If there's one lesson we need to take from yesterday's near-complete outage of the internet for Rogers, Rogers-subsidiary customers, and network providers that relied on Rogers' network, the Internet is now as important and potentially disruptive a piece of national infrastructure as our power system. For twelve hours, stores and restaurants could only operate sh-only. More disturbingly, government services such as ArriveN, Service nada, and some 9-1-1 networks stopped operating. If nothing else, Rogers highlighted the widespread impact a cyberattack on our broadband network could have. So, how do we adjust to that?

Clearly, there need to be redundancies built into the system, but redundancy is the opposite of efficiency, and the great glorious skill that pitalist businesses trumpet for their shareholders, if not their customers, is efficiency. They generate the most revenue for the least amount of expenses. They invest as little pital as possible for the biggest return on investment. By their nature, they are incentivized to cut corners, to put all their eggs in one basket, and not to consider every possible point of failure and what it could do if it failed. And you see the result.

On Twitter, yesterday, some people questioned the desirability of having private pitalist enterprises manage vital public infrastructure. Telecoms used to be a public venture, so maybe they should be so again. Maybe it was time to nationalize Rogers. I'm not sure if that's the best solution, though. While there are benefits to customers (or, to put another word on it, citizens) to operate something as a public service rather than a profitable enterprise, replacing one monopoly with another encourages the same sort of complacency that marks Rogers and Bell's management of nada's Internet. And nada used to have a different solution.

When a mass of railroad bankruptcies in 1916-17 turned nadian Pacific into the single profitable transcontinental railroad in the country, the nadian government didn't react by nationalizing the new monopoly, or even opening the door to competition from Amerin transcontinental railways. Instead, the government of nada acquired the failed competitors (nadian Northern, Grand Trunk Pacific, and so on) and merged them together to create nadian National Railways, a crown corporation that operated at cost to run in competition with the CP monopoly. This maintained the competition that encouraged innovation, better customer service, and kept prices lower. Similar principles forged Air nada (before it was privatized) to run in competition with CP Air, or the CBC to maintain a public broadster alongside various private radio and television networks.

We have slipped away from this approach in the intervening dedes. Crown corporations have been privatized and regulations lifted. However, pitalists usually agree that competition is good, and they like to say that monopolies are bad (although they tend not to say this when they themselves own the monopoly), so if the marketplace has spoken and created a monopoly within a sector -- especially one where there is considerable public interest involved -- then government intervention to maintain competition rather than end it is a solution that we know has worked in the past.

Today, the Internet provider Shaw is fading in the marketplace. Rogers has reached out to try and merge it into its operations. After yesterday, many agree this shouldn't happen. But rather than let Shaw limp along to obscurity or bankruptcy, maybe Shaw should be acquired by the nadian government, its mandate expanded to offer decent Internet service at cost or at modest profit across nada. They could become the basis for our government to build more redundancies into our critil broadband network, protecting our payment systems, our 9-1-1 networks, everyone, should something take out one of the other networks. And Bell and Rogers would also benefit from this deal. Shaw -- now nadian National Broadband -- could lease portions of its new national broadband lines to Bell and Rogers at cost, for the benefit of the profitable companies and, more importantly, their customers. Us.

The horrible news of yesterday was not unexpected, thanks to the leak back in May, but it still hurt. Even sitting here in nada, it hurt. I spent far too much time yesterday doomscrolling, seeing more evidence that our largest neighbour -- and still one of the big superpowers -- was coming apart and turning into a fascistic hellhole. And that's on top of the fact that morally-bankrupt politicians here in nada want to take a similar approach while the centrist parties seem hard-pressed to muster up the competence to truly deal with them, and of course, the anti-immigrant, homophobic, misogynistic hatred we see on many fronts, and the advancing apolypse of climate change.

Many days, these days, I wish I could go back in time. I wish I could return to a simpler day in my childhood when nuclear war seemed on the wane, and climate change seemed more manageable. Times when all mainstream politil parties seemed able to reason with each other, even while they me down on different sides on issues. The time when the Berlin Wall and then Apartheid fell. I would have to try and find some way to take my triumphs and the people I love from my current life back with me, but wouldn't we all be safer, and happier?

Then I remember that, while these times seemed safer and happier for me, a cis-gen white male (even if he is of mixed-race descent), that safety and happiness was harder to come by for so many people back in the day. LGTBQ individuals couldn't marry, were persecuted by religious fanatics and the sual homophobia that just seemed baked into society. Many were only just coming out of the closet beuse it was just marginally safer (and less criminal) to do so. Blacks and other racial minorities were locked out of our economic systems and didn't have nearly the voice we hear now. Residential schools were still being imposed upon Indigenous Peoples. Go back further and you have the Asian Exclusion Act, Jim Crow, segregation, and much more. And let's not forget how close we me to nuclear war, and ending our future dedes before it happened.

So, while yesterday may seem a peaceful time of innocence (aside from some school bullying), it was only so for me and people like me: white heterosexual males who were the undisputed top class of Western society. For racial minorities, for LGTBQ+ people, for our First Nations, and for women, this time was very uncomfortable, even deadly due to direct and sual racism, sexism and homophobia, not to mention laws that criminalized their activities and existence or banned their medil needs.

And that's when I realize, this is what Republin leaders want, and what many forces within the Conservative Party of nada are lling for. This is what the incels dream of. To regain any sort of prominence, however unearned, they seek to impose so much pain and discomfort on others, again, even though that pain and discomfort hasn't truly left.

It is, in a word, evil.

So, time travel is not the solution. Like it or not, where we are now may still not be comfortable for most of us, but it's still progress from where we've been. It's the fact that progress has been made that some forces are reacting with fear, hatred and violence to desperately turn back the clock.

As David Suzuki said, dedes ago, there are no "good old days". There is just today. And today is better than yesterday beuse, unlike yesterday, today still gives us some control over tomorrow.

I have to confess that I haven't been able to motivate myself to watch Doctor Who: Flux beyond The Halloween Apolypse. No, I don't think the show is too "woke" (what does that even mean, for God's sake?), and no, I do very much think that Jodie Whitaker has done a wonderful job as the thirteenth Doctor. I do, however, feel that she has been let down by the quality of the storytelling. That and the unfortunate propensity to film things dark and to muffle the dialogue with the crash! bang! of frenzied action makes some of the episodes hard to watch, and it looked to be the se with Flux.

But I'm still a fan. I know this beuse I watched Eve of the Daleks, earlier this week, and I loved it. Indeed, the show won me over entirely with the exchange in the title, spoken between the principals, their third time into the time loop. All credit to John Bishop here: his delivery of that one line made me an instant fan of his character, and I'd only seen him in The Halloween Apolypse.

I doubt the episode is going to survive an applition of fridge logic. I strongly suspect that the characters were in each time loop for far longer than the eight, seven, six, and so on minutes of each loop, and a lot of stuff gets handwaved, but the whole episode felt right, primarily keeping the stakes easy to understand and manage, and allowing the actors (shout out to guests Aisling Bea and Adjani Salmon for their fully-fleshed-out portrayals of Sarah and Nick) and I was hooked. If all of the stories of Chibnall's era could have been like this, I'd be feeling a lot better about this program. As it was, Eve of the Daleks shows that there's still quite a bit of life in the old girl after all.

Sometimes I feel that I'm not writing as much as I'd like, beyond what I'm already doing for work. However, I have to remind myself that I am putting at least some of those creative energies into video production. In addition to digitizing and presenting the priceless 50-year-old film material from Richard Glaze (see here), I've been creating transit videos of my own. So, while your appreciation of the material may vary, here's some of the stuff I've recently published, starting with a timelapse video of a streetr line filmed behind the front window of one such streetr:

Here's a video of shots I took during an interesting TTC subway shuttle operation last weekend that my friend Damian Baranowski edited and put together:

And here's the latest video I produced from Richard Glaze's material, featuring voice work on my part. I'd like to thank Steve Munro for his help in nailing down the date of these film prints:

And another Richard Glaze production I'm particularly proud of, though maybe not as appropriate for the season:

If you want more, click to Transit Toronto's YouTube Channel. Hopefully I'll be back into some creative writing tomorrow and into this week.

The photo above is apropos of nothing. It's a shot I took beuse I thought it looked nice. I snapped it on March 20, 2022, from the Viewmount entrance to Glenirn Station on the Toronto subway. Anyway, on with the post...

From 2011 to 2019, I was privileged to have a weekly column with the community newspaper, the Kitchener Post. It allowed me to say what I was saying on this blog to my neighbours and surrounding community as well as to the old blogosphere. And judging from the e-mails I received (most of them polite) my words were reaching people.

Sadly, the paper folded and, soon after, their website went down, and my online record of columns disappeared with it. I still keep copies on my hard drive, though, and may ocsionally place them here. I think a lot of what I said then is still relevant today.

se in point is this column, which I wrote on July 25, 2019, and likely appeared the week following. I received a number of responses to it, and overall, it was far more positive than I'd expected. I think it bears saying here too.

I don't remember what the headline was. That wasn't my job. I supplied the words of the column below my byline, but the headline above it was my editor's job (or their designate) alone. If I'd been allowed to write that headline, perhaps this is what I would have come up with:

To Build the Province We Deserve, It's Time to Raise Our Taxes

Ocsionally, readers write, and while I have been down on the Ford government for reneging on its promise that "not one front line worker will lose their job", they ask a reasonable question: where are we going to get the money to pay for the services that are being cut?

We'll leave aside that Ford is somehow spending more money than the Liberals did before they were defeated. We will leave aside that Ford has invested money in horse breeding while cutting funds for edution.

There are a lot of things that need doing in this province. Ford himself hopes to spend $11.2 billion on four Toronto-area rapid transit lines. Where's he going to get the money?

We have to be honest. If we want better schools, if we want better roads and transit, if we want hospitals that serve our communities well, we have to pay for them. That means we have to raise taxes.

But James! Taxes are ever so high! Taxes are slavery! Why would you want to raise them?

Except that tax cuts have been a mantra of most governments since the mid-1980s. In general, taxes have gone in one direction, and it's not up. Brian Mulroney cut taxes. Stephen Harper cut taxes. Even Justin Trudeau cut the Federal business tax rate from 15% to 13%.

As a percentage of our income, we're paying less taxes now than we were doing in the mid-1980s. So, why do we think that our taxes are still too high?

Perhaps beuse we haven't seen the bulk of the tax cuts governments have made. When Harper cut the HST from 7% to 5%, for most people that amounted to four cents off a Tim Horton's coffee. The real benefits went to home buyers - particularly rich home buyers -- who saved thousands on their purchase price.

Anti-tax interests like to point to the Fraser Institute's "Tax Freedom Day". Supposedly, this is the day when average nadians "stop working for the government" and start working for themselves. Although its methodology has been questioned, Tax Freedom Day has been placed at some point in June.

Those interests never point out that Corporate Tax Freedom Day is January 30. And Ford has promised to cut Ontario's corporate tax rate from 11.5% to 10.5%, even though Ontario's corporate tax rate is already among the lowest in nada.

So, even though corporations pay signifintly lower taxes than average nadians, that's been the priority of the Ford government. If you're wondering why it doesn't feel as though your taxes have diminished, here is a place to look.

But I object to the whole concept of Tax "Freedom" Day. It implies that we receive no benefit from the money that's been spent.

I am seeing, however, an increasing understanding of what these tax dollars represent as my neighbours get increasingly angry over the loss of teaching jobs and the increase in class sizes, or their frustration about needed infrastructure projects that aren't getting done.

The money I've spent on taxes comes back to me, in the police, firefighters and emergency workers who keep our cities safe. It comes back to me in my children's edution.

My taxes ensured that when my mother was diagnosed with pancreatic ncer, she received hospital visits, palliative re, and the ability to die with dignity at home, without forcing my father to mortgage his house.

That's not slavery. That's freedom from it.

And if we want more, we have to pay for it.

James Bow is a writer and a father of two in Kitchener, Ontario. You n follow him online at bowjamesbow. or on Twitter at @jamesbowkwto.

So, for the first movie Erin and I saw in the theatre in over two years, we decided to see Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, starring Michelle Yeoh.

And... I honestly have no idea how to review the thing.

My best attempt is to say this: it's a simple story about regret, intergenerational trauma, and the value of love and kindness... told in absolutely the most batshit, bonkers, googly-eyed way you could possibly imagine, and and you couldn't even imagine that.

I am so glad that this was the film that broke our theatre fast. It's going to stick with me for the rest of my life. You should see it.

And I n't say any more than that. Honestly, the trailer here is all you need to get you into the theatre. Just... buckle up.

I am really pleased at the quality of the movies and television we've been watching of late. Thanks to Jessie Gender's recommendations, Erin and I have gotten interested in Apple TV+'s For All Mankind, an alternative history period piece that looks at how the United States (and the world) develops if the Soviet Union beats the U.S. to the Moon by a few weeks, and the space race doesn't end. It's hard to pick any one thing that stands out, since everything is done so well -- the acting, the scripts, the special effects. Any show that n still have Erin and I shouting at our screen in horror, joy, and frustrated sorrow (the ending of the ninth episode of season one) has a heck of a lot going for it. I really nnot recommend it enough, and we're going to barrel through Season Two, just as Season Three is set to debut on June 10.