Alex Reid

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.

Last month, Macleans magazine issued a bold exposition; assessing our cities.

Instead of measuring citizen’s happiness or measuring young professionals’ choices, the survey – conducted by the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies (AIMS) – looked at the performance of city services compared to the cost. The magazine explained:

For without some sort of yardstick to measure their performance, either against other cities or against their own past record, how can they hope to know whether they are succeeding?

Macleans was quick to point out that their survey is different than the Frontier Centre’s Performance Index which they say measured how efficient Canadian cities are (doing things right) while Macleans was trying to measure how effective they are (doing the right thing).

There were two conflicting factors in the survey. One was inconsistency. Upon hearing the results, some cities’ Mayors complained that their city was unique and did not compare justly to other cities. And the fact is that some provinces maintain certain services while in other provinces, it is the cities that maintain those services. It was like comparing apples to oranges in many cases. A city that has a lot of crime may not be the fault of the police, just as a city that suffers a lot of snowfall may have to spend a lot of effort and money to plow it.

However the bigger problem in comparing the cities was the utter lack of transparency. In many cases, many cities either didn’t collect any data or feedback on their service levels or straight out did not release it to the public. But this all comes back to the main point, if we aren’t allowed to know the data which we already paid for, then how can we properly judge the decision making of our community leaders, or more importantly understand our weaknesses and improve upon that?

Macleans stated that if more than half the top 30 cities did not release information on a certain indicator, it was left blank such as “fire department response times or the percentage of roads in good condition” and if a city (like Victoria and Laval) didn’t release much data, they were dropped from the overall score. Painfully, one third of the cities offered very little data, specifically in regards to safety and protection (police and fire services). So AIMS had to rely on other previous works in the field of municipal assessment, such as Ontario’s Municipal Performance Measurement Program which started in 2000.

It’s not perfect, AIMS admits, but it’s a start. Assuming that Macleans will sponsor this survey on an annual basis, researchers hope that a pattern will emerge and hopefully pressure for open government data will prevail. In the meantime, it’s all meant for consideration.

FOR ALL THE DETAILED DATA, click here.

One interesting point was that the cities near the top of the list tended to have low voter turnouts while those cities near the bottom had the highest voter turnouts in Canada. Perhaps happiness equates to apathy?

Another interesting trend appears to be geographical, lending weight that the provinces or regional attitudes may play a part in local city centres.

Three of the top four cities in the Macleans list are in Vancouver and its suburbs. Quebec contains three top cities (Longueuil, Sherbrooke and Quebec City) in the top ten list, and apparently have the best fire and police services in Canada. Four cities in the Atlantic region ranked in the bottom third of the list. Winnipeg scored well with having the fourth most city employees per capita and Winnipeg Transit scored really well.

City Council voted on two motions regarding ethics on Wednesday; both stemming from allegations that Winnipeg’s Mayor Sam Katz was in conflict during a lease renegotiation deal last September.

One motion was from City Councillor Gord Steeves. He wanted to see the city establish an “Accountability Commissioner” to review the politicians and city employees; enacting a whistle blower hotline; and to create an “enhanced expense account monitoring reporting system”.

While the Mayor agreed with the idea, he was short on votes as two of his allies were not present. Steeves’ motion was defeated by left-leaning Councillors who preferred to approve fellow Councillor Jenny Gerbasi’s alternative motion to call on the province to be the one to create a “Conflict of Interest Commissioner”. The vote passed narrowly by 7-6.

Passing the buck appears to be Gerbasi’s forté.

Gerbasi essentially made a motion to call on the Province to employ an ethical accountability mechanism, instead of Steeve’s motion which would have the City directly handle such issues.

A spokesperson for the Intergovernmental Affairs Minister, Steve Ashton, told the Winnipeg Free Press that they don’t even understand Gerbasi’s motion, questioning why the city doesn’t “use existing legislation to do what they’re proposing”. One would think a City Councillor belonging to the political party that happens to be in power of the Province, might want to check with her friends to see if her motion has teeth. It’s lazy to call on another level of government and even more lazy (or strange) why you wouldn’t validify your own work.

The Mayor suggested to the Winnipeg Free Press why it was that certain City Councillors voted against Steeves’ motion; expense account irregularities.

“There’s no secret about that. Many councillors don’t want people knowing when they’re buying tickets to what type of events of what (political) parties they’re supporting. Or what restaurants they’re going to.”

I agree with the Mayor here.

Each City Councillor receives a Ward Allowance of $70,000 to pay for an assistant, office supplies and travel costs. Because each City Councillor represents an average of 50,000 people, an assistant and office supplies are often required and the allowance is just. However, the problem is that there is no line-by-line expense list, instead there is simply expense categories. This makes it impossible for the public to know how effective their elected representatives are spending taxpayer funds. The public *can* however apply for information invidividually.

What’s more concerning is that there is no inventory of purchased assets. City Councillors have made expensive material purchases only to disappear when the Councillor leaves office.

Having worked at City Council, I can attest that there are “account irregularities” and I have no doubt that some of those who voted against Steeves’ motion for acknowledge this as well. I still can’t figure out how Councillors can amass a $5,000 phone bill in one year.. ? Or why certain Councillors somehow need a brand new computer every year, and what happened to the old equipment.

Gerbasi applauded herself in her newsletter by believing this was a defeat for the Mayor. It wasn’t. Steeves was the one who made the motion, not the Mayor, and it was those who wanted real accountability who were defeated.

Almost ten years ago in a Toronto inner city public park a small group of university students and community members began joining homeless people who resided in the area to hold a “sleep-in” protest to highlight the housing crisis in Toronto.

Every Friday night for 120 weeks in a public park.

On one of those nights in October 2000 Toronto police “conducted a sweep of the downtown park” in riot gear, dragging three people from a tent (Elan Ohayon, Alex Brown and Oriel Varga)*. Ohayon was holding a video camera and all three claim that police became angered when seeing the video camera.

The trio claim a police officer smashed the camera, took the video cassette and charged Ohayon with assaulting a police officer. Ohayon received a cut underneath his right eye, went to the hospitial and the arresting police officer said he cut his finger but denied there being any camera. The broken camera was later found missing its film.

Ohayon spent three weeks in jail before the charges of assaulting the police officer were dealt with by a judge and immediately thrown out. Ohayon was offered a $500 bail with the condition that he stay away from the park where he was seized by police but he refused citing the need to provide food and care for homeless people staying in the park. A few months later the trio sued the city, the police and a number of officers as individuals for $150,000.

Lawyer Vilko Zbogar represented the trio with Peter Rosenthal, another lawyer and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Toronto. Ohayon and Varga were both post-graduate students and Brown is an unemployed truck driver.**

The case was finally due for court on December 8, 2008 (8 years later) before a settlement was brokered at the eleventh hour with the City of Toronto agreeing to pay the trio $116,000. Anti-poverty activists are calling the agreement a “vindication” that the protest was valid and the treatment by city police was unfair.

The Toronto Star reports :

City lawyer Kevin McGivney who represented the city and police, later said in a phone interview that calling the settlement a “victory” is a “bit like calling a tie hockey game a victory.”

“This is purely just a settlement, a compromise on both sides,” said McGivney.

“Considering it’s litigation over events that occurred 10 years ago, the best decision was to compromise the case and achieve a resolution rather than spend weeks in court fighting.”

While it’s not unusual for the City of Toronto to settle payments to some police brutality complaints against homeless people or to have embarrassing moments harassing other community activists and being sued, it is highly unusual for the details of a settlement to be released, or at least the cost. In most legal settlement agreements, political or celebrity, a non-disclosure agreement is tacked on to avoid the public record.

With the case so close to going to court, the city lawyer claiming a few more weeks of testimony after waiting 8 years just now might be a tad bothersome so late in the game and the conditions of the settlement released, one has to question why indeed did the city finally agree to the settlement at the last minute… ?

Not all politicians are included in the legal reasoning of the city they serve despite the trouble being inflicted by political ignorance to a civic problem. City Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong, a suspected conservative Toronto Mayor contender in the next civic election balked to the National Post about the settlement cost asking why Toronto “spent eight years fighting a lawsuit by a trio of activists only to settle out of court on the eve of trial”.

The police should be doing everything they can to make sure the homeless get shelter, but aren’t squatting on properties that should be used for the general public. It’s one of the reasons why so many people decide not to come to downtown Toronto, because of the panhandling and the homeless people sleeping on grates and sleeping in parks.

By “properties” the City Councillor means “public parks” and by “general public” he’s clearly not referring to “the homeless”, which draws the irony of the issue. He calls the complainants “professional protesters” who make Toronto “look bad” while the City Councillor admits he is outside on the details and fails to recognize it was the complainants who were the ones calling attention to the homelessness crisis in the first place.

These “professional protesters” have a lot in common with a civic election contender. They both don’t like homelessness. But it is the professionals who have made their point, effectively by virtue of patience. Even the Toronto police agree, a “compromise” was necessary at the very last resort. In my opinion, it is continued (patient and well funded) legal action that is the last resort to forcing city officials to recognize civic liabilities.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

And the answer lies in the complaint.

“The duration of the process highlights the continued problems in Toronto housing and the Ontario justice system,” Varga said.

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*The Globe & Mail erroneously reported that the incident happened in 1999 on the 120th consecutive night. The silent protest actually started in 1999 and carried on for 120 weekly Fridays, despite the “sweep” in late October 2000.

** Some media sources are technically reporting that Brown, an umemployed truck driver, is an “unemployed auto worker” in what I can only suspect is sensationization considering the “economic slowdown” .

ps. I somehow

The New York Times has launched a new site tool named Represent that allows New Yorkers to find out who their representative is on all levels and then access news stories relating to those politicians.

There’s nothing new in Represent technologically as it’s simple tagging news stories and categorizing by congressional district but The New York Times illustrates the next step for news(paper) content providers; “hyperlocal” content.