Some thoughts on the occasion of the G20 summit in Toronto.

The police presence and violent protest were both of a scale unprecedented for this city. The security cost, at over $1 billion, was also unprecedented in the history of the G-summits and is unlikely to ever be equalled.

Much ink will be shed on the taxonomy of protesters (a term which, apparently, also now includes opportunist vandals with no policy demands), the validity of their various motives and the contemptible nature of their actions. Equally, the actions of individuals among the tens of thousands of police involved will be put under the microscope.

Both those debates will prove fruitless. To me, it is more important to see the three outsized aspects of the event—police presence, violence and cost—as foreseeable consequences of the unnecessary and astoundingly poor choice of a venue for the summit.

I have heard two believable theories about how the choice was made: ignorance and spite.

The 'ignorance' theory was advanced on CBC's The Current by Deborah Cowen of the University of Toronto. She noted that the Conservative government, with almost no seats in Toronto, Montréal or Vancouver, has an essentially rural background on which it draws and little firsthand knowledge about how large cities actually are. The implication is that they might have honestly but falsely believed that the effect of promoting Toronto, Ontario and/or Canada would outweigh any disruption caused by security measures and protests.

The 'spite' theory (of my more cynical friends) holds that the disruption was expected and anticipated by the government. In this view, the decision was to be seen—and appreciated—by the Conservatives' rural base as a giant middle finger raised towards Toronto and its citizens.

The first explanation wins by Ockham's Razor, at least; but whichever is more accurate, it is certain the decision was made for political, not economical (read: cost-saving) reasons.

To explain a bit more why I think the choice was 'astoundingly poor,' and the consequences 'predictable' I will channel Jane Jacobs, late Torontonian, whose The Death and Life of Great American Cities I recently read and enjoyed. Any errors in my paraphrase of her writings are, of course, my own.

One of Jacobs' criteria for distinguishing Great (very big, large scale; important) Cities is diversity of use. On a summer weekend in Toronto, the downtown streets might be used by shoppers, baseball fans, theatregoers, businesspeople, diners, marketers, people-watchers, store clerks, deliverymen, walkers, those passing through to the lake or parts west, east or north, local residents, café patrons, cyclists, taxi drivers, buskers, runners, transit staff, and a whole cast of others my imagination is too weak to summon. The vast majority of these people are strangers to one another, but their mere presence civilizes the streets, so that events like the 2005 Boxing Day shooting of Jane Creba are truly rare, unexpected and shocking.

Jacobs contrasts diverse use with the atmosphere in single-use residential projects, where the same advantages (many eyes at all hours) are not enjoyed and, not coincidentally, comparatively more gang-related violence occurs.

During an event like the current summit, normal usage is suppressed. Within the security perimeter, there is no use at all by locals. Security measures impede normal use in surrounding areas, so that the Blue Jays and theatres take their business elsewhere or cancel whole performances (even at large cost). People who would have attended these larger events have no reason to be in the same areas for meals and other secondary activities. The secondary businesses they would have frequented, always sensitive to demand, run reduced staffs, further depleting the stock of people on the streets. And so on. In the current, extraordinary situation, even residents flee who are able to stay with friends in the suburbs or out of town.

Note that at no point is a collective decision made along the lines of, "Let's turn over the streets to rioters!"; instead, the deadening is an aggregate result of reasonable responses by normal individuals.

The few uses that remain can be numbered on one hand: peaceful protesting, spectating (both amateur and professional), policing and violence. The dead streets are a boon only to those engaged in the latter two activities, who find it easier to identify members of the other groups without actual citizens around.

Without any hysterics about professional anarchists or police agents provocateurs, then, it is easy to see why emptying the city invites situations that would be impossible under everyday circumstances. That this conclusion can be reached on the basis of accessible, popular writing from the 1960s makes me doubt that no one in government raised an objection to the choice of location. Mayor David Miller and other representatives of the city claim openly that they put forward the Exhibition grounds (which, note, are already largely empty) as an alternative.

Those voices were obviously disregarded when the decision was made, and that disregard is the root cause of everything we have witnessed.

Recently several people have expressed frustration, within hearing range, over infuriating actions of large companies. For example, Apple's practice of generating excessive hype for unremarkable hardware by applying a spot of polish and a kiloton of marketing. Aggressive lawsuits and patent trolling are another instance. Attacks on the reputability of excellent sources of journalism are a third.

The corporation is a paradox. Unlike the human beings that own and work for it, the corporate entity can be physically massive and far-reaching, to the point of incomprehensibility. We are hard-pressed to even picture Toyota's 300,000 employees, or the 9 million cars it sells annually. Conversely, while the behaviour of their employees and investors as individuals is complex, corporate 'behaviour' is very simply-motivated.

In fact, it is not reductio ad absurdum to say that nearly all business ventures have a single purpose: to generate a return on investment. This is an ineluctable truth, their raison d'être.

With this in mind, we see that it is unreasonable to treat corporate behaviour as if it were human behaviour. "Singly-motivated" humans are frequently described as insane. Likewise, it is unreasonable to describe corporate behaviour using the human qualities of hypocrisy, audacity, justice, honesty, fairness, consistency, etc.

On the other hand, lower life forms, which respond predictably to changes in their environment, are a good model. If I say that ivy will put roots in weak mortar, unable to know that such action will cause the wall on which it lives to collapse, you can begin to see my meaning.

Bacterial colonies can be made to commit suicide by consuming all the food in a closed container. Similarly, when the return on investment is demanded quickly, the corporation can be expected shoot itself in the foot by generating short-term profit and ignoring (or actively denying) the possibility of long-term repercussions.

There are, of course, attempts to quantify the human impact of corporate activities. In such discussions you hear the terms goodwill, corporate social responsibility, ethical consumerism, and so on. But at root these are ways of assigning monetary value to efforts to limit profit-reducing public backlash against corporate actions which are seen as 'evil'. In nature, small creatures will avoid the unwanted attention of predators and competitors.

Applying this sort of analysis doesn't reduce the human damage often caused by corporate actors, but it certainly renders most instances unsurprising. The comparison works best for larger companies, in which the actions of the whole are most divorced from any good intent of the many individual employees. It also explains why we tend to see fewer 'inhumane' behaviours from non-profit organizations and charities. Freed of the overriding imperative to generate returns, these entities can adopt decision-making structures that tend to increase other outcomes.

Finally, to my mind, the analogy clarifies the issue of public versus private provision of government services. To shoehorn the positive societal impacts we expect from certain government programs into the measure of profit or return on investment is often inappropriate. Even where it is, private service providers can only be expected to yield the desired outcome if the direction of increased return is carefully aligned with more positive societal impact. On the other hand, as outlined above, the same providers can be expected to find all new ways of generating returns which do not necessarily correspond to any societal improvement—bursting like so many blades of grass through cracks in the figurative pavement.

I stumbled across a short but fascinating work by the 19^th-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer called variously the The Art of Controversy or The Art of Being Right. Wikisource has one version; another site has what seems to be the same English text alongside the original German. Read it in full!

His topic is controversial dialectic:

...the art of disputing, and of disputing in such a way as to hold one's own, whether one is in the right or the wrong—per fas et nefas. A man may be objectively in the right, and nevertheless in the eyes of bystanders, and sometimes in his own, he may come off worst.

The prefatory rationale for this discussion is interesting, but more useful are the thirty-eight tactics proposed in the body of the work. For example, here is #24 ("State a false syllogism"):

This trick consists in stating a false syllogism. Your opponent makes a proposition, and by false inference and distortion of his ideas you force from it other propositions which it does not contain and he does not in the least mean; nay, which are absurd or dangerous. It then looks as if his proposition gave rise to others which are inconsistent either with themselves or with some acknowledged truth, and so it appears to be indirectly refuted. This is the diversion, and it is another application of the fallacy non causae ut causae.

I have no idea of the popularity of this work among modern politicians, but even if they are entirely unaware, Schopenhauer literally wrote the book on argumentation—in 1831! The presentation is neutral, but I am inclined to read it as a spotter's guide to dishonest debate. Of statements by public figures and the online commentariat which infuriate me, not a single example falls outside his categories.

Armed with this knowledge, I have been able to point out the underlying fallacies or distractions when I see these methods in use, instead of falling prey to them. Often the author retreats from an unsupportable claim. When I prepare arguments myself, I check to see that I am giving my case honestly, and not using these shortcuts to merely appear persuasive via distraction.

At the risk of stating the obvious, democratic government is unlike running a business in a number of important ways. David Olive gives one of the similarities in his excellent blog at the Toronto Star:

It is the death of any commercial enterprise to starve itself of necessary expenditures on R&D, new-product development and marketing. I'll never understand how today's conservatives fail to make that connection, slavishly devoted as they claim to be to free-market principles. Maybe it's because so few of them have run a business. Or had to make their way in the private sector - as I do - without being subsidized by a Rupert Murdoch, the Fraser Institute or the Heritage Foundation.

Incompetence is universal. It should be evident that the architects of such spectacular failures as the overdue Boeing 787 project, the GM bankruptcy or the Wall Street meltdown would do no better in public office, where oversight is more open but less effective. However, even successful companies are usually inappropriate models for government.

Choose Apple, for example, whose innovation and focus on design has made it wildly successful and won it hordes of fans who might well vote for a President Steven P. Jobs. But the breath-taking, march-stealing nature of Apple's product launches depends on a rigid and well-documented culture of secrecy. As much as politicos might envy the impact of Apple announcements, they would be ill-advised to try and duplicate it. Funding announcements without stakeholder input will miss the mark and be ineffective; unannounced funding and/or cuts make the granting government look guilty when they are inevitably unearthed.

Yet governing parties at all levels, in Canada and elsewhere, continue think they can engineer positive surprises and suppress negative ones—and they continue to fail in doing so.

Identity

You can observe a number of common privacy tactics among your friend with an online presence:

• Private or semi-private blogs or portions of blog posts.
• Using partial names on social networking services ("Paul K").
• The use of handles or pseudonyms.

I use none of the above. If identify theft is a concern, they will foil only casual (harmless) attempts. As for sharing details of one's personal life, it is mostly pretentious to expect they are consequential, or that large numbers of others will be interested in them. I—and certainly others—often neglect life proper, so why further the problem by spending time writing about it?

Alternate identities are another easy target. We spend entire phases of our lives struggling with identity, so maintaining a second (or third, or fourth) introduces needless complications. Where concerns about one's employer motivate anonymity, there is doubtless a value conflict that deserves close examination.

Having grown up before the advent of cyber-bulling and, being male, unlikely to be the target of sexual violence, I am no doubt privileged in being able to hold these views. Still, I firmly believe in consistency and honesty of online identity.

Meat!

Finally, the Walrus (after disappointing in May) redeems itself with this excellent short story by Zsuzsi Gartner in its September issue. Delicious! If the quality of writing remains so high for a full year, I can quit whining forever.

Public policy is a growing personal interest, building on my background in engineering, my morbid fixation with local, provincial and federal politics, and a view for leadership.

This term I have a fascinating graduate course in Engineering & Public Policy at the University of Toronto. While much of the material would likely cause the reader's eyes to glaze over, I hope to write about some situations that motivate the use of policy.

My mother grew up in what was essentially farmland in Aurora, Ontario in the 1950s and '60s. School always involved a long bus ride; the nearest neighbours were miles away. Her love of the outdoors led our family to own a ski chalet on 8 acres of land in upstate New York in the '90s, and for decades she has enjoyed an annual, week-long canoe trip with several women her age to one of Ontario's many parks. The works of the Group of Seven are among her favourite art.

I, on the other hand, have resolved never to own a car, which mostly confines my working life to urban areas. I am still interested in living in a Japanese-style one-bedroom apartment, the sort that tend to be too small for even a shower (a nearby bathhouse substitutes). Bicycle activism interests me, and recently I use 'driver' as an ephithet more often that not. Despite these contrasts I find that I share a high valuation of nature, of open spaces away from civilization, of the pristine. I cycle, ski, run and dragon boat because I love being outdoors. Nature's majesty has an unrivalled capacity to awe me.

Whereas earlier generations, especially in North America, had a concept of nature as bountiful and boundless, we are aware today of the limits of our planet. Conventional wisdom has it that a person is entitled to his own homestead, his plot of land, or at least his suburban home on a large lot. When space is plentiful, this is excellent—if each child had his own patch of woods to tromp through, we would surely have better mental health overall.

In Mississauga, where I grew up, there is no longer empty land; every hectare within the city limits has been zoned, and much of it for housing. The consequence is sprawl; youth who feel disconnected from communities they cannot traverse without a license and a vehicle; poor public transit in areas with density too low to support frequent service. Development, far from ceasing, continues in Brampton and other municipalities further from downtown Toronto.

I don't think this should be interpreted to mean that we no longer value nature. Imagery of the Great White North is central to our national identity and we are loath to abandon it. Nor are the developers and new homeowners inherently evil. Instead, I feel, our behaviour has been slow to change and no longer suits our values.

The course has confirmed my distaste for the varieties of conservatism that favour small government and markets. In the Greater Toronto Area, the de facto policy of letting the housing market alone has only allowed the efficient paving of large areas of green land. Yet the market provides no incentive to use instruments of collective benefit (parks, transit and multiple dwellings) over those of individual benefit (backyards, cars and individual homes). Thus the need for progressive policy. Looking to Western Europe and East Asia we can see myriad examples of both success and failure in this policy space, and we have the luxury of adapting the former to our own cities.

Thus also I can reconcile my 'city mouse' predilections with my 'country mouse' values. When wilderness and nature—the urban park, the lakeshore, the ski slopes and national parks a few hours away—are within easy reach, urban living need not feel confined or artificial.