For our special 50th anniversary issue, Canada’s brightest, boldest, and most rebellious thinkers, doers, and creators share their best big ideas. Through ideas macro and micro, radical and everyday, we present 50 essays, think pieces, and calls to action. Picture: plans for sustainable food systems, radical legislation, revolutionary health care, a greener planet, Indigenous self-government, vibrant cities, safe spaces, peaceful collaboration, and more—we encouraged our writers to dream big, to hope, and to courageously share their ideas and wish lists for our collective better future. Here’s to another 50 years!

The images of Prime Minister Trudeau shaking hands and taking selfies at the Jarry Metro station in his Papineau riding the morning after his federal election victory were striking. Choosing a public transit station for his first high-profile media event in a country deeply immersed in rural and wilderness ideology, where mentions of cities or being seen as too urban has been a liability, was a strong statement that our political landscape has shifted. Millions of Canadians who live in urban environments could relate to those images and their way of life was suddenly part of the national conversation. As it should be: eight out of 10 of us live in and around cities.

Things changed quickly after the election. In the run-up to Trudeau’s first budget there were signals of major change in federal-municipal relations. When the budget was unveiled in March, it called for billions for “unsexy” new spending for Aboriginal communities, middle-class families, transit upgrades, and social housing. “This is truly a cities budget and I’m encouraged by the investments being made in Toronto from transit to social housing, green infrastructure to heritage and culture,” said Toronto Mayor John Tory. Though the budget didn’t deliver an explicit change in the funding formula for cities, there was and is a buzz in municipal circles: perhaps this was finally the start of a coherent national cities policy renewal.

Canadian urban policy is certainly germinating. We must now continue to demonstrate to each other that we are an urban nation—80 percent strong—with cities that have tremendous value and are often the envy of the world. This often conflicts with the idea we Canadians have of ourselves. Even the 80 percent figure incites controversy—critics will point out that the number largely encapsulates suburban dwellers rather than truly urban. The suburban landscape, in the varied ways that it’s defined, is as common a Canadian condition as farm life was a century ago, but it’s more similar to an truly urban condition than not. Focusing on shared values rather than differences could encourage cohesion between the two. So far we’ve had people trying to divide these nearby camps; Toronto’s Rob Ford is evidence of what happens when we focus on differences rather than what could unite us.

Just as there have been nation-building projects in Canada, the country needs an overt urban nation-building project, bundling the suburbs and downtowns together. The architecture, history, built form, economies, culture, and feel of Canadian cities needs to be explored, celebrated, critiqued, and reflected back to Canadians in order for the policy discussions to stick, for it to relate, for people to understand it matters. Policy needs to be connected geographically, along the city streets of this country. This need not be in opposition to rural life or traditional economies, but bringing the new Canadian reality into Canada’s idea of itself. Perhaps if we all started to identify as urbanites, some of Canada’s self-sabotaging regionalism might disappear: we’re all in this together, and struggling for the same way of good life.

This country and its disparate, far-flung geography is an invention of the railway, telecommunication connection, and a 150-year nation-building project. It’s time to make our great cities part of that ongoing story, and part of that project.

Illustration by Matthew Daley

Illustration by Antony Hare

ON MARCH 20, 2008 New College students at the University of Toronto occupied Simcoe Hall to protest a hike in fees during a tuition freeze. The students, who were all people of colour, sat chanting and singing songs hoping to get a meeting with the school’s then president David Naylor. One of the students sitting in Simcoe Hall that day was second-year student Rio Rodriguez—who became one of multiple students arrested for the peaceful sit-in. Things escalated quickly after police arrived and Rodriguez (who identifies as multi-racial gender non-conforming Latin@ person and who uses the pronoun “they”) was injured in the confrontation.

Before this, Rodriguez envisioned U of T as a place to thrive—one that was inclusive and welcoming. Suddenly, they had to re-imagine it as potentially violent for people of colour. Soon, Rodriguez and the other 13 students arrested that day were referred to as the “Fight Fees 14.” The student activists were pressed with criminal charges and, per the conditions of their bail, also escorted to and from classes and restricted from communicating with one another. Naylor later issued a statement that framed the student activists as “thugs” and “violent”, refusing to acknowledge they were just students concerned about their tuition fees.

This incident sparked Rodriguez’s start as a radical historical researcher and, subsequently, the launch of their radical walking tours, which retold the story of U of T as a space that not all students experienced the same way. Highlights of the tour included Robarts Library, Hart House, and Simcoe Hall, all forgotten places of student protests—ranging from solidarity with South African resisters during Apartheid to demands of divestment. Living in Toronto’s famous gay neighbourhood, the Village, at Church and Wellesley while attending school, Rodriguez was once excited to attend the university, which they assumed—like many have—was a utopia for progressive folks. Now they realize even spaces that are presumed to be inclusive and Rodriguez continued the walking tours until they graduated in 2011, with a degree in sexual diversity studies.

Shortly thereafter, they headed to New York and became a researcher with a walking tours group in the lower Eastside and were impressed by the group’s comprehensive programming, especially its ability to take up complicated issues like gentrification and educate people in an accessible way. Rodriguez began to wonder why the Village, sold as a supposed bastion of progressiveness, seemed so over-policed. They often saw police target and harass young Indigenous people and people of colour— sometimes on a nightly basis. Their image of a safe haven was shattered.

In 2012, Rodriguez decided to return to Toronto and to start a new radical history walking tour, this time of the Village. Their first step was intensive research at the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, where they found the histories so often glossed over when the Village is championed as a utopia for everyone. Or, as Rodriguez puts it: “the shiny benefits for some oppress many others.” Through research, they re-centered and uncovered hidden marginal histories, including, but not limited to, “people of colour histories, radical sex working histories, racist removal of public space, and policing.” From there, Rodriguez re-mapped the Village as what it looks like for the “other,” tackling the false narrative that many tourists and Torontonians see each year during the Pride celebrations. One stop on the walk, for example, is an intersection where transgender sex workers have been violently forced off the street. “People only want to map the Village when happy stories, gay legacies, and success are focal points,” says Rodriguez. “No one ever complicates it.”

But there is value in complexity. Today, Rodriguez largely focuses the walk on its youth audience, who, they believe, will benefit from being confronted with ideas that counter mainstream belief about the Village, and also from thinking through their own political analysis and how they form it. Several people now lead the walks, adds Rodriguez, emphasizing they don’t own the tour and that all collaborators bring value to the projec —including those who go on the walks. In 2012, for instance, York University professor Jin Haritaworn took the walk, inspiring Rodriguez to enrol in the university’s master of environmental studies program. They’re now working together and in 2014 won an Early Researchers Award to create Marvellous Grounds, a project that will look at the history of queer of colour organizing and spaces. The goal is to create a book, blog, and digital mapping project, as well as to initiate a series of focus groups.

Rodriguez hopes Marvellous Grounds will sustain itself as an ongoing platform to map and document queer of colour histories. They plan to create an audio version of the tour for their master’s project so that more people can access it globally. When asked why they focused their activism on neighborhoods and mapping, Rodriguez said it was important to look beyond accepted neighbourhoods of places and communities. “It’s not like rainbows organically appeared,” they say. “[We need to] look at how the spaces manifested, but also how they’re built on erasure.”

Photos by Ian Willms

Robert Beynon’s dairy farm sits just north of the Toronto suburb of Richmond Hill, on one of the southernmost edges of Ontario’s greenbelt. It’s a small operation (40 cows, 350 acres) set back off of busy Bathurst Street. Behind his 150-year-old brick farmhouse and squat green dairy barn stretches a patchwork of bare fields, still muddy in mid-April. It’s the kind of pastoral scene city dwellers naturally think farms look like.

What those urbanites likely wouldn’t picture is what surrounds Beynon’s piece of rural paradise. Across the road, on the east side of Bathurst, sprawls MacLeod’s Landing, a 1,400-unit subdivision of looping streets and oversized homes. Houses bleed north onto former agricultural land—much of which Beynon’s family used to farm. He’d like to expand his property, but it’s boxed in on one side by the development, and on another by land slated to become a cemetery. Besides, he says, “The land’s too expensive, and you wouldn’t want to set up a bigger dairy operation next to a subdivision. Everyone loves the idea of living in the country, but they don’t really want to live beside somebody milking a couple hundred head of cows.” Later he wonders aloud, “And who wants to farm in the city when it comes down to it?”

Beynon is 33 years old; he’s no grizzled old-timer ready to retire. When he was still in school at the University of Guelph, taking a farm operations program, he and his father made plans to move outside of the GTA, away from the already encroaching houses, to buy more land and milk more cows. But in 2001, the Oak Ridges Moraine Act became law. (The moraine area’s 470,000 acres run from Brampton to past Cobourg.) The result was strict land-use regulations dictating how farmers could alter or expand their operations. There was also a moratorium on intensive development, but that didn’t stop construction on MacLeod’s Landing; the development was grandfathered because it had been approved before the moraine policy was created. There was no such provision for Beynon, whose family has owned its land for 150 years.

Then in 2005, the provincial government created the 1.8-million-acre greenbelt, which wraps itself around the Golden Horseshoe—running north of Toronto, Hamilton and their suburbs. (The greenbelt also includes the Niagara Escarpment, which bends down from the Georgian Bay to Niagara Falls, and encompasses the environmentally fragile Oak Ridges Moraine, the expanding Rouge Park, and the Holland Marsh.) Beynon claims his property value dropped about 70 percent. Now he and his wife Trina are stuck. “We don’t plan. We can’t justify putting an addition on our farm. And there isn’t more land to rent,” says Beynon, exasperated. “I’m not happy.”

Not that you would know that from his demeanour. Giving me a tour of his farm one April evening last year, he talks constantly, filling up silence and filling in detail. He opens the creaky wooden door to his dairy barn and calls to his big black lab, Jake, to follow him. Inside, his Guernseys chew their cud under the old barn’s low ceilings—the building, constructed around the same time as the farmhouse, has hardly changed in 40 years. “This barn’s dated,” says Beynon, more serious now. “Through the ’90s we were not improving our farm because what’s the point when you’re supposed to move? So we got behind on that and now we’re trying to play catch-up,” he says, explaining that he’s trying to modernize his barn—to make milking and cleaning more efficient— without spending too much money on facilities he still hopes to leave. “But it’s hard to make a business plan when you’re in our situation.” So for now he waits, hoping he finds an opportunity to sell his farm and move his operation out of the GTA.

Other farmers, fed up with the costs, the traffic, and the bureaucracy are doing exactly that, setting out for more open, less regulated, less occupied spaces to the south, east, and north. Some believe a mass exodus is inevitable, and that as agricultural land empties, it will be bought up by wealthy urbanites and made into 100-acre hobby farms. “Little by little, down in the greenbelt, some of those [farms] are going to become big estates. What happens then, to good, quality land?” asks retired veterinarian and dairy farmer Terry O’Connor. The promise of a sustainable, local food source for millions of Ontarians may be thwarted by the very policies designed to foster it.

How did this happen? Despite good intentions, the government made a false assumption about agriculture: just because you save the land doesn’t mean you save the farms. Without a well thought-out provincial agricultural policy implemented along with the greenbelt, those good intentions will remain wishful thinking, or even worse, the death knell for small-scale agriculture in the GTA. If things keep going this way, farmers warn, the future of the greenbelt will be one of large-scale industrial farms and barely productive hobby farms—the worst of both worlds.

“Ontarians will never have to fear that our access to food runs out. Unless we experience a nuclear holocaust, we will always have access to farm-fresh foods.” That’s Burkhard Mausberg, president of the Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation, paraphrased last summer by urban affairs magazine Spacing. “We have our own food basket in our backyard,” he said.

That’s the dream. In 2006, one year after the greenbelt was created, The Globe and Mail reported [PDF] that Municipal Affairs Minster John Gerretsen was happy with the result: the scheme was “strutting its stuff in that it’s curbing urban sprawl, protecting water supplies and ensuring land for food protection.” Four years later, the Toronto Star’s Christopher Hume chimed in: “There was much shouting and screaming at the time—most notably from certain developers whose fury knew no bounds—but half a decade later, the wisdom of the move has been widely acknowledged.”

The Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation, a nonprofit whose purpose is to promote the protected area, boasts on its website that “possibility grows in the Greenbelt,” and claims the area is the most diverse of its kind in the world, both ecologically and agriculturally. It’s certainly one of the largest. At 1.8 million acres, it beats out London U.K.’s 1.2-million-acre swath, B.C.’s 716,000 acres, and the Netherlands’ 395,368.

There’s also no doubt Ontario’s greenbelt has saved land from developers. Conservationists and the public cheered the promise of land staying pristine, frozen in time. In fact, supporters cheered so loudly, they barely heard the grumbling from farmers out in their fields. Farmers weren’t consulted until after the McGuinty government announced the policy, and even then, they claim, no one listened. Agriculture, farmers groused, came second to environmentalism.

While she makes clear that she’s a staunch greenbelt supporter, food journalist Margaret Webb says, “When the local food movement gained momentum a few years ago, my perspective was that no one was really talking about the farmers… I think there was a misunderstanding of how farmers need to make a living.”

“We’re lashing out at the greenbelt because it’s the last insult,” says Niagara-area grape grower Howard Staff. “They should have talked about viability and programs that should have kept farmers in business.”

On the phone from his mid-town Toronto office, Mausberg—a former University of Toronto environmental studies professor and Ivey Foundation environmental director—says need for land protection was dire. “There was enormous growth eating up the land. Every year [in the GTA] we lost the equivalent of 1,200 soccer fields”—about 2,400 acres.

According to University of Toronto researchers Felix Fung and Tenley Conway, Toronto is “one of the fastest growing regions in North America, with the annual population increase exceeding 1.5 percent between 1996 and 2001. It is estimated that an additional 3.7 million people will make the region their home by 2031.” It’s no coincidence the greenbelt was created around the same time as the Places to Grow Act, a province-wide planning program to better manage municipal growth.

The Greenbelt Act itself states that the policy was created “to sustain the countryside, rural and small towns and contribute to the economic viabilities of farming communities;” “to preserve agricultural land as a continuing commercial source of food and employment;” and “to recognize the critical importance of the agricultural sector to the regional economy.”

But nowhere in the act’s 5,000 words does it lay out policies that support agriculture in any concrete way. Farming near an urban area, with its traffic, lack of agricultural infrastructure, and high land prices is difficult and frustrating. Those problems weren’t caused by the greenbelt, but they should be ameliorated by it.

In August 2009, University of Guelph rural-planning professor Harry Cummings and two grad students released a detailed analysis of agriculture in the region. Using census data, they looked at agricultural change from 2001 to 2006 in the greenbelt, and compared it to the rest of Ontario. What they found was that, in those years, the greenbelt area lost 490 farms and 86,000 acres of farmland, and every livestock operation in the region was either experiencing more rapid decline or slower growth than those in the rest of the province. The number of pigs had decreased by 31 percent in the greenbelt versus 14 percent elsewhere in Ontario, and the number of greenbelt beef cattle dropped by 24 percent versus 13 percent. The number of dairy cattle in the greenbelt fell by 13 percent versus 9 percent. (London, England’s greenbelt, created in 1939, faced a similar problem in the mid-1980s. High land prices forced farmers to rent land rather than own, and according to three University College London researchers, the percentage of family-run farms dropped from 45 percent in 1970 to 29 percent in 1985.)

Mausberg isn’t convinced by Cummings’ research. He says the numbers present a cause and effect relationship between the greenbelt and the flight of farmers that doesn’t actually exist. He calls Cummings’ research shoddy (something he’s even told the researcher himself), explaining that Cummings’ team studied census data from 2006, even though the greenbelt was only implemented the year before. “When you look at animal agriculture, it’s the first to leave when urbanization comes close because the infrastructure for that kind of farming is too far,” he says. “Urbanization is the single largest reason why farmers move, not land-use regulations. If you want to keep livestock agriculture, then you need to grow the greenbelt.”

Cummings, however, believes his conclusions will be borne out when he redoes the study after the 2011 census. “The one thing I want to make clear is I never claim the 2006 data shows the impact of the greenbelt; I’m just showing what happened between 2001 and 2006,” he says. “I hope that in 2011 we’ll see some new agriculture being created in the greenbelt, but that’s not what I hear. In fact, what I hear is the province hasn’t chosen to have any special near-urban agricultural policy.”

While Toronto Regional Conservation Authority planner David Burnett says farmers are exempt from some regulations if there is no alterative (they could, for example, build that shed within 30 metres of the buffer zone for a waterway if there was nowhere else to build it), Cummings says it’s still a burden farmers aren’t able to carry. “Many of the people who are stronger environmentalists than they are agriculturalists haven’t thought of the implications of how we grow our food in a responsible manner and have a green countryside,” he says. “It’s a lack of comprehension about the total picture.”

On a stretch of secluded rural road about a 10-minute drive east of Kitchener lives dairy farmer Ken McNabb, his wife, Marie, and their three boys. I visit one morning in late spring, and McNabb takes me for a tour around his property, showing me the grove of giant, sheltering trees, a backyard swimming hole, and tidy, black-metal-clad barns. This is the alternative Toronto-area farmers are seeking. Marie is baking a batch of muffins when I arrive, and as we all sit at the kitchen table, McNabb, a lean 52-year-old with a kindly, matter-of-fact demeanour, tells me what it was like to move 40 cows, his farm machinery, and all of his family’s household belongings from Georgetown, about 15 kilometres west of Brampton, to New Hamburg: easy. Okay, maybe not easy. The process of packing up and hauling away their entire livelihood was stressful, but McNabb regrets nothing. They don’t have to deal with bumper-to-bumper traffic backed-up in front of their house (“You try to teach a 16-year old to get across four lanes of traffic with a tractor and a wagon”); they don’t have to worry about encroaching suburbs. And they can see the stars at night.

Though McNabb’s former property wasn’t inside the greenbelt, he faced many of the same problems farmers there do. He was too far from a lot of farm services like tractor mechanics, stable cleaners, and machinery repair services. And they owned only 88 of the nearly 300 acres they farmed, so he couldn’t expand. But unlike Beynon, McNabb was handed an easy way out. Farmers on either side of the greenbelt say that when the legislation was enacted, it was almost like someone drew an arbitrary line in the soil. It was hard to say why some were encompassed in the protected swath and why some were left out.

The McNabb farm ended up on the south side of the line, in the so-called white belt—land on the Toronto side of the greenbelt left ripe for development—and between April 2004, when he and Marie started thinking about moving, and February 2005, when they sold, the value of his farm nearly tripled, from $1,800 per acre to $5,200 per acre.

McNabb sold his land to a speculator. It’s still being farmed, but will inevitably be developed. While he seems sanguine about his own situation, he’s fatalistic about farming around the Golden Horseshoe. “Eventually everybody has to go. Everybody leaves at a different time for a different reason, but eventually they all have to leave,” he says. “Some tolerate it longer than others. It depends on where they are, who their neighbours are, and what traffic is on the road. But it’s not as easy to pursue agriculture in the greenbelt as it is out where we are.”

About 100 farmers, planners and environmentalists gathered at the Four Points Sheraton in Thorold, Ontario, near St. Catharines, on a Wednesday in March 2010, to talk about the greenbelt. The summit was a makeshift review of the policy, hosted by the Region of Niagara. Local MPPs Tim Hudak and James Bradley were invited, but didn’t show.

The Greenbelt Act won’t be up for official review until 2015, 10 years after it was passed, but farmers here have decided they want to be prepared. “Just because the province can’t review it doesn’t mean we can’t,” says Len Troup, chair of the tender fruit marketing board and one of the summit’s five panelists.

Some, like TRCA planner David Burnett, believe a lot of farmers are mad the greenbelt took away their retirement funds. “They thought that their retirement would be based on selling their farmland to a developer…they feel certain rights were taken away.” But that isn’t the main reason for farmers’ anger. On the contrary, they’re upset by the “browning” of the greenbelt as land slips out of agricultural production. Ultimately, they want the same things as the food activists: viable local agriculture, more access to local markets, and support from their communities and government.

Mausberg was also at the summit in March, and while he believes more conversation is needed among farmers, citizens, and the government, he doesn’t share all of farmers’ sentiments: he thinks they’re focused on the wrong problems. “If we start the conversation with why the greenbelt was terrible and how the government forced it on you, we’re not going to have a dialogue,” he says. “You can sit there and whine about the fact that this happened five years ago, or you can talk about it.”

Even if opposing groups do find common ground on the issue, fixing the greenbelt is going to take more than a simple review. Suggestions of ways to revamp the act read like a long wish list. Foodies like Webb and Toronto-based food writer Sarah Elton, author of the book Locavore, want a food policy; farmers want an agricultural policy—it’s something they’ve been asking for since the beginning. “It’s about time the government came out with a statement to the effect that agriculture is a needed industry in Ontario,” says GTA Agricultural Action Committee chair Peter Lambrick.

“Farmers have to get the sense that they’re actually wanted here and that they can make a living,” says Lambrick. “I think it will come, but whether it will be this generation that does it or the next is what we’re asking now.”

Eric Deis's large-scale photographic installation of Last Chance. Image courtesy the artist.

Even after all its Olympic-related world-class-city posturing, Vancouver remains very much at odds with itself. At once a bedroom community, a wannabe metropolis, and the centre of a long-running real-estate boom, the city is like a teenager who keeps changing her clothes, says visual artist Eric Deis. “Kids grow up, they push boundaries, they try different things. I think that’s what’s happening with this city,” he says.

We’re leafing through a collection of Deis’s photographs at his studio in Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant neighbourhood, a few blocks from his home. It’s a Friday morning in May, and the first signs of summer have cast a new optimism over the city like they always do at this time of year, as if challenging more restless residents to tough it out and stay. But if the 30-year-old Deis has his way, this could be his last year in Vancouver. Like any serious artist, he wants to go where the opportunity lies. Despite years of photographic work documenting the city, plus a large-scale public installation and a well-received gallery show this year, it’s just not here.

“I’ve explored all my opportunities in Vancouver, and I’ve kind of maxed out,” Deis explains. “Vancouver’s cost of living is so high, but I don’t think the return of what you’re getting out of living in the city is on par. Sure, it has mountains, you can go skiing, you can take your yacht for a spin. But as far as cultural stuff, it kind of pales in comparison to other places.”

Deis’s complaints are common. Provincial government cuts to arts funding in the last year have left British Columbia’s arts and culture sectors reeling, and an unstable real-estate market creates increasingly prohibitive conditions for young people to live affordably in the city. Deis’s work—mostly large-format photography of architecture and urban spaces—depicts Vancouver in the midst of this transition. His focus on construction sites, homes on the cusp of demolition, and tensions surrounding gentrification and real estate development also capture the conditions that compel people like him to leave town. His images often take on the character of dioramas in their forfeiture of single-subject focus for wide-ranging narrative studies of streetscapes and inbetween spaces.

In Last Chance, Deis captures a new condominium development on Richards Street. The street sits on the boundary of Yaletown, an upscale downtown neighbourhood that has grown rapidly over the last 15 years into a forest of high-rise condo properties. A small green bungalow stands beside the banners advertising the condominiums. The house, affectionately known by locals as “the little green house,” was eventually demolished in the condo construction process. Last Chance was installed as a large-format photograph on the wall of Vancouver’s CBC building in April, where it stayed for five months. Deis’s other works, such as the luminous Hipsters and Drug Dealer, inhabit similar moods of loss and transformation. Seen together, Deis’s photographs comprise an intriguing series that deftly captures urban history in a seemingly ageless and perpetually adolescent city.

Eric Deis. Photographed by Tomas Svab.

Deis is no stranger to transition himself. Born on a military base on B.C.’s Queen Charlotte Islands, he was raised in Red Deer, Alberta, attended art school in Vancouver, completed an MFA in San Diego, and returned to Vancouver in 2004. He’s not sure where he’ll move next, but like many emerging artists his age, survival as an artist in Vancouver isn’t likely. “They haven’t built an office tower [in Vancouver] in the last 20 years, because it’s three times more profitable to build a condo tower. That changes the dynamic of the city,” he says. “Vancouver, instead of becoming an economic or business hub, becomes a sleepy suburb.” Downtown’s suburban turn is rooted in condo marketing to baby boomers in search of a second mortgage, Deis says, not a first home.

Deis’s sharp eye and idiosyncratic photography—at once self-aware and critical of its surroundings—presents a brilliant reflection of a changing city at the end of a decade. Too bad he’s so eager to leave.

A Bixi bicycle stand in Montreal. Creative Commons photo by Flickr user pdbreen.

When Toronto launched Canada’s first bike share program in 2001, many saw it as a miracle project. Mirroring the popular-abroad systems of Paris and Vienna, the system allowed cyclists to grab their bikes at one hub, cruise the streets, and then drop the bike off at a rack nearest their destination—all for a daily or monthly fee. It seemed bike sharing would cut traffic congestion, greenhouse gas emissions, and even obesity.

It wasn’t to be. The program crashed after only five years and Canada’s been stuck in first gear since. Thanks to Bixi, that may soon change. The international company—which already operates programs on three continents—ran a trial bike share program in Ottawa-Gatineau and a five-day demonstration in Vancouver this past summer, and was in negotiations with Toronto in 2009. While its efforts to revive bike sharing there were a failure, Bixi’s fledgling program in Montreal is gaining momentum fast.

The program has been in operation less than a year and already has 5,000 bikes, 400 stations, and 10,000 full-time members. That’s massive compared to the 450 users Toronto had at its peak before the 2006 closure.

A coordinator with the group that ran Toronto’s short-lived program says the on-and-off success of bike shares in Canada comes down to funding. “It’s a struggle being able to charge enough,” admits Sherri Byer. Indeed, Toronto’s Community Bicycle Network was forced to shut down its program after falling short $80,000.

While Bixi’s fee structure has kept it stable so far, the company actually credits its success to community consultations promoting bikes. Byer agrees combating people’s stereotypes is important. “North Americans generally don’t believe in bikes as transportation,” she says. “They’re seen as a recreation vehicle.”

Even so, while change may be a long road, Bixi has given bike-share enthusiasts heart. Eleanor McMahon, president of the cycling advocacy organization Share the Road, says there’s no question that bike sharing needs to come back, it’s just a matter of when and how. “Cycling is not viewed as mainstream, and it’s time that city government stepped up [and talked about it],” she says. “We have to ask, what kind of city do we want?”

It's time to rid our neighbourhoods of the green menace. Creative Commons photo by Robert S. Donovan.

From the first breath of spring, we North Americans dream of an expanse of green grass, a vast carpet that tickles our skin and stains our sundresses on which we can spend long, lazy days barbecuing and reading summer fiction. But our love affair with the lawn has got to stop.

Even pesticide-free, grass is an environmental menace. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates the footprint of fertilizing an acre of lawn equals a 700-kilometre car trip, and Statistics Canada found that gas-powered lawnmowers—which two-thirds of Canadians with lawns own—contribute to smog as much as driving from Saskatoon to Montreal. Kentucky bluegrass, which actually has its roots, so to speak, in Europe and the Middle East, is so ill-suited to our climate that it requires constant water and food (causing irate and impassioned CBC Radio listeners to vote it Canada’s worst weed). But lawns stretch across 32 million acres of the U.S., occupying more space than wheat, corn or tobacco. (There are no comparable numbers collected from Canada.) Who knew so much green space could be such bad news?

Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn (Metropolis Books, 2008), a project by artist and environmental designer Fritz Haeg, documents one solution to our yard woes. He turned lawns into farms, growing “edible landscapes” in three sites in the U.S. and one in England. Destroying the uniform lawns, to Haeg, is more than ecological: it’s revolutionary. “The monoculture … covering our neighbourhoods from coast to coast,” he writes, “celebrates puritanical homogeneity and mindless conformity.” Like Joni Mitchell’s hissing summer lawns, which represented control and repression in unhappy suburban marriage, Haeg’s work dismantles the way the lawn “divides and isolates us.”

Haeg’s projects defied that isolation, with communities collaborating on the antilawn designs. But for those of us with small green squares, going lawn-free doesn’t have to be complicated. The answers are easy to implement. Put down mulch so water stays in the soil. Compost and collect rainwater. Plant native species in abundant diversity: they won’t need much water and they’ll handle pests better (start with Evergreen’s native plant database). Plant trees: they are still the best carbon sinks we have. Get out your shovel, put on some sunscreen and let it grow, lawn-free, from there.

Toronto's Rogers Centre (formerly Skydome), built with public funds and later sold off to private business for a pittance. A major league sports team is often assumed to be more economically stimulating than actual results attest. Creative Commons photo by Mike Babcock.

The National Hockey League playoffs open this week and the abundance of emotion-laden storylines are sure to captivate a significant portion of the the Canadian sporting public’s hearts. But while three Canadian squads—the Vancouver Canucks, the Montreal Canadiens and the Ottawa Senators—vie for Lord Stanley’s coveted Cup, there’s another, less exciting, story unfolding that probably should captivate our minds, even those of the non sports-adoring variety.

Tomorrow, the city council of Glendale, Arizona will vote to approve the arena-lease agreements for the two bids put forward to purchase the suburban community’s NHL hockey club, the Phoenix Coyotes. But, as the Globe and Mail reported this weekend, even if the leading bid, submitted by Chicago White Sox owner Jerry Reisdorf, is approved the lease agreement may not survive. In an interesting twist of fate, a lawyer for the Goldwater Institute recently announced that the conservative watchdog group won’t hesitate to take the city of Glendale to court if it appears the agreements are in violation of Arizona laws against public subsidies for private corporations.

The concern for Goldwater is a piece of the Reisdorf “memorandum of understanding” that calls for local taxpayers and businesses to foot up to $165-million of the purchase price and annual operating losses. While this sort of stipulation isn’t unusual in the standard agreements between sports franchises and host cities, it is unusual that a powerful watchdog is calling both parties out.

For too long, the public has dogmatically accepted the connection politicians and team owners like to tout between sports franchises and local economic development. Massive public subsidies are regularly given to billion-dollar sports operations under the guise that they will bring an influx of new economic activity to the local community. This year alone, Winnipeg, Quebec City and Hamilton have all, at one point or another, flirted with the idea of bringing a professional hockey team home. And each has made claims about the economic benefit a pro franchise would bring. However, the problem is that justification is demonstrably false. There is, in fact, no economic rationale for publicly funded sports teams and stadiums.

According to Andrew Zimbalist, a prominent sports economist at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, all independent scholarly research on the economic impact of sports teams and stadiums has come to the same conclusion: there isn’t any. As he told Stephen J. Dubner on the New York Times Freakonomics blog, contrary to the rhetoric often aired by local politicians and sports teams owners, “one should not anticipate that a team or a facility by itself will either increase employment or raise per capita income in a metropolitan area.”

The economics behind this are complicated, but, generally, three principles hold. First, sports stadiums rarely create new capital: consumer spending on sport is almost always a redistribution of existing dollars in the local economy. People don’t spend money they wouldn’t have otherwise; they simply spend some their entertainment budget on local teams instead of something else. Second, much of the income generated by the team ends up leaking out of the local economy. Millionaire owners and players have their savings tied-up in world money markets and often live and spend their money outside of the host city. Third, and perhaps most importantly, host governments typically contributes close to two-thirds of the financing for the facility’s construction, usually takes on obligations for additional expenditures and routinely guarantee a significant amount of revenue. In other words, it’s the taxpayers that bear most of the risk—not the multimillion-dollar franchises that make a city home.

That’s not to say there aren’t perfectly good reasons for cities to host big-time sports teams or build world-class sports stadiums. It’s just that the supposed “positive economic impact” of a sports franchise shouldn’t factor into local governments’ decisions. Cities spend millions of dollars on cultural activities that they don’t anticipate to yield additional revenue. Sports teams can have a powerful cultural impact on a community and are integral part of most cities’ social fabric. If local residents value sport they are obviously welcome to allocate public dollars toward it. In fact, I, for one, hope they do. But sports teams and stadiums should be sold as a source of civic pride—not as a source of economic development.

Volunteers building a wall as part of an August, 2009 strawbale building workshop in Craik, Sask. Creative Commons photo by CSLP.

Ever wanted to live in a truly green town, full of energy-efficient homes and people working together for the environment? Then follow the lead of Craik, Sask., and start up an eco-village.

Located halfway between Saskatoon and Regina, the town of Craik (population: 450) is reinventing itself and attracting new residents from as far away as British Columbia who want to take advantage of its slower pace, greener outlook and cheaper cost of living.

And while starting an eco-village is a lot of work, as Craik’s shown, it can be done. Here’s how:

1. Find a small town. They don’t get caught up in bureaucracy and are often desperate for new residents and ideas. When Saskatchewan’s Prairie Institute for Human Ecology first suggested the idea of an eco-village in 2001, Craik jumped on it. Seeing the project as a chance to address climate change and revitalize its community, the Rural Municipality of Craik donated 127 acres of land for the eco-village.

2. Raise some money. You’ll need it to pay for such things as legal fees and marketing costs. Start by checking out grants such as the $100,000 one from the Green Municipal Fund from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities that Craik was awarded for their Eco-centre.

3. Find some residents. Craik built a website and developed partnerships with community and environmental groups to get the word out about what it was doing. Make your village more appealing by pricing land cheaply; Craik sold residential plots for as little as a dollar.

4. Get people inspired. Build a demonstration project to show off your village’s possibilities. Craik created the Eco-centre, an energy-efficient restaurant constructed with straw bales from nearby farms and timber from the town’s demolished grain elevator. The building is heated using geothermal technology and augmented with solar panels, has indoor compost toilets and outside there’s an environmentally-friendly golf course. Since opening in 2004, the centre has become a popular meeting place for Saskatchewan businesses.

5. Set the rules—and follow them. Have residents agree to community guidelines that encourage them to be as green as possible. Craik eco-village residents are expected to build energy-efficient homes and compost, among other things.

In her new book, Imagining Toronto, York University geography professor Amy Lavender Harris creates a literary map of that identity building. What she finds is a literary scene that is reflecting the city’s shifting geography, moving into inner suburbs like Scarborough and North York, and well into deep suburbia: Pickering, Vaughan, Ajax.

Harris began writing her book two years ago after scouring the city for books for a Toronto literature course. She soon found herself delving into the city’s literary history, as framed by the narratives of iconic neighborhoods like the Annex, Parkdale and Cabbagetown. Now she has oriented the city’s public spaces in its literature, tracing Toronto’s identity to the streetcar lines and architectural icons that recur in its literature.

It’s those architectural icons that often define the Toronto identity, for better or worse. “The CN Tower comes to mind because it’s the most iconic, as well as in some ways, hated, symbol of Toronto,” she says—but that was until Michael Lee-Chin’s crystalline addition to the Royal Ontario Museum was unveiled, Harris notes.

Harris says there is plenty of literary history to left to map. “If you could say everything there was that could be said about Toronto, then it would be a pretty boring place.”

All the papers last week were abuzz about an op-ed written by now-backbench Conservative MP Maxime Bernier. Writing how climate change is an unsure thing indeed, he said his party was on the right track by playing it cool in Copenhagen.

He was roundly criticized by Canadian media and bloggers. Globe contributor Robert Silver called him Canada’s Sarah Palin. The National Post’s article on the matter began with Environment Minister Jim Prentice stating that the Harper government did not share Bernier’s skeptical position on the science. And Sun Media writer Lorrie Goldstein’s article, Mad Max makes sense on climate change, stated: “The good news is Harper is better on climate change than the opposition parties. The bad news is, that’s not saying much.”

Wait a minute. Harper not strong enough on climate change? Sounds like something we’ve been saying for a while.

Goldstein, however, thinks he hasn’t rejected climate change enough. Even believing in the evidence is too much.
But that’s okay, who reads the Sun anyway?

Oh right, lots of people.

Sun Media Corp. is Canada’s largest newspaper publisher, having eaten up dozens of mainstream dailies and hundreds of other community papers. It reaches over 10 million Canadians.

Bernier’s view was echoed by Conservative bloggers and comments in online articles. There was significant talk of Bernier setting up a future leadership run for the Conservative Party.

Move over to provincial politics and Ontario’s Conservatives have already chosen their Bernier. Leader Tim Hudak, elected last year, is a right-winger through and through. The Party’s environmental platform is perhaps yet to be hashed out for the next election, but there are rumours that the Green Energy Act—a new staple of support for renewable energy projects in the province—might be something Hudak would repeal.

This would be made politically salable by the unexpectedly strong pressure from supposed grassroots organization, Wind Concerns Ontario, which has branches in towns across the province. Hundreds come out to environmental assessment meetings to oppose wind establishment in their areas. These people are finding a friend in Tim Hudak.

Similarly, the Ontario Landowners Association is one to watch. The organization is another collection of rural groups from across the province with a membership 15,000 strong who support policies that may appear radical or American to their urban friends. And though some are good stewards of their land, they may not be interested in hearing about climate policy.

Although Randy Hillier, first president of the Association, lost soundly to Hudak in the Party’s leadership bid, its strong anti-Liberal message of rural land rights and ability to bus people to meetings may give Hudak the desire to lean on it in the next election. Having been in a room of rural Ontarians during a presentation by climate change skeptic Patrick Moore, I know that there is a widespread desire to hear and believe in the other side.

Drilling down one more level to municipal politics, Rocco Rossi, former National Director of the Liberal Party of Canada and inner-circle advisor to Michael Ignattieff has thrown his hat in the ring for Toronto Mayor, promising to ditch bike lanes and pause the city’s ambitious transit plan. After having taken Al Gore’s climate presentation training, this so-called “liberal” is looking to plan a city without the critical infrastructure necessary to support a safer method of travel for both cyclists and drivers, ditching a key urban carbon reduction measure.

But could it work for him? With commuting cyclists currently making up a very small proportion of residents, a move to make driving even appear more convenient, in a time when traffic jams clog Toronto morning streets, might be politically expedient in many Toronto neighbourhoods.

The United States is undergoing a strong movement of its far-right known as the Tea Party, described in a weekend article by Frank Rich. Rich warns to take the group seriously. The Tea Party has got people in the U.S. talking, and its mainstream conservative party getting nervous.

American writer Chris Hedges gives his answer to the movement and the weakness of Barack Obama (at Copenhagen and beyond), in a piece yesterday stating that the progressive left and the Democrats have succumbed to cowardice and have lost their energy. He urges a move back to third parties on the left, suggesting that a credible alternative to the state of the economy and society is what is most needed to bring the public onside, not liberals talking about policy all the time.

And so in the rural revolution and climate change deniers and their supportive media and blogs, Canadians may have our version of the Tea Party. While Americans, politics may be their hockey at the moment, we too may soon have an excited right which could pit itself against climate progress at a level that even Stephen Harper won’t touch. And whether that means bringing rural landowners in for climate consultation or starting a socialist revolution, it sounds like something worth planning for.