politics

Suburban Community Considers Higher Taxes for Paved Properties

- Adam Clare

Toronto and area received massive rain fall last week and one suburban community has decided that the need to encourage better water management through taxes. Basically, if you pave over green space you’ll literally pay for it. THe idea is to preserve as much green space as possible to act as a natural sponge during large rainfalls.

As a bonus, the preserved green space will also act as a natural coolant for the local environment.

Powell says a user-fee levy is expected to get final council approval by the end of the year.
Dan McDermott, the Ontario chapter director for the Sierra Club, says the proposal makes perfect sense.
“It’s a very clear disincentive to paving over or covering over your whole property. If you’re going to put up a parking lot, you need to leave enough ground space to let the water naturally drain.”

McDermott says governments need to incorporate that kind of thinking when they plan or approve new structures.
Mississauga faces special challenges because of its short history, Powell said.
“All of this infrastructure built by development charges, by developers, all of a sudden has to be rehabbed by tax dollars. That’s where the pressure comes; that’s what Mississauga is facing over the next 10 years.”

Read more.

15-Year Study: Stop Drug Use Through Harm Reduction

- Adam Clare

The American style “war on drugs” undoubtably ruins more lives than it saves (all while militarizing North American police forces), yet some people think that punishing drug users is sound policy. Research is continually adding more evidence that approaching drug consumption as a health issue and not a criminal one improves the lives of users and of non-users.

In Vancouver, a 15 year long study has concluded that safe injection programs like Insite make the city a better place. Drug users are safer and so too is the surrounding community.

In 1996, almost 40 per cent of drug users reported sharing needles, but by 2011, that had dropped to 1.7 per cent. About 25 per cent of Vancouver’s drug users are HIV positive, and about 90 per cent suffer from Hepatitis C.

The overall health of drug users had improved and more people were accessing addictions treatment, jumping from 12 per cent on methadone treatment in 1996 to 54.5 per cent since 2008, statistics showed.

“This is probably the city with the most aggressive harm reduction approach, yet we’re seeing declining rates of drug use within this community,” Kerr said.

Read more.

Hopefully local politicians in Toronto (the mayor is an alleged crack user after all) will support calls for a pilot test of age injection sites.

How to Get Out From the Invasive PRISM Surveillance Program

- Adam Clare

Thanks to the brave efforts from Edward Snowden we are now aware of something long suspected: that the USA (and many other nations including Canada) are reading our communications. The program is called PRISM and it monitors your communication. Basically, if you connect to the internet or use a mobile phone you can, and may already, be tracked by various entities.

This shouldn’t be acceptable to anyone. With the pervasiveness of the internet it may seem like an overwhelming task to not be monitored. PRISM Break is a guide to open source and secure technology that you can easily implement on your own.

PRISM Break

Check out PRISM Break.

USA Raises ‘Carbon Price’

- Adam Clare

Climate change is happening and it’s costing a lot of money to deal with. More floods, tornados, hurricanes, and other natural events are happening with greater frequency thanks to planetary temperature increase. The reason the planet’s temperature is increasing is thanks to the way previous generations have dealt with waste.

One such waste product comes in the form of exhaust from cars and other air pollution from various sources. This much is obvious, but very few countries have acted on this issue (in fact, Canada has gone out it’s way to stop action). In the USA, the Obama administration has quietly passed a new law that raises the cost of releasing pollutants into the air in the hopes it will help slow more climate change.

Buried in a little-noticed rule on microwave ovens is a change in the U.S. government’s accounting for carbon emissions that could have wide-ranging implications for everything from power plants to the Keystone XL pipeline.

The increase of the so-called social cost of carbon, to $38 a metric ton in 2015 from $23.80, adjusts the calculation the government uses to weigh costs and benefits of proposed regulations. The figure is meant to approximate losses from global warming such as flood damage and diminished crops.

Read more at Bloomberg.

Brazil Restructures Debt With African Countries

- Adam Clare

Brazil has announced that they will essentially “write off” about $90 million in debt from African nations. This is for helping the countries alleviate their huge levels of debt while helping create stronger economic ties between Brazil and their indebted partner nations.

“To maintain a special relationship with Africa is strategic for Brazil’s foreign policy.”

He added that most of the debt was accumulated in the 1970s and had been renegotiated before.

A spokesman for Brazil’s Foreign Ministry told Efe news agency that the debt restructuring for some countries would consist of more favourable interest rates and longer repayment terms.

Congo-Brazzaville owes the most to Brazil – $352m – followed by Tanzania ($237m) and Zambia ($113.4m).

The other countries to benefit are Ivory Coast, Gabon, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Mauritania, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, and Sudan.

Read more at BBC.

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