Category: Journal

It’s a provincial election time. I hate it when people say “Oh, there’s an election, but I just can’t bring myself to care.” But this time, I can kinda relate.

Thing is, I *do* care. There’s a lot of provincial stuff I care about. It’s just that from what I can tell, my local race is a foregone conclusion, I don’t think any of the candidates are awesome enough for me to feel like I should be personally sticking my neck out for any of them, and I’m a little bit annoyed with every one of them for one reason or another.

I actually mostly like the Liberal government’s record. I think the HST is a fantastic idea. I like green energy and I think they’ve been doing a reasonably good job of investing infrastructure. They’re taking credit for uploading services off of municipalities, which I think is a very good thing, but it’s taken them an awfully long time to do it, and they’re only just getting started at the end of their second term.

I also don’t like aspects of the campaign they’re running, but it’s not like any of the rest are much better. I’m really annoyed about the G20, but it’s not been an election issue, other than some noises from the NDP, and as there’s been no inquiry, I have no idea how much of that to lay at the feet of the province.

I would like to see people talking about building a new deal for cities, creating a sustainable funding model to get them less dependent on property taxes, which create perverse incentives and disproportionately hurt the elderly, of whom there will be many more in the near future. Other than talk of uploading and downloading, we aren’t getting any of that. And that’s thinking way too small.

I’d like to hear more about public transit infrastructure than just the Liberals patting themselves on the back for things like the LRT and the NDP promising to freeze fares (with no discernible plan to fund ridership growth).

I’d like to hear actual *innovative* ideas about how to solve Ontario’s problems. That’s probably too much to hope for.

So I don’t know. I’ll probably vote Liberal. I’m not a huge fan of the candidate, but I’m not a huge fan of any of the candidates. Not even the Greens. That just leaves me with my [algorithm](http://www.flyingsquirrel.ca/index.php/2008/09/08/ugh-election/).

Listened to the latest This Developer’s Life yesterday. “[Education](http://thisdeveloperslife.com/post/2-0-3-education)”. I enjoyed especially the Seth Juarez interview.

Along with a bunch of useful advice and insight on how to think about school, Seth recommends every programmer should learn 3 languages: a strongly-typed compiled language, a dynamic language and a functional language.

I’ve got the first two well covered with multiple languages for each, but besides a bit of Scheme in school (nothing more than the usual trivial toy problems they give you to supposedly learn anything), I’ve never really delved into functional languages.

So learning one might be a good goal to set for myself. That leaves me with two questions to get started: what language? and what project?

I can kinda learn a language by reading books or whatever, but that’s a pretty shallow surface understanding. I need a project to really get into it. Now I don’t particularly *need* more projects to get into, but maybe it’s something I can putter around with when I’m just hanging out at [[Kwartzlab]] making myself accessible to people.

The problem is what project? I actually understand why and how functional languages are useful these days, but none of the half-dozen or so project ideas I have backburnered jump out as screaming for a functional implementation. So what to do will require a bit of thought.

The more fun problem is picking a language. I can hear [Eric](http://eric.gerlach.ca/)’s voice screaming “Haskell!” right about now. I’ve also heard good things about Scala. And Erlang. Then there’s OCaml and Lua and good ol’ Lisp.

Have to think about it. I have a Python project I’ve been slowly getting started on that would really help me out at work when it’s done. After that, I’ll look at functional a bit more, I think.

I love living in Waterloo Region.

I love living in the City of Waterloo.

One of the things I love is that I can start walking from my house in Lakeshore–a 40-year-old suburb–and find myself in cow pastures in about 20 minutes.

I worry that if our current growth patterns and planning continue, we will lose that agricultural heritage. What we get in exchange are more car-dependent neighbourhoods, more traffic, more infrastructure that will need to be maintained and need to be replaced in the future.

I don’t want the Region of Waterloo to become another Mississauga.

Something needs to change, and I applaud regional council for moving forwards with an initiative to make that change.

Waterloo region is growing fast. In order to accommodate that growth, we need to intensify. The people who will move to those intensified neighbourhoods in our cores will not want to own a car. Because if they do–if they all do–they’ll see nothing but gridlock. It won’t work. We need rapid transit. And we need rapid transit on a dedicated right of way so that it is not held up by traffic.

Should we choose buses or trains? About 15 years ago, I lived in Ottawa and rode on what was at the time an excellent bus rapid transit system. Just a few decades after it was built, however, Ottawa is replacing its BRT system with light rail, at great expense to avoid disrupting existing ridership.

But what I find particularly telling is that there’s no discernible intensification around Ottawa’s Transitway stops since I lived there 15 years ago. BRT doesn’t meet our goals for intensification. People don’t want to live near buses. People don’t want to build near buses.

People *do* want to live next to rail. Developers want to build next to rail. In cities with rail transit, people organize their lives around rails.

In 2009, regional council chose light rail by an overwhelming majority. The provincial government, however, failed to come through with their promised share of the capital cost. So here we are.

As much as I favour light rail, I would prefer not to have to raise property tax rates significantly, nor do I believe we should slow implementation of the excellent [Regional Transportation Master Plan](http://www.movingforward2031.ca/). That’s why I favour [Option 1A](http://rapidtransit.region.waterloo.on.ca/pdfs/2011_May_Handout.pdf), with its shortened LRT route to Ottawa St. A shortened route still encourages growth in our cores.

I also believe we should aggressively pursue development charges and tax increment financing to fund LRT, as Rob Ford proposes for his subway project in Toronto. But if that’s not possible, I do believe we need to bite the bullet and build light rail.

If you vote against the LRT proposal I would expect to hear how your proposed alternative encourages intensification and can help to halt sprawl.

When asked if she had any regrets over her long career as mayor of Mississauga, [Hazel McCallion](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazel_McCallion) said* her one [regret](http://www.thestar.com/news/mississauga/article/937684–hazel-mccallion-oversaw-mississauga-s-transformation-from-rural-to-urban) was not investing in transit and using it to shape development of her city. I urge you not to repeat the mistakes of the past and the mistakes of other cities. I urge you to invest in a fast, convenient and attractive rapid transit system. I urge you to hold the line against urban sprawl and protect our natural landscape. I urge you to invest in LRT.

Thank you.

* And I’m paraphrasing here, since i didn’t have internets in the meeting when I wrote this

I used to volunteer at the Royal Medieval Faire, usually working gates: taking money and welcoming people to the Faire. One year the Faire tried giving people wristbands instead of hand stamps to let them back in. For no discernible reason, the wristbands were pink.

One little boy worked his way up to us in the line with his parents. Dad paid the admission and we got out the wristbands.

“You’re not putting that on my son.”

He was, we thought, unnecessarily forceful. We explained that they were meant to let people back into the park.

“I won’t have him wearing that. It’s a girl’s colour. My son isn’t a girl.”

We actually got a few people like that. None quite as aggro as the one father, but it had us shaking our heads.

Really? Parents were really willing to push their preconceived notions of gender on their kids that hard? I had to feel sorry for the little boy. What if he turned out to be gay? Or just secretly liked flowers? I can’t imagine what it would be like living with a father like that.

I read the [Parents Keep Child’s Gender a Secret](http://www.therecord.com/living/article/535943–parents-keep-child-s-gender-a-secret) story and thought “Huh, I can kinda see their point.” But then I read the comments (more on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/waterlooregionrecord/posts/116849045067945)) and my heart sank. And I thought about that little boy and realized there are a lot of people out there like his dad.

I have the start of four other posts about the current Canadian parliamentary election in my drafts folder. I’ve been having a hard time collating my thoughts into something novel or interesting.

This election scares me and makes me profoundly sad for my country. That’s made it hard for me to get my thoughts together. Fortunately, Canadian constitutional expert Peter Russell does a better job than I could.

I’ve got an Ubuntu release party this weekend, but I’m hoping I get pull together some sort of substantial election post before the actual election.