Canada Day, 2024

Being contented in turbulent times.

I was going to finish this up and put it out the day after Canada Day but I have been preoccupied with other things. Especially, with getting my site moved over from Wordpress, and I have already blogged enough about why.

I would invite everyone reading this to comment about how the site works for them, and I now have the comments section working. I am not going to set up a contact page. With Wordpress and Substack, no one ever contacted me and I got few, but sometimes very interesting, comments.

What I do like is when people hit the “like” button. I still have not figured out this function with Ghosts. I will talk with them about it.

So, drop me a comment. I would like to know how readers find this new platform; easy to search through, easy on the eyes, etc.

So here is the first post made specially for this new site. The best of my old stuff is moved over and searchable. Much of my older stuff is outdated and needs to retire. A lot of stuff is now in a folder marked “revise/update” and will reappear rejuvenated.

It is summer in big T.O. It was an unusually cool spring, which killed most of my pepper plants. Now it is finally getting hot.

“Climate change! Gleep, gleep. Climate change!” No, the climate is about as it always is. I recall we had hot summers when I was young.

What it does seem is that the climate has grown milder in recent years. There are fewer serious heat waves. There are fewer cold snaps in winter. All in all, it is a little cooler.

Any suggestion of this gets the ”climate scientists” howling like zombies. Anyone who believes their own senses and memory instead of what they are told by the thought controllers, is another “climate denier,” to be stoned to death.

What I say is corroborated by the real scientists who study the actual climate. The weather changes in cycles solely as a result of the solar energy reaching earth. The cycle changes are more pronounced in polar regions, and have less effect as we go south. Many mid latitude areas of earth have logged no serious climate variations in the past four centuries, despite the “little ice age” and the “warming”.

The carbon level in the atmosphere has increased, leaving many areas of the planet more humid, and increasing the growth of plants. All over the planet, deserts are shrinking. All over, harvests were increasing until the disruptions effecting fuel and fertilizer availability.

And here in central Toronto, close to the lake, summer is hot and humid, but not uncomfortably so. The thermometer never seems to get over 30 degrees, which used to be the signal for a “heat emergency.” Summer is not so bad in Toronto, unless you are living in a badly designed building without air conditioning.

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On Canada’s 157th birthday, July 1 2024, I was sitting in the park watching the kids splashing in the wading pool, newly opened for the summer. I fell into conversation with a woman who had, incredibly, never seen such a thing before.

No, she was not fresh off the plane from some global south country. She was just from the ‘carburbs’, the ‘905’ belt around Toronto. She grew up there and was new to city living.

She had a different perspective that me. I am a big city person, who likes to walk to everything. This neighbourhood is the perfect place for me. Yet I grew up in a very carburbian place.

She was amazed at public parks, with people walking around inside them, as well as along the sidewalks. On the darker side, she saw camps of homeless people, with no one bothering them. The campers just wandered around the neighbourhood, in sight and in mind.

Having seriously never seen a kid’s splash pool, she had to ask the city workers what they were doing as they filled it up for the summer. So now she sat and watched the children splash. It seemed she has no kids and no immediate plans for them.

She and her husband had just moved into the huge new condo across the road from my building. Many long time residents of the neighbourhood scarcely believe anyone is actually moving in there. It is a monster, built way above the original height restriction for the neighbourhood. Yet it is to the north and casts no shade on us.

The monster filled in the last block of open land in this planned neighbourhood. Or at least, it started out planned, about forty years ago. Some developers had other plans for it. We lost the space that should have been a high school. Once kids here reach grade seven, they have to bus out.

The word is that no one is buying condos anymore, because they are too expensive; interest rates and so on. Yet people are slowly trickling into this new condo. We gradually see more lights on at night.

It should fill up. It took long enough to build. This neighbourhood is on reclaimed land. The monster complex straddles the incline where the old shoreline had been. This caused the builders some problems.

This was an industrial area for a long time. The site the monster sits on was once a pork rendering plant. When they started digging the foundation, they found that people were not kidding them that there were large gas pockets underground. That is what those strange pipes along the roads are for; venting the ancient gases.

So the developers had to wait two years for the gas to dissipate around their excavation. We smelled that well aged, burned rancid pork smell for two summers. They also discovered a huge concrete pier, buried, forgotten, not shown on most maps. They could not remove it. This forced them to redesign the foundations of the south end of the building complex.

These are the consequences of trying to slap up a massive, four tower condo complex without proper study of the ground you are building it on. As in, test drilling and historical research. Most of the buildings in this neighbourhood do not even have basements, for a reason.

This is what my new neighbour from Brampton has moved into. They have not bought into the condo, but have some sort of ‘lease option’ arrangement. Probably most of the people moving in are renters.

The landlords would mostly be ‘investors’, often from abroad. I am personally disinterested in the housing rental markets, but I follow the situation. It seems many of these condos are bought up by these ‘investors’, who often do not even bother renting them out. They are just objects to be traded.

Yet it also seems that a lot of these investors are getting into trouble. They expected to be able to charge a high level of rent. They are discovering they cannot get it for the simple reason that people cannot pay it. It is the same as with the home owner’s market now; the dynamics of a deflating market, a gap between what owners demand and what they are getting.

Thus, I think now is a good time for a carburbian couple to try out city living. As well, the car culture is headed for a fast decline, and not because of ‘climate’ related fuel costs. No one is going to pay anymore for the infrastructure to support that nonsense.

My neighbourhood, by the way, is considered to be one of the ten best in Toronto to live in. The one adjacent to it is considered one of the ten best in Canada.

After awhile, I left my Bramptonian to continue her observations of her new environment. I had already had a good walk around and it was time to go in and cook my Canada Day feast.

I had already been down to the harbour front. People were walking along the boardwalk and gathered in the parkettes. This is the more usual way for people to to mark Canada day in these times. Or, they gather in their patios or sundecks, or just front porches for little barbeques.

The big, organized Canada Day celebrations are not so popular anymore. At least, not with people under sixty. Yet the over sixties are the people controlling the neighbourhood association and they are still into these ritualistic things.

They had to cancel the Canada Day parades a few years ago due to lack of interest. But they still hold a celebration in one of the local parks, with some live entertainment and things kids are supposed to like. I am not sure if most kids are all that interested in getting their faces painted. Balloons soon disappear into the sky.

The event is less populated every year. I did not even feel it necessary to to don my N-95. But I hung around awhile and listened to a good Jewish Klezmer band.

Twice in my travels I went past a homeless encampment in an underpass. Sure enough, somebody had a small Canadian flag flying over his/her pup tent.

I have a good deal of sympathy for homeless people. At times in my earlier life, I was homeless. Fortunately, for short periods.

I am not, however, one of these asses who think homelessness is an acceptable lifestyle. It is disgusting that it is allowed to happen in a reasonably prosperous country like Canada.

The neighbourhood has a civil relationship with the campers on its edges. Most of them are not crazy and dangerous. They are just homeless.

In fact it seems like the really crazy ones get but into social housing buildings, like mine, before the people who would make good neighbours if they were given a chance. The city social services ways of managing homelessness, and mental health and addiction problems, seem often to cause even more harm.

But mostly, the homeless just pass through. They used to hide in the weeds in the vacant lots to the south of us. Now those lots are filled with new condos and some other actualized ideas. Now they inhabit the underpasses and the police are told to stop bothering them. Also, to try to protect them from the predators and the real crazies.

So, I am home again. The world comes in through my internet cable. The news, locally and nationally, is that we are celebrating Canada Day. All the grim stuff will wait until tomorrow.

The local government will still be trying to roll the stone up the hill, to make government work in Toronto. Every time they get close, the screw heads in the business councils and in the provincial government will knock it back down the hill. The national government will continue trying to figure out how to govern without actually having the power to govern.

Internationally, it is just another day. The long, slow, violent process by which an independent world is coming out from under the Atlanticist hegemony, plays on. Every day, a little more power seeps away from London, New York, and Washington, and toward the multipoles.

No doubt that is how a new world evolves, with no global hegemonies and no local fascist regimes. One where competents are in charge and serving the interests of the whole society. It starts from the global level and finally works its way down to the local.

While all this goes on, life goes on. If we have won the struggle to secure the means of living a decent life, then we live. Only crazy people deliberately make things harder for themselves. Only evil ones want life to be harder for others.

To conclude, I think I have made it obvious that I am not a “doomer”. I do not think we are headed for a breakdown. I think we are headed for a break through.

I predict that by Canada Day of 2030, things will be getting a lot better.