This article was originally published by the Forget the Box news collective on January 31st 2012. While it refers to events that I commented on back in October of last year, the simple fact is that we have done virtually nothing as a society to fix the rampant corruption, collusion and nepotism at the heart of our vital construction industry. The control over this sector by the powers at be ultimately define our paralysis, impotence, as a people. If we can’t ensure those who build our metropolis can do so free from the pressures of dishonesty and organized crime, then we are figuratively sewing these traits into the very fabric of our social tapestry. Until our society decides, in unison, that they will no longer tolerate this corruption and seek to annihilate it, it will stand as the greatest obstacle to our mutual success.

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I’m not an accountant but I can’t believe that the cost of constructing a $5 billion bridge can be done without cost to the taxpayers. Where will the initial capital come from? Who will pay for the design, materials, salaries, equipment etc?

The Tories have stated that an initially two-dollar toll will be collected and that will pay off the bridge “without cost to the taxpayer”. The toll may one day recoup the initial capital investment, but that investment will most certainly be coming out of the pockets of the taxpayers up-front, unless the fed and province feel initial capital can be covered through investment from the private sector. In that case, we need to figure out what the interest will be on such an immense loan.

All of this aside, we haven’t left the box yet; what if I were to tell you that keeping the bridge serviceable for the next decade has been pegged at only $25 million? And what if I were to further tell you that replacing the Champlain Bridge (without expansion) was estimated to only cost $1.3 billion back in 2007? Moreover, if adjusted for inflation, the cost of the Champlain Bridge in today’s money would only be about $250 million, though this figure doesn’t account for the rise of construction costs (which may be artificially high and thus kind of useless given the established corruption in the Québec construction industry).

And all of this is secondary to the main issue: what is the bridge designed for? The simple answer is that it allows about 159,000 vehicles to cross the Saint Lawrence each day and that is about as much daily traffic as it can handle. So if more than 159,000 people need to use their cars to get into the city, the city, province and fed need to find a way to get those people onto the island in a more convenient and less ecologically damaging manner.

Consider a 2009 plan prepared by the provincial government estimated to cost $4 billion to add 20km and between ten and twelve new stations to the Montréal Métro, extending the Blue and Yellow Lines, and closing the Orange Line. That plan spread the cost across the entire metropolitan region, across three cities, and would likely draw at least one hundred thousand new riders from the South Shore alone.

All of a sudden the lifespan of all the existing bridges would in turn increase, given the drop in automobile traffic across all spans, and the Champlain would no longer be in dire need of replacement. Two megaprojects of similar cost, though extending the Métro benefits far more citizens and guarantees a better dollar value for the taxpayers. This is stimulus done right because it is far-sighted, benefits a majority as opposed to a minority and further allows for stimulus in a niche domain, in this case Métro design and construction.

But when stimulus spending is viewed as a source of financial reward to party stalwarts, the project tends to be organized and designed as though it were a consumable object. And so, instead of designing a bridge to last forever, we design infrastructure to require near-constant maintenance, or take a very long time and very large budget to complete.

Every infrastructure project necessarily becomes a megaproject for the status it brings, for its marketability and political connotations. Thus, those responsible for us are tasked by the public’s failing comprehension of the purpose of government to simply demand as much money as they possibly can so that they “get what’s theirs” first and foremost.

How many Canadian voted strategically in favour of a Conservative candidate during the last election because it’s a fait accompli that Tory and otherwise strategic ridings generally get a disproportionate amount of financial stimulus money? Perhaps we’re searching for a strange equilibrium where eventually every electoral district in Canada gets a $5 billion cash infusion, though it seems as though those on the receiving end of the stimuli don’t change all too often with Tory administrations.

Ask Tony Clement how it’s paid off for the needy constituents of Toronto’s cottage country. And ask yourself if you think this is a financially tenable economic model, whether it can be sustained, or whether we keep making the same mistakes over and over again.

The astounding thing is that this kind of behaviour is lambasted as “excessive socialist spending” and “corruption disguised as socialism” when proposed by a Liberal or NDP member of parliament, and “investing in Canadian families” when proposed by the Tories. They benefit from manipulating elements of our ideology towards their own self-interests and then have the audacity to call us thieves seeking to ruin the economy to fulfill some kind of anarchistic desire to hasten the collapse of our society. Trying to untangle this misguided web of rhetoric leaves me feeling hung over, but the progressively inclined have no choice but to imbibe each time we’re confronted with the spastic outbursts and double-speak of so many glossy-eyed young Conservatives, fed talking points by master puppeteers.

A guy about my age accosted me at a restaurant about a week before the last election when he overheard me talking about my NDP leanings with several similarly minded individuals. He was clearly looking for a fight, and was agitated, as though he felt compelled to exorcise my socialist sympathies for fear of my own damnation. It was frustrating and very off-putting. But what could we do, we had to step up to the trough of life and take in a big sip of crazy.

Dejected Parents – Credit to John Kenney at The Gazette

Another year and another round of school closings – what a stable future we’re leaving our children…

There exists in Montréal a damning, apparently hidden problem concerning our public education system – it’s name is segregation and it is a multi-headed hydra of social pathologies.

Just to remind you, it’s 2012. We’re now twelve years into the 21st century. The Titanic sunk a hundred years ago. The Québec government eliminated publicly-funded confessional school boards in 1998, fourteen years ago. Unfortunately, rather than defining school boards along purely geographic lines, the PQ government of the day instead decided to maintain linguistic segregation in public schooling. So we achieved secular education for the public while further entrenching an unnecessary division within our society. Linguistic and class seperations continue to persist in Montreal public schools, and it is leading to over-crowding, high drop-out rates, poor performance, school closings and the gradual erosion of a key component in maintaining stable urban neighbourhoods. Not the victory I was hoping for.

There are at least five public school boards serving the communities of Montreal Island, three French and two English. They are divided by language and geography. Unfortunately, for this and other reasons, the urban Francophone board (Commission Scolaire de Montréal) is over-populated and has some of the highest drop-out rates. The urban Anglophone board is depopulating rapidly as a result of gentrification and the proliferation of private schools in the urban core, and has a similarly high drop-out rate. The three remaining boards are more suburban and have comparatively lower drop out rates than their urban counterparts and are thus more stable though new schools need to be built to ease over-crowding in some sectors. All of these problems are inter-related and could be fixed simply by uniting all boards into a single bilingual public education board for the whole island. It would allow more neighbourhood schools to remain open while stream-lining procedures, materials, infrastructure development, maintenance and specialty educations resources. A bigger common revenue pot with fewer operational redundancies in other words, and best of all we’d finally do away with the last vestiges of Victorian-era public education policy. Why on Earth would we ever wish to educate children in two separate languages and not both is profoundly stupid.

I think on the whole there’s been a general move away from public urban education institutions by the rich and middle class in favour of private, in some cases religious, alternatives, and thus the urban public schools tend to uniquely serve the poor and working classes. The linguistic divisions in turn lead to school closures and increased bussing costs. A recent example; just days ago the EMSB announced three elementary schools would close and amalgamate with other schools. Another example; Westmount High School, a school which serves the communities of St-Henri, Pointe-St-Charles, Notre-Dame-de-Grace, Shaughnessy Village and Little Burgundy. For a school located in Westmount, it has surprisingly few Westmount residents in attendance. This is because most of the children who live in Westmount attend private schools. Are there no schools closer to the communities they serve? And what about James Lyng High School, consistently (publicly) rated as one of the poorest, most violent and lowest-scoring public schools in Montreal. Has anyone ever wondered whether it’s location under the Turcot Interchange and near-total lack of a green-space might be having an effect on the students? Can you imagine how hard it must be to concentrate there? If there was a single, secular, bilingual public education option, more students would live within walking distance of their schools, classroom sizes could be reduced and facilities could be redesigned strategically. Moreover, we could create stronger links between children living int he same neighbourhood, inasmuch as we could develop stronger ties to the parents and community on the whole. Some education experts believe the best way to educate at the early level is to do so close to home with as much parental involvement as possible. In the urban context this would further mean children from diverse backgrounds would be educated together, regardless of mother-tongue, parental-income or ethnicity. A unified board could present itself as the legitimate pedagogical representative of the citizens and would further have the resources necessary to persuade middle and upper-class citizens to enroll their children in a fundamentally progressive and egalitarian schooling system. A unified board would be far better suited to petition the provincial and federal governments for additional funding, not to mention serve to unify diverse teachers union, allowing for more effective collective bargaining and a larger pension fund.

It’s time we got honest with ourselves – segregated education is no longer working and it lies at the heart of a public education crisis in our city. School closings rip communities apart and are traumatic for the children involved. If we could get beyond our shortsightedness and see what the future will require of our children, then we know, fundamentally, that the only way forward is through a massive re-investment in innovative public education. Linguistic segregation is perpetuating an under-educated urban working class and we should no longer tolerate it.