Why I will never vote Conservative

To continue the thread from yesterday: in an article titled And no flowers bloomed, Margaret Atwood tries to guess why the Conservatives are slashing arts funding:

[Maybe] the Harper Conservatives don’t want a society in which the arts and the creative industries are important. Maybe they don’t want the jobs in those fields to exist. Maybe, as in so many other areas of their thinking, they want to turn back the clock to the good old days — some time back in the golden fifties, when there wasn’t all this bilingualism and multiculturalism, or indeed any lingualism or culturalism at all, and most Canadian artists left the country, and those who remained could be referred to jokingly in Parliament as a bunch of fruits jumping around in long underwear.

If people – especially people from the West – wonder why very few people in Toronto ever vote Tory, you now have your answer.

I occasionally do creative things – though not as often as I should – and most of the people I know are part of the Toronto performing arts community in one way or another. Stephen Harper and his party hate people like us – or, at least, are extremely strongly indifferent to people like us. For this reason, I will never vote Conservative.

Margaret Atwood on arts funding

Here’s an excerpt from a Globe and Mail article by Margaret Atwood on the Conservative Party and arts funding:

Why invest money in the arts? Because — simple answer — it’s a great investment: A few dollars in means a lot of dollars out. Without the arts, the average Canadian citizen would be poorer, and I don’t mean just spiritually.

Why don’t the Conservatives grasp that? Maybe they just feel in their disapproving bones that art sucks. If so, that’s retrograde of them, because countries around the world now realize that a vital arts sector increases their energy in a multitude of ways.

And:

Once it’s lying in the ditch, Canadian art will be accused of not having been strong enough to survive in the Alpha Chimp social-Darwinist marketplace model favoured by Harper’s Conservatives, thus justifying the contempt and scorn with which the arts sector has been treated.

(Thanks to Strange Breakfasts for the link.)

Same-sex marriage and subway travel optimization

So the much-heralded vote on same-sex marriage failed to pass the House of Commons. Or, rather, the vote to maybe consider reopening the discussion of whether to continue the debate on how to initiate a dialogue on whether to partially restructure the law that might or might not no longer allow same-sex marriages or civil unions under certain specified circumstances – but of course even if couples of the same sex are or are not allowed to marry, ministers from certain specified religious groups are given the right to refuse to marry couples of the same sex if they so choose, unless it’s Tuesday, on which day all bets are off. Or something.

All the evidence I’ve seen suggests that most Canadians don’t particularly care one way or another about the issue. It doesn’t affect their pocketbooks and it doesn’t affect the quality of their lives, so why not allow gays and lesbians the right to marry? Can’t we move on to more important things, such as who the Jays are going to get to fill the holes in their starting rotation?

The Guardian has a list of 50 great works of art you should see before you die (link courtesy of Metafilter). To see them all, you would have to visit 21 separate countries. I might have seen one, or maybe two. Sigh. I’ve led a dull life.

If you’re waiting for a train on the Toronto subway, you will usually notice that people are constantly moving up and down the platform. If you’re new here, you’re probably wondering: why? The answer is that everybody is searching for the spot on the platform that corresponds to the location of the exit at their subway stop. (Each platform has its exit at a different spot, so that people won’t bunch up in one car.) If you’ve lived in the same place for a while, you’ll usually have figured out where the ideal spot is for your stop. There’s nothing better than being able to waltz straight out the subway car door and right up the escalator, ideally without having to move left or right more than a foot or two.

My own stop is Broadview – after nearly six years in the neighbourhood, I can usually get it exactly right. This is essential in rush hour, as hundreds and hundreds of people are heading for the up escalator all at once. It’s surreal to be walking up an empty flight of stairs, and then look over your shoulder to see an entire army close behind you. It makes you feel like a Fearless Leader.

For my new job, I have to get out at St. Patrick, and I think I’ve gotten that down now too. For optimal results, I have to position myself at the first door to the second car on the eastbound Bloor-Danforth train in the morning, because that’s where the up staircase is located at St. George. Then, it’s the second-last door in the last car of the Yonge-University train, which will position me at the location of the up escalator at St. Patrick.

This may seem startlingly anal-retentive, except that proper subway positioning can save a vital two or three minutes every morning. That’s an extra 180 seconds of lying-in-bed time. Which, some days, is like manna from heaven.