and loyalty about being bullied,” said John Pritchard.

“He would never back down, like in school. He would never back down to older boys who wanted to push him around.”

Pritchard leaped to prominence soon after the Taser incident when he went public with complaints the RCMP had reneged on a promise to return the video recording, which he handed over voluntarily, within 48 hours. Police gave it back after he threatened legal action.

The recording was made public Wednesday evening and the major Canadian TV networks paid Pritchard a small fee for its use.

The Canadian Press was also given a copy and posted it for use by its online news clients but did not pay a fee.

Pritchard was whisked to New York on Thursday to tape appearances on U.S. network television.

“I woke up this morning and did a couple of phone interviews and all of a sudden I’m flying to New York,” he said Thursday.

Pritchard said he’s considering becoming a reporter now after spending the last two years travelling and teaching English in China.

“I’m looking into a journalism route now,” he said. “I’m really interested in how the media has worked. I’ve got to see the whole media side of things and it’s kind of sparked an interest in me.”

Pritchard said he’s been content until now to travel, but it’s now time to make long-term plans.

“I was travelling around the world,” he said. “I had a couple years left in me. My plans, I was moving to India after China. I was going to South America after that.”

John Pritchard said his son has always stuck to his principles and his determination to ensure the public saw the video is a sign of that inner strength.

“He’s not always made the right decision, like all teenagers,” he said. “But there’s also a very sensitive side to him which I don’t think he lets come through that often.”

He said he’s seen pictures of Paul teaching children in China and the Philippines that show his caring side.

Paul Pritchard said he leaned on his father for guidance after witnessing the Taser incident. He said it was his father who gave him the phone number of a lawyer to contact about getting his video back.

“I needed someone’s influence and help in these situations with my choices, for most of them anyway,” said Pritchard.

“I’ve got a father who’s dying … It’s really brought us together at a pivotal point in my life, our life.”

A cultural analyst at the University of Victoria’s English faculty said Pritchard should guard against being caught up and spit out of a media whirlwind.

He must remember he was a witness to an extraordinary event and he’s not an expert in police tactics or dealing with traumatic situations, said Prof. Kim Blank.

“He’s become somewhat of a celebrity just by the fact of witnessing something,” he said.

Blank said he can’t say if the Taser incident will end up changing Pritchard’s life.

“It may open up some doors. It may make him interested in something he wasn’t interested in before,” he said. “But he may feel he ends up getting used. People can go from naivete to experience very quickly in this.”

John Pritchard said everything has happened so quickly that he and his son haven’t had the chance to talk about the pros and cons of the video experience.

“I’m just myself wondering now how he views the outcome of all of this and where it’s going to go,” he said.

But Pritchard said he’s extremely proud of what his son has done.

“I can’t walk very far at the moment, so he takes me shopping,” he said. “He’s been a really really good son and I’m very proud of him, very thankful he came home.”

From CBC news: Few answers from Airport Customs union in Taser death:

Can’t explain why no one offered help to connect Dziekanski, mother

Last Updated: Friday, November 16, 2007 | 6:54 PM ET

CBC News

Story Tools: E-MAIL | PRINT | Text Size: S M L XL | REPORT TYPO | SEND YOUR FEEDBACK

The head of the union representing customs officers at the Vancouver airport says it was unusual no one offered to help Robert Dziekanski connect with his mother the night he died, after being stunned with a Taser by the RCMP.

Before police arrived, Robert Dziekanski picked up a small table and put it in the doorway between the customs exit area and a public lounge.
(Paul Pritchard)

George Scott, vice-president with the Customs Excise Union, told CBC News he can’t explain why nobody was willing to check where Dziekanski was on the night of October 14, despite repeated requests from his mother.

“It’s something that wouldn’t be hard to find out,” Scott told CBC News on Thursday said. “We certainly do have the resources.”

The comments from the union leader are the first public statement about Canada Border Services Agency conduct during the incident.

The agency has remained silent about how Dzeikanski went unnoticed for more than eight hours in the highly controlled customs and passport area inside the immigration hall at the airport.

Meanwhile on the other side of the wall, Dziekanski’s mother Sofia Cisowski spent more than six hours in the international arrivals lounge that night trying desperately — even crying to officials — to persuade anyone at the airport to help her make contact with her son.

“I was asking the woman and she said do not worry because security people or somebody else… they’ll find him,” Cisowski told CBC news.

But nobody did. Larry Berg, the Vancouver Airport C.E.O was also unable to explain why airport staff would not help Cisowski contact her son in the immigration hall.

Airport staff refused to help mother find son

“I can’t speak for everybody who works at the airport that was in involved that evening. It wouldn’t be appropriate for me,” Berg told CBC News last week. “We’re going to…wait for the coroner’s report before we make any conclusions or decisions relative to that.”

Berg said staff did eventually page Dziekanski, but used a public address system that did not broadcast in the secure customs area controlled by the CBSA.

Cisowski said she was sure here son was inside the secure customs area waiting for her by the baggage carousel because she had told him specifically to wait for her there.

But she later found out the public could not access that area, and she turned to airport officials for help to make contact with her son, who spoke only Polish and had never been on a plane before.

After her repeated requests for help were turned down at the first airport help desk, Cisowski told CBC News she went to the CBSA office in the waiting area near the international arrivals lounge.

But when officials there checked a computer, they told her told there was no sign of her son, even though records would later show he had pass through the primary passport check into the area.

Mother advised to go home

She then found a second airport help kiosk and made several more requests for help making contact with her son, but eventually she was told he was not there, and she should go home.

At around 10:30 p.m., she drove back to Kamloops.

Around the same time, Dziekanski finally made his way to the secondary customs check inside the secure customs area, where he was redirected to immigration control, and eventually emerged from the customs area around midnight.

An hour later an agitated and confused Dziekanski was confronted by the police. Within 30 seconds they stunned him at least twice with a Taser. He died a minute and half later.

Currently there are four investigations into the death underway, by the B.C. coroner’s service, the RCMP, the public complaints commissioner of the RCMP and the Vancouver international Airport.

The Canada Border Services Agency has not said if it is conducting an investigation of its own.

From the Canadian Press: Police statements differ from what video shows of Taser death:Amnesty Int’l:

 

Police statements differ from what video shows of Taser death:Amnesty Int?l

1 hour ago

VANCOUVER – There are too many differences between what police told the public and what a video shows of the fatal night RCMP used a Taser to subdue a frantic Polish immigrant at Vancouver’s airport, critics say.

Amnesty International Canada is calling for an independent investigation and an expert in police force says the Oct. 14 incident and the video released this week raise serious concerns that need to be addressed.

“For me, it (the video) raises a lot of questions as to how decisions were made going into that incident because what you appear to see is that they show up and move to Taser somebody,” Hilary Homes of Amnesty International said from Ottawa.

Robert Dziekanski died minutes after being zapped twice by a Taser-wielding officer in the airport’s international arrivals area.

Police were called because Dziekanski had been acting strangely after spending hours waiting vainly to meet his mother.

The video shows Dziekanski, who spoke only Polish, trying to barricade himself into the secure area of the arrivals terminal while bystanders try to communicate with him.

Immediately after the incident, Sgt. Pierre Lemaitre, spokesman for the RCMP’s E Division, said three Mounties tried to hold Dziekanski down after approaching him in a secure area of the airport.

In fact, the video shows four officers confronting the agitated Dziekanski and backing him up to a counter inside the terminal’s secure area. The Taser was deployed within a minute of police confronting him.

It’s unclear whether Lemaitre meant officers tried to subdue him before he was shot with the Taser or afterwards.

The video shows the four Mounties piling on to a fallen Dziekanski after he was zapped.

Lemaitre wasn’t available for comment Thursday.

The video shows the officers crowding around the fallen man as he writhed and moaned. At least one of them appeared to put his full weight on the man’s neck.

Dziekanski eventually stopped moving and the video ends soon after a man in a suit bends over to see if he had a pulse.

Traveller Paul Pritchard, who shot the video, said officers seemed to come prepared to zap Dziekanski.

“As they ran in, I heard one of the officers say, ‘Can I Taser him, should I Taser?’ before they actually even got to Mr. Dziekanski,” said Pritchard, who lives in Victoria.

Homes said 17 Canadians have died after being shot by a Taser, which jolts the body with 50,000 volts and is often used to subdue people deemed dangerous to police, themselves or others.

But she said the video clearly shows Dziekanski wasn’t a threat to anybody and the footage does not indicate Mounties tried to restrain him before he was shot, if that’s what Lemaitre meant.

A report published by Amnesty International in May says all police departments should stop using Tasers until thorough studies have been done on its effects.

RCMP Cpl. Dale Carr said he doesn’t understand why people would think Dziekanski was shot with the Taser prematurely.

“How much time does one need to make an assessment that there is potential of danger or potential of somebody being harmed?”

Carr wouldn’t comment on whether the four Mounties could have used other tactics to deal with Dziekanski, who does not appear to threaten them and at one point backs away.

“The whole basis of our investigation is to get to the bottom of how Mr. Dziekanski ended up in the state that he did: deceased,” said Carr, who speaks for the RCMP homicide unit investigating the death.

“We want to answer those questions but they’re not going to be answered through the media.”

He said a coroner’s inquest, which has yet to be scheduled, would answer a crucial question about why the officers involved didn’t use other means of trying to subdue Dziekanski.

“That’s a good question,” he said. “That’s a question for those officers while they’re under oath at the inquest.”

Carr said he’s been getting angry calls about the incident from “people who feel that they have the right to call me and blast me.”

“I suspect they’re making conclusions, based on one piece of evidence and they’re not waiting, perhaps, for all of the evidence to come out down the road and that’s unfortunate.”

He said the video is a strong piece of evidence but it’s only one side of the story.

Carr wouldn’t say if police have a video recording of their own of the incident that has generated buzz on radio talk shows and led to a website called Justice for Robert Dziekanski.

Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day said the RCMP is reviewing the practices related to Taser use and that a report is being prepared.

Day is waiting to see the conclusions of that report before commenting.

Michael Lyman, a professor in the criminal justice and forensic science department at Columbia College in Missouri, said the video shows Dziekanski to be in crisis but that he certainly didn’t pose a threat to the four police officers.

“I don’t see where the officers made any attempts to rush him or to control him physically through the use of soft-handed control techniques as in simply just holding him and securing him without having to resort to any weaponry,” he said.

Lyman, who has testified in hundreds of cases in the United States involving proper use of police force, said he’s particularly concerned about a Mountie putting his full weight on Dziekanski after he’s been flailing on the floor.

“That is very, very dangerous because persons have difficulty breathing when an officer places weight on them, especially on a hard floor.”

Lyman said many questions need answers in what has become a huge international story.

“We have to just take a breath and consider what the police might have known about this person, if anything, prior to their arrival.

“How did they receive their message? Was there anybody else that might have come to them and said, ‘This person’s going to hurt somebody?’

“I’d like to approach a situation like this from the standpoint of listening to what the police have to say but holding them accountable for their actions that are clearly depicted by what we see on the video.”

Quote, from above:

Carr said he’s been getting angry calls about the incident from “people who feel that they have the right to call me and blast me.”

Oh, boo-hoo Mr Carr, that must really hurt. Almost as much as getting tasered?

From AP: Cameraman Changes Mind About Taser Death:

 

Cameraman Changes Mind About Taser Death

By ROB GILLIES – 2 hours ago

TORONTO (AP) — Videotaping the last moments of a Polish immigrant’s life, Paul Pritchard thought the police were 100 percent right to use a Taser stun gun to subdue the man.

That was a month ago, before the police returned the videotape they borrowed from Pritchard, a Canadian who had filmed Robert Dziekanski’s death.

Now that Pritchard has watched his own tape — and no longer believes Dziekanski posed any threat of violence — he condemns the police use of a stun gun just 46 seconds after confronting Dziekanski at the airport in Vancouver, British Columbia.

“At the time I thought it was the right thing,” Pritchard said Friday. “I thought it was more of a standoff, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t like that at all.”

A coroner’s inquest has been called and police have launched an investigation. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police have said they are reviewing Taser use; 18 people have died in Canada after being hit with a Taser in the last four years.

Dziekanski, 40, of Gliwice, Poland, arrived at the airport Oct. 14. It was his first flight, and was to be the start of a new life with his mother in western Canada.

But Dziekanski, who spoke only Polish, began acting erratically at the airport. He apparently became upset when he didn’t see his mother in the secure baggage area — which she was not allowed to enter.

She had told him to wait for her there, and he did, for about 10 hours. When she could not find anyone to help her get to the secure area, and he did not emerge, she thought he had missed his flight and she left the airport.

Pritchard pulled out his camera after watching Dziekanski pace back and forth. Dziekanski threw a computer to the ground, and he lined up chairs, a small wooden table and a clipboard along glass doors that separated the secure zone from the public waiting area.

“He was acting erratically,” said Pritchard. “I saw what I saw, but I didn’t realize the seriousness until I got the footage back. He wasn’t acting violent in any way. That’s what is most disturbing.”

Robert Szaniawski, a spokesman for Poland’s Foreign Ministry, said Poland has asked Canada for an explanation of Dziekanski’s death.

“We believe that the use of Taser on Mr. Dziekanski was excessively brutal and unjustified,” Szaniawski said. “No attempts were made to use other means to solve the situation but from the very start the toughest means available to the police was used. We want the matter clarified and we want those guilty named and prosecuted.”

The video shows:

_Dziekanski acting confused for several minutes before four police officers arrive and vault over a railing and confront an agitated Dziekanski behind the glass doors. Loud cries of what sound like “polizia,” can be heard as the officers are told by someone that the man only speaks Russian.

_The officers stand before him and Dziekanski throws his hands in the air and walks away, and the officers follow, apparently indicating he should put his hands on a desk top. Dziekanski stands with his back to the counter and the officers surround him before they use a Taser stun gun on him and he falls, screaming in pain.

_A voice is heard yelling, “Hit him again, hit him again.” The four officers clamber on top of him, restraining his arms and his head, as Dziekanski twitches. Finally, he is still.

Pritchard turned over the video to police that day and was told he would get it back within 48 hours. When police later refused he hired a lawyer. He got it back on Wednesday following a court order.

Pritchard said police told him they didn’t want the video to taint potential witness testimony. Pritchard didn’t believe it.

“There’s obviously something that they didn’t want the public to see which is why we took the steps to get it,” Pritchard said by telephone from New York City.

Police Cpl. Dale Carr said the video is just one small piece of evidence. “Although the video is compelling and does demonstrate a great deal of what went on there, it’s only one piece of evidence,” said Carr.

“There are a number of other witnesses that have an account and we are interested in getting to the bottom of it,” he said. “We want people to make judgment on the totality of all of the evidence and that will be shared at the inquest.”

I haven’t arranged these articles in any particular order. They tell a balanced story, I think.

More updates soon…

Too many things on the agenda, and a looming computer-allergy as a result: the combined effect is that I’m once again behind on my “hope to do/ blue sky” list.

One of those to-do items includes posting more of my FOCUS Magazine articles (in PDF) to the link here, just above my about page (see sidebar) . Well, October’s article about the Belleville Street Terminal “renovation” is out, and I do plan to add it later today — and also add some of the earlier months still outstanding.

Meanwhile, I sent my first-ever letter to the National Post, and it was published! Slightly abbreviated, but still. The article I responded to was by Robert Fulford, entitled To the Turnstiles! (Oct. 2) — great article that leads with the question, “Should the public pay to visit museums? It’s a question rarely asked in Canada…” Go read the whole thing. The next day, the National Post published J. Kelly Nestruck’s Price To Peep At Pepys? Pfffft!, a good follow-up.

My letter is on this page in today’s National Post, and it reads:

 

Museums: an invaluable part of our national fabric

 

National Post

Published: Thursday, October 04, 2007

I moved back to Victoria some years ago and was shocked to realize that the Royal B.C. Museum (RBCM) now charges a hefty admission fee. When I lived here as a kid 30 years ago, the museum was free, which meant that I was free to wander into its galleries regularly to indulge my interests. I didn’t need to make a “special day” of it or cajole my parents into spending money they didn’t have, and consequently, the threshold for culture was level with my day-to-day life. It wasn’t something I had difficulty crossing.

Curiously, I ended up earning a PhD in art history at Harvard. I won’t say it was because of the RBCM, but I can’t help wondering how many Canadian kids today are cut out of the experience of culture because we keep it hidden behind a turnstile. By charging admission to collections that effectively already belong to us, museums are double-dipping into the public’s purse.

Yule Heibel, Victoria.

The editor took out a couple of sentences, for the sake of brevity. Understandable, but I’ll add them here:

After the first paragraph (which ends with the word “crossing”), I wrote: “I didn’t need to rely exclusively on a peer culture for entertainment, or hang out at the mall. Unhurried, I could go to the museum, and take my time absorbing its offerings.” What I meant by that I had a free venue that was public, but in which I could be an oddball (a museum-goer, gasp!). I didn’t need to be part of a group, or herd.

After the last bit in the published letter, I added my concerns around infrastructure funding. What I wrote was this: “…museums are also double-dipping into the public’s purse. I guess this is what ‘downloading’ is all about, with Joe or Jane Public at the very bottom of that particular food chain. But as Fulford notes, maybe it’s time to call the politicians to heel and impress upon them that free admission should be the norm.”

That last bit references a key concern of mine at present: municipal infrastructure funding. Perhaps more on that later, but let me just say that I also believe that the arts are part of a society’s — and particularly a city’s — infrastructure. All municipal infrastructure needs proper funding.

On the road to Vancouver’s 2010 Olympic Madness, one sleeping bag at a time…

Marianne Lepa, publisher of Arts News Canada (see my blog post from July 21), wrote in today’s by-subscription newsletter about Kimberly Baker, an artist who recently graduated from Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design in Vancouver.

It’s a story of the ham-fisted 2010 Olympics/ Vancouver Organizing Committee’s approach to “copyright” and marketing rights, and it should shock the hell out of any sane person. I’ll quote from Marianne’s email (which is based on Baker’s article in Common Ground):

For her graduation project, [Kimberly Baker] created a poster that depicts a homeless man in a sleeping bag with his shopping cart beside him. The image is reproduced five times and placed just so, each sleeping bag is coloured in five vibrant shades. The title of the poster is “Vancouver 2010″.

Imagine Baker’s surprise when the printer told her that “2010″ has been trademarked by the Olympic Organizing Committee and she was breaking the law by using the date on her poster.

“Sure enough, an investigation showed that Canada had passed Bill C-47, the Olympic and Paralympics Marks Act, legislation that provides the Vancouver Olympic organizers with extreme power over the symbols and language linked with the Olympics,” she writes in a commentary on Common Ground, found in our Opinion section today.

She went ahead and exhibited the poster anyway. It garnered enough attention that it earned a Vancouver Sun review, but unlike the other four works reviewed by the Sun, Baker’s poster wasn’t given a photograph.

“Had the Vancouver Sun been so intimidated about liability issues pertaining to any formation of ‘Vancouver 2010′ ,” she wonders, “that they wouldn’t print the image?”

Appropriating objects from our culture is necessary, Baker argues, “relevant issues become visible to a broader, public audience, challenging the notions of political authority, as a result.”

After learning that she may find herself in an expensive and protracted court case if she displayed the poster, Baker instead sought permission from VANOC to use the poster. It was granted, but for only limited applications. She met with Colin Jarvis, VANOC’s manager of Commercial Rights Management.

“When I met with Mr. Jarvis, he was very accommodating and open to answering all my questions. He assured me that VANOC’s position is that they are not interested in litigation with artists and that artists have a right to critique.

“When discussing my posters, Jarvis said that VANOC would not have a problem with them. However, if put them up on bill boards across the Downtown Eastside, there would be a problem because that action would be considered more in the light of my creating a ‘campaign’, as opposed to my displaying a work of art. So how do I know where the threshold is before I cross the boundary into creating allegedly illegal art?”

A link to Appropriation Art, a coalition of art professionals concerned for the protection of the artist to appropriate cultural objects in face of stiffening copyright legislation, can be found in our Blue Column under Advocacy Links.

Readers and local people might remember the equally outrageous attempts by the VANOC to force the Olympia Restaurant, in operation for over 15 years in Vancouver, to change its name. According to VANOC, its use of the name “Olympia” as well as the 5 Olympic rings under the name — which the restaurant had been using for 15 years — was suddenly a violation of copyright. Commenting on the absurdity of it all, Denny Hatch wrote in November 2005:

…forcing Alvand to change the name of his long-established restaurant seems gratuitously nasty. It means not only changing the sign, but also the menus, napkins and brochures, as well as spending money for public and customer awareness.

Further, it renders useless his entry in all the listings of Vancouver restaurants on the Internet and in printed materials all over the world.

Plus, in five years the whole thing will be over.

It just blows me away that the Canadian Civil Liberties Association or the Canadian Civil Liberties Union or the B.C. Civil Liberties Association haven’t started a … well, a civil liberties fight over this. Are there too many of them, are they too scattered (a federal association, a federal union, a provincial association — sheesh, is this necessary? are they effective?)?

For more on the question of VANOC’s overstepping of trademark & copyright (copywrong) claims, see the March 29, 2007 Vancouver Sun article, The law says don’t try to make money using these ‘Olympic’ words, by Jeff Lee (it’s spread over 4 webpages). On the last page, Lee lists words that, according to VANOC, may not be used.

“May not be used”: christ, it sounds like some cheap scare tactic at Hogwarts, doesn’t it? Here’s the list:

• See You in Vancouver

• See You in Whistler

• See You in Beijing

• Let the Dreams Begin

• Friend

• Sea To Sky

• Top

• 2010

• ‘10

• We’re Next

• Road to Beijing

• Driven by Nature

• Road to Vancouver

• Road to Whistler

• Driven by Dreams

• Celebrate the Impossible

• Vancouver ‘10

• Vancouver 2-10

• Vancouver 2′10

• Gold Medal

• Game Plan

• 2000

• 2002

• ‘00

• ‘02

• Host Country

• Bid Booster

• Bid Champion

• Beijing and Beyond

• I’m Backing the Bid

• It’s Our Time To Shine

• For The Fire Within

• Voldemort

Ok, ok, I made the last one up. But the rest? Even J.K. Rowling couldn’t come up with something as absurd as this… If you think I’m kidding, Lee spells it out:

Here [the list, above] are SOME of the words that are claimed as official marks by the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Games, its predecessor Vancouver Bid Corp., the Canadian Olympic Committee and its predecessor Canadian Olympic Association. All are still in force. Vanoc has ownership of these official marks as the rights-holder for the 2010 Winter Games. The COC also has some of these words under other marketing rights they haven’t given up to Vanoc but share in common.

This is so wrong it doesn’t copy. This is so hugely wrong, it can only be laughed at. Except it isn’t funny.