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...
Featured News
There’s Nothing Fair About Canadian Health Care
For the past 14 years, Vancouver surgeon Dr. Brian Day has led the charge for health-care reform, pushing for the right of patients to pay for private care if their health and well-being are threatened as a result of waiting in a stagnant and overburdened public...
Transformers: More than Meets the Eye
The path to net zero, based on the much disputed belief that carbon dioxide is a pollution, is more steep and impractical than most people realize. Replacing fossil fuels with clean electricity will require much more power generation and a greatly upgraded grid to...
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...
Maximum Pain for Minimum Gain at City Hall
We have all seen this movie before. The theatrics now underway at city hall over the city’s ongoing budget “crisis” is just too predictable. Taxpayers have seen this movie so many times before that we know the plot. City bureaucrats float various dire scenarios,...
Police Budgets and Accountability 2.0
Winnipeg’s police Chief Smyth has the typical police challenge on his hands - the ones seen over and over again: crime is up, resources are stretched, and more money is needed. Behind the scenes and out of the public’s eye, he must also be seen as preserving the...
Slum Cities and Refugee Camps: Gateways to a Perilous Future
At any given time, there are about 20 million people on the move in the world. When there’s war, terrorism, extreme weather events, or other disruptions, this can grow to 80 million people trying to get to safety. We hear of illegal immigrants crossing borders and...
Allowing Liquor Store Thefts Is Just Dead Wrong
The problem of theft from Winnipeg’s liquor stores is steadily growing more serious. It has become well known to thieves that they can steal with impunity from the stores. They know that the staff have been advised not to interfere with a theft in progress under any...
Municipal Governments should do Less and Spend Less
Municipal spending in British Columbia is rising far too fast. According to a report from the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, the cost of running the municipal government – even after accounting for price inflation and population growth – rose by an...