• 51 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • This is the Ford government, so it stands to reason that this was entirely a change that was brought on by developers… And considering this mirrors what was previously done, I’m 99% sure it is. Unfortunately, having the province to go to in order to override a CA is something that both homeowners and municipal governments are going to find useful because of how the CAs have been operating for years… running rough-shod over municipal development plans or property owners plans to enjoy the use of their property. The fact of the matter is that not everyone owns hundreds of acres, so a 30 m setback from any ‘water’ more significant than a puddle may mean that you can’t make changes, improvements or in some cases, repairs to your entire property.

    Considering that the original plan was to strip powers away from the CAs to only managing their parks, this seems to be a reasonable situation - it only formalizes the powers the government gave themselves last time when the province had to step in on overriding a CA to allow a warehouse going on a sensitive wetland the CA identified on private industrial-zoned land. It gives them blanket power to do the same thing they’ve already done in that one-off situation (although the mechanism will be different - they won’t just make a law telling the CA to issue a permit). The law does indicate that the ministry still has to consider the same things the CA does, so it’s possible that a Ministry’s ‘overrule’ (or even bypass as the law would allow) can been challenged in court at least.











  • I don’t even have faith in the USA to do the right thing. We’ve been hit with tariffs from the USA on aluminum and steel before because of ‘reasons for national security’ during the first Trump term. We need to start thinking of defending ourselves without the help of the USA because we shouldn’t be concerned about our defence after the way Michigan votes every 4 years.

    Even beyond that, the amount of Russian control over the US administration in the next term may be significant. We may not be able to work with the US in matters of intelligence for fear of some information going to the Russians. The US might not step in and help NATO if Russia decides to test our resolve to defend Finland for instance, and wouldn’t it be good if the rest of the alliance could do their fair share of the work defending the rest of democracy even if the USA won’t?


  • They aren’t saying ‘no bikes,’ they are saying ‘no bike lanes.’ It’s predicated on the mistaken impression that the bike lanes reduce the number of car lanes, and thus would slow car traffic. They would like to up the danger to bikers by having them ‘take the lane’ and force them to bike in the car lane. In addition to the danger to biker, it actually slows driving traffic as bikes are now in car lanes of traffic, and if any biker does get hurt, which is bound to go up, the accidents will slow traffic as well.

    I should stop saying ‘bike lane’ and ‘car lane’ I suppose - the Government of Ontario has a preference that it’s just a lane for everything.


  • Well, MMP breaks down when you realize you need to define geographic areas of ridings that you need to lump together so that you can get the ratios right. An example elsewhere in the post points out lumping Victoria’s 4 seats and the rest of Vancouver Island’s 3 seats. If all lumped together, you can get the ratios of actual votes to match the representations of the MPs pretty good - but ultimately someone has to sort of ‘fix it in post.’ If 80% vote for party X in all 7 ridings (which, without looking at the data, I will concede in advanced has never bloody happened) you’re going to take one of those ridings and hand it off to an MP that didn’t win to represent the collective 15-20% that voted the second place party that might be popular there. Which riding gets the MP not elected in the riding? Of course, we need to keep ridings because the population density is very skewed in Canada. If you take a look where people live, you’d realize without ridings, in a true PR setting, the Windsor-Québec City corridor would forever run the rest of Canada. Why try to get votes anywhere else? Do you really want to give Alberta another reason to say that Ottawa has no mandate in their province?

    Another option is to drastically increase MPs (that seems like a terrible idea) so that if the riding is 55% for party X and 45% for party Y, you can have 2 MPs from both parties and not add any advantage to anyone to help in forming government. It would almost be a better idea to have a run-off vote until you reach a true majority instead of a plurality in a riding.