bob tarantino

Passing By 04.29.07

I had no idea Ontario had a "badlands".  It's not a big badlands, mind you, but it still makes for an interesting stop along the way.  The easiest set of directions I can figure out is to take Hwy 410 all the way to the end (i.e., it literally stops) where it hits Olde Baseline Road, take a left (i.e., go west) and drive just past Chinguacousy Road - the badlands will be on your left.  If you go down a really steep hill, you've gone too far.

Look, at the end of the day, it's mostly just dirt, but it's relatively interesting dirt.  There are a couple of hiking trails around the badlands (which, it turns out, are largely manmade - or at least mostly the result of agricultural practices from the 1930s), and a gaggle of children and a few dogs were having a grand old time romping up and down the dunes in today's spectacular weather.  If you're in the Glen Williams/Caledon/Halton Hills area, you may want to stop by.

BT Review: Fiasco

Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, by Thomas Ricks (2006) (Publisher: Penguin)

We can no longer read anything without checking what prism the writer is using.  We (by which I of course mean I) ingest political and historical media from a stance of perpetual skepticism: am I reading something from the Toronto Star or the National Post? National Review or The Nation? CBC? NPR? NYT? Fox? Globe and Mail or Western Standard? Before determining the veracity of an account, in short, we invariably interrogate the source.  While it is healthy to constantly query, especially when talking politics, it can quickly shade into a wearying cynicism.  Sometimes, rather than being constantly on guard for someone who is trying to pull one over on a reader, you accept the bona fides of the author and just immerse yourself in the narrative.

I finished reading this book a few weeks ago, as I'm in the midst of an Iraq war book jag - and if anyone else has any interest in reading about the war, this book is really among the best I've had the pleasure of reading.  Ricks is at his best when he's chronicling the realities of feet on the ground, rather than using a wider lens, such as when he's recounting the steps leading to the invasion or speculating about the future of the country.  Because those bookends of his narrative, particularly the pre-invasion period, allow Ricks to relax his analytical rigour, they tend to more obviously betray his political preferences and indulge in foreign policy analysis which doesn't seem to be a particular strength - but even those minor lapses help in making his masterful account of the war itself even more compelling by contrast.

The title of course gives away Ricks' conclusion about the conduct of the mission to topple Saddam Hussein and liberate Iraq.  After reading this book, it's hard to come away with a starkly different assessment.  The notes indicate that Ricks' research comprised tens of thousands of pages of correspondence and hundreds of hours of interviews; many of his sources are on the record in their criticisms of the war effort, and if he's fabricating much, it's an awfully cogent forgery.

Whatever his criticisms of the Bush Administration, Ricks writes with an obvious depth of knowledge about and respect for the American military.  The bitterness of many of his interview subjects can't help but emerge in the recounting, and so this is a profoundly depressing read.  It seems that whatever could have gone wrong (whether from intention, negligence or accident) did: the litany of mistakes and missed opportunities is staggering.  Ricks determines that a familiar set of deficiencies resulted in the current situation: a failure to comprehensively plan for the post-invasion occupation period; a lack of sufficnet numbers of troops; a fatal discord between the military authorities and the civilian Coalition Provisional Authority; a failure to implement counter-insurgency tactics and, when they were implemented, a failure to maintain them over the long term; communications failures, strategic failures, failures of will - it becomes painful to read.  Some of the mistakes are cringe-inducing - such as when it is recounted that, as coalition troops moved towards Baghdad, they came across and then left unguarded literally tons of weapons which were cached in depots; because of insufficient troop numbers, the caches were left behind unguarded, thus providing a handy source of materiel for insurgents; because of a (misplaced) fear that the depots might be repositories of bio-chemical weapons, they weren't destroyed.

Many of the detailed stories here (of the battles for Falluja, or Tal Afar, for example) are riveting.  Interspersed among the reportage are gems of military history and philosophy.  And ultimately the reader is left with a book which explains so much, in such a satisfactory fashion, that you can't help but enthusiastically recommend it.  It's obviously not the entire story, but it's a required component of any fair assessment.  Anyone who has any interest in the Iraq war should be reading this book.

Grade: A

Recommendation: Buy (on the Buy/Borrow/Don't Bother metric)

"desperate, desperate"

Q: What kind of line would be written by a reporter who (i) has apparently never attended a soccer match, (ii) doesn't appear to know what "hooliganism" is, and/or (iii) evidently has a crush on one particular party in the legislature?

A:

The kind of hooliganism usually saved for soccer arenas swept across the legislature as critics took to banging on desks and stalling question period in protest that neither Premier Dalton McGuinty nor Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Mike Colle were around to answer questions. [emphasis added]

Maybe they need to start sending the Speaker in via helicopter...

Steynshire Redux

There was a Calvin and Hobbes installment from the early years of the strip which, if I recall correctly, chronicled some kind of negotiation between Calvin and his mother over bed-times, or TV watching or candy - the punchline was something to the effect of "we're both speaking English, but we're not talking the same language".  That has been echoing for me as I've been reading the point, counterpoint, comment and countercomment occasioned by the responses to the Virginia Tech massacre and, among other things, my own Steynshire Initiative post (as an aside, if you ever need to generate traffic for your blog, just write something which pisses off someone over at The Corner).  This is the last thing I'll be writing on the matter, since I'm pretty sure we're all talking past each other at this point, and the whole discussion has become slightly depressing - it appears that the mind of no one is going to be changed regardless of what is said and the bitterness of some of the debate, among people who are ostensibly at least vaguely on the same "side" of the political divide, is not going to be helped by further discussion - but I did want to clarify a few things.

Having now duly received the memo that sarcasm is a frowned-upon mode of rhetoric in blogging, I'll try to describe what I think happened in more sober terms.  We saw, I think, two different kinds of analytical disjunctions.  In the first instance, what I'll call the Steynshire side made comments about the reaction of the individuals present at VT - and some of their readers, myself included, read that as taking a morally neutral reaction (i.e., cowering and fleeing in the face of gunfire) and ascribing to it a morally negative judgment (i.e., cowardice - or, from Mark Steyn's April 18 post, emasculation).  Some of us, me included, were offended by that - I just don't see how that logical jump gets made.  For what it's worth, those on the Steynshire side insist that they were not, to use their own argot, "blaming the victim" - and I'm sure they were just as offended by the implication that they were.  When the reactions of those of us on the other side of the analytical divide were read by the other side, another disjunction occurred: they read us as being actively opposed to the moral virtues of bravery and courage.  For what it's worth, we insist we are not, and are offended by the implication that we are.

Goalposts then began to get moved.  The Steynshire side recast their comments as a cultural critique: querying whether, to quote, "cultural changes [have] moved us too far from the old American ideals of self-reliance and self-defense".  It was that post by John Derbyshire which prompted by own Steynshire Initiative post.  Of the dozens of comments and private emails I received, no more than a handful waded through my snottiness (Derbyshire's assessment) and failed attempts at humour to reach what I mistakenly thought was a fairly clear point: that using the reactions of unarmed individuals who are under fire by a crazed gunman as an indicia of cultural "courage" (which is as close as I can come to a succinct statement of Derbyshire's and Steyn's thesis, such as it is) is... well, ludicrous.  As some commenters pointed out (though apparently they were intending to buttress the Steynshire argument), there are numerous contemporary examples of people who, when faced with gunfire, have charged the gunman - which simply goes to disproving the Steynshire hypothesis that American culture has somehow become so "feminized" that people line up like lambs to the slaughter.  My own examples, hardly intended to represent serious research, went to the opposite point: that in previous generations, when confronted by crazed gunmen firing live ammunition, some Americans reacted precisely as some of the Americans at VT reacted - by trying to escape, not by trying to charge the gunman.  Does this prove that previous generations of Americans were less "courageous"?  Hardly.  There isn't any sort of Bravery-O-Meter which we can pull out and "measure" courage or bravery across a culture - they are, after all, individual virtues, not societal ones.

Whatever.  As I said, all of this is getting tedious for everyone involved.  But Derbyshire was gracious enough to respond to my post (his response here) - so I think I'll take the opportunity to point out that the analytical disjointedness appears to continue apace.  As Derbyshire notes, mass killings of unrelated victims by lone gunmen are exceedingly rare ("a very small dataset") - so analyzing them for some greater social import seems ambitious.  Which was my point - it was his point that a single instance (Virginia Tech) is indicative of cultural change.  He then cites both the 1991 Luby's massacre and the 1993 Long Island Rail massacre - but it's unclear what they are evidence of, precisely.  That some Americans are brave enough to tackle armed gunmen?  It wasn't me who was denying that - it was Derbyshire's entire thesis that some sort of societal metamorphosis has occurred whereby people seem unwilling to do precisely that.  It's not until we get to the end of his post that we see that the goalposts have moved yet again:

"So again, my suggestion that an unarmed individual has some kind of chance against a shooter seems to have some foundation in fact.  In the extremely unlikely case that you and several other unarmed citizens are confronted by a lone gunman plainly intent on mass murder, go for the guy. You might get killed, but then he plans to kill you anyway. You might stop him and save many lives."

Fine.  I have no quibble with that statement, nor have I ever - it seems like it would take uncommon courage to do so, but you're certainly not going to get an argument from me that (a) it's probably a good idea (as Derbyshire says, the odds are good you're going to get killed anyways) or (b) someone who does so is, as I mentioned, brave.  But notice how Derbyshire's argument has altered: it has become a kernel of tactical advice, whereas previously it was an assertion (sorry, sorry, a questioning) of declining cultural ethics.  It's one thing to say "Hey, you know what you should do if confronted with this?  Rush the guy", but it strikes me as quite another to say "Where was the spirit of self-defense [at Virginia Tech]? ... At the very least, count the shots and jump him reloading or changing hands" (Derbyshire), or "Whatever its other defects, Canadian manhood does not suffer from an excess of testosterone. I have always believed America is different. ... this awful corrosive passivity is far more pervasive, and ... is an existential threat to a functioning society" (Steyn) or "if something has gone wrong in our culture, and if that something might have contributed to the Va. Tech. death toll, that needs talking about" (Derbyshire again).

We can't marshall convincing evidence for our positions, because the assertions don't lend themselves to empirical proof - how would one go about "demonstrating" that current American culture lacks bravery or courage?  Not even Virginia Tech is evidence of that: in addition to Liviu Librescu (previously cited by the Steynshire side as a counter-example of "old world" masculinity), some students in the VT classrooms acted in an almost identical fashion.  Would we hold up 9/11 firefighters or soliders in Iraq and Afghanistan - and then start arguing over whether they are anomalous cases?  The absurdity of it highlights the salient points: that pointing to the reactions of the victims at VT as being evidence of cultural ennui is bizarre, and more, that the absence of the moral virture of courage in a particular instance is not proof of either (a) the presence of the moral failing of cowardice or (b) the absence of courage in an entire society.

The Steynshire Initiative

This just keeps getting better and better.  John Derbyshire clarifies that his earlier post, wherein he queried why it was that none of the victims at Virginia Tech had "count[ed] the shots and jump[ed]" the guy who was busy filling them with bullets, was actually a finely nuanced cultural critique:

This issue is: Have cultural changes moved us too far from the old American ideals of self-reliance and self-defense, towards a more "European" style of responding to crises by waiting passively for the authorities to do something? Seems to me this is a perfectly valid topic for discussion, as are corollary questions like: Supposing the older ideal was still dominant, would it have made a difference in this particular case? ... If these are not fair topics for discussion, I wish someone would tell me why.

Set aside for the moment the creepy quasi-Troother mewling about how he's "just asking questions" and appealing to some vague insinuation that his brave quest for enlightenment is being suppressed.  Set aside for the moment his bizarre assertion that Mark Steyn is "fearless" for raising the same "questions" (people who were slaughtered by a madman = wimps; guy posting pithy columns = fearless; got it).  Let's focus instead on the primary assertion (also echoed in Andrea Harris' comments): that what we witnessed in Virginia Tech was evidence of some sort of societal breakdown whereby an "older ideal" of self-defence and self-reliance has not just fallen out of favour, but actually been determinedly bred out of the populace. In short, "Europeanization", as Derbyshire would have it. (We can note in passing that it's not the mass murder itself which is taken as evidence of some anomaly by Derbyshire and Steyn, but the reaction to it.)

Fine.  This assertion assumes that at some point in the past, red-blooded American males would never have reacted in the "passive" manner seen at Virginia Tech.  A "cultural change" has occurred - so we should be able to identify a point prior to the change, where these ideals were manifest.  Let's call the metric for determining the matter the Steynshire Test, and examine some previous mass shooting events in American history to assess how real men would respond, and not the puerile, de-fanged variety which seems to haunt the land these days.  Excellent.  Here's a first stab at doing so.

Let's step back roughly a generation - July 18, 1984, James Huberty walks into a McDonald's restaurant in California and, over the course of 77 minutes slaughters 21 people.  Massacre only ends when the nanny state shows up in the form of a SWAT sniper.  Steynshire Test analysis: the culture of cowardice is already well entrenched - no reports of victims charging at the gunman, nor any evidence of plans being put in motion to either circle around him, scuttle across the ceiling and drop in on him from above or employ ninja stars.  Especially odd, considering some of the victims were presumably of relatively small stature, meaning they would have been more difficult for him to hit.

Okay, let's try a further step back in time, roughly another generation.  August 1, 1966, Charles Whitman ascends a clocktower at the University of Texas at Austin, armed with various guns, and proceeds to kill 16 people and wound 31 others.  Whitman had encountered numerous individuals on his way to the top of the clocktower, including one couple who saw him brandishing his weapons.  No one stopped him.  The killings do not end until the nanny state shows up in the form of three police officers who finally manage to kill Whitman.  Steynshire Test analysis: still no evidence of the American ideals of self-defence and/or self-reliance.  No accounts of individuals scaling the outside of the clocktower with knives clamped between their teeth in an effort to take down the gunman.  And in Texas, no less!  Things are looking grim.  To rub salt in the wound, because Whitman was a former Marine, his funeral featured his coffin draped in the American flag.  Perhaps evidence of communist infiltration - should be followed up on.

[UPDATE: Shouts to those in the comments - evidently you really should not mess with Texas: "By now word of what was happening had spread, and police began returning fire toward the Tower, trying to pick off Charlie as he rose up over the parapet to take aim.  Citizens went home and got their own guns, and hundreds of shots chipped away at the Tower in the next hour." And: "As I walked down the hall toward that office the sound of a large caliber rifle thundered from that open doorway followed by two men talking. After all the bizarre events of the last few minutes it didn’t seem strange to me when I peeked around the office doorway to see one professor shooting a deer rifle at the top of tower while the other fed him ammunition."]

Okay.  Maybe a still earlier generation had some brass ones.  Let's go back another twenty or so years.  The morning of September 6, 1949.  Howard Unruh prowls the streets of Camden, New Jersey, and kills twelve people with his gun - men, women and children among them.  Victims scramble out of the way, hiding behind houses, counters in shops and in closets.  But wait!  One man, Frank Engel, took a shot at Unruh, possibly hitting him (the forensics were a bit unclear on this) - but even this display of fortitude is compromised.  His resolve failing, Engel "could have fired again and killed him, but he refrained.  Later he would say, "I could have put a half dozen shots into him.  I don't know why I didn't do it.  I wish I had.""  Unruh would not be stopped until he barricaded himself in his house and was surrounded by dozens of police officers.  He eventually surrendered, and was committed to a mental institution.  Steynshire Test analysis: somewhat better, since someone took a crack at the gunman, but only a partial score is accorded - only one guy responded in a sufficiently "old American ideals" fashion, and even he lost his nerve.  Plus, Engel shot at Unruh from behind - further research required to determine whether this is sufficiently "manly" to warrant positive reviews.  Oh, and Unruh ended up in the loony bin, when he should have been hung by the thumbs.  Evidently the emasculation of America extends further back than we had feared.

Alright.  Twenty more years into the past we must go.  Francis Crowley.  In 1925, his older brother John got into a fight with a police officer in NYC, a fight witnessed by dozens of onlookers, none of whom intervened.  Crowley swore revenge against the officer.  A month later, the two encounter each other once again - this time a running gun battle between the two ends with both the officer and Crowley dead.  Again, no one interfered to assist the officer.  John's younger step-brother, Francis, grows up hating cops, eventually murdering one in 1931.  A massive manhunt ensues, until Crowley is finally located in an apartment on West 90th Street.  A virtual war ensues: hundreds of police officers, armed with everything up to and including machine guns, begin a shootout with Crowley, who fires back at the police and the gathering crowd.  He is eventually subdued when five officers break down the door of the apartment.  More than 10,000 spectators surrounded the building and watched the barrage.  Steynshire Test analysis: well, this is a little better (lots of guns!) but there remain a couple of problems.  First, it was the nanny state in the form of the police which really subdued Crowley (and why did it take five cops to take him down? he was only armed with .38s!). Second, the crowd, by some reports reaching nearly 15,000 people, just sat back like bovines, doing nothing - why didn't they rush Crowley in his apartment?  They had him outnumbered nearly 15,000 to one!  Wankers, the lot of them.

This is distressing.  We just know something has been irrevocably rent asunder in the body politic of the American people - yet we find it difficult to pinpoint either (a) when it happened or (b) events that occurred before it happened.  The challenge goes out!  Who can find documented examples of the "old American ideals of self-reliance and self-defence" being effected - we need examples of civilians under fire who did the manly thing: charged the gunman, kicked him in the ding-ding, grabbed the still-smoking weapon, cooly leveled it between his eyes and snarled "who's your daddy now, mofo?".  Or something like that.  And nothing too recent, mind you - that would throw off our whole "culture change" narrative.

*shakes head*

I suppose with respect to any saturation coverage event like the massacre at Virginia Tech, most people reach a threshold where they simply overload and say "enough".

For me, I'm pretty sure that moment occurred when some conservative commentators took time out of their day to make the repugnant argument that the victims were a bunch of pussies.

Take John Derbyshire, writing at National Review Online.  If he didn't begin the parade, he at least waved the standard with the most enthusiasm with a post that quickly degenerated from the pathetic to the hallucinatory:

Where was the spirit of self-defense here? Setting aside the ludicrous campus ban on licensed conceals, why didn't anyone rush the guy? It's not like this was Rambo, hosing the place down with automatic weapons. He had two handguns for goodness' sake—one of them reportedly a .22.

At the very least, count the shots and jump him reloading or changing hands. Better yet, just jump him. Handguns aren't very accurate, even at close range. [emphasis in original]

Fertheluvva... That isn't written from the experience of inhabiting any world with which I'm familiar - that's the considered opinion of someone who exists exclusively in a Showtime action flick co-starring Steven Seagal and The Rock.  As I understand Derbyshireland, all red-blooded males come equipped with a mental catalogue of armaments, enabling one to not just identify the weapon being held by the evil bastard who is in the process of shooting at you, but also be familiar with the number of bullets held in the clip, thereby facilitating your efforts at "count[ing] the shots", so that you can rush him in a heroic blaze of glory - presumably accompanied by stirring slow-pan shots and a wicked awesome soundtrack.  Even more bizarre, on the laws of physics qua Derbyshire, is the fact that Cho Seung Hui managed to kill anyone, never mind thirty-three people - seeing as how he was equipped only with "two handguns for goodness' sake".  Clearly </sarcasm>, Cho just wasn't all that lethal.  And yet we've got all these bodies lying around... Strange, that.

While Mark Steyn isn't sure he's "ready to go the full Derb", he is pretty sure that there is a "corrosive passivity" at work in our society - whereby the victims of "murderous misfit loners" (Steyn's words) just didn't have the balls to... I don't know, kick some ass or something.  And what better time than the slaughter of thirty-three innocents to bring up the deficiency of testosterone suffered by "Canadian manhood" (evidenced apparently by the fact that, when Marc Lepine went on his own murderous rampage in Montreal, the men (or "men", on Steyn's formulation) at whom Lepine was pointing his weapons "did nothing".  The fact that the armed man was firing weapons in their general direction evidently doesn't factor in.

Even my friend Kathy Shaidle got in on the act: "when we say "we don't know what we'd do under the same circumstances", we make cowardice the default position".  Well, "cowardice" or "self-preservation" - whichever works for you.  At Victory Soap, we get this:

my first thought was "how the hell can one guy walk around an area full of grown adults, killing at will, with no one stopping him until several people are dead?" ... People wonder why so many apparently meekly lined up for their "execution style" deaths. I don't -- I've had the same public school education everyone else has.

Set aside the gross smear that those who fell prey to Cho's guns "meekly lined up" (really? Did they meekly line up? Or did they desperately fling themselves from fourth floor windows, cower behind barricaded doors and die screaming, weeping and bleeding?).  Ponder how someone can query how "one guy [can] walk around an area full of grown adults, killing at will".  Perhaps because he's armed, dangerous and, permit me to stress this because apparently it isn't sinking in for some people, shooting at them.  With guns and live ammunition.  I'm pretty sure it wasn't my "public school education" that would prompt me to get the hell out of there - it would be my well-honed desire to stay alive.  And feel free to call me a coward - but it would be nice if people would let the bodies at Virginia Tech cool before sneering about their distressing lack of manliness.

I recall when it was some on the left who were clearly working out some daddy issues in public (anyone else remember Bill Maher, among others, criticizing Bush for not "demanding more sacrifices" of them in the wake of 9/11? What was that all about?) - now it appears that both sides of the aisle are a bit put upon.

Maybe Nietzsche really did have it all figured out.  There is a bizarre moral inversion at play here: the posts I linked to had little or nothing to say about the murderer, reserving their ire for the dead - the "meek", "passive", evidently emasculated dead.  So evidently their victim status is compromised.  Or something.  One wonders how long it will be before this morality of action turns its steely gaze onto, say, the murdered in, I don't know, Darfur, or the inmates of a Sobibor (why didn't they just rush the guards? after all, the guards were outnumbered! the voice seems to say).  To the extent there is any irony to be found in surveying these comments, we can note that the one individual who is being praised even by those who evidently have little to say about the victims at Virginia Tech is Liviu Librescu, a 76-year old Holocaust survivor teaching at the college who gave his life blocking a door so as to delay Cho's entrance into the room, thereby allowing some of the students in the room time to escape; Zach Petkewicz, a student who did essentially the same thing as Librescu, but was not killed, is rarely mentioned - perhaps because his youth doesn't follow the trope that courage or defiance has been "mostly bred out of people".  On the macabre accounting evidently favoured by a Derbyshire, perhaps Librescu was simply correcting an earlier deficit in the "manliness" department.  I feel soiled even writing that, but it is the inevitable conclusion of the slightly deranged passing of judgment which we're encountering.

The philosophical worldview that underpins the comments of Derbyshire, Steyn et al. isn't a conservatism of responsibility, or solidarity, to say nothing of compassion.  It isn't, in other words, a conservatism I recognize or even understand.

"in the past, the disparities"

Need some help here.  Mark Steyn has been on a bit of a demography and immigration kick lately in case you hadn't noticed, and in making his "demography is destiny" argument, he's had to confront a bit of a conundrum: as high as immigration rates are currently, they have been as high or higher at certain times in the past.  (I write this post without delving too deeply into the slightly disturbing strains of hysteria which seemed to grip some parts of the Canadian blogosphere within the past couple of months after the most recent Canadian 2006 Census report came out about immigration and urbanization trends - one day I'd like to take some time and examine some of the more disturbing anti-immigration rhetoric which came out of that, but I didn't have time then and don't really have time now... so it'll have to wait.)  I don't mean to simplify Steyn's argument, because I don't think it is one which is easily dismissed out of hand, nor is it the same argument which it is caricatured as by some of those who consider themselves on the other side of the political divide from Steyn.  But this post isn't about Steyn's broader argument - rather, it is about a particular passage from one of his most recent columns in The Western Standard.

The column can be found here (registration required) - the full text should be online in a few weeks (the Standard keeps opinion columns from its current print issue (or at least Steyn's columns) behind a registration wall until the next print issue is available).  Here is the passage:

Prior to the boom of the nineties and oughts, the all-time blockbuster immigration year was 1913, when 400,000 "new Canadians" arrived.  Whether they looked at it like that is another matter: most of them were British subjects moving from one part of His Majesty's realms to another.  In that sense, it was not "immigration" at all, or not as currently understood.  The 2006 census numbers take as a given that the Canada of the 21st century will be a project built almost exclusively by foreigners.

Here's the thing: I'm not quite convinced that the factual underpinning for Steyn's argument is correct.  Problem is, I'm having a bit of trouble coming to a conclusion one way or the other.  So here's the question: in 1913, did "most" immigrants to Canada consist of Britsh subjects?  That doesn't sound quite right, but I could be entirely wrong.  I'm trying to find authoritative sources on the matter, but am having a bit of trouble, so I'm wondering if someone reading this might be able to find something (Selley? You still out there?).

Here's what I've been able to find thus far.  This site contains some handy charts which set out the ethnic origin of immigrants to Canada from 1896 to 1915 (with the onset of the First World War, immigration plunged to negligible levels).  So far as I can tell, for the year in question (1913) British subjects comprised 39.5% of immigrants to Canada, a number which is roughly comparable for the five preceding years (some years it was slightly higher, some years lower).  The site lists "Statistics Section - Department of Citizenship and Immigration Canada" as its source, but doesn't provide any pertinent links.

The closest set of relevant data from StatsCan itself is in this issue of Canadian Social Trends, published by StatsCan.  The article "100 years of immigration in Canada" is a wealth of information, and anyone interested in the topic is strongly encouraged to spend some time reading it.  On page 4, we find this passage: "At the start of the century the majority of immigrants to Canada had originated in the United States or the United Kingdom.  However, during the 1910s and 1920s, the number born in other European countries began to grow, slowly at first, and then rising to its highest levels in 1961 and 1971."  On page 10, there is a graph which I find difficult to read with any precision, which purports to show the relative numbers of immigrants from different ethnic backgrounds.  But the numbers of immigrants from the UK as reflected in the graph seem significantly higher than the numbers shown at the Ships List site linked to above.

So, can anyone find an online Statscan source which provides, in numerical rather than graphical form, numbers for immigration by ethnic group for the opening years of the twentieth century?

"sought the views"

If I seem not to be blogging much, it's because I'm, er, not.  Part of it is being busy with other things (like, say, work), but part of it also is that I appear to have lost the ability to write posts like this one, over at Dawg's place.  Smart and irreverent - I don't know that my blogging ever possessed those qualities (certainly if it did, it was a couple of years in the past), but if you want to read an excellent post about an elected judiciary, check out what Dawg has to say on the matter.  (As an aside, his post also helps highlight one of our lost modes of expression: the dialogue.  How far gone is our collective ability to make use of the dialogue?  Consider that Berkeley once wrote his theories about the faculty of vision in the form of a dialgoue - and it was actually pretty interesting.  I digress.)  Dawg opened by wondering what I might have to say about it, which prompts the following.

I'm agnostic on proposals for an elected judiciary, because it's a complicated issue which deserves lengthy consideration - if forced to show my hand, I'd have to say that I would oppose any moves in the direction of electing judges.  But just as interesting, I think, is the question of why the proposition has even arisen in Canada (a poll released last week showed a majority of Canadians in favour of the idea).  I tend (moreso recently) to shy away from large-scale societal-level psychographic explanations for things, but it strikes me that talk about electing judges is the result of a bad case of structural dissonance in our legal/political system.

The delegation of personal sovereignty is the bedrock on which liberal democratic government stands.  The electoral franchise is the mechanism by which this delegation occurs - and so the default conclusion to which those socialized in a liberal democracy arrive is, if something is wrong, vote the bastards out.  Or something to that effect.  The floating of the "elected judges" idea is just the application of that principle to perceived problems with the judiciary.

It has become trite to say that the introduction of the Charter resulted in a fundamental shift in the locus of power in Canadian politics - but that doesn't make it any less true.  What is often overlooked is that there was no commensurate change in any other aspect of our polity: the federal legislature essentially handed off a significant portion of its decision-making authority to the courts.  The courts, being comprised of humans, with all their attendant foibles, have jealously guarded their new-found power and looked askance at anyone who questions it ever since (which partly explains why our current Chief Justice spends so much time, more than any previous Chief Justice so far as I am aware, proselytizing).

Something fundamental changed in our political structure with the introduction of the Charter, and the effects are still being worked out.  The expression of a desire to elect judges is the expression of a desire of citizens of a democracy to exercise control - we tend to disdain any governmental function which lacks accountability.  And, at bottom, I think that's what we're seeing when there is a popular sentiment in favour of electing judges: it is a crisis of accountability, much more than a crisis of legitimacy.  But a crisis of accountability left to fester for too long can become a crisis of legitimacy.

We've changed the power of the judiciary (in itself not necessarily a bad thing) without making any accommodation in our system to take account of that change (itself necessarily a bad thing).  And even the most marginal tinkering around the edges of the current system to inject a measure of democratic accountability (viz. the prospect of allowing a Parliamentary committee to question Supreme Court nominees) is met with shrieking outrage from the guardians of the legal caste and their reactionary allies in the media (why, yes, Eddie Greenspon, I am looking at you).

The electorate, looking askance at some of the judicial decisions they see being handed down from on high (take your pick depending on your allegiance, from Chaoulli to criminal sentencing to Bryan) sees that not only do some of these decisions seem to come from no discernible political place, but even raising the question is frowned upon.  For a sense of the disorientation that your average apolitical voter must feel on being informed of some court decisions, muse on this report about our former Prime Minister and Minister of Justice responsible for the drafting and implementation of the Charter:

In an interview ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Charter, Chrétien said he was taken aback by a series of judicial rulings in 2003 – his last full year as Liberal prime minister – that put a legal stamp of approval on gay and lesbian weddings. "I was caught by surprise..." [emphasis added]

You don't say.  This is a former prime minister, former justice minister, occasional lawyer, one-time leader of a party which prides itself on defending human rights and the Charter (when (and only to the extent) politically expedient, of course) who was "taken aback".  When someone is grumpy about a political issue, they usually seek to implement a mechanism which enables them to exercise a measure of control over it - and when you're watching an unaccountable judiciary, it's understandable that one of the primary instincts of the electorate is to seek to use the one tool which hasn't (completely) been snatched from them yet: the ballot box.

All that being said, do I think that "electing judges" is the way to go?  No.  But don't get distracted by the keening wail of those who seek to defend judicial "independence" or avoid "politicizing" the judiciary.  Trying to take "politics" out of judging is akin to hoping for rain to not be wet - we should try to avoid partisanship in the judiciary, but even that can't be fully worked around.  Whatever the answers are to "fixing" our political system, these are ultimately political questions which will be answered by political means.  And we would all do well to heed the sentiment of frustration that is expressing itself in unfortunate initiatives like seeking an elected judiciary - because a legitimate concern which is met by sneering and stonewalling is unlikely to go away.

Lamer Does Not Rhyme With Gamer

Continuing on the theme of our judiciary, it's fascinating that these comments did not receive more coverage (the story is from February, but I'm just coming across it now):

in an interview in his Ottawa apartment, [former Chief Justice of Canada Antonio] Lamer said he thinks some judges these days are too lenient and some prisoners, such as drug traffickers, are up for parole too early. "I will candidly say I have been looking at some sentences and I have found they are not what they should be. They should be more severe," said Mr. Lamer. "These words coming from me might surprise some people, but I mean them." To that end, Mr. Lamer said, he agrees with some of the Harper government's tough-on-crime initiatives. [emphasis added]

Those comments are... I'm not even sure what word I would use to describe my reaction in reading them. As the story notes, Lamer "was part of a voting bloc that tended to side with the accused in criminal cases, earning him a reputation for being soft on crime" - which is an oddly bland way of saying that, at least when I was reading his judgments on a regular basis, you could pretty much bet the house on Lamer giving the accused/convicted a gentle nudge on the wrist and sending them on their way (I swear there were times when you half expected to come across an annotation to the judgment which described him high-fiving defence counsel on the way out of the courtroom).  For him to publicly come to the on-the-record conclusion that some judges are handing out sentences which are too lenient is just... nope, still don't have the right term for it. "Flabbergasting" is trending in the right direction, I suppose.

The rest of the article is just as interesting, mostly because it shines the proper light on the kerfuffle late last year and earlier this year about changes to the judicial appointments process, raised mostly by an organized bar intent on protecting its privileges:

Mr. Lamer also denounced the much-criticized system of appointing judges to the 1,100-member federal bench, saying the process is "flawed" and there is no good reason that either police or community members should be involved in selecting judges.

... Police, as a special interest group, should be excluded, and members of the public simply don't know enough about the job of judging to competently select candidates, Mr. Lamer said.

... Mr. Lamer said judges should be screening judicial candidates seeking promotions and lawyers should be vetting other lawyers who want to sit on the bench because they are the ones who know what the job is about. "If I were on a selection committee to pick the head of neurosurgery, I wouldn't know anything," he said, by way of comparison.

... Mr. Lamer said he takes no issue with the partisan nature of the appointments as much as he does with the fact they are not from the legal community.

"Why not have lawyers and judges on the panels picking the chief of the firefighters?" he asked.

At least give him credit for honesty, a trait much lacking in the pronouncements on the matter from such outfits as the Canadian Bar Association: the entire issue is about the legal community protecting its own interests and its nearly feral reluctance to share power or allow non-professional oversight.  Note that Lamer isn't just complaining about the injection of the supposed "special interest" group of the police onto the Judicial Advisory Committees: he doesn't think anyone except lawyers should be involved (which would be a rather dramatic change to the system which has been in place for the last twenty or so years).  The bad analogies to neurosurgery and firefighting just serve to illuminate how the judiciary views itself: not as exercising a governmental power derived from the citizenry, but as a group of specialized technocrats.  It also shows that Lamer does not understand quite how governance works: at least in the province of Ontario, fire chiefs are appointed by the elected members of the relevant municipal council (see section 6(1) of the Fire Protection and Prevention Act, 1997 (Ontario)) - to make the irony that much more poignant, a significant number of those municipal council members are likely to be lawyers.

Shouts to TPL

It's my understanding that some writers are inclined to bemoan the borrowing of their books from the public library system - presumably on the theory that each such borrowing represents what otherwise could have been a (royalty-generating) sale.  I take the point of view that I'm stunned anyone, anywhere, would want to read anything I've written, and I'll take readers wherever I can find them.  Hence, lots of love to the Dundurn team for their promotional work and to the Toronto Public Library system for ordering forty-two (count 'em) copies of Under Arrest - Canadian Laws You Won't Believe.  Readers may also be interested to note that Canadian writers are able to receive compensation from the Public Lending Right Commission of Canada, which remits royalties to authors on account of borrowings from public libraries.

On the Podcast 04.07.07

Back when the Canadian political blogosphere was young and things were funny, Mike Brock was... a unique voice.  Nearly a year ago, he posted his final post, with the Brockian sign-off, "Media: Go to Hell".  Brock, being irrepressible, is now back, with a regular podcast show, co-hosted with Al MacDermid, which can be found here.  Seeing as how I'm absurdly easy to flatter, Brock graciously contacted me and cleverly informed me he liked my "wicked legal perspective on stuff", and I was sold - I'll be on the podcast this coming Saturday, April 7, 2007 - evidently the files are posted around 6pm (EST).

Passing By 04.03.07 (Cecil Pt 2)

Part 1 of this two-part Passing By can be found here.  In the first installment we moved east from the west end of Cecil Street in downtown Toronto, a shot street which, to my eye, offers numerous examples of some of the more charming aspects of living in the urban core.  For all the sights offered by the western end of Cecil, from the squat castle of the Community Centre to the parking lot murals, as we head towards the eastern end of the street we start encountering some features which give Cecil its unique character.

First up, some of the houses which reflect a late Victorian style (I think - if anyone is better able to identify the architectural style, please let me know).  The trim surrounding the second-floor balcony, when nicely maintained as in the first example, is one of the elements common to older houses populating the surrounding streets.

I also like the gating which you can see in this example:

On either side of Ross Street, which runs north from Cecil, there are twinned buildings like the one below - I still can't figure out whether these are original buildings which have been restored, or relatively new buildings in the style of older ones.

Now we start getting to the good stuff.

One of the big presences on the block is the squat three-story brown building which houses the United Steelworkers of America.  The building is named after Larry Sefton, who was a prominent member of the Canadian Labour Congress.

This part of downtown has a relatively long history of organized labour involvement.  Tucked back from the Steelworkers building is this gathering place - the Toronto Labor Lyceum (note, oddly, the American spelling of "Labour"):

I actually rather like the utilitarian lines of the Lyceum - the front is composed of six equal boxes, providing a nicely elegant contrast to the somewhat rococo elegance of some of the trim on the nearby houses.  The building is also noteworthy for the fact that the access ramp at the lower left was so well-incorporated into the design that it actually enhances it, by adding a visual accent which still maintains the geometric lines of the structure.

Jack Layton and Olivia Chow live around the corner from here (Olivia is the MP for Trinity-Spadina, the riding in which Cecil lies), and this neighbourhood and this building fly their colours:

At the far left (ha!) of the first picture of the Lyceum, above, you may have noted a small white sign affixed to the building.  The sign points members to Steelworkers Dental Office, guided by the smiling visage of Alex the Tooth.  I swear I am not making this up.

Seeing as we're downtown, and outside a labour/left stronghold, it seems apposite to point out what the people (or at least the postering subset thereof) are saying:

Some of these buildings house mysterious gatherings.  This building, for instance:

In the lower right-hand corner, you will see space for signs built into the brickwork beside the stairs.  Here is the sign:

For the longest time I was baffled by the reference - "The Church in Toronto".  I wasn't really sure where the emphasis should go: was it "The Church", but it had an office in Toronto? Or was the nature of the church in question that it was in and of Toronto? Was this some sort of Arcadian sect which knew the secret? Or something more mundane? Figure it out for yourself.

As we saw in Part 1, Cecil continues to witness the reappropriation of buildings for new uses, reflecting the needs of the community inhabiting it.  What is now home to Chinese-Canadian social clubs:

was previously home to buildings servicing Caribbean-Canadian immigrants:

As we continue east, we're getting closer to the end of Cecil, and the building stock changes markedly.  The houses are newer, not possessing the character of homes farther west.

Where Cecil crosses Beverly Street, we find an outpost for yet another immigrant group:

The modern building features one element not often seen downtown: open-air parking (well, there's a ceiling) which is located under the building, barely visible in those shots.

I have no idea what to make of this, present at the corner of the plot of land on which the Polish Combatants Association building:

A silver stone.  Why is it there? Why is it silver? Is there some legend of a silver stone in the Polish mythos? Anyone?  One possible, if decidedly less interesting, guess is that the stone was getting covered by grafitti, so they decided to cover it up, and they just repaint it every once in a while; but I've never seen it tagged, so if they are responding to grafitti, they're doing it awfully quickly.

Anyways.

Crossing Beverly, we encounter one of the true mysteries of Cecil Street: a massive abandoned building (the blonde in the picture is no mystery, she's just equipped with bad timing).

This is a big building - lying completely unused in downtown Toronto.  The value of this land must be laughable - I've seen houses in the immediate area listed for more than $700,000.  Just south of Cecil on Baldwin, a similar plot of land is being developed into townhouses.  An intransigent owner waiting for a higher price in a hot market? Environmental concerns? Haunted?

No idea what this is supposed to represent, or what it is he's holding - a breadstick? Or something more, uh, primal?

This one is interesting as well; I like the little guy with the crown:

As we get to the end of Cecil, there are a handful more houses, along with a large co-op.  Behind the abandoned building, we can see an access alley with garages, which allows houses on the street (in this case, Henry Street) to be built without driveways, permitting a more intimate relationship between the homes and the street.

Finally, we reach the eastern capstone of the street: Holy Trinity Russian Orthodox Church.

Note the image of Christ and the three-barred cross which sit at the top of the nave, looking rather sternly down over Cecil.  Take from that what you will, I suppose - because with that we've come to the end of this edition of Passing By.

The Deep Funk 04.03.07

It's been a while since the last installment of The Deep Funk, but this video certainly warrants attention - we present "White Chicks & Gang Signs".  Awesome.

Passing By 04.01.07 (Cecil Pt 1)

I grew up in the suburbs.  And loved it.  But ever since moving away from home permanently (i.e., not including stints at unversity and law school), I've only lived in decidedly urban environments.  And loved it.  One of the things that I think many people overlook about downtown Toronto is just how interesting it is from an architectural and social history perspective - if you're looking for the right things.  Downtown isn't always pretty, but I like to think there's a more complicated beauty which can be uncovered.

So here's a look at a street which I happen to walk along fairly often and which possesses the sort of understated charm which requires a bit of attention to discover: Cecil Street.  I won't be able to do it justice in this photo essay, but I'll do my best to get a start on it, as we saunter from Cecil's western end to its eastern terminus (a total of about a four minute walk).  You can see the street on this map, running as it does between Spadina Avenue on the west and Henry Street on the east:

Map of 2 Cecil Street Toronto, ON M5T, CA

Now, Cecil is surrounded by some interesting stuff.  To the west of Cecil, on the other side of Spadina lies Kensington Market.  To the north, on the other side of College St., is the University of Toronto campus, an entirely underappreciated font of amazing architecture in the middle of Toronto.  To the northeast and east is Queen's Park and University Avenue.  To the south and southwest is Toronto's Chinatown.  Actually Cecil probably belongs to Chinatown as well (since the streetsigns bear both English and Chinese script), but it takes inspiration from most of its surroundings and works its own charm.  In any event, Cecil is so unassuming that it gets overlooked - most people from outside the neighbourhood have little, if any, reason to traipse along it. 

One of the reasons I think it's so interesting is that it is bookended by two buildings, which are perfectly centred on the street and, if buildings had eyes, could be seen to be staring each other down.  They are buildings of strikingly different character, and between the two of them Cecil unfolds, and the nature of Cecil and the uses made of it changes several times.  The western bookend of Cecil can be found in this commercial streetscape:

The actual bookend, centred, as I mentioned, almost perfectly with the middle of Cecil Street, is this commercial/residential building on the west side of Spadina:

Note the opening near the top: I don't have faintest clue what it's there for.  It opens onto the roof, which is essentially not accessible.  It's not a window, just a frivolous design element - but frivolity has its own value, I always say.  Spadina at this point, between College and Dundas, is not the most gripping of streets: a frazzled mix of Chinese, Thai and Vietnamese restaurants, Asian dollar stores, cheap clothing stores, computer outlets, import/export shops, empty units, fly-by-night bargain book sales, and an inordinate number of stores selling flags.  I've never been able to figure out the flag stores.

Anyways.  At the western end of Cecil proper, sitting on the southern corner of Cecil and Spadina, stands a Toronto institution: Grossmans Tavern, which boasts live blues music seven nights a week and this mural:

Across from Grossmans you get a taste of what downtown living can sometimes be like, with a rather handsome building marred by grafitti:

I'm one of those people who is endless fascinated not just by architecture, but by buildings, especially smaller, idiosyncratic ones.  This white one has always freaked me out a little bit:

It's not really connected to any other building, and you never seem to see lights on there.  Lately I've started hearing a band practising in there.

At the far right of the photograph above you can see the corner of a central feature of Cecil Street: the Cecil Community Centre.

What appears to be the history of the Community Centre (as gathered from the outside of the structure) is worth recounting, since it seems to be a concise summation of this entire neighbourhood, as different waves of Canadians have washed across the area.  The Community Centre was originally built in 1890 as a Church of Christ -

At some point, the building was modified to accommodate the Jewish community -

And now it serves Chinese-Canadians -

On the south side of Cecil, across from the Community Centre, is a parking lot; but even there, there's art and humour to be found.

I didn't say it was good humour.

Continuing east, a stretch of attractive row houses begins.

One of the best things about downtown is that, because the building pattern is so organic, the most fascinating things spring up out of nowhere.  F'rinstance, you may think this is just a service alley behind the Community Centre:

In fact, it is Glasgow Street, which is the downtown equivalent of a cul-de-sac, completely inaccessible except from Cecil, and its own mini-neighbourhood tucked away behind what you pass by on the street:

Glasgow even has its own little parkette:

Going back to Cecil (really our only option since, as I mentioned, you can't go from Glasgow to anywhere else (you used to be able to wind your way on foot through an alley to College, but that has been closed off)), the intersection of Cecil and Huron streets offers a glimpse of the different types of buildings and residences to which a downtown neighbourhood is home.  We'll look from the SE to the SW to the NW to the NE corners.

First up, an attractive older house which only recently offered itself up to pedestrians, since it was previously hidden by tall hedges:

Next is a newer multi-unit residential building:

On the northwest corner is a single-family dwelling with a sizeable lawn (relatively rare down here), and built at some point in time between the two prior examples:

Finally, on the northeast corner sits a Hydro substation:

That strip of green you see running between the substation and the street is an attempt to make good on the city motto, visible in the sign below - "Toronto - A City Within a Park".

It doesn't look like much before the flowers have begun to bloom, but little touches like this parkette, with its benches, flowers, greenery and playset for kids, are part of what makes downtown eminently habitable.

That's it for Part 1.  I'll continue with Part 2 shortly, as we move east along Cecil.  In the distance of the shot below, you can see the eastern capstone of Cecil, Holy Trinity Russian Orthodox Church, about which more next time.

Part 2 will include what I think is the even more interesting part of Cecil Street, with the Steelworkers, the Lyceum, and the mysterious silver stone.  For now, I leave you with pictures of branches.  Just 'cause - I mean who doesn't like bare branches against the sky?