Toronto Politics

Toronto elected a new mayor last year, Rob Ford, a man who ran on a pledge to radically change politics in Toronto for the better (sound familiar?) by cutting wasteful spending, and by being a champion of the common man.   His rival, George Smitherman, an intellectual though pragmatic politician, an allegedly gay man (it didn't help that his alleged homosexuality was advertised as something akin to blasphemy by some homophobic Taliban-like ethnic group, three days before the election), was an early favourite, presumably because his message to carry Toronto into the 21st century was very sensible.

Anyway, Mayor Ford, who campaigned to reduce waste, wasted no time, ironically, in introducing a more expensive plan to build a subway instead of an already-approved light rail line through Toronto.   In his first order of business, the new mayor decreed that the meticulously planned light rail project would be scrapped in favour of his own subway plan, which would deliver one quarter of the benefit for four times the cost.

Here we are a year later and, after wasting a year arguing about it, Toronto's councillors have sensibly voted against the mayor's plan.   Now, finally, wisdom has prevailed.

Or has it?   This is Toronto, after all.  This is 2012.   Anything can still happen.  

For over a quarter century, the fate of Toronto's local city centre airport, located in Toronto Harbour has swayed to and fro, from expansion to outright closure and conversion into a park.   For years proponents of the airport have argued for permission for jets to land there, and for a bridge to be built to the island (one must board a ferry to travel across a small channel to use the airport in what can only be described as deliberate pain).   Local residents have thus successfully managed to block such expansion, against the wishes of the majority living in metropolitan Toronto.   The result has been a vastly underutilized piece of Greater Toronto Area infrastructure.

In the end, as I've often said, democracy can be messy.   Toronto got a mayor who is clearly ineffective.   Why?   Perhaps because not enough people cared to vote.   Perhaps because candidate Ford's message resonated with the working men and women of Toronto.

Personally, I believe a big reason democratic elections return anomalous results is because too many voters are just plain ignorant.

In Toronto, I predict it will be at least three years before a shovel goes into the ground on any new transit line.  How will that have served anyone?

Why Iran Isn't Ready For The Nuclear Club

Iran is in the news a lot, especially this week as Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, meets with U.S. president Obama tomorrow, in an attempt to convince Obama that Israel is right to strike Iran's nuclear weapons program before Iran succeeds at getting a nuclear bomb.  And who can blame him?  After all, Iran's president, Ahmadinejad, on October 26, 2005, stated that Israel should be wiped off the map.  In a flurry of reactions to his statements, consensus seemed to be that, despite what, exactly, he meant or didn't mean by his statement, Ahmadinejad really didn't like Israel in his backyard, on Palestinian land, as he put it.  If anyone ever doubted what his true beliefs were, two years later, in 2008, on the celebration of Israel's 60th birthday, Ahmadinejad said, "Today the reason for the Zionist regime's existence is questioned, and this regime is on its way to annihilation."

Meanwhile, along the way, Iran has steadfastly denied, since at least 2005, that it is trying to make a bomb; rather, that it's developing uranium enrichment facilities of its own so that it doesn't need to depend on other nations for the fuel to power its nuclear power plant, which went into service in September, 2011, and so that it can make the radio isotopes necessary for cancer treatment.   While the current sanctions against Iran suggest that there could be a modicum of truth to Iran's concern about uranium supply, it's hard not to imagine that Iran is really forging ahead with aspirations of one day having a nuclear bomb.

Sadly, as is often the case in dictatorial regimes like Iran's, the people do not necessarily share the same values as their leaders.   Following a June 2009 general election, in which the vote was rigged in favour of the incumbent dictatorship, there was six months of protests and rebellion in the country, aided by young Iranians using facebook and twitter and other social media, opposing the outcome of the election.   It was suddenly muted when activists were jailed or put to death, fully two years before the "Arab Spring".   Maybe this time will be different.   Just yesterday, Iranians cast their ballots yet again in a general election.   Here's hoping that the brush fire that smolders in the Arab world will ignite lasting change inside Iran.

Meanwhile, the international trade sanctions that president Obama's administration has led against Iran are intended to weaken Iran's governing regime.   Unfortunately, however, they may backfire by further alienating Iran's people and by galvanizing them with their leaders against the "evil American empire".

So how will this all play out?

The answer to Israel's very understandable mistrust of Iran is to trust the United States because, to pre-emptively attack Iran would invite chaos, finger-pointing, crisis escalation and, very possibly, an attack on Israel by nations not entirely friendly to it.  Economically, it would raise the cost of oil, thus strengthening Iran and OPEC and weakening the West.  All of this would undermine U.S. and western allies' strategy to disarm Iran and to broker peace.

Longer term, the real answer is for Iran's people to overthrow their regime and elect a comparatively moderate government that wishes to play by western rules.   Until they install leaders who are not lunatics or until the present Iranian regime agrees to mothball uranium enrichment facilities within Iran, their country will never be completely trusted with nuclear power, it will be under extreme surveillance, and it will face economic hardship, or worse.   The only other way out of this is for the Iranians to openly embrace the Russians or Chinese as their military guardian, suitably consummated with free trade and other economic ties with one of those countries, in exchange for dismantling any nuclear weapons program Iran may have or may ever wish to have.