Mike Powell Fanclub

This past Tuesday, I spoke with Kathleen Cote of the Otesha Project, an organization that seeks to promote environmental awareness through a short play, variably performed by a series of cycling theater troupes and by interested high school students.

On the weekend, I also had the pleasure of attending their 5th anniversary celebration in Sandy Hill, courtesy of an invite from fellow cyclinginottawa.ca contributor Josh Prowse. I was expecting a small affair, so was more than a little surprised to see some 250 people crowded into the hall. The event itself was a mixture of the usual Otesha presentation intermixed with speeches about the organizations history and growth. For what its worth, I think that the play itself is a little hokey, and the associated slide show a little over the top, but I think that is also kind of the point. I’m certainly not the target audience, and I suspect that those in late-elementary school would be much more receptive.

As always, if listening through an embedded player, be warned that the audio might sound accelerated. If so, download the file itself or listen via the iTunes feed.

(image from Flickr user fortinbras, licensed via the creative commons)

 Kathleen Cote on the Otesha Projects 5th Anniversary [8:24m]: Download

As usual we air on CKCU 93.1fm from 7 to 9:00am. For those outside of Ottawa you can listen live on the web at the CKCU website.

At 7:30 I will be talking with Christine Blatchford  about her new book Fifteen Days about Canadian troops in Afghanistan.

We’ll also be joined by Phil Robinson of People for a Better Ottawa, a citizen’s group that (in short) advocates for greater city funding for social services. They had their city budget kick-off last Tuesday morning.

As well we will be talking with a representative from the Otesha Project who had their fifth anniversary celebrations on Sunday.

After tazering a Polish man twice in the Vancouver airport, a public inquiry has been launched. Shocking!

Want to smoke in your car with your kid? After today that will be against the law in Wolfville NS.

UN complains to Bush Administration about upcoming murder trail of Omar Khadr. Good to see the UN will lookout for our citizens when Canada won’t.

In the midst of huge budget deficits Ottawa’s Corporate Services Committee recommends $15 million more for the Congress Centre expansion.

Violent youth and identity thieves, watch out. The Conservatives have you in their sights.

BC NDP to take steps to increase number of women and minorities in the BC legislature.

Music downloaders beware. The Tories also are out to get you.

As usual we air on CKCU 93.1fm from 7 to 9:00am. For those outside of Ottawa you can listen live on the web at the CKCU website.

This week Adam will be covering for Lucy and playing music from 9:00 to 10:00am. Tune in and judge him based on his musical tastes.

At 8:30, we’ll be joined by Phil Robinson of People for a Better Ottawa, a citizen’s group that (in short) advocates for greater city funding for social services. They have their city budget kick-off later in the morning.

Maclean’s has its annual university rankings out: Carleton’s number 7!
Further accusations against NATO regarding torture in Afghan prisons.

And Amnesty International doesn’t stop there. A week after announcing Canada wouldn’t seek the return of prisoners facing the death penalty, Canada refuses to co-sponsor a bill which denounces the death penalty.

NCC promises to actually consult public next time it choses to selectively remove information on Canada’s history.

Hugo Chavez actually compares himself to Christ. Wow!

Toronto School Board proposes Afri-centric schools for black children.

Portrait Gallery looking for a home and not necessarily in Ottawa.

Want $1000 dollars? Write an essay and collect 25 signatures on a petition.

City considering pulling funding for Ottawa Concert Hall.

City investigates selling Hydro Ottawa to raise $300 million.

A couple of quick thoughts on last night’s Saskatchewan election:

1. It astounds me that the local CBC coverage was as bad as it was. Inane chatter was brought to a new level when the talking heads described results from a single poll as “indicating a really tight race.” No, it suggests that a sample of 30 people is a bad thing to draw anything from. Also, they stopped updating their website at around 9:20, at least for declared races. Boo-urns.
2. Bigger boo-urns to Elections Saskatchewan, which didn’t even seem to have results coming in at all.
3. Cheers to Global, which actually kept updating things even after races were said and done.

37-21 seems like a reasonable split to me. Interestingly, 21 seats, as a percentage of the legislature, corresponds within a couple of points of the NDPs popular vote share. The Saskparty, who got a little more than 1/2 the vote but 63% of the seats, don’t really fit in that regard. It would seem that at least in this case the NDP shouldn’t be opposed to some kind of PR; the Liberals, again the party that was too-slow to grab a seat in musical chairs, should be screaming for it. Switching to PR might also appeal to Saskatchewan’s latent sense of moral superiority for being first at progressive things like Medicare.

More interesting, though, is a look to the close races. Global has a useful chart here (apparently no direct link. Click on “close races” below the table). I haven’t looked at the ones the NDP won, but the 6 that the Sask Party picked up were decided by something like a cumulative 1200 votes. That’s right: if 1200 people hadn’t of showed up, or if 600 well placed people had changed their mind, the narrative today would be something along the lines of how “Brad Wall eked out a narrow 31-27 majority.” It’s not as crazy as the Quebec results, but shows the idiocy of the system.

Also, and more importantly, the people of Saskatchewan are weaker for having not elected Ryan Androsoff, regardless of the colour of his lawn signs.

We are back to the usual radio show format, what with topics and all. Thanks again to all those that donated and contributed to another successful funding drive. This show raised something just shy of $700, and the station total was 112,000, more than the goal. Forgot to donate? You can still do so at www.ckcufm.com; be sure to list “Tuesday Special blend” as your show of choice. As always, we air from 7am-9am on 93.1fm in Ottawa, the aforementioned website for everyone else.

The one piece of funding drive that we have to complete is my run up Dunton Tower (left). As promised, I’ll run up one floor for every $50 dollars we raised. Just under 700 translates to 13 floors, but I’ll let you guys keep the change and go to 14. Hopefully I won’t die, because I forgot how tall it actually looks. That’ll start at 7:30.

The Saskatchewan election is now about a week away, and the Sask Party lead is sufficiently large that you can’t see the end of it over the horizon, even in the Prairies. Adam Radwanski ponders why people want to do away with what seems to be a good thing.

The NCC to open board meetings! Mills also muses about selling part of the Greenbelt. Sacred cows do make the best hamburger.

Canada will stick up for you, until you are sentenced to death. In some countries. Maybe.

You have the right to remain silent, not the right to silence.

Late, but good: Mayor ignores city managers warnings of service cuts even with a tax increase.

Low income units at Lebreton flats threatened by lack of transit plan.

Campus bar’s license revoked. Not for why you’d think.

OC Transpo to fine smokers near bus stops, even if outside.

Google entering phone market.

Below is what I sent to David Reevely for his Worst Intersection in Ottawa Poll:

I am a bit surprised that no one has suggested Baseline and Merivale in your worst intersection contest.

A couple of thoughts on it: First, it seems to always pop up on lists of “most accidents in Ottawa”, and my (limited) encounters with traffic certainly hold that it can be more than a bit confusing and produce congestion, even if not to the same degree that narrower and busier choke points (ie Bronson and the Queensway or Bronson and Carling). Secondly, and more in keeping with your comment about the pedestrian focus of the response, is that the intersection makes distances in the area seem more daunting.

I only realized this this weekend, when a friend of mine was in from out of town, and staying with a friend who lives in a townhome in Central Park. In conversation, in-town friend remarked that one of the things he misses about centretown is that it was much easier (and nicer!) when able to walk to the grocery store. Out-of-town friend pointed out that in this case, the problem was not that the store was much farther (it may even be closer), but that the way the roads were designed discouraged people from walking even that reasonable distance.

Now, I know am not so naive as to suggest that we can totally avoid having busy streets, or that we are just one magic fix from removing people from their cars and having a happy people-powered transportation infrastructure. But there should be a goal of creating safe, efficient roadways that also encourage people to get out of their cars and walk as much as possible. Here we have an example of an intersection that not only is inefficient at being safe, but in doing so forces people into their cars, compounding the traffic problem and limiting the ability to create communities.

(cross posted to Cycling in Ottawa)

“Mr. Pearson said that he had never approached an international discussion with deeper concern. He had been astonished by the amount of public and press interest in the meeting that had been shown in the United States. President Kennedy intended to welcome him as if he were a Head of State.” (Cabinet Conclusions, May 9 1963, LAC RG2 Series A-5-a)

Almost as if he actually was the de facto head of state!

I know what you are thinking: there is no Portrait Gallery, at least thanks to the actions on the part of the Conservatives. Instead, we have a partially-renovated heritage building sitting directly across from the House of Commons, ripe to benefit from the thousands of tourists that visit the Parliamentary precinct every year.

But you’d only be sorta right. There is a portrait gallery- it even has a website, curators, and (presumably) an acquisition budget. What it lacks is a permanent home in which the general public could go and see it’s holdings. Instead, they sit locked in a preservation vault in Library and Archives Canada’s Gatineau Preservation Centre, where no one but those employed by the gallery can see them.

No one, that is, until the recent vault tour program was started. Sadly, its also finished. I managed to get in yesterday, one of only about 250 people to do so (capacity is limited by the size of the vault and the need to keep climate conditions under control).

The tour itself was fantastic. I’m a building and history geek, so getting to go into the vaults was the biggest thrill, and something that I’m certainly going to try to do again. The portraits themselves were impressive and included the usual suspects, like Karsh’s photo of Churchill and Warhol’s of Wayne Gretzky; more interesting were some not-so-usual suspects, including a bunch of small photos taken of immigrants as they arrived in Canada and of Demasduwit, which is the only known image of a Beothuk. The curator took great care to explain why each was important, where to look for meaning, and what it tells us about both the subject and the times it was made.

Very clear throughout the whole trip was that these tours were about getting people the chance to see at least some of the collection, the same reason why the gallery works with other museums to lend out pieces for exhibitions. But even more clear was that the gallery has important stuff and it wants everyone to be able to see it. It’s impossible to sit through the discussion, even if occasionally I wished that I had learned more about art history, and not feel bad that you are one of only a handful that gets to see this.

It would be one thing if we were talking about setting up a collection from scratch, but we have been collecting pieces for longer than anyone but the British, we’ve just never found a home to put them in. So let’s get the gallery built, and soon.

I don’t usually like to talk about horserace politics on the blog, but wanted to give some quick thoughts on the new ads, as shown on Stephen Taylor’s website:

1) I think that it is fair to say that this ad looks terrible, but the M.O. for the off-period attack ads so far has seemed to be “powerpoint chic.”

2) Does anyone else notice the pronunciation of Dion’s name? The emphasis in “Stéphane” seems almost purposefully wrong, as if to point out that it is french and, you know, not English. We’ll see if that keeps up. The soundbyte also feels out of place.

3) All the war-chest in the world can’t buy a better picture for the anti-dion messaging than the one used here (and everywhere else, it seems) then they have now, even if it is getting more than a little tired. I happen to think that the Liberals should respond in kind.

4) Perhaps we see the emergence of the new tory ad strategy: “Dion: Not a Leader. Not worth the risk“. Bolding mine. Now, 30 second ads aren’t the time to talk about nuance (hence why they talk about how Dion needs to increase taxes to pay for his spending, not that any Liberal increase to the GST would go to cutting income taxes), but it seems that we are already starting to see the fear-mongering campaign that the comfortable ambivalence of the public with a Conservative Minority might be fucked up if we have the temerity to vote a Liberal in. If I have time (which I won’t), I’ll go back to try to draw some comparisons with the messaging here and with the Mike Harris’ second Provincial election.

I have a couple of interviews to go up- hopefully that will take place tomorrow, but it really depends on whether I have the time to break them into chunks sufficiently small for my hosting service. I also plan to comment on the (truly promising) stuff that NCC Chair Russell Mills mused about in Randall Denley’s column in today’s Citizen, especially about developing parts of the greenbelt. If you are opposed to Urban Sprawl and think that it is a tragedy that so much of this city lives far away in places like mars and venus Kanata and Orleans, you should be opposed to the greenbelt status quo.

But I have stuff to do today, and something is angering me more: Oliver’s, the largest bar at Carleton, getting shut down for license violations. You can read about it here.

Now, normally you’d think “liquor license violation” and “serving to minors” would go hand in hand at a campus pub, but you’d be wrong. Oliver’s is actually, in my limited experience, pretty good at making sure that minors don’t get in. At night, you need a couple pieces of id, and they seem pretty thorough about inspecting drivers licenses. During the day, they have pretty good protections for friends buying friends beer. Even then, getting nailed for serving to minors is something that even the best and most thorough of bars can get caught for such things.

But this isn’t the problem. It’s because they were serving to people that were too drunk, and that these people were being served. From the Campus rag:

At the hearing, both representatives submitted an Agreed Statement of Facts, which stated that on four days between October 2006 and April 2007, police officers and/or liquor inspectors observed drunken patrons in the pub. It was also agreed that in February 2007, police officers observed drunken patrons being served alcohol. The AGCO withdrew other allegations.

What’s more, it wasn’t the first time:

Oliver’s had its licence suspended for 14 days in 2003 for serving alcohol after hours, according to Campion. This is the second time CUSA has pleaded guilty of being in violation of the Liquor License Act.

Not to pick nits, but I’m pretty sure that in the latter case they were caught serving before they were supposed to, but whatever.

In any case, the problem with both of these situations is that they are easily avoided by keeping a watchful eye on patrons, both at the bar and at the tables. Oliver’s consistently hemorrhages money (something that will only be compounded this year with it being closed for 12% of the time that it is actually open), so it is important to be ruthless to make sure that it does not get dinged with fines that could otherwise be avoided. Is it sometimes too busy to keep an eye on everyone? Then hire more staff. That’s how businesses should be run.

But while the money annoys me, my principal concern is that serving to those that should be put in a cab is unsafe. People that are too drunk help start the fights that have gotten the bar into trouble in the past, but they also end up presenting a danger to themselves in any number of ways. Any bar must bear the responsibility for those that it serves in this regard, but a campus bar that is run by student governments should be even more cognizant of this.

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