The past week or so has been interesting, as the direction of the City has been shaped for next 4 years. It began with a "strategic planning" meeting on Tuesday where City Councillors outlined their priorities for the term as part of the second fifth of the City's 20 Year Strategic Plan. To my embarrassment, … Continue reading Priorities, Opportunity Cost and Courage

Last week (Jan 23) the Brooksfield Institute put out a report that outlined wage and employment in Tech in CMAs across Canada. Windsor came out of the report ranked with the highest wage gaps between men and women in Canada. On January 30th a rebuttal emerged. Now I have a lot of respect for Yvonne … Continue reading On Tech Wages, YQG Perception and Leadership

Where are People in Windsor-Essex? As was mentioned earlier in a previous post, there is a lack of literature on mid-size Canadian cities and urban/sprawl issues which creates challenges in finding comparative context for our community. The vast majority of literature, research and best practices on sprawl focus on large urban centres. Large cities are home to … Continue reading The Windsor Research Project – Where are the People?

A tweet by former Councilor Bill Marra caught my attention. https://twitter.com/biagiobillmarra/status/1075206400429547520 As I responded when I retweeted his tweet, LRT should be considered but it needs to be done in the context of other possible corridor options like BRT, a street car or as a part of an traditional corridor with enhanced bus service and … Continue reading University Ave. Light Rail?

The Excel file below holds a record of all recorded votes by Windsor City Council from January 1 2015 to September 17, 2018. All of this data was mined from City Council Minutes that are posted on the City of Windsor website. The file is sorted into sheets by year and tracks Yay, Nay, Abstain … Continue reading How your Councillor Voted 2015-18

The Town of Essex is first of the communities that I am working on that has a ward system. As you can see from the map above, there is not a exact alignment between the Census boundaries and the municipal wards. The difference although visually large, from a population basis they tend to extend one … Continue reading #Knowyourward- County Edition: Essex

The Town of Amherstburg doesn't have Wards, so I divided the community into 3 areas of close to equal population based on Census Dissemination geographies. The following table "Wards" show the Amherstburg total plus the socio-economic breakdown of the 3 areas. Town Total Rural Amherstburg/ South Shore Downtown Amherstburg River Canard Total Population 2016 21,936 … Continue reading #knowyourward – County Edition: Amherstburg

The Town of Lasalle doesn't have Wards, so I divided the community into 4 areas based on Census Dissemination geographies. The following table "Wards" show the LaSalle total plus the socio-economic breakdown of the 4 areas. Town Total Near Windsor Matchette to Malden + Todd Lane Matchette to the River "Rural" LaSalle Total Population 2016 … Continue reading #Knowyourward – County Edition: LaSalle

In a previous post on Sprawl I mentioned how what took 50+ years to build, couldn't be undone easily or cheaply. So I figured that I would dive into that discussion a little bit. Which brings me back to a quote from 2016: Forget about the fact the streets are all four lanes, they’re too … Continue reading The Windsor Research Project: Clogged Arteries