Things Are Good

Protecting Canadian Privacy and Sovereignty

Peace Tower at Parliament Hill in Ottawa

The Canadian government has made it clear that Canada is all in on AI for better or for worse. Amongst many concerns with the AI approach is the protection of both Canada’s sovereignty and its people’s privacy. Unfortunately the government has opted to not protect privacy and to spy on every Canadian to the point where privacy-first companies are saying they can no longer operate in Canada if the bill passes. Thankfully there are organizations like Open Media that are championing the rights of Canadians and you can help them by signing their recent petition. You cannot have political sovereignty without individual privacy.

Privacy regulators, election experts, and the public have all consistently told the government we need privacy protections to apply to political campaigning. Even Parliamentary and Senate committees say permanent party exemption from privacy law is unacceptable.

But the federal Liberals, Conservatives, and NDP have not only refused to permit any meaningful oversight of their activities; they’ve worked together to thwart it!

Over the last few years, they’ve initiated court challenges and forced through legislation, most recently Bill C-4, that effectively excludes them from normal privacy obligations that would otherwise apply under provincial laws. They’ve even granted themselves immunity from past violations of these privacy laws—going back to the year 2000.

Privacy is not partisan. With AI already supercharging voter micro-targeting, we need real privacy oversight over all party activities in place today. The basic integrity of our democracy depends on getting it right.

Take action now!
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A Blender Can Improve Your Garden

A small vegetable garden is good for your health, your neighbourhood, your sense of self, and even your pocketbook. In many backyard gardens a simple composter is usually enough to refresh the soil and keep the plants happy. If you’re limited in space you can still make use of your kitchen scraps in a garden using the power of a blender. A household blender can speed up the decomposition process by chopping up food waste into a slurry that will quickly be consumed by all those nice little microbes. When you do this don’t go easy on the water and don’t dump all the slurry in one spot – spread it out for best results.

Blender compost can be made out of any blendable kitchen scraps that you’d normally throw into your compost pile, such as vegetable and fruit peels and cores, cooked pasta, eggshells, coffee grounds, and loose-leaf tea. If you don’t mind a bit more mess, you can also blend in premoistened paper towels, cut flowers, and dried autumn leaves. Just like with any compost, steer clear of blending meat or dairy waste, which attracts pests.

Using Dirt From Tunnels to Build New Stuff

picture of a tunnelling machine

Digging a subway means cutting through a lot of dirt, but what to do with it? This is the question that has troubled many construction sites throughout the years and depending on where you’re digging dirt you have different options. The worst, but all too common, option is to send the dirt to a landfill as ridiculous as that sounds. When Line 2 was being built in Toronto they used the dirt to build a whole new park and that approach is becoming popular the world over. Now Toronto is building a new subway and the dirt is being used in nifty ways too.

The hallmark for all cities to get to is the standard set by Paris.

Some global jurisdictions have pushed further into circular approaches that go beyond simple reuse. In France, large volumes of soil from metro construction projects have been integrated into systems designed to keep material within the local economy. Regional operators manage large-scale soil redistribution for parks, green spaces, and land restoration, creating a coordinated soil logistics network across Paris.

Paris’s proactive initiatives like Cycle Terre, carried out between 2018 and 2021, processed suitable excavated clay from the Grand Paris Express project into compressed earth blocks and other low-carbon building materials from a factory 10 kilometres from the excavation sites. This resulted in relatively short transport times and effectively turned soil into a construction input rather than a disposal burden. Ultimately, however, the initiative failed to generate enough commercial contracts and went into liquidation.

Get an Early Warning for the Apocalypse

If you’re worried about an impending apocalypse then this is the app for you! The Apocalypse Early Warning System is an art project created by Kyle McDonald that is a commentary on the inequities of wealth. The ultra-wealthy tend to have insider information on global events so Kyle figured that if there were to be an apocalypse then the ultra wealthy would be amongst the first to know. And what would the wealthy do? They would flee to their bunkers using their private jets, so the early warning system simply uses private jet flight data to let commoners know that the elite are up to something.

It’s a neat art project that makes wealth inequality clear in a way that we can all understand.

In the event of an imminent nuclear apocalypse, we suspect that many people who have access to private jets will immediately take to the skies and escape city centers. This site tracks this indicator in realtime. The current emergency level is reported on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being an indicator of a likely imminent apocalypse.
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For this app, business jets are a fixed aircraft cohort selected from public aircraft metadata by ICAO hex. The filter looks for jet records whose manufacturer, model, or ICAO type matches common business-jet families such as Citation, Gulfstream, Falcon, Global, Challenger, Learjet, Phenom, Praetor, HondaJet, PC-24, Hawker, Beechjet, Eclipse, and Vision Jet. It excludes aircraft marked military and obvious airliners or regional airliners such as Boeing 7xx, Airbus A3xx/A2xx, CRJ airline variants, ERJ/EMB regional jets, MD/DC aircraft, and other large transport categories. It is a practical type-based cohort, not proof of private ownership, passenger identity, or trip purpose.

Women Changing Cities

A new book has come out to celebrate Women Changing Cities for the better. Cities around the world are dealing with climate change, inequality, and an assortment of local issues and often we forget that these cities can do more than react – they can lead. This book takes a look at 19 women who are leading our urban fabrics into the future to ensure a better locally life and, in some cases, shaping the globe.

The book spans 11 geographies, profiling 19 women in leadership: mayors, civil servants, entrepreneurs and advocates who, through their work, are fundamentally reimagining how cities can and should function. A brief preview of some of their stories are below. What unites these women across wildly different cultural and political contexts are five recurring themes: a commitment to listening and empathy; an intersectional, long-term vision; care as a social value; the power of coalition-building; and the courage to prioritize having an impact over holding on to power and pushing through the opposition.