March 2010

Wednesday 24 March - Government At Work

Loyal Readers may recall that last September I had some concerns about the lane markings on an intersection near my home which had been rebuilt. When I called 311 about this, I also pointed out that another intersection just up the road, which had been repaved during the summer, had not had any lane or turn markings painted on it at all.

Well, today when I got home from work, my answering machine had a voice mail from someone (who didn't leave a name or phone number) from the City. He said he was responding to the 311 call from last year (and yes, he did say it was from last year, so obviously he was aware that this was not something I'd just called in recently) and he said he had visited the intersection himself and found that it had lane and turn markings, and so he said he didn't know what the complaint was about. Then he paused, apparently waiting for my answering machine to respond, and when it didn't speak back to him, he said "Hello?" and paused and then "Hello?" again and then there was nothing but the background noises you'd hear in an office.

So just in case anyone wonders what the quality level of some of the City's employees may be: when you call in a complaint, they may visit the site five or six months after it's been fixed, and then expect your answering machine to explain this to them when they ask it what the problem is.

Friday 19 March - My Campaign Platform

A lot of people are disillusioned these days about politicians who say one thing to get elected and then do a whole pile of other things once they're in office. I wouldn't want anyone to think that of me, so I'm putting my campaign platform out there for the whole world to see.

• I will try to nail everything that moves. Yes, I'll do it on the couch in my office in City Hall, as long as it isn't the same couch Adam Giambrone used - I'd be worried I might catch something from that couch!
• I will take a taxi to get between places that are easily accessible using the free TTC pass the city gives me.
• I will use up the vast majority of my office budget every year; in fact, I'll strive to be #1 on the list in this regard.
• I will rent various costumes and expense them. And when I rent a bunny costume, it won't be the kind you see in an Easter parade; it will be the kind that will make one of my girlfriends and/or office staff look like a hot Playboy model.
• I will conduct an extensive examination of strip clubs and expense the lunches I have there.
• I will spend most of my summers in Toronto, but I'll be away a lot in the winter, attending various conferences on municipal issues. In warmer places.
• If you're reading this, you're probably a friend or relative, which means you're in luck: I will try to direct jobs and contracts to my friends and relatives. And girlfriends/mistresses, too. And people who give me envelopes filled with cash in parking garages and restaurants.
• I'll do what I can to get rid of emails and letters that are sent to me, just in case any of you say anything you might regret later if it becomes public. You're welcome. Please note that I am not responsible for any efforts the city's staff make to keep these sorts of records.
• I will make every effort to use the city's lawyers to handle any legal issues that arise. Not just for me, but for my friends, relatives, and assorted other cronies.

Now, I know what you're saying: these aren't original. You're right, of course! They've all been done before, most of them by members of Toronto council. The difference is that I'm telling you up front that I'm going to do these things. Vote for me, and this is what will happen. So when the press starts writing about all this stuff I'm doing, I'm just keeping my promises.

Oh, and I have to mention one thing I won't do. I won't forget my place. When I'm at the airport and the security people are ticking me off, I won't play the "DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?" card. After all, it just wouldn't be right to have people thinking I must be a Harper cabinet minister when I'm just a city politician.

Tuesday 2 March - Olympic issues

Now that I've said all kinds of positive things about the Olympics, there are a few issues I think ought to be looked into (even though I don't expect the IOC will actually change anything). And let me be clear: I don't claim to have the answers.

Judging

The issue of judging always comes up. A lot of the time, it's whining by athletes who think more highly of themselves than the judges did. And yes, there are some sports which simply could not exist without subjective judging; as well, lots of other sports rely on a certain amount of judgment on the part of officials in determining whether the rules of the sport are being followed.

But it tends to make a sport look bad when there are questions about whether it was judged properly. Perhaps in any future decisions about what sports to add or remove, there ought to be a bias against sports which require judging, so that any sport that is prone to whining and/or questionable marks has to get its act together if it wants to be/remain in the Olympics.

Figure Skating

As usual, the worst of the judging problems are in figure skating. There's the whining mentioned above, and the questionable judging mentioned above (and by "questionable" I mean that people other than the athletes affected are puzzled by some of the results). But there are a couple of other issues.

The new scoring system, which was brought in after the Salt Lake City fiasco to try to make the judging more tamper-resistant, seems to have a couple of problems. One is that almost nobody understands it. In the old days, even the most casual figure skating fans knew that each judge gave marks on a scale with 6.0 as the maximum, so if you saw a bunch of 5.8 and 5.9 marks, you didn't have to think about what discipline (men's, women's, pairs, ice dance) it was or what performance (short or long program etc.) it was to try to figure out how close it was to a perfect performance; it was obvious. Now, there are two scores with names that aren't dreadfully meaningful, and a deduction for problems, and what constitutes a good score can be very different from one discpline to another or between things like the short program and the free skate. It may well be a superior scoring system to the old one, but if nobody knows what it means or how it works, is it better overall?

The other issue is that a number of voices within the figure skating world suggest that the system assigns less weight to extremely difficult jumps (quads and quad combinations) than to other aspects of skating, with Evan Lysacek's win over Evgeni Plushenko being an example of how this affects standings. And it should be noted that there are voices on both sides of this issue who agree that this is how the system works: those who do quads say it wrongly tilts the balance away from quads, while those who don't do quads say it rightly tilts the balance toward artistry. You probably can't devise a judging system that will satisfy both sides of this, but there at least needs to be a discussion within figure skating to sort out whether the current system's bias toward skaters who construct their programs to achieve maximum points is or is not good for the sport.

Uncompetitive Sports

There was unsuccessful legal action by a group of female ski jumpers who tried to force women's ski jumping into the games. The IOC's reason for not allowing women's ski jumping was that it needed more time to develop, as there weren't enough world-class female ski jumpers to justify the sport's inclusion.

Meanwhile, consider women's hockey. It's virtually guaranteed that Canada and the U.S. will be the two top teams, in one order or another; they will both end the round robin undefeated, having a goals-for total of more than ten times their goals-against total. The IOC defends the inclusion of this game because it will help the sport develop.

The IOC needs to speak out of the same side of its mouth on these sorts of issues. If sports are to be included in the Olympics in order to help them develop, then women's ski jumping should be in. If sports are not to be included in the Olympics if they're not well developed, then women's hockey should be out. Either decision will tick some people off, but at least they'll have made a decision and applied it consistently, which they clearly are not doing right now.

Uncompetitive Athletes

We all remember "Eddie The Eagle" from the Calgary games. He was a middle-aged, overweight Briton who represented his country in ski jumping because, despite the fact that he was really rather poor at it, Britain didn't have better ski jumpers to send in his place. We all got a good laugh out of it, and then the IOC tightened up the rules to try to ensure that even if you were the best your country had to offer in a particular sport, you couldn't get to the Olympics unless you were actually competent.

It appears they still have some work to do. As an example, consider the Ghanaian ski team (one man of Ghanaian ancestry, born in Scotland, living in Ghana, training in the U.K.). Now, he seems like a very nice person, and he's raising awareness for my favourite species of large cat, so he can't be all bad. But if you watched him race, you know he's not a world-class skier. Granted, he didn't crash on the course, like many other athletes did, but that's like saying that you're a better driver than Michael Schumacher because you've never crashed. Well, let's see you avoid crashing at the kind of speeds he hits on the racetrack, and then maybe you can claim to be a better driver than he is.

And speaking of crashes, it's all fun and games until someone who shouldn't be competing crashes. In any of the winter Olympic sports powered by gravity, and some others that are human-powered as well, there's a risk of severe personal injury if you don't have the skill level for which the venue was designed. Eddie the Eagle admitted that there was a very real chance he might go splat. We all loved the Jamaican bobsled team, also in Calgary, but let's not forget that they wiped out; fortunately, they weren't injured, and they showed great spirit by picking up their sled and carrying it across the finish line. But not everyone is so lucky.

The IOC needs to revisit this issue.

Monday 1 March - Olympic wrap-up

The games had some problems, particularly at the beginning. I think the fuss in some media outlets over the things that were less than perfect was overblown, all in all. And by the end of the games, there didn't seem to be a lot of chatter about that stuff; it wasn't current information any more, the organizers did what they could to fix things as they came up, and so many things went so well that the overall impression has to be a positive one.

I have three favourite characters. Joannie Rochette showed how powerful the Olympics are when she competed (and won bronze) just days after her mother's sudden death. Alexandre Bilodeau's devotion to his disabled brother was very touching. And Jon Montgomery is a walking, talking larger-than-life hilarity factory (as well as the winner of a gold medal).

For me, the biggest story in men's hockey is not Canada winning the gold; nobody is surprised when Canada wins a hockey tournament. It's not the U.S. winning silver; nobody is surprised when the U.S. does well in a hockey tournament. It's not Finland winning bronze; while that's a couple of steps higher than they'd typically be ranked, they have a strong hockey program and are always a possible medal contender. It's not even Russia losing in the quarter-finals, though that was certainly a surprise. For me, it's Slovakia. Slovakia usually has a handful of highly skilled players and they're often capable of upsetting a higher-ranked team in the round robin. But they're not even in the top half-dozen hockey nations, and yet they beat Russia in the round robin and Sweden in the quarter-final, very nearly beat Canada to get into the gold-medal game, and when they didn't manage that, they very nearly beat Finland for a bronze. Two upsets and two near-upsets is quite a performance!

The Own The Podium program didn't achieve the goal in its name. We came third overall. But it was a massive success. We entered these games having failed to win gold in either of the two previous Games on Canadian soil, and yet we ended up not only having broken that string, not only having set a record for the most gold medals by a host nation in the winter games, but having set a new record for the most gold medals by any nation in the winter games. We set a new Canadian record for the most total medals in a winter Games, beating the previous record we set in Torino. And all of the athletes say that the support they got from Own The Podium made a huge difference. There are other countries that spend about as much on just one sport as we did on all of our sports combined, and it's not a lot of money (less than a dollar a year per Canadian). We should continue funding our athletes at a similar level.

If there's one impression I hope the world takes away from these games, it's a new impression of Canadians. We're still nice and friendly and we still apologize reflexively, but the world couldn't help but notice the sea of people wearing red, waving Canadian flags, singing our national anthem, and cheering like crazy. Really, we're normally far more reserved; we kind of acted like Americans in that regard. But if anyone was under the impression that we aren't patriotic, that we don't support those who represent our nation, then they found out something about us over the last couple of weeks. We're still Canadians, though: we cheered great performances by other countries' athletes, too. We're like that.