This is the second in a series of blog posts in which, well, I learn about things. Previously, I learned about the WNBA.
Yesterday I was invited to a Facebook group entitled “Save the Rifle Registry. No to C-391″. That made me realize how little I actually knew about the Canadian Firearms Registry. I don’t have enough information to know whether it’s a good thing or not. So, let’s learn.
What is the Firearms Registry?
Established in 1996, it’s a program that requires the registration of all firearms in Canada. Interested in getting a gun? According to Wikipedia:
Any person wishing to obtain a firearm must first acquire a Possession and Acquisition Licence or PAL. The PAL carries a fee of $60 for non-restricted, $80 for restricted, and is renewable every five years. Expiry dates are set on the holder’s birthday following the fifth anniversary of the initial issue of the licence
How do you register firearms?
You can do it online, apparently. I can’t get past the first step, as I don’t have any firearms license numbers handy, but it looks straightforward.
Why require citizens to register their firearms?
The big argument that I see again and again is that the registry is a useful asset for police. Police across the country apparently query (PDF) the database more than 13,000 times a week. That number sounds ridiculously high to me (though a CBC article claims it’s used 6,500 times a day), but the RCMP’s site makes similar claims about office safety: “Without a firearms registry, when police are called to a residence or stop a vehicle, they would have to take the word of the occupant whether firearms are present or have been surrendered.”
How much does the registry cost?
This is the big knock against the program. By 2004, eight years after its inception, the total program costs had risen to over $2 billion. Annual operating costs are reportedly anywhere from $15 to $80 million. The Conservative Party of Canada has introduced Bill C-391, a private member’s bill, which aims to eliminate the program. The Conservatives argue that the money spent on the registry could be more effectively spent elsewhere in law enforcement.
The other question, which I was unable to answer, is ‘what percentage of firearms-related crimes involve an unregistered gun?”
So where does that leave us? It’s an expensive but apparently useful program. To be honest, I’m no closer to forming a strong opinion on this one. What do you think?
We’ve been doing a lot of speaking and workshops lately. At these events, people inevitably ask us “what’s the Next Big Thing?” I’m incredibly poor at predictions, but my best guess lately has been Foursquare. The buzz for this location-based social network among the early adopters mimics that of Twitter, Flickr and other tools.
Here’s a great Mashable article on what Foursquare is, and why it’s more compelling than the other location-based social networks such as BrightKite and Google Latitude:
Now we’re starting to see the app get adopted by more and more of our friends, finding traction in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, San Diego, and several other hyperlocal metro hubs. These breeding grounds of Foursquare activity are creating quite a frenzy, and we thought it appropriate to take a step back and survey the surrounding location-based social networking space as it applies to mobile apps, look forward to the future, and break down the beauty of Foursquare.
As the article points out, the killer feature of Foursquare is the gaming component. In Foursquare, you earn points every time you ‘check in’ to a particular location. The point system is slightly more complex than that, but that’s the basic gist. If you check in frequently at a particular location, you can become ‘the mayor’ of that location. What does that imply? Nothing really, it’s just classic useless online cred, as old as arcade games. But I suspect that it’ll be highly addictive.
Foursquare strikes me as one of the first practical tools to have a powerful and direct connection between the web and the real world. It blends the real-time nature of something like Twitter with the physicality of the real world. It takes Twitter’s question of “what am I doing right now?” , adds “where am I doing it?” and turns the whole process into a game.
I also like that Foursquare reflects the social swarming behaviour that text-happy teens exhibit. It feels like a logical extension of this behaviour.
A Game-Changer for Local Businesses?
We’ve been mentioning Foursquare in some recent workshops, and I’ve been showing this photo from San Francisco’s Marsh Cafe (click to embiggen):
Talk about an enticement to frequent visit this cafe, eh? I’m not sure what they are yet, but I can imagine that there will be all sorts of creative applications for real-world businesses. Consider, for example, a restaurant where each subsequent check-in in the same week gets you an additional 10% off? It feels like a game-changer for local businesses who haven’t necessarily seen the point of having a robust web presence.
What About the Creep Factor?
Normal Humans tend to get seriously creeped out by location-based social networks. It’s not a surprising response, but I remind them of the fears they’ve probably already overcome as they adopted blogs, Facebook, Twitter and so forth. They may find that, in six months, Foursquare feels totally ordinary to them. Or not–I’m incredibly bad at predicting the success of these things.
In any case (thanks mostly to Chris Briekss, I gather), Foursquare has arrived in Vancouver–the first Canadian city. I won’t be able to try it out in person until I return from my pan-Canadian voyage next week, but here’s my account.
I’m not sure how (or even if) I’m going to use Foursquare. However, I’m going to try to only ‘friend’ Foursquare users who I know and have met in real life (and probably people who I’ve come to know well online). Sharing my physical location with strangers, even only occasionally, feels like a bridge too far.
UPDATE: Here’s another symptom of Foursquare’s real-world connectedness: there won’t be the same compulsive friend-counting that occurs in Facebook or Twitter. What’s the upside of having 1000 Foursquare friends? That doesn’t scale very well if you’re just trying to get some work done at Starbucks.
Apparently Edmonton has a municipal airport a stone’s throw away from the centre of town. It’s called Edmonton City Centre Airport (also known as Blatchford Field), and has been around in some form or another since 1929. Google Maps says it’s 4.4 km from the airport to Edmonton’s City Hall, or seven minutes of driving time.
I gather that the airport is used for regional flights and private air travel. It also gets annually converted into a race track for the Edmonton Indy. Larger aircraft and international flights come through the Edmonton International Airport, which is 26 km southwest of the city centre.
Some of the people who have made submissions to the public hearing want the downtown airport closed and the land developed into a transit-oriented community with housing for thousands of people, along with commercial and retail space.
Other presenters have told city councillors the airport must stay open because it is vital for the business community. They describe it as a hub to the north and argue that it is critical for medevac flights. About 4,000 medevac flights a year go through the facility.
I learned about this whole business from Mack’s site. He’s started NotMyAirport.ca (here’s the associated Facebook group), which argues for replacing the airport with “a new transit-oriented, green community”, as well as an expansion of Edmoton’s NAIT campus. Removal of the airport would also apparently change building height limitations in the city, which is a good thing. A dense city, after all, is a healthy city.
Mack launched his site in response to SaveOurAirport.ca, which argues that the airport “plays a vital role in making Edmonton one of Canada’s leading health centres, as a hub for air ambulance and other essential health services for all of Alberta, the Northwest Territories, British Columbia and Saskatchewan.” This claim is disputed by the CEO of Edmonton Airports in the aforementioned CBC article, who says “”what the City Centre Airport offers is a tremendous amount of convenience for corporate travellers and those people who live in the downtown area and have private aircraft.”
As BC readers know, we’re electing a new provincial government on May 12. I confess my general ignorance about provincial politics. I don’t have that much attention to give to politics generally, and I usually exhaust that on federal and international issues. Combine that with our having been recently out of the country for a year, and I have very few opinions about who to vote for next week. I’m a little ashamed of that, but what’re you going to do?
So here’s your opportunity to convince me to vote for your party of choice. I’m not particularly interested in opposition-bashing. I’d prefer to hear about platforms, policies and initiatives that align with your values and vision for the province.
I have a slight bias against the NDP (I’m not a fan of unions) and for the Green Party, but neither seem overwhelming in this case.
Leave a comment and fire away. If you’re disinclined to comment, here’s a poll:
I don’t actually guarantee that I’ll vote for who wins the poll, but I thought it’d be fun to take your temperature nonetheless.
In February, 2009, the Globe and Mail estimated that all levels of government had spent $1.4 billion dollars on Vancouver’s Downtown East Side since 2000. If the article is correct, that works out to $230K per person, in addition to what the government spends on the average citizen. Has there been progress? Not much, apparently. Anecdotally, the neighbourhood feels as (if not more) sketchy and broken as it did a decade ago.
I’m an advocate of radical solutions to the drug problem that’s at the heart of the Downtown East Side. I, for example, think we ought to give free heroin to drug addicts. I’m also a fan of decriminalization, so I was intrigued to read this report on Portugal’s 2001 decision to “abolish all criminal penalties for personal possession of drugs, including marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine”:
The paper, published by Cato in April, found that in the five years after personal possession was decriminalized, illegal drug use among teens in Portugal declined and rates of new HIV infections caused by sharing of dirty needles dropped, while the number of people seeking treatment for drug addiction more than doubled.
“Judging by every metric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success,” says Glenn Greenwald, an attorney, author and fluent Portuguese speaker, who conducted the research. “It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does.”
There are plenty of numbers in the article, but it makes a pretty compelling case. I’d also be curious about related crime trends, such as drug-related violence, robberies and so forth. I favour decriminalization (and free heroin for addicts) because it reduces or removes the economic incentives around selling and procuring illegal narcotics.
I spotted this Reuters photo in the Globe and Mail last week. You can just hear our Prime Minister thinking, “now is when the humans raise their hands in successive groups. I, too, shall raise my hands, to cement the illusion that I am one of them.”
Broadly speaking, Vancouverites (and, really, people everywhere) feel one of two ways about the Olympics:
They’re a huge, heinous waste of taxpayer dollars.
They’re a celebration of the city, province and nation which, through infrastructure investment and international exposure, brings new wealth to the region.
The more left of centre you are, the likelier you are to be in Camp #1. I like to think of myself as near the centre, and this conversation highlights that position. I haven’t done enough reading. However, looking at previous Olympics in North America, it seems that both outcomes are true, depending on who you ask. The key facts that I wrestle with are:
The money available for the Olympics wouldn’t necessarily be available to house the homeless or increase the police force.
It’s incredibly difficult to accurately measure the benefits of an event this big, which impacts so many sectors in the short, medium and long term.
We can see this discussion on a simpler, smaller scale in the current grumblings by the BC NDP about BC Place’s new roof. The roof will apparently cost CAN $365 million, and the NDP is running a marketing campaign against the expenditure. It’s worth noting, of course, that neither party are strangers to absurd over-spending (how now, PacificCat Explorer).
Here’s the NDP’s position, and here’s the BC Liberal’s response (I note that the NDP is winning the search engine optimization battle). To be honest, I can’t even grok this simpler issue. What’s the value of the roof’s refurbishment? How long will it extend the life of BC Place, and much event-related and spin-off revenue will that generate? How many jobs does the project and the subsequent expansion create? What’s the value of an MLS franchise to the city?
On the other hand, what would $365 million mean to the Downtown Eastside? Knowing that $1.4 billion over the past nine years has barely made a dent in that neighbourhood’s problems isn’t particularly encouraging.
It’s easy to say “I like sports, and therefore the Olympics and the roof replacement are a good thing”. It’s much, much harder to be a good citizen and dig up the empirical data that makes an unbiased case one way or another. I’m sorry that I haven’t done that in this blog post, but time marches ever onward and all that.
What do you think? Should BC Place get a new roof?
I’m rather late getting to this, but I wanted to express my happiness about a successful conclusion to the Save the Great Bear project. Regular readers will recall that we were helping with the online outreach for this effort to ensure that the BC government kept its promises regarding protecting the Great Bear rainforest on BC’s central coast. From the Vancouver Sun:
Agriculture and Lands Minister Ron Cantelon said the Great Bear plan is an example to the world on managing human activity while protecting biodiversity. “The war is over. Now we can move on in a positive way,” he said in an interview.
The 6.4-million-hectare area is roughly the size of Ireland. The plan sets aside 2.1 million hectares of land as parks and conservancies. Over the rest of the land, resource development, specifically logging, is to be based on ecosystem-based management.
Environmentalists say the new logging rules will require streams, grizzly bear habitat and half the old-growth timber to be protected.
I confess to being reasonably naive about the politics and backroom dealings that presumably get these deals done. Most parties seem happy with the outcome, which is, inevitably, a compromise from everybody’s initial position.
We can only accept a sliver of the credit for this result, but it’s one of my proudest moments for Capulet.
Skimming recent new followers this afternoon, I discovered that Ms. Denise Savoie, Member of Parliament for Victoria, is newly on Twitter. I started wondering which Canadian MPs are on Twitter?
As you’ve probably heard, our federal government has gone a bit mad. If nothing else, this political crisis has taught an unsuspecting nation the meaning of the word prorogation.
I really don’t know what to think on this one.
There seems to be plenty of blame to spread around. Prime Minister Harper seemed pretty eager to goad the opposition with inaction on a stimulus package and the elimination of political subsidies (now off the table). The opposition seem all to keen to exploit this apparent misstep for all it’s worth. And poor, nerdy Elizabeth May is still trying to get a seat at the table.
What’s Best For Canadians?
It’s a simple question to ask, but I can’t answer it. Who are the better guides through murky economic waters? The Conservatives or a coalition? What kind of economic stimulus package (in your pants–sorry, just needed to get that out of the way) does the country need? And should we really bail out the auto industry? I’m philosophically opposed to such bailouts, but that’s a pretty unthinking response.
And then there are the ins and outs of parliamentary procedure. I’m pretty ambivalent about the whole mandate issue. Everybody in the House of Commons has a mandate. Prime Minister Harper’s high ground looks no taller than a pitcher’s mound when you consider his minority position and the fact that his party only received 38% of the popular vote.
Several of my left-leaning colleagues have invited me sign petitions or join Facebook groups supporting the coalition of the Liberals, NDP (doesn’t Mr. Layton look like an eager spaniel these days?) and the Bloc. I won’t blindly do so just because I voted Green in the last election. It seems a little petty, particularly when there are parliamentary processes in place for the parties to resolve matters, one way or another.
I’m not usually a fence-sitter. I’d like to hear the summarized professional opinions of about fifty economists regarding what Canada needs to weather the economic downturn. That might clarify what I think the country needs.
