Alex Reid

After the election was official this past weekend, canada.votes2011.ca went live, gathering up steam on Facebook and Twitter. It’s a project that I’ve been somewhat busy with for the past ten weeks, in anticipation of the five provincial elections coming up this fall.

The site is built around using the new functionality of WordPress’ Multi-site network, and a subtle domain hack. I’m still adding to the site, and recruiting writers to add content over the next five weeks, and again closer to the five provincial elections in October.

The Federal government via MP Shelly Glover and the Province of Manitoba via Trade Minister Peter Bjornson have announced a shared funding boost of $1.8 million to Manitoba Music (which New Winnipeg Media is a corporate sponsor of) – a not-for-profit industry association designed to help local artists and companies market their music beyond Manitoba’s borders.

The money is part of a four-year plan under the Canada-Manitoba Western Economic Partnership Agreement (WEPA), in which both the Province of Manitoba and the Government of Canada are contributing $25 million each over four years to “to strengthen economic activity and improve the quality of life in western Canadian communities.”

The people over at How’d They Vote have included a postal code look up in their API.

“How’d They Vote?” aims to be a non-partisan website which provides a variety of in-depth information on the operations of the Canadian Parliament, specifically, how our politicians vote and what they’ve said. We take Hansard and extract information on bills, members of parliament, votes, and speeches. Hansard is an excellent resource, but it is not the mandate of the parliament website to fully index and extract every nugget of interesting information from it.

A worthy project indeed.

A US consulting company has announced their top Canadian cities for young professionals (like me). The company’s founder, Rebecca Ryan says:

“The next generation is very savvy about choosing where they’ll live. They look carefully at quality of life factors like how much time they’re going to spend in traffic commuting, if they can live near a park or hike-and-bike trail, and whether a city’s downtown stays awake after five.”

Victoria, Ottawa and Vancouver got the top three positions:

1. Victoria, British Columbia
2. Ottawa, Ontario
3. Vancouver, British Columbia
4. Kingston, Ontario
5. Halifax, Nova Scotia
6. Toronto, Ontario
7. Calgary, Alberta
8. Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
9. London, Ontario
10. Edmonton, Alberta