Mock Turtle

Over time, the spam filter on my e-mail account has become smarter, shielding me from random Biblical quotes and letters from the many bankers of the victims of that 2000 Concorde crash. So I was pleased to see that the filter is so sensitive that it knew to let in an e-mail plea for help from jailed Russian tycoon and former Yukos chief Mikhail Khodorkovsky:

Firstly, this is not to cause you embarrassment, I am ALEXANDER SHANNIN and I represent Mr. Mikhail Khordokovsky the C.E.O of Yukos Oil Company in Russia. I have a very sensitive and confidential brief from my boss to ask for your partnership in re-profiling funds. I will give the details, but in summary, the funds are coming via privatbank corresponding bank in europe. This is a legitimate transaction…. I will also suggest you visit these news sites on the internet to be better informed about this project.

One of the links provided leads to an entry in Sourcewatch that begins like this:

Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky (1963- ) is a former Communist Youth Leader leader turned Russian billionaire with ties to the Russian mafia. In August 2001, he hired the Public Affairs Firm, APCO Worldwide, to restore investors’ trust in his scandal-plagued company, Yukos Oil Company, where he is Chairman and CEO. APCO advised him to adopt “honesty, openness, responsibility” as his new motto — quite a turnaround for someone who has reportedly trafficked in women, laundered money and defrauded minority investors.

I’m guessing one of Putin’s henchmen got there first.

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The Star polishes up yesterday’s Ontario Auditor General report on the immigration year-end grants:

Auditor General Jim McCarter found that Liberal connections played no role in which groups received money, but that the money was doled out without proper controls.

What the Auditor General actually said (emphasis added):

We found no evidence that any organization received a grant because it had political ties. However, in some cases those ties did exist, and, when this is combined with a process lacking openness and most of the normal accountability controls, it can create the perception of favouritism if the organization ends up obtaining a grant.

And:

The majority of the more significant grants were recommended by the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration and his staff.

And then later:

On March 10, the DM of Citizenship and Immigration wrote a letter to the DM of Finance in which she confirmed that her Ministry would be able to flow the funds as instructed but also pointed out that her Ministry did not currently have a funding relationship with most of the 14 organizations listed. She therefore recommended that a minimum amount of due diligence be performed before any payments were made.

The report doesn’t dismiss anything; the Auditor General didn’t have the time or the mandate to thoroughly examine the issue. The fact that the grants were made verbally by the Minister’s Office — staffed by political staffers — to organizations that in many cases had not requested any funding, and that were not known to the hundreds of Ministry staff at Citizenship and Immigration, speaks volumes.

Report here.

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The Toronto Sun, in its paranoid wisdom, has an entertaining article linking a one-off, one-week traffic enforcement blitz , acknowledged and publicized by the police, as a desperate cash grab by Mayor Miller.

The anonymous officers quoted in the story lend some credence to the rumour that the Toronto force is less-than-enthralled by enforcing existing traffic rules, particularly when it comes to high-occupancy lanes:

“Hey, don’t blame me; my boss told me to take my ticket book out,” said one copper this week. He was at Dundas St. W., near Kipling Ave., handing out ticket after ticket to people driving in diamond lanes — designated for buses, taxis or cars with three or more people in it.

Another cop tells the Sun, “We never mind writing tickets for legitimate driving infractions, but the enforcement of the diamond lanes is something new. And not something we are crazy about.”

As the Sun reporter points out, there’s money to be made in enforcing existing rules. 2,790 tickets were issued for various infractions during the campaign. And hey — buses and bicycles would move faster too. Too bad traffic rules are only enforced for a week or two each year!

In a blitz in the past week, Toronto Police nailed 1,220 motorists for driving in “HOV lanes (high occupancy vehicle lanes) during prohibited times.”

You might think the Sun’s law-and-order outrage would be focused on diamond lane scofflaws. But no — it’s upset about whoever is forcing officers to do their job. It’s not just greedy — it’s downright unsafe to have officers stopping the chaotic flow of bylaw-breaking traffic! To quote again:

But they are not tax collectors for an inept city council either. For example, stings during rush hour in the phony environmental lanes is an appalling practice, unsafe for the police and drivers, and needs to be stopped immediately — no matter how much extra money it brings in at a time when council has a $576 million budget shortfall for next year.

The article also contains the sad tale of a man who had double parked in a spot already occupied by a motorcycle and was ticketed — even though he’d just gone to Cherry Beach to walk his dog. Life’s a bitch sometimes.

Or maybe more sinister forces are at work:

Cash seems to be the name of the game. Eddie Dimitropoulos of Mr. J’s Chip wagon at Cherry Beach said he has never seen anything like it in his 18 years there. “This year is very bad — especially in the past two weeks,” he said.

One of those two weeks would be the timeframe of the rare traffic enforcement blitz. I was at Cherry Beach last Sunday, during the second week of unprecedented ticket writing, and witnessed some of the worst and most frightening driving I’ve ever seen in the city. The friend I met who drove in and parked in the busy and crowded lot commented on it too. I don’t want to leap to conclusions — since a plan to make up a half-billion dollar deficit one $80 fine at a time makes so much sense it’s hard to question it might be at work — but could the atrocious driving and the unprecedented ticketing at Cherry Beach be somehow linked?

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An OPP officer in Grand Bend explains the meaning of “lost” in today’s Globe:

“I don’t think we can say where he is, and that’s very problematic in trying to track him down,” said Detective Inspector Dave Cardwell of the OPP Criminal Investigation Branch.

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This is an appalling story:

“Ghetto dude” e-mail sent by mistake, province says

But taking it a step beyond the obvious racist, classist slur meant to describe, it seems certain, the job applicant is the pathetic bureaucratic reaction of the supervisor of the woman who sent the e-mail:

Reached on vacation in the Maritimes, Craig Sumi, manager of Siu’s department, last night referred to her as “an unclassified, part-time employee … low level.”

“I don’t know where you’re going with this,” he said.

Oh, well that’s OK then. It’s just a low-level, unclassified employee acting as team leader for hiring for — oh, for Cabinet Office. Who is likely represented by one of the major unions or at least covered by a collective agreement and collecting years of service toward her pension. And who has taken the oath of secrecy and who, most likely, was hired through a competitive process. Not really connected to the Ontario Public Service in any meaningful way. I don’t know where that Star reporter was going with it either.

UPDATE: The Globe and Mail is planning an online discussion tomorrow on “How to avoid e-mail disasters”, which seems to miss the point. Wouldn’t an online discussion on “How to avoid being an ignorant asshole” be more useful?

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Clever public garbage can with shelf for returnable bottles

Originally uploaded by morecoffeeplease.

Vancouver’s garbage cans now have a little shelf on the front, in which you can leave return-for-deposit bottles (the vast majority of drink containers in BC are deposit-return).

People used to just leave return-for-deposit bottles on the ground next to the garbage cans so other people could take them and return them — this is tidier. Also easier and less undignified for folks than digging through the bins.

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Sassafraz is planning to reopen in time for the TIFF, and in preparation they are posting on the hoardings and on their website comments from blogosphere circa the time of their fire. Was surprised to walk by the site and find myself quoted (yes it’s from the law-related one).

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How walkable is your neighbourhood?

Plug in an address and a googly algorhythm will tell you.

Take it with a small grain of salt — our score came it at 60, which is only somewhat walkable, when I’d say where we live is extremely walkable. Apparently my old haunt of St. Patrick St. is much more ped-friendly.

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The delay of the vote on the land transfer and vehicle registration taxes may represent a defeat to Mayor Miller, but more than anything, it’s a victory for the Toronto Real Estate Board, who orchestrated a bombastic campaign against the former.

“Nobody likes taxes, but the public has been adamant that a second land transfer tax is not the right approach to addressing the City’s fiscal challenges because it could make the dream of home ownership more difficult to achieve for home buyers, while impacting
property values for some current home owners,” warned TREB president Donald Bentley in a July 5 press release.

This is, of course, misleading, in that the tax was not to be applicable to first-time homebuyers — i.e., those trying to achieve the “dream of home ownership”. Initially, there was a cap of $227,000 on the first-time buyers, who would pay only the tax on the value above that amount, but that cap was under review. However, it’s not really so compelling to talk about the “dream of larger home ownership”, now is it?

More from TREB: “Even though this tax will be paid by home buyers, current home owners understand that it could make their properties less marketable compared to homes in other municipalities where there is only one land transfer tax. This could hurt their property’s value, which would impact seniors the most because many of them rely on their property’s value to help with their retirement”.

Of course, other GTA municipalities around Toronto don’t all have lower property taxes, so such a move would be foolish in the long term. How this one-time, *2%* tax would lead property values to fall to the point that they would endanger any pensioner’s lifestyle, when leading economists predict a doubling in home prices in 2026 because of immigration (oft-cited by TREB itself as a reason the market will never, apparently, decline), is unclear.

TREB’s concern had nothing to do with a possible collapse of the real estate market. It had to do with a fear that, as the tax was absorbed, prices might adjust by 2% to accomodate it, affecting the commissions of TREB’s agent and broker members, who would either be forced to keep prices, and momentum, artificially aloft by cutting their commissions — generally higher than 2%, and serving the city as a whole in no obvious way — or allow the adjustment to take place and take home full commissions on slightly smaller prices.

I was interested to see if TREB would now take this opportunity to misinform the public about the coming property tax increases that are the result of its successful campaign — increases that will affect everyone who is enjoying that “dream of home ownership”. However, as TREB explains : “Property taxes can be paid monthly and, therefore, are more easily absorbed into home buyer’s budgets.” So just remember that when the assessment freeze comes off in 2008 and your 2005 assessment is updated and you pay your newly-increased property tax on your more valuable home, will you? And think of the seniors.

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