Week 18: It's MUCH worse in Toronto

Today, I went back to Toronto on the train. I am going back to University of Toronto. It was a chore just getting to the train station. It is out in the suburbs, and since gas costs $2.15 a litre now, taking the car was out of the question. I took the bus, which was an adventure. Kingston Transit has started running a lot of school buses on regular bus routes. There are more drivers now, because the provincial government has relaxed restrictions on licensing; a former truck driver can now drive a bus with nothing more than a day of training. As a result, yellow school buses, which go to the train station, run every 3 minutes or so in front of my house. Getting on is a challenge, because there is only one door on school buses and so stops take twice as long as they did before. Also, there is barely enough room for my one suitcase - I have to pack light - under my seat. It ended up taking an hour to get to the train station on the bus, because the bus stopped everywhere to pick people up and drop them off.

When I got to the station, the platform was PACKED. There was a line of 5 school buses letting kids like us off, suitcases in hand. There weren't even very many parents wishing their kids goodbye - there wasn't enough room on the bus. The parking lot was, of course, almost empty, except for a few Mercedes and Lexuses owned by people who could afford to buy gas. Some of us, like me, were going to Toronto, but a lot of people were also going to Ottawa and Montreal. Apparently, tickets for this train sold out in July - it is September now, and luckily I thought ahead and bought a ticket early. There are extra trains running, but not nearly enough to cope with the demand. The train was 30 minutes late (VIA trains are never on time) and when it arrived, hundreds of people got off - presumably, they were Queen's students. We got on, taking all their seats.

On the train, I chatted with the girl sitting beside me. Her name was Sarah and she was also a student at U of T. She was studying environmental studies, so she was keenly aware of the issues surrounding peak oil, sustainable energy and global warming. Even before the oil crisis hit, she was worried about the consequences of our excessive oil consumption (largely due to the private automobile). She was active in the university's environmental club, which is raising funds to put solar panels on the roofs of university buildings and to make older buildings more energy efficient. It is also lobbying for better public transit, including a $6 billion dollar light rail plan for the city, and lower fares for students and the poor. She described how she bicycles everywhere, even in the winter. We exchanged email addresses before getting off the train.

I got off the train in Toronto. It was afternoon rush hour by then, and the train station was extremely packed, mostly due to people taking the GO Train (commuter trains). The subway was so packed that staff wouldn't let us in, so I decided to walk - people were walking on the streets, which were almost completely empty. It's quite a long walk to the university, especially with a heavy suitcase in hand - it took an hour to get to my residence. I checked in, and had only just gotten up to my room when the don called everybody to an "emergency meeting".

Usually, the meeting at the beginning of the year serves only to introduce ourselves to the people on the floor, and to go over basic rules (which I already knew, being in 2nd year). However, there were some new rules due to the oil crisis. Food rationing was now in effect in Toronto. There was a scary-looking police officer there, who distributed ration cards to everybody on our floor, after carefully checking our ID. He explained that to buy food, whether in the residence cafeteria or in grocery stores or restaurants, we had to present our ration cards. Our rations of meat and certain imported foods, like coffee, were very limited. In the cafeteria, we were no longer entitled to eat as much as we wanted. We had to swipe our ration cards when entering, and each meal cost 6 points; we were not allowed to take seconds. We were issued small portions of some vegetarian dish topped with a tiny amount of meat if we wanted, one slice of bread, one small glass of milk, and an apple. A dinner was probably about 800 calories, and a breakfast much less than that. It was never enough.

After eating a very small dinner, I went to the common room and watched TV. The news was sad. There were riots in the U.S., and even in Toronto there were reports of youths burning cars and assaulting drivers of SUVs. Gas cost $2.55 a litre, much more than it did in Kingston, and unemployment had reached 30% in the city of Toronto and up to 50% in the suburbs. To cheer myself up, I changed the channel - but watching Survivor hardly changed the new reality. Things were much worse in Toronto than they were in Kingston. I hoped that people like Sarah, the girl I met on the train, held solutions to this oil crisis. Could we get through the crisis with a little ingenuity - by developing alternative energy sources and by decreasing energy use? Did we still have hope?