Choosing how we Choose

Check out the guest article I recently wrote for the Toronto Board of Trade's municipal election blog. I'd love to hear your thoughts, too. We are only at the beginning of the conversation about changes to municipal voting.

http://www.votetoronto2010.com/board/guest-blog-choosing-how-we-choose/#more-4220

Better Ballots - Join us at a Town Hall - April 13, 20, 26 or 27

I've been doing a lot of work with the Better Ballots initiative over the past few months. The purpose of Better Ballots is to expose Torontonians to some of the ways that we could conduct municipal elections in Toronto a little differently than we do now.

The upcoming Town Halls are your opportunity to learn about the various options and to provide us your thoughts on them. With your input we'll know what voters in Toronto are ready to support and what they think we could do without. I hope you can make it out to one of the events. You can sign up below.

Thanks!

Better Ballots announces Town Hall meetings across Toronto

Civic elections in Toronto are not meeting our expectations.

Turnout is surprisingly low. New faces on City Council are uncommon. Candidates can 'win' a seat with as low as 20% of the vote. And perhaps most importantly, our City Council does not reflect the evolving demographic of Toronto’s diverse population.

Should Toronto have municipal parties? Term limits? A lower voting age? Ranked ballots? Multi-member wards? Borough councils? Online voting? Finance reforms?

Join us at the Better Ballots Town Hall meetings to learn about fourteen specific ideas that could make Toronto's elections more inclusive, diverse and fair. What are the possible benefits and concerns for each proposal?

This is your chance to learn about options for election reform in Toronto and to join the discussion.

Website: http://www.betterballots.to/townhalls.htm

Facebook events:

North York (April 13): http://bit.ly/betterballots_NORTH
Scarborough (April 20) : http://bit.ly/betterballots_EAST
City Hall (April 26): http://bit.ly/betterballots
Etobicoke (April 27): http://bit.ly/betterballots_WEST

Let's raise our expectations and work towards a voting system that meets them.

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Better Ballots
http://www.betterballots.to
info@betterballots.to
@betterballots
 

Contraception is part of the solution.

Contraception is 'greenest' technology

A recent study from the London School of Economics assert[s] that family planning is nearly five times more cost effective in mitigating global warming emissions than green energy technologies like wind and solar power.

And yet not surprising that this element of our impact on the planet was not part of the recent discussions in Copenhagen.

TD Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup 2008

I hope you can join me at David A Balfour Park on Sunday, September 21, between 12:00 PM and 4:00 PM for the annual TD Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup. You'll have tons of fund picking up tons of litter!

To register go to www.vanaqua.org/cleanup and look for David A Balfour Park in the sites for Toronto.

See you there!

What next?

TheStar.com | Business | Auto crisis kills more GTA jobs

The storm engulfing the auto industry touched down in the GTA again yesterday and swept away more than 2,000 jobs.

OK, it's time to invest in a new industry. Well, actually, the time to invest in a new industry was four or five years ago, but today will have to do.

Unfortunately, by being complacent about the success we thought we saw from the auto industry we may now be in the unfortunate situation of not having the revenue available to invest in new industries. (Most of what we got from our investment in autos went back into autos and the infrastructure to support them.) We've missed the boat on using "old economics" to fund the next new thing, so now it's up to carbon pricing to provide the incentive.

The world is changing. Will we lead people into tomorrow or will we be dragged kicking and screaming? Looks like the latter so far.

Time to Look at a NEW Industry

CAW to fight Oshawa closing

General Motors will halt production at its Oshawa truck plant next year and probably won't reopen it again because of the collapse of pickup sales in the U.S., chairman Rick Wagoner said today.

It's time for Ontario to begin investing in tomorrow's industries and help our workforce become less dependent on yesterday's industries. It would have been better to have started this a few years ago, but the next best time is to start today. Before anyone else loses a job without a new one to go to.

How about solar panels? How about scooters? How about subway cars and street cars? How about anything that recognizes that the cost of oil is only going to go up and that, thankfully, people are making different choices than they did 5 and 10 years ago. (That is, not Fiat! Same problem, different logo.)

Beyond a shift in what we make to sell to the world, we also need to be training our workforce to make a lot more of the stuff we need right here at home. The increasing cost of transporting goods means that the earth is a lot less flat than we thought cheap oil made it. A recent report from CIBC World Markets covered in the Toronto Star makes the point well.

We have two choices: we can plan now for where things are headed, or we can wait and be forced to change when it's too late. I prefer the first option.

Food and the City

canadianarchitect.com - Canadian Architect - 5/30/2008

Our discussion will begin to assess the health of the city through examining the cycles of its food – the sourcing, production, buying, selling, cooking, eating and waste disposal of food. At its very essence, the city is what, where and how it eats.

I'm looking forward to this. Hope you can make it, too.