Bob Ramsay

Last weekend, I was hiking with a dozen friends near Lion’s Den on Fogo Island. It was the most desolate part of this desolate island, at one of the four corners of the earth, off the north coast of Newfoundland and warmed by the presence of the Fogo Island Inn.

We were being guided by a local host who raised her voice to puncture the sound of the wind and the waves crashing ashore below. She told a complicated tale of a woman who came alone from Ireland in the late 1700s, settled near Lion’s Den, married a fisherman and had kids. Then, for some reason, she fled and re-settled in Patagonia in the very south of Argentina, where she lived until the age of 102.

Yes, they’re kidnapping Canadians off the street, imprisoning over a million Uyghurs, Kazakhs and Kyrgyz, using AI to spy on far too many of their own people, and rattling their sabres against America and Taiwan.

But…

In the spirit of “at least the trains run on time,” here are some of the things the Chinese government is doing for its 1.4 billion people, or things that some in the sloppy democratic West wish we could do if only our governments were a little more authoritarian.

This conversation popped back when I read that Edward Rogers’ secret plot to remove his CEO, Joe Natale, was foiled when Edward’s candidate for the job accidentally “butt-called” Natale, who overheard the entire conversation about the planned coup.

Toronto regularly makes it onto the lists of the world’s great cities (as in ‘great to live in’). But the world’s safest cities? I doubt that, if by “safe” you mean resilience around the pandemic, in addition to things like personal security, clean air and water, traffic, modern infrastructure, and digital life.

But, as often happens, I am wrong. Last week, the Economist Intelligence Unit released its 2021 Safe Cities Index. It ranked 60 cities across 76 safety indicators. Toronto not only finished in the Top 5, it is Number 2, next only to Copenhagen.

This got me thinking that maybe Torontonians suffer from a kind of reverse NIMBY, i.e. we think we’re dreadful until we compare ourselves to places we envy, only to discover they’re worse. Like Churchill’s definition of democracy as the worst form of government, except for all the others.