Thursday, January 28, 2010

Blaming the victim

I was going to post a rant about the police response to a dramatic increase of pedestrian-vehicle fatalities (and we all know which side of that equation suffered the fatalities), but the Star's Christopher Hume beat me to it, articulating what is most galling about the cop's propensity to blame the victim. When we have a traffic system that never ensures the safety of pedestrians (and cyclists, for that matter), whether they obey the rules or not, any incentive to obey the rules is removed.

People wonder why there's been such a rash of accidents. My theory: drivers are more cautious when there is a certain threshold of pedestrians around. Drivers have to see a decent number of human beings to register, "Hey, there are people around I have to watch out for." (As a cyclist, I've learned that the most dangerous time to bike is spring, just as biking weather hits. Drivers have to re-learn how to navigate us.)

Un-vehicled people are scarce on many streets and neighbourhoods in the winter so drivers become more cavalier. Our warm snap brought pedestrians to places where motorists weren't expecting them, but not enough to make them more careful.

Regardless, any response that treats pedestrians and people zooming around in 5,000 pound worth of fast-moving, gas-guzzling armour as equally responsible is a response that's out of touch with reality.

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Bright young thing

I have also been doing work lately for Yonge Street Media, a weekly online magazine that spotlights innovation and creativity in Toronto. Having focussed so much on theatre lately, I often feel like I'm applying arts-style coverage to business and community-building projects, which is kinda fun.

Link to 'This' article

When out came out in the fall, my piece on queer politics was paper-only, but, ever slow to catch up, I just realized it's now online.

Tuesday, January 05, 2010

A clever balance

The uproar over how Prime Minister Stephen Harper has prorogued Parliament has focussed mostly on how it helps him escape the controversy over the allegations that Afghan detainees under the care of Canadian troops were handed over to be tortured.

But the strategy is also effective for a minority PM who has struggled with not looking too scary to moderate Canadians. People talk about how legislation dying on the order paper must be a disappointment to him. But perhaps some of it--copyright, the end of conditional sentencing and the overhaul of the national sex offender registry--was introduced to keep his core right-wing supporters happy without Harper caring if the laws ever passed. You introduce legislation to please the core and kill the legislation to please the moderates. The result is that nobody hates you and you can wield the powers of a Canadian prime minister, powers that are much grander than the lowly enacting of legislation.

And the fury over the proroguing? Name me somebody who lost an election due to the abuse of Parliamentary procedure.