Transit 180o could be a 360o
Groups ask council to reverse its reversal to transit changes and simply make tweaks to the new system as they are needed
The decision to revert to the old transit system will return to council next Monday after two groups say it would be premature to give up on the new one.
The new system needs time to be tried and tweaked with consideration given to the option of some weekend and evening service, the Social Development Advisory Board and the Transit Advisory Committee told members of the Public Services Committee on Monday.
Incumbent mayor Ted Clugston expressed regret that agencies had not presented their thoughts before council’s meeting on Sept. 18 when council voted 6-3 to return to the old transit system.
PSC did not adopt any resolution to see council reopen debate on the issue but accepted the recommendation as “information” to be “considered as part of the total future solution for transit,” said committee chair Coun. Julie Friesen.
Coun. Les Pearson says he will be asking council to rescind its motion.
“I voted in haste and am repenting,” said Pearson, who was one of the six votes in favour of returning to the old system.
Clugston does not think it is likely there will be any change at council on Monday.
“It would take a two-thirds majority to revert the decision that was made a week ago. That’s kind of difficult to do,” said Clugston.
Prior to last week’s council meeting the public had been contacting councillors to express concerns about the new system and issues experienced. On Monday the committee was hearing from a different perspective.
In some venues, spectators booed. Tshirt sales spiked for one Pittsburgh Steelers player who saluted the anthem alone. A year earlier, sales had spiked for Colin Kaepernick, who started the NFL police protests.
That illustrates the existing market for two types of American patriotism: Trump’s and Obama’s.
Obama articulated his in different speeches, including in Canada’s House of Commons, where he quoted Pierre Trudeau saying nations are not to be admired as pyramids, but of objects of constant improvement.
He offered a more detailed explanation in Selma, Ala.
On the 50th anniversary of a bloodsoaked march for voting rights, Obama described the people who trudged in the face of police batons and hostile public opinion, as quintessential American heroes.
His American patriot fights for change — with protesters following the pioneers, revolutionaries, abolitionists, suffragettes, baseball’s Jackie Robinson, the gay-rights activists also beaten bloody and the disrupters who created jazz, blues, rock and roll.
“What could be more American than what happened in this place?” Obama said in Selma. “That’s America. That’s what it means to love America... That’s what it means when we say America is exceptional. “For we were born of change.” Some political scientists have tried giving names to these types of patriotism.
In a 2007 paper, Leonie Huddy and Nadia Khatib, identified three varieties: symbolic patriotism (celebrating flags and anthems), uncritical patriotism (which they linked to authoritarianism) and constructive — the kind that seeks change.
It’s no accident this clash is unfolding in football stadiums.
NFL football is at the political epicentre of American sport. It’s not only the most-watched in the country; but in a politically segregated America, where the left and right inhabit individual cocoons, separated by class, race, and urban-rural divides, pro football is the place everyone meets.
A study by market-research company Scarborough found in 2013 that golf, college football and NASCAR fans skewed heavily Republican. American NHL fans were mostly Republican. NFL fans were closest to the centre, with a tiny GOP tilt. On the other side, NBA basketball, soccer, and tennis fans leaned Democrat.
The leagues have responded accordingly to the anthem-kneeling controversy.
On that left-to-right continuum, NBA stars piled onto Trump and had a White House visit cancelled; the NFL was split; and on the right, the NHL’s champion Pittsburgh Penguins said they would still visit the White House, while NASCAR declared its drivers were forbidden from protesting. The trendline is inseparable from race. The NBA comprises 74 per cent black players, the NFL 68 per cent, Major League Baseball (which had one prominent anthem-protester) eight per cent. The NHL has a smaller percentage of black players and NASCAR recently got its first black driver in 11 years.
What about the politics of anthem protests?
A poll by Quinnipiac after protests started last year showed just nine per cent of Republicans and 30 per cent of whites supported them along with 74 per cent of blacks and 63 per cent of Democrats. Overall, the national approve-disapprove rate was 38-54.
Americans overwhelmingly see themselves as patriotic with 89 per cent of respondents this year telling Gallup pollsters they were extremely, very or somewhat proud of their country, although there are clear enthusiasm gaps, with whites 23 per cent likelier to be extremely proud.
One famous sports commentator urged a more generous definition of patriotism.
“Martin Luther King was a patriot. Susan B. Anthony was a patriot. Dissidents are patriots... Schoolteachers and social workers are patriots,” Bob Costas said on CNN. “And yet...(in every baseball game) the Yankees honour a military guest... There’s never a schoolteacher...
“Patriotism comes in many forms. And what has happened is it’s been conflated with a bumper-sticker kind of flag-waving and the military only, so that people can’t see that in his own way, Colin Kaepernick, however imperfectly, is doing a patriotic thing.”