It’s not that VIA Rail is good. That would mean high speed, high reliability, high frequency, and low cost. VIA Rail is slower, less reliable, less frequent, and more expensive than, literally, the bus.

It also cost the Canadian taxpayer $773 million in 2023 to carry 4.1 million passengers (their most recent annual report). That’s a drop in the bucket, or perhaps a drop in the budget, compared to the billions the federal government wastes every year, but suffice to say it doesn’t compare well to Amtrak. You don’t want to lose efficiency contests to Amtrak. In a serious country, VIA Rail could easily do more with less, pleasing the many Canadians who want to go by train and hurting nobody except us foamers.

However, when an American visits Canada and rides VIA Rail, he is pleased, even when the train is eight hours late. Easy for him to say, he doesn’t pay our taxes, but Canadians don’t feel the same way on Amtrak. VIA Rail, the $773 million remittance man of the federal government, too unrewarding to nurture and too popular to eliminate, has got character. It places elegant slow travel within reach of the middle class. And since we do not live in a serious country, for most of us the choice is not between “current bad VIA” and “hypothetical efficient VIA,” but between “current bad VIA” and no service at all.

VIA is not good, but it is nice. Recently I got to cross Canada by train, starting with the Canadian from Vancouver to Toronto. It was very late most of the time and I sampled many VIA inconveniences. It was still very nice, and not as a “subsidized cruise ship on land” which would be, let’s face it, a waste. In fact, one of the most worthwhile VIA complaints is how hard it is to see whether the niceness is what’s costing all the money.

VIA trains 1 and 2, the Canadian, are VIA’s “flagship” trains. They are not its most popular, certainly not its most frequent, and do not set standards in speed or reliability. They are, however, its longest, most luxurious, and by far its most famous. The Canadian was featured on the reverse of the previous $10 bill, of course in the Rocky Mountains, symbolizing, according to the Bank of Canada, “the engineering feat of linking Canada by rail.” Only a symbol, as the Canadian does not take the original Canada-linking Canadian Pacific route¹. It is also, literally, a slower trip than in the steam days: there is so much freight traffic on the line that the Canadian is routinely delayed in sidings for hours at a time watching cargo roll to the ports. Canadian National only begrudgingly lets VIA Rail operate on its tracks at all, in exchange for millions of dollars a year² and a certain amount of government goodwill, but prioritizes their freight.

Freight trains are very important, and a passenger corridor from the Pacific to Toronto in today’s climate is literally impossible, even with many more than the Canadian‘s current 60,000-odd passengers a year. What we have now, though, is not good enough. In the United States Amtrak is, by law, given priority over freight traffic. Something similar is proposed every few years as private members bills by the NDP and the Greens and go to the great Green/NDP private member bills home in the sky. The “VIA HFR” plan, to resurrect abandoned lines between Toronto and Montreal, would fix one corridor if it showed any signs of ever happening, which it doesn’t, and if it wasn’t a back-door way to peel off the bulk of VIA Rail’s resources into a public-private partnership that would leave 90% of the country with nothing, which it is.

A government that took rail seriously could cut a day off a transcontinental train cheaply: pass a law giving VIA Rail priority over freight. CN would be unhappy, but CN is a private company which got Canada’s public rail assets for a song in the Mulroney years and annihilated many of them, so CN can lump it. More productively, that obligation could come with the government financing sidings and extra tracks through bottlenecks, and buying outright underused bits of track that CN finds economically dubious and would probably be happily rid of at a fair price. The government sometimes pays for track work for VIA’s sake, but CN owns the tracks, the government never requires CN to actually prioritize VIA on them, so new construction gets clogged up with freight same as the old and only CN shareholders are happy. Government subsidizing business without even getting what we pay for is is the worst of both worlds.

Though, as I saw before my train left, there’s no solving every problem.

The Canadian
Day 1
Pacific Central Station, Vancouver, BC
underway 4.5 hours late

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What is VIA’s fault is their “airlineification.” Much of the tedium of getting on an airplane without the justification.

I arrived at Pacific Central Station, Vancouver relatively early. VIA asks long-distance passengers to arrive an hour early, and departure day was a work day: my thought was to make the trip over on my lunch break, sit in the business lounge (sorry the Salon Panorama Lounge), work on my laptop, and be both responsible and timely.

But the business Salon Panorama Lounge was not open yet. There is a lot of boring queuing to do, getting checked in (why?) and, for sleeping car passengers, booking a dinner reservation (why then? why not online or on the train?), and those pointless lines weren’t open yet either. All I could do was sit on the stately tall wooden benches and work as best I could. Those benches were invented after homeless people but before laptop computers: they are more comfortable than they look but still hostile for laying or even working in and with no power anywhere. The reason nothing was open is that two trains a week depart from Vancouver so most of the work is done by the trainboard staff.

It’s aggravating. The lining up is unnecessary, and long, with the priority plutocrats in Prestige Class going first. Finishing queuing doesn’t nearly mean boarding, of course, so off into the Salon Panorama Lounge. VIA’s business lounges are reliably mid and Vancouver’s is more mid than most: no snacks to speak of and only coffee, tea, water, and soft drinks available, but as a bonus there is a phone booth’s worth of seating inside. Most wait on the patio, and when I say “patio” I mean a fenced-off part of the train platform, where foamers can ogle the Park cars then find the free seat nearest a heater. During the high season the lounge must be a stockyard of Baby Boomers, mashed together in their livestock pen waiting to enjoy the trip they paid thousands of dollars for.

Unless you’re hankering for A&W it’s still the best place to wait, but woof. Being antsy to board a train one will spend the next four nights on seems mad, but people are mad and I am people.

When I boarded my sleeper car (Brock Manor, #8310, and what’s more 1950s than a sleeping car named after Sir Isaac Brock rather than Viola Desmond or Henry Morgentaler), there was the usual VIA swarm to help me and my baggage up if necessary and point me to my berth. The person sitting across from me was unfortunately fragrant, but the berth seats are only averagely comfortable anyway so I was just waiting for them to scan my ticket before I bounced to one of the two common lounges on the train: the Skyline car and the Park car. Both are dome cars, the Skyline being rather more homey, 1950s chic, festooned with four-legged chairs and chess boards on the tables. The Park car, or at least the renovated Prestige Class Park car used on The Canadian, is a lovely mahogany-paneled bar car that, in the summer, is restricted to Prestige Class passengers during the day but which in the winter welcomes grubby sleeper-folk any time to sell them $10 train beers³. I’d grab a Bridge Blood Orange, sit in the back and look out the ultimate foamer window as we pulled out of Pacific Central, all would be well.

The best-laid plans of VIA Rail travelers inevitably go agley. Over on Boundary Road, a dump truck had smashed into a power pole and brought it down over the line out of Pacific Central. Power lines across the tracks is not the type of electrified railroading people have in mind, and trains were stuck while BC Hydro took their time tidying it up. It is an aspect of Canadian life which happens so long as the government imports the sorts of truck drivers who do these things. How could VIA Rail possibly avoid that problem? Spend tens of billions building an elevated heavy rail line right next to the Skytrain’s Millennium Line? Somehow build underpasses for every road?⁴

So we did all we could do, which was wait. If we happened to be in sleeping cars, we also had a glass of Canadian sparkling wine to welcome us aboard. When people say the Canadian is a cruise-ship-like experience, that wine is what they have in mind. Felt pretty good, though.

There was also time for absurdity. The Railway Association of Canada requires that on “other-than-commuter” services a passenger in each car be taught how to open the train doors in an emergency. In this car, that someone was me, chosen on the scientific basis that I was going to Toronto so they’d only have to tell one person for the whole trip. The doors on those 70-year-old coaches are not user-friendly and the process is a multi-step one that involves bracing oneself against the train while pulling the floor up. In an emergency I’m sure I would have muddled through, for the attendant concluded that five-minute demo by reminding me very clearly that I was supposed to open that door when called to, not because I felt like going outside, a warning that must have come from experience.

Thus amused I went to the Park car to gently pickle myself. It’s a very nice place. Good drink, good conversation, good views of the train station I’d already spent two hours in. Train travelers are as a rule pleasant folk; every long-distance train has its bore but one learns to recognize and avoid him. It passed the time before a grand old dining car dinner, also sitting in the station. Meals are made fresh to order and are reliably superb. It would be curious to know how much VIA spends feeding each sleeper passenger (the dining car is sure thoroughly-staffed), but with a limited menu, alcohol at a healthy markup, and the high fares for sleepers, it ought to be possible to do economically.

We got away only about four and a half hours late and passengers were all in fine spirits. Nobody boarded that train expecting everything to run smoothly, and while losing that much time before starting was unexpected, it was all part of the fun⁵. I stayed awake a bit past Mission Harbour station, where we always pick up more passengers than I’d think⁶.

The ride up the Fraser Valley, through the agricultural districts, pleasant old homes, and gradually building mountains, are a scenic highlight most of the time. By now it was well dark, but this meant more daylight in the mountains.

The Canadian
Day 2
“North Kamloops” station, Kamloops, BC
6.5 hours late

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I enjoy trains too much to sleep well on them. Traveling up the Thompson River beneath a beautiful full moon, I too often sat up in my berth, put my glasses on, and just looked out the window for a while. When I slept I slept well, which is why you get a sleeper, so my fatigue was entirely self-sabotage.

There are three classes of service on the Canadian. Economy is exactly what you think. Unassigned seats rather than beds. You buy your meals à la carte from the cafe car and sleep in a chair. For one night or less, this is an exceptional way to travel. The economy class seats are not merely the most comfortable on the train but the most comfortable on any mode of transportation I have taken. The pitch is enormous, the legroom is beyond generous, there are footrests and plenty of room for baggage, and between, say, Vancouver and Jasper, it is an astonishingly cozy way to travel. You even get access to a dome car: a private economy class dome car, since that’s where the cafe is. Alas, the microwaved cafe car food is execrable and the line for coffee in the morning is long and slow. Once every blue moon or so the attendant will offer to sell you a styrofoam tray of dining car food, but that seems to depend on the whim of the staff and it shows up when it shows up. However, it is better-than-Air-Canada-business-class comfort for an economy class price and is recommended to those of us made of meat rather than money.

Next is “Sleeper Plus” class. The level of service improves: a bed of some sort, a bit more attention, and unlimited coffee and tea as well as the sublime dining car meals (though you pay for alcohol). I took a berth, which is essentially a pair of seats that face each other in the day and a pair of bunks, one over the other, by night. I paid extra for a lower berth, basically because I wanted a window at night, and found it very comfortable; the lower berth also benefits from no ladder (obviously) and handier bag storage atop turned-down headrests (less obviously). There are no power outlets in the berths and the tall should be careful: I am 6’0″ and if I was 6’2″ I might have felt scrunched up. Bunk beds conjure up images of hostels but tall, thick curtains mean privacy and the bunks are so solidly-built that the one night I had someone sleeping above me I got out for the sake of this post to make sure he was actually there⁷. I have slept in many hostels and there is absolutely no comparison.

The cost for a bedroom is more than double but you get even more privacy and a power outlet. You share the same shower and bathrooms as everyone else, and in the bedroom for two you and your lady love still sleep in bunks, so decide for yourself if it’s worth it.

Finally, there is Prestige Class. There is something vaguely loathsome about a government transit service advertising Prestige Class, isn’t there? Prestige Class tourers get personal service, an actual double bed in a suite as nice as a decent hotel room with personal toilet and shower, drinks on the house, a television in case you want to watch Netflix rather than your colossally expensive train tourney, priority check-in for what that’s worth and, in the summer, priority access to the best communal space on any train, the Park car. This is the short paragraph, partially because I have never traveled Prestige Class and to all appearances never will, and partially because, though my favourite way to travel is luxury on the way and the cheapest hostel/campsite possible at my destination, I cannot for the life of me see what the money gets you. People do take it, though. I have met them.

The fares? As of this writing, an economy-class Vancouver-Toronto ticket starts at $514. An upper berth will be yours for $1,587, and a bedroom for one a mere $3,399. But if you want to go Prestige Class be prepared to fork out $13,930 of your hard-won Canadian dollars, exclusive of tax. This seems very expensive, because it is. However, in the offseason VIA regularly runs very steep discounts, and all year there are ways to save 10% here and there if you’re a CAA or a Hostelling International member or the like⁸. I didn’t pay no $1,600 for my berth let me promise you: with a Black Friday sale and an off-peak itinerary I got out the door for $938 including my $157 berth selection (!!!) and tax. Still more than a business-class flight with similar smart shopping, but not much more. On the other hand, if you’re going in the summer not only should you not expect bargains but you had better book well in advance before demand drives prices up even higher.

There are some experiences which are tawdry however much you pay, and one of them is the first smoke break⁹ of the trip at North Kamloops station, not really in Kamloops, BC. You can see Kamloops glimmering in the distance but the station itself is smack dab in the middle of CN’s North Kamloops rail yard, with cars driving on the platform, strict rules on where you may and may not stand, and a plethora of interesting rolling stock that you can’t see from anywhere accessible. There is a shabby station building, and though the train usually arrives at a grim time of night some loyal souls always board here¹⁰. Nestled in the Okanagan, it manages to be as picturesque as a rail yard is likely ever to be.

We were six and a half hours late by this point, having lost time in the night for freights and to change locomotive crews when their shifts ended. But what of it? Some parts of your trip must be in the day, and some parts must be at night, and all are beautiful, and as the sun got up we got to watch the magnificent plains, peaks, and burned-out forests of the British Columbia interior rise with it. At first my fellow passengers were eager to see Jasper and Kevin, attending in the Park car, refused to be drawn into guessing when we’d arrive. But the antsiness died down as the grandeur of the North Thompson River scenery began to make itself felt. It doesn’t get the hero photos, it doesn’t get put on the $10, but it is a spectacular region of ranches, river, foothills, those sketchy rural dwellings that remind you British Columbia was once a place for pioneers, weirdos, and ordinary people as well as multi-millionaires and their servants.

It wasn’t the passengers’ fault that all they knew was Jasper, for most weren’t from around here. There were a plethora of Americans and a solid contingent of Australians; Canadians on the Canadian were a minority. There was a trivia contest in the Skyline car after brunch, and the teams were advised to grab a Canadian each because it was emphatically elementary school Canadian history, “what year did Canada gain independence” with no tricks about the Statute of Westminster. The climax was a higher-or-lower team battle to find the exact height of Mount Robson, one of those pieces of trivia that has never managed to stick in my brain, so it wound up a pretty fair fight. Later, in the Park car, the woman who hit the height exactly quoted it with a smile and said “I will never forget that.”

Lateness gradually accumulated. Brunch was excellent (banana-pecan pancakes, yum) and there were no incidents, just freight trains; that tell-tale slowing and thunking as the train passed over a switch into a siding, the hope that the freight was already on the main line ahead of us so it would be a short wait, the too-frequent disappointment, and sometimes the irritation of watching the freight pass and our train not move, meaning another freight was behind that one and we’d wait for it too. We reached Valemount in the sunset, and saw Mount Robson beneath the clouds, but what is normally a noon arrival in Jasper was today in the dark.

Which, I realized as the familiar town came nearer, was a blessing in disguise. Jasper is one of my favourite spots, and in the summer of 2024 it was ravaged by the wildfire that everyone knew was coming. The fire, miraculously, was less damaging than it seemed at first it had to be. Homes and businesses were lost, but many more were saved, along with the infrastructure, and there was only one death, a firefighter battling the blaze outside of town. It was still a tragedy for many, and if I was in their shoes I would not like tourists crawling all over the burned-out ruins. As a tourist I only then realized how much I was not looking forward to seeing it.

And, thanks to the late train, I didn’t. The worst of the damage was on our approach to Jasper, and all we saw were lights; the lights that were still there, just sparse enough to call attention to the lights that were missing. The burned-out trees visible in the glow from our passing train. Hints, vestiges, reminders. No scenes of devastation, nothing to wrench the heart.

In a brief walk around town I did not tour the burn, or at least no more than I had to. I saw the Jasper Brewing Company, a favourite haunt, and it was gutted down to the studs, though the exterior looked fine and there was hard work within. The former Anglican church was the one loss I sought out: it loomed up like a Greek ruin, old walls and columns blasted with soot, while the church sign and the benches by the sidewalk were quite intact. It was a poignant stroll even when one consciously tried not to do disaster tourism: the capriciousness of wildfires that plucked some buildings away and left both their neighbours intact, the scorched fence surrounding an intact house, the clean mountain air and the ubiquitous signs, “NO ENTRY: ASBESTOS.” A lady had brought her dog in the luggage car, all the way from Vancouver to Toronto, and she literally ran circles around the beautiful old Jasper train station with him until it was time to reboard.

I left Jasper more heartened by what was still there than mourning what had been lost. Call it a tourist’s privilege.

From there, back on the rails. Often slow; sometimes backwards, onto the prairies in the dark. I stayed up much too late in the Park car chatting with a couple from near Toronto and, of all things, an American former diplomat, three very nice people. You meet all sorts on the train.

The Canadian
Day 3
Edmonton station, Edmonton, AB
9.5 hours late

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After two hours or so I woke up to clunky train noises and the feeling we were reversing. “Ah, Edmonton,” thought I. Nope. Not even close¹¹. We hit Edmonton at 4:30 AM, and those of us awake anyway stomped through the ice and looked at the skyline in the middle distance.

There was a fine demonstration of what it means for VIA Rail to be nice. A woman had booked the berth above mine and, clear though the VIA website is, she somehow thought an upper berth was really a bedroom. In the most polite, and quietest, way, she made it clear to the attendant that she wouldn’t possibly be able to sleep in a confined space with no window. The attendant promised to do something and did, putting her into a vacant roomette. Imagine somebody on Air Canada horrified to discover what an economy class seat meant and getting an upgrade to business class before the plane even took off. This niceness doesn’t scale in a world where people pretend to have mobility issues to get onto a plane faster, but away from the horror of airports, being nice is possible and it was done. “But that’s not fair for the people who paid for a berth and got it!” I was that people and I was happy for her.

Another nice woman was trying to go to Viking, Alberta with the best possible attitude. The scheduled arrival in Viking is 8:53 PM, so as we got later she worried about the poor fellow who’d committed to pick her up. Then, the train got so late that every hour made her pickup time more humane, not less, and she openly looked on the bright side even as she spent so long on what should have been a simple journey. There is no bus service to Viking so, without a three-hour round-trip January drive to Edmonton, VIA Rail was what she had. For me this trip was an experience but I usually take the train to get to a place at around a certain time, so I admired her and thought more about how what should be a practical means of transport isn’t.

Why so few Canadians on the Canadian? Two trains a week that are routinely hours late. Canadians notoriously do not vacation in Canada, and with trains this infrequent, this slow, and this unreliable, taking one is a vacation-sized commitment. A train between Vancouver and Edmonton by train is reasonable for any but a habitual hurrier. Between Vancouver and Jasper, the train is more practical than any combination of airplane and bus. But you can’t arrive in Jasper on Saturday, have a nice weekend, and get home to Vancouver on Monday or Tuesday; the return train doesn’t leave until mid-week.

What do you do about that? Run more trains. VIA only has enough equipment to run three trains on the Canadian at once, so two departures a week, but they are very long. Mine had 15 carriages and in the summer it pushes above 20. Three trains of 15 carriages can be six trains of seven to eight; two trains a week become four just by shuffling. VIA has plenty of locomotives to pull them¹². A shortage of dining or baggage cars could be solved by using lower-service trains on shorter runs, like Edmonton-Vancouver or Winnipeg-Edmonton, and still running two Toronto-Vancouvers a week with the full Monty¹³. The Canadian is a popular train, and frequently sells out, but many are on it for a night or two, not all four, and a cabin sold from Edmonton to Saskatoon can’t also be sold from Toronto to Jasper. Opening up weekend destinations far from airports is one of the train’s great strengths, but you need to be able to take it both ways.

There’s said to be a shortage of locomotive engineers, which as always when you hear about a labour shortage is 90% nonsense. CN and CPKC routinely furlough conductors (one step short of an engineer) in low seasons and work them to the bone when they have them, so there’s plenty of material available for good government jobs¹⁴. Then, when VIA Rail is fit onto CN’s tracks, the length of the train doesn’t matter to CN but the number of trains very much does; VIA could never run a train long enough to need special handling but every individual train is a piece of traffic to be controlled. Without legal protections, VIA Rail is CN’s hostage.

Departing Edmonton station is a good specimen of that, as the train waits and waits and waits for freights to clear the Walker Yard before being allowed to crawl out at fifteen miles an hour. Underslept and feeling in need of prairie sunrises, coffee, and quiet, I decamped for the Skyline car. In the dome, the sun was beautiful and the host never stopped talking. I went downstairs. The train bore nattered away, repeating statements that I suppose were meant to be jokes in hopes of a reply. “There goes Wainwright! Blink and you’ll miss it! Did you see Wainwright? Or did you blink and miss it?” The social element of the train is fantastic, but not perfect.

It was not possible to endure this; I returned to my berth, which the attendant had not yet had time to turn into chairs. I sat on the edge of my bunk and got in the way, with people tripping over my toes. Another crack at the Skyline car, and hooray, this time there was a sufficiently quiet corner where I could drink coffee number five and watch the prairie go by at quite a clip.

I have ridden the TGV, France’s high-speed train. I have ridden the Acela Express in the northeastern United States, the only high-speed line in the Americas. Those certainly seemed fast at the time. But the true feeling of speed on rails comes only on a 70-year-old Budd stainless steel car swaying and lurching down freight-pounded tracks at 85 miles an hour. The swinging, the creaking, the sheer sensation of velocity, made it feel like we were trying to make up nine hours of delay at once, and looking out the window gave the very unusual sight of VIA Rail’s train no. 2, the Canadian, outrunning traffic on highway 14. Nine and a half hours of lateness was down almost to eight before we were exiled to a siding to await a freight train that turned out to be a million miles away.

On balance, a good morning. A hearty breakfast, a jump forward into Central time as we reached the Saskatchewan border, and therefore an improbably prompt lunch for passengers who’d done nothing more than sit, read, write, and talk for a few hours. Familiar names on the map whipped by, often but not always without stopping: Viking, Wainwright, Unity, above all Biggar (“New York is big, but we’re Biggar.”)

Saskatoon arrived, sooner than expected; another unique experience was being pleased to see Saskatoon. The station, again, is in the rail yard and even more flagrantly out of town than Edmonton’s, but unlike Edmonton it’s quite a nice building and an interesting place. We took a few people aboard, changed crews, refuelled, dilly-dallied. Rolled out, got back to that exciting 80-odd miles an hour, pulled into a siding, waited for a freight. Didn’t move. Waited for another freight. Didn’t move. Waited for a third freight. We spent more than two and a half hours in that siding; all of dinner was eaten in that siding. The train’s service staff was due to change in Winnipeg, and a dining car waitress wrote ‘Goodbye’ in syrup on the plates of cheesecake that should have been our last meal with her, which seemed to be rather tempting fate.

I had thought CN was taking its revenge, but the truth was more interesting. We’d picked a fellow up in Saskatoon who was coming off a two-week shift in a mine. I spoke to him briefly and would put him down as “civilly drunk” and perfectly agreeable company, but either he hit it hard onboard or he’d badly miscalculated his celebration in town, because he escalated to unsteadily drunk, then troublesomely drunk, more quickly than even I, a seasoned train drinker, would have expected¹⁵. He made himself a nuisance, he lit up a cigarette in the vestibule (both forbidden and impossible to get away with), he became trouble. The last I saw of him was when I was sitting in my berth, watching the most glorious red moon rise above the rod-straight horizon. It was beautiful, prairie night at its best, and utterly unphotographable. The train inched forward at last, not far, just to a road crossing, and when we started again the sozzled miner had been dropped off to wait for the RCMP in the back-end of nowhere and was taking the opportunity to wave his bare behind at the train as we passed.

A completely lovely young attendant came by shortly after. “Did you see the moon?” she enthused.

“I saw two,” said I. She didn’t know what I meant, which was for the best.

Thanks to that we were now over eleven hours late. The miner was not the only one drinking onboard, just the worst at pacing himself, and in the common areas there were assorted accents asking “are you kidding me?”; a perfectly fair question when stuck in yet another siding. But they were in a good mood about it, taking it as more time to have a good time. They put a movie on in the Skyline car, and that was about it for me. Train travel is great, but train stationary palls.

The Canadian
Day 4
Portage-la-Prairie, MB
12.5 hours late

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Twelve hours late on the train beats four hours late on the airplane any day. The worst train seat excels the best plane seat and no amount of complimentary pretzels/bretzels compares to a sit-down breakfast at breakfast time, notwithstanding that you should have been having it in a different time zone. The breakfast was, of course, served by the same crew that had wished us goodbye last night. They were on mandatory overtime and unlike most of us, who endure the occasional super-long shift with our fellow-workers in grim but not joyless solidarity knowing we’re all in it together, these (mostly) women had to provide sterling white-cloth customer service to a train full of travelers that included some high-paying VIPs. They succeeded, completely; not even with robotic rigor-mortis grins but with humanity and good attitude, no attempt to pretend that they wouldn’t rather be at home right now but not the slightest slackening in their high standards. You may be sure their overtime provisions are generous but all the same it was admirable, and gave me a feeling I’d never had before: I felt sorry for employees of the federal government¹⁶.

In 2023 the Canadian taxpayer subsidized trips on the Canadian to the tune of 79 cents per passenger-mile. This is not especially bad for VIA: worse than the Corridor services but 50% better than their other sleeper train the Ocean, and many multiples better than the legally-mandated rural services. It is still higher than anyone would like, and because there are so many passenger-miles between Toronto and Vancouver it adds up to a rather eyewatering subsidy of over $1,000 per rider. It is common at this point to attack the subsidized cruise ship but I utterly decline to believe VIA Rail is losing money on $13,000 Prestige Class tickets and if they are somebody should be shot. It’s definitely a political impediment to any attempt to actually increase service on this money-bleeding route, and the question you can’t get answered from VIA’s public financial statements is: where does all that money go?

That deficit is not just immediate operating costs, gas and food and staff. It is VIA Rail’s entire $812.5 million in expenses, including the executives, the front office, amortization, pensions, and the great colossus of liabilities that cling on to any public enterprise, divided up between its routes in some manner with the Canadian‘s particular needs tacked onto it in an opaque way. This is good accounting practice but bad for planning train routes in a blog post. You can’t automatically say that running more trains would increase that loss, especially if you were operating shorter trains with about the same amount of staff; you also can’t say that it wouldn’t.

How do you run more trains for less money? Fire everybody! Replace those nice young ladies and their pensions with temporary foreign workers! Replace the dining car with a microwave and frozen pizza! Abandon niceness and turn the train into Greyhound on rails, give the executives fat bonuses, watch travelers flee the train just as they fled Greyhound, and wait for it to gracelessly expire.

Alternatively, run the trains on time. How were those nice young ladies in the union compensated for an extra 12 hours? Probably well. Legally, train engineers must work no more than a twelve-hour shift, with proper rest breaks off the train in-between. When twelve hours is up you must replace those engineers, and a late train is explicitly not an exception: if you have to do it at a level crossing hours by taxi from the nearest relief crew then legally that is what you are going to do and all the costs go to us. There were people waiting to service the train at each of its smoke breaks whose shifts are all over the place, and that’s not free either.

Moreover, part of VIA Rail’s niceness is its “comp culture.” I heard of a passenger who got off to walk around Jasper and stayed out too long. The train left without them. They went to VIA, and VIA called them a cab to get to Hinton, where the train would wait for them. That part was all well and good; the part where VIA paid for the cab ride was above and beyond. There are so many problems with late trains, so many missed connections and improvised hotel stays for passengers, that the path of least resistance is to hand a passenger a voucher and tell them this one’s on the taxpayer.

The costs of running a train more quickly are some wear and a bit of diesel. The savings once you can count on changing your engineers at bases rather than in whichever hinterland they time out in are huge. A reliable service, as rapid as the track will bear, is not merely better for passengers, but saves the operator money.

“Why prioritize VIA Rail over freight trains? Freight makes this country money; VIA Rail loses it, and how.” Giving VIA Rail that priority would take probably hundreds of thousands of dollars off the budget every year, to say nothing of making a public service better. You will never reduce lateness to zero, there will always be drunk miners or downed power lines, but at least twelve hours of every journey on the Canadian, and probably more, are simply a policy choice by the government.

We ought to have been in Winnipeg at 10 PM the previous day, which would have made for a bad visit. Twelve and a half hours late was, from the perspective of a passenger who has always sneakily liked Winnipeg, perfect. The huge schedule padding¹⁷ between Portage and Winnipeg turned twelve and a half into eleven by the time we pulled into Winnipeg Union Station, probably the most beautiful train station in the country. Supplies held out for the delay (the cinnamon pancakes had no cinnamon, oh no), and our hour in Winnipeg was a happy one. Winnipeg is the first prairie city of Canada: as an Edmonton native, the first time I went to Winnipeg I felt immediately like I knew my way around by blood memory. The station, alone among the major stops between Jasper and Toronto, is right smack downtown, and while an hour wasn’t time to do more than walk around and feel the salt beneath my boots, arriving in the day meant all the difference between a pleasant stroll through a pretty city and lights, drugs, and knife crime.

A surprising number of passengers boarded, given the shortage of actual destinations between there and Toronto. Those who had come from points west were now familiar faces, though not familiar names, and the ones who showed away with a “hi, Ben!” when I could only respond with a “hey there, big guy!” were becoming noticeable. The crew, of course, were all new, and I had a taste of VIA niceness when I ordered a beer just after we passed out of effective range of the persnickety credit card machines. “Pay me back at Sioux Lookout,” he said, handing over the beer, and it’s not like I was going to jump train over ten bucks but the guy didn’t know me and it was nice of him to expect me to remember.

Elma, Manitoba is billed as “the start of the Canadian Shield,” that wild desolation of muskeg, lakes, windblown little spruce and pines, great mineral wealth, and eager adventurers on quad, canoe, and snowmobile. Entering Ontario by train looks indescribably wild, rolling through 120-year-old blasted cuts with boulders piled up by the right-of-way forever, siding tracks iced over, freights less common (though sadly not absent). The stops are more frequent, as here the idea of the train as an essential service comes into its own, as it pulls up at some tiny town or, more often, a CN division point scarred by snowmobile tracks and built up with portables and, here and there, a ramshackle old station with VIA signage. People get off and get on, the wise ones with headlamps as they stride through the snow. The day turned completely overcast, and that may be the perfect weather for the Canadian Shield.

The Rockies do not feel nearly that wild. They’re too close, too elegant, too flagrantly scenic: they conjure up too many memories, and the spirits are too happy to see you. On the Canadian Shield, at least on the rail line, the sheer harshness strips away gloss and leaves only Nature, breached here and there but unconquered and fighting a perpetual rearguard action against civilization. It reminded me a great deal of the Yukon, once you get out of Whitehorse and up the Alaska Highway, not so much in terrain but in its soul. Men work there and die there. It is beautiful, and of course there is tourism, and some nice towns, but it’s not the Canadian Rockies sort of tourism. It is the tourism of rewarding battles to stay warm and safe in a forbidding land, not 100-mile walks down old trails in a land that, ultimately, wants you to succeed. It was appropriately enough the least social day. I loved it.

The Canadian
Day 5
Foleyet, ON
9 hours late

1/8

2/8

3/8

4/8

5/8

6/8

7/8

8/8

❮ ❯

On and on through the darkness. Lit up workshop windows with CN hardhats on shelves, steam rising from chimneys at all hours of the night. Not very infrequent stops for passengers. By day, some quite substantial summer homes wew visible on the many lakes and one realized that to an extent all that wildness and isolation was an illusion, that this is a playground for many, but in the winter they are all closed down, and they pass by the window in a few moments, and the hinterland returns with full force.

Overnight we reclaimed a few more hours on the schedule. A delicious berry waffle made my morning, and as we ticked along with little interruption, morale was high. The Skyline car attendant ran the willing through seated yoga stretches, then held a trivia contest with few takers. I was in the car just to journal and took part, on my own, just to make up the numbers; it was somewhat stiffer Canadian trivia and the final question was “what is the height of Mount Robson?” I looked across at my adversaries, including the woman who had promised she would never forget that number a few days ago.

She hadn’t.

Rolling through hostile terrain in a comfortable train is a beautiful experience, recommended for all, but CN was not done with us. What should have been a ten-minute break at Capreol, a town in Greater Sudbury, took 45 as CN, in an act of true CNitude, let a freight out ahead of us even though we were ready. Not only did this delay us half an hour, we were stuck behind that slower train all the way past Parry Sound. There had once been hopes of reaching Toronto in time for dinner, and these were now dashed, but at least a 2 AM arrival was now off the board.

Worst of all, it was only afterwards that someone came on the intercom to say that there was a train museum down the opposite end of the platform from the one I had stomped. I would have been much happier checking that out in person instead of seeing it flit past the window; it was an astonishing variety in a small place, including what looked like a hundred-year-old electric steeplecab locomotive. I couldn’t even imagine how it had got there¹⁸.

The roll behind the freight through the last of the Canadian Shield was slow, but pleasant. People treat it as the trip’s scenic lowlight, the part you have to go through because Toronto is on the other side; I never tired of the experience. But what about the famous Muskoka, land of (so I was assured by unreliable guides) 1,300 lakes and countless Hollywood celebrities? I’ve no idea; the sun set at Parry Sound¹⁹.

We were late enough that the train set us an unscheduled dinner, which I looked forward to out of curiousity. There was to be no lingering over coffee this time: the crew were rushing us through in plenty of time to prepare for Toronto. Rail services, and doubtless cruise lines as well, keep an emergency meal around for cases like ours, where the thing is so late that you have to feed the crowd something. Amtrak boasts the infamous Dinty Moore beef stew, fresh out of the dollar can on a bed of rice. The Canadian did rather better, and I’m not sure how much of it was canned and how much was leftovers but it was awfully darn good, right down to the usual choice of three options. In my case I had pot roast with sauteed vegetables, gravy, and white rice; no soup, no salad, also no complaints from the happiest group that had ever endured such a delay.

From Washago, the next-to-last stop, to Toronto is officially four hours, twenty-nine minutes, but here VIA Rail’s padding came into its own. Despite being stopped for a while by the longest, slowest freight I had ever seen in my life, we had otherwise fine speeds and the expected arrival time tumbled down as we blew past GO Transit stations, soccer fields, and IKEAs. I, and surprisingly few others, sat up in the Skyline dome awaiting that great Toronto moment: the first sight of the CN Tower lit up brilliantly on the night sky, as we wound our way through the Don Valley. It did not take four hours and twenty-nine minutes to get to Toronto; it took two hours and forty. We arrived in Toronto at quarter past nine, not quite seven hours late.

I took it as a win.

Last month, a wave of TikTok users flocked to Rednote (小红书) during its short-lived ban in the US, coalescing under the hashtag #TikTokRefugee. The Chinese social networking platform subsequently topped US mobile app store charts, and the predominantly Chinese-speaking and China-based users on Rednote welcomed their foreign visitors. As the latest episode from the 新新人类 Pixel Perfect podcast points out, this was very much an unexpected moment as Chinese companies typically create separate apps for domestic and international audiences. (The most prominent example is Lemon8, a Rednote clone created by the company behind TikTok for international audiences.) And so, those of us who opened Rednote during that fateful week were privy to a rare moment where American users were welcomed into the Chinese internet — and schooled publicly on the do’s and don’ts there.

Throughout this brief period, I downloaded and installed Rednote from a US app store to open a new account on my smartphone to witness these welcoming messages, as well as explanations of how to best use Rednote. Below is my informal record of what advice was given in the 38 welcome videos that I watched, ranked from most to least frequently mentioned, with a minimum of two mentions. Note that this is far from an exhaustive study — my sample happens to be the introductory videos that caught my eye when I opened the app.

Pay your cat tax (7 mentions)

This humorous rule says that new users coming in from TikTok must pay a toll to enter Rednote, and that toll takes the form of a cat video or picture. Most articles online suggest this was a spontaneous, word-of-mouth phenomenon with no clear origin story. Yet in my research, I found a TikTok user in China (@chinesewithfan_meow) who claims her viral video might have started it all. In her video on Rednote, she says that she didn’t invite the idea, but that her video on TikTok just happened to catch people at the right place and time. Indeed her video on TikTok did garner over 150,000 likes, 2000+ comments and over 6000 shares (and she only has a follower base of 10.1k at the time of writing after her viral success).

No offensive comments or DMs (5 mentions)

Videos range from general pleas to not make offensive comments “against the rules,” to specific mentions of rude DMs (direct messages) . One riled up user told people not to be racist, after seeing a post greeting Chinese people with “konnichiwa” (hello in Japanese) and making jokes about “colonizing” the app.

Don’t talk about politics (5 mentions)

Some Rednote users were direct about this, while others were more circumspect. One person bluntly told their audience to not “touch on sensitive topics like politics, leave it alone, unless you want grandpa to chase after you.” Another stated plainly that there is a “content surveillance system, [so] do not post sensitive content.” Less direct was the video that visually displayed the text “no talking about ” on top while the audio track talked about protecting the platform and its creators.

Include Chinese subtitles (4 mentions)

Variations from telling people to add subtitles to showing people how to use machine translation to make them easily.

Learn Chinese/Mandarin (4 mentions)

Beyond subtitles, some frustrated Chinese users urged their American brethren to learn some spoken Mandarin, and in one case, exhorted them to memorize some basic Chinese internet slang written with numbers or Latin alphabet acronyms.

Express yourself authentically (4 mentions)

This was a sentiment that came through on multiple videos, and while it’s nothing unique, it felt reflective of the lifestyle influencer vibe that permeated many videos.

No flirting or harassment (3 mentions)

I’m placing this as a separate rule from no offensive comments or DMs because it feels tied to Rednote’s reputation as a woman-dominated platform. The most strident (and eloquent) example I found proclaimed that there is “zero tolerance on Rednote” for harassment, told people to call them out and report them, and to “let our local girls help you, we are going to help you to curse those suckers in a language they understand.” Another video affirmed this by declaring that Rednote is a “safe space for women.” And lastly, a milder video simply chided people to “not use DM for flirtation.”

No naked (or half naked) pictures (3 mentions)

Users differed on whether the rule was strictly about nudity or whether a shirtless or bikini photo would qualify as well.

Use emoji correctly (3 mentions)

These comments were mostly about how people were misusing Rednote’s custom emoji (小红薯表情包) and mistaking sly or ironic expressions as earnest. For example, the emoji below is not used as a normal smile, but as a forced, probably annoyed, smile.

No cussing (2 mentions)

Reminders that people shouldn’t swear on Rednote.

That’s it for our little compilations of unofficial rules! As you can see, the most frequently mentioned rule, pay your cat tax, was only present in 7 of 38 videos. So for the most part, the welcome videos were simply that: efforts to welcome new people onto the platform and introduce some of the norms. If anything, it’s clear that RedNote has a very different culture from TikTok, and we’ll see over time if the platform truly takes hold in the US or if it was a brief cultural moment.

To learn more about this so-called #TikTokRefugee phenomenon, we recommend reading Yiwen’s article Chinese internet as an identity, and listening to 新新人类 Pixel Perfect’s episode on How did the TikTok refugees end up on Xiaohongshu? (Mandarin audio only). And remember, if you enjoyed this post, we’d appreciate a cat GIF or two.

An Xiao Mina contributed editing to this article.

Calgary’s downtown has the world’s longest network of elevated hallways and bridge connecting buildings. Beginning in the 1960s, it’s grown to around 16 km (nearly 10 miles) of designated path and enclosed bridges over city streets.

Imagine a second city, built 15 feet above the ground, entirely climate controlled year round. It has benches, tables, chairs, restaurants, shops, and the occasional green plant or water feature.

The Plus 15 was the subject of a year 2000 film by Canadian filmmaker Gary Burns. Called waydowntown, it’s about a group of office workers who make a bet on who can go the longest without setting foot outside, since the Plus 15 makes this somewhat possible.

24 years later, the network has evolved: grown in length, and almost certainly changed in character, especially post-covid. The office vacancy rate hovers around 20%, and the city has put a lot of money into office-to-residential conversion (this is extremely challenging, especially with skyscrapers built in the late 20th century, like almost all of Calgary’s). Here is an excellent video on why it’s such a difficult task.

Since I’m chronically online, I browse reddit a lot, and found this post about the possibility of a run through the Plus 15. It would be great fun for the novelty, but it was pointed out that the nature of the network–where each building is privately owned, while the bridges are public, and the hallways are public easements–would make it an absolute nightmare to organize.

My biggest question, though, was… how scenic would a tour through the Plus 15 be? Would it be full of unexpected surprises? Would it be a level of nothingness to rival the Worst Hike in the World? I needed to find out.

I managed to convince my friend Luke and [other] Jon (who, in turn, convinced his brother Chris) to take a little walk with me. It would be simple: every single path and bridge in the Plus 15.

At 11am on December 20th, we set out from Calgary City Hall. It would be a largely rambling walk, more exploratory than record-setting.¹

We head off going north, crossing a bridge over 7th Avenue and the C-train tracks. The trains run on the street in a dedicated transit street.² We’re then greeted by a sign that says “No video or recording”, which is surprising, because it’s nothing more than a bland corridor and dusty empty display cases. Luke tells me that the building used to be the booking facility for the police, where people who were arrested were “perp-walked”. So the sign makes a little more sense.

Taking the little spur into Bow Valley College’s campus, it dead ends, we snap a pic, and backtrack to head westward. The Castell building, the former Central Library, houses a surreal and eerie hallway. The deserted route is enclosed on both sides, with only frosted windows that face into the building (currently occupied by the University of Calgary’s architecture school). The few bright colourful splotches on the wall do nothing to distract from the generally depressing vibe.

The term “liminal space” is very popular today, at least in my circles. Wikipedia calls them “[…] empty or abandoned places that appear eerie, forlorn, and often surreal. Liminal spaces are commonly places of transition […]”. We’d quickly find that the Plus 15 was full of these liminal spaces, even on a workday. Many of these places we saw today were perfectly forgettable.

We cross a bridge, then go inside, then outside, then inside, then cross a bridge. Other than some memories from Luke and Jon, there’s truly nothing going on: no one in sight, and only a locked door to a sad-looking rooftop patio.

Here, we have to go outside to continue onward. We leave the Andrew Davison Building (at one time, the main cop shop, and today, suspiciously devoid of signs or signs of dilapidation), and cross the street to get to the park where there’s an open-air bridge where we can continue on.

There’s a big sculpture in the park, usually called the Family of Man, of a bunch of giant naked people holding hands or whatever. It sits in front of the derelict education centre, once home to the public school board. Strangely, the Calgary Board of Education (CBE) still uses the statue as their symbol, and even more strangely, the fun story of the statues is almost completely forgotten. Here’s a link to a CBC story on it; basically it was made by Spanish sculptor Mario Armengol for a “Britain and the World” exhibit at Expo ’67 in Montreal, then bought by a mysterious businessman, donated to the city for the tax write-off, and then assembled in front of the education centre based on best guesses, where the anatomical correctness caused a stir. Finally the CBE adopted it as their logo, before abandoning the area for a new building south of downtown in 2010, leaving the building vacant for the last 14 years. But the statues are still here.

We duck into a hotel to continue onward to the Harry Hays Building, the home of the federal government in Calgary. It’s a rather unassuming, fairly low building, off to the side of downtown near Chinatown instead of being close to the oil company headquarters or the halls of civic or provincial power. Other than getting passports renewed, there’s really not much there for the average person. Hitting the end of the line, we turn back.

Next is the “First” building, formerly the Telus building, and before that, the AGT (Alberta Government Telephones) building. Stripped of all its neon signs today, I remember it best for Christmas lights that are turned at night: cartoony trees and a flickering candle. Today it appears to be less desirable space, and it’s fairly quiet.

The next three hours are a blur of extremely uninteresting hallways, repeating cafes and restaurants, and a variety of holiday displays. We have entered the downtown core: where all the money from the oil pumped up north ends up. The ambience is best compared to that of an airport: you have plenty of windows, but are cut off from the outside world. Uniformed security guards are everywhere, so you don’t need to watch your possessions too closely. The climate is completely controlled, and the environment is immaculately clean.

I start taking pictures of wet floor signs and variations of the flooring³ to keep from going crazy. We pass by several repeats of local and international chain restaurants. Similarly, the lunchtime crowd I see in the hallways seem to merge together into a mass of humanity. I poke Jon whenever I see someone wearing a fun sweater, because a deviation from the norm is really that noticeable. Everyone around us dressed in business casual or similar: High heels abound and button downs, blazers, and brogues are the norm.

On second thought, an airport is more interesting because of the wider cross-section of humanity you see: there are far more families and seniors, and people passing through from all over the world. Sure, it’s a school day, and it’s fairly cold and icy outside (fairly few residential buildings are connected to the Plus 15, and Bow Valley College students don’t seem to venture far in the network), but people-watching is much more fun at the airport because of the sheer variety. Here, it feels like a repeating loop. Not boring per se, but something that takes far more effort to see beauty in.

We stop for lunch, and jokingly ponder when the impeccably dressed security guards dressed in blazers will ask us to leave. It may be casual Friday, but I came ready for a warm weather hike: jean shorts, t-shirt, bucket hat, hiking boots, and stick out pretty obviously.

Also noticeable is the abundance of small, family-run, non-chain Asian restaurants in the +15, and their unusual opening hours: one is only open Mon-Fri, 10-3. They are entirely reliant on the work lunch crowd, and must have been hit hard during the pandemic when many offices worked from home. I think about how remarkable it is that I am seeing these restaurants for the first time–I used to work on the east end of Downtown, and usually walked outside on the city streets.

Highlights here include a low door to a parking garage (“parkade” in Calgary parlance), and a helpful guy wearing a jacket saying “information technology” down the sleeve telling us that it was dead beyond this hallway. He was right. The west part of downtown feels moribund, with empty storefronts everywhere. The foot traffic drops off to almost nothing.

Amec Place might be a rare bright spot, for how sheerly anachronistic it feels. There’s a lobby with a kind of glossed up tile you don’t really see anymore, and planters and a fountain break it up. So far, we’ve seen a few green walls, but they turn out to be illusory: real plants, but preserved and not living.

Part 2 coming soon!

1. I thought about doing some planning to find the optimal route, since the problem very much resembles a classic problem for computer scientists: the Chinese postman problem (named in honour of, but not using the name of, the Chinese mathematician Meigu Guan), which, is solvable rather simply with a few caveats. I’ll add a post about my attempt to find an optimal route using the R programming language. ︎
2. the talk of the town is currently the proposed Green Line, which is hard to see in any other way than the provincial government holding the city hostage, but that’s for another day… ︎
3. It’s mostly tile, with some carpet. I don’t recall any terrazzo. ︎

[This post is about the day that Glitch failed, and how that failure created the opportunity to make Slack. We're sharing it here (out of chronological order) to mark 12 years since the famous pivot.]

“We have to shut down the game.” Stewart Butterfield said.

I looked at him out of the corner of my eye. He looked exhausted. The result of years of long days and short nights pouring all of his substantial creative energy into Tiny Speck and the game it was conceived to create: Glitch. 

He also looked resolved. He had tried every option he could think of to keep Glitch alive: alpha and beta releases, launches and unlaunches, new features, a completely overhauled new player experience, elaborate collaborative modes of play, invite campaigns, generous credits to existing players, and clever storytelling in the press. 

None of it was enough.

The quirky game populated by a far-flung community of players had absorbed his time since 2009. The company had attracted a team of 40 artists, engineers, game designers, animators, musicians, writers and in-game guides to build and tend to the world we had collectively imagined.

It was now late 2012. On a chilly November morning, Stewart and I walked along the seawall in the politely trendy Yaletown neighbourhood of Vancouver. I had been surprised by his invitation when I arrived at work that morning – I joined the company 8 months earlier and was not accustomed to coffee walks with our charismatic CEO.

He explained that despite all of our efforts, there just wasn’t a viable business for Glitch. It was expensive to build and keep online, and we had not attracted enough players to bear that expense. Moreover, with the rise of smartphones and the incompatibility of our Flash-based game with mobile, we didn’t have an easy way to meet new players where they were spending their casual gaming time.

“If we keep going as we are, we’ll burn through the rest of our money in a few months and be left with nothing to show for it,” Stewart explained. We walked in silence for a few paces, the low clouds dull and drizzling overhead.

I hunched into my rain jacket as I realized what this meant. My colleagues and I without a job. Tens of thousands of players abandoned. Hundreds of thousands of hours of collective creative work lost. Another failed startup. Fuck.

“But if we stop now, we can use that money to build something else,” Stewart went on. “I think the tools we’ve built internally could be useful to other people.”

“Our IRC server?” I asked, feeling a combination of skepticism and confusion. Why would a game company make chat software? And why would anyone pay for the unpolished conglomeration of tools we had glued together to solve our own problems?

When I joined the company, I’d been given a crash course in how we worked together. No email. Everything happened in IRC: a chat protocol from the late 80s. We had a server set up with channels based on topics of discussion: #general for company-wide chat, #deploys for new code releases, #support-hose for inbound customer support requests, and so on.

Alongside this we added a few other things we needed. A simple FTP server which posted uploads into the #files channel. A system that wrote our chat logs to a database so we could search them and read old archives.

A set of integrations that posted updates from other systems into IRC: whenever a new user signed up for Glitch, or bought credits, or wrote in for support, it showed up in a channel. Whenever we deployed code, or got a new review on the App Store, or tweeted from our Twitter account, it showed up in a channel.

Taken together, this allowed us to communicate in real-time, share files, find anything we’d ever talked about at the company, and keep track of everything happening with the business – all while avoiding the unique 21st-century hell of email reply chains and fragmented organizational knowledge.

At first it felt awkward, but within a couple weeks I couldn’t imagine using anything else.

It was a system only a nerd could love. It was quirky and technical. Most things didn’t have a GUI – instead displaying everything in text. You had to set up your own clients or bookmark webpages for each of the subsystems. It was held together with custom scripts and cron jobs and ugly SQL queries. It worked just well enough to serve our needs, but no more. Every ounce of energy we had was going into trying to make the game successful. These tools were a means to an end.

Without missing a beat, Stewart launched into a reasonably well-rehearsed pitch. “It’s all your team’s communication in one place, synced, searchable, and available wherever you go.” With one system we would replace email and basic file hosting, and allow a single point of integration for all of a team’s messaging needs: both between humans and between people and computers. “We’ll get rid of all the stuff we’ve duct-taped together and start fresh, but keep everything we’ve learned,” he said.

“I’m thinking of calling it Slack,” he added, making a gesture as though gently pulling and loosening a string between his thumbs and forefingers. “We can come up with a better name later.”

Stewart and his co-founders Cal Henderson, Eric Costello, and Serguei Mourachov had made up their minds to close the game and embark on something entirely different. He had already pitched this idea to our investors and they were on board – a sign of their continued belief in his leadership and track record of correctly predicting trends.

It sounded crazy to me. But I had also seen enough in my brief time working with the four of them to sense that if anyone could pull it off, it might be this group.

“We’re asking a few people to stay on. I’d like you to join us.” Lacking anything insightful to say, or any other handy job offers, I accepted.

“Good. But before that, let’s get a web page up so that we can get everybody another job.”

Glitch was an unusual, clever, heartfelt game. Within the realm of Ur, dreamt by eleven magical Giants, players created playful new identities for themselves. They designed and clothed their avatars to their heart’s content, delighting in new hats and a rainbow of possible skin tones. They crafted working music boxes and decorated their architecturally-unlikely homes.

They planted and grew gardens and milked the local butterflies. They collected pull-string dolls of modern philosophers – including plausible Nietzche and Wittgenstein quotations. They climbed into enormous dinosaurs, passing through their reptilian intestines and out of their helpfully sign-posted butts.

It was, in a word, preposterous.

It also meant a great deal to those who discovered and adopted it. It was an online place with a unique community. Glitch’s players identified with the game’s pervasive sense of humour, its gentle pace, and its weirdness. Mostly, they identified with each other and came to pass the time and make something new together. There was no way to win the game. And because of that, you couldn’t lose.

It was Butterfield’s second attempt to make an online game. In 2002, he and the co-founders of Ludicorp had launched Game Neverending, a similarly lighthearted game that allowed players to traverse a simple map, visiting obscure locations and leaving notes for others. It built on the mechanics of earlier eras of text-based networked games, but focused on the emerging possibilities of new spaces for social online play. Though Game Neverending and its esoteric goals were shelved after a couple years, an offshoot of the effort would lead to the team’s first major commercial success: Flickr.

In the early aughts, the combination of growing availability of consumer-grade digital cameras and home internet connections provided an opportunity. Flickr was created to allow people to upload and share their photos on the web – something taken for granted today but novel at the time. This was an era before the dominance of social networks (Facebook had yet to hatch across American college campuses) and smartphones (three years before the iPhone, when most Blackberries had abysmal cameras and worse cellular bandwidth).

Recognizing this opportunity and sensing the transformative potential of popular access to digital photography, Butterfield and the Ludicorp team launched Flickr in early 2004. Digital photographers flocked to the platform, rapidly making it one of the largest photo-sharing sites on the web. They built enduring communities around camera gear and common interests. People tagged their photos, added annotations, and – miraculously by today’s standards – had substantive and generally positive conversations in comment threads.

For a while, Flickr became the de facto photo layer of the internet: powering blogs, institutional collections, and enabling pro photographers to share their work in full resolution. The combination of timeliness, superb user-centered product design, and the nurturing of a new community resulted in a hit. Flickr became an essential part of the “Web 2.0” renaissance in the wake of the dot-com bubble.

Flickr’s success quickly attracted acquisition attention from other consumer Internet companies: Yahoo most of all. In 2005, Yahoo acquired Flickr for about $25 million dollars, incorporating it into their eclectic portfolio of web services and replacing the nascent Yahoo Photos product.

For a period, Flickr continued to grow and thrive, rapidly expanding to tens of millions of users. The growing prominence of smartphone cameras brought a new type of mobile-first photography to the platform, and the continued investment in the community by pros using high-end gear cemented the site’s importance for serious photographers. The site’s “Interestingness” algorithm surfaced the most compelling content to draw in new users.

But Butterfield was miserable. Yahoo’s idiosyncratic and sprawling set of online properties and incoherent response to changing trends left Flickr adrift. Yahoo’s search business was being decimated as Google’s engine redefined online search. Two enormous shifts in people’s online behaviour – to social media and mobile phones – were largely missed by Yahoo. Sharing and tagging photos on Facebook became one of its killer features, and the centrepiece of much of its early viral growth. Flickr’s position in the marketplace was reduced as these trends swept the Internet and drove people’s attention away from websites toward social networks and apps.

As soon as his vesting period was up, Butterfield left Yahoo, penning a legendary resignation letter criticizing the company’s strategic disorganization with his signature sardonic wit.

“I don’t know what you and the other executives have planned for this company, but I know that my ability to contribute has dwindled to near-nothing, and not entirely because of my advancing age,” Butterfield wrote. “I will be spending more time with my family, tending to my small but growing alpaca herd and, of course, getting back to working with tin, my first love.”

Five years after launching Flickr, Butterfield found himself back in Vancouver. Shortly thereafter, his co-founders Cal Henderson, Eric Costello, and Serguei Mourachov would leave Yahoo to join him in his new venture: the humbly named Tiny Speck. This time, he thought, they would make the game work.

When Stewart and I arrived back in the office that November morning in 2012, I looked around at my colleagues as they drifted in. As a gaming startup, hours were characteristically shifted. Many folks preferred to work late and sleep in, nursing productivity out of the creative hours after sunset. I hung my rain-beaded jacket beside the enormous amethyst geode that stood by the front door.

Stewart bee-lined for his office to prepare himself for the announcement he was about to make. I went to the small kitchen for coffee, listening to chatter about the new user experience we’d recently released, and the upcoming features the team was working on. The office – cluttered with video game figurines and toys, art sketches on the walls, and a model of Glitch’s evil Rook hanging from the ceiling – felt surreal and sad. I thought about the people in our San Francisco office going about their day, and the same weight the company’s co-founder Cal Henderson would be carrying there.

I sat at my desk and began to think about the task Stewart had set: he wanted to make sure everyone had a job. He had convinced dozens of people to join him in making Glitch – asking some of them to move around the world – and felt direct responsibility for their well-being now that we were shutting the game down.

What he had in mind was simple: we’d call it “Hire a Genius” and list the photo, skillset, and contact information for everyone at the company. We would pair a link to this page with all of our closure announcements and press releases. I got to work building it out, dropping in my colleague’s photos and adding the info I had available. We’d fill in the rest later, once everyone knew they were now on the job market.

It wasn’t long before Stewart called us together. The SF office dialed in to the big TV in the lounge, and co-founder Eric Costello called in from his home in New York. Forty or so faces turned expectantly to Butterfield. The emotion in his voice was apparent from his first words. “This is a horrible day, and I’m so sorry,” he said. Realization spread across people’s faces as they understood.

Stewart explained why we had reached the end of the road, and what we had to do next. We would announce the closure of the game to our players, sharing a FAQ to answer their most urgent questions. We would refund all purchases in the game dating back over the past year. We would put up the hiring page for everyone interested, and make calls and introductions on their behalf to find new work. We would release all of the game’s assets – including code, artwork and music – into the public domain (much of which has since been reconsituted into a playable version of Glitch by the Odd Giants project!).

The team’s response was emotional: shocked and sad, overwhelmed and confused. As the reality of the situation settled in, some degree of relief was also apparent. Many of Glitch’s staff had been pouring their heart and soul into the game for years without finding that magic alchemical combination that turned an idea into a success with its own momentum.

Somebody got out a bottle of whiskey. We ordered pizza. Everybody stayed at the office. People hugged and cried and shared stories. Someone suggested releasing all of our half-baked experiments and unfinished features to our players. This idea took hold and the creative wheels started spinning. The afternoon and evening had the mood of a family wake for a lost loved one.

We closed down Glitch a few weeks later. The End of the World party was well-attended by thousands of players, saying goodbye and exchanging contact information, taking snaps in their favourite locations, and mixing and mingling with Tiny Speck staff. On December 9th 2012 at 8pm, the game’s servers were shut down and Ur went offline.

Our colleagues at Tiny Speck finished their jobs shortly thereafter. Our once-bustling offices were empty. Chairs haphazardly pushed into corners. Dead batteries on desks. Filing cabinets dangling open.

The few of us who remained put our heads down and started digging out of the hole we found ourselves in together.

Within a month, we were living on our first prototype of Slack.
A year later, we launched the product to the world.
5 years later, we took the company public.

A version of this post was originally published on https://www.johnnyrodgers.is/.

Burnaby Mountain is a little slice of nature in the city. But how did Simon Fraser University end up on its peak?

The post How did SFU end up on top of Burnaby Mountain? appeared first on Better Columbia.

Yes, the votes are finally in, and I lost by 36 to 45.

It feels a little inappropriate to use percentage points to analyze a race where less than 100 votes were cast in total, but that's 44.4% to 55.6%, an 11-point loss. The closest analogue in provincial politics would be Bronwyn Eyre, the former MLA who just lost Saskatoon Stonebridge by a nearly identical margin, 43.4% to 54.3%. Now I have something polite to talk about if I ever meet her!

That's enough votes that I'm not embarrassed, and in the world of municipal politics I think it's not a bad performance against a 21-year incumbent. Here's my campaign story:

The Paperwork

If you've never done it before, running for office usually carries some kind of signature requirement.

To get on a federal ballot, you need 100 eligible voters... but you're encouraged to collect 150, because there is no post-submission appeal process if any of your signatures are found to be invalid. Just imagine collecting 150 signatures on behalf of the Liberal Party in Weyburn! This mighty task is the greatest preoccupation of dozens of paid organizational staff come election time, and only a few parties have the resources to send those staff into every single longshot riding in the country. I personally gathered about 60 nomination signatures in my 2021 campaign.

At the municipal level, this task is much less onerous. Please flip open your copy of the Local Government Election Act, 2015 to Part VII, Section 67(3):

Val Marie is DEFINITELY:

• not a rural municipality (yes, really: RMs are their own distinct category, it's a Saskatchewan thing)
• a place with less than 20,000 people (19,880 less, in fact)
• not divided into wards (entertaining as this would be)

That means five signatures - an easy hour's work. With 4% of the electorate contacted already, I was feeling good.

The Long Month of October

In Canada, federal and provincial elections can be called by the executive branch at any time - and must happen automatically if a major deadlock emerges (if you ever wondered why we never deal with government shutdowns). In contrast, municipal elections happen on a fixed schedule, proceeding every four calendar years come hell or high water. (This philosophy is employed in the U.S. at all levels of government.)

What if a dysfunctional town council collapses halfway into its fixed term? Municipalities are "creatures of the province" with almost no guaranteed rights that cannot be stripped away by provincial legislation, and it is the province's thankless job to intervene.

In Saskatchewan in 2024, the provincial election happened to be called for October 28, while all municipal elections happening across the province were set for November 13. This close-but-not-exact overlap created an obnoxious time crunch for many, many politically involved people. In my own case, I was working as campaign GIS lead in Regina for all of October, so municipal politics were necessarily second priority.

After knocking a hundred doors on the 28th for Joan Pratchler (who, ahem, ended up beating a sitting cabinet minister by 7 points), I was finally free to go home and do the same thing in Val Marie.

The Platform

Val Marie, with its resident population of 120, has a very small tax base. The village government has very little leeway to spend money on anything other than basic services, so most options for a policy agenda are off the table. Why did I even put myself out there if I don't expect to have much power? My personal reason: tourism development requires that the village show up to professional stakeholder meetings sometimes, and with my day job sales experience I know that I'm good at leaving a positive impression on rural development types.

In a tiny community, I knew that everybody would already have some idea of who I am, so I thought I would re-iterate the personal basics:

• I'm here by choice
• My map business is a full-time thing
• I'm a volunteer museum chair
• I like to apply for grants

I also had the full endorsement of the runner-up from the 2020 election, who said that he had been the subject of unjustified rumours that he supported an expensive new water system (something which has proven to be a painfully high per capita expense in nearby Mankota and Climax). This proved to be the case on the doorstep, as multiple voters still remembered the water system gossip four years later.

I think Val Marie's appeal as a community has basically nothing to do with our water infrastructure, and there are so many other business development ideas that would be cheaper to try first. So I made sure to add a final line item into my platform:

• Very specific fiscal conservative pledge

At the start of the campaign, I knew that I had probably only ever spoken to about half the people in town, so I decided to get whimsical with a more personal back side of the flyer. Here are the basic messages that I hoped to re-iterate:

• You already know my family isn't from here, but I'm still a prairie person
• My business is successful
• Did you know I CONSTANTLY get asked about copyright traps?? Seriously, this comes up SO MUCH.

In the end, this kind of thing probably only changes 1 or 2 votes, especially in a tiny social environment where both candidates are already known to everybody. But it was honestly just fun to try and use my political skills in a non-partisan environment, and nobody could accuse me of not running a full-scale campaign.

Financial audit

The flyer ended up being my only campaign expense. I still have a few left over!

Total campaign expenditures: $155.23 ($4.31 per vote)

Sadly, just giving a $5 bill to every likely supporter would be very illegal.

Ten Miles from the Border

For a couple days around the U.S. election I finished all of Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective and drew 30 neurotic little depictions of my own face from memory, but otherwise I did not manage to change out of my pajamas or get any useful work done, so the effective campaign period was really a little shorter than two weeks.

Data Operation

With my flyers going out on the Friday before election day, I was free to spend the Remembrance Day long weekend canvassing. Uh-oh... there's a catch!

Section 53.1(1) says that the council may provide for the establishment and maintenance of a voter registry. Well, Val Marie doesn't.

Provincial and federal canvassers work off a big central voters list, maintained with data from the relevant election agencies (which collaborate with the CRA, so file your taxes correctly). Among its other uses, this crutch is an essential part of my electioneering social routine because I'm really not good with names. There was only one thing to do next.

Fearlessly hit the doors anyway? No, let's just make our own voter registry!!

With the help of five volunteers, I called a data meeting where we simply went... street by street... block by block... house by house... naming every resident in every building, from memory. I was really curious how accurately this could be done, but after two and a half hours, we were at something like 95% completion and estimated an electorate of 128 people. (More than our census population? Yes, any Saskatchewan resident who owns property inside the municipality can vote for mayor.)

In addition to being a useful social tool - because I was not about to open every conversation by asking "I'm Alex, who are you?" - we also used the list to do a rudimentary tiering operation, estimating the likelihood that every individual person in town would vote for me.

Canvassing

It took two afternoons to hit every door in town, and I took a third afternoon to try all the uncontacted Tier As again. This pushed my contact rate up to an even 50%, which is great but could definitely have been improved with more lead time.

Most people do not make up their mind about politics because their door got knocked on once, but the data collected is a useful way to identify the needs and priorities of the general public, and it's also a great way to predict how the election will actually go.

Compared to my federal experience, I was shocked to discover that nobody would directly tell me that they were going to vote for my opponent - it just wouldn't be polite in a small town! I ended up getting all of four explicit negative responses. When you canvass for the NDP, this is much less of a problem. I realized early on that it was probably safe to assume that every single "undecided" voter was going to show up and vote for the incumbent.

With voter contact done, here's how things stood the night before the election:

For your reference, this is the NDP spreadsheet code: a 1 has explicitly said that they will vote for you, a 2 is a likely supporter, a 3 is undecided, and a 4 has explicitly said that they won't vote for you. Easy!

First of all, it was frankly incredible to see our tier list hold up this accurately, given that it was literally created off the top of a couple people's heads.

This put me on track to win 80% of A's, 45% of B's, and 10% of C's, provided that you assume...

1. ...that I had recorded a representative sample of the electorate.
2. ...that I was accurate at differentiating 2's and 3's.
3. ...that nobody was lying to my face.

Three risky assumptions in politics, but if they all held true, then our simple tier model returns 64 votes for me (yay!!) against 55 votes for my opponent. In practice, I think 2. and 3. did hold up, but with such a tiny campaign, I assumed that my canvassing efforts were disproportionately reaching my own people. When I went to bed before the election, the most optimistic thing I was willing to believe was that the race was tied.

Election Day, November 13

In Saskatchewan, it is legal for a municipal candidate to spend all day watching people vote at the polling place! I decided to give this a shot, because with a 50% complete canvass sheet in my hot little hands, I would be able to cross names off the list and plan a bite-sized GOTV operation to go find any supporters who were late to show up. My colleague, the 2020 candidate, kindly tagged me out so I could go on a lunch break.

The Race for School Trustee

If you're an avid reader of my blog, you'll recall that the mayoral election was held concurrently with a contested school board election. With different franchise rules (anybody living within thirty miles of Val Marie could vote for public school trustee), this meant there were two separate tables inside the municipal hall, each independently checking voter ID.

Name recognition seemed to be a problem for school trustee... which makes sense because we live in an electoral subdivision with three schools, and neither of the two candidates were associated with ours. At least twenty voters declined a school ballot because "they didn't know either one". (The incumbent, Susan Mouland, had paid the same $18.14 as me to get her flyer placed in every mailbox in town two weeks previously - a great illustration of the limits of postal advertising.)

In practice, although the eligible electorate was much larger, only about five people came out from the countryside to vote for school trustee without being allowed to vote for mayor.

No such problem for me, every single person who walked in the door requested a mayoral ballot. I was the star of the show!

The Day Drags On

Turnout was very healthy. In fact, every single identified supporter voted without needing that 7pm follow-up! A great problem to have, so my GOTV operation ended up amounting to nothing. Parks Canada has a very large footprint in Val Marie, so there was a big rush starting at 4pm when many of the scientific staff get off work.

The final turnout for the municipal election was 82 votes. With no official voter registry, it's impossible to calculate turnout by percentage, but that's 69% based on my personal voter list, and a whopping 82% of our census adult population (math problem, guess how many adult residents they counted in 2021). In the end, there was a significant undervote for the council race on the same ballot, so I really was the star of the show!

At the end of a very long day of sitting on my butt, I was pessimistic: every single one of my identified supporters turned up, but there were quite a few people coming to vote who I hadn't been able to contact. In particular, I realized that I had made very few contacts inside the assets department of the Park, which is in charge of doing all the blue-collar stuff that keeps our local tourist attraction functioning. When these younger people started to show up at 5pm, I started to expect a close loss.

The Count

If you've been following all these numbers really closely, there was one pair of spoiled ballots for Mayor and Council: somebody had written some initials in the corner, seemingly by accident, but this is clear grounds for rejection under Canadian election law. I would like to remind all my supporters to not draw any identifying marks on their ballot!

Drama and excitement as the doors finally closed at 8pm. I overdramatically shook the box and said "It sounds like I'll lose by 7 votes", the signed seals were ripped open, the ballots were dumped in a big pile, the counting sheets were readied... and the count was tied until the halfway point!! Finally, Roland Facette pulled slightly ahead by a couple votes, and I realized the narrow lead was going to be insurmountable. I said some kind words to Rolly and wished him the best for his latest term. (With no recounts on the table, all of the election workers seemed very happy to finally go home.)

Things I Learned

• I never wanted to say it, but I thought this race would just end up being a census of old families vs. transplants. Wrong! It's fair to say that I did better with newcomers, but during voter contact I was surprised on both counts by a number of exceptions.

• I had been wanting to meet everybody in town for years anyway, I just knew that I was never going to do it unless there was some kind of challenge behind it.

• I identified 36 1's and 2's, and I ended up getting 36 votes.

• The Sask NDP typically gets 15 or 16 votes in the Val Marie polling place, so I can now officially call myself an electoral overperformer. Thank you, thank you!

• Actually, there were multiple partisan NDP supporters who did not support my mayoral campaign.

• Traditional field strategies are a very effective basis for predicting the result of a small-scale election.

• Nobody mentioned either my known affiliation with the NDP, or the fact that I was visibly married to another man when I first moved to town.

• Losing was a relief. There is nothing like talking to every voter in town to make you realize that being elected to any public position is a solemn and terrifying responsibility.

In the end, it really was about the friends we made along the way: I was able to mobilize eight volunteers and I could have had access to even more, except there is absolutely no practical need for a large volunteer operation in an electorate of 118. My people were really passionate... and therefore tended to be more eager to get on my spreadsheet, it turned out.

Having lost a few races in my life: if you expect politics to satisfy your desire for fame and fortune, you'll run out of motivation really quickly, but working with a core group of dedicated people who like the things you represent is usually enough to keep me going. Thank you to everybody who has been a part of this community over the years!