Tag: apropos of nothing

Middle Aged Westminster

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. Leave a comment.

I am just back from Vacation, and I am still trying to understand where the Royal City New West Record newspaper is coming from when they emphasize an alleged clash between the “New” and “Old” communities in New Westminster as their Story of the Year. Perhaps I am being obtuse, but it seems to evoke the divisiveness of the Old Stock Canadians dog-whistle message quoted in the article’s lead, and I simply disagree with the premise.

To suggest that “younger folks and families” filling new condos are somehow different than families living in houses is not only a false dichotomy, it creates an impression that one is better or more important than the other, and that somehow people (especially, as continually suggested in the story, the City’s government) are picking sides. It belies the reality of how mixed and diverse our City is, and how much blending there is in those two alleged camps.

I’m a resident of Brow of the Hill, not born in New West, but feeling very connected to this community I live in a house across the street from numerous apartments built in the 60s and 70s, predominantly full of renters, some more connected to the community as I, some less. On one side of my house is a family of “younger folks” who moved in at the end of 2015 after a decade of living in Vancouver, although one of them grew up in Queens Park and graduated from NWSS – are they “Old” or “New” New West? What about the retired couple across from me, one of whom was born in the BC Interior (like me) but had a career working for the City of New Westminster? I have friends who live in a condo on the Quay that has a demographic not far from your typical retirement village, I know young families filing more-affordable single-family homes in Queesnborough, some second-generation Canadians who first learned English at Queen Elizabeth Elementary, others the children of families that built Queensborough generations ago. Who has the hubris to draw the line between “New” and “Old” New West within this mix? Why would we want to?

Because between “New” and “Old” New West is a huge and growing number of “Middle Age” New West, those who have been here for a few years, or a few decades, and despite having not been born here, they have put down roots and are making New Westminster home. And they are raising a new generation of New West. At the the suggestion of conflict, most would say we are all New Westminster, whether our grandfather was born here, or we arrived as a refugee last week.

Our success as a community will be found in supporting each other, and embracing the diversity of our community. As the great Jane Jacobs reminds us in her treatise on vibrant neighbourhoods and cities, a diversity of people, families, buildings and activities are what create an economically viable and culturally sustainable community. Only that will make us strong enough to withstand threats external or internal, and avoid the stagnation that too often follows on the heels of urbanization. Just as we cannot stop innovating, we cannot throw away what is established, we need to make them work together.

So if building a great community means accepting all types of people sharing and working together, and if the line between “New” and “Old” is so fuzzy, what is to be served by trying to insert arbitrary lines, creating arbitrary categories, and watching for reasons for them to fight?

This ambiguity extends to the idea that there is some sort of fundamental transition happening in New Westminster today, or that suddenly the town that time forgot is being trust into a new era. The reality is that (for lack of a better word) “change” has always defined New Westminster as much as stability. Over 150 years we have gone from a Quayqayt (“Resting Place”) on a pristine river to a Capital City on the edge of the colony. We were at times largest port on the west coast, the home of the pacific fishing fleet and a regional commercial centre. We were eventually outshone by an upstart western suburb, then gradually enveloped by its growing metropolis. Over time our commercial dominance waned, then our waterfront industry declined. Soon the Quayside led a new residential focus based on waterfront location and condo living, while our transportation spine went from streetcar to automobile to Skytrain. There were good times and bad, and most of the time there was a little of both. These changes were most often gradual, shifts were generational, as were the waves of new immigrants putting their cultural stamp on our community – English, Chinese, Punjabi, Filipino, Honduran, Somali, Syrian…

Through all those times, transitions, and shifts, which should we stamp as the optimum, the one we must not move away from? I know I can’t make that call, and it would suggest it is silly to try. Because over that time all of our strongly-held traditions have adapted – including the oft-cited example of May Day. A couple of years ago I wrote a blog post about a study that outlined many of these “transitions”, including the way May Day and the festivals around it have changed, sometimes back and forth, based on the economics and attitudes of the day. Most interesting to me was the part that talked about a new upstart group of young business leaders who came in 40 years ago and re-drew a bunch of traditions to modernize the City’s May festivals – the group that came to be known as the Hyack Festival Association.

I only use this as an example, and don’t want to dwell on it, for fear I am playing into the narrative that I don’t believe.

Far from suddenly transitioning to a New New Westminster, we are continuing to evolve. I love some of New Westminster’s “Old” traditions (the Anvil Battery Salute? Who can’t love that?) and am completely uninterested in some others. I also love some (not all!) of the “New” traditions being developed (PechaKucha Nights!) and hope they survive to the next generation. Of course, in between there have been many Traditions that have come and gone, and some in that intermediate stage between “Old” and “New”. Some people like the RC Musical Theatre, some like the Symphony, some like comedy at the Columbia and live music at the Heritage. I think the Royal City Curling Club is a 50-year cultural and sporting tradition in the City that not enough people appreciate, but to love it doesn’t take away from the legacy of the Salmonbellies. Why do we have to choose and put ourselves in camps?

We are all New Westminster. So let’s keep embracing the things we love, and not be afraid to try new flavours. Because it is the combination of “New” and “Old” that makes us special, not an alleged conflict between them.

Inconvenient Thesis

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 3 Comments.

I’ve mentioned the Gish Gallop before, in how it is used by the disingenuous to cast doubt on the scientific certainty that the observed recent increase in warming of the planet is caused by the introduction of fossil carbon to the atmosphere by human activity. I even opined that the Gish Gallop is the mark of someone who knows they are being disingenuous, because its use knowingly belies intelligent discussion of the topic or useful exchange of ideas.

I have also written several retorts and taken pot-shots at Tom Fletcher, because he is, in my opinion, the most ignorant, belligerent, lazy, and cynical columnist claiming the mantle of journalism in British Columbia today (and there is an ongoing battle for that low ground) while being unexplainably ubiquitous in small town media across BC. Misinformed and regressive opinions are one thing, but when combined with terrible rhetorical skills and piss-poor writing, it is pretty unforgivable that Fletcher still draws pay from the ever-shrinking dead tree media. I have not agreed with a P.J. O’Rourke opinion since I was an 18-year old, hemped up on hormones and car magazines and the smart-ass-conservative-white-dude-certainty they reinforce, but at least O’Rourke can turn a phrase and make me laugh while I disagree with him. Fletcher just makes me weep for a societal system that gives him a forum.

One thing they teach you in high school English class (and sorry to get all academic elitist here) is that an essay needs to have a thesis – in the OED sense of “a statement that is put forward as a premise to be maintained or proved”. In other words, before you sit down to write something, you need to understand what you are trying to say. For example, the thesis of this blog post started out as my strongly felt personal opinion that:

“Tom Fletcher is a hack journalist whose opinions are ignorant to the point of insulting his readership, whose writing skills are subpar, and whose continued employment as a columnist by Black Press represents an injustice to the many skilled and determined journalists currently suffering underemployment from the collapse of traditional media model, while also supporting the theory that this collapse is a result of wounds self-inflicted by the very media platforms that are suffering most from the collapse”.

Although, in the interest of brevity, I might have to reduce the scope of this thesis to the first 5 words.

The piece of evidence that led me to write an opinion essay on this thesis is Fletcher’s most recent Black Press missive, entitled “Inconvenient truths of climate change”. I challenge you to put a single-sentence thesis on this column that is supported by the column. Is Fletcher arguing that polar bears are fine, and therefore the climate is not changing? Is he arguing that the COP21 talks are doomed to failure, or that, because of the “religious zeal” of climate change profiteers, they should be doomed to failure? Is he arguing that BC was wrong to put in a carbon tax and reduce emissions while growing the economy, or that BC were previously leaders who are now failing because the economy is growing despite the existence of a carbon tax? Or is he arguing that Barack Obama’s failure to meet some of the aspirations he expressed at his inauguration should be a lesson to Justin Trudeau to just give up?

The column comes across as a Gish Gallop of disconnected factoids bereft of context, leading one to suspect that introducing context to any of the factoids would prove most of them to be less representative of the truth than a typical YouTube video comments stream. By introducing a little context, or at least a coherent narrative, perhaps Fletcher could get the column past the entire “old man sitting on a porch shaking his fist at passing clouds” aesthetic. Although, one could suppose that was the position he was actually aiming for. I can’t imagine his motivations, only marvel at the results.

Large parts of the old media are dying, at least in part because of instant accessibility to a huge variety of new voices and more interesting approaches to content delivery that are simply out-competing the dead tree press for time, for eyeballs, and for advertizing money. Smart companies are adapting to this change and not just taking the same stale product on-line, but are re-investing in quality of content, giving people a reason to look at what they are producing. Other companies are just pushing their old, tired concepts onto digital platforms, hoping that enough flashing lights along the edges will make their tired content seem new, and the pop-up ads will be attractive to the people who pay the bills. In the quest to appear “interactive” they have created unreadable comment forums attached to articles, that soon degrade into nonsensical collections of disconnected uninformed factoids bereft of content or self-recognition, interspersed with cynical drive-by insult-by-implication.

In other words: a typical Tom Fletcher column. They should be treated with the same deference.

Getting our head in the game

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.

I have been pretty silent on this blog about the ongoing election, as I have directed my (almost daily) rants over to my Facebook Page. However there is one topic I figured was non-partisan enough and apropos for this blog, so I am copying it over here almost verbatim.

This Candidate-shaming thing has gotten completely out of hand.

The idea that people vying to be a Member of Parliament should not have ever expressed an opinion or uttered a word that would raise your grandmother’s eyebrow is a grotesque shift of what it means to be a community representative or a member of the “House of Commons”. Worse, it threatens the nature of our democracy and the quality of our governance.

It is hard to keep count, but there have been at least a dozen candidates from all three major parties turfed aside this election based on something they said last year – or last decade. Some may have said truly offensive things that speak to fundamental character, some may just have acknowledged the existence of sex, and used the language of his peers in talking about it. The problem in the election cycle is that we are rarely provided any context whatsoever – we are just provided a few salacious quotes from some social media stream. Soon enough, someone announces “the former Candidate’s views do not represent the Party” and the Candidate is sent down the memory hole.

There are many things wrong with this. I will try (and fail) to be concise. Beware: there may be a career-limiting four-letter word or two below.

He without sin: Ever said anything you regret? Ever had a strongly held opinion and expressed it? Ever just thrown a weakly held opinion out there to see what sticks, and after feedback, consideration, or learning, changed that opinion based on better information? Ever used sarcasm or humour to diffuse a delicate situation? Ever challenged a popular notion? If not, then your social media history and public record is probably safe from scrutiny. However, you are equally unsuited to be in a decision-making position in any organization, never mind representative government. If you have never done any of those things, you likely lack intellectual curiosity, a willingness to challenge yourself or others, and an empathy for ideas.

Selection towards older, duller people: If you have no social media history, you are likely over 35, and as much as I appreciate and value your experience and knowledge, we also need some young, fresh ideas in politics. If you have no record of challenging norms, you are probably not a very interesting person, and don’t bring anything to the table with which it is not already overflowing. Regression to the mean is a bad thing for leaders and governments.

It hurts our understanding of candidates: We currently have a raft of candidates, mostly from one party, and including local candidates here in New West, who have practically no media (traditional or social) profile. We have no idea who they are except for their scripted Bio pages. Their entire history and public record has apparently been scrubbed clean, for fear of missing one 4-letter word. It is like they popped into existence at the nomination meeting, and since then have only forwarded Tweets from Head Office. With few of them showing up for public events (all to avoid the gaffe, of course), most of us have no practical opportunity to know who these people are. I don’t mean to shock you here, but I guarantee they all have flaws, and that doesn’t mean they aren’t good people trying to serve their community. It hurts local representation when we try to shame them for a cheap news story.

It is a barrier to participation: Who wants to put themselves up for this scrutiny? Why would any person with the talent and energy to do good work for their community risk being embarrassed nationally because of an essay they wrote in their second year comparative religion class, or because they once wrote a positive review of a Biggie album that referred to “the gang lifestyle”? Why would you even want to work on a campaign or be a vocal supporter when there is a risk of some faux-outrage tarnish rubbing off on good people?

It is meaningless: There are three hundred and thirty-eight seats; more than a thousand candidates. We can spend our time digging through them all to try to find a time a local no-hope candidate said “blow job” on a rap lyrics website. But we should ask if that is really deserving of column inches when the last two elections resulted in people from the winning party going to jail for cheating, when for the second time during this election members of the Prime Minister’s Office are being named in sworn testimony during criminal proceedings, when we have no action on climate change, when we have more than a thousand murdered and missing women, when salmon stocks are collapsing and refugees are flooding Europe and our leaders are offering three very different visions of Canada…

There is an election going on, people! The polls are too close to call! Get your damn head in the game!

Thermodynamics

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 4 Comments.

Now that we are deep enough into the Anthropogenic Global Warming crisis that only the whackiest of whackaloons are still denying its existence or the serious impacts it is going to have on planetary livability, a whole different type of whacky thought is filling the airwaves. These have to do with a variety of techniques to suck CO2 out of the sky and turn atmospheric carbon into something useful like carbon nanotubes or alternative fuels.

These schemes are no doubt possible. The problem is that they don’t solve the actual problem, which isn’t carbon in the air, it is about making energy by putting carbon in the air. To talk about that, we need to talk about thermodynamics.

The Laws of Thermodynamics are pretty fundamental science. They cannot, in the normal universe where we live, be violated. They were once summed up to me in this analogy which helps to keep track of them*:

1st Law: You can’t win.
2nd Law: You can’t even break even.
3rd Law: You can’t get out of the game.

The one we are most worried about here is the 2nd Law, which essentially says that any time energy changes states, there is a net increase in entropy. In other words, every time you use energy to do something, you lose a bit of energy. It is the 2nd Law that makes perpetual motion machines impossible.

Relating this to schemes to pull carbon out of the air and make it useful, it is important to realize we don’t just toss CO2 into the air for the fun of it. For the most part we do it to use the energy released when you combine carbon with oxygen, be it energy to drive our cars/planes/ships or energy to generate electricity. We do this because the act of combining carbon with oxygen releases energy in the form of heat (which is a whole different chemistry lecture we should save for Beer Friday). We can do the same thing backwards, strip the oxygen off of the carbon, but that takes energy, and (this is where the 2nd Law comes in) a little bit more energy than it produced during the original combination.

So all of those schemes you see that will turn CO2 into something useful, no matter how efficient they are, will require more energy than we gained when we created the CO2 in the first place. So it makes way more sense to simply not produce the CO2 in the first place. instead, we could use the energy we would dedicate to sucking it out of the air and making carbon nanotubes out of it back into doing whatever job we wanted to do with the energy we gained in the first place when we added the oxygen to the carbon. As a bonus, we can still make the carbon nanotubes out of any of a zillion existing carbon sources we have on the planet, be they plants, rocks, or hydrocarbons, without the need to waste a bunch of energy stripping oxygen off of the carbon.  That way the carbon stays out of the atmosphere, we use less energy, and we are all better off.

The reality is that the “technological fix” of climate change is nothing shocking, cutting edge or freaky; it is in our hand right now. It is no more complicated than stopping the taking of carbon out of the ground to combine with oxygen for cheap energy when there is an abundance of alternatives available. But it starts with recognizing this “cheap” form of energy is a false economy, as is betting the future on big fans and diamonds from the sky.

*there is a 4th Law, but since it was developed later, and then determined to be more fundamental, the physics community called it the “0th Law”, just to reinforce those points. In the analogy above, it would be translated as “We are all playing the same game”

Voting Hardly Matters.

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.

Contrary to the main narrative in the media this past weekend, the longest-ever election campaign in modern Canadian history was not launched by the Prime Minister’s speech on Sunday. It was just the moment when the longest-ever election in Canadian history entered a new phase. The election has been going on since the day of the first ham-fisted “He’s Just Not Ready / Nice Hair” video. We have now just entered a new phase of enhanced advertising, before the post-Labour-Day orgiastic full-court-press.

All along, you will be encouraged to vote for change or to stay the course; for the good of your children, for the good of your job; to protect yourself from terrorists or taxes or something called the TPP. I am not going to discourage you from voting for whatever is important to you, but I will suggest that voting on October 19th is the least effective thing you can do for democracy this election.

Your vote will be one of the 15,000,000 cast in October. It may even be one of the handful that swings a riding one way or another, but it is more than likely going to be lost in the crowd. Your chosen candidate will win or lose your riding by thousands of votes*, and it is only through accumulating those vote gaps of thousands across the country that we will determine who gets to make choices that impact your life, taxes, and the future of the planet.

Yes, the end of that previous sentence underlies the reason why you should vote, but it also emphasizes why you should do more than just vote.

Here are the three things you should be doing before October 19, all of which will be more important than voting on October 19.

1: Inform yourself. 15 Million people voted last election, but almost 10 Million who were eligible to vote chose not to. The most commonly cited reason for this mass disenfranchisement is that it doesn’t matter. That sounds vaguely like my initial point, but it is strikingly different: election results matter.

I have no doubt that Canada would have gone in a different direction domestically, regionally, and internationally if Michael Ignatieff or Jack Layton had become Prime Minister in 2011, or even if Stephen Harper was forced by minority status to find support across the floor. People who say “elections don’t matter” are cowardly avoiding the issue, and are shirking their responsibility to inform themselves about the issues in their community and their nation.

Informing yourself is hard. You need to get out of your echo chamber and hear opinions that disagree with your opinions, or even your deeply held convictions. The Social Media encourages these echo chambers, these individual bubbles, where you are so drowned by self-supporting noise that you can’t hear anything else. Two perfect examples from my Twitter Stream today:

tweet1

tweet2

The elections is going to be filled with this kind of hyperbole and ridiculosity**, and you have to filter past that stuff and try to find the core of the ideas. You also have to get past “I’ll never vote for X, because I’ll never vote for X” type of tautology, and understand what you are voting for. Do the policies offered by the Parties approach your concerns in different ways? What do independent organizations say about those approaches? What are the built-in biases of those independent organizations? Perhaps more effectively: What other nations have been more or less successful at dealing with these issues, and which Party’s proposed policies closest match those successful nations’ approaches?

Yeah, this seems like a long approach, but we have an 11-week campaign, you have the entire world’s database of knowledge at your fingertips. Who knows what you might learn along the line. And you might just find a reason to vote.

2: Get Involved If you think you know the issues, and know how you want to vote, the biggest thing you can do is help your chosen candidate. Campaigns are run on money and volunteer energy, and you can provide both.

You can donate up to $1,500 to your chosen candidate, and for every candidate you would like to support, you can give each of them up to $1,500. Political donations qualify for tax credits, as well, so you get a chunk of them back in the spring with your income taxes. Donate up to $400, and you get 75% of it back in your tax return, regardless of your income level. Donate $1,500 and you get $650 back.

Volunteering is even more important. You can walk down to the local campaign office and there are any of a thousand tasks you can help with. You might be able to work the phones, collect and manage data, help coordinate other volunteers, go door-to-door with a candidate, manage data, stuff envelopes, deliver and construct lawn signs, bake cookies, sharpen pencils, drive a person to the polls… there are a million little tasks that take a bit of human help.

3: Spread the word Decided you are going to vote? Informed yourself on the issues, and chose your preferred candidate? Tell people about it, and take someone with you to the polls! We live in an era of social media where it has never been easier to spread and share ideas. If you like a candidate enough to vote for her, you probably like her enough to tell people why, in the hopes they also will vote for her. The best way to make your vote count more is to take a half a dozen people to the poll booth with you! Car pool, go for coffee or beer after.

So vote, because you can and because you should. There is a tiny chance it will shift a riding, or the fate of the nation, but more likely your favourite will win or lose by thousands of votes – one of them may as well be yours.  The only way you are sure to win is if you get informed and get involved in the election, because you will be living and learning and taking part in this messy democracy of ours. And who knows where that will take you?

*In 2011, the two New Westminster ridings were won by 6,100 vote and 2,200 vote gaps.
**Yes, I made that word up. In combines the states of being so ridiculous it is beyond the scope of ridicule.

Bicycles

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 3 Comments.

No secret around these parts – I like to ride bicycles more than most people.

The last couple of years, my mountain bike has been gathering dust as I spend much more time on the road, in no small part thanks to the guys of the Fraser River Fuggitivi – a rag-tag group of Sunday morning riders, some life-long cyclists, some new to the sport, some fast, some just trying to hang on. On a good day, the FRF can be a dozen riders; on some days we only have three or four; on rainy days we stay home. Them’s the Italian Rules.

This past weekend, for reasons that are more complicated than just the serious headwind we experienced on part of the ride, I was thinking about what riding a bicycle has taught me about society. Cycling is not just a social sport, it is a socialist sport. From the Pro Peloton to a local Sunday morning ride, we work together into the inevitable wind. The weaker riders protected by the efforts of the strongest, taking their pulls when they feel able, sitting back when they don’t. Rarely do we judge those who don’t take their pull, we know when you can pull, we know when you are hurting. By working together, we all go faster for less effort. There is nothing more socialist than that.

However (and here is the beautiful part), all that working together doesn’t mean there can’t be winners. Individually, few in the FRF could have pulled off our 80+km ride on a hot windy day with the average just a tick under 30km/h like we did on Sunday, but working together we got there and got home sooner. But not before we sprinted our lungs out to see who had the most left in the tank. @Gye_Incognito managed to ride the rest of us off his wheel in that flat-back slightly-too-big-gear style of his (last year’s FRF Sprint Champ @FlyingOakes was not present, and John of the Thundering Thighs is no longer with us, so we will have to put an asterisk next to this win). The sprint was fun as much as it hurt, and there is pride and respect earned for winning it, but none of us would have gotten there together to see it won without the several-hours effort we put in together, pulling together against the wind.

Over history, bicycles have been liberating and empowering, and they have been marketed, commercialized and commoditized. They were seen both as a symbol of Maoist communism, then as a roadblock to progress in post-Maoist communism. They were effectively driven off of the streets of our democratic urban areas to foster “free movement” of people and goods, and are now a symbol (arguably, THE symbol) of urban renewal across that same post-industrial capitalist world. Meanwhile, bicycles facilitate a sport that never shies away from its pure capitalist roots – Professional Cycling is a rolling consumer road show that grinds through its workers like a commodity, but where sacred symbols (including the most sacred of all – the Maillot Jaune) are just corporate branding exercises. Still, it is full of traditions that put the team before the individual: with winners who giving their cash awards to their teammates, a culture of Domestiques and Omerta and lead-out-trains and not attacking when your opponent is down.

Bicycles are about the most efficient human-powered machines ever invented, but they are also a powerful tool for society. They bring people together for common causes, and make society move forward more efficiently. You can’t help it: cycling makes you a socialist.

They also commonly remind me how out of shape I am. Thanks for the pulls, guys.

Short note on progress.

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 3 Comments.

It was such a beautiful weekend in New Westminster. I had a couple of events downtown on Saturday, and enjoyed my time wandering around between them, and something occurred to me.

The Northwest Fan Fest was occurring at the Anvil Centre. There were something like 10,000 people drawn to downtown New West on the weekend, spilling out onto the street, filling the sidewalks and Hyack Square – geeking out and having fun.

fanfest

And they spilled over to Pier Park, to mix with the usual families and locals using what is coming to be seen as one of the great public spaces in the lower mainland.

Pier Park2

Yet this is the weekend when a full half of the Parkade was closed to start the repairs, which will eventually see the west side removed. Parking chaos? Hardly.

parkade
Saturday, early afternoon. Yes, every parking spot behind me was closed for construction.

And I was reminded why I ran for Council. This City is on such a positive path. We are moving forward, setting plans and reaching for a better future. There are bumps along the way, some tough decisions to make, and some difficult setting of priorities.

But during the last election, not 6 months ago, there were people running who thought this was a waste of money that no-one would ever use:

20150530_121234
Westminster Pier Park. Saturday, May 30. Early afternoon.

Yet this was a valuable resource we cannot possibly afford to be without:

parkade empty
@HulkParkade, with all parking behind me closed and thousands of people in town for Fan Fest, Saturday, May 30, 2015, early afternoon.

I am happy to say I spent 10 hours in Council meetings today with people who see a more positive vision for the City, and we are moving ahead.

Too Busy!

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 1 Comment.

This is another in my semi-regular series of excuses for not updating this blog in a timely enough manner. I have been busy.

To clarify what that means, I think people know I have a job. Regular take-a-lunch-box-to-the-office 5-days-a-week three-weeks-vacation fill-out-timesheet type stuff. Fortunately, my employer has adopted a fortnight flex day schedule for all employees (meaning I work 7.75 hours for 9 days every fortnight, and get every second Monday off) and my employer has agreed to a small concession of unpaid leave for alternate Mondays when I have New West Council duties (which turns out to only be about 12 days a year). This still means I spend (on average) 35 hours a week completing Comfort Letter requests, administering dewatering agreements, reviewing Site Profiles, managing contaminated sites investigation and remediation projects and coordinating the technical aspects of PS3260 Accounting Standards compliance. It is fun and I work with a great team of people, so no complaints on my part. But it does eat into my time.

This week (as an aside, but to demonstrate the general chaos of my life right now), I took a couple of hours of my vacation time (with prior approval from my boss) to have a morning meeting with representatives from The Shops at New Westminster Station, Fraser Health, TransLink Police, NW Police Department, and New West Bylaw Enforcement to do a walkaround at New Westminster Station and the surrounding bus loops, retail areas and sidewalks to discuss a collaborative approach to making the area a more inviting pedestrian and public space, with an emphasis on how the various Provincial and City anti-smoking bylaws could be applied to address one of the primary complaints about the area (see pic above). Wow, that was a long sentence. I hope to be able to report an update on that meeting soon.

After work most nights, my schedule is rather chaotic. This week, I had a frustrating committee meeting with the Royal Lancers on Tuesday, and pinch-hit for Councillor Harper to chair a much more positive and productive Residents’ Association Forum on Wednesday. Thursday is free (hence me writing this), but I have, since Monday’s Council Day, received about 50 e-mails to my Council address, which will take some time to triage and decide what requires a response. Some may even require multiple e-mail exchanges with staff or others to gather the data required for a useful response. If you e-mailed me and I have not responded yet, my apologies. I have read it, and will try to get back to you as soon as practicable. And on Friday, I receive the Council Package I need to review in detail before Monday. I also have to organize my Jane’s Walk for Saturday, so that will have to be done tonight or Friday night, as I work Friday. I will probably get something figured out by Saturday Morning.

This is not meant to be a whine. I chose my path (and as has been joked, I went door-to-door begging for it!). So this is more an explanation why my blogging and other correspondence is, occasionally, less timely than I would like it to be. There are a few “Ask Pat” posts in the queue, and I am late assembling the April 27 Council Report. It also explains the lack of copy editing on this blog – any attempts at scanning for typos likely occurred after midnight.

On the plus side, I did get a great bike ride in on Sunday morning, and the New West Lit Fest last weekend was a great event, so it isn’t all toil. Actually, I am loving it.

New Rabble Rouser Website!

Posted on . by Patrick Johnstone. 3 Comments.

For long-time readers (Hi Mom!) I am happy to announce I will now have a website that contains everything my former blog was missing: form, function, design, and aesthetics.

If you are reading this on the NWimby.blogspot.com website, then you need to go to PatrickJohnstone.ca right now and see what you are missing. All new posts from this point forward will be there, and all old posts from here are also over there as well, with a much more friendly archive and search capability. It really is better over there. Go now, take the click.

If you are looking at this on the patrickjohnstone.ca website, welcome! Look around. This new website has all of the questionable content you have known from my former blog, along with new features and more questionable ideas, opinions, and news.

The quick good(?) news is that all of the content from my 5 years blogging as GreenNewWest and NWimby is included in the archive here. Those posts are tagged with their original tag, categorized with the NWimby label, and serchable by content and date. Also, all of the writings/musings I did for my Campaign website during the recent Election are also archived here, categorized as “Campaign” and similarly searchable. Hit the Archive button above and search the goodness!

You will also notice that red button over to the right that says “Ask Pat”. That is something new that I hope people will put to good use. Do you have a question about why the City does something the way it does? Do you have an idea about how to make the City better? Do you have a gripe about my use of prepositions? I want to make that feedback as easy as possible. Just click that button and Ask Pat, I will endeavour to answer as soon as I can reasonably get to it, and the answer will appear here and in your inbox.

Much thanks and volumnous shout-out to Wes at Of Desks right here in New Westminster for the incredible work he has done to make this website revamp so damn vamping. I wrote a few words and sketched something on a napkin, and he spun it into a custom design with custom functions that is estetically clean with really clear functions and navigation. It looks great – it works even better!

Welcome to the universe where my name is a web address. How did it ever come to this?