On Tuesday, October 20th we learned that the Ford government intends to remove the ability for a municipality to use ranked ballots. I’m a bit gutted about this. There is still time to register for a 60 minute session on Monday October 26 at 7:30pm from Unlock Democracy about the success of Ranked Ballots in […]
Category archives: Politics
Weeknotes, Oct 6 – Oct 12 2020
Jeewen Gill is Windsor’s new Ward 7 councillor with a share of 19.7% share of the vote. Despite my misgivings, I did listen into the virtual Ward 4 & 5 Town Hall meeting last week. It was better than I expected and I did appreciate the ability to be polled about future budget priorities and […]
Weeknotes, Sept 8 – Sept 14 2020
Items of note from last week’s news: LaSalle to construct bike lockers at select bus stops – Windsor Star, September 7, 2020 Privacy, community trust, equity a concern after Windsor police access COVID-19 database, CBC Windsor, September 8, 2020 “A Crown witness in a lengthy gun trafficking trial repeated earlier assertions of “dirty cops” on […]
Weeknotes, August 18 – August 24
Today there is a Windsor City Council Meeting at 11am. My annotated agenda is here. On that note, I did not know until now that the City of Windsor’s website has Municipal Calendar that looks lovely. It would be nice if the calendar could have also been presented as a feed (although when there are […]
Weeknotes, August 11 – August 17
On August 14th, civic activist (civic influencer?) Dave Meslin shared some of the work from his latest project: a Municipal Democracy Index, “ranking Ontario’s largest cities based on a series of quantifiable metrics related to how power is shared / distributed and the degree to which local democracy is accessible, responsive and representative…” Dave Meslin […]
Weeknotes, August 3rd – August 10th
Inspired by both Frazier Father’s weekly editions of A Few Thoughts… as well as the valiant cohort of writers trying to keep blogging alive by publishing Weeknotes, I thought I would try to publish a set of short Windsor-related entries on a weekly basis. Let’s see if I can make this habit stick. Last Tuesday […]
The Inspectors We Have and the Inspectors We Need
The City of Windsor employs 500 sworn officers and approximately 150 staff. Yet the most pressing need for our region’s safety and well-being are not those kind of inspectors. We need inspectors who are able to inspect farms in person. The federal government has conducted mostly remote inspections of Ontario farms that employ migrant workers during […]
Taking Suggestions Instead of Making Change
Despite the fact that the post curiously doesn’t use the words #blacklivesmatter, I like the text that introduces the Windsor Black Lives Matter Questionnaire from the Mayor’s Facebook post. I also appreciate the fact that it tells us that the questionnaire closes July 10th. I do not like the wording of the introduction from the […]
Law and order vs. Justice and peace
I don’t know whether it is possible to understand the protests of the current moment as a single, country-wide, thing. We know that there are those protesting police brutality, those who are inciting violence to incite more police brutality, those there to loot, and there are those who are just there because they have had […]
No Ring Please
In September of last year, not long after I had shared my concerns that new police cameras could be used with facial recognition software, mayor Drew Dilkens told AM800 that he was in talks with Amazon to make Windsor the first city in Canada to have their police department connect to their Neighbors App which […]