The war on cars people know they’re completely ridiculous, right? Like there is no way they truly believe that there’s a campaign or a conspiracy to completely get rid of all the cars on the road. If they do, I feel sorry for them for having such a narrow perspective on society. They should travel more.
Over the past few years, I’ve had the privilege of being in some truly world class cities. These are places even Conservatives would have to admit are amazing. It’s an objective fact.
Vancouver. Geneva. Paris. Toronto. Montreal. Amsterdam. Hong Kong. To name some of them.
What I’ve experienced is no matter how great the pedestrian and cycling infrastructure is, or how incredibly developed the transit system is, there are still lots of cars. In a city where just about everyone was born on two wheels, I was in a traffic jam while taking a taxi from Amsterdam’s airport to my hotel. Hong Kong has incredibly aggressive drivers and pedestrians do not have the right of way. To be fair, there are so many pedestrians, drivers would probably never get to go if they had to wait for them to cross the street.
It’s sad how so many people have bought into this lie that gets pedalled around by some of our elected leaders that the building of bike lanes and bus routes means we’re replacing cars forever. I was thoroughly amused by a lady’s comments on an Instagram post by Councillor Nathaniel Schmidt where she is adamant that a family needs to have a car, maybe two, because how else can they go to Costco? Where does she even get the idea that every family needs to shop at Costco? Lady, you can have your car.
I wish your cars were smaller but that’s a whole other point.
But you can have your cars, and I can have my bike lanes and transit. Yes, there is, and should be, room for all of it. You get to drive safely, and I get to bike safely. You get to sit in a car and drive, and I get to sit on a bus or train and not think about driving.
This is the goal. It’s not you get to drive safely and I have to risk my life to ride a bike. It’s not you get to drive and I’m SOL if I don’t want to drive. Everyone gets to move around in whichever way is best for them in whatever given situation.
This is how they do it in the best cities in the world and that’s what we should strive for.
“The root is the fulcrum on which will rest the expression of your soul; the root is the ‘starting point’ of all natural manifestation. It cannot be, when the root is neglected, that what should spring from it will be well-ordered.”
I pulled this quote by Bruce Lee out of a book about his philosophies written by his daughter, Shannon Lee. It comes at a good time while I sit here in a hotel in Hong Kong and contemplate who I am, what I care about and what I can offer the world.
An introduction to Canadian law should be a compulsory high school credit in every province. In the past, I would have said it’s important for kids growing up to understand their basic rights, especially if they’re ever confronted by police.
But now it seems like we need to make sure someone who aspires to be the head of government has taken some Law 101 before they assume such a position. Like Alberta’s Danielle Smith, who recently suggested her provincial government would not provide supplemental administrative funding for Alberta’s justice system unless Prime Minister Mark Carney and the federal government gives Alberta more of a say in who will be appointed as judges.
Very few people want a government that’s fiscally conservative. Most people actually want a government that’s fiscally responsible. Yes, even in Alberta! Those two things aren’t the same.
Screenshot of Alberta’s budget webpage
It took me a while to figure out how to best articulate this but a conversation with a new acquaintance sparked these thoughts. He described himself as “socially progressive and fiscally conservative.” By that he means he believes our elected officials should more or less pay their own way. They shouldn’t be expensing office supplies, coffees, meals, travel costs or basically anything a politician might spend their publicly funded constituency budget to do their work on a day to day basis. He called this nickel and diming the taxpayer, reimbursing little things that someone should be willing to pay out of their pocket with the salary they earn.
He had a point and I agree with him to an extent. But I wouldn’t call that being fiscally conservative. That’s being fiscally responsible. Or even simpler, just being a good steward of the budget you’re given.
Yep, I said it. I don’t like to play that card and almost never do but I’m playing it for this one.
It’s also a giant waste of time but it’s the latest topic of faux outrage conjured up by conservative council members so we have to address it.
I can understand why the Jewish community is upset about the Palestinian flag being raised but this idea that it’s going to create further tension between the two communities is completely overblown.
I’m not referring to the results. I’m referring to all the ways the UCP government changed how our municipal elections work to quote them “strengthen democracy” and things were objectively worse in every way.
Yes, I’m talking about the voting, the counting, the campaigning, everything. It was a shitshow. There’s no sugar coating it.
Voting
Voters reported long lines all day and you can’t just chalk that up to timing with the Blue Jays game and the high number of undecided people who had to wait until election day to make up their minds. The system was broken. A lot of voters had to re-register, have their ID checked twice, had to watch election workers fill out another form by hand. It was just really confusing and I don’t remember the process being so cumbersome. But it was 100% the UCP’s requirement to have forms filled out by hand that slowed things down.
I voted in advance and my wait was maybe 20 minutes. I did have to update my address so yes that would take some more time. But not that many people would share that same experience so much that it would cause waits of around two hours.
My friend, who was voting for the first time ever, also was confused by an election worker who asked if she wanted to vote for a public or private school trustee. They would’ve meant public or separate school board trustee. But even when she said public, she didn’t receive a ballot for it.
Counting
I spent election night as a scrutineer at the central counting centre. Bless all the people who were hired to manually count every vote by hand because they should never have had to. The UCP banned voting tabulators for no other reason than because some conspiracy theorists told them to. And so, it took about four hours to get any solid results on the race for mayor.
Just to contrast this. I scrutineered the advance vote in 2021. The process went like this: polls closed at 8:00, the election official turned on the tabulator machines, pressed report on all of them, and I was out of there by 9:30. When I left, none of my advance vote reporting actually mattered because the counts were already done at every other polling station. When I got in my car, I already knew who was going to be on city council. It’s 7:00 AM the next morning as I write this and we’re firm on maybe three councillors who are far ahead enough in their races that the advance vote won’t make a difference. What a huge change.
The folks at Elections Calgary tried their hardest to train the workers consistently but I saw dozens of booths all with different methods of sorting and counting ballots. Some would sort on the table while others sorted ballots into bins. Some checked the ballot for an official’s initials first, then sorted, then counted. Others checked and sorted at the same time. Some counted both first and second counts where we could see. Others did the second count turned away from us. One booth would fill in their results sheets in plain view of scrutineers while others did it at the back so we couldn’t see it.
All of this was incredibly inefficient and definitely not any more secure than before. This is not the fault of the counters. They were all very lovely and so were the supervisors overseeing things. A few of them looked at me and commented on why we didn’t have electronic counting.
Campaigning
How could an election be fair when belonging to a party gives you a fundraising advantage? This doesn’t mean every party candidate raised more money than an independent but that kind of advantage should never exist.
It’s pretty obvious the provincial government allowed for parties to exist in Calgary and Edmonton to make it easier to elect conservativesin the big cities. The plan was always to consolidate support around one candidate, put conservative on their stuff and cruise to victory. They even gave them that fundraising advantage.
For the most part, parties were soundly rejected but it’s not like they had absolutely no impact. Kim Tyers in Ward 1 and Mike Jamieson in Ward 12 either wouldn’t have won or would’ve had a harder time winning if not for their party affiliation. For Tyers, she was running to replace Councillor Sonya Sharp, and being in the same party sure makes it very easy for Sharp’s previous supporters to just pick the person on the same team. She still almost lost.
Jamieson’s situation is more interesting because he ran against two party candidates and only won by 59 votes. One of his opponents was in the other conservative-branded party. No doubt voters in Ward 12 were looking for someone calling themselves a conservative. Considering some thought Sharp’s Communities First party was too centrist, it would seem like voters chose the even more conservative Jamieson.
Meanwhile, some of Jamieson’s A Better Calgary colleagues probably did better purely because of that branding. I doubt Tony Dinh would’ve picked up so many votes in Ward 9 to finish third if he wasn’t in the party. And Christy Edwards in Ward 3 absolutely would not have gotten 3,000 votes if she wasn’t in the party. Her flyers were literal trash and she didn’t do any campaigning.
Absolute failure
The election wasn’t made better in any way and I don’t expect the UCP to go back and look at what could be improved. I wish the new council would make a public statement calling out all these issues. It was clearly terrible and there’s no way the next election in four years should be run the same way. It was less efficient, less fair, less accessible and more expensive. That’s an epic fail.
We’re one week from election day, various polls are showing a very close race for mayor and people are freaking out about the low turnout so far after advance voting week.
About the only outcome you can predict at this point is that almost every candidate will win without picking up a clear majority of the votes cast.
This will happen because of a known bug in the Canadian electoral system. It’s the person who gets the most votes who wins, not the person who crosses the majority-has-spoken threshold.
This is why a candidate – whether for mayor or council – should include election reform on their platform and set themselves apart from their opponents.
If I was running in the municipal election as a candidate in a party, here’s what I’d say in my defence:
“I joined a party because I believed this was the new reality we would be living in after it was imposed on us by the provincial government. This gives me the best shot at winning a council seat to do work that I’m passionate about. At the same time, I am with a group of candidates who all believe in the same vision for Calgary. I’m glad there are still a large number of people running independently. At the end of the day, I will work hard to earn the respect and support of voters and I believe I will be elected based on my personal character, not because of the party I belong to.”
I thought about this because there were a couple of articles in the past month (CBC, Livewire) that interviewed several candidates about the addition of political parties in this year’s municipal elections in Calgary and Edmonton. It was so interesting to see the candidates who are running with a party dance around trying to defend the decision.
They’re in the party because they think it makes sense to work with like-minded people but they don’t like that they’re in the party or how it was imposed on them by the provincial government. Or they’re in a party now but they won’t necessarily vote alongside fellow party members once they’re sitting on the horseshoe in council chambers.
I recently came across a TikTok video where a local influencer giddily took us on a tour of the revamped Eau Claire YMCA. Now a private luxury spa, I quickly became depressed by what it’s turned into and thought wow, here we go again with neoliberalism taking over and ruining our community.
The Y was once a publicly accessible space where everyday citizens could exercise and connect. Becoming a private members-only playground for the wealthy highlights everything wrong with our society and how our governments just don’t care to invest in our community.
Also the ED of the Calgary Downtown Association praising this is just wrong on so many levels. This isn’t something to celebrate. It’s a tragedy!
It’s time for the blog revival. It’s good therapy. My therapist even said it’s a good exercise in defining my identity at a time when I’m questioning what I should be doing with my life or what I’m good at. I said: I’m good at writing. I’m a writer.
andrewng.media 