# The One About The Number Two

An episode of [Rose City Politics](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1247337855), 17 Aug 2023, 59 min.

Audio: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/api.spreaker.com/download/episode/56505948/the_one_about_the_number_two.mp3

Guest panelist Frazier Fathers joins Jon and Doug to discuss new poverty data, Activate Transit Windsor Essex's "BUS or BUST" campaign, and the response to a new encampment in South Windsor. Rose City Politics is brought to you with the kind support of LiUNA Local 625: Building Better Communities. Support the show at Patreon.com/RoseCityPolitics. Read our stuff in Biz X Magazine or online at BizXMagazine.com or RoseCityPolitics.ca.

## Transcript

[0:25] No, it's still venom addled folks. Good evening, everyone, Welcome to
[0:35] Rosity Politics, brought to you with the kind support of Len six two five
[0:39] Building Better Communities. Tonight on the show, we have a different intro and
[0:44] we're gonna be talking poverty and housing with special guest Frasier Fathers. Our regular
[0:49] panel tonight includes Doug Startry and myself John Lidkey. But if you were reading
[0:54] the rundown, you'd be not misinformed if you thought that Twitter was our guests
[1:00] tonight xxxxx. Besides being done by a bee. Yesterday, John Big timed
[1:07] us a little bit and asked me to do the grunt work of preparing our
[1:11] research documents. So in case you're not clear on what he's doing right now,
[1:15] folks, he's shitting on me. No, I'm just reading in real
[1:19] time. I just I had thought that maybe you would just do like the
[1:22] copy and paste of like an old one. No, no, and that's
[1:25] what that's what wims do, man. I typed that up fresh. This
[1:26] is here, that's my copy. That's brand new. It's it's real.
[1:30] And but look at we haven't missed a bee. Now. We're still walking
[1:34] right through it. We are on the path. We're in the forest.
[1:36] We're not worried about what might be coming towards us. Good. Yeah,
[1:40] yeah, So for Asier, how's growing good? Any wild animals get you?
[1:45] Yesterday? There's a skunk of my neighborhood. The dog's been after but
[1:48] like not no sprays yet, but you can smell it every you know,
[1:52] in the evening, every now and then there's wafting through the air. That's
[1:55] not just the neighbors. It's a different it's a skun. Okay, that's
[1:59] I like my neighbors. It's a skunk. Okay. Freas Your father is
[2:01] glad to have you with us today. You're going to help us break down
[2:06] a lot of numbers, right, sure, Well, it's kind of what
[2:07] I'm here for usually why I'm here. Otherwise, I mean, I would
[2:13] be lost. So why don't we just dive into things? Some of that?
[2:17] Cool? So we're looking at what are we looking at? John?
[2:23] My lip is still a little inflating. How about you off? Right now?
[2:29] Are you blaming the bee? It's still with me right now? Okay,
[2:34] Now I got to read my crappy copy. Statistics Canada has released a
[2:38] new data product, the Municipal Quality of Life dashboard. The London Free Pest
[2:43] had a piece about this, written by Jennifer Beaman. It was republished in
[2:47] The Windsor Star from that piece. According to a new quality of life snapshots
[2:53] from the National Statistical Agency, ten point eight percent of Windsor's population is unable
[3:00] to afford a set list of basic necessities. About twenty four thousand, three
[3:05] hundred and fifty five people in the city of approximately two hundred and thirty thousand
[3:08] live in poverty. In addition to the dashboard, Statistics Canada released low income
[3:15] and inequality data for twenty twenty one on August nine. This is almost like
[3:20] it's the other podcast Frasier. Yeah. Local data guru Frasier Fathers wrote up
[3:24] an excellent post about the issue on his blog, Ginger Politics, which you
[3:30] can find at ginger politics dot com. And so maybe we'll turn to you,
[3:37] Frasier, and let's before we do, can we just can okay,
[3:40] get me to do your work for you, and now you're going to jump
[3:43] in, Yeah exactly. That was like the beauty of like getting this scar
[3:46] started, or getting the pickle jar to the point where I'm ready to you
[3:53] know, just to be real real quick about it. Then I'm sorry,
[3:54] I'll let you go where you're going. Are we at all surprised when we
[3:58] see that number, because I'm not. Yeah, no, not significantly surprised.
[4:04] But there's some technical stuff that if we want to pretend we're on the
[4:06] other podcast, we can get in the weeds of But but but let's let's
[4:11] pick up from as an excellent question, John, let's pick up from that,
[4:15] because why are we not surprised? We're not surprised because Windsor has been
[4:19] hovering in this position for a decade more two thousand and six, you know,
[4:25] fifteen years probably, So part of it is also just to get into
[4:30] the weeds of it. You know, the municipal dash quality of life dashboard
[4:33] is all based on the census, so again it's twenty twenty data. It's
[4:38] now twenty twenty three, so there is a time like there. But it's
[4:41] actually a really interesting tool and if you want to dig into like quality of
[4:44] life data, and they've broken it down also by a lot of subcategories,
[4:47] so you can actually go in and there's nice graphs and stuff that you can
[4:49] export pretty easily about like your town has this percentage in the low income and
[4:55] breaking that stuff down. So it's actually a really good tool from the census
[4:58] data perspective, I'll be it's three years out of date now. What came
[5:02] out in the beginning of August is the tax filer data, which is again
[5:09] you know, a separate data set, but it's released every year on a
[5:12] two year leg pretty much you file your taxes and then two years later,
[5:15] STAT can gets around or releasing for large metro areas aggregates of that to sort
[5:20] of tell you GDP low income, how much income from various types, whether
[5:26] it's employment income or government transfers or you know, how many people were getting
[5:29] eis. All that sort of stuff gets released. So this is what twenty
[5:31] twenty one, we're a year into the pandemic, so this is a second
[5:35] pandemic year worth of data, right, So the twenty twenty census was a
[5:39] pandemic census. It was always has and always will have those asterisks around that
[5:43] SERB was running during the census and poverty rates fell, and STAT can recognize
[5:47] that during the census that SERB was knocking down poverty rates as well as the
[5:51] other rent subsidies and even some of the business subsidies that were keeping people employed
[5:56] when they probably shouldn't have been employed on a drallow up CRB as well.
[6:00] Yeah, and then and then that rolls into twenty twenty one. So by
[6:02] what twenty twenty one has is those starting to end. So in October of
[6:08] twenty twenty one, you know, SERB ended people that transitioned to EI,
[6:11] some people weren't eligible for those transitions. Somewhere of an accurate assessment stood without
[6:15] the support. Well, yeah, that end, the economy wasn't fully up
[6:18] and running either, right, So there were still sectors of the economy and
[6:21] we went in and out of walks really unique look then at things. Yeah,
[6:26] so it's it's sort of this gray area where it was like the pandemic
[6:29] was still happening. There was some supports for part of the year, but
[6:31] then the supports started going away at the end of the year. Pretty Much
[6:33] what it painted a picture of across the country was it meeting incomes across the
[6:38] country declined by about two and a half percent, give or take. In
[6:42] Ontario they designed declined by about three point eight percent, and in Windsor we
[6:45] had the largest meeting income to decline of five point seven percent between twenty twenty
[6:48] and twenty twenty one. And that's largely driven by government subsidies going away and
[6:54] the economy not being back right because because winds Or, we did that analysis
[7:00] a while back and looked at served by postal code, and Windsor had one
[7:05] of the higher uptakes of SERVE in the whole country. Windsor was at a
[7:12] hot spot for serve outside of the outside of the Far North. I don't
[7:15] think there were too many other other areas that were in the range that Windsor
[7:20] was. I don't have the data in front of me, so I'm being
[7:21] deliberately vague, but but I just I just wanted to touch on that,
[7:28] like when SERB receded, we were always going to feel it more because we
[7:33] took it up more. But also I want to ask you about the detail.
[7:38] Like when we talk about being in poverty, that means that your income
[7:44] either falls below a line either of you know, like some kind of basket
[7:48] of goods or some other measure. But there's a line. Yeah, But
[7:53] one thing the poverty rate doesn't measure is how far below the line is the
[7:56] population? Right For that, you have to actually look a little bit more
[8:00] detailed at income data. So what I'm getting at is where people's baseline incomes
[8:05] and winds are further below the sort of that serb top up than another centers.
[8:13] I didn't look at it that way exactly when I took a look at
[8:15] the data. But what I would say is a couple of things one and
[8:18] taking a half a step back. Canada has three measures of poverty, and
[8:24] so being clear on which measures we're talking about is an important one. So
[8:26] the census data, the first data from the census was about market basket,
[8:30] right, So when they're talking about a basket of goods, it's how much
[8:33] is your rent, your hydro, your food transportation in the town. They
[8:35] calculate how much that minimum is, and then if you're below that, you're
[8:39] in poverty. Using the market basket. What the tax file data uses is
[8:45] the low income data low income measure, which is based a proportion of median
[8:48] income. Right. And so again both of these are somewhat arbitrary. They
[8:52] are not an apples to apples comparison. So the ten percent number that you
[8:56] quoted in the intro, there was a market basket number, and then nineteen
[9:00] point three percent that was released in August was a low income measure, so
[9:05] there is a little bit of grayness in there, and that we're not talking
[9:09] apples to apples there. The nice thing about the tax filer data, though,
[9:13] is it comes out every year and so you can go back and look
[9:16] and you can see the dips and the decline and in the rise. So
[9:20] the decline in low income in twenty twenty was driven by SERB and other things,
[9:24] and then you can see it's starting to tick back up again in twenty
[9:26] twenty one and went up four point six percent. So Windsor does have and
[9:31] especially comparing to the other Southwestern Ontario cities, has had lower median incomes.
[9:35] Generally, a lower median income means that middle person is right in the middle
[9:39] is lower, which means there's fifty percent of the people below that and fifty
[9:41] percent of the people above that. So by having a lower median income,
[9:46] it means that odds are the you know, the fifty percent of people are
[9:50] below that halfway point, and as a result, they're lower than in other
[9:54] communities in southwestern Ontario. I think the other thing that they did a decent
[10:01] job of doing here is they actually released and it was one of the first
[10:05] times I've seen it a low income ratio for the first time. So what
[10:09] looking at that lower fifty percent and what proportion of them is then underneath that
[10:13] low income ratio? In Windsor it was thirty eight point six percent, which
[10:16] is so like looking at that media and thirty eight point six of them were
[10:20] then under that low income ratio. So that was you know, certainly telling
[10:24] and that based on the media and a huge chunk of them or then under
[10:28] that low income ratio. And so it's Windsor has had this problem. And
[10:35] We've talked about it on this podcast, and I've blogged about it, and
[10:37] it's been on our other podcast and all those other things like that. You
[10:43] know, this is a structural problem for Windsor. I would say, I
[10:46] would go so far to say that, like, it's not something that just
[10:50] because the economy is booming now in twenty twenty three, that this issue has
[10:54] gone away. You know, these people in all likelihood are not walking into
[10:58] the battery plant for jobs in a year and a half when those jobs become
[11:03] available, they are still going to be in these situations. And that creates
[11:07] a overall stress on our community. When you're talking about housing and food banks
[11:11] and all of those other things which have been in the media pretty recently as
[11:15] well. I'm glad you brought up the I'm glad you brought up the battery
[11:18] plant because that's kind of where I wanted to go to. One of the
[11:22] things that I don't think happens often enough when we talk about poverty is connecting
[11:28] poverty to the general economy. Let's talk about Windsor's economy. And when you
[11:33] say that poverty in Windsor is structural, what economic factors do you think contribute
[11:41] to that. So the biggest one is educational attainment. Right, So Windsor
[11:45] has about a six percent gap. So we have a six percent rate where
[11:48] the highest educational attainment being just high school, so that six percent more of
[11:54] our population proportionally has just a high school diploma in the twenty five to sixty
[12:00] four age range. So in the working age population, we're not talking about
[12:03] fifteen year olds. We're not talking about you know, your grandfather who's you
[12:05] know, seventy five now and who've just got a high school degree but got
[12:09] a good job at Ford or something like that. They're excluded from that.
[12:13] Compared to the provincial average so there's a six percent gap there, which is
[12:16] important to understand because you know, generally speaking, and the correlations are very
[12:22] clear. The higher your education you go up. You know, whether it's
[12:24] a trades or college diploma or a bachelor degree or a master's degree or whatever,
[12:30] incomes go up. And so you're comparing, for example, you compare
[12:33] yourself to like a London or a Waterloo where they have a much higher rate
[12:37] of high school graduation and some sort of post secondary attainment. That probably creates
[12:41] some resiliency in their economy where you know, those people have degrees that are
[12:48] in demand. Probably they are already working in sectors of you know, based
[12:54] on their local economy, whether it's manufacturing or tech or whatever, what have
[12:56] you. They are then able to weather economic churn and weather economic downturn in
[13:05] a way that a person with a lower certificate or a lower degree may not,
[13:09] because generally speaking, you're more precariously employed with lower education, and as
[13:15] a result of that, when things go bad economically, you're usually the first
[13:18] people to be laid off. Right, So if you if you have a
[13:22] lower educational attainment, so for example, I have a far lower educational attainment
[13:28] than Jessica, who's sitting next to me. So, in a typical scenario,
[13:35] I would be the first one out of work, I would earn a
[13:39] lower wage while I was in work, and I would be the last to
[13:41] come back. And that six percent gap in high school graduation attainment represents a
[13:50] lack of resilience in our economy, a limited ability for this city to recover
[13:56] economically through those kinds of Let's be clear, yes, all of X County
[14:03] now that we're talking about, but yes, okay, so let's talk about
[14:09] the battery plant then. So the battery plant is coming. It is being
[14:15] touted as the panacea of Windsor's economic future, the ultimate end of history for
[14:22] Windsor. We will never have a problem again. We've got a battery plant.
[14:26] I'm a little skeptical, but of that level of it. Just announced
[14:30] another investment coming today too. Okay, Well, that's that's two paradises.
[14:35] Another one there are supposed to be three to six bill or something something.
[14:37] I don't know it was. I saw a headline before I came in.
[14:41] So so what I'm what I'm getting at, what I'm driving at, is
[14:46] the battery plant will create jobs, all of which will presumably require a reasonable
[14:52] level of educational attainment, or the de facto will because there will be so
[14:56] much interest in the jobs that even if they say didn't not require a high
[15:00] school diploma, most likely very few people without one would end up making the
[15:05] kinds. So there's limited direct relief. But we hear a lot about spinoff
[15:09] jobs and spinoff opportunity from something like the battery plants. So I've seen estimates
[15:18] all over the map about the number of jobs created. Let's say this thing
[15:20] creates a couple of thousand jobs in windsor and therefore spinoff economic activities three x
[15:26] twenty x depends on who it is, right, will that have an impact
[15:31] on reducing poverty and windsor potentially? Right, So some of those are like
[15:37] proportional jobs, Like they're not. You know when you say, like there's
[15:41] a multiplier, And how economic impact assessment works is when they do that multiplication,
[15:46] Like whatever that number is on the end is not actually X number of
[15:50] jobs, it's X number of job equivalents. Right, So it might be
[15:54] that like a part time person working at Tim Horton's gets an extra four hour
[15:58] shift a week because at three pm when the shift change is happening now at
[16:03] the battery plant. They just need one more person manning to drive through,
[16:06] right, and a bunch of those people added together cobbles together, you know,
[16:11] the equivalent of a full time job in those multipliers. So it's not
[16:15] like, okay, three thousand jobs here, nine thousand other jobs. It's
[16:19] not that nine thousand people will have jobs. It may mean actually twenty thousand
[16:23] people have jobs, but they're all getting a portion of some like they're getting
[16:29] four hours a week or ten hours a week more or whatever in a part
[16:30] time role. Some of them are getting a full time role. Though.
[16:34] So will it decrease poverty to an extent? Right? I think? You
[16:41] know, there will be more jobs, there will be more employment in the
[16:42] community, there will be more opportunity, and frankly, if there's a strong
[16:48] upskilling pathway aligned with the battery plant, which I know a lot of people
[16:52] are talking about, and that's being worked on from my understanding, in a
[16:55] number of different spaces, whether it's specific trades or specific training. If they're
[17:00] willing to train people to work in the plant as part of hiring them,
[17:03] then I think then certainly there will be some resilience to some of those people
[17:07] who could be upskilled for you know, you've you know, you've worked,
[17:12] if you have some manufacturing experience or whatever, but maybe not the diploma or
[17:17] the advanced degree, you still might be able to get your foot in the
[17:19] door in order to you know, get that upscaling into that battery environment.
[17:23] You know. Like I've spoken with a bunch of people in the industry trying
[17:26] to figure out like what the jobs are, and it's really hard to get
[17:30] anything out of them because that makes perfect sense, right, Like they're not
[17:33] going to go showing their hand until everything has to be shown. But from
[17:36] what I can assess, it looks like thirty percent of the jobs are probably
[17:40] around those higher advanced degree type jobs, whereas the rest are the ones where
[17:47] you're going to need to have significant training, but then you're going to be
[17:51] able to you know, operate the machinery and whatnot, and then you've got
[17:53] those thirty percent of people that are above you overseeing things. It's a completely
[17:59] different breakdown then we've had in our traditional auto sector. As I've tried to
[18:03] keep saying, you know, like these aren't Grandpa and Grandma's traditional auto jobs.
[18:07] You're going to need training and even if you look at how things are
[18:11] going in the United States where just in Michigan, they're building the same plant,
[18:15] you know, but in a different economy, a different environment, and
[18:19] they're setting up educational institutions to feed people through that will be able to start
[18:26] off at nothing and walk out on the job with like, you know,
[18:30] two to three years of training, which is to say, here you're walking
[18:34] out with a automotive engineering degree walking in four or five months of training on
[18:41] the job doing it right. It's so it's interesting seeing like what our built
[18:45] in supports our versus what they're having to create from the bottom up. But
[18:48] the difference being I guess, is when you look at the entire situation,
[18:53] it's still not helping those who are at the very bottom of our you know,
[18:57] society. We're still left in a situation where our elected leadership keeps pointing
[19:02] at it. As you know, Doug, you said, this is the
[19:04] end all, be all, it's our silver bullet. My god, We've
[19:07] finally revitalized. And my concern looking at this is are we just going to
[19:11] be bringing in sixty percent of this factory from out of town who are going
[19:15] to go and build or buy new homes and live here in our community,
[19:19] and the people who are already displaced and not receiving the supports that they need
[19:25] are going to you know, still not be seen. And we look at,
[19:27] you know, all the conversation with the Sandwich Southlands and oh my god,
[19:30] look at the opportunity for the development here. Every one of those houses
[19:33] is probably going to be six seven, eight nine, a million plus.
[19:38] Why wouldn't they be? There's no incentive not to be. And as we've
[19:42] right and as we've moved institutions out of the city core, we've moved employment
[19:48] opportunities and economic activity out of the city core. And are we going to
[19:52] end up with sort of this two speed geography which some might argue we already
[19:56] have a two speed geography in terms of the economy, Windsor and in the
[20:00] rest of Essex County? Are we going to end up with that? And
[20:04] I think it's I think it's a possibility. I also I really do wonder,
[20:11] like I think that there's a lot of discussion right now about what is
[20:15] the quality of the jobs at the battery plan going to be, what is
[20:22] the what is the security of those jobs? Did you see they're offering buyouts
[20:26] right now. It's all over the media. And there's a reason why buyouts
[20:32] are always offered. It's not because higher wage chubbs are coming in well.
[20:37] And part of it is also like this is and again on my other other
[20:41] podcasts at a conversation with Greg Lason about this and part of what this is.
[20:45] And John's right, they haven't really tipped their hand to what these jobs
[20:48] are going to be. But LG's already built a plant in Tennessee in partnership
[20:52] with GM, starting wages with sixteen dollars an hour US, which is about
[20:56] twenty one twenty twenty one depending on your exchange right now, starting wage at
[21:00] winsor assemblies like twenty six or something like twenty five or what. I don't
[21:06] know what the exact number is, but it's certainly above twenty bucks an hour.
[21:10] So and given that the living wage in Essex County is only about eighteen
[21:15] dollars an hour or eighteen ten now, like it's not significantly above what would
[21:18] be considered sort of the bare threshold wage that is above the poverty line,
[21:22] but a household income that you could sustain and thrive on, like occasionally spend
[21:27] some money on a restaurant or or an entertainment thing. So I think there's
[21:33] there are I think John made a great point about, you know, what
[21:36] proportion of these jobs get filled locally versus like imported talent as well, and
[21:40] like they're going to recruit worldwide for these positions, right and like and some
[21:45] of the people they're going to bring in people from Korea or Poland or wherever
[21:48] these these existing plants already are in order to help get these new plants up
[21:53] and running. So some of those jobs are going to go to people from
[21:56] outside the community who are going to come here hopefully put down routes. But
[22:00] it will then put pressure on the existing sort of supply demand pressures, whether
[22:04] that's housing affordability or you know, take your pick of some of the inflationary
[22:10] challenges that our community faces. So yeah, there's a lot of Like this
[22:14] is sort of the classic you know, your economy is so good that like
[22:19] people cute wages can't keep up with you challenge that you saw a sort of
[22:22] like at a hyper level out in the Bay Area, out in like the
[22:26] you know, early two thousands, like where you know, people were making
[22:30] ridiculous money, but you know, a timing apartment was two million dollars.
[22:33] Like, we're never going to get that far, but like that's kind of
[22:37] it's a decent problem to be in. But like, unless you really start
[22:41] trying to unpack the underlying issues underneath that and thinking creatively about those, you're
[22:48] going to end up with a city of halves and have nots. And you're
[22:51] already seeing that in a region of haves and have nots, and you're already
[22:53] seeing that in the income inequality data, Windsor has the fourth highest income inequality
[22:57] in Canada. Yeah, we've talked about that on the show before. Uh
[23:02] and and uh. One thing about income inequality data and Canada. I think
[23:07] is important to point out that we may be fourth worst, but Canada's income
[23:15] inequality exists within a narrow band. Certainly, it's it's generally speaking, we
[23:18] have a broadly similar amount of inequality, but ours is worse than most most
[23:25] other centers in Canada. And so what what I what concerns me about that
[23:33] is I don't have a whole lot of evidence, and I have some evidence
[23:38] to the contrary that that Winsor's leaders, elites, government, industry, whatever,
[23:48] see income inequality as any kind of a problem or actually even understand the
[23:53] level and depth of poverty in our community. Like and I really do mean
[23:59] this, you know who more than a decade ago, now, I took
[24:04] becky parents awesome Leadership wins or Essex course at United Way, and I think
[24:11] Fraser you may have done that in the past as well. Okay, John,
[24:15] you, sir, had done the Mayor's Youth Advisory Council, so you
[24:17] were ineligible for Leadership wins or Essex. I'm pretty sure with how that's how
[24:21] that works. So one of the things that we did in lwe which I
[24:27] thought was excellent Becky was Becky is a person who was very interested in social
[24:33] justice, and she constructed that program so that folks who were being groomed by
[24:38] whatever organization in the city that thought they wanted they needed a leadership training program
[24:44] would be exposed to poverty, inequality, and deprivation in our community. And
[24:48] I found it to be quite effective. But here's the thing. More than
[24:53] one person who was in that group with me expressed disbelief, express shock,
[25:02] was acting like they were receiving new information. Keep in mind, this was
[25:07] a cohort of people that had been not self selected that have been selected by
[25:11] their employers as future leaders. So so this is what I'm what I'm saying
[25:17] is this is a little bit of an anecdote to point out that I think
[25:19] there is a real lack of social cohesion and motivation towards it in Windsor So.
[25:26] I think I agree with you. I think you know, we're talking
[25:30] about numbers right now, and those are very intangible to a lot of people.
[25:34] Okay, I know people probably turn on podcasts realize prasiers on and like
[25:38] some portion it's like, okay, I'll skip this week. Oh this is
[25:42] the one about the number two. Yeah, exactly right. I think this
[25:45] is the one where like everyone like flocks to it, to be honest.
[25:48] Yeah. But and so yes, like like, the question around social cohesion
[25:55] is a big one because and it's about you know, if you don't see
[26:00] it, you don't hear it, you don't feel it. And part of
[26:03] the challenge that is out there certainly is you know, like I've done a
[26:08] lot of mapping. You can point to certain neighborhoods having certain higher levels of
[26:14] inequality and low income and all those sort of things in the city other downtown
[26:18] West End, you know, prosperous is working in certain neighborhoods. United Way
[26:22] has talked about certain neighborhoods, but I think the real challenge is going to
[26:27] be you know, for many people, you drive through those neighborhoods. You
[26:33] know, if you even work in the city corps, you know, or
[26:37] work in the City of windsor you know, you're not exposed to maybe those
[26:41] neighborhoods or those circumstances on a regular basis, Like you know, how many
[26:45] people drive. You know, you work at the city, but you live
[26:48] in the county. Well, you may drive through one of those neighborhoods in
[26:51] order to get to work, but it's not like you're stopping and experiencing things
[26:55] unless there's a lineup that's long at your local timportance and you want to go
[26:57] to the other one. So let's dive into one of those neighborhoods right now.
[27:03] If you're coming into the downtown core, driving in along Howard Avenue or
[27:08] Doogal Avenue, you're going to see potentially a new or what some might say,
[27:15] a recurring on going though often not seen before now more apparent homeless encampment
[27:22] that's been set up behind the Roundhouse Center on Howard and behind the Wholesale Club
[27:30] on Doogal right in that tracks area. And this is the second homelessness encampment
[27:37] in a number of weeks, one which was just cleaned out of Sandwich.
[27:42] But what's most interesting is that we are watching a migration. I feel like
[27:48] that's a not humane term to use right now, but for lack of a
[27:53] better one. What's most interesting though, that I find is I don't think
[27:59] so. I just want to interrupt because by so, it just so happened
[28:03] that I worked an election campaign in twenty nineteen and twenty twenty one in that
[28:07] plaza with the with the wholesale club where you're talking about. So so I
[28:15] know this geography pretty well. I spent like two years apart. I spent
[28:18] like six weeks every damn day, and those it didn't do me any good.
[28:22] But that's another story, it's another podcast. I spent a lot of
[28:26] time there, and the biggest change I saw between twenty nineteen and twenty twenty
[28:30] one was the amount of foot traffic in the alley way driveway whatever it was
[28:37] between that wooded area behind the wholesale club and the dumpsters that were serving all
[28:44] of the units in the plaza, like among which one one was us and
[28:49] and certainly like I live in that part of town. I have family in
[28:55] Remington Park, So when I drive through that area, the southern part of
[28:59] Howard Avenue has had lots of people obviously experiencing difficult circumstances or street involved at
[29:08] bus stops. I've driven by and seen people sleeping at bus stops in the
[29:11] morning more than once, in bus shelters and whatnot. You see the folks
[29:17] on the street. So I just don't want to say it's not it's not
[29:19] new. It's not like a migration, like somebody said, you know what
[29:22] this boundary of word three, we're going to cross it. It's this has
[29:26] been happening in South Windsor for a couple of years now. Absolutely. I
[29:30] think what I would I guess then, just to most clarify, is that
[29:36] it's now in the media. It's not being discussed publicly. It's now at
[29:38] a point where we have city counselors that are saying, I'm getting phone calls
[29:44] about this, yea, I have to now deal with it. Well,
[29:47] now they have to acknowledge that it fun, it exists. Yeah, jinks,
[29:52] But I mean, and we've always made the jokes, right, wait
[29:56] until it becomes apparent and you know, a Ward one neighborhood and if on
[30:00] we're here, he'd be he'd be ripping on you for for having a house,
[30:03] having a house and living a life. All right, they're working their
[30:06] way to Rosa exactly right. You know, I'm telling you that is a
[30:10] big course. Lots of places to hide, folks. But I mean,
[30:14] so here we are, and it's manifesting itself more visibly, more apparent,
[30:21] more readily. We have aggressive panhandling by laws that are going to attempt to
[30:26] deal with these situations maybe or they're just going to be used to target.
[30:33] So we can move away from it's just the statistics realm. I did it.
[30:37] It's the game, isn't it? Yeah? The batlip aside the fact
[30:42] frasier, What does it actually look like the actual poverty angle of things?
[30:48] I mean, we can all, like you know, have our own input,
[30:51] but still from your viewpoint, like, let's just not talk about it
[30:55] from the numbers point of view. What what does poverty and windsor look like?
[31:00] What the what is a family that's living in poverty actually dealing with?
[31:03] Well? So let's just I'll start with some numbers, then i'll go away
[31:07] from that. But like, so, using the low income measure for individual
[31:10] person, it's twenty seven thousand dollars a year. If you're making less than
[31:14] that as an individual person, you're considering the low income as a family of
[31:17] four, it's fifty four thousand dollars a year, So not insignificant amounts of
[31:21] money. But if you're thinking about like Ontario Works or ODSP, and you're
[31:26] getting fourteen or fifteen thousand dollars a year, you know there are a portion
[31:30] of the population who are in structural poverty. They're on OW or ODSP,
[31:34] they have a disability, they're getting supports, but really it's locked them into
[31:40] a type of poverty because you know just how the system is designed, and
[31:44] then the system is designed in a way that you know, every dollar they
[31:47] earn over a threshold, they start getting clawbacks and all those sort of things,
[31:51] and so there's incentive to not maybe earn additional income. In some cases
[31:55] there are only earn so much income and then like stop each month and all
[31:57] sorts of stuff like that. So for a portion of the population, it's
[32:00] that for another portion of the population, it's very transitory. You know,
[32:05] oh, you got laid off from whatever job, You're laid off for four
[32:08] six months. You know, you statistically fall under a threshold based on your
[32:13] household size, your communities. You do a startup, you do a startup,
[32:16] you know whatever, you know, that sort of thing, and you
[32:20] would statistically fall into that that bucket for a period of time. I think
[32:23] the third and I think like the real for the bulk of people, though,
[32:29] it's sort of this messy middle where you're underneath a threshold but you have
[32:35] income, and it's really about making hard choices, right, So it's about
[32:39] you know, we've seen tons of stories this summer about food banks, food
[32:43] programs all being you know, at higher demand than during COVID, and it's
[32:47] twenty twenty three, and you know the economy is booming, yea, food
[32:52] banks are shelves are bare right, Well, people are making strategic choices.
[32:55] It's rent or groceries, or it's electric bill and groceries, or it's you
[33:00] know, take your pick on things. And I know you've talked a lot
[33:04] about you know, access to park programs and things like that in the past
[33:07] few weeks, but like those are the choices that families are being forced to
[33:12] make. Is like Timmy can't go to swimming lessons this year because of this
[33:16] right and and you know that's this sort of circumstance that they're in. So
[33:21] you know, between twenty twenty one and twenty twenty three, the puppety rate
[33:23] will probably decline a little bit from where it is and the numbers I talked
[33:27] about, just because the economy got back up and running, and you know,
[33:30] we're probably going to regress back, but it will be a national regression
[33:32] back to the mean. The question that is really out there is, you
[33:37] know, is wins are going to aggrest more or less, and traditionally it's
[33:39] been less back towards that mean. So for a lot of people, you
[33:44] know, and people who end up in an encampment style situation, you know,
[33:49] housing is not affordable, whatever form of housing the rafter, and the
[33:53] challenge then is, you know, well where are they going to live?
[33:57] And you know with summertime and for some people, you know, and a
[34:00] news story said that, well, there's open shelter beds and there probably are
[34:06] probably well there probably are. I don't know, but I think like there's
[34:09] a but people can still make the choice, not the access. I'd really
[34:14] like to know how many. Wouldn't that be an interesting piece of open data
[34:19] for the city to publish on a weekly basis. City at Toronto does,
[34:22] Yeah, Windsor should too. But I think in the absence of open data,
[34:25] I think that if you're listening and you are a member of the under
[34:30] siege journalistic class in Windsor, you might consider asking the question, make a
[34:36] few phone calls, find out from the city, and don't take the first
[34:38] answer you get. I'm very curious about this about how many shelter beds there
[34:43] are available in the city at any given time, And I think that's a
[34:45] flexible number two because like usually when shelters are full, they start in here
[34:50] this during the winter, you know, when it's minus thirty outside, like
[34:52] they start booking up hotels yep, right, And so there is a flexibility
[34:57] in like the shelter space and the community and that they can book out a
[35:00] hotel and put people in there if they need to. So I think the
[35:04] trade part of this is there is an aspect of human choice in there where
[35:07] people who are in encampments have to a degree they're not able to afford housing
[35:12] but they're choosing an encampment over a shelter space. And you know, based
[35:15] on court rulings, they can't just go in with cops anymore and break up
[35:20] the encampment and force them into a place. And also like what a nonsense
[35:24] distinction to like not have to delineate and say like here's our capacity, or
[35:31] oh, we always have capacity because there's there's always a hotel room, there's
[35:36] other hotels, there's always a hotel that we can rent. I mean,
[35:38] Caesars is a gorgeous place for every or any X hotel. I don't need
[35:43] to That was free advertising. Caesars is all that that was. You know,
[35:46] it's it's a really interesting situation like what the amount of capacity that we
[35:52] can provide is versus what we are providing. Actually, it's frustrating. I
[36:01] can tell you I spoke with one elected official and I won't name which one,
[36:06] and when the Sandwich encampment was occurring, and there was somewhere between one
[36:12] to three at that point that was in it. I was told, thank
[36:15] because that was right. Also, when the court case came down out of
[36:17] Hamilton, I believe with the ruling that said you can't go clearing encampments unless
[36:22] you have enough shelter beds specifically for everyone there is. And i'mber asking like,
[36:28] oh, how is this impacting you now, knowing that there could be
[36:30] a pushback, and the response was, fortunately, I think we've got one
[36:37] to three. I think we're okay. And so when I hear that as
[36:40] the response rather than what you just indicated, freighter, you know like,
[36:45] well, there's a lot of hotel rooms available. So when I hear thankfully
[36:47] there's one to three, to me, I hear we're about at ninety eight
[36:52] percent cap it seems, and that means though we need more. You guys,
[36:58] remember a couple of years ago, I think it was Doug Schmidt did
[37:01] an excellent, excellent piece about the people sleeping in cars in a big box
[37:06] parking lot, one of the better pieces actually the windsor Stars produced in recent
[37:09] years, and there was triple digit people living in that parking lot, if
[37:14] I remember correctly. I wonder what that the size of that population is today.
[37:21] Suspect it's grown yea. Like, So here's where I want to go
[37:27] with this, because when I read the article about encampments today in preparation for
[37:30] the show, my next stop was the Wikipedia article on shanty towns, because
[37:37] I wanted to just get a little bit of a survey of, you know,
[37:39] kind of the history, how they evolve, how it works. And
[37:45] I feel like I feel like that's a possibility in this city and this country
[37:52] overall. But I feel like that's a possibility in this city that we're going
[37:54] to start to see semi permanent structures being put up and not really a lot
[38:01] of options. Besides, like you know, just if you destroy people's homes
[38:08] and you don't have an alternative for them, you're kind of killing them.
[38:13] Well, we've got legislature or now we have a court ruling that says if
[38:17] we're not willing to go pay for it, and they're willing to go build
[38:21] it themselves, you can't do anything. So so what what is going to
[38:29] happen when we have a shantytown in Windsor if that happens, if we have
[38:34] a permanent like outsider village somewhere in Windsor or just outside the city, what's
[38:40] going to happen? So that conversation just started today in Hamilton's right. So
[38:44] the city of Hamilton just declared that they're going to build twenty five tiny shit
[38:50] homes like the size of a garden shed in on a piece of property that
[38:53] they own in a section of Hamilton. Pretty much it was done without talking
[38:57] to the community the neighborhood sort of explain loaded when it was just sort of
[39:00] announced, like, hey, we're building this here for homeless people in our
[39:04] community, and like that's where this conversation goes. It's like when you hear
[39:10] like there is absolutely a need to house these people, right and so,
[39:15] and I would say, you know, whether they're sleeping rough or in a
[39:17] tiny shed style home, Like I can't be one to say if that's better
[39:23] or worse, because there's certainly some human choice in that as well. But
[39:29] I think you know, but like the City of Hamilton's building pretty much what
[39:32] you just described, like twenty five garden sheds on a piece of property.
[39:37] You know they'll probably be they'll be porta potties there and probably some running water
[39:40] set up, and you know, maybe a mess hall style thing in like
[39:44] an old portable or shipping container. And because they don't allow cooking inside those
[39:50] little homes, like they're like they're literally just space for a bed and like
[39:52] a dress of drawers and you can lock the door like that's all that those
[39:57] are. And so, you know, I think that's where we're going.
[40:01] And you know, I think, you know, you're common about shanty towns
[40:06] is pretty prevalent. And I think what it leads me to think too,
[40:09] is this past year and I don't remember what the movie was called, but
[40:12] we've had a movie about trailer parks and how in the nineteen fifties and sixties,
[40:17] trailer parks were seen as the entry level sort of the housing market.
[40:21] You buy a ten thousand dollars trailer, you pay that off, you sell
[40:25] that off, and then you use that equity to go and actually buy a
[40:29] real, real home quote unquote. Well this is where we're probably circling back
[40:35] to that, where there's going to be sections of communities which are now you
[40:39] know, quote unquote stigmatized because like they're gonna the government's going to build some
[40:45] really temporary quick shelters for people, and suddenly it's going to be a no
[40:49] go zone for a section of the community population. Yeah, so this doesn't
[40:54] sound like a thing that we want as a community. It doesn't sound like
[41:00] a thing that we want unless unless the alternative is that people don't have shelter.
[41:07] The only thing I want to say. I know John's got some stuff
[41:08] he wants to get into it. The only thing I want to say here
[41:12] is that if you are an elected official or you're a public servant, and
[41:20] in the last decade you have had a part in minimizing awareness of poverty in
[41:28] our community, you have played a part in shutting down opportunities. Oh,
[41:34] I don't know, perhaps grant applications that that we're you know, explicit about
[41:42] poverty in our community. I do not want to fucking hear you talk about
[41:45] this problem. Keep your fucking mouth shut. You contributed to it by staying
[41:52] silent. By there is no elected official in Windsor who does not know about
[41:58] the depth of poverty in our community. There's nobody who's elected who doesn't know
[42:01] how much poverty there is in our community, how much deprivation there is in
[42:05] our community. You can't be elected for long without knowing about it. But
[42:08] they also know that their electorate doesn't give a fuck. But but here's the
[42:15] difference. You're Joe on askin Avenue, and you know, you vote,
[42:20] your preferences and whatever whatever. I think, you have a completely different level
[42:24] of moral culpability than the folks who are an elected office and certainly know what
[42:30] is going on? What is this if you We're just gonna give it a
[42:38] pregnant pause right now, because it was a pretty good raft of why why
[42:44] you do that? Well? It was also going to be our segue into
[42:45] the next topic, because there's nothing to say after that. You did such
[42:50] a good job with it. I wasn't going to bring in my thanks.
[42:52] I felt, I felt that this was a little bit of mockery, maybe
[42:55] a little bit of beata no way at all, No, no, no,
[43:00] no, no, We'll leave that in Nightmare of the Behold. I
[43:02] honestly just wanted to like use it as like a soft transition because I love,
[43:07] I love how extremely high our production values are. John wants some transition
[43:13] music, so he just butts out, bust out some tablet and starts playing
[43:16] something on Spotify. Amazing work. Or maybe it didn't feel in the comments,
[43:23] you know, let's just jump on a bus and take a selfie.
[43:29] Right to the next topic. Absolutely, activate transit. Winds or Essex has
[43:35] a new campaign that's running right now, Bus or Bust. This is all
[43:39] about advocating for better public transit better, faster, stronger, sure transit.
[43:46] Dare I say six million dollars worth? Dare I say that they're pulling a
[43:51] page out of the doug Ford playbook for housing? Sure, bigger, faster,
[43:55] better, Yeah, playbook, but sure for transit. I like this
[44:00] idea. I love the challenge of trying to get our local elected officials and
[44:06] our non elected officials to use public transit. And I chatted about this on
[44:10] AM eight hundred and the first question that I got was, so are you
[44:14] going to do it? John? And I was like, I can't like
[44:17] this just it doesn't work, Like our transit system is just awful. And
[44:23] again, you know what a privileged point that I'm able to talk about it
[44:28] from this perspective. No, I'm not going to use it because I have
[44:31] alternative means and I appreciate the novelty of it. And if I wasn't working
[44:37] a full week this week at I AM eight hundred and we weren't doing you
[44:39] know, after work engagement, it's like this, maybe I would have considered
[44:45] it, but living in windsor the idea of going through somewhere where I don't
[44:50] usually go via public transit, navigating a system that I know that won't be
[44:54] there when I want to go to it, and I certainly won't be able
[44:57] to get back when I need to get back. What a great descriptor of
[45:01] how terrible the system is. And what I thought was so funny when someone
[45:05] presented it to me on radio was that presentation of like, oh, well,
[45:09] now you can't you know, you can't present it, you can't talk
[45:14] about it, like or they're not going to be happy if you get a
[45:16] negative engagement on social media, And I was like, they don't work for
[45:21] transo windsor they don't want positive engagement, Like they're more than happy to have
[45:25] people saying like this is shit. Nobody's happy. Like that's the Like I'm
[45:30] not going to say it's the point of it, but like those are very
[45:32] meaningful data points. Doug ten years ago or so this podcast. At the
[45:38] time it was a radio show data Transit Challenge and asked elected officials to ride
[45:45] the bus, challenged elected officials to ride the bus during a given week and
[45:52] listeners And at the time I was a Rose City politics listener, a super
[45:55] fan perhaps, and I took the bus that week. They all use to
[46:00] be Yeah, I took the bus from my home which is still my home,
[46:04] to to downtown where I still work. And so the question like I
[46:08] could do it again? I could. I'm not going to because I'm actually
[46:13] golfing at Roseland tomorrow, so I won't be driving any one of the bus
[46:20] that just goes around Roselands. I just take the circuit. This is what
[46:23] we need innovation Frasier. We need like a little Roseland shuttles, little walk
[46:30] anyway, clubs on back and just you know, but I certainly would,
[46:37] but that and that experiment was really useful. I think for me, it
[46:42] kind of got me thinking at the time, what will it take for me
[46:45] to actually use transit as a mode that that is part of my mix of
[46:51] commuting options? Right? And uh, it's actually like I've got a pretty
[46:55] good, pretty good transit story for Windsor. It's about a kilometer from my
[47:00] house. Is the bus stop that I would need to take. There's a
[47:05] bus that goes from there pretty much will drop me off, you know,
[47:08] a couple of blocks away from work. It would work. It would work
[47:13] for me. It has worked for me as long as I don't really care
[47:15] when I show up at work because the problem that I encountered back then,
[47:21] and I would imagine wouldn't be too different now. Is that service was unreliable.
[47:28] There's not enough service for it to be reliable. The bus that the
[47:32] bus that I would take only travels every forty minutes, so uh, and
[47:39] it's and it's not exactly precise to the second of the schedule. So if
[47:44] you happen to miss it because it was five minutes early or you were five
[47:46] minutes late, your day just started is starting forty minutes later. But also
[47:54] it's just not a reliable service in that not on time. You know a
[48:00] lot of times they're not on time. And so it was a beautiful sunny
[48:05] day when I did this last time, and I enjoyed the whole process,
[48:08] but I was sitting there for like five to ten minutes at the bus stop,
[48:13] waiting for the bus that was supposed to be there five to ten minutes
[48:16] ago, and I was thinking about what if there's no shelter here, what
[48:22] if it was raining, what if it was snowing, what if it sucked
[48:25] today? And how many days does it kind of suck out of the year
[48:29] in windsor oh and windsor so so all in all, I think that unfortunately
[48:35] my experience of windsor transit and at we folks's if it is radically different,
[48:40] if we're some if we got hover buses and I don't know about it,
[48:44] you guys can get in touch and let me know and maybe I'll make a
[48:45] separate arrangement another day. But like it's the service is just not good enough
[48:52] for anybody with an option to use it unless they're just trying to make a
[48:55] point. You know what, you just describe it. I'm just really quick
[48:59] before you jump out. You just described our our bike row network, our
[49:06] active transit network. It's great if you're doing it recreationally, yeah, it's
[49:09] it's real shit. If you need to like actually do something with it,
[49:13] the problem is who rides the bus recreationally? Exactly? Yeah? Great?
[49:16] But also though, like so if you're not going to be able to like,
[49:20] you know, ride your bike though around the city because we don't have
[49:22] that grid that we need, well at least you can rely on you know,
[49:25] public transit. Oh so are we are we supposed to be like plugging
[49:30] this is something people should do because I kind of just spent a few minutes
[49:35] talking about how crappy it was so the engagement the bus, take the bus.
[49:39] We has spoken take the bus. No, they wanted you to document
[49:43] your experience, and that's what we're doing. Listen. Our engagement with them
[49:47] was to plug. Okay, view thing we've done. We fulfilled our contract
[49:52] very probably not the way they wanted. Sorry you guys, but I mean,
[49:59] what did you expect in us? So and they but they didn't want
[50:01] photographic evidence, right, so we couldn't have just lied and say we're on
[50:05] the bus right now. Yes, yeah, that was a car out there
[50:10] or something. I don't know. Anyways, so that's the show that was.
[50:13] Wait so no, it's aid give them a plug. Okay, we
[50:16] did that plugged. It was inspired by our thing a decade ago. Yeah.
[50:22] So you're taking credit for their hell yeah yeah, you know. It's
[50:28] it's a good form of like getting involved. Well, it's not where none
[50:30] of us can take credit, Frazier, because due to the menudo like nature
[50:34] of Fro City politics, none of us were actually on the show. Fair.
[50:37] Yeah, so I don't often take the bus. I did so again.
[50:43] This is our second attempt at recording this episode. Yesterday I thought about
[50:46] taking the bus to get here. I had no change at home. Oh
[50:51] all right, well fair enough. So I had no change, and one
[50:53] thing that is coming is tapped to pay on the buses a year and so
[50:58] like that's it was in the capitol budget last year. They didn't do the
[51:01] garage, but they are doing that. So like I think that for someone
[51:07] like me that would hopefully, you know, in certain circumstances, I would
[51:10] consider taking the bus. And in those circumstances I ended up. But after
[51:15] we decided we weren't doing the show yesterday, I had cycled down here and
[51:17] I wrote down the university avenue, which you guys nicknamed like the Dilkins Death
[51:22] Road or something like that, like a couple of weeks ago. But I
[51:27] survived. But on my ride home, I was following the one C and
[51:30] I on my bike. I kept up with that bus because it was stopping
[51:36] at every corner. And so like again, like the system, long conversations
[51:43] about the problems with the system. The system needs to be reworked. It
[51:45] needs a massive, you know, injection of capital. You know, where
[51:50] I do think there is opportunity for the system is and I think it.
[51:55] You know, you got to start thinking about this thing regionally, right,
[51:59] like that battery plant is going to be, you know, serviced by some
[52:02] sort of bus, and so we'll say in which south at some day,
[52:06] whether it's a great system or not to be determined, and we can all
[52:08] be cynical about that, but I think there are opportunities in the coming year
[52:15] where the system is going to have to evolve, years where the system is
[52:17] going to have to evolve. And like I can give you a story right
[52:21] now. A friend of mine, she owns a business. They used to
[52:24] be Ontocumpsey Road, and they moved up to Oldcastle because they had more space,
[52:30] better rent all of those things, and they do food production. And
[52:34] her staff used to take the bus. It was Ontocompsy Road, you know,
[52:37] they could take the one Sea or whatever, the across town three,
[52:39] whatever, whichever bus it was, would drop them off pretty much right in
[52:43] front of their business at the old location. As business owners, they now
[52:45] pick up two of their staff on their way to work and drive them out
[52:52] because they want to keep your staff. They like their staff. Their staff
[52:53] are great, They've trained them to do a job. And the barrier is
[53:00] this transit windsor doesn't go to Old Castle, it ends right at the old
[53:02] movie theater. This is the problem I think where ideology smushes up into reality
[53:09] right and well, and I think the question that I would have, and
[53:14] I think the broad question is there has been significant advocacy by major organization and
[53:19] the chambers come out time after time saying we need better transit. I've seen
[53:22] maps, We've seen maps for at least you know, you always talked about
[53:25] it. You know a bunch of people have talked about it at some point.
[53:29] Though, when you have conversations with those organizations, you hear that,
[53:34] well, we've talked behind the scenes, we've advocated behind the scenes at some
[53:37] point. One of the things I'd like to see AT we try and do
[53:39] is pull some of those conversations into the light pressure one of those organizations say
[53:45] like you said this in twenty fourteen, do you still stand by it now?
[53:51] Yep, And like that's something that like an AT we could do where
[53:53] like then you have a news story because then it's like, oh, well,
[53:57] that's still in the role of the gap in the media too, because
[54:00] they can't do the diving into it. And so like this is where like
[54:02] I appreciate the what that we's doing. I think it's a great little thing
[54:06] for the summer. You know, if it's a nice day, I want
[54:07] to hop on the bus and go downtown whatever. I would do it if
[54:12] I had change. But like, you know, I think that's the bigger
[54:15] role that they can undertake. It's like there's been plenty of conversations outside of
[54:19] just master plans and showing up at city Hall, and plenty of organizations and
[54:23] businesses that have said if this was working better, it would do the better
[54:27] things. You know. I had Gary McNamara on my podcast like two years
[54:30] ago and we talked about, well two Compsy's the broken link between you know,
[54:34] transit running up to Lake Shore and Lake Shore wanted transit Windsor, but
[54:37] Comesy didn't want to be involved. And then you know, City Windsor couldn't
[54:40] do it because you know, and like there's interest there to town of Compsy
[54:45] just redid their transit map right, like they have their own little bus running,
[54:49] but like how do you get these things moving? Like and so it's
[54:52] about you know, a coordinated effort and like really pushing pushing multiple boulders up
[54:58] a mountain rather and you know, just one. So this is where a
[55:02] philanthropist and Winsor could actually have like a significant impact like fund one, two,
[55:07] three, four specific positions, not a serious amount of money, not
[55:12] building a building or you know, dedicating a wing, but drop two hunder
[55:15] grand to hire four people who do researching and put together a you know,
[55:20] outcome that describes like here's what the situation exists as and here's what better could
[55:24] be. We don't have those opportunities. I saw a really or I rather
[55:28] listen to a pretty great podcast yesterday. Why does most of Canada suck at
[55:32] building transit? It's by the big story. You can check it out wherever
[55:37] you get podcasts. And one of the biggest things was, aside from our
[55:42] windsor problem that's replicated across the country, we're gonna go find our own maid
[55:46] in Canada solution to transit rather than just we're gonna go buy the expensive thing
[55:51] that we know works because it has so many billions already baked into it.
[55:55] A failure to get to that price point. Now we're gon we're gonna do
[55:59] it better. But one example of very good transit in Canada was the skytrain
[56:05] in Vancouver, and the reason that the host attributed to was he went every
[56:13] five years. They just like extended five kilometers or they might add like,
[56:19] you know, a new station here, but it's never like a huge crazy
[56:23] thing. We're not gonna upgrade it to LRT. We're never gonna go and
[56:29] introduce a brand new crazy mega station. It's just here's five clicks, but
[56:34] they miss out on all those photo ops. Yeah yeah, But I mean
[56:37] I think of it through what Frasier was just saying, you kept up with
[56:44] the pus as you're doing the right and there's nothing wrong with that. We
[56:49] don't know how fast Frasier is. Well, then that's a whole other thing
[56:52] fast. But all that I'm thinking is in that situation going fast rights.
[56:58] As a cyclist, you can only imagine that that seems like it is a
[57:01] ride that probably deserves and express bus that can bypass those stops and get a
[57:07] whole other group of people. You mean, a bus that connects the two
[57:12] parts of the University of Windsor campus. Oh wow, it seems like a
[57:15] really good idea to me. So, I mean, and this is the
[57:16] frustrating thing, especially coming from a city that had the first electrified streetcar grid
[57:22] in North America. Right, we know what the answers are. We just
[57:27] seemingly want to stay as far away from you know, as possible. I
[57:30] never thought about that, and maybe we can just end the show on this
[57:31] remark. But I never thought about that. But the city did a lot
[57:36] of arm twisting, if I remember correctly, to get the University of Winds
[57:40] are interested in investing downtown, and it's a heck of a way to kind
[57:50] of repay. When I think about like the way that the way that the
[57:54] bike lane on University Avenue has become a political football, it's kind of interesting
[58:00] like that that you'd think that there would be more, Like the city wanted
[58:04] this so bad, you think that there'd be more infrastructure and support. Kind
[58:08] of interesting or conversely pushback, But that is a story for another day. Hey for

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