Big Topics & Big Ideas
Municipal Government
Frontier Live on X – Local Government – Making Cities Work For You – With Sam Sullivan
Big Topics & Big Ideas
Malign Neglect: What Calgary’s Water-Main Break Reveals about the Failure of City Government
The rupture of Calgary’s biggest water main revealed more than the problems of aging infrastructure. It showed a civic bureaucracy unable to provide basic services or fix things when they break, and a mayor eager to blame others and scold citizens for their selfishness in wanting city services in return for their tax dollars. Above all, it laid bare the increasing tendency of governments to neglect their core responsibilities in favour of social policy fetishes, and to sidestep accountability when things go wrong. Clear, competent, mission-focused public servants are a vanishing breed, writes George Koch, and governing a city is now mainly about keeping city workers, senior officials and elected politicians happy.
Manitoba Must Protect Consumer Choice In Energy
The provincial election is the perfect opportunity to lay down the gauntlet against the green extremists’ unjustified war on natural gas furnaces and stoves that is slowly creeping up on us. The City of Nanaimo - yet another British Columbia municipality – just passed...
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Canadian Property Rights Index 2023
A Snapshot of Property Rights Protection in Canada After 10 years
Alberta Politics and Empty Promises of Health-care Solutions
The writ has been dropped and Albertans are off to the polls on May 29. That leaves just four weeks for political leaders and voters to sort out what is arguably the most divisive, yet significant, issue for this election - health care. On Day 2, NDP leader Rachel...
Cox: Downtown Rethink
This article entitled People in Toronto won't stop working from home and it's impacting the city paints a relatively negative picture about downtown prospects - noting that Toronto office vacancy rates have just hit their highest level since 1995. Looks like the...
The 15 Minute City: An Idiotic Dream
One of the arguments against single-family zoning is that separating housing from other uses forces people to drive to shops, work, and other destinations. Urban planners want to redesign cities so that people can walk to most of those destinations. They even have a...
Downtown Calgary: At Risk?
Downtown Calgary is a big deal (see photo below and photos following the text). Traditional American and Canadian downtown areas (central business districts or CBDs) are a holdover from the pre-auto era. Their geographical limits were largely set by the early Great...
Defund the Police? No, Defund Sociologists!
The demand currently on the lips of youthful mobs and their academic enablers is “Defund the Police”, a catchy phrase that encapsulates both the innocence and ignorance of the young and the sinister intent of those who will use any crisis to bring down capitalism and...
Targeting Violent Crime: The Sequel of Unintended Consequences
Chicago has experienced a disturbing number of homicides, shootings, and overall violence during the past year. Chicago, like several other American cities, is once again experiencing unprecedented levels of violent crimes, shootings, and homicides, matching the...
The Masked Failure of Command
Police services are once again hard at work preparing annual budget submissions for the next fiscal year. The cost of policing continues to mount year after year, and the justifications seem to repeat year to year as well. The budget for Canada’s largest municipal...
A New Epidemic of Illegal Firearms
An analysis by the CBC covering two decades of homicide statistics for Winnipeg reveals a major shift in the types of weapons used in the incidents. Winnipeg has seen 42 homicides to date in 2019, more than in any other previous ten-year period.1 Winnipeg police...
Governments Should Announce Results, Instead of Spending
The carpenters’ mantra — measure twice but cut once — says when you have limited resources move carefully because you have only one chance to get it right. Failure to follow this wisdom can lead to costly waste. Outcomes. Results. Value. While governments struggle to...
Hazardous Levels of Lead in Canadian Tap Water
Canadians have been exposed to a silent health hazard for more than 40 years: high levels of lead in tap water. Although a clear case of municipal mismanagement, Toronto shows the issue can be handled at the local level with minimal federal oversight—given the right...