• 4 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • If we get the unnecessary middle-class commuter vehicles off the streets, the drop in congestion will make it easier for those people who do need to drive to do so, and make increasing the road capacity unnecessary. A solution doesn’t have to work for everyone to be useful, and yes, I agree that this one is obviously not practical or useful for someone who works construction, or retail, or in a warehouse or a garage or a restaurant or a lab or a factory or any other job that requires you to be on-site.

    I’m not anti-car. I own one. I drive. My physical condition and the location I live in pretty much require it. What I’m against is car trips that increase congestion and pollution without serving a practical purpose, and the constant increase in the number of overpriced lanes of asphalt around Toronto when vital transportation infrastructure in the rest of the province is falling apart. There’s a road a couple of hours’ drive north of here that gets a decent amount of traffic that they’re talking about downgrading to gravel because the municipalities that the province dumped it on can’t afford to repave it—it would literally cost several times the annual budget of the smaller town to repave their section. The railways are decaying to the point that the speed limits on the lines still in service are lower than 30km/h in some areas. The major east-west highway corridors through the province are riddled with potholes and disintegrating asphalt. And Ford wants to waste money on a Toronto commuter tunnel that we should not need. Diminishing the amount of traffic on the 401 would hopefully get him to move on to the next hare-braned wasteful idea. Eliminating all traffic on the 401 is obviously impractical (and not really necessary to avoid this particular piece of idiocy, since the road is already there).






  • And if the panic button is going to call the police, how is that any different from the passenger using their phone to contact police? Seems like extra steps of middlemen and confusion when the passenger could just call once they feel the need.

    Think of it as a backup for the phone in the case where, say, there’s an adult and a kid in the car, the kid has no phone of their own, and the adult loses consciousness with their phone locked. Or the car is being actively jostled by a group of people (say it drove into the middle of an embryonic riot), causing the passenger to drop their phone, whereupon it slides under the seat. Or the phone just runs out of charge or doesn’t survive getting dropped into the passenger’s triple-extra-large fast-food coffee. It won’t be needed 99% of the time, but the other 1% might save someone’s life, and (presuming the car already has a cell modem it in) the cost of adding the feature should be minimal.



  • Ultimately, the police are compounding mistakes made by Grogan, who apparently trusted his business partner so much that it took him more than four years to actually check the books and report anything stolen. Since the cars were goods for sale and not of any sentimental value to him, and he doesn’t need the money or he would have kept a closer eye on the business, the moral thing for him to do would be to leave the vehicles in the hands of their new owners and go after his former business partner for the money he effectively embezzled from the sales. That might not be legally feasible, though.


  • The actual relevant source document appears to be this: https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2024/2024-121.htm. Judging from that, some of the money will go to funds that subsidize the production of local news programs in any medium (including radio), and there’s a small amount earmarked for community radio. It’s supposed to encourage the stations to create and broadcast content that’s beneficial to the general public but not as profitable as what they might otherwise air in its place. If you consider that to be “helping” radio stations, then fine, I concede, but to be honest, the specific details of where the money ends up aren’t the major point here, and will probably change over time.

    I expect domestic radio stations pay into many of the same funds, although to be honest I’ve never checked. If we actually had a Canadian-owned streaming service that was willing to produce news programs or one of the other categories the government wants to encourage, they might get some money too. Including some of what’s coming from the radio stations, because no one is making an attempt to keep the revenue streams coming from different sources separate . . . and really, why should they? It’s extra administrative overhead to no real benefit.











  • For those unable to read the article, and who haven’t heard about this through other channels . . .

    The issue is that Quebec is actively throwing Francophone minorities in other parts of Canada under the bus, which goes beyond them being “reluctant to defend” them. The Quebec government doesn’t seem to care that the weapons it’s using against its Anglophone linguistic minority can be turned around to attack Francophones in the rest of the country. What they do doesn’t necesarily stop at their borders.

    It’s been a while since I had any reason to talk to a Franco-Ontarian about Quebec politics, but Quebec used to be considered snooty, obnoxious, and out of touch at best.