A Few Thoughts on Week 54

You can hear the latest episode of Council Conversations with Nathan Colquhoun from the City of Sarnia.
- A teaser for this week’s season finale with Armine Yalnizyan is available. A decade to fix housing affordability?
- If you are worried about Season 2, it is coming in late April.
This map of the train lines in Ontario in 1955 is interesting. A lot of “what could have been” though can go into this.
Want to travel the new HWY 413 route in the GTA? Someone flew their drone the entire route (as close as possible) to give you an idea of where it is.
This story was weird from Anne Jarvis.
- I can think of three big reasons for the lower usage of the downtown site not being fully utilized lets begin with a map.

First as the crude map above (with a weird scale admittedly due to a wide range of 70+ population and total populations) you see the the total number of 70+ year that live in each Census DA.
- The majority of 70+ year old people live in East and South Windsor in very close proximity to the WFCU and St Clair College Vaccination sites. As my “Know your Ward” feature from 2018 pointed out, Wards 1, 6 and 7 have the highest proportions of 65+ population while Wards 3, 4, 5 have the lowest.
Second, Essex Windsor Paramedics have been vaccinating people in vulnerable situations. WE Community Housing seniors buildings where many these vaccinations were taking place are largely located in the Core. Raymond Desmarais Manor has 320 single seniors units and Ouelette Manor have another 400 both in the downtown and can probably see “Windsor Hall” from the top floors. I don’t know how many vaccinations occurred in those building but certain a portion of those buildings would have been vaccinated already meaning they don’t need to go get their vaccination. Same can be said for LTC homes (see many homes listed map below) all of which have been vaccinated already.

Finally, WFCU and St Clair both opened prior to the Windsor Hall location. So there is a recently bias issue that needs to also be explored. There is a wide body of research on consumer behaviour out there that said the first impression is often the most important, the fact that they opened WFCU and St Clair first, which have been in the media for days could also be driving interest.
- Setting aside the google issues that I believe have been fixed, we also don’t know how many from downtown went to other locations in the days where WFCU and St Clair were open before the downtown site opened.
This isn’t to minimize the fact that there are challenge in the core, and some of those are perception driven that are largely disconnected from reality IMO.
My new favourite meme format.
The Ontario Budget dropped Wednesday after you get through the local headlines around the hospital which is good news that it moves forward in process.
- Windsor/Essex other mentions in the budget relate to touting investment at FCA around electric vehicles and one mention of the HWY 3 expansion.
- The overall budget actually reads like one of the late liberal party budgets, not a PC one.
- One of the budget items that irks me is the payment to parents with children in the budget. My issue with this are 3 fold:
  - First, selfishly, I don’t have kids so I don’t get money.
  - Second my understanding this fund is for all parents not just those in need, so I a subsidizing households in Windsor Essex where parents don’t need a subsidy. Odds are in many cases these amounts are not directly being spent on children, and in high income households it is possible that the money is apart of the saving boom we are seeing in white collar households.
  - Third, if there are 20 kids in a classroom with each of their parents get $400 – if that amount went to the classroom itself, and an extra $8,000 was invested in COVID protection, technology, and additional instruction support all of which lead to better learning outcomes. I would at least some societal benefit over the long-term of this investment.
As usual a thoughtful piece by Sarah Mushtaq in the Windsor Star.
An interesting legal challenge on Education Development Charges and what developers have to pay for related to school infrastructure.
An interesting thread on trying to close the digital divide in San Francisco.