The end of the beginning….

• Tomorrow January 18th is Blue Monday – the most depressing day of the year. So reach out to people and check in, they are calling for grey skies and a gloomy day.
  • It shares a name with a classic synth pop track that always seems to cheer me up.
• Town of Kingsville is starting a strategic planning process. These are always interesting to watch!
• Obviously President elect Biden will be inaugurated this week. Wide ranging executive orders will see the US position on issues from climate to travel bans to the border immediately shift. Although positive it does nothing to heal the rifts in the US.
• I have been reading Dr. Stephanie Kelton – former Bernie Sanders budget advisor and economist – Modern Monetary Theory. This video does a good job (a bit dated from 2019) summarizing this interesting debate. Here is a longer read rebuttal if you are interested.
• Nearly half of Canadians fail at Literacy -that’s bad for the economy!
• An interesting blog post on Capital Gains – a missing piece of the income conversations in Canada.

At tomorrow's Council Meeting I've brought forward to a Motion asking @CityWindsorON to support the repeal of Sch. 6 of #Bill229 which significantly weakens the protections regional authorities have in terms of watershed managment & flood mitigation.https://t.co/00X81yIkPU

— Kieran McKenzie (@KieranMcKenzie) January 17, 2021

• A motion from Councillor MacKenzie around changes to Conversation Authorities will be made at Council tomorrow. It will be interesting to see how this is received.
• An interesting paper written by Richard Florida et al, on the Post-Pandemic Impacts on Cities. The topic of social scarring is particularly interesting to me. The paper doesn’t dive that deeply into some of the specific issues it does bring forward a number of though points like this one – Cities as a destination – something I would argue Windsor has been attempting to do.

• A collaboration of social service organizations has released a roadmap for a Just Recovery in Hamilton. This follows the London strategy led by their mayor, that I talked about last spring/summer (I can’t remember what post). We can certainly have a lively debate on the specific elements of a local strategy but the fact that there hasn’t been a conversation about this in our community is damning on all of us.
  • There is an opportunity for leadership and that opportunity is being obfuscated for a status quo that was arguably broken prior to Covid-19.
    • City Council hasn’t to my knowledge, outline any plans beyond begging for money from the Provincial or Federal Government.
    • Economic Development is focused on automobility and hospitals which are arguably the status quo. People were talk about this before the pandemic.
    • The social service sector is just trying mitigate the damage being done by COVID has no resource or time to think about the future.
    • Health care is trying to get people vaccinated while bodies are stacking up.
    • Education is trying to teach the next generation via Zoom.
      • This data by the Opportunity Insights Institute at Harvard is pretty telling.

• Would it have taken sacrifice to move something forward, absolutely. We are 8 weeks away from the 1 year anniversary of our first local cases, but there is still no vision, no priorities and no leadership on what will make our region a better place post COVID-19.

• The 87 reported cases on Saturday was a hopeful sign that was quickly crushed on Sunday with 270 cases. The R rate has dropped below 1 which is a very good sign!
• Vaccine shipment delays are less than ideal.