The City of Surrey is launching a dashboard that allows the community to track the City’s progress towards sustainability. Some of the indicators tracked include:
Read more at the city’s website.
Last Friday, teachers in Nova Scotia rallied in front of 18 MLA offices to protest provincial cuts to education. The government insists the cuts are a necessary part of declining enrollment, but teachers are claiming cuts to funding mean larger class sizes and poorer quality education. Read more at the CBC.
Under current municipal laws, food grown on residential land cannot be sold commercially, but city council has asked staff to remove legal impediments in order to encourage local food production, one of the 10 goals of the Greenest City 2020 plan. Read more in the Vancouver Sun.
A study published in the International Journal of Science Education provides good news for parents with children in public schools; students from public schools outperform in the fields of math and physics at university. Furthermore, students from East Vancouver outperformed students from Westside schools. Read more in the Vancouver Sun.
Find study here.
Restaurants and cafés in Leduc Alberta will now be able to convert parking spots to outdoor patios. The city has put aside $5000 for patio planters and is hoping the move will make the town livelier in the summertime. Several Edmonton councillors are hoping to pass a similar policy. Read more in The Edmonton Journal.
For 60 years Gideon Bibles have been distributed to grade 5 students Owen Sound Ontario, but an 8-3 vote by local trustees is bringing the practice to an end. The board made the move to reflect both the diversity of the local community, not wanting to grant preferred access to a particular faith group, and the district’s secular education policy.
“We cannot include every-one’s God, so we should not allow any,” Meaford and Blue Mountains trustee Fran Morgan said via a conference telephone connection.
“This is a secular school system,” said Owen Sound trustee Marg Gaviller. “There are lots of other opportunities for people to get their Bibles.”
Read more in the Sun Times.
BC secondary students are sharpening their palettes, culinary skills and appreciation for local, seasonal, and nutritious food in a program called Take a Bite of BC. The program delivers donations from 42 local B.C. farms, food producers and industry associations twice a month to participating schools. Currently 37 schools are participating. According to cofounder, Lindsay Babineau, “Each of the culinary arts programs has about 100 students in Grades 10 through 12 and they are serving out food to 50,000 kids.” Read more in The Vancouver Sun.
The Toronto School Board is considering closing171 schools to deal with a significant drop in enrollment. While the student population has dropped by 71,000 students, many worry that closing schools will have serious consequences for students, families and neighbourhoods. Trustee Cathy Dandy called closing schools “the most wasteful, inefficient, myopic thing any government can consider, and (it) flies in the face of what every progressive jurisdiction is doing.”
She called it foolish to close schools “at a time when kids have increasingly complex needs and we could be putting in mental health centres, health centres and programs for seniors” to better serve communities.
Read more in the Toronto Star.
The Gold Trail BC School District, encompassing Ashcroft, Cache Creek, Clinton, Lillooet and Lytton recently passed an anti-homophobioa policy. The decision to do so came up at a routine committee meeting, “We thought it was important that we have a policy in place to make it quite clear where we stood on the matter,” says Gold Trail trustee Christopher Roden. So far the policy has proved uncontroversial. Read more in Xtra West.
Sechelt BC has agreed to consider draft legislation that allows rezoning for commercial medical marijuana grow-op industries. The first step will be a series of public hearings on the matter. The local RCMP and fire department approve of the plan, noting it will decrease fire risks and increase public safety. Read more in the Huffington Post.
In addition to limiting the time period for an environmental review process to 24 months, the federal government has also announced it will be cutting the number of review agencies from 40 to 3. Minister of Natural Resources, Joe Oliver has justified the cuts, saying,
“We need to tap into the tremendous appetite for resources in the world’s dynamic emerging economies — resources we have in abundance.”
Environmental groups claim these cuts are designed to not simply shorten the review process but to gut environmental protection. Read more at the CBC.
Two studies, one from the US geological service and another commissioned by the government in the UK have concluded that fracking, the process of blasting water, sand and chemicals deep into the ground to fracture rock to obtain oil and natural gas, causes earthquakes. Both the US and the UK have witnessed a spike in earthquake activity since the introduction of fracking. Read more at the CBC.