Gee Canada Drops $1 Billion on G8 & G20

Property taxes in Canada’s largest city are rising, the country’s largest province is implementing a new combined federal/provincial tax in July, and many are still getting over the effects of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

Yet today’s estimate of security costs to protect the G8 and G20 world leaders which will be in Canada for a mere 48-hours have topped the $1CDN billion mark.

The Canadian federal government says it’ll cost at least $930CDN million, but won’t release final dollar amounts until after both events, which are being hosted in Toronto, Ontario, and “cottage country” just north of Toronto, in Muskoka, Ontario.

It is expected security costs will actually be higher than estimates, due to threats and allegations from protest groups.

That’s more than double what it cost Canadian taxpayers to secure the entire 17 days of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympic Games.

Yes, it is important that world leaders have clear and concise communications – but can Canada afford to spend a billion dollars for a mere 48 hours, to keep these people safe?

At least with the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympic Games, much of the costs to secure it were recouped through tourist dollars – if anything tourists are being discouraged to come to Toronto during the G20 and G8 summits.

Much of the downtown core – the heart of the largest city’s entertainment and tourism industry – will be shutdown and off limits due to security concerns during the G20 and G8 summits. Just yesterday, the country’s largest university – The University of Toronto – announced it was ordered to close its downtown campus for the duration of the two-day summit, because it represented a security risk. At great expense to the educational institution, they will be putting students who live on the downtown campus up at hotels, as the campus will be sealed off tighter than Fort Knox.

Other tourist attractions, such as the CNTower, the Rogers Centre, First Canadian Place, numerous theatres, clubs, restaurants, bars, hotels, the major banking skyscrapers, and many other places right in the downtown core will be off limits to anyone who either doesn’t work there, have the right security clearances, or both.

Getting around Toronto and “cottage country” will be hell in late June, when the summits are to occur – roads and highways will be sporadically closed to ferry the high ranking world leaders to the various venues of the two summits.

That and the thousands of people expected to flock to both areas to protest the summits, the leaders, and their policies, don’t make for a tourist-friendly environment.

Would you want to take your next vacation amidst the screams and chants of an angry mob?

Well, maybe the protesters will at least spend some money while at the summits, to help offset the costs?

Wait a sec . . .

Aren’t most protesters twenty-something unemployed students with too much time on their hands?

Guess not.

Oh Canada – what a country.

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Canada’s Largest City Among the Least Public Transit-Friendly Worldwide

Major urban centers always have traffic problems – that is just part of life in a big city. Traffic jams are regular fixtures in the urban landscape in New York City, Los Angeles, London, Montreal, and Toronto.

Though the last city mentioned is the worst when it comes to doing anything to reduce the strain traffic jams have on our environment, our transportation networks, or the economy. According to a recent study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the loss in productivity in Canada due to traffic costs the country $3.3 billion every year.

The OECD says Toronto’s public transit system has failed to keep up with the constant increases in the city’s population, resulting in 70 percent of the city’s residents depending on their personal vehicles to get to work – that is the highest rate among the OECD’s member nations.

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The OECD is composed of 30 countries from across the globe -- with an additional 25-non-member countries which participate in OECD activities and initiatives. Member countries including Austria, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Spain, Sweden, Japan, Germany, Iceland, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and The United States.

Who’s to blame for all of this?

Politicians which decide the fate of bike lanes, toll-highways, traffic calming devices, public transit fares and expansion, the location of new neighborhoods and commercial developments, and pretty much everything else making up urban sprawl are the primary culprits.

They have failed to plan, and in turn have planned to fail.

By not thinking through the locations of major attractions, and the way traffic will come and go from those major attractions, politicians have created more traffic headaches.

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Sure, it is great having the Air Canada Centre, The Rogers Centre (formerly The SkyDome), The CNTower, the Hockey Hall of Fame, and pretty much any other major sporting center and tourist attraction within walking distance of the downtown core. But most are sold out with events, and everyone is sitting in traffic to get to those events, we tend to think differently. Although these buildings attract thousands of people (the Rogers Centre can hold upwards of 60,000 people), no new major thoroughfares were built for the added vehicular traffic in these areas.

Local radio and television stations always encourage people to take public transit when there are crowd drawing events in the downtown core – but have you taken public transit recently?

The city’s public transit system – the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) – does an adequate job of moving people around the city. Remember, it hasn’t kept pace with the demands of the growing population, so allow yourself at least twice as long as you would normally take if you were driving, and don’t be surprised if you have to wait for an empty bus, streetcar or subway to get on – especially during the rush hour.

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During the rush hours in the morning and the afternoon it is pretty much standing room only, unless you happen to get on at the very first stop. In the afternoon rush, coming up from the downtown, people are literally squished right against the sides, frozen in place because even the slightest movement will put you nose-to-nose with a complete stranger.

There have been many plans to expand Toronto’s subway system, and in the past twenty-years, a whole new subway line did open up. It cost a billion dollars, has only five stops, and the one-way trip from start to finish is less than 15-minutes, but at least it shows effort.

Toronto’s politicians have been too wimpy to really create policies which encourage public transit use, which is where the real problems are. If more people took the city’s antiquated and underfunded TTC, then there would be a greater pool of funds to maintain it, expand it, and keep it in line with population increases.

This is typical of most urban centers around the world – the best ones are in the cities where taking public transit isn’t seen as being cheap, poor, or an inconvenience, as it is in Toronto. In other places, such as New York City, Chicago, even Vancouver, taking public transit is more socially acceptable, and as such, more people take it, so there is a greater amount of available funds to maintain and constantly improve it. And as it is socially acceptable to take transit in these cities, politicians feel compelled to fund these systems better.

But in Canada’s largest city, the politicians talk a lot about public transit, but because 70 percent of the city’s population don’t use it (including quite a few of those very same city politicians), funding is always taken from transit, and funneled into other projects.

What happens when you have a city with a constantly growing population, but little to no growth in terms of public transit?

More traffic – lots more. Current studies say it takes the average Toronto resident an hour-and-half to get to work during the morning commute. Taking growth models and the other estimates, within the next five to ten-years that morning commute will more than double, having Torontonians sitting in traffic for over three-hours just to get to work from the suburbs to the downtown core. And then there is the afternoon commute back home later in the day to look forward too.

Toronto’s city politicians are masters of making the transit system look good on the outside, while hiding the decaying rot on the inside. They have invested in new buses, streetcars, and subway cars over the past 20-years – new streetcars and subway cars are expected to hit current transit routes in next couple of years.

Though they don’t plan these transit purchases well. Back in the 1990s, they spent millions on natural gas powered buses. These buses turned out to c

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ost more to maintain, and so the project got the axe, but what a waste of funds.
Around the same time, they also spent millions on double-length buses, which turned out to be dangerous – studies found they could split apart, crunch passengers in the center as they turned, or even flip right over and crush nearby cars. Although some are still in use, they don’t purchase these anymore.

Most recently, the TTC has invested in gas-electric hybrid buses, which although safe, have had battery issues early on. The TTC has complained to the manufacturers that the batteries don’t last as long as the manufacturer claims, meaning they have to be replaced sooner. The manufacturer says it isn’t the batteries, it is the long routes which the TTC has which are to blame.

More money wasted, while our traffic jams continue to grow.

The new transit vehicles coming onboard the TTC system in the next few years will cost less to maintain, are more fuel efficient, and have nice and shinny seats. Too bad most won’t get to enjoy them much – thanks to the standing room only of today’s and tomorrow’s TTC system.

Most of these new transit vehicles will replace older ones which are becoming too costly to keep repairing. They should have been purchased years ago, to build the fleet, instead of just maintaining it at current levels forever.

But hey, if you visit Canada’s largest city, at least you know you better get yourself a car – then you’ll be able to get around without standing, poking and pushing your way through the city’s faltering public transit system.

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It’s War in Canada’s Television Industry – Thanks to the Government

War has been declared between Canada’s local private broadcasters and the cable and satellite providers over who should pay for Canadian content.

Many Canadians are more than familiar with “funded in part by a grant from the Canadian Film and Tax Fund” tagged at the end of most Canadian-made productions. This fund was setup by the federal Canadian government many years ago, to ensure Canadian broadcasters had an incentive to produce their own Canadian-grown content, rather than relying solely on American-made productions.

Recently, the federal government decided to change where that money comes from, and as is typical of governments looking for more money, they imple

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mented a new tax to cover Canadian-made content.

The federal government passed this tax onto the cable and satellite providers, as a fee equal to about $10 per subscriber. Naturally, the cable and satellite providers have passed this new tax onto their subscribers. And this is where the battle cries began.

In tough economic times as we’ve been in, we’re all trying to save money. And for most of us, if that means cutting back on our entertainment expenses, say cancelling some of the channels we don’t watch to save a handful of dollars, for the most part we’ll do just that.

Research has shown that for every price increase in cable and satellite services, over 40 percent of those subscribers will adjust their subscriptions to counter the increased fee. According to the same study, about five percent of cable television subscribers hit

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with an increase of $10 or more on their monthly bill will actually cancel their cable services completely.

So, just ahead of the addition of this new tax on their customer’s bills, the cable and satellite companies informed their customers of the new fee, and in a not quite objective letter, blamed the local broadcasters for the cash grab. They even included contact information so their customers could complain directly to their local federal Members of Parliament (MPs) – how nice of them.

The local television stations retaliated claiming they would go off the air, if they didn’t have this funding to produce quality, Canadian programming. Their news crews did “investigative” pieces on how the money is used, and what will happen if the government seed money stops coming. They ran – and continue to run – ads saying they will go out of business if they don’t get the money to produce Canadian content.

The cable and satellite companies continued the battle, with their own ads, more letters and emails to their customers, and claims that Canada’s private broadcasters made a combined total of over $4 billion in profits – hardly penny-poor in need of a handout.

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Although these very same service providers aren’t exactly desperate for cash either, making mega-huge profits off their subscribers. One of the biggest cable companies in Canada – Rogers Cable -- has made so much over the years, they have bought professional sports teams and stadiums. Currently, Rogers owns Major League Baseball’s Toronto Blue Jays, and their home stadium, formerly “The SkyDome,” renaming it “The Rogers Centre.”

SO what is the truth in amidst all this propaganda from the local Canadian private broadcasters, and the cable and satellite companies?

The truth is the federal government continues to demand Canadian content produced and aired by our local broadcasters, but has decided they just don’t want to fund it anymore. So they mandated – through the Canadian Radio and Television Commission (CRTC) that all television service providers pay this fee, else they would block the signals of the major American networks – ABC, CBS, NBC, and FOX.

This whole war started because some select members of our federal government were looking for a new revenue stream and they realized the government had been subsidizing Canadian content for years. Back in the mid to late 1990’s, they changed the rules governing local Canadian channels and television service providers.

They began retooling the Canadian Film and Television Tax Credit, and a

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t the same time ended the mandate that all television providers had to provide a community access channel. For years, the law of the land was quite clear – if you wanted to be a cable or satellite company, you had to provide a free, public access channel which was open to the local community for their news, information and access to locally produced content.

As more diverse as the television dial became, the government realized it was impossible for the television service providers to cater to the many needs of their subscribers with one channel, and they removed that mandate for a local community channel from the rule book – with some lobbying from the television providers themselves – naturally.

This unfortunately also opened up the possibility, to the federal government, that they no longer needed to pump as much money into funding local Canadian content. But they always put pressure on the television broadcasters to continue to create this home-made content.

And rather than face the wrath of the Canadian population as a whole, for cutting this subsidized funding for Canadian-made productions, they decided it would be an easier political pill to swallow for the television service providers. They never thought for a second, that the television service providers would in turn, pass this new tax onto their customers – though that just makes sense.

And now we have a war of words being aired very publicly on televisions across the country, as the big cable and satellite companies go head-to-head fighting for what each believes is in their best interests.

While us lone consumers who subscribe to these services are stuck in the middle of it all – all while watching are cable and satellite bills increase.

What should be done, is to go back to the original model, where television service providers, local private broadcasters, and the federal government each contribute a fair share of money to a fund for local, Canadian content – without charging anything directly back to us subscribers.

This was how it was for much of the 1970’s until the late 1990’s, when the federal government introduced laws to deregulate the cable and satellite industry. They had hoped that these changes would open the market, which in turn would lower the cost for subscribers via good old fashioned competition.

That plan fell through the ice like a barrel full of bricks, as many of the smaller, local cable companies were bought up and swallowed by the already mega-large cable and satellite providers.

And now it has come full circle, as the government’s plans to increase competition have failed, but they continue to act as if they were successful, by implementing this new tax. But because deregulation has failed, there isn’t a broader, more competitive customer-base to draw additional funds from.

Yet the government – never all that quick on the uptake – is still bargin

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g ahead with their plans to increase funding for Canadian content, by adding this new tax.
And we haven’t even scratched the surface when we toss the end of analogue signals into the mix. This year, American stations stopped broadcasting on what was called “over-the-air” via the good old fashioned Ultra High Frequency (UHF) band. Remember when you were able to just plug in a TV anywhere there was an electrical outlet, and watch fuzzy stations using “rabbit ears?”

Not anymore in the States – and soon not anymore in Canada either. As digital signals, with their high definition digitally crisp and clear pictures dominate the landscapes, both Canadian and American federal governments have decided to acquire those UHF frequencies used by television broadcasters for emergency signals and lower-band cell phones. So if you don’t already subscribe to cable, eventually you will have too – otherwise all you will see on your TV is your own reflection.

Maybe we all should write our local MPs and tell them to wake up, look around, and work with what is, rather than what they thought would have been?

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