Alberta: Get Rich or Die Trying

In the news

Lots of interesting stuff going on today. Here is a roundup of links:

Photo: Globe and Mail

The Globe and Mail has a good article detailing the 'in and out' scheme the Conservative Party of Canada allegedly used during the last election to finance national campaign advertising and exceed their allowable spending under the Elections Act by over $1 million dollars (and has resulted in yesterday's RCMP and EC raid of their headquarters). According to the Ottawa Citizen, this is the first time in Canadian history that a political party headquarters has been searched by the RCMP. I always new PM Harper would be a path breaker.

UPDATE: CBC's Politics with Don Newman is reporting that the RCMP are executing a criminal search warrant, granted by a Toronto criminal court at the request of Elections Canada. In fact, the ongoing search may have nothing to do with the 'in and out' scheme investigation and this may just be an attempt on the CPC to mask the real reason the cops are there.

Alberta Health and Wellness minister, Ron Liepert, has laid out his plan for the next year. The press release is seemingly benign. Some highlights include expansion of addiction and mental health services and a renewed strategy for regional health planning by June 15th. As they say though, the devil is in the details (and also the forthcoming provincial budget). I'd expect some healthcare-related controversy when Alberta Health's 'long term sustainability' plan is released in 9 months, if not sooner. Especially given Liepert's stated support for the Manzankowski and the 2006 Health Policy Framework reports and his general lust for 1990s-style, slash and burn budget cuts.

The Edmonton Journal's Todd Babiak has changed his tune (somewhat) on Edmonton's bid for the National Portrait Gallery. His column yesterday paints quite the rosy picture of a revitalized downtown arts and culture district. I like to think his newfound optimism is the direct result of  reading this blog...

Maude Barlow and the Council of Canadians warns that if Canada doesn't revist NAFTA, Canadian governments can expect litigation by foreign oil companies if ever a water shortage were to halt oil and gas production.

Health Canada looks ready to ban bisphenol A. This endocrine disruptor mimics the effect of estrogen and has been linked to breast and prostate cancer. The bad news is that bisphenol A is in many clear plastic bottles (water bottles, water cooler jugs, clear/tinted nalgene bottles) and it is also used to line tin cans. The good news is that it can be avoided somewhat. See Green Edmonton for advice on that.

Finally, this gem. Apparently Vancouver transit cops have been tasering fare-cheaters. Even the non-violent ones. SHADY.

Sadly, this one isn't an April Fool's joke

That said, it's certainly the most foolish thing I've seen in quite a while. Although I've already posted on this subject, I just wanted to remind all of our Edmontonian readers that as of yesterday, you'll now be charged a cool $250 if you get busted for jaywalking.

The logic given for this increase? Pedestrians need an "incentive to play safer." Apparently, not getting smashed by a car and slowly bleeding to death on the pavement is not quite incentive enough.

Takin' it back to the old school, 'cuz I'm an old fool who's so cool: Part 2

About a week ago I addressed the recent school closures in Edmonton in this post's predecessor, unsurprisingly titled "Takin' it back to the old school, 'cuz I'm an old fool who's so cool: Part 1." In that post, I posed and answered the first of two questions on the topic: what's causing these closures? Below, in a manner no less rambling or nonsensical, I will pose and answer the second.

2. What can be done to prevent school closings?

If, as I posit in my first post, these closures have resulted from a combination of the homogeneity of the neighbourhoods in which the schools are being closed and the general trend of suburbanization that Edmonton is undergoing, the answer to question 2 is theoretically simple:

• increase the number of residents with children in the affected neighbourhoods
• increase the diversity of the housing stock in the affected neighbourhoods to hedge against future demographic shifts of the magnitude that resulted in this round of school closures

Practically, however, it's a complete nightmare, mainly because if there is one thing that Edmontonians hate more than school closures, it's density infill development (which is the only way I can think of in which you could increase the diversity and abundance of housing stock in a neighbourhood). It's kind of funny, because I have a feeling many of the very same people who are raising a big stink over these school closings would be dusting off their grumpy pants and marching over to the community league if somebody wanted to build some condos in their neighbourhood. I'm not saying that either of those actions are generally right or wrong, but I am saying they're inconsistent with one another on some level.

Which brings me to what I think is really the root of the problem: the stigma that most Edmontonians attach to any density level or housing format that isn't strictly single-family, and the logical inconsistencies that result from this. For most people, it seems that infill projects aren't evaluated on their individual merits; they're simply bad. The brouhaha that ensues after every successive round of school closures in some way illustrates this, I think, because the topic of infill -- which is really the only thing that can reverse the trend of these closures -- rarely, if ever, comes up.

I don't think people fail to make this link because it's conceptually difficult; I mean, it's obvious, to me, that a neighbourhood with a 40-year-old school is going to need at least a few more residences to sustain that school if only because families simply aren't as big as they used to be. I think that this doesn't come up because Edmontonians inhabit an environment in which the popular discourse says that "infill/density = the great satan," and as a result are much less acquainted with the positive attributes that infill can bring.

So, in my opinion, the root-cause solution is simply to change the long-ingrained thinking of 1 000 000 people, a good portion of which are stubborn Ukrainians.  If this sounds like a tall order, that's probably because it is, but I'm of the mindset that all this would really take is one good project: one in which the neighbourhood is properly consulted; a reasonable amount of density and diversity is achieved without simply plopping a 30-story tower in the middle of a bunch of bungalows; a pleasant, lively and rejuvenated neighbourhood results; and, hopefully, an ailing school is saved. I think a project like that could show Edmontonians that infill can do more for a neighbourhood than increase traffic and make parking harder.*

In summary: infill is what can stop school closures, and residents need to understand that so they can encourage it in their neighbourhoods instead of banding together to stop it.

*I think that while kids in most cities have nightmares about the boogeyman, children in Edmonton have nightmares about not being able to find a parking spot or getting stuck on the Quesnell bridge. I can just see a kid in Oilers pajamas asking his mom to check under his bed for construction on 114 st.

The good and the bad: Edmonton's proposed new arena

On the issue of a new arena, we defer to our guest poster on the AGRDT sports beat, MR. Thanks for an insightful analysis!

The long awaited Edmonton arena feasibility report came out on Tuesday, and to the surprise of no one, it glowingly endorsed a downtown arena. What people seem to forget about this report is that it is only the preliminary stage of the process, it’s not a plan and therefore it lacks the details that would be associated with a plan. Nonetheless the document will guide future decisions so let’s take a look at the good, and the bad:

The Good

•“That existing parking in the multipurpose activity district be maximized.”

According to the report parking and traffic will not be a concern because last new years “more than 35,000 people gathered in Sir Winston Churchill Square without overcrowding, creating parking challenges, or causing any traffic problems as the crowds dispersed.” So take that… Seriously though, while I don’t agree that one debatably successful instance of smooth mass exodus from the downtown core proves anything, I do agree that parking and traffic should not be a concern. That is assuming that the location selected has proximal access to public transportation. A lack of parking might even encourage people to leave their vehicles at home.

• “The facility should be programmed to maximize use through concerts, events, shows and community uses, given the limited numbers of Oilers games annually.”

To me this was recognition of the fact that it is not a good idea to simply plop an arena that remains dark on most nights into the downtown core…it’s a start.

• “That a sports/entertainment facility within a multipurpose activity district be designed to link the neighbourhood, the City of Edmonton, the Edmonton capital region and central and northern Alberta.”

Anyone who read my previous post knows that I think it is absolutely crucial for this project to be more then just a big old building. There is not much detail here, but at least the idea is being presented. Hopefully, as the planning process continues we will see the district development and the arena development merge because I think that planning the two as separate entities, or phases, is a huge mistake. 

• “That the sports/entertainment facility be environmentally sustainable, using LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) criteria.”

Very good…Enough said.

The Bad

• “The subcommittee believes that there is potential to identify additional sources of revenue associated with a revitalized downtown area such as a downtown parking levy and/or an increase in the existing ticket surcharge.”

A new arena means more expensive tickets, which means even fewer games for me and probably you. Expected, but still bad.

•“There is precedent in Alberta for the use of a community revitalization levy (CRL) for enabling projects such as this. A CRL allows a municipality to raise funds against future increases in the tax base.”

The Mandel loop hole: apparently tax money doesn’t include future potential tax money.    

How things will go down…

    There will be a new arena and it will be downtown, any alternatives have pretty much been steamrolled over by the municipal government and the Edmonton media. There will be public funding, not direct tax increases, but by other means, and the province will give nothing. The report’s suggestions seem to point to the development of an entertainment district which, hopefully, will be part of, and not separate from the arena planning process. Unfortunately, I don’t see the city using this project as a means to fight any of the other major civic problems (like say…affordable housing). Just my thoughts…how do you see it playing out?

UPDATE: The Canadian Finals Rodeo threatens to pull out of Edmonton, if new downtown facility is difficult to access via truck and livestock trailers.

For more insight on the new Edmonton downtown arena plan, check out our friends Daveberta and Covered in Oil.

Takin' it back to the old school, 'cuz I'm an old fool who's so cool: Part 1

Apologies for the lame title, but I challenge any of you to write about old schools and not somehow incorporate at least one rap lyric. I thought I'd get it out of the way early so I wouldn't feel the temptation later in the post.

The old school I'm referring to is Ritchie Junior High, which, according to this story in the Journal, is going to be the latest casualty in the round of school closures sweeping through Edmonton's mature neighbourhoods. The fact that this is happening in the face of unprecedented population growth within the city as whole raises a lot of questions about the way we've built and continue to build our city. Although I'm certain I'm not the first to ask or attempt to answer them, I'm going to focus on two of these questions.

1. What's causing these closures?

The obvious answer to this is the sweet siren call of the suburbs that we Edmontonians seem to be so powerless against. More than anything a school needs a pack of slobbering, whiny rugrats (if it's elementary; if it's secondary, it would need a troop of mouthy, angst-ridden yahoos) to make it viable. It's quite clear that the parents of these kids are choosing overwhelmingly to reside in suburban neighbourhoods, so that's why the schools that the Edmonton Public School Board (EPSB) has closed or is considering closing are in mature, central neighbourhoods, and the new schools they have planned or are constructing are in suburban areas.

Further to that, I think this phenomenon is exacerbated by the design of the mature neighbourhoods themselves. In my opinion, school closures are eventually what happen when you have neighbourhoods that consist of a whole bunch of similar buildings that were built at the same time to house the same type of people. The funny part about Edmonton is that even our core neighbourhoods are, for the most part, designed using suburban principles. The neighbourhood that Ritchie Junior High is located in (Ritchie, I believe it is called), for example, would be considered by almost everyone to be a "core" area of the city, but it's still suburban housing -- it's just the post-war version, made slightly more benign but the smaller lot sizes (relative to contemporary suburbs) and more rational street design (grid and laneways vs the rambling cul-de-sacs we see today).

The design of Ritchie contributed to this closure, I think, because neighbourhoods that consist of vast tracts of identical housing tend to attract vast tracts of demographically similar people. When suburban neighbourhoods like Ritchie were built they appealed largely to families, which necessitated the relatively large amount of schools constructed within them. Those families and their kids then grew up more-or-less simultaneously, and by the time this had happened there hadn't emerged a source of housing within the area that was attractive and/or numerous enough to make up for all of the kids that had simply grown out of their neighbourhoods.

So we get school closures, which in turn make neighbourhood renewal infinitely harder because school proximity is a major factor when young families are trying to decide where they want to live.

All that being said, I don't think school closures are in themselves a bad thing. Neighbourhoods change, people move, and some schools are just crappy. It's just alarming to see such an obvious pattern that is contrary to what is becoming more and more widely accepted as the most desirable paradigm of urban planning: that of diversity and and reasonable density.

It's also discouraging to see that we don't seem to have learned from our mistakes. I would wager that all of the new schools going up in the suburbs will likely face a similar fate in 30-40 years, given the general lack of diversity in the housing stock of the neighbourhoods that surround them. The Alberta government seems have similar feelings, as they've structured the maintenance contracts on the new suburban schools to only last 25-30 years*.

The issue of what makes an individual school close is always a complicated one with many contributing factors, and it's impossible to identify a single cause as responsible. That said, when we see schools closing  in central areas of the city in the face of a population boom with their replacements being constructed in suburban areas, we can reasonably conclude that this problem is driven by the larger trend of suburbanization that Edmonton (and virtually all North American cities) has undergone and continues to undergo.

This all of the sudden got quite long while I was writing it, so in the efforts of keeping our readership awake I will break it into two parts. Stay tuned in upcoming days for part two of this post: What should we do?

*Gotta love the politicization of publicly-funded government websites. Anyone else notice how "A PLAN" is bolded in the "Building Tomorrow" logo at the top right of the story, or ring-road projects that were barely complete at the time of this release are referred to as "very successful?" It was truly a pleasure to see that my tax money was being used to further strengthen Tory hegemony while reading a release about it being used to line the pockets of private investors via the proven-to-not-work P3 model.

Bizarro Week continues

First, we had oilsands companies advocating a carbon tax, and now this: Kerry Diotte and I agree on something.

The man who attributed Don Iveson's win in the recent Edmonton municipal election to a socialist conspiracy and I are united -- albeit for fairly different reasons -- in our strong distaste of the city's new jaywalking bylaw, which increases the fine for inappropriate street crossing in our city from $40 to a truly ridiculous $250 (see the story here; I never thought I'd link to the Sun three times in two paragraphs, but for some reason no one else has covered this -- and, after all, it is Bizarro Week).

The reason for this increase? "There has to be a greater incentive for people to play safer," according to traffic safety office official Gerry Shimko, who refers to Edmonton's 13 pedestrian fatalities last year. Right off the bat, I question if this will really accomplish anything because as Diotte points out in his column, jaywalking is responsible for only 4 of these 13 fatalities. That said, I do agree that the city should be working to reduce the number of these fatalities, but as is all-too-common in our city, this problem is being looked at from the slightly elevated and air-conditioned perspective of the driver.

I'm going to hazard a guess and say that the majority of jaywalking in the city -- and the majority of jaywalking enforcement -- takes place downtown and in the University/Whyte Ave area (when I say "jaywalking," I don't include crossing cul-de-sacs and similar trivialities). Because these are pretty much the only two places in the city where one can walk anywhere, I feel reasonably confident making this assertion. Taking this into account and using the city's logic, one would think that most of the traffic fatalities that this bylaw is aiming to fix would have occurred in these areas.

However, taking a look at this map reveals that this isn't the case. 10 or 11 (depending on your figuring) of 2007's 13 pedestrian fatalities took place within what I would call the peripheral areas, where  my contention is that jaywalking (and pedestrian travel in general) is less frequent but made much more dangerous when it does occur by the inadequate pedestrian facilities in these areas. My point: jaywalking, at least when it's done in pedestrian-friendly areas, isn't the problem -- the problem is people attempting to navigate on foot a city that is designed for cars.

I'm certainly not saying that the city should go to say, Argyll, widen the sidewalks, and build pedestrian overpasses at every intersection; this would be an ultimately superficial measure that would do little to change the habits engendered by 50 years of designing for the automobile. What I am saying is that this yet another example of the car-centric mindframe that still permeates City of Edmonton decision-making, and one more thing to add to the extensive and growing list of reasons for the city to make a fundamental shift to its design philosophy and priorities.

As well, as a resident of a "core" area in the city it frankly pisses me off  that my street-crossing privileges are going to be restricted essentially so non-core residents drive 60 through my neighbourhood with impunity. Could you imagine the furor if a bunch of fellow core residents and I decided to go rip around Riverbend and then, after smashing a few kids, suggested that the solution would be to give the kids tickets?

I'll close by conceding probably the best argument of all to Diotte, who contends that the effectiveness of this bylaw will ultimately be compromised by the scads of irate, fine-contesting people there will be if bylaw officers start writing $250 tickets for jaywalking.

Portions of this post were inspired by conversations with friend BD. I have to give credit where credit is due, particularly since I think he's starting to get suspicious of me appropriating his intellectual property for the purposes of this blog.