I've been a negligent boy lately. Negligent for not paying enough attention to what's been going on in the Green Party with regards to the upcoming Biennial General Meeting, being held in Toronto this coming August. Motions have been available to be viewed on the Green Party's website for some time now, and just tonight I've finally started to turn my attention to them.
I, along with all on-line Greens, received a letter from Elizabeth May, telling me that the motions being proposed for the General Meeting are significant, and may end up changing the structure of the Party. May says that she could be forced to resign if some of the motions are passed. Serious stuff indeed. But going through these motions is going to take significant time, which is something that I haven't had as much of lately as I would like.
And my goodness, there are a LOT of motions being proposed. This is going to take longer than even I had hoped. It's no wonder that so many Greens are turned off by this process, that they don't bother to vote. You'd better be prepared for a marathon when you log in. And best of luck trying to figure out exactly how these governance-related motions will really work. I suppose the people who put all of this together figured voters could use some help. They have kindly provided a “Considerations” section as a preamble to the motions, which seeks to identify what the motion will do, whether there are conflicts with other motions being proposed or with existing by-laws of the Party. Swell.
Well, no, not so swell. Tonight, I decided to tackle those motions of primary importance to me, as CEO of the Sudbury Federal Green Party Association. Specifically, the 15 motions grouped under the “Organizing – EDA's” heading. What a marathon. Here are my observations on the first of many of the proposed motions.
But first, a quick discussion of those “Considerations” which preface the motions. In some cases, the “Considerations” are fairly short, and imply that the motion is seeking to codify an existing situation. Where I came across those Considerations, I was uncertain whether the situation described was really one which was in existence for everyone or not, but the situations did seem to largely be “best practices”. On first glance. When you dive into the actual wording of the motions, I was left with the impression that the situations being described in the motion were vague or ambiguous. Hardly the right approach for creating true best practices.
On other motions, the “Considerations” were quite lengthy, and in my opinion, biased against the motion. No surprise that these motions appear to have been sponsored by some members who have been vocal regarding their concerns with the Party's direction, either their blogposts or comments made on other blogs. The bias was very apparent to me, and in some cases, including misrepresentations about specifics of the motion itself (for example, motion G10-d12, the Considerations suggested that the Second clause of this motion contradicted the Constitution. No, it did not contradict; it created a situation which would be considered ambiguous, but it was not an outright contradiction. The use of the word “contradiction” here likely would bias a casual reader of this motion to potentially vote against it).
Interestingly, those Considerations failed to pick up on a glaring oversight perpetuated in many of the motions, sponsored by long-time Greens and some members of Federal Council. These motions often referred to “Riding Associations”, despite the fact that there are no such units in the Green Party of Canada. We have “Electoral District Associations” whose jurisdiction corresponds to many of the 308 Electoral Districts which comprise Canada. Just a small matter, you say? Maybe so...maybe we all know that a “Riding Association” and an “Electoral District Association” are intended to be the same thing...but what about those that don't know? What about those who go looking for a definition in our Constitution and fail to find one? What should they assume? Better: why the imprecision of the language used in the first place, especially when using the correct term required no greater effort?
Yet the Considerations failed to remark on this imprecise use of language. Indeed, the Considerations remained silent on a large number of ambiguous points.
EDA Responsibilities and Consequences
A number of the motions being considered will create numerous new responsibilities for EDA's, and set out consequences (financial and de-registration) as potential consequences for an EDA which does not follow these new responsibilities. All of these motions seem to have been sponsored by the same group of Greens. Since Ralph Benmurgi's name appears first (alphabetically) on the sponsor's list, I'll refer to these as the Benmurgi Resolutions (and they are: G10-c14 through c23).
The Benmurgi motions, taken together, will create new reporting and other requirements for EDA's beyond which are currently required by the Party. Many of these requirements are could be considered “best practices” in building responsible relationships between EDA's and the Central Party. However, the structure of these motions is problematic, due to the vague wording which is used. Although many EDA's and Central Party have great and wonderful relationships, there is sometimes friction. The Benmurgi motions, through their vagueness, completely stacks the deck against the EDA in favour of the Central Party. In short, the Benmurgi motions leave lots of room for interpretation, and since the consequences of not being responsible fall squarely and only on the shoulders of the EDA's, they're the ones who may end up getting burned due to a lack of precision in the language used.
By way of example, I offer the following (beyond the use of the term “Riding Association”, which is present in every motion, and which I've already explained really has no meaning as far as our Party's Constitution goes...one could suggest that since the Benmurgi motions refer to something which doesn't exist, they have will have no impact on the relationship between EDA's and the Central Party...but I'm not going to be that one this time).
G10-c14, Riding Association AGM's, requires that an EDA hold an AGM every 15 months, and that minutes are submitted in a timely manner to the Party. Seems pretty straight-forward, and certainly providing the minutes to the Party seems like a best practice. Except...who is the Party? There is no unit of the Party in the Constitution which is identified as “the Party”. Indeed, where the Constitution refers to the Party, it is implying each and every member and each and every unit. The Party is ALL OF US. So, as CEO of a “riding association” which has just had a General Meeting, who do I submit the Minutes to in order to be in compliance with this motion? Maybe I'll have to post them on the website somewhere, so all Greens can view them. Again, a lack of precision in language here, where imprecision wasn't necessary. Why not just say submit the minutes to the correct organizer, or maybe to the Chair of Federal Council, or to the Chair of Campaign Committee, or whoever would be the right position to send them to? Trivial? Maybe; but when it comes to best practices, ambiguity is problematic.
G10-c15 indicates that the Party (whatever that might be) must provide EDA's with candidate nomination rules. That's fine, I'll support this Benmurgi motion, but only because the motion doesn't require an EDA to use those rules. Hmmm...for those who thought otherwise, look again. EDA's were caught up in having to use Campaign Committee's candidate nomination rules last time because there were clauses in local constitutions which required the use of Central Party rules. I know because my EDA was one of them, and we had some issues with the rules. We amended our Constitution to change the requirement for using Central Party rules so that we are now responsible for making our own rules. The requirement for using Central Party rules was found in the original “template” constitution which our EDA had adopted, provided to us by the Party. Once we identified this issue, our members unanimously endorsed amending our Constitution so that we will have more autonomy in the future to develop rules which make sense in our Electoral District. Easy as pie...
G10-C16, however, seeks to change all of that. Part of this motion requires that an EDA has an adopted Constitution. Fine, great idea. But wait. The motion goes on to clarify that the Constitution of EDA's will be one “provided by the Party”. Hmmm...why not let EDA's create their own constitutions? Further, this motion goes on to indicate that any amendments to a local constitution must be approved by the Party. Yes, APPROVED. That's veto power over a local EDA's governance document folks, and that's very insightful as to where all of these Benmurgi motions are leading: together, they will severely curtail EDA autonomy.
Again, I'm not sure who “the Party” is here. Maybe that's all of us at a Biennial General Meeting (and won't it be fun to have to go through all of the local constitutional amendments as well the next time we have a BGM?). So...approval is required, but the by whom isn't identified. This is vague and ambiguous, and frankly shoddy work on the part of the sponsors, especially when there was no need to create this kind of ambiguity.
Allow me an aside here, regarding the “template” constitutions, which would presumably be the “basic” constitution referred to in this motion. Beyond the issue of who gets to set candidate nomination rules (which would also be impacted by this motion), there are other problems with the templates which have been provided to new EDA's. Specifically, the template constitutions indicate that only members in good standing are allowed to vote. This is in direct contradiction to the Green Party of Canada's Constitution, which (in By-law 1) indicates in Section 1.1.1 that all
Members have the right to vote. Section 1.3.1 refers to when a member ceases to be a member, and Section 1.3.1.4 clearly indicates that a member ceases to be a member only when not in good standing for 12 consecutive months or more. This means that “lapsed” members remain members and are eligible to vote, despite not being “members in good standing”. In this instance, the template provided by the Party is in contradiction to the Party's Constitution. I've brought this to the Party's attention in the past, and I've blogged about it as well, but nothing appears to have been done (unless this is addressed in a motion which I've not yet reviewed, which is possible).
One last thing about this motion: to which EDA's is it intended to apply? The motion says “Riding associations will adopt a basic constitution provided by the Party....” When I read this, to me it means that to be in complicance, the Sudbury EDA will have to go and adopt this new basic constitution, despite the fact that we already have a constitution. You have a different interpretation maybe, one which suggests that those EDA's with constitutions in place would be exempt? Why would you think that? It says “Riding Associations”, presumably meaning EDA's. It doesn't make any allowances for those with Constitutions in place already. The lack of additional language here implies that all EDA's will have to adopt the basic constitution. The motion could have been more specific if it intended otherwise. But it's not more specific.
Again, more evidence of a poorly worded motion leading to ambiguities. But what is clear is that this motion will strip EDA's of local autonomy.
G10-c17, riding associations will provide contact information for CEO's and FA's to the Party. Again, not sure who the Party is. However, this motion really is codifying a best practice. It galls me that we actually need something in our Constitution and by-laws to trigger this, but I understand that this has been an issue.
G10-c18 provides a process for the assets of de-registered EDA's to be transferred to the Party and held for up to 2 years, until a new EDA can be registered. I would like this if I knew to which unit of the Party the assets were to be transferred to. Also, I'm not sure what the mechanism for transfer will be. Will someone from the Central Party drive out to the EDA and pick up the banners and signs, or will the now-former CEO have to continue to store them in her garage?
G10-c19 requires that a copy of the local EDA's Constitution, certified by the CEO, be forwarded to the Party and kept on file. I see the need for the Central Party (presumably the National Office) to have on file the right copy of any local Constitution. What I don't understand, though, is the need to have a CEO certify a copy. First, if the earlier Benmurgi motions are passed, requiring all EDA's to adopt a new, basic Constitution, and only the Party can approve amendments to it, then the Party will always have a copy of the current Constitution on file.
I suppose that motion could fail, though, leaving the current situation. Since it's a best practice to submit a current copy of a local constitution to the National Office, I would generally have no problem with that. But...why a Certified copy? What does that mean anyway? That the CEO has to physically sign it, or will a simple email with the Constitution suffice? My interpretation is this: the CEO will have to sign it in front of a notary. That's the only way to “certify” a document. Why else would the motion use the word “certified” when it could have used the word “provided”? The CEO has no special powers of certification just by virtue of being a CEO. Do you disagree with my opinion? That's fine, and I guess we'll find out who is right about the term “certified” when it becomes an issue between the Central Party and your EDA. And as we'll see, those consequences could be significant.
G10-c20 requires that all Officers of the EDA be members in good standing. This Benmurgi motion is not in keeping with the approach to members set out in the GPC Constitution, however it doesn't actually contradict it, as it deals with a bit of a different issue. But I'm not sure why valid members of the Party should be denied being Officers of the EDA. Don't see it that way? Go back to the GPC Constitution and try to find where it says that lapsed members aren't members. You won't find it.
This Benmurgi motion is problematic for a few other reasons. First, it's not unusual for someone on a local Executive to forget to pay their Party dues right on time, even with all of the notices we receive from the Party to do so. Right now here in Sudbury we have a member of our Executive, who is also an Officer of our Association as per Elections Canada, who is a lapsed member (despite all of those reminders...and if you're reading this and you know who you are, please, pay up!). Many EDA's, though, have only the CEO and the FA identified as Officers. That may seem fine, and that may be the advice you've received from your organizer (it was the advice we received, given because every change of Officers needs to be documented with Elections Canada; the more officers, the more potential changes).
But what would happen to an EDA where both the CEO and the FA forget to pay their dues, if this motion is passed? This Benmurgi motion has no flexibility at all. It simply states that all Officers must be members in good standing. If an Officer is no longer a member in good standing, they are no longer an officer, file the paperwork with Elections Canada. If ALL Officers cease to be members in good standing and are no longer Officers of the EDA, what happens to the EDA? It goes bye-bye, that's what. There will no longer be continuity; there will be no one left to call an election of Officers or appoint them for that matter, because the EDA will have ceased to be.
Given that this motion is a) not in keeping with our Constitution, and b) seeks to create more situations where EDA's can fall apart through oversight, this Benmurgi motion deserves to bite the dust.
G10-c21, indicates that an EDA must provide all financial information as requested to do so by
Federal Council. At least this Benmurgi motion identified the appropriate requesting unit.
Anyway, this one seems harmless, right? But what if Fed Council has a real hate on for a particular EDA (and don't think it hasn't happened). Council requests a copy of each and every transaction, dating back to the establishment of the EDA (despite the fact that CEO and FA ran away to Mexico together, taking the only copies of the receipts with them). My point is that EDA's will have to comply with even the unreasonable requests from Fed Council. And not doing so could lead to serious consequences. Due to the vagueness of this motion, local autonomy for EDA's will suffer.
G10-c22 sets out the first set of consequences for not complying with the earlier Benmurgi motions: Your EDA may be denied it's portion of the funding it is supposed to receive through the Revenue Sharing Agreement (RSA). Seems like a fair consequence, eh? Maybe it would be if the requirements for compliance were clear. But they're not clear. They're vague and ambiguous, and open to interpretation. And therefore open to abuse.
If we pass these Benmurgi motions, EDA's will be surrendering an incredible amount of autonomy to the Central Party. The Benmurgi motions will completely alter the existing power structure of the Party, and completely in favour of the Central Party with little benefit and significant headaches to local EDA's. Remember that EDA's are comprised largely of volunteers who are just trying to do the best job they can (and the other part of our composition consists of volunteers who aren't trying to do the best job that they can, but I believe those people are a minority throughout Canada). Point is we're volunteers, and we get pretty demotivated when we're crapped on. The Benmurgi motions are a bit of a demotivator, to say the least.
Which leads us to G10-c23, the last Benmurgi motion, which indicates that EDA's which are not in compliance with a number of things, mainly those taken from previous Benmurgi motions, can be de-registered. There are a few extra things thrown in here for good measure which I'd like to explore.
First off, I understand that this motion will not mean that all non-compliant EDA's will be automatically de-registered by the Party. That would be foolish to think. However, given the number, and vagueness, of the items to which an EDA must be compliant, the door will be open for the Party to de-register an EDA very easily if this Benmurgi motion is passed.
This motion requires that an EDA's Constitution be consistent with the GPC Constitution. I agree that's a worthy cause, and we should always strive for consistency. But who determines what “consistent” really means? In my job, that's a word that I have to ponder a lot, “consistent”. I'm still not absolutely certain that I know the meaning. I like to think that I'll know consistency when I see it, but certainly my take on “consistent” is not at all “consistent” with that of others.
In short, there's a lot of disagreement about what it means to be consistent, at least in my workplace.
(If you're wondering what I'm going on about here, I work for the Provincial Government, and one of the land use planning policies that exists in legislation is that all decisions made by local governments, such as municipalities, made under the Planning Act shall be consistent with the provincial policy. So, was expanding that settlement area into prime agricultural land consistent with provincial policy? Maybe it was...maybe not. That's what we look at).
The point here is that an inconsistent Constitution, whatever that is, could get your EDA deregistered.
And what about if your EDA doesn't share the purposes of the Party? What does that mean, anyway? What if your EDA has nominated a candidate to run in the next election, but the Party decides that it's going to enter into a strategic voting pact with one or more of the other parties. First, who would have authorized such an action, and second, if your candidate was told not to run, how would that be in keeping with the purpose of the Party? Who gets to decide?
If the above example seems extreme, what about this one: and EDA is told to hold a candidate nomination meeting and follow the rules provided by the Party. But the rules are not in keeping with the Party's Constitution. What's the purpose of the Party here? To nominate candidates, or to do so in compliance with the Party's Constitution? Yet EDA's have been told to do just that in the past. So you could be damned if you do, and damned if you don't.
What I'm getting at here is that the wording is vague and open to considerable interpretation.
Yet all of the power for de-registration will lie with the Central Party. The scales will be tipped so far in favour of the Central Party, that if an EDA disagrees with even the interpretation of what it means to be compliant, they could still be out of luck. Not holding an AGM once every 15 months is one thing, but what about that “certified” copy of a constitution tucked away in a filing cabinet at National Headquarters? Or what about having a consistent constitution?
Here's my analysis: these Benmurgi motions go too far. There may be one or two which I can individually support, assuming that a “riding association” is intended to mean an EDA. But only G10-c14 and c15 seem to fall into that category. The others are too vague. They are ambiguous. And they are open to interpretation. And given that they will create a power structure within the Party which is completely tipped in favour of the Central Party, I can not support what they are trying to do.
Look, we keep saying that this is a grassroots party, and then we encounter this sort of attempt at power consolidation. I want to devote my time and effort to going out there and getting our nominated candidate elected, but instead here I am at 3 AM writing about yet another attempt at grabbing power being made by the Central Party (if you know who the sponsors of the Benmurgi motions are, you'll see that most are affiliated with Central Party governance).
Rather than club EDA's over the head with these new requirements and create situations where potentially non-compliance can lead very quickly to funding being withheld or an EDA being de-registered, why isn't the Central Party trying to support it's volunteer driven EDA's by establishing and codifying clear best practices, and providing EDA's with the tools necessary to carry them out? Some may feel that the Benmurgi motions seek to do just that, but if all that these motions wanted to do was codify best practices, why the imprecise language, which drastically tips the scales against local EDA autonomy? Sorry, but it looks to me like these motions are seeking to create every opportunity for the Central Party to punish what they view as wayward EDA's, and punish quickly and decisively.
And that's no way to run this Party.
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Speaking Against the Proposed Barrydowne Highway
Last night, I attended a very interesting public meeting on routes proposed for the Barrydowne Extension. If you're not from Sudbury, you're probably not familiar with this issue, which, along with its partner, the Maley Drive Extension, has been around now for about 20 years or so. However, if you live in an urban or suburban centre, you've probably run into the issue of extending roadways as a means to alter existing traffic flow. I'm reminded of what's currently going on in Ottawa with the Terry Fox Extension.
Some quick history and geography for background: New Sudbury is a suburban enclave on the old City of Sudbury's northeast corner. It is somewhat separated from the rest of Sudbury, and there are only a few major thoroughfares along which Sudburians can travel from New Sudbury to the older parts of Sudbury: you can travel west along Lasalle Blvd., and then south along Notre Dame; or you can travel south along Barrydowne Road (or Falconbridge Highway, which is a little further out), and then west on the Kingsway. That's pretty much the grid.
To the northwest of New Sudbury is the community of Garson, which has turned into a fairly suburban community over the past several decades, although it does have an older section. If you're travelling from Garson to Sudbury, you'll use the Falconbridge Highway, and either continue south to the Kingsway or head west into New Sudbury along Lasalle. Needless to say, at certain times of the day, all of these roads are quite congested, and especially Lasalle Blvd., which is the only east-west link north of the Kingsway.
North of Sudbury is the Valley. This sprawling series of communities consists of Val Caron, Val Therese, and Hanmer. About 25,000 people live there, and mostly on very large residential lots. If you live in the Valley, there are only two main ways to access Sudbury: you travel straight down a road which turns into Notre Dame, or you head around through Garson, and end up on Falconbridge. Neither way is direct from Hanmer. Picture a big circle, with Sudbury at the bottom and Hanmer at the top. The idea of the Barrydowne Extension is that instead of travelling along the circumference of the circle, this new road will connect the two communities through the diameter. And suburban New Sudbury will find itself at ground zero for this traffic.
When New Sudbury was built, apparently Barrydowne Road was only a two lane road. It headed north from Lasalle, and served the interior curvilinear cul-de-sacs and collector roads. It terminated essentially in the middle of nowhere, although Maley Drive was ultimately built so that Barrydowne doglegged to the east at Maley Drive, and connected with Falconbridge, the main highway between Sudbury and Garson and other communities (including Falconbridge, Skead and Capreol). When Cambrian College was built on Barrydowne, the road was widened to four lanes, and slices of property belonging to residential owners were expropriated at the time for the widening. Barrydowne has since turned into a bit of an arterial road, yet with people's driveways accessing directly on to the street, it still retains its residential feel to an extent.
The City has been moving ahead with extending Maley Drive westward from where it currently terminates at Barrydowne, bringing it all the way over to Notre Dame and beyond. There is to be a cloverleaf interchange at Maley and Notre Dame. The stated intent of this extension is to free up traffic along the Kingsway and especially Lasalle, which are the only two east-west corridors in the northern part of the City. People travelling from the Valley will now be able to use Maley Drive to access the shopping centres in New Sudbury along Lasalle at Barrydowne, and further south at Barrydowne and the Kingsway. The problem is, though, to do so, they'll be travelling through the very residential section of Barrydowne north of Lasalle, or filtering through some of the side-streets. Truck traffic may opt to head all the way over to Falconbridge, which would probably be a good thing, because Lasalle Blvd is currently quite clogged with trucks. However, with other options available to motorists and truckers alike, it's no surprise that the residents of New Sudbury are concerned about adding to the already extant traffic woes on what were supposed to be residential collector streets at best.
What is a surprise is that the residents of New Sudbury have been rather silent and unorganized in their opposition to Maley Drive, which is sure to change the character of their neighbourhood. Right now, it looks like Maley Drive is a done deal, although I heard last night that the City is still looking for funding partners from senior levels of government.
Enter the Barrydowne Extension, which will act as a Highway from Hanmer. And that's not an exaggeration. We learned last night that this new road, whatever route it is to take, will be a four lane divided highway, cutting straight through the wilderness for about 10 km. This will shave considerable distance on the round trip from Hanmer to New Sudbury. But it will strand motorists in a very residential section of New Sudbury with little choice but to clog Barrydowne Road between Maley Drive (where the divided highway is to end) and Lasalle Blvd. Again, this section of Barrydowne includes churches, Cambrian College, and numerous residential homes, mainly in the form of single-detached housing.
After seeing the plans for the Barrydowne Highway last night, I was reminded a little bit of how the Allen Expressway terminates abruptly at Eglinton Avenue in Toronto, in a fairly residential neighbourhood. Of course, at the time of the Allen's planning, the Spadina Expressway was supposed to cut through the heart of that residential neighbourhood, and was only stopped when residents banded together. Today, the situation on the ground there isn't the greatest, with traffic from the 401 forced to filter through the side streets south of Eglinton, or more often, just clog up Eglinton.
The difference with the Barrydowne Highway, though, is that there will be an extremely limited number of choices for motorists: they'll be able to head east or west along Maley Drive (although that won't really take people anywhere much; since the destinations are in New Sudbury, there's little point in heading away), or they'll be able to filter first eastward along Maley to Lansing, and through that residential neighbourhood down to Lasalle. The truth is, I can't see how most motorists would do anything other than to continue to head down Barrydowne to Lasalle, given that Wal-Mart and the New Sudbury Centre mall, and the power centre are all located on Barrydowne south of Lasalle.
If the Spadina Expressway was going to be a divide in an established residential area, the Barrydowne Highway is going to completely transform the traffic situation in New Sudbury.
At last night's meeting, which was ostensibly about route planning (although I don't think that the differences between the route options were ever discussed, including by the engineering consultant presenting...not that there was that much difference between those routes), the residents of New Sudbury went off on the City for entertaining what, in their minds, is a crazy idea which will destroy their community. The City listened, and to its credit, provided good responses when it could, even though most of the questions were clearly outside of the scope of what the public meeting was supposed to be about.
4 municipal councillors were in attendance to witness the fireworks, including Councillor Ted Callaghan, whose ward will be most impacted (although Callaghan won't be returning as Ward 8 Councillor, now that he's thrown his hat in the ring to contest the Mayor's position); Councillor Landry-Altman, from nearby Ward 12 (which includes the western part of New Sudbury along the top of which Maley Drive will run) was also there, along with exurban councillors Ron Dupuis (Ward 5; the southern part of the Valley) and Councillor Andre Rivest (Ward 6, Hanmer), who has been instrumental in moving the Barrydowne Extension issue forward through this term of Council. Also present was Leo Bisson, who is running for the position of Ward 8 Councillor, to replace Ted Callaghan. A meeting was held in Hanmer the night before, which I did not attend; however, I heard that the tone of the meeting there was substantially different from the tone of the New Sudbury meeting.
In short, residents were furious. They did not understand why consultation was taking place on this matter now; it appeared as if Barrydowne was going to be another “done deal” despite years of opposition. We learned from the City that the 2005 Transportation Study, prepared as background for the City's Official Plan, identified the Barrydowne Extension as a potential way of alleviating traffic volumes along Notre Dame, coming into the City from the Valley. That study, which may have been in part based on bloated population projections, called for further studies, and Council has continued to move forward. The Route Planning Study, prepared by AECOM Engineering, was the next step. The proposed routes were overflown by helicopters and mapping was prepared, including topographical cross-sections. All in all, when asked, the staggering price of $100,000 was offered up for the completion of this one study. Yet when asked about environmental features, such as wildlife habitat or significant wetlands, through which these proposed routes were to traverse, AECOM admitted that wasn't part of their mandate, and that consultation with outside agencies (presumably the Conservation Authority and the Ministry of Natural Resources) would only occur after the preferred route was selected for protection.
More than anything else, that really stung me. It boggles my mind that those charged with assessing the best route would leave those sorts of “environmental details” to a later date, while the engineering considerations (and there are many) for both suggested routes have received almost all of the attention. The blasting of rock and filling of wetlands seem to be more important to building a highway than the impacts on the natural features along its route. Again, I think the people of Ottawa opposing the Terry Fox Extension are familiar with this. No doubt it happens all of the time, because we treat the natural environment as an after-thought.
It also appeared that the residents of New Sudbury were going to be treated as afterthoughts as well. Unlike the fish, the birds and the deer, however, New Sudbury residents can actually voice their concerns, and get themselves organized to save their neighbourhood.
It wasn't all negativity last night. Some really good alternative suggestions for the very real traffic problem in New Sudbury were proposed by some of the residents. One enlightened resident suggested that the City look at putting funds into transit so that residents of the Valley would have better choices when making their way into the City. Currently, bus service to and from the Valley leaves a lot to be desired. It was also suggested that instead of focusing growth in the Valley (which is primarily car-oriented, very low density residential..which might explain the lousy bus service), why not either focus development within areas of the City which are more transit-supportive, or help Valley communities intensify, so that transit can become a more viable and economic option. Catering to car-culture, in times of rising gasoline prices, just didn't make sense any more. And no, this comment was not made by me!
The response was, of course, that this wasn't the mandate of this Study, and that you could bring those things forward at the review of the next Official Plan, or perhaps the Environmental Assessment process, blah blah. Essentially, these sorts of issues are too big for the City to grapple with, unless there seems to be some clear political direction. In a City where senior staff believe the City should be looking to the province to regulate drive-throughs in the same way that the province regulates smoking and pesticide use, I don't have a lot of hope that anyone is going to try to address changing our culture of building cities for cars rather than for people. At least, certainly not on their own initiative.
So that leaves it up to the people. We need to be bold, and we need to step forward and tell our elected officials that this isn't what we want for our community. I know that many people are skeptical of this approach. We often hear that “City Hall” just doesn't want to listen. There's some truth to that, but it's not always that way. Many municipal councillors really don't have an agenda beyond trying to do what's right or best for their constituents. For example, Councillor Rivest, I'm sure, believes that the Barrydowne Extension is a good thing, because it will mean easier access for his constituents to shopping and recreation in Sudbury. Councillor Landy-Altman and Candidate Leo Bisson may have serious concerns because of what will happen to their New Sudbury constituents.
For me, this isn't an issue which pits the access needs of Valley residents against the desires of New Sudbury to limit traffic volumes in their neighbourhoods. It's much bigger than that. It's about how we build cities, and for whom. It's about what priorities we, as residents of a City, have for our community. It's about the need to start thinking more about people, and less about cars, because frankly, there just aren't going to be as many cars on the road in the coming decades, as gas prices and poverty increase.
I believe that the cost of building the Barrydowne Highway could be better invested in things this City needs: more transit, better alternative transportation opportunities, such as pedestrian and cycling infrastructure. The goal should be to create a healthier, more eco-friendly community, rather than to continue to facilitate a car-culture, which will increasingly become the realm of the rich. Already in sprawling Sudbury, one third of our driving age residents rely on other forms of transportation to get around. Many of these people are living on fixed incomes. The Barrydowne Highway (even with bikes permitted on the shoulder) will do little for these members of our community. It will not contribute to creating a vibrant, healthy, sustainable community.
Luckily, the residents of New Sudbury have finally decided to get themselves organized. A few people volunteered to take this task on last night, so that residents could speak with a clear and united voice in opposition to this costly, neighbourhood destroying highway. When people band together, we can achieve remarkable results. There is still time to kill this highway. I expect that Sudburians from across the City will see the folly in proceeding, especially when a price-tag is attached. Right now, Maley Drive is up to an anticipated cost of $111 million, with the City intending to be on the hook for about $40 million or so (and currently without senior levels of government as funding partners, which may be troubling to the City given the orgy of roadwork which the feds have financed here already). How much might the Barrydowne Highway cost, in total? At least another hundred million, possibly several.
It's also time to begin treating the natural environment and greener transportation alternatives as more than just afterthoughts in the transportation planning process. For too long, building roads has been about engineering, and not about impacts on social matters, such as communities, or the natural environment. When you go out to the public and ask for input on preferred routes, it should no longer come as a surprise that the first question you're going to get is why on earth are you thinking about doing this in the first place, and have you explored any other alternatives? Are the population projections from the Official Plan playing themselves out now, 5 year later on? And do they continue to be supportable given the current and expected economic climate?
No, the Barrydowne Highway isn't what this City needs. All of the rest of us need to take a cue from what's going on in New Sudbury, as this issue is bigger than Wards 8 & 12; it effects all of us, because we pay taxes, and because we live here and dream of how great our community could be if we began to shift its priorities.
Some quick history and geography for background: New Sudbury is a suburban enclave on the old City of Sudbury's northeast corner. It is somewhat separated from the rest of Sudbury, and there are only a few major thoroughfares along which Sudburians can travel from New Sudbury to the older parts of Sudbury: you can travel west along Lasalle Blvd., and then south along Notre Dame; or you can travel south along Barrydowne Road (or Falconbridge Highway, which is a little further out), and then west on the Kingsway. That's pretty much the grid.
To the northwest of New Sudbury is the community of Garson, which has turned into a fairly suburban community over the past several decades, although it does have an older section. If you're travelling from Garson to Sudbury, you'll use the Falconbridge Highway, and either continue south to the Kingsway or head west into New Sudbury along Lasalle. Needless to say, at certain times of the day, all of these roads are quite congested, and especially Lasalle Blvd., which is the only east-west link north of the Kingsway.
North of Sudbury is the Valley. This sprawling series of communities consists of Val Caron, Val Therese, and Hanmer. About 25,000 people live there, and mostly on very large residential lots. If you live in the Valley, there are only two main ways to access Sudbury: you travel straight down a road which turns into Notre Dame, or you head around through Garson, and end up on Falconbridge. Neither way is direct from Hanmer. Picture a big circle, with Sudbury at the bottom and Hanmer at the top. The idea of the Barrydowne Extension is that instead of travelling along the circumference of the circle, this new road will connect the two communities through the diameter. And suburban New Sudbury will find itself at ground zero for this traffic.
When New Sudbury was built, apparently Barrydowne Road was only a two lane road. It headed north from Lasalle, and served the interior curvilinear cul-de-sacs and collector roads. It terminated essentially in the middle of nowhere, although Maley Drive was ultimately built so that Barrydowne doglegged to the east at Maley Drive, and connected with Falconbridge, the main highway between Sudbury and Garson and other communities (including Falconbridge, Skead and Capreol). When Cambrian College was built on Barrydowne, the road was widened to four lanes, and slices of property belonging to residential owners were expropriated at the time for the widening. Barrydowne has since turned into a bit of an arterial road, yet with people's driveways accessing directly on to the street, it still retains its residential feel to an extent.
The City has been moving ahead with extending Maley Drive westward from where it currently terminates at Barrydowne, bringing it all the way over to Notre Dame and beyond. There is to be a cloverleaf interchange at Maley and Notre Dame. The stated intent of this extension is to free up traffic along the Kingsway and especially Lasalle, which are the only two east-west corridors in the northern part of the City. People travelling from the Valley will now be able to use Maley Drive to access the shopping centres in New Sudbury along Lasalle at Barrydowne, and further south at Barrydowne and the Kingsway. The problem is, though, to do so, they'll be travelling through the very residential section of Barrydowne north of Lasalle, or filtering through some of the side-streets. Truck traffic may opt to head all the way over to Falconbridge, which would probably be a good thing, because Lasalle Blvd is currently quite clogged with trucks. However, with other options available to motorists and truckers alike, it's no surprise that the residents of New Sudbury are concerned about adding to the already extant traffic woes on what were supposed to be residential collector streets at best.
What is a surprise is that the residents of New Sudbury have been rather silent and unorganized in their opposition to Maley Drive, which is sure to change the character of their neighbourhood. Right now, it looks like Maley Drive is a done deal, although I heard last night that the City is still looking for funding partners from senior levels of government.
Enter the Barrydowne Extension, which will act as a Highway from Hanmer. And that's not an exaggeration. We learned last night that this new road, whatever route it is to take, will be a four lane divided highway, cutting straight through the wilderness for about 10 km. This will shave considerable distance on the round trip from Hanmer to New Sudbury. But it will strand motorists in a very residential section of New Sudbury with little choice but to clog Barrydowne Road between Maley Drive (where the divided highway is to end) and Lasalle Blvd. Again, this section of Barrydowne includes churches, Cambrian College, and numerous residential homes, mainly in the form of single-detached housing.
After seeing the plans for the Barrydowne Highway last night, I was reminded a little bit of how the Allen Expressway terminates abruptly at Eglinton Avenue in Toronto, in a fairly residential neighbourhood. Of course, at the time of the Allen's planning, the Spadina Expressway was supposed to cut through the heart of that residential neighbourhood, and was only stopped when residents banded together. Today, the situation on the ground there isn't the greatest, with traffic from the 401 forced to filter through the side streets south of Eglinton, or more often, just clog up Eglinton.
The difference with the Barrydowne Highway, though, is that there will be an extremely limited number of choices for motorists: they'll be able to head east or west along Maley Drive (although that won't really take people anywhere much; since the destinations are in New Sudbury, there's little point in heading away), or they'll be able to filter first eastward along Maley to Lansing, and through that residential neighbourhood down to Lasalle. The truth is, I can't see how most motorists would do anything other than to continue to head down Barrydowne to Lasalle, given that Wal-Mart and the New Sudbury Centre mall, and the power centre are all located on Barrydowne south of Lasalle.
If the Spadina Expressway was going to be a divide in an established residential area, the Barrydowne Highway is going to completely transform the traffic situation in New Sudbury.
At last night's meeting, which was ostensibly about route planning (although I don't think that the differences between the route options were ever discussed, including by the engineering consultant presenting...not that there was that much difference between those routes), the residents of New Sudbury went off on the City for entertaining what, in their minds, is a crazy idea which will destroy their community. The City listened, and to its credit, provided good responses when it could, even though most of the questions were clearly outside of the scope of what the public meeting was supposed to be about.
4 municipal councillors were in attendance to witness the fireworks, including Councillor Ted Callaghan, whose ward will be most impacted (although Callaghan won't be returning as Ward 8 Councillor, now that he's thrown his hat in the ring to contest the Mayor's position); Councillor Landry-Altman, from nearby Ward 12 (which includes the western part of New Sudbury along the top of which Maley Drive will run) was also there, along with exurban councillors Ron Dupuis (Ward 5; the southern part of the Valley) and Councillor Andre Rivest (Ward 6, Hanmer), who has been instrumental in moving the Barrydowne Extension issue forward through this term of Council. Also present was Leo Bisson, who is running for the position of Ward 8 Councillor, to replace Ted Callaghan. A meeting was held in Hanmer the night before, which I did not attend; however, I heard that the tone of the meeting there was substantially different from the tone of the New Sudbury meeting.
In short, residents were furious. They did not understand why consultation was taking place on this matter now; it appeared as if Barrydowne was going to be another “done deal” despite years of opposition. We learned from the City that the 2005 Transportation Study, prepared as background for the City's Official Plan, identified the Barrydowne Extension as a potential way of alleviating traffic volumes along Notre Dame, coming into the City from the Valley. That study, which may have been in part based on bloated population projections, called for further studies, and Council has continued to move forward. The Route Planning Study, prepared by AECOM Engineering, was the next step. The proposed routes were overflown by helicopters and mapping was prepared, including topographical cross-sections. All in all, when asked, the staggering price of $100,000 was offered up for the completion of this one study. Yet when asked about environmental features, such as wildlife habitat or significant wetlands, through which these proposed routes were to traverse, AECOM admitted that wasn't part of their mandate, and that consultation with outside agencies (presumably the Conservation Authority and the Ministry of Natural Resources) would only occur after the preferred route was selected for protection.
More than anything else, that really stung me. It boggles my mind that those charged with assessing the best route would leave those sorts of “environmental details” to a later date, while the engineering considerations (and there are many) for both suggested routes have received almost all of the attention. The blasting of rock and filling of wetlands seem to be more important to building a highway than the impacts on the natural features along its route. Again, I think the people of Ottawa opposing the Terry Fox Extension are familiar with this. No doubt it happens all of the time, because we treat the natural environment as an after-thought.
It also appeared that the residents of New Sudbury were going to be treated as afterthoughts as well. Unlike the fish, the birds and the deer, however, New Sudbury residents can actually voice their concerns, and get themselves organized to save their neighbourhood.
It wasn't all negativity last night. Some really good alternative suggestions for the very real traffic problem in New Sudbury were proposed by some of the residents. One enlightened resident suggested that the City look at putting funds into transit so that residents of the Valley would have better choices when making their way into the City. Currently, bus service to and from the Valley leaves a lot to be desired. It was also suggested that instead of focusing growth in the Valley (which is primarily car-oriented, very low density residential..which might explain the lousy bus service), why not either focus development within areas of the City which are more transit-supportive, or help Valley communities intensify, so that transit can become a more viable and economic option. Catering to car-culture, in times of rising gasoline prices, just didn't make sense any more. And no, this comment was not made by me!
The response was, of course, that this wasn't the mandate of this Study, and that you could bring those things forward at the review of the next Official Plan, or perhaps the Environmental Assessment process, blah blah. Essentially, these sorts of issues are too big for the City to grapple with, unless there seems to be some clear political direction. In a City where senior staff believe the City should be looking to the province to regulate drive-throughs in the same way that the province regulates smoking and pesticide use, I don't have a lot of hope that anyone is going to try to address changing our culture of building cities for cars rather than for people. At least, certainly not on their own initiative.
So that leaves it up to the people. We need to be bold, and we need to step forward and tell our elected officials that this isn't what we want for our community. I know that many people are skeptical of this approach. We often hear that “City Hall” just doesn't want to listen. There's some truth to that, but it's not always that way. Many municipal councillors really don't have an agenda beyond trying to do what's right or best for their constituents. For example, Councillor Rivest, I'm sure, believes that the Barrydowne Extension is a good thing, because it will mean easier access for his constituents to shopping and recreation in Sudbury. Councillor Landy-Altman and Candidate Leo Bisson may have serious concerns because of what will happen to their New Sudbury constituents.
For me, this isn't an issue which pits the access needs of Valley residents against the desires of New Sudbury to limit traffic volumes in their neighbourhoods. It's much bigger than that. It's about how we build cities, and for whom. It's about what priorities we, as residents of a City, have for our community. It's about the need to start thinking more about people, and less about cars, because frankly, there just aren't going to be as many cars on the road in the coming decades, as gas prices and poverty increase.
I believe that the cost of building the Barrydowne Highway could be better invested in things this City needs: more transit, better alternative transportation opportunities, such as pedestrian and cycling infrastructure. The goal should be to create a healthier, more eco-friendly community, rather than to continue to facilitate a car-culture, which will increasingly become the realm of the rich. Already in sprawling Sudbury, one third of our driving age residents rely on other forms of transportation to get around. Many of these people are living on fixed incomes. The Barrydowne Highway (even with bikes permitted on the shoulder) will do little for these members of our community. It will not contribute to creating a vibrant, healthy, sustainable community.
Luckily, the residents of New Sudbury have finally decided to get themselves organized. A few people volunteered to take this task on last night, so that residents could speak with a clear and united voice in opposition to this costly, neighbourhood destroying highway. When people band together, we can achieve remarkable results. There is still time to kill this highway. I expect that Sudburians from across the City will see the folly in proceeding, especially when a price-tag is attached. Right now, Maley Drive is up to an anticipated cost of $111 million, with the City intending to be on the hook for about $40 million or so (and currently without senior levels of government as funding partners, which may be troubling to the City given the orgy of roadwork which the feds have financed here already). How much might the Barrydowne Highway cost, in total? At least another hundred million, possibly several.
It's also time to begin treating the natural environment and greener transportation alternatives as more than just afterthoughts in the transportation planning process. For too long, building roads has been about engineering, and not about impacts on social matters, such as communities, or the natural environment. When you go out to the public and ask for input on preferred routes, it should no longer come as a surprise that the first question you're going to get is why on earth are you thinking about doing this in the first place, and have you explored any other alternatives? Are the population projections from the Official Plan playing themselves out now, 5 year later on? And do they continue to be supportable given the current and expected economic climate?
No, the Barrydowne Highway isn't what this City needs. All of the rest of us need to take a cue from what's going on in New Sudbury, as this issue is bigger than Wards 8 & 12; it effects all of us, because we pay taxes, and because we live here and dream of how great our community could be if we began to shift its priorities.
Monday, June 21, 2010
A Sad Day for Local Democracy in Greater Sudbury: City Shuts Down Public Input into Changes to Proposed Zoning By-law Related to Drive-throughs
I just returned home from a local council meeting. Or, more correctly, the continuation of a meeting of Planning Committee, which is a Committee of Council, consisting of 5 council members; they make recommendations to council on various sorts of land use matters. A meeting on the City's new zoning by-law was held on June 1st, and most of the issues related to the zoning by-law appeared to have been resolved, except for a matter related to rooming houses, which did get resolved at the meeting. However, out of the woodwork and at the last minute, there arose a new issue, brought to the City's attention by the Ontario Restaurant Hotel and Motel Association (ORHMA). They were very concerned with the City's modest proposal to regulate drive-throughs.
I was at the meeting on the 1st to discuss another matter (one I had blogged about earlier related to neighbourhood gardens, the fourth item in this blogpost). I was not particularly familiar with what the City had proposed to do, through zoning, to regulate drive-throughs, but from what I gathered it amounted to the following situation:
Currently, there are no restrictions on drive-throughs anywhere in the City. The City has an Official Plan which has a policy prohibiting drive-throughs in the downtown core, and one of the things the new zoning by-law would do would be to cast this prohibition into law. Further, drive-throughs, now identified as a specific land use, would be restricted to certain zones (C2 and C5 zones) whereas now they are able to locate just about anywhere. Also, there would be queuing requirements for the first time, meaning that new drive-throughs would need enough space on the ground for 13 vehicles to line up. And new setbacks from residential uses were also proposed: 15 metres from queuing lines to residential lot lines, and 30 metres from order boxes.
After almost 6 months of public consultation, ORHMA wrote a letter to the City, received on the day of the final public meeting. ORHMA took issue with just about everything proposed by the City. Up until that point, a local citizen's organization (of which I am a member) called The Coalition for a Livable Sudbury was the only person or public body to be on record about drive-throughs (The Coalition essentially said, “That's a good start, but really you should be regulating drive-throughs in certain identified high-traffic pedestrian, cycling and transit areas of the city, as drive-throughs have an impact on the pedestrians and cyclists and buses trying to get to where they are going due to vehicles queuing onto streets).
After listening to ORHMA's presentation at the June 1st meeting, I couldn't help but jumping up and speaking about this issue, as it was apparent to me that ORHMA's request for change was going to be taken seriously. A number of local fast food restaurant owners also spoke in favour of the changes requested. I didn't want Planning Committee to hear only one side of the issue, so I opened my big mouth and stepped right into it.
Interestingly, I had written a letter to the Sudbury Star just a few days before, based on a report prepared by Statistics Canada which arrived at the conclusion that Sudbury is the second dirtiest city in Canada when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions from personal vehicles. I posted this letter to my blogsite on May 26th, a couple of days before the meeting, so some of the numbers were fresh in my mind when I gave my off-the-cuff presentation. The Sudbury Star published my letter a week and a half ago (under the better and more concise headline: Sudbury second dirtiest city in Canada), which was timely, because I was urging people to come out and support the Sustainable Mobility Plan, prepared by Rainbow Routes. Council accepted this Plan last Wednesday night, June 16th. The plan calls for the City to make a priority of establishing more pedestrian and cycling infrastructure, and improvements to transit.
Back to June 1st. I talked a lot about climate change and how personal vehicle use contributes. I told Planning Committee that we can't stop vehicles from idling in many circumstances, such as when they are stuck in traffic or at rail crossings; decisions to idle or not are really up to the owner of the vehicles. What we can do, however, is create fewer opportunities for idling vehicles. Drive-throughs are a convenience, and one we now know we can live without. This convenience is needlessly contributing to our greenhouse gas emissions. It doesn't matter if cars become more fuel efficient, the fact is that vehicles cued in lines at drivethroughs almost invariably emit greenhouse gases when there is no good reason for it.
I indicated that I supported somewhat what the City appeared to be trying to do, by providing regulations which would make it a little more difficult for new drive-throughs to locate. A step in the right direction, if a very small one. Ultimately, Planning Committee deferred making a decision on this matter, and directed staff to meet with both ORHMA and the Coalition for a Livable Sudbury. Those meetings took place, and each side was able to expand on their issues and identify possible solutions.
City staff appear to have worked with ORHMA to address many of their issues, and proposed changes were provided to the public through a staff report released late on Friday afternoon (Planning Committee confirmed that they received the report at the same time). Gone was the approach of identifying drive-throughs as a specific use, and adopted was ORHMA's call to treat them as accessories. This seems a small change, but what it does is opens up all sorts of locations where drive-throughs can now choose to locate as-of-right, without going through a rezoning process. All commercial and industrial zones are now in play, whereas for 6 months up until last Friday, anyone picking up the draft zoning by-law would have seen these uses restricted to only C2 and C5 zones.
Setbacks were reduced to only 15 metres from residential lot lines. Queuing lines were down to 8 vehicles. Agreed, that this is still better than what we have today (no regulation), but it falls short of what Sudburians might have expected had they been reading the draft by-law.
What all of this means is that the City will accomplish its goals regarding drive-throughs by using a process called “Site Plan Control”. This is not a public process. There is no opportunity for meaningful public input. It's a discussion between the City and a developer, which, if the developer does not like, they can bump up to the Ontario Municipal Board, where it remains a process which provides no opportunity for meaningful input by the public. Had the starting point been an application to rezone, it would have been a public process. For all drive-throughs proposed outside of C2 and C5 zones, the public would have had an opportunity to be engaged under the original draft by-law; under the new proposal, too bad so sad, the door is closed and the public is being kept out.
A number of speakers identified this approach as a significant change from what was originally proposed. I was one of them. I suggested that it was incumbent on Planning Committee to take this back to the public. It was not right for this change to go forward now because ORHMA showed up at the last minute, and worked with staff to achieve just about everything that they wanted. And, having only a weekend to notify the public through the internet about this issue, it was simply unreasonable and undemocratic to move forward.
I didn't think that Planning Committee was going to be swayed by this argument, because they have other timelines to keep. So despite the fact that the draft by-law was experiencing this comprehensive change with extremely limited input from the public and at the very last possible moment in the public consultation process, it was not enough to sway 3 of 5 councillors from voting to accept the new changes and put an end to this process.
Councillors Calderelli and Berthiaume, at least, were not in favour of moving ahead at this time. Councillor Calderellli went so far as to suggest that she did not support the proposed changes, that they did not represent the values of our community as they relate to building sustainable, healthy communities. But Councillors Craig, Rivest and Dutrisac (who had been wavering) ultimately voted to accept the changes.
Now, the truth is, I doubt very much that I would have been satisfied with any outcome here, short of outlawing all new drive-throughs in the City, and that just wasn't in the cards. What I at least thought that Planning Committee might do is take this issue back to the public, in a similar manner in which the Rooming House issue played itself out. Given that the expression of concern from ORHMA arrived at the 11th hour of the public consultation process, and given that staff's proposed changes had been available for public consumption for 3 days, two of which were on the weekend, it seemed sensible to me that Planning Committee go and solicit more public input on the significant changes proposed. But no...it was more expedient to simply move ahead. They didn't even want to hear any other voices.
This was a very sad night for local democracy, no matter what your feelings about drive-throughs. When our elected officials shut the door on a severely flawed public process, the interests of the community are not served. I'm not naive enough to think that the ultimate resolution of this issue might have been any different than the one arrived at tonight, but without the benefit of hearing from the voices of the public who have been engaged in the public zoning process, the interests of our community can not have been served. You can't bait and switch at the last minute, substituting one approach for another at the very last minute, and say that the public had an opportunity to voice their opinion. There simply was not enough time.
What I hope to take away from this is that the City is at least taking some very modest steps to further regulate drive-throughs. The existing prohibition on drive-throughs in the City's downtown core was a positive start, and now some very small restrictions related to setbacks and queuing requirements are beginning to create a body of policy and regulation in this City which is moving this issue in a particular direction. The 5 year review of the City's Official Plan will be starting in just a few years. Time enough for those of us concerned about climate change to get out act together. I have no doubt that the Ontario Restaurant Hotel and Motel Association will be lobbying the City to remove the prohibition, and maybe even making an argument that drive-throughs are actually good for lowering emissions (I understand that they have the studies!). We will be ready to take them on, and we will be ready to tell our Council that combating climate change has to occur at all levels of decision making, including the municipal level. Drive-throughs are a part of the culture of convenience which we can no longer afford to indulge. Their time has come and gone.
We will be ready in 2012 for the 5 year Official Plan review. Game on.
I was at the meeting on the 1st to discuss another matter (one I had blogged about earlier related to neighbourhood gardens, the fourth item in this blogpost). I was not particularly familiar with what the City had proposed to do, through zoning, to regulate drive-throughs, but from what I gathered it amounted to the following situation:
Currently, there are no restrictions on drive-throughs anywhere in the City. The City has an Official Plan which has a policy prohibiting drive-throughs in the downtown core, and one of the things the new zoning by-law would do would be to cast this prohibition into law. Further, drive-throughs, now identified as a specific land use, would be restricted to certain zones (C2 and C5 zones) whereas now they are able to locate just about anywhere. Also, there would be queuing requirements for the first time, meaning that new drive-throughs would need enough space on the ground for 13 vehicles to line up. And new setbacks from residential uses were also proposed: 15 metres from queuing lines to residential lot lines, and 30 metres from order boxes.
After almost 6 months of public consultation, ORHMA wrote a letter to the City, received on the day of the final public meeting. ORHMA took issue with just about everything proposed by the City. Up until that point, a local citizen's organization (of which I am a member) called The Coalition for a Livable Sudbury was the only person or public body to be on record about drive-throughs (The Coalition essentially said, “That's a good start, but really you should be regulating drive-throughs in certain identified high-traffic pedestrian, cycling and transit areas of the city, as drive-throughs have an impact on the pedestrians and cyclists and buses trying to get to where they are going due to vehicles queuing onto streets).
After listening to ORHMA's presentation at the June 1st meeting, I couldn't help but jumping up and speaking about this issue, as it was apparent to me that ORHMA's request for change was going to be taken seriously. A number of local fast food restaurant owners also spoke in favour of the changes requested. I didn't want Planning Committee to hear only one side of the issue, so I opened my big mouth and stepped right into it.
Interestingly, I had written a letter to the Sudbury Star just a few days before, based on a report prepared by Statistics Canada which arrived at the conclusion that Sudbury is the second dirtiest city in Canada when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions from personal vehicles. I posted this letter to my blogsite on May 26th, a couple of days before the meeting, so some of the numbers were fresh in my mind when I gave my off-the-cuff presentation. The Sudbury Star published my letter a week and a half ago (under the better and more concise headline: Sudbury second dirtiest city in Canada), which was timely, because I was urging people to come out and support the Sustainable Mobility Plan, prepared by Rainbow Routes. Council accepted this Plan last Wednesday night, June 16th. The plan calls for the City to make a priority of establishing more pedestrian and cycling infrastructure, and improvements to transit.
Back to June 1st. I talked a lot about climate change and how personal vehicle use contributes. I told Planning Committee that we can't stop vehicles from idling in many circumstances, such as when they are stuck in traffic or at rail crossings; decisions to idle or not are really up to the owner of the vehicles. What we can do, however, is create fewer opportunities for idling vehicles. Drive-throughs are a convenience, and one we now know we can live without. This convenience is needlessly contributing to our greenhouse gas emissions. It doesn't matter if cars become more fuel efficient, the fact is that vehicles cued in lines at drivethroughs almost invariably emit greenhouse gases when there is no good reason for it.
I indicated that I supported somewhat what the City appeared to be trying to do, by providing regulations which would make it a little more difficult for new drive-throughs to locate. A step in the right direction, if a very small one. Ultimately, Planning Committee deferred making a decision on this matter, and directed staff to meet with both ORHMA and the Coalition for a Livable Sudbury. Those meetings took place, and each side was able to expand on their issues and identify possible solutions.
City staff appear to have worked with ORHMA to address many of their issues, and proposed changes were provided to the public through a staff report released late on Friday afternoon (Planning Committee confirmed that they received the report at the same time). Gone was the approach of identifying drive-throughs as a specific use, and adopted was ORHMA's call to treat them as accessories. This seems a small change, but what it does is opens up all sorts of locations where drive-throughs can now choose to locate as-of-right, without going through a rezoning process. All commercial and industrial zones are now in play, whereas for 6 months up until last Friday, anyone picking up the draft zoning by-law would have seen these uses restricted to only C2 and C5 zones.
Setbacks were reduced to only 15 metres from residential lot lines. Queuing lines were down to 8 vehicles. Agreed, that this is still better than what we have today (no regulation), but it falls short of what Sudburians might have expected had they been reading the draft by-law.
What all of this means is that the City will accomplish its goals regarding drive-throughs by using a process called “Site Plan Control”. This is not a public process. There is no opportunity for meaningful public input. It's a discussion between the City and a developer, which, if the developer does not like, they can bump up to the Ontario Municipal Board, where it remains a process which provides no opportunity for meaningful input by the public. Had the starting point been an application to rezone, it would have been a public process. For all drive-throughs proposed outside of C2 and C5 zones, the public would have had an opportunity to be engaged under the original draft by-law; under the new proposal, too bad so sad, the door is closed and the public is being kept out.
A number of speakers identified this approach as a significant change from what was originally proposed. I was one of them. I suggested that it was incumbent on Planning Committee to take this back to the public. It was not right for this change to go forward now because ORHMA showed up at the last minute, and worked with staff to achieve just about everything that they wanted. And, having only a weekend to notify the public through the internet about this issue, it was simply unreasonable and undemocratic to move forward.
I didn't think that Planning Committee was going to be swayed by this argument, because they have other timelines to keep. So despite the fact that the draft by-law was experiencing this comprehensive change with extremely limited input from the public and at the very last possible moment in the public consultation process, it was not enough to sway 3 of 5 councillors from voting to accept the new changes and put an end to this process.
Councillors Calderelli and Berthiaume, at least, were not in favour of moving ahead at this time. Councillor Calderellli went so far as to suggest that she did not support the proposed changes, that they did not represent the values of our community as they relate to building sustainable, healthy communities. But Councillors Craig, Rivest and Dutrisac (who had been wavering) ultimately voted to accept the changes.
Now, the truth is, I doubt very much that I would have been satisfied with any outcome here, short of outlawing all new drive-throughs in the City, and that just wasn't in the cards. What I at least thought that Planning Committee might do is take this issue back to the public, in a similar manner in which the Rooming House issue played itself out. Given that the expression of concern from ORHMA arrived at the 11th hour of the public consultation process, and given that staff's proposed changes had been available for public consumption for 3 days, two of which were on the weekend, it seemed sensible to me that Planning Committee go and solicit more public input on the significant changes proposed. But no...it was more expedient to simply move ahead. They didn't even want to hear any other voices.
This was a very sad night for local democracy, no matter what your feelings about drive-throughs. When our elected officials shut the door on a severely flawed public process, the interests of the community are not served. I'm not naive enough to think that the ultimate resolution of this issue might have been any different than the one arrived at tonight, but without the benefit of hearing from the voices of the public who have been engaged in the public zoning process, the interests of our community can not have been served. You can't bait and switch at the last minute, substituting one approach for another at the very last minute, and say that the public had an opportunity to voice their opinion. There simply was not enough time.
What I hope to take away from this is that the City is at least taking some very modest steps to further regulate drive-throughs. The existing prohibition on drive-throughs in the City's downtown core was a positive start, and now some very small restrictions related to setbacks and queuing requirements are beginning to create a body of policy and regulation in this City which is moving this issue in a particular direction. The 5 year review of the City's Official Plan will be starting in just a few years. Time enough for those of us concerned about climate change to get out act together. I have no doubt that the Ontario Restaurant Hotel and Motel Association will be lobbying the City to remove the prohibition, and maybe even making an argument that drive-throughs are actually good for lowering emissions (I understand that they have the studies!). We will be ready to take them on, and we will be ready to tell our Council that combating climate change has to occur at all levels of decision making, including the municipal level. Drive-throughs are a part of the culture of convenience which we can no longer afford to indulge. Their time has come and gone.
We will be ready in 2012 for the 5 year Official Plan review. Game on.
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Is the Green Party Ready for a Shot-Gun Wedding of the Liberals and the NDP?
It’s beginning to look like something serious really is going on behind-the-scenes with the Liberals and NDP. Today, CBC News is reporting that talks are on regarding a possible merger: Liberal-NDP Insiders Talk Merger. Liberal insider Warren Kinsella, former advisor to Jean Chretien, is reported by CBC as saying, "The reality is that we (the Liberals) are in a bad position. Serious people are involved in discussions at a serious level." So, it really does look like the potential of a merger is being investigaed, as per Chretien’s "If it’s doable, do it" sentiment expressed last week.
The merger talks appear to be on, despite the apparent denial by both the Liberal Party and the NDP that talks are taking place. Michael Ignatieff, the Liberal Leader, apparently had slammed the door shut on the possibility of a coalition with the NDP, not to mention to a merger. Why should Ignatieff be honest with Canadians about what’s going on behind closed doors? These parties have never been truly honest with Canadians about what they would do if they formed government, so why start now?
I’m not certain that a merger between the Liberals and NDP would be in the interests of Canadians, but I’m leaving the door open to the possibility that it might be. Certainly, any party being led by Michael "Tar Sands Forever" Ignatieff is, in my books, a non-starter. The Liberal Party of Canada, as currently constituted, has nothing of value to add to the Canadian conversation about the future which we need to engage in...other than to pipe up and say, "We’re not the Stephen Harper Conservatives!", which might be the single valid point they bring to the conversation. Still, that’s not enough.
The NDP, however, occupies a bit of a different location on the spectrum of addressing many of the issues the Liberals and Conservatives both fail to acknowledge as important issues. Certainly the NDP have been far more pro-active on climate change; it was an NDP private-members bill which eventually became the Climate Change Accountability Act, which while still a very flawed piece of legislation (it says little about how Canada will actually achieve the ambitious CO2 reduction targets it sets), is still a step in the right direction. From a policy perspective, the NDP has a lot to offer in terms of framing a conversation about the future.
From an implementation perspective, however, the NDP has traditionally proven itself to be another woeful example of how a mainstream party talks the talk while in opposition, but once in power, all of its ambition goes out of the window. Now, I know that the Federal NDP has never been in power, however it’s Provincial Partners have formed governments in B.C., Ontario, Saskatchewan, and most recently in Nova Scotia. By way of example, all of these Provincial NDP parties say that they believe in democratic renewal and the need to assess changes to our electoral systems, some with a bent towards implementing proportional representation to better elect a parliament which reflects the true will of voters. However, in power, none of these parties have done anything to actually address the democratic deficit (Liberal parties in both B.C. and Ontario held lop-sided referendums, but the NDP hasn’t ever walked their talk).
Further, the NDP continues to be mired in the politics of yesterday. It continues to view our political reality as carefully segmented into discrete issues: the economy; the environment; housing; etc. Although it has started to move in a direction of addressing all issues holistically through interconnected policy proposals (linking housing and poverty, for example, to building better communities), the NDP can’t seem to adequately wrap its head around why it’s important for local solutions to be discussed and implemented around matters which affect individuals. Truly, the NDP remains a party of "big government", looking for big solutions to problems which might better be served by more local initiatives. In the year 2010, to me, this is further evidence that the NDP remains stuck in the politics of the brown economy.
And finally, the NDP is very good with production value. They are a slick political machine, excellent at staying on message. I’m not sure that any government run by Jack Layton would be all that different than Stephen Harper’s in terms of command and control from the centre. The NDP have invested heavily in the sound-bite politics of spin. While one can argue that they’ve also experiences some real electoral successes from such investment, I would suggest that this is not the sort of politics that Canada needs to address the very real issues facing us in the next several decades. Partisan rhetoric and politicking will do little to lay the necessary groundwork to move Canada from a fossil fuel-based economy to a green economy.
If the NDP and the Liberals get their collective acts together before the next election or not remains to be seen. I strongly suspect that they won’t, and I don’t even think that they will have a riding-by-riding agreement not to oppose each other. I do, however, suspect that if the numbers work out after the next election, we could be in for a Liberal-NDP government, likely supported by the Bloc, and potentially by other parties (like the Greens) on an issue-by-issue basis.
However, what might happen if a merger proves to be successful? And how might that impact the Green Party? Of course, the answer to these questions would depend on the resolution of two big issues: what sorts of policies would the "Liberal Democrats" adopt, and who would lead the Party.
Regarding policies, given issues related to timing, the new Liberal Democrats might have to ask Canadians to trust them, while putting out a hasty and vaguely worded platform which would appeal to centre-left voters. Details likely would be filled in later. In many respects, this is where the Liberal Party seems to be headed today anyway: "Trust us, we’ll do well by you. Oh, and we’re not the Harper Conservatives". The Liberal Democrats, however, would be able to add the post-script, "We’ll get our act together in short order, when there’s a little more time, after the election when we form government". Essentially, voters will be asked to cast their ballots based on hope, rather than ideas. Since it’s already been suggested that elections are notoriously poor times to have policy discussions anyway, the Liberal Democrats could certainly pull off winning without saying much about what, exactly, they might do with the power they’re asking Canadians to give to them.
The Leader question is much more relevant. A recent poll has suggested that Jack Layton, or even Bob Rae, would be a much better leader of a united Liberal/NDP government than Ignatieff. Since many Libs want to dump the underperforming Iggy anyway, I just could not see Ignatieff leading a new party. So...what about Jack Layton? I admire Layton, although I wish that he weren’t so slick and would actually address real issues rather than grandstanding. But I would have to think that as part of the Liberal concession, a leader would have to come from their ranks. So, what about Bob?
Now, I understand that Bob Rae has a lot of baggage, both with voters and in his own Party. He might even carry more baggage as a result of a Liberal/NDP merger, as I understand that there are many in the NDP who see him as a turncoat traitor (I wonder why). I don’t know if he would be palatable to a new party, but I think a Liberal Democrat party would be well-served.
Of course, outsiders should also be considered: how about Roy Romanow, or even Dalton McGuinty? McGuinty, in particular, would be well-suited to lead, given his more fiscally-conservative leanings.
Now, what about the Green Party? A Liberal-NDP merger would present both an opportunity and a threat to the Green Party. The threat comes from the notion that the "left" is uniting in an effort to dump Harper, so why should voters turn to the Green Party when the goal is to oust the Conservatives? Don’t discount this threat, as it’s very real. However, I believe that the opportunities for our Party are far greater.
Greens would be able to benefit by making a clear impression with Canadians that our Party offers an even more real alternative between a new form of science and policy-led democracy on the one hand, and partisan politicking on the other. With a platform which outlines what, exactly, voters could expect if they elected Greens, we would likely be ahead of an airy-fairy "vote for us, we’ll figure these things out later" Liberal-NDP merged Party. Further, we could use this opportunity to play up our fiscally-responsible approach to budgeting, including putting a price on carbon (and set out how, exactly, we would do that). Canadians, I would hope, would be able to compare our approaches to that of the other Parties: where we’ve given some thought to doing things, and doing them well and differently, the other parties continue to offer vague promises with little or nothing tangible attached.
Greens need to start thinking about how we would strategically place ourselves should the federal political landscape suddenly shift. As a first priority, we should engage in significant outreach to disenchanted NDP and Liberals, especially those currently in parliament. I’m not suggesting that Stephane Dion would be one of the disenchanted, but his personal politics have always appeared to me to be much closer with our party’s ideology than that of his own. At the very least, we should start courting him and others. And then there are the "blue Liberals" who might not feel at home in a merger with the NDP, and who could see the financially sound policies our Party has on offer.
To take advantage, though, we’ll need to have our Leader do the bulk of the work with sitting MP’s. We need to start outreach at lower levels right now, including at the EDA level in those areas like Sudbury where one or the other of the Liberal or NDP currently have an MP. If those two parties merge, there will be a few upset locals, including some currently nominated candidates, who may have to give up their dreams of parliament in favour of an incumbent from the "other side". Nominated NDP candidates with an environmental bent in particular might make excellent acquisitions. We need to start thinking ahead.
Now, some in the Green Party might think that ending up in bed with the Liberals and NDP would benefit Canada and the environmental movement. They may rationalize that if we added our 10% of the vote share to a United Left movement, the anticipated benefits from ousting Harper would outweigh our lack of involvement, so let’s jump on the bandwagon. To those Greens, I really want to point out that a united Liberal-NDP party would still represent the old way of thinking about politics, and more importantly, thinking about "big government" solutions to the many issues facing Canada today.
A Liberal-Democrat Party would surely remain beholden to the interests of corporate Canada at the expense of being able to move forward with real reform in areas where its needed. The "environment" (whatever that is) would remain a secondary afterthought, while the "economy" (whatever that is) would continue to be placed at the fore-front of policy and legislative initiatives. Instead of looking at the environment and the economy as parts of a wider system, the political culture of both of these to-be-merged parties would continue to lead Canada in a direction which is ultimately not beneficial for Canadians.
In short, if Greens want a green government, we need to encourage voters to cast their ballots for a Green Party. And right now, that’d be us: the Green Party of Canada. It won’t be the Liberal-Democrats.
While I agree that getting rid of the Conservatives would be a wonderful, liberating, and sublime experience, I’m not sure that there is a lot of real benefit with believing that a merged Liberal/NDP would take the real step which need to be taken to address the many issues Canada is facing. Both the Liberals and the NDP are part of the current problem with democracy in this country. I just don’t see how a shot-gun wedding of these two parties could truly be part of a solution.
(originally posted at Green Party of Canada blogsite)
The merger talks appear to be on, despite the apparent denial by both the Liberal Party and the NDP that talks are taking place. Michael Ignatieff, the Liberal Leader, apparently had slammed the door shut on the possibility of a coalition with the NDP, not to mention to a merger. Why should Ignatieff be honest with Canadians about what’s going on behind closed doors? These parties have never been truly honest with Canadians about what they would do if they formed government, so why start now?
I’m not certain that a merger between the Liberals and NDP would be in the interests of Canadians, but I’m leaving the door open to the possibility that it might be. Certainly, any party being led by Michael "Tar Sands Forever" Ignatieff is, in my books, a non-starter. The Liberal Party of Canada, as currently constituted, has nothing of value to add to the Canadian conversation about the future which we need to engage in...other than to pipe up and say, "We’re not the Stephen Harper Conservatives!", which might be the single valid point they bring to the conversation. Still, that’s not enough.
The NDP, however, occupies a bit of a different location on the spectrum of addressing many of the issues the Liberals and Conservatives both fail to acknowledge as important issues. Certainly the NDP have been far more pro-active on climate change; it was an NDP private-members bill which eventually became the Climate Change Accountability Act, which while still a very flawed piece of legislation (it says little about how Canada will actually achieve the ambitious CO2 reduction targets it sets), is still a step in the right direction. From a policy perspective, the NDP has a lot to offer in terms of framing a conversation about the future.
From an implementation perspective, however, the NDP has traditionally proven itself to be another woeful example of how a mainstream party talks the talk while in opposition, but once in power, all of its ambition goes out of the window. Now, I know that the Federal NDP has never been in power, however it’s Provincial Partners have formed governments in B.C., Ontario, Saskatchewan, and most recently in Nova Scotia. By way of example, all of these Provincial NDP parties say that they believe in democratic renewal and the need to assess changes to our electoral systems, some with a bent towards implementing proportional representation to better elect a parliament which reflects the true will of voters. However, in power, none of these parties have done anything to actually address the democratic deficit (Liberal parties in both B.C. and Ontario held lop-sided referendums, but the NDP hasn’t ever walked their talk).
Further, the NDP continues to be mired in the politics of yesterday. It continues to view our political reality as carefully segmented into discrete issues: the economy; the environment; housing; etc. Although it has started to move in a direction of addressing all issues holistically through interconnected policy proposals (linking housing and poverty, for example, to building better communities), the NDP can’t seem to adequately wrap its head around why it’s important for local solutions to be discussed and implemented around matters which affect individuals. Truly, the NDP remains a party of "big government", looking for big solutions to problems which might better be served by more local initiatives. In the year 2010, to me, this is further evidence that the NDP remains stuck in the politics of the brown economy.
And finally, the NDP is very good with production value. They are a slick political machine, excellent at staying on message. I’m not sure that any government run by Jack Layton would be all that different than Stephen Harper’s in terms of command and control from the centre. The NDP have invested heavily in the sound-bite politics of spin. While one can argue that they’ve also experiences some real electoral successes from such investment, I would suggest that this is not the sort of politics that Canada needs to address the very real issues facing us in the next several decades. Partisan rhetoric and politicking will do little to lay the necessary groundwork to move Canada from a fossil fuel-based economy to a green economy.
If the NDP and the Liberals get their collective acts together before the next election or not remains to be seen. I strongly suspect that they won’t, and I don’t even think that they will have a riding-by-riding agreement not to oppose each other. I do, however, suspect that if the numbers work out after the next election, we could be in for a Liberal-NDP government, likely supported by the Bloc, and potentially by other parties (like the Greens) on an issue-by-issue basis.
However, what might happen if a merger proves to be successful? And how might that impact the Green Party? Of course, the answer to these questions would depend on the resolution of two big issues: what sorts of policies would the "Liberal Democrats" adopt, and who would lead the Party.
Regarding policies, given issues related to timing, the new Liberal Democrats might have to ask Canadians to trust them, while putting out a hasty and vaguely worded platform which would appeal to centre-left voters. Details likely would be filled in later. In many respects, this is where the Liberal Party seems to be headed today anyway: "Trust us, we’ll do well by you. Oh, and we’re not the Harper Conservatives". The Liberal Democrats, however, would be able to add the post-script, "We’ll get our act together in short order, when there’s a little more time, after the election when we form government". Essentially, voters will be asked to cast their ballots based on hope, rather than ideas. Since it’s already been suggested that elections are notoriously poor times to have policy discussions anyway, the Liberal Democrats could certainly pull off winning without saying much about what, exactly, they might do with the power they’re asking Canadians to give to them.
The Leader question is much more relevant. A recent poll has suggested that Jack Layton, or even Bob Rae, would be a much better leader of a united Liberal/NDP government than Ignatieff. Since many Libs want to dump the underperforming Iggy anyway, I just could not see Ignatieff leading a new party. So...what about Jack Layton? I admire Layton, although I wish that he weren’t so slick and would actually address real issues rather than grandstanding. But I would have to think that as part of the Liberal concession, a leader would have to come from their ranks. So, what about Bob?
Now, I understand that Bob Rae has a lot of baggage, both with voters and in his own Party. He might even carry more baggage as a result of a Liberal/NDP merger, as I understand that there are many in the NDP who see him as a turncoat traitor (I wonder why). I don’t know if he would be palatable to a new party, but I think a Liberal Democrat party would be well-served.
Of course, outsiders should also be considered: how about Roy Romanow, or even Dalton McGuinty? McGuinty, in particular, would be well-suited to lead, given his more fiscally-conservative leanings.
Now, what about the Green Party? A Liberal-NDP merger would present both an opportunity and a threat to the Green Party. The threat comes from the notion that the "left" is uniting in an effort to dump Harper, so why should voters turn to the Green Party when the goal is to oust the Conservatives? Don’t discount this threat, as it’s very real. However, I believe that the opportunities for our Party are far greater.
Greens would be able to benefit by making a clear impression with Canadians that our Party offers an even more real alternative between a new form of science and policy-led democracy on the one hand, and partisan politicking on the other. With a platform which outlines what, exactly, voters could expect if they elected Greens, we would likely be ahead of an airy-fairy "vote for us, we’ll figure these things out later" Liberal-NDP merged Party. Further, we could use this opportunity to play up our fiscally-responsible approach to budgeting, including putting a price on carbon (and set out how, exactly, we would do that). Canadians, I would hope, would be able to compare our approaches to that of the other Parties: where we’ve given some thought to doing things, and doing them well and differently, the other parties continue to offer vague promises with little or nothing tangible attached.
Greens need to start thinking about how we would strategically place ourselves should the federal political landscape suddenly shift. As a first priority, we should engage in significant outreach to disenchanted NDP and Liberals, especially those currently in parliament. I’m not suggesting that Stephane Dion would be one of the disenchanted, but his personal politics have always appeared to me to be much closer with our party’s ideology than that of his own. At the very least, we should start courting him and others. And then there are the "blue Liberals" who might not feel at home in a merger with the NDP, and who could see the financially sound policies our Party has on offer.
To take advantage, though, we’ll need to have our Leader do the bulk of the work with sitting MP’s. We need to start outreach at lower levels right now, including at the EDA level in those areas like Sudbury where one or the other of the Liberal or NDP currently have an MP. If those two parties merge, there will be a few upset locals, including some currently nominated candidates, who may have to give up their dreams of parliament in favour of an incumbent from the "other side". Nominated NDP candidates with an environmental bent in particular might make excellent acquisitions. We need to start thinking ahead.
Now, some in the Green Party might think that ending up in bed with the Liberals and NDP would benefit Canada and the environmental movement. They may rationalize that if we added our 10% of the vote share to a United Left movement, the anticipated benefits from ousting Harper would outweigh our lack of involvement, so let’s jump on the bandwagon. To those Greens, I really want to point out that a united Liberal-NDP party would still represent the old way of thinking about politics, and more importantly, thinking about "big government" solutions to the many issues facing Canada today.
A Liberal-Democrat Party would surely remain beholden to the interests of corporate Canada at the expense of being able to move forward with real reform in areas where its needed. The "environment" (whatever that is) would remain a secondary afterthought, while the "economy" (whatever that is) would continue to be placed at the fore-front of policy and legislative initiatives. Instead of looking at the environment and the economy as parts of a wider system, the political culture of both of these to-be-merged parties would continue to lead Canada in a direction which is ultimately not beneficial for Canadians.
In short, if Greens want a green government, we need to encourage voters to cast their ballots for a Green Party. And right now, that’d be us: the Green Party of Canada. It won’t be the Liberal-Democrats.
While I agree that getting rid of the Conservatives would be a wonderful, liberating, and sublime experience, I’m not sure that there is a lot of real benefit with believing that a merged Liberal/NDP would take the real step which need to be taken to address the many issues Canada is facing. Both the Liberals and the NDP are part of the current problem with democracy in this country. I just don’t see how a shot-gun wedding of these two parties could truly be part of a solution.
(originally posted at Green Party of Canada blogsite)
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Greater Sudbury's Personal Vehicles Disproportionately Fuel Climate Change
A recently released report from Statistics Canada, "Greenhouse gas emissions from private vehicles, 1990 to 2007" shows that, on average, Greater Sudbury is now the second dirtiest city in Canada. The study, available through the Statistics Canada website, provides some startling revelations for anyone who lives in a community where residents rely primarily on cars to get around town (click here for the study's highlights).
The study reports that the Transportation Sector produces approximately 27% of all greenhouse gases generated in Canada. Of that, road transportation accounts for 69%. On average, 2,149 kilograms of greenhouse gas emissions are produced for every Canadian from personal vehicle use alone!
Of course, not everyone contributes equally to the production of greenhouse gases from personal vehicles. People who don’t own vehicles, for example, contribute nothing to these totals, yet they are impacted just as much by rising emission levels. According to Statistics Canada, the wealthiest amongst us (those making more than $100,000 a year) produce, on average, a staggering 5,737 kg of greenhouse gas emissions from personal vehicle use.
In Greater Sudbury, 2,844 kg of greenhouse gases are produced from personal vehicles for every resident, which makes us the second dirtiest city in Canada, behind only Kingston (at 3,035 kg per person). In contrast, Montreal, Canada’s lowest level per capita emitter, produces only 1,219 kg of greenhouse gases per person from personal vehicles.
There is no question that Greater Sudbury profited from the economic boom of the last decade. While there were economic benefits, we must acknowledge that we’ve made choices which have led to our disproportionate contribution to Canada’s greenhouse gas emission totals. These greenhouse gas emissions are fuelling the climate crisis.
To compensate, we need to start making investments in alternative means of transportation, in order to better facilitate walking, cycling and public transit use. A significant number of Sudburians do not own personal vehicles, and many more are choosing to leave their cars at home in an effort to make a real contribution in the fight against climate change. However, as many Sudburians can attest, it’s not exactly easy getting around this city on foot or by bicycle. This has got to change.
While there remains the need to improve infrastructure for cars, we can’t neglect necessary improvements for those making green transportation choices, whether by design or because of personal economic circumstances. We need safe, well-designed sidewalks and pedestrian crossings, especially for seniors and for those living in outlying areas. Designated lanes on major roads for bicycles, and more public bike storage will encourage more cyclists to take to the road without fearing for their personal security.
Together, we can do a lot to improve our community without significant cost. Mainly, what’s required is a change in the way we think about transportation. In our community, Rainbow Routes has recently been leading an exercise to produce a Sustainable Mobility Plan for active transportation. A presentation before Council is currently scheduled for the evening of June 16th, 2010, at Tom Davies Square. Efforts like these are a good start in moving forward with changing perceptions about transportation.
Let’s all try to lower Greater Sudbury’s overall greenhouse gas emissions by making the healthy choice to leave our personal vehicles at home a little more often. It’s time to start thinking more about walking, cycling or taking the bus.
(originally submitted as a letter to the Editor of the Sudbury Star, May 20 2010; as of this date, the above letter has not been published)
The study reports that the Transportation Sector produces approximately 27% of all greenhouse gases generated in Canada. Of that, road transportation accounts for 69%. On average, 2,149 kilograms of greenhouse gas emissions are produced for every Canadian from personal vehicle use alone!
Of course, not everyone contributes equally to the production of greenhouse gases from personal vehicles. People who don’t own vehicles, for example, contribute nothing to these totals, yet they are impacted just as much by rising emission levels. According to Statistics Canada, the wealthiest amongst us (those making more than $100,000 a year) produce, on average, a staggering 5,737 kg of greenhouse gas emissions from personal vehicle use.
In Greater Sudbury, 2,844 kg of greenhouse gases are produced from personal vehicles for every resident, which makes us the second dirtiest city in Canada, behind only Kingston (at 3,035 kg per person). In contrast, Montreal, Canada’s lowest level per capita emitter, produces only 1,219 kg of greenhouse gases per person from personal vehicles.
There is no question that Greater Sudbury profited from the economic boom of the last decade. While there were economic benefits, we must acknowledge that we’ve made choices which have led to our disproportionate contribution to Canada’s greenhouse gas emission totals. These greenhouse gas emissions are fuelling the climate crisis.
To compensate, we need to start making investments in alternative means of transportation, in order to better facilitate walking, cycling and public transit use. A significant number of Sudburians do not own personal vehicles, and many more are choosing to leave their cars at home in an effort to make a real contribution in the fight against climate change. However, as many Sudburians can attest, it’s not exactly easy getting around this city on foot or by bicycle. This has got to change.
While there remains the need to improve infrastructure for cars, we can’t neglect necessary improvements for those making green transportation choices, whether by design or because of personal economic circumstances. We need safe, well-designed sidewalks and pedestrian crossings, especially for seniors and for those living in outlying areas. Designated lanes on major roads for bicycles, and more public bike storage will encourage more cyclists to take to the road without fearing for their personal security.
Together, we can do a lot to improve our community without significant cost. Mainly, what’s required is a change in the way we think about transportation. In our community, Rainbow Routes has recently been leading an exercise to produce a Sustainable Mobility Plan for active transportation. A presentation before Council is currently scheduled for the evening of June 16th, 2010, at Tom Davies Square. Efforts like these are a good start in moving forward with changing perceptions about transportation.
Let’s all try to lower Greater Sudbury’s overall greenhouse gas emissions by making the healthy choice to leave our personal vehicles at home a little more often. It’s time to start thinking more about walking, cycling or taking the bus.
(originally submitted as a letter to the Editor of the Sudbury Star, May 20 2010; as of this date, the above letter has not been published)
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Smorgasblogpost
I’ve been away from the blogging for the past little while. Real life seems to have a way of intervening, and taking up many of my hours. So, today, in an effort to try to catch up on a few things, I’m going to deliver a bit of a smorgasboard of issues. In no particular order. And I use the word "smorgasboard" deliberately here, although I might have chosen "salad bar" instead. "Smorgasboard" is a tip-of-the-hat to my highschool music teacher, Mr. Darraugh, who used words in a way which were highly appropriate, if somewhat unexpected. Earn the Burn, baby!
Policy Resolutions for the Party Convention
So, the Green Party Convention is coming up (August 20-22, in Toronto). Early Bird registrations must be in by June 5th. I have to say, I like what the Party is doing, charging registration fees by Zone. I’m in the Zone closest to Toronto, so I get dinged with the biggest fee, but realistically, that’s ok, because I have a much shorter distance to travel, and far smaller travel costs than many others who will be heading to T.O. for the convention. I was a little surprised at the cost, not having attended past conventions, but I like the tax receipt. I’m looking forward to attending this year, and meeting many Greens face to face, most for the first time.
What I’m most looking forward to in the near future, though, is seeing all of the proposed Policy Resolutions up on the website. From what I’m hearing, there may be some very interesting resolutions proposed indeed. We Party Members need to use the time pre-convention to hash things out: identify our support for desirable resolutions, and try to have the problematic ones amended or outright kiboshed. I’ll certainly be hanging out on the Party’s website, adding my two-cents.
Some of the interesting ones I’ve been hearing about:
1) A Resolution from Federal Council proposing to change our by-laws to remove the requirement for a Leadership Contest, and replacing it with a leadership review 6-months after a federal election (I’ll be supporting that resolution, or a variation of it, because if we don’t change our by-laws, we’ll be obligated to have a leadership contest in the fall. I believe having a contest now, in advance of an anticipated federal election, is the very worse thing that we as a Party can do.
2) A Resolution from a nominated candidate on allowing elected MP’s to vote their conscience on certain issues, such as abortion and marijuana legislation (and presumably other issues, if added to a list). Right now, I don’t think I’ll be supporting that resolution, as I strongly believe that Greens, when elected, should vote in accordance with member-approved policy, unless there is some very good reason why they shouldn’t.
Coalition Talk
Seems like the pundits are speculating that talks are under-way between prominent Liberals and NDP-types (Chretien’s and Broadbent’s names are mentioned) in an effort to see whether or not some sort of deal might be reached to bring the two parties a little closer together in terms of how they approach the next election or the period shortly afterwards.
Although the folks over at Rabble.ca are always up to the challenge, there’s no sense on speculating whether these talks might lead anywhere. I just can’t see the Liberals and NDP agreeing not to run candidates against each other anywhere, unlike the sort of talk Gillian Steward reports that Alberta Provincial Liberal Leader David Swann has been on about.
However, these talks might actually go somewhere, especially if Ignatieff’s poll numbers keep plummeting (I don’t think that they will...I mean, how low can they really go? Not much lower than they are currently. I have to figure that the numbers are scrapping the top of the Liberal core vote right about now, at around the 25% mark).
Many in the Green Party will be tempted to try to force our way into those talks (we certainly won’t be invited, as we have so very little offer either the Liberals or the NDP, and in fact, we pose more of a threat to either of them if it starts looking like we’re a "legitimate" party).
Mark Taylor has already given his opinion on whether the Green Party would benefit from joining an NDP-Liberal Coalition. Here’s mine:
The Green Party has nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by agreeing to some sort of formal coalition with these two parties, especially if that agreement means that we don’t run candidates in certain ridings. I’ve always been a firm believer in the need to offer voters a true choice, and not just the "best of a bad lot" in an effort to get rid of a government. If we are serious about democracy, we need to be able to offer voters a Green choice, even if it’s just a paper candidate.
The policies of the NDP and the Liberals are not our policies; they are the tired policies of the brown economy, and although they’ve started to green themselves a little bit, both parties are still a long way from where they need to be. Simply put, Orange and Red don’t make Green.
And, from a practical side of things, if we were to bully our way into some sort of coalition, likely our condition for inclusion would be to have the NDP and Liberals back down their candidates in Saanich-Gulf Islands, so that our Leader would run virtually unopposed against the Conservatives. That...would be a minimum. And likely that would be the only riding offered to the Greens. Again, we bring so little to the table.
Where would that leave us, though? A whole federal election would slip by, and we’d be involved primarily in one riding. And what about our own issues? Would this bring us any closer to a carbon tax? Or proportional representation? I doubt it.
No, an NDP-Liberal coalition likely won’t materialize pre-election anyway. All bets are off, though, after an election is held, and if the balance of power could be shifted away from a hypothetical Conservative minority situation, I think that the NDP and Liberals would be foolish to continue to let Harper govern in that circumstance. And if we have a few Greens elected in the mix, well, that would certainly change things up a little bit. The problem would be, who would lead? Ignatieff and Layton would have just been "rejected" at the ballot box, having not formed a government (the same problem which the "Coalition" faced back in 2008 with lame-duck Dion at the helm). The Liberals aren’t even in a position to offer up a good second-choice (unlike Gordon Brown’s gambit in the U.K., resigning as Leader of the Labour Party in an attempt to entice Nick Clegg to join a coalition; Labour had a number of quality candidates waiting in the wings. The Liberals have...Bob Rae, who I like, but whom many Liberals really don’t like...and even fewer NDP like). Maybe Layton should lead, if the NDP does better than they did in 2008.
Ah, but there’s no use speculating, I think I said earlier. But it’s oh-so fun!
Deep Water Oil Drilling
With the ongoing environmental disaster occurring south of the border, I know that many Canadians are thinking about deep water drilling. I’m glad to see that the press in Canada has started to talk about what could happen here, and is concluding that, yes, such a disaster really could happen in Canadian waters and we need to be vigilant. They’re not swallowing the government line that our Regulations are so much better than the American’s (because the fact is, they aren’t, and if anything, they’re worse!).
Yes, it’s true that in the States, a lot of the media coverage seems to be focussed around BP’s techno-fixes or the finger-pointing game (which is much more interesting that watching oil float on the surface of the ocean). But the slick has started to make landfall now, and dead seabirds coated in tar do make for good TV, so we can expect a bit of a shift in U.S. coverage for a few days. I’m almost tempted to say that the fact that BP’s techno-fixes seem to keep failing looks good on them...but the environmental damage from the uncapped well is just too great for me not to want it to stop.
As reported in Sun Media, a recent Leger poll about deepwater drilling suggests that a majority of Canadians are really very uncomfortable with drilling; 54% want drilling suspended until safety concerns can be addressed; another 24% want drilling stopped altogether. To me, that means that Canadians really are cognizant of the disaster going on in the Gulf, and are aware that the same can happen here. That level of awareness is encouraging. And some in the media have started drawing the connection between the environmental devastation taking place in the Gulf with that taking place in the tar sands. Good.
Neighbourhood Gardens
One of the things which has been occupying my time lately has been my involvement with a new community garden, which is going to be built this weekend in a municipal park close to my home. A lot of work has gone into this initiative, and I have to say that I’ve been overwhelmed with all of the positivity coming out of this. Donations are being made by community businesses, the City has been incredibly supportive, the local Councilor has been on-board since day one, and the media has started to cover the garden. All in all, it’s been just great so far.
I recall attending one of the first meetings where the Community Garden was discussed, and went home and talked to my wife about it. She told me that she would do something similar in our backyard, which has essentially been "wasted space" from her perspective (my dog, who spends most of his time out in the yard, was not consulted). Since we live in a mixed neighbourhood where there are good number of apartments, we figured that it would be easy enough to generate interest to have between 6 and 8 garden planters, which people in our neighbourhood could use to grow their own vegetables in. Our yard is entirely fenced in, thanks to the dog, and we’d be comfortable with people coming and going (and we suspect that the dog would too, if properly introduced up-front).
Little neighbourhood gardens on un-used private yards! What a great concept, we thought.
Boy, were we ever mistaken. Our plans haven’t progressed very far, as we seem to have run into two issues, one of which seems insurmountable, the other just expensive to deal with.
Turns out that we’re not zoned for this sort of use. I spoke with a guy from the City about this, and he explained it to me: if you’ve got a garden in your yard for your personal use, well that’s considered accessory to the primary use (which is a residence, ie. living in your house), so that’s all kosher. However, inviting people to come and use your yard for the purpose of gardening is not accessory to the primary use (because the people you’re inviting to your yard are not primary users of the property). He said that 6 to 8 planters might not seem like many, but potentially how many people would that be bringing into your yard at any given time? What might your neighbours think of that (we fully anticipated discussing the garden concept in advance with our neighbours anyway...but if we were someone else and just went ahead without saying anything to anyone, well, ya, I can kind of see that a neighbour might not take too kindly to the idea). And, what if our property were bigger, as many other properties with the same zoning in the City are? What about 20 planter boxes? What about 50?
Anyway, I can see that zoning is an issue. A minor variance would be the answer, although the guy at the City cautioned that their Committee of Adjustment isn’t big on granting variances for use (they’re better with setbacks). However, the option remains available, although potentially it would be expensive, being $600 just to make an application, and who knows how much more for other documents, and maybe an appeal to the OMB. Still, though, it might be doable, right?
Wrong. I also spoke with my insurance company. They advised me that if I were inviting people onto my property to engage in a hazardous activity (gardening), and I were sued, they would drop me like a hot potato, and I would never get home coverage again. If you think about it, they’re actually onto something too, because they are looking out for my interests. As much as it might be funny to think that gardening isn’t all that dangerous of an activity (when compared to trying to get around this City on a bike...but I anticipate myself), the fact is people do find new and inventive ways to hurt themselves all the time. For example, I’m not a gardener; I tried my hand at some weeding the other day at another Community Garden in the City, just to see what it’s all about. I almost took my toe off with the whatever it was I was using (some kind of shovel-like implement). So, if that were to happen on my property, someone might be thinking "lawsuit" and my insurance company would be asking me why I was foolish enough to invite someone to do that in my yard in the first place. And while I told my insurance company that really this isn’t all that different than having a friend come over to help me change a light bulb and fall off of a ladder and sue me, they remarked that I really shouldn’t be engaging in that sort of activity either, and that I should change my own lightbulbs.
Anyway, I see where they’re coming from, and I see why the City is concerned as well. But it’s still disappointing. We’ve created so many rules in our society, that sometimes doing a good thing can be a dumb idea. I remember when I was reading a few years back about two separate fires. In the first fire, a building just outside of a municipal boundary (literally on the other side of the road) was burning, and the volunteer fire department rushed to the scent and put out the fire, saving the pets stuck inside the building. One of the firefighters was slightly injured, and had to miss work. Because he was injured outside of the municipality, there was no insurance coverage for him. Had he died, it would have been too bad so sad. The moral of the story: don’t fight a fire when there’s no insurance. Having learned from this situation, another fire happened just outside of a municipal boundary; realizing this to be the case, although the volunteer fire fighters rushed to the scene, they elected to watch the house burn to the ground, and all of the homeowner’s contents were destroyed in the process (no lives were lost). They caught royal hell from area residents. Talk about "no win".
And that’s where I think my wife and I are at with the backyard garden: "no win". Well, maybe my dog will be the ultimate winner, because it looks like he’ll be able to lord over the backyard for another year yet.
Sudbury Cyclists Union
One of the other initiatives that I’ve been involved with lately has been helping with getting a new advocacy organization off of the ground here in Sudbury. A few of us have decided that it’s time that Sudbury had a Cyclists Union, to advocate for the needs of the cycling community. We’ve seen so many streets being resurfaced and expanded lately, many with the benefit of federal stimulus money, but the City hasn’t considered the needs of cyclists. In fact, I’ve heard that the City couldn’t add bike lanes to the federally-funded projects because they would have had to expand the roads outside of the original envelopes to do so, and thus would not have been eligible for funding (yet another "oversight" for stimulus spending). In some cases, the City has been calling for wider curb lanes to accommodate the possibility of cycling, but aside from a few kilometres of bike lanes painted on two roads about 5 years ago, there’s been nothing new for cyclists in this City.
I often ride my bike to work. When I do, I’m taking my life into my hands. Sudbury doesn’t have the greatest reputation when it comes to roads anyway (or drivers, for that matter). Try riding a bike on the roads here. Many don’t: they ride illegally on the sidewalk. And I can’t blame them. It’s damn scary to be a cyclist on the road.
Recently, Statistics Canada released a report about greenhouse gases generated from personal vehicles. Per capita, the City of Greater Sudbury ranked as the second dirtiest city in all of Canada, behind only Kingston. Barrie clocked in at #3, although quite a ways back from Sudbury. Montreal was the best. Why was Sudbury so bad? Could be because of all of the SUV’s and pick-ups on the road here. But it also probably has something to do with the fact that if you want to get around town, likely you’re doing so in a personal vehicle of some sort, because forget about it if you’re a pedestrian or cyclist. Transit, also, leaves a lot to be desired, although apparently 1/3 of Sudburians who are within the age-range to own and operate a personal vehicle do not do so.
So, we’ll be moving ahead with the Sudbury Cyclists Union here locally. Not sure what it’s going to look like. We’re hoping to get a Steering Committee nominated at a meeting on June 24th. If you’re in Sudbury, look for us on Facebook ("Sudbury Cyclists Union), or come out to the presentation of the Sustainable Mobility Plan, developed by Rainbow Routes, on Wednesday June 16th (wear your helmet!). I...hope to be there too, but the last personal initiative that I’ve been involved with might impact my attendance.
Parenthood
Yes, my wife is due to give birth on June 16th. Just about everything that we’ve both been involved with these past couple of months have been in anticipation of this wonderful event. This is going to be our first child. So, needless to say, we’re both really excited about this. I’m hoping to take some time off of work when the baby is born. I suspect that some of the other things I’ve been involved with might have to be put on hold from my perspective as well, at least for a little while. Of course, if my constant availability on the home-front begins to grate on my wife’s nerves (a distinct possibility, or so I’m told), I may be looking to become more involved with some projects. I certainly continue to plan to attend the Convention in August.
And I think that brings things just about full circle for today. Hope you enjoyed the smorgasblog!
Friday, May 7, 2010
Some Observations on the UK Election, from a Canadian Green
I’m an election junkie, there’s no doubt about it. I’ve watched a lot of election coverage in my time, mainly Canadian, but also a fair bit of U.S. coverage as well. I recall staying up until 3 AM to see which way the votes in Florida would finally go back in November, 2000, only to go to bed disappointed, not knowing. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one. It reminded me of a playoff game between the Washington Capitals and the New York Islanders back in the 80s, which I watched at my grandparent’s place in Newfoundland (already an hour and a half ahead of the Eastern Time Zone) which went into, well, I don’t know, quadruple overtime or something silly. I had no vested interest in the outcome (being a Leaf fan, I’m sure that I wanted both teams to lose, an impossibility to be sure, but nevertheless), but I watched it all unfold...or not, until a winner was declared.
Watching last night’s UK election was similar, only it became apparent quite early on that there would be no final resolution. And, as the polls predicted, there wasn’t. So it wasn’t like I was hanging on to the edge of my seat, waiting for Al Gore to score that game winning goal in the Florida Islander’s net.
Which, in a way, was kind of a relief, because it meant that I could sit back and enjoy the election coverage for what it was. Now, this was the first time that I’ve ever tuned into the BBC to watch their election coverage. You’ve got to understand that everything I knew about elections in the UK up until last night, I had learned from Monty Python’s "Election Night Special" sketch, where the Sensible Party goes head to head with the Silly Party. Me and a friend of mine in highschool actually parodied that sketch during a school field trip, but it was really only last night that I finally "got" the jokes about the swing and the swong - the swong being kept alive in cardboard box with airholes. But I digress.
So, let me offer to you, dear reader, a few of my observations on the UK election. At least those parts that I saw covered on BBC.
The Results are In, Part 1
First of all, I raced home from work last night to watch the results pour in. The polls closed at 10pm local time – 5pm here in the Eastern Time Zone. I arrived home at 5:30, ran straight to the TV, passing my wife in the hall with barely an acknowledgment and without our usual welcome home kiss, turned the TV on to the BBC and....watched them discuss their Exit Poll and interview B-list British celebs I’d never heard of for the next hour.
Apparently, they do things a little differently on the other side of the pond. In Canada and in the U.S., the media appears to be plugged into receiving the results from each individual polling location, and then eventually declares a winner in a riding where the received results can be extrapolated as representative of all of the results (essentially, declaring a winner before all votes are counted). Only in close races do they wait, and even then, winners are often declared by the media before all polling locations report. "Official" results, of course, will be reported on the next day, like last night’s lottery numbers. We’re very big into receiving instantaneous information in our election coverage over here. Of course, sometimes media outlets look a little foolish, having declared someone a winner based on an extrapolated result, only to have to retract the declaration, as most US media did in 2000, giving Florida to Gore, and then to Bush, and then to neither. But even that makes for good TV!
Well, as I found out, it doesn’t work that way in Britain. Instead, it seems that all of the ballots might be brought to a central location (I saw one shot of people sitting at rows of tables, counting ballots...looked to be hundreds of people, so there’s no way that could have been a single polling station), counted, and the results are reported to the Chief Returning Officer. Finally, the CRO goes onto a stage, where all of the candidates are lined up in alphabetical order (or a close approximation of) behind the CRO, wearing their huge, gaudy, party-coloured badges. And then the results are read out, and the winner is declared. And that’s what the media reports: actual results.
What it means, though, is that the view has to wait a little while for all of the votes to be counted before knowing the actual outcome. That seems so strange...and then it seems so not strange at all! I mean, think about it...we here in North America don’t really seem to care so much about counting all of the votes. Examples: moments after polls close, the media "awards" certain ridings to a Party which has polled consistently well there. Take Alberta. Polls close at X o’clock. Well, within the next minute, the CTV (who always likes to be first) awards the whole province to the Conservatives, this before any votes are counted. And usually they get it right.
Stage Managed
Anyway, back to the UK. I really like that all of the candidates are brought out together, and they each receive a moment’s worth of recognition, in the public’s eye. While there are over 600 ridings to report, the speed at which results trickle in, given this system, means that most of the time, BBC was able to go live when a result was being reported. And the BBC announcers did not often talk over the CRO, even when the results were being reported for a guy dressed up like Jesus on the Cross representing the Monster Raving Loony Party (I'm not making that up), who most would have to figure really wouldn’t have much of a hope of winning. It was respectful. And much better than reporting from a candidate's "victory celebration" in some rented party room like we do here.
Bantering Brits
I also noted that BBC commentators don’t seem to shy away from calling some of the politicians out when foolish remarks are made. Once, they were interviewing a Conservative Party MP live, when the camera cut away to other coverage of a car driving down a dark street. The voice-over interview continued, but the announcer tried to get the MP to stop talking. "We now have pictures of Gordon Brown on his way to" wherever he was being driven in that car. The Conservative MP, not missing a beat, "Oh by all means cut away from me to follow a car driving down the road." or something like that, which was kind of funny and kind of true at the same time. Whatever it was, though, in Canada, no media would have touched that remark; it would have been left hanging. This announcer, though, went on to scold the MP to the effect of saying that his remark was completely uncalled for! The thing about it was, though, that this kind of fearless, unscripted banter, made for really good TV!
The Results are In, Part 2
Well, it looks like sometime in the middle of my night, the results came in for Brighton Pavilion, the one and only riding I was actually watching for all night long, but eventually gave up on before going to bed. In Brighton Pavilion, located somewhere in Sussex, apparently, Green Party Leader Caroline Lucas was running against a new Labour candidate in a Labour-held riding where the incumbent had stepped down (and what was with about 150 MP’s stepping down for this election? Many because of scandal, apparently, involving their expenses being made public! Something that the Conservatives, Liberals and NDP are all in agreement on that MP’s in Ottawa should not be obligated to do!). The media and the bookies were both predicting the Green Party’s first seat in a UK election (yes, apparently you can bet on election outcomes in Britain, although I don’t think they have a state-sponsored lottery that lets you do so).
Anyway, congratulations are in order to Caroline Lucas, who took Brighton Pavilion for the Greens with 31.3% of the vote, to Labour’s 28.9% and the Conservatives’ 23.7%. This apparently represented a constituency swing of 8.3% from Labour to the Greens, whatever that means. Well, whatever it means, it means that Lucas will now sit as a Green MP in Westminster.
Green With Envy
The Green Party, overall, gathered only about 1% of the popular vote, yet still managed to elect an MP. Contrast that with Canada’s Green Party, which received 6.7% of the national vote in the 2008 election, and elected nobody. Apparently, in the UK election, the Green Party was following a strategy of putting most of their resources into 3 "winnable" ridings (including Brighton Pavilion), and running candidates on shoestring budgets in only half of the other UK ridings. What I found interesting about this strategy (aside from the fact that it worked) is that it worked with Green candidates in only a fraction of UK ridings.
Now, it’s true that there were other Green Parties involved in this election which might have taken some of the popular vote. There was a Scottish Green Party and a Green Party (Northern Ireland) which ran candidates in their local regions or "nations" as they refer to Scotland and Wales (do they call Northern Ireland a nation? I didn’t catch that reference if they do). So, perforce the Greens under Lucas were not going to run candidates everywhere.
Interestingly (to me, at least) is the fact that none of the Parties actually run candidates in all of the ridings. In Northern Ireland in particular, there were no Conservative or Labour candidates, and maybe not even Liberal-Democrats. Seems like "national" ("regional") parties, some small "c" conservative, some small "l" liberal/labour, are the norm in that part of UK, likely based on many of the complicating factors Irish political history has been famous for. Point is, though, none of the parties run everywhere, and maybe that’s why the Greens thought that they could still be serious if they ran candidates only in some places, and not others.
Personally, I’m not a fan of this approach. If I were a Green voter in a riding where no Green was running, I would be forced to cast my ballot for a second choice. That’s hardly representing my interests. Yes, I understand, there might just not be the money available for the Party to run people everywhere (and I understand that there are many in the UK who are calling for party financing reforms right now), but I think that I would still feel cheated a little bit. So don’t anyone take this observation of mine as my thinking that we Canadian Greens would be better off to not run candidates in all ridings, because I do not feel that way (and not just because of the per-vote subsidy).
The Minor Parties
What struck me about the minor parties in the election, beyond the Northern Ireland / Scotland / Wales - specific "national" parties like the Ulster Conservative and Unionists - New Force, Plaid Cymru, and the Scottish National Party, was that there are a couple of other minor parties which seem to have some big ambitions, running candidates in many ridings in England (more than the Greens). Here I’m talking about the U.K. Independence Party (which I had never heard of prior to last night) and the British National Party (of which I was more familiar). UKIP garnered 3.1% of the national vote (more than 3x that of the Green Party) and elected nobody. The racist BNP received a (shocking) 1.9% of the vote, also electing nobody.
Since I don’t know much about UKIP, beyond their desire to take the UK out of the European Union, let me say a few things about the BNP. Apparently, this party had a "whites only" policy for Members until 2001, when they opened their membership rolls up to anyone non-whites foolish enough to join them. Their policies used to include the forced "repatriation" of non-whites to their countries of origin (or, if they were born in the UK, presumably ancestral country of origin), but that also fell victim to their "softening" in 2001. Now they just want to end all immigration, and promote the voluntary relocation of immigrants out of Britain. No doubt through creating a culture of hatred from which immigrants and upright British citizens alike might feel compelled to escape from.
And 1.9% of the electorate voted for these guys (and I do mean guys...all of the candidates seemed to be guys, at least the ones that I saw). That's. Just. Great.
The Lib-Dem Dilemma
Let me tell you about the Liberal-Democrats, Britain’s ne’er do-well third party. They’re kind of like Canada’s NDP (they even go in for the orange colour) in that they don’t form government, but they can play spoiler once every few decades (as they are doing right now). Unlike the NDP, this party sits between the right-wing Conservatives and the left-wing Labour Party, firmly occupying the middle of the political spectrum, if you believe the pundits. Having found out more about this Party, I’m not sure that I would agree outright with that statement, especially since Labour’s move to the right over the past decade, but for now, take it for granted that the Lib-Dems are centrists who not many really like.
For me, this situation is kind of like the situation federally in British Columbia, where voters seem to alternate between the Conservatives and the NDP, and the rest of the country can’t really understand why someone who voted blue in the last election would now want to vote for Jack’s boys and girls. Well, likely it’s because the Liberals in B.C., federally, have the same level of cred as the Lib-Dems do historically. And federal Liberal results seem to suggest just that. But I digress (again).
So, the Lib-Dems received 24% of the national vote last night, but only took 57 seats out of a parliament containing 650 seats (although, as an aside, apparently only 649 seats were up for grabs last night, as the election in Thirsk & Malton has been postponed, due to the death of a candidate. What a humane decision by someone. Not sure that a death of a candidate would put a stop to an election here). With 24% of the vote, one should have thought that Lib-Dems might have taken about a quarter of the seats available, which would have been 156, but instead they received almost 100 fewer seats than their proportion of the popular vote would have ascribed.
Needless to say, one of the big planks on which the Lib-Dems campaigned is changing the British electoral system from the increasingly archaic first-past-the-post system, to a more balanced form of proportional representation (which is apparently how legislators in Scotland and Wales are elected to National assemblies right now). After results like the Lib-Dems received last night, you can understand why they might be a little miffed with the system.
There Can Be Only One
Of course, now that all of the votes have been counted, there can be only one Prime Minister to emerge from the election. The way that the British system works (despite what Conservative Leader David Cameron, a Stephen Harper-wannabe, would have the British public think), Labour Leader Gordon Brown remains the Prime Minister until he: a) resigns, or b) loses a confidence motion in the House, when parliament resumes sitting on May 25. So, right now, Brown remains the PM. And it seems he’s not ready to resign.
Nick Clegg, Leader of the Lib-Dems, has a chance of playing King-maker. If he forms a partnership/coalition with the Conservatives, David Cameron will be able to govern as if he enjoyed a majority, and there’s nothing Labour can do to stop him. Most pundits, though, believe that Labour and the Lib-Dems are actually closer to one another politically, though, so it’s anything but a foregone conclusion that Cameron and Clegg will be able to work things out to the Conservative’s advantage.
And that’s probably why David Cameron and his Party have been going out of their way to convince the British people that Labour has no mandate now to govern, after having "lost" the election. We here in Canada have seen this all before, during the Coalition Crisis of 2008, when Harper and his cronies trotted out the same sorts of arguments, which many Canadians fell for, not understanding the way in which the system works. I was cringing last night when I heard Cameron say that Brown had been defeated. He hasn’t been; in fact, he was re-elected by his constituency. Yes, his Party lost seats in the House, but he’s still the Prime Minister. Brown might now have an opportunity to work with the Liberal-Democrats to build a partnership or coalition, and most importantly, to govern.
Clegg’s price for partnership, though, many have reported, is proportional representation, which is a no-go for the Conservatives. Labour hasn’t exactly been thrilled with it, but Brown apparently has been saying today that it’s time, especially given the lop-sided results experienced by the Lib-Dems last night. Even the Prime Minister can’t claim that first-past-the-post is at all fair, when it so obviously is not.
My prediction: we’ll see a coalition between Labour and the Lib-Dems, with Lib-Dems in cabinet. And maybe with another Party represented in cabinet as well.
Because, the fact is, a coalition between Labour and Lib-Dems still won’t be enough in terms of numbers for the coalition to govern as if it were a majority. Together, Labour and the Lib-Dems would have 315 seats to the Conservatives’ 308. But there are 28 other MP’s from "other" parties out there (and 1 seat which has yet to elect anyone) which, if they worked with the Conservatives, could topple the coalition.
So nothing is a foregone conclusion, unless some of the other minor parties are brought into a coalition. Likely one of the Labour-friendly parties from Northern Ireland could do it (the Democratic Unionist Party, with 8 seats, I think is a good candidate and has supported Labour traditionally). Plaid Cymru with 3 seats might another. Not sure about the Scottish National Party with 6 seats. Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland is a Conservative surrogate? I don’t have a clue.
Anyway, there is much which remains to be decided, but I’m sticking with my prediction. And I don’t think that there’s going to be anything like a "coalition crisis" in the UK as a result. I base that on, what to me seems to be, a knowledgeable media which isn’t afraid of stating facts clearly (something which I found to be lacking back in December 2008). Cameron can make a case, but ultimately the rules favour Brown (if he partners with Clegg). And "moral argument" or not, the British are probably more plugged in to how their system works than we in Canada are for the most part.
One Last Observation: Where Were The Women?
Yes, this is my last observation. With all of these parties running around trying to get elected, where the heck were all of the women leaders? Cameron, Clegg and Brown, all men. The only woman Leader I knew about last night was Caroline Lucas of the Green Party. I had to go online when I woke up this morning to discover that there were, in fact, very few women leaders for any of the other parties. Apparently, the Social Democratic & Labour Party, which took 3 seats in Northern Ireland (with only 0.4% of the national vote, mind you), is led by a woman. The only other woman leader I could find heads the anti-war Respect - Unity Coalition, which didn’t fare all that well, with less than 0.1% of the vote. What’s up with that? Frankly, I’m very surprised that there aren’t more women leading political parties in the UK.
Watching last night’s UK election was similar, only it became apparent quite early on that there would be no final resolution. And, as the polls predicted, there wasn’t. So it wasn’t like I was hanging on to the edge of my seat, waiting for Al Gore to score that game winning goal in the Florida Islander’s net.
Which, in a way, was kind of a relief, because it meant that I could sit back and enjoy the election coverage for what it was. Now, this was the first time that I’ve ever tuned into the BBC to watch their election coverage. You’ve got to understand that everything I knew about elections in the UK up until last night, I had learned from Monty Python’s "Election Night Special" sketch, where the Sensible Party goes head to head with the Silly Party. Me and a friend of mine in highschool actually parodied that sketch during a school field trip, but it was really only last night that I finally "got" the jokes about the swing and the swong - the swong being kept alive in cardboard box with airholes. But I digress.
So, let me offer to you, dear reader, a few of my observations on the UK election. At least those parts that I saw covered on BBC.
The Results are In, Part 1
First of all, I raced home from work last night to watch the results pour in. The polls closed at 10pm local time – 5pm here in the Eastern Time Zone. I arrived home at 5:30, ran straight to the TV, passing my wife in the hall with barely an acknowledgment and without our usual welcome home kiss, turned the TV on to the BBC and....watched them discuss their Exit Poll and interview B-list British celebs I’d never heard of for the next hour.
Apparently, they do things a little differently on the other side of the pond. In Canada and in the U.S., the media appears to be plugged into receiving the results from each individual polling location, and then eventually declares a winner in a riding where the received results can be extrapolated as representative of all of the results (essentially, declaring a winner before all votes are counted). Only in close races do they wait, and even then, winners are often declared by the media before all polling locations report. "Official" results, of course, will be reported on the next day, like last night’s lottery numbers. We’re very big into receiving instantaneous information in our election coverage over here. Of course, sometimes media outlets look a little foolish, having declared someone a winner based on an extrapolated result, only to have to retract the declaration, as most US media did in 2000, giving Florida to Gore, and then to Bush, and then to neither. But even that makes for good TV!
Well, as I found out, it doesn’t work that way in Britain. Instead, it seems that all of the ballots might be brought to a central location (I saw one shot of people sitting at rows of tables, counting ballots...looked to be hundreds of people, so there’s no way that could have been a single polling station), counted, and the results are reported to the Chief Returning Officer. Finally, the CRO goes onto a stage, where all of the candidates are lined up in alphabetical order (or a close approximation of) behind the CRO, wearing their huge, gaudy, party-coloured badges. And then the results are read out, and the winner is declared. And that’s what the media reports: actual results.
What it means, though, is that the view has to wait a little while for all of the votes to be counted before knowing the actual outcome. That seems so strange...and then it seems so not strange at all! I mean, think about it...we here in North America don’t really seem to care so much about counting all of the votes. Examples: moments after polls close, the media "awards" certain ridings to a Party which has polled consistently well there. Take Alberta. Polls close at X o’clock. Well, within the next minute, the CTV (who always likes to be first) awards the whole province to the Conservatives, this before any votes are counted. And usually they get it right.
Stage Managed
Anyway, back to the UK. I really like that all of the candidates are brought out together, and they each receive a moment’s worth of recognition, in the public’s eye. While there are over 600 ridings to report, the speed at which results trickle in, given this system, means that most of the time, BBC was able to go live when a result was being reported. And the BBC announcers did not often talk over the CRO, even when the results were being reported for a guy dressed up like Jesus on the Cross representing the Monster Raving Loony Party (I'm not making that up), who most would have to figure really wouldn’t have much of a hope of winning. It was respectful. And much better than reporting from a candidate's "victory celebration" in some rented party room like we do here.
Bantering Brits
I also noted that BBC commentators don’t seem to shy away from calling some of the politicians out when foolish remarks are made. Once, they were interviewing a Conservative Party MP live, when the camera cut away to other coverage of a car driving down a dark street. The voice-over interview continued, but the announcer tried to get the MP to stop talking. "We now have pictures of Gordon Brown on his way to" wherever he was being driven in that car. The Conservative MP, not missing a beat, "Oh by all means cut away from me to follow a car driving down the road." or something like that, which was kind of funny and kind of true at the same time. Whatever it was, though, in Canada, no media would have touched that remark; it would have been left hanging. This announcer, though, went on to scold the MP to the effect of saying that his remark was completely uncalled for! The thing about it was, though, that this kind of fearless, unscripted banter, made for really good TV!
The Results are In, Part 2
Well, it looks like sometime in the middle of my night, the results came in for Brighton Pavilion, the one and only riding I was actually watching for all night long, but eventually gave up on before going to bed. In Brighton Pavilion, located somewhere in Sussex, apparently, Green Party Leader Caroline Lucas was running against a new Labour candidate in a Labour-held riding where the incumbent had stepped down (and what was with about 150 MP’s stepping down for this election? Many because of scandal, apparently, involving their expenses being made public! Something that the Conservatives, Liberals and NDP are all in agreement on that MP’s in Ottawa should not be obligated to do!). The media and the bookies were both predicting the Green Party’s first seat in a UK election (yes, apparently you can bet on election outcomes in Britain, although I don’t think they have a state-sponsored lottery that lets you do so).
Anyway, congratulations are in order to Caroline Lucas, who took Brighton Pavilion for the Greens with 31.3% of the vote, to Labour’s 28.9% and the Conservatives’ 23.7%. This apparently represented a constituency swing of 8.3% from Labour to the Greens, whatever that means. Well, whatever it means, it means that Lucas will now sit as a Green MP in Westminster.
Green With Envy
The Green Party, overall, gathered only about 1% of the popular vote, yet still managed to elect an MP. Contrast that with Canada’s Green Party, which received 6.7% of the national vote in the 2008 election, and elected nobody. Apparently, in the UK election, the Green Party was following a strategy of putting most of their resources into 3 "winnable" ridings (including Brighton Pavilion), and running candidates on shoestring budgets in only half of the other UK ridings. What I found interesting about this strategy (aside from the fact that it worked) is that it worked with Green candidates in only a fraction of UK ridings.
Now, it’s true that there were other Green Parties involved in this election which might have taken some of the popular vote. There was a Scottish Green Party and a Green Party (Northern Ireland) which ran candidates in their local regions or "nations" as they refer to Scotland and Wales (do they call Northern Ireland a nation? I didn’t catch that reference if they do). So, perforce the Greens under Lucas were not going to run candidates everywhere.
Interestingly (to me, at least) is the fact that none of the Parties actually run candidates in all of the ridings. In Northern Ireland in particular, there were no Conservative or Labour candidates, and maybe not even Liberal-Democrats. Seems like "national" ("regional") parties, some small "c" conservative, some small "l" liberal/labour, are the norm in that part of UK, likely based on many of the complicating factors Irish political history has been famous for. Point is, though, none of the parties run everywhere, and maybe that’s why the Greens thought that they could still be serious if they ran candidates only in some places, and not others.
Personally, I’m not a fan of this approach. If I were a Green voter in a riding where no Green was running, I would be forced to cast my ballot for a second choice. That’s hardly representing my interests. Yes, I understand, there might just not be the money available for the Party to run people everywhere (and I understand that there are many in the UK who are calling for party financing reforms right now), but I think that I would still feel cheated a little bit. So don’t anyone take this observation of mine as my thinking that we Canadian Greens would be better off to not run candidates in all ridings, because I do not feel that way (and not just because of the per-vote subsidy).
The Minor Parties
What struck me about the minor parties in the election, beyond the Northern Ireland / Scotland / Wales - specific "national" parties like the Ulster Conservative and Unionists - New Force, Plaid Cymru, and the Scottish National Party, was that there are a couple of other minor parties which seem to have some big ambitions, running candidates in many ridings in England (more than the Greens). Here I’m talking about the U.K. Independence Party (which I had never heard of prior to last night) and the British National Party (of which I was more familiar). UKIP garnered 3.1% of the national vote (more than 3x that of the Green Party) and elected nobody. The racist BNP received a (shocking) 1.9% of the vote, also electing nobody.
Since I don’t know much about UKIP, beyond their desire to take the UK out of the European Union, let me say a few things about the BNP. Apparently, this party had a "whites only" policy for Members until 2001, when they opened their membership rolls up to anyone non-whites foolish enough to join them. Their policies used to include the forced "repatriation" of non-whites to their countries of origin (or, if they were born in the UK, presumably ancestral country of origin), but that also fell victim to their "softening" in 2001. Now they just want to end all immigration, and promote the voluntary relocation of immigrants out of Britain. No doubt through creating a culture of hatred from which immigrants and upright British citizens alike might feel compelled to escape from.
And 1.9% of the electorate voted for these guys (and I do mean guys...all of the candidates seemed to be guys, at least the ones that I saw). That's. Just. Great.
The Lib-Dem Dilemma
Let me tell you about the Liberal-Democrats, Britain’s ne’er do-well third party. They’re kind of like Canada’s NDP (they even go in for the orange colour) in that they don’t form government, but they can play spoiler once every few decades (as they are doing right now). Unlike the NDP, this party sits between the right-wing Conservatives and the left-wing Labour Party, firmly occupying the middle of the political spectrum, if you believe the pundits. Having found out more about this Party, I’m not sure that I would agree outright with that statement, especially since Labour’s move to the right over the past decade, but for now, take it for granted that the Lib-Dems are centrists who not many really like.
For me, this situation is kind of like the situation federally in British Columbia, where voters seem to alternate between the Conservatives and the NDP, and the rest of the country can’t really understand why someone who voted blue in the last election would now want to vote for Jack’s boys and girls. Well, likely it’s because the Liberals in B.C., federally, have the same level of cred as the Lib-Dems do historically. And federal Liberal results seem to suggest just that. But I digress (again).
So, the Lib-Dems received 24% of the national vote last night, but only took 57 seats out of a parliament containing 650 seats (although, as an aside, apparently only 649 seats were up for grabs last night, as the election in Thirsk & Malton has been postponed, due to the death of a candidate. What a humane decision by someone. Not sure that a death of a candidate would put a stop to an election here). With 24% of the vote, one should have thought that Lib-Dems might have taken about a quarter of the seats available, which would have been 156, but instead they received almost 100 fewer seats than their proportion of the popular vote would have ascribed.
Needless to say, one of the big planks on which the Lib-Dems campaigned is changing the British electoral system from the increasingly archaic first-past-the-post system, to a more balanced form of proportional representation (which is apparently how legislators in Scotland and Wales are elected to National assemblies right now). After results like the Lib-Dems received last night, you can understand why they might be a little miffed with the system.
There Can Be Only One
Of course, now that all of the votes have been counted, there can be only one Prime Minister to emerge from the election. The way that the British system works (despite what Conservative Leader David Cameron, a Stephen Harper-wannabe, would have the British public think), Labour Leader Gordon Brown remains the Prime Minister until he: a) resigns, or b) loses a confidence motion in the House, when parliament resumes sitting on May 25. So, right now, Brown remains the PM. And it seems he’s not ready to resign.
Nick Clegg, Leader of the Lib-Dems, has a chance of playing King-maker. If he forms a partnership/coalition with the Conservatives, David Cameron will be able to govern as if he enjoyed a majority, and there’s nothing Labour can do to stop him. Most pundits, though, believe that Labour and the Lib-Dems are actually closer to one another politically, though, so it’s anything but a foregone conclusion that Cameron and Clegg will be able to work things out to the Conservative’s advantage.
And that’s probably why David Cameron and his Party have been going out of their way to convince the British people that Labour has no mandate now to govern, after having "lost" the election. We here in Canada have seen this all before, during the Coalition Crisis of 2008, when Harper and his cronies trotted out the same sorts of arguments, which many Canadians fell for, not understanding the way in which the system works. I was cringing last night when I heard Cameron say that Brown had been defeated. He hasn’t been; in fact, he was re-elected by his constituency. Yes, his Party lost seats in the House, but he’s still the Prime Minister. Brown might now have an opportunity to work with the Liberal-Democrats to build a partnership or coalition, and most importantly, to govern.
Clegg’s price for partnership, though, many have reported, is proportional representation, which is a no-go for the Conservatives. Labour hasn’t exactly been thrilled with it, but Brown apparently has been saying today that it’s time, especially given the lop-sided results experienced by the Lib-Dems last night. Even the Prime Minister can’t claim that first-past-the-post is at all fair, when it so obviously is not.
My prediction: we’ll see a coalition between Labour and the Lib-Dems, with Lib-Dems in cabinet. And maybe with another Party represented in cabinet as well.
Because, the fact is, a coalition between Labour and Lib-Dems still won’t be enough in terms of numbers for the coalition to govern as if it were a majority. Together, Labour and the Lib-Dems would have 315 seats to the Conservatives’ 308. But there are 28 other MP’s from "other" parties out there (and 1 seat which has yet to elect anyone) which, if they worked with the Conservatives, could topple the coalition.
So nothing is a foregone conclusion, unless some of the other minor parties are brought into a coalition. Likely one of the Labour-friendly parties from Northern Ireland could do it (the Democratic Unionist Party, with 8 seats, I think is a good candidate and has supported Labour traditionally). Plaid Cymru with 3 seats might another. Not sure about the Scottish National Party with 6 seats. Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland is a Conservative surrogate? I don’t have a clue.
Anyway, there is much which remains to be decided, but I’m sticking with my prediction. And I don’t think that there’s going to be anything like a "coalition crisis" in the UK as a result. I base that on, what to me seems to be, a knowledgeable media which isn’t afraid of stating facts clearly (something which I found to be lacking back in December 2008). Cameron can make a case, but ultimately the rules favour Brown (if he partners with Clegg). And "moral argument" or not, the British are probably more plugged in to how their system works than we in Canada are for the most part.
One Last Observation: Where Were The Women?
Yes, this is my last observation. With all of these parties running around trying to get elected, where the heck were all of the women leaders? Cameron, Clegg and Brown, all men. The only woman Leader I knew about last night was Caroline Lucas of the Green Party. I had to go online when I woke up this morning to discover that there were, in fact, very few women leaders for any of the other parties. Apparently, the Social Democratic & Labour Party, which took 3 seats in Northern Ireland (with only 0.4% of the national vote, mind you), is led by a woman. The only other woman leader I could find heads the anti-war Respect - Unity Coalition, which didn’t fare all that well, with less than 0.1% of the vote. What’s up with that? Frankly, I’m very surprised that there aren’t more women leading political parties in the UK.
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