The future's looking bleaker every day

It’s amazing what the Globe and Mail can find room for when they don’t give half the opinion section over to that self-aggrandising American harpy, Sarah Kendzior. Today’s Sarah-free paper featured thoughtful and timely opinion pieces by a couple of Canadians instead.

Iconic Canadian architect Jack Diamond offers a scathing critique of Toronto’s descent into dystopian uninhabitability. We’re not there yet, but that’s our general direction. He’s clearly talking to the two mayoral candidates and the current preem, but it’s a good read for anyone interested in the future of what could still be a great liveable city.

Just a few pages away you can find an advert for two-bedroom plus den condos starting at a mere $710,000… oh, wait a minute; this two-bed plus den measures out at 764 square feet!

WTF? How do you get two bedrooms and a den out of 764 feet? Well, the “den” is 5′ by 6’4″ for starters. Back in the day, when Toronto’s first wave of highrises were going up at ten bucks a foot, that would have been considered a roomy one bedroom apartment. Fifty years later it’s a two-bedroom + den condo that clocks in at a whisker under a thousand bucks a foot.

We’re clearly trending in the wrong direction!

Elsewhere in the Opinion section, Canadian academic Marcel O’Gorman offers up a timely analysis of our tech enslavement. We even get a shout-out to the great Canadian obfuscator Marshall McLuhan! Marcel seems to be a little wary of our brave new tech-obsessed world, and who can blame him? You can fill your two-bedroom plus den 764 foot condo with all the tech gadgets you want; it ain’t gonna get any bigger.

Those two articles alone were worth the price of admission (still $6.30 at the Korean extortionist).