Category Archives: Ontario

Rush, Fifty Something Tour, Toronto

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Well, that was great. Anika is a very proficient and powerful drummer, and learning Rush’s complex songs in the first place must have been very challenging. Certain elements can’t really be dispensed with (as they’re permanently a part of the songs), but then she also brings her own style to it. Loren played keyboards in a few more songs than I expected, and he and Alex also did occasional backup vocals. Geddy’s voice was pretty strong, especially given that he’s 73 and that he recently had a brief setback. We found the mix to be heavy on Geddy’s bass (and on his occasional keyboards) and on Anika’s drums, although Alex’s main riffs and solos were balanced in reasonably well.

We heard the setlist with side one of “2112” (the whole suite) and all of side one of “Moving Pictures” (just not in the album order), plus side two’s “Witch Hunt” and a nice variety of other material from 1974 to 2012. Other highlights for me were the opener “Xanadu,” the two instrumental pieces (including “YYZ”), “The Trees,” Geddy’s story of day one with Neil as an intro to “Anthem,” Alex’s hilarious intro to “A Passage to Bangkok,” “Time Stand Still” (Aimee Mann’s guest vocals were on video), and “Caravan.”

The video elements were impressive and extensive, and they included several, nice tribute moments of Neil Peart speaking from interviews. The encores of the two earliest songs also highlighted images with original drummer John Rutsey.

We ended up getting much better seats at the 100 level rather than our original back-corner 300-level nosebleeds, thanks to some kind-soul young man from Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena staff, who said it was our lucky day! Some photos thanks to Vicky.

Privatized Health Care

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Alberta letting people self-diagnose and pay out-of-pocket for MRIs, etc. (instead of making sure its public health care system actually works) just brings it one more major step towards not being a part of Canada. Actually, Ontario, with its increasingly privatized and partial-work-benefits health-coverage options, is not much better. My work benefits covered $180 of my $250 charge for my private, online dietician appointment early last year. I will refuse such referrals in the future and insist on public community health care referrals. Maybe doctor-referred, publicly-paid MRIs, etc. in Ontario could reasonably follow a hybrid, public/private option. However, 100% private dieticians, etc. is going way too far down the path of strictly making more money for the wealthy business buddies of Premier Ford, who then facetiously claims his government is doing a great job in increasing health care provisions.

Basic Income for “Unaffiliated” Scholars

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I wonder what I would have done with my life, if there had been a basic income (of, say, $2500 to $3000 Cdn. per month) available to me after I completed my Ph.D. I wouldn’t have had to deal with (roughly in chronological order) part-time adjunct/sessional teaching, part-time arts admin and choral singing jobs, three temporary full-time academic jobs each most of the way across the continent, applying for several hundred full-time academic jobs, several periods on welfare (averaging around $550 per month, including shelter!), bankruptcy, attempts to get into IT and LIS, leaving academia for a series of part-time and temporary customer-service type jobs not at a living wage, and getting approved for a consumer debt proposal.

The job I have now as a medical courier is full-time, with some benefits, and I was very lucky to be able to upgrade my casual/on-call role to that. However, it’s still on the low end of a living wage and way below the national average annual income of around $69,000 Cdn. It’s okay, though, because I have places to keep my stuff, a place to live, a person to share my life with, a dog, an extended family that helps me with my elderly Mom, and financial help from my Mom (via my aunt and uncle) to get a used car.

However, without being an exploited academic or an exploited worker and with having a basic income to live on, I could have become what I should have been. I would have continued as an “unaffiliated” musicologist: writing scholarly books and articles, presenting papers at academic conferences, developing music-related websites and web content, and performing and composing music–without ever stopping any of those things.

(Friday, July 24, 2026, 9:15 p.m.): Oh, well, back to work: the final four hours of my 40-hour work week.

See also: https://drbdurrellbowmanphd.bandcamp.com/album/the-tower

Some of the “Broader Public Sector” is Apparently Private and For-Profit

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I attended the 2026 annual convention of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU) as an Observer. So, here are a few of my observations. The company for which I work, LifeLabs, is ostensibly a part of the Broader Public Sector (BPS) and receives most of its revenues in public funding from OHIP, Ontario’s public health insurance. Most BPS institutions–such as hospitals, universities and colleges, and school boards–also get funds from the Ontario government and are public and not-for-profit.

By comparison, LifeLabs is decidedly private and for-profit, makes about a billion dollars per year, and is now owned by the US company Quest Diagnostics. So, it cannot possibly be legitimately considered a part of the Ontario Public Service or even the Broader Public Sector. Only some LifeLabs’ workers are members of OPSEU, but the number of locals is increasing.

OPSEU understandably dislikes Doug Ford and his Conservative Ontario government, and it particularly dislikes his interest in privatizing health care. The irony of all of this is that Ford must actually love LifeLabs, which has been doing privatized health care in Ontario for about sixty years. It must be the case that OPSEU doesn’t know (or doesn’t care) that LifeLabs is a private, for-profit, US-owned company.

Rush Live at the Juno Awards

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Thoughts on Rush playing live last night at the Juno Awards in Hamilton, Ontario.

There are about one hundred Rush songs that would give a good sense of what Geddy Lee can still sing quite well, but “Finding My Way” is not really one of them. (They even kept it in the same key as the original recording.) However, playing the first song from the band’s self-titled debut (1974) does suggest they meant it as a kind of re-birth (after last playing live in 2015), and it also subtly pushed the point that Neil Peart (d. 2020) hadn’t always been the drummer (or lyricist, obviously), even though he played that song live hundreds of times. In addition, Neil was born in Hamilton, and they had him (not John Rutsey) in the on-screen clips. Moreover, 1975 was the year the band won its first Juno Award (for Most Promising Group), so that also makes sense. The song’s not very Rush-like lyrics also suggest getting back on track: “I’ve been gone so long. I’ve lost count of the years . … Look out, I’m coming. Finding my way back home.” The band members were obviously enjoying themselves, which was nice to see!

Instrumentally, Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee were still quite good, and Anika Nilles was fortunately very good. On the other hand, “Finding My Way” is a boogie-blues-type song in 4/4, so we have yet to see what she can do with something more progressive-rock oriented. I’m not sure what Loren Gold and all those keyboards were there for. He added some organ-like or string-pad sounds (and even possibly supporting vocals) towards the end of the song, but I don’t think Geddy ever played keyboards on that song. Given the predominantly twenty-something nature of the music fans at that awards show, the band could have played a more familiar, later song, such as “Tom Sawyer” or “Subdivisions.” There was a slight chance some of those fans at the show might have known one of those songs, or at least might have heard one or both of them played by a parent or teacher on a CD, mp3, or stream, for example. And I wanted to hear the Oberheim OB-X8 synth! I guess it’s possible they played another song or two, but that only the one song was broadcast. Tickets are stupidly expensive for the Fifty Something tour, but it should be good for those who can make it. #Rush #Junos

Ticketmaster/StubHub – The Ticket Reseller Conundrum

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When I joined the Ticketmaster queue at 12:00 noon today, 6566 “people” were ahead of me to buy tickets in the summer 2026 Rush: Fifty Something pre-sale. So, the pre-sale probably accounted for most of the venue’s seats, and what I encountered was just for the second day out of the four in Toronto. Theoretically, there were tickets for as low as $137.75.

I joined the waiting room within seconds of it opening at 11:30. At 12:05 (in the queue for 5 minutes), it indicated that $137.75 and $173.25 tickets were limited. Clearly, StubHub, TicketSmarter, etc. reseller bots beat me in the waiting list / queue and bought up all the cheap seats first, to sell them at higher prices.

After 12 minutes, there were still 2946 “people” ahead of me, and tickets were by then “very limited.” After a 20 minute wait in the queue, the cheapest seats available to me were $417 each. After another 3 minutes, the cheapest were $608.73 each. After another 2 minutes, the cheapest thing was a hotel/tickets package for two at $1478.91.

StubHub very quickly had new tickets available for the same show on the same day, and the lowest price I saw within an hour was $380 each. A few hours later, it was $431, and StubHub also seemed to know that the event was 88% sold out. Why would a reseller know that, unless it had scooped up basically all of the tickets and replaced Ticketmaster as the seller?

I will try for tickets up to $200 again on Friday, when Ticketmaster’s “general public” sales open. I fully expect things to happen much the same as today. However, I will do a more direct comparison of actual seat-price levels on Ticketmaster and on StubHub. My guess is that their resellers are more than doubling the prices.

The US, Canadian, UK, and other governments need to put an end to the obvious “insider trading,” “antitrust,” scalper-bot shenanigans going on at Live Nation / Ticketmaster / StubHub / TicketSmarter, etc. Even if it’s currently legal, it certainly is not ethical. Actual humans should be able to buy actual tickets at the actual prices.

Ontario, Canada’s “Sunshine List”

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$100,000 is now much too low of an annual salary threshold for Ontario, Canada’s annual, public sector “Sunshine List.” In 2024, a total of 377,666 public sector employees made at least that much, up from 300,680 in 2023.

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Work Update

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Our union (0PSƏU) reps are having meetings this week with our employer (L1feL@bs) and an arbitrator. About a month ago, we overwhelmingly voted for strike action, if no new deal can be arranged. However, only about a quarter of our drivers have full-time routes, and a further quarter or so are permanent part-time (21 guaranteed weekly hours, with benefits). I assume that most of those drivers usually feel like actual employees.

About half of us are casual/on-call drivers (without benefits) and don’t necessarily get more than two shifts per week, especially outside of the summer vacation period. I’m in the bottom half of the seniority list and probably will be for quite a while. Even a permanent part-time position apparently only comes up once every year or two. Most of our part-time and casual drivers are retired or semi-retired from other things and already have pensions, other retirement savings, and benefits in place from those, not to mention being homeowners. A few of us do not have any of those things. Once my employment insurance top-up from being laid off from my last job ends in a few months, things will get very tough. I guess I need to find a second part-time job.

Our work is important: picking up medical specimens and delivering accumulated bags, sharps bags, empty bags, supplies, and reports (“mail”). A few routes have as many as 70-120 stops, but some of them are multiple doctors’ offices in larger buildings, of which some are report delivery only. Several routes each take many dozens of full bags from the Kitchener-Waterloo/Cambridge/Guelph/Fergus and surrounding area to major facilities in Etobicoke and Mississauga (about an hour or more away, in the Greater Toronto Area), where the specimens are processed. Sometimes, our manager gets stuck at the last minute having to hire a third-party company, which gets paid two to three times more than we do, even though their drivers skip many thing (e.g., sharps, empties, supplies, and mail) and frequently make mistakes.

After only about five months, I’ve already done (or, in a few cases, just been trained on) 14 of our 17 routes. However, even with extensive notes it’s hard to be efficient, stay on schedule, and get one’s breaks in when there can be a gap of up to several months before doing the same route again. Also, all routes have aspects that are illogically arranged and expected stop timings that are impossible, even for the most experienced drivers. My favourite is downtown Guelph to Rockwood back to downtown Guelph to west Waterloo in 52 minutes, including all of the time it takes to do things at these places.

We drive all over the place in all weather conditions and deal with potentially hazardous things all day (anywhere from 8 a.m. to 1:30 a.m.), but we are the company’s lowest paid employees. The company is just being sold, though, and the new owner’s US drivers actually get paid more per hour (in equivalent Canadian dollars) than we do. I hope this week’s meetings will address some of these things.

The Canada Revenue Agency and Canada Post

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The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) won’t accept my additional employment expenses for a used vehicle I purchased in 2021 to work as a Rural and Suburban Mail Carrier (RSMC) for Canada Post for about fifteen months. I kept meticulous records about my purchase and my fuel, maintenance, and repair expenses beyond what Canada Post gave me, but the CRA claims I owe them $2,857.27. Given the number of days I worked 8, 10, or even 12 hours while only being paid for 4, 5, or 6 hours, the federal government should be paying me that amount. I’ve re-sent my paperwork both electronically and in printed form, but they’ve so far ignored my attempts to make them look at my file again. Canada Post relies on a patch-work of 8,000 mainly part-time RSMCs (70% of whom are women) who generally use their own vehicles, and I honestly don’t know how they get away with it.

Happy Canada Day

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Happy Canada Day! I see numerous Canadian flags every day I’m on my rural Ontario FedEx route. However, almost all of them are on the property, including vehicles, of freedom-convoy, anti-mandate people. The flag was established in 1965 (so was I!), the same year as universal health care and around the time that multiculturalism was starting to emerge as official policy. In 2023, there is still much to be done, especially reconciliation for indigenous peoples and addressing climate change. So, let’s celebrate openness, helping each other, and so on. The US continues to move backwards on things like abortion and LGBTQ rights, and the Canadian “freedom” enthusiasts undoubtedly wish that Canada would do the same. Let’s not do that, okay?