Poll: Omnibus Bills

Welcome to the first poll on the blog. The topic for this one is Omnibus Bills, which are a type of bill that groups together a diverse number of subjects into a single legislative document. On one hand, they can speed up the passing of legislation tremendously and increase the chances of the measures contained being passed. On the other hand, the included measures could potentially be only loosely related, allow for controversial measures to be “bundled” into a take-it-or-leave-it package, and suppress discussion of individual parts of the bill.

The current debate in the House of Commons is over the Safe Streets and Communities Act, which groups together previous bills ranging from youth crime to sex offences to counter-terrorism and (until recently) police surveillance of internet activity. A precedent for this type of bill comes from the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1968-69, which covered issues such as divorce, birth control, homosexuality, gun control, gambling, and cruelty to animals.

So the question is…

Municipal Policy Primer: Alberta’s opposition

L->R: Sherman, Mason, Smith, Taylor

Hello all, it is September and I haven’t posted in a while. Today’s topic is going to be municipal policy in advance of a possible election either this fall or in the spring. Whenever it is, it’ll depend on the will of whoever wins the leadership of the natural governing party of Alberta this month.

This post follows the launch of citiesmatter.ca by the Mayor’s Office of the City of Calgary. Since they covered responses of PC leadership candidates, I will only focus on the policies of the major opposition parties. If you really give a crap what the natural governing party has to say, go to the other site.

For the purposes of this discussion, I am going to lumping in affordable housing policies with general municipal policies.

Urban Vacation: Paris Notes

Champs-de-Mars as seen from Le Palais de Tokyo

Note: This draft for this article was written a little over a week before it’s posting.

I pull out my netbook to write this review as I begin the second leg of a nineteen-hour, transatlantic journey back home to Calgary. A cup of coffee has put me in the right mood to reflect on and write about my travels as of late. This morning I was in the top floor of an apartment in the 1st arrondissement of Paris, about four blocks from Musée de Louvre. Aweek before that, I was finishing up packing my room after a year of postgraduate studies in Nova Scotia.

It’s been a long week.

I see Paris, I see France, I see Boris’ underpants

And now you've seen them too.

The long school year came to a close, lasting from September through convocation in early June. I’m happy to report that I am still, in fact, alive. I have not turned completely into a zombie as of this time. It’s also been a while since my last post, as I was hard at work through May on a research project which involved far too many all-nighters and waking up at weird hours.

Data Project: North-Central LRT Alternatives

Here’s a quick Easter update for the data project. The addition to the files (at the usual place) is an alternative alignment for Calgary’s proposed North-Central LRT alignment. This alternative would take the CTrain underground from the Bow River right up to Beddington Trail while tunneling under Centre Street North. It would also serve as a functional extension of the Southeast LRT which would otherwise end at an Eau Claire subway station.

The route and station locations were largely inspired by work done over on TransitCamp by Peter Schryvers. You can find those articles over on CivicCamp. I will note that I took artistic liberties with the station names and presumed that the line would otherwise follow the Calgary Transit route past Stoney Trail (up to 150th Avenue North).

Data Project: Calgary Transit Layers

Funded stations on the Under-Construction West LRT Expansion

This is only a small step towards building a full transit layers package. So far, the only features included are placemarks for current and future (funded) CTrain stations. The full package will include the lines as well as future planned stations, plus information on each point about which routes they are serviced by and whether or not they are in the free fare zone. It will not include bus stops or maintenance facilities (you can find all the bus stops on Google Earth already, and there’s far too many for me to contemplate making an alternate version of those right now).

You can find the transit package in the usual place (hint: over there on the links sidebar).

Update (April 9, 2011)

The transit package has been restructured into three categories:  1) current system, 2) future additions (funded), and 3) future additions (proposed). Colours have been altered slightly for easier viewing with other Google Earth layers (especially the roads), and the track (line) segments are now included as well.

Checking the numbers twice on HSR

German ICE3 Train - © Wikimedia Commons

The last week has been a flurry of news. The next federal election is off to a start, a friend is nominated for the Green Party in Calgary-Centre, Canadian big city mayors are calling for a national transit strategy, and other exciting things.

Today, the Green Party of Canada released it’s HSR policy. Now, I’m onboard for HSR, at least as an issue of long-term connectivity between Canadian cities in relatively dense urban corridors. I believe that, in the long run, we are eventually going to have to do this as the price of energy goes up (which will drive up the absolute cost of train travel up but drive it down relative to driving to taking the plane). Like any megaproject which requires vast amounts of public spending, it will require a lot of planning and due process.

As soon as I read the GPC release, however, I knew that something smelled fishy. Let’s take a look.

Primer: Federal Politics and Canadian Cities

If you are like me, you probably caught Wednesday’s Globe and Mail article elucidating the positions of Canada’s big city mayors regarding the Federal role in urban infrastructure funding. It’s a good time to talk about it, with the hints of an election coming up. And I’ll make this clear: this needs to be an election issue.

In this article I’ll provide, with as much brevity as I can afford, what Canada’s political parties seem to be thinking regarding the subject.

How Google Profiles lost my seal of approval

There’s been a bit of news recently going around lately regarding attempts by Google to spruce up user profile pages through Picasa photos. This was rather expected, since social media is one of the areas that Google has struggled with (for example, see what a failure Buzz is). I use Picasa web albums right now as a small online storage space for my photos, but I’m very much on the fence about whether I’m willing to dump money for expanded storage or just get another HDD or two. Might honestly have to look into some kind of backup system that is a little more robust — who knows when my current drive is going to fail me and I’ll lose all my photos, and work… again.

Hell, I wonder that about this blog. At any time WordPress could undergo some massive failure and all of it – gone. Sometimes I wonder if that would be for the best.

But I digress. What caused me to go wide-eyed with surprise was something lurking under the surface of these profile changes. And it is certainly not typical for me to rant about Google.

What was hiding behind the curtains… can be found after the skip.

Calgary Historical Boundaries: 1884-2007

Following up after the release of the municipal boundaries for cities and towns, I have a new file up on the Data Project. This one contains all the different boundary changes for Calgary right from it’s incorporation as a town in 1884 right up to the last annexation in 2007. This file is mostly complete — I have purposely left out a small annexation in 1974 that, as far as I can tell, is merely the addition of a right-of-way that didn’t add any noticeable area to the city.

The file is based off of the History of Annexation map from the City of Calgary website.