Mock Turtle

You might think that, in a GDP report that revised the first quarter contraction to 6.1% from the already amazing 5.4%, a growth figure of 0.1% for June is not a conclusive sign that a recovery has taken hold. This is, apparently, because you are not Canadian business journalist, or economist employed by the Big 5.

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Ontario forests are full of bears, but many hikers and campers never see the elusive animals at all. These days, financial bears are just as hard to find. I know I’m not the only one puzzled by the buoyant mood among economists and financial writers in Canada — ex-Merrill Lynch economist David Rosenberg and the Other Reader are on my side — but we appear to be alone in our skepticism, in spite of a host of economic indicators and other signs that might be expected to temper the unbridled optimism:

* Home sales have hit highs in some of the same areas (OK, Toronto) where unemployment is at an 18-year high, and is above the national average. How does that make sense?

* Back to unemployment for a second. It rose more than expected in July. Breaking down the figures shows that the part of the workforce actively looking for work has shrunk; another huge number of people are self-employed. Having recently spent a couple of months being counted among the self-employed, I can assure you that it is not an indicator that people laid off from higher-wage positions are replacing their former incomes, or are actually starting viable new businesses. It’s often a stopgap measure to bring in more income than EI would provide while looking for a job in a tough market.

*The number of people collecting EI has ballooned. In Toronto, the number has doubled in a year.

* We have deflation. Economists are spinning the most recent CPI reading the same way they spun the inflation beforehand: strip out crazy energy prices, everything is pretty stable. Except now, as before, we all have to pay for gas, heating oil, etc. Bottom line: not all prices are deflating, but some are. Never a sign of economic health.

All the consumer spending in the world can’t convince me that all the rest of it doesn’t matter.

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From the Fans of Toronto Public Library’s blog post on the renovated Bloor-Gladstone branch:

Realization

I have finally been able to put my finger on a thought that has half-occurred to me on my now-numerous visits to renovated libraries. Here’s a slogan to get you started: “Your tax dollars at work!” TPL keeps getting awarded modest increases in budget, even as it carries out budgetary trimming here and there, because we want to reward something that’s already working.

But what I’ve really been ruminating on is this idea. We live in a city that is otherwise so wedded to mediocrity it becomes indistinguishable from outright championing of mediocrity. Nonetheless, we build giant palaces to every form of learning, all free of charge and open to everybody. What we do here is we build palaces of learning. Ninety-nine of them. And when they wear out, we fix them. We throw good money after good because we think libraries are that important – which they are.

Toronto really does do a great job with libraries (see also: Runnymede branch, Jane-Dundas, Lillian H. Smith….). It’ll be interesting to see what happens with Metro Ref.

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So remember a year ago all those rumours about oil being stored at sea? Well, now there’s so much of it out there that I’d think twice before swimming in any ocean for a while. One oil-watcher calls it “the largest and longest continuous glut of supply that I have seen in 30 years of following energy prices” and thinks the price per barrel could fall from the current $70-ish to $20 before the end of the year.

I don’t see how this is unavoidable; I’m still puzzled that it hasn’t happened yet. In the early part of the decade, post Asian currency crisis, oil prices were at $20 per barrel. Now, however, consistently weakening demand and massive oversupply isn’t leading to lower prices — yet another example of markets not functioning like they should.

Canada has become so resource-dependent that a serious fall in oil prices would cripple any nascent recovery for quite some time. Wonder what the mood is like at the Stampede?

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The obvious solution to a garbage strike is to leave town.

Well, actually we had our trip to Boston planned for at least two months. J. read in the NYT about a once-in-a-lifetime exhibition coming to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), and we realized we had a bit of time in late June, and, besides, J. had never been to Boston and I hadn’t been since 1999 or thereabouts.

We flew Air Canada, which was uneventful on the way down, and slightly more eventful on the way back since they cancelled our flight. We were fortunate to get seats on the next flight out which was also the last flight of the day. In town, we stayed at the Copley Square Hotel in the Back Bay, which was apparently the first hotel in the back bay, having been in business since 1891. It was just renovated last year and re-opened with a modern hip international-style look — a bit hipper than we really needed or would ordinarily be willing to pay for, but they had a very good promotion for their “interior view” rooms. Since these rooms remain a nonnegotiable part of the hotel’s structure, I wouldn’t be too surprised if there were more such promotions in the future. It’s very conveniently located just off Copley Square, near a number of other hotels, shops, and restaurants, within reasonable walking distance of many attractions and convenient to the subway which will get you pretty much anywhere you’re likely to want to go. The 39 bus also stops right at the hotel’s doorstep which is actually probably the fastest way of getting to the MFA.

We spent our first day wandering around Boston, up to the old North End — an slightly odd combination of Revolution Era landmarks and Boston’s Little Italy — where we visited Old North Church and drank iced coffee and double espresso (J. and I. respectively) in an Italian cafe. We wandered back through Quincy Market (now unfortunately transformed into a food court) and downtown with lots of photo ops, finally getting back to our hotel via Boston Common, the Public Gardens, and Newbury Street.

Our second day was devoted to the MFA. The special exhibition — on till mid-August — is a comparative exhibition of Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese, three leading Venetian sixteenth-century Venetian painters. All are obviously first-rate artists, but our favourite by a long measure was Titian — J. putting it in terms of Titian being a “once-in-a-century” painter and the other two “once-in-a-decade” painters. Tintoretto is interesting, with canvasses characterized by great energy and outward drama, but Titian is often capable of capturing the same dramatic intensity with greater complexity and richness. Their later works sometimes made us think of El Greco and Rembrandt respectively. I’m not sure what to make of Veronese based on what was on offer — I think numerically he had slightly fewer paintings on display than the other two — and a certain amount of what I saw struck me more as not-Titian or not-Tintoretto than as something distinctively Veronese. Apparently Titian himself — a generation older than the other two — preferred Veronese to Tintoretto, though that may have had as much to do with personal and professional reasons as with any view of their respective artistic merits. In the evening after dinner we walked through the Back Bay and parts of Beacon Hill.

We went back to the same neighborhood on our third day to see the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, a palazzo-style building built to order to accommodate the collections of its founder, Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924). Gardner was a woman of considerable means and strength of personality who acquired a very distinctive collection of art, mainly European pre-1900, which in its day was more significant than the collection next door at the MFA. It’s still a very impressive collection, a whole that is more than the sum of its parts, with a number of significant old masters (including another famous Titian). It is also the scene of one of the most (in)famous art thefts of the last century, dating from the early 1990s, where about a dozen works were stolen including a Rembrandt and a Vermeer.

We had some time left in the afternoon and took the subway over the Cambridge to see Harvard University, unfortunately a bit underwhelming as far as we were concerned. I think perhaps we have just spent too much time hanging around universities.

We spent our last day in the Back Bay, taking in views at the Public Gardens, walking along the Charles, and finally popping into Trinity Church, a remarkable Romanesque-style Episcopal church designed by the American architect H.H. Richardson and dating from the 1870s. It is interesting partly for its engineering, sitting like other buildings of days on multiple wooden poles that carry the weight of the building through the Back Bay infill to solid clay.

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I’m not sure how or when it happened, but at some point Toronto residents became the unhappiest and least pleasant people on the planet.

What’s behind the transformation? Is it the sudden growth in population through the last two decades that has made the city so miserable, or the proliferation of Tim Horton’s (Toronto was once almost Tim’s free) since the turn of the millennium?

What is it that makes Toronto residents today so very unpleasant? Well, there’s the extreme selfishness — the belief that each citizen in a large city should be able to get around without any impediment, and that your problem is never, ever mine.

There’s the non-stop intolerance, whether it’s of delayed streetcars, Tamil protesters, crowds –in a city, noise, weather (hot, cold, humid, dry), cyclists, car drivers, unionized workers, and most of all, each other.

And, of course, there’s the whining — or, more accurately, bitching and moaning, which better captures the anger underlying the whole thing — that never really stops, just redirects itself. As Christie Blatchford asks in this morning’s Globe, “who feels stressed out on the third day of any strike, you may well ask? Torontonians, that’s who.” The Star headline on TUESDAY claimed that parents were “desperate”. If one day of scrambling makes you “desperate”, what happens on day 10? In the 1970s, there was a lengthy TTC strike and people picked up hitchhikers to help fellow citizens get around. A walk down Queen St. W. last night shows little evidence of that civic spirit, with discarded coffee cups and food wrappers already, three days in, lining the sidewalks. At some point will Toronto residents realize that they are, themselves, the problem? I won’t hold my breath.

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From the Chronicle-Herald reporter’s affadavit to the Nova Scotia court today. Not only, as it turns out, an effective argument against a frivolous injunction against publication, but also a much-needed reminder for the often acquiescent pool of Canadian political reporters:

In exercising the freedom of the press, The Halifax Herald Limited engages its reporters to gather news of interest and importance to the public. It is an expensive and time-consuming exercise. All media are under financial pressure in this aspect of our business. The sources through which we obtain are not always simply accessed. It is our function to scrutinize and report on government. To do that adequately, we endeavour to be fair but cannot confine our inquiries to government press releases or material government chooses to make available to the public at the time and in the manner that best suits government for its political ends.

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I’m probably showing my age, but I’m relieved that the grownups have intervened and cancelled a planned rave in the old Don Jail. The new owner’s site had the wrong tone, and something like this was probably inevitable. More here and here.

The old jail could be used as a performance art venue, but in all decency it has to be in a context that works with themes around suffering and despair, both experienced by the inmates and by their victims, and by the people who worked in the building before it was a Doors Open curiosity.

The place has a dark history – not playfully Gothic dark, but really seriously dark, and I don’t think that’s registered with the people offering ‘ghost tours’. More below the fold.

Continue Reading »

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Missed this the other day, but it jibes nicely with the giddy excitement about the Canadian economy reporting a mere 5.4% (annualized) contraction in the first quarter of 2009. -5.4%, guys! Practically growing! Never mind that the outlook is not for growth for the rest of the year, but for continued, if not necessarily as significant, contraction, while the now-official recession drags on. Who cares if there hasn’t been such a bad GDP reading since 1991. Green shoots!

And so, this makes sense:

Canadians optimistic about economy despite downturn: Poll

According to the article, the poll results show that Canadians have not been more optimistic about the economy in EIGHTEEN YEARS. Which, come to think of it, is also 1991, a miserable time of contraction that led to a painful, slow, lost decade (or most of one) in Canada. Good to see Canadians still have the sharp insight into the economic state of the nation displayed back then.

And there’s this: “Last weekend, 53 per cent of those surveyed said they thought the economy was in either in “good” or “very good” shape.” If this is the economy in “very good” shape, I’d hate to see the “fair” iteration.

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Next casualty of the recession: spas. Any place whose doors I’ve darkened in the last ten years has been in touch over recent months; some highlights from this week:

We’re writing to share some news about some incredible Limited Time Only Offers. …Serious Savings While Appointments Last!

50% OFF Selected Facials

As a welcome back, we are pleased to offer you a *COMPLIMENTARY $25 Gift Card when you book a Therapeutic Body Massage of 60mins duration or more. You will also receive a 25% discount on retail items during your return visit!

Flash Promotion! $25 off Facials Tonight?

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