The City of Edmonton is looking at incorporating lands reserved for agriculture, as well as community and backyard food gardens, into its city planning. A huge demand for local produce combined with disappearing agricultural land has motivated the city to start looking at the long range picture, “There has to be a balance with how we are going to grow and how we are going to use our land,” said Edmonton Mayor, Stephen Mandel.
Read more in The Edmonton Sun.
Frustrated by Toronto Mayor, Rob Ford’s attempts to scrap 20 well-established citizen groups, several councilors are going ahead and forming their own committees and task forces so they can continue to address important civic issues from childcare to cycling infrastructure. Read more in the Toronto Star.
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Environment Canada has just released an Executive Summary of the 1990-2009 National Inventory Report, the Canadian Government’s 2011 Submission to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Find the report here.
Last Friday the Ministry of Education informed school boards that they are now responsible for paying property insurance premiums. This carves a significant amount of money out of already stretched school board budgets. Vancouver’s school board will have to pay the highest premiums at $291,285.27, amounting to significant cuts to school programs and staff. Read more in The Tyee.
The Burnaby school district has drafted a policy, No. 5.45, to support students and employees who are (or are assumed to be) lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, two-spirit or queer (LGBTQ). While the policy is being met with protest from some parents and church groups, students are overwhelmingly in favour of the policy.
Read more in the Burnaby Now.
Read the draft policy here.
During the past four years the city of Surrey has greatly reduced criminal activity by employing a variety of strategies: increasing police presence at hotspots for crime, creating more affordable housing, neighbourhood beautification and increasing community and school programs for youth. Surrey’s innovative crime reduction program is the result of “community partnerships, innovative programs and public involvement.”
Read more on the city’s website.
The Cameroon Councils Against Climate Change Network are working together to combat climate change. Loss of agricultural land to reoccurring droughts has taken its toll on many Cameroon communities and a top-down government approach failed to address the different realities each community faced. This new network “will enable local councils to exchange ideas and experiences but provide them the clout to spur government into making decisions on climate change that adequately address local needs.”
Read more at Alertnet.
The Acandi peoples of Columbia are about to become the first community in Columbia to manage and care for forests through conservation offsets. With the help of Anthropologist, Brodie Ferguson, they expect to be certified under the “Climate, Community and Biodiversity (CCB) Alliance’s REDD standard, a voluntary market scheme to reduce planet-warming emissions from deforestation while protecting threatened ecosystems and the local communities that inhabit them .” Read more here.
Several municipalities across BC already have cosmetic pesticide bans, but now there is a move to extend the ban province-wide. NDP leader Adrian Dix proposed the ban last week, and in a rare moment of agreement, it looks as though the Liberals are on side. Read more at the CBC.
To find out more about pesticide bylaws and bans, visit Pesticide Free BC.
Vancouver city council has approved a motion to introduce on-line voting in time for the upcoming municipal election in the fall. The motion was introduced by councillor Andrea Reimer who stated, “There are risks to online voting, but there are also huge risks to having so few people participating in the political process, and particularly the act of voting, and Vancouver came down so low in voter turnout, I think it’s incumbent on us to figure out how to deal with it.”
Read article in the Georgia Straight.