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Personally, I think Sunday shopping should be allowed year-round. I had never read the Province’s Sunday shopping legislation and I was curious, hypothetically speaking, if the City might be able to enact its own bylaw should Council ever want to do that. But, as I discovered, the Act specifically says that it supersedes any municipal bylaws.  I found section 4 (Exercise of conscience or religion) interesting because it appears to allow any business to open on Sunday as long as they close one other day of the week. Depending on the business you’re in, it might make sense to close on, say, Monday instead of Sunday. I wonder if anyone takes advantage of that?

This “conscience or religion” exception means what we really have is not a ban on Sunday shopping, but a legislated six-day retail business week for five months of the year; thou shalt not sell things seven days per week (except those of you covered by section 3). I have some sympathy for all the arguments for the Sunday ban, but the world has moved on. In an increasingly pluralistic society, Sunday has different significance to different people, and none at all to some. And conscience in this context is just another word for choice since, if it’s not for religious reasons, there’s really no justification to feel differently about Sunday than any other day of the week. So it seems sort of arbitrary to limit the business week to six days. Why not five?

This is very much outside the realm of my responsibilities as a councillor, but reading the Act for the first time was a bit of a revelation. In my opinion we’ve reached the day and age where, for better or worse, it should be a retailer’s choice if they want to operate seven days per week.

Continuing with the recent bird theme, today I received an inquiry from a resident about keeping egg-laying hens in the City. This is the second time in four months someone has asked me about this. A bit of quick research shows this is becoming a popular trend. A few examples:

• Urban Chickens addendum: Allowing Vancouverites to Raise Chickens Fact Sheet
• Waterloo Hen Association by-law proposal
• Urban Hen Movement

Currently, our by-laws severely limit the raising of any livestock within the City, but the trend away from factory farming and toward locally grown food is giving the laying hen hope for a better future as a food-producing urban pet.  What do you think? Would something like this “fly” here? Or would it be dead as a Dodo?

Best viewed with sound. It’s difficult to see because of the quality of the video, but many of the trees in the background and the surrounding area are also full of crows. Loud, squawking, pooping crows.

The City has received many complaints about the recent Festival of Lights from residents of downtown Charlottetown. I’ve heard others call these people “whiners”. I can tell you, these people have very legitimate complaints. I’ve heard some horrible stories about the things residents had to endure over the course of this event.

On the other hand, I’ve had members of the business community tell me how important and successful this festival is, and how we need to maintain it downtown.

In my opinion, something needs to change — either the demographic the concerts cater to, or the location of the concerts, or both. I recently spoke to a friend who played a leading role when the Festival of Lights was originally conceived. It was also his opinion that the festival had “gone off the rails”.

Certainly the people of Charlottetown and PEI are divided over what constitutes “success” where the Festival of Lights is concerned. But consider the email below, received by the Mayor, from a managing editor of a Southern California magazine who was here to write a travel article (the email is published with permission but name is withheld by request):

Dear Mayor Lee,

I was in Charlottetown during the recent Festival of Lights. This was my first visit to your city and to PEI. I was an assignment for [name withheld] Magazine, for which I serve as managing editor. I stayed at the Rodd Crowbush Golf & Beach Resort in Lakeside, Dalvay-by-the-Sea, and Hillhurst Inn, and have written a travel article for the magazine’s August issue.

I must admit I was quite dismayed by the crowd that was attracted to the Festival of Lights. I have traveled widely throughout the world, but I cannot remember encountering a ruder bunch of people than I did in Charlottetown. Anywhere I went in town, my ears were assaulted by young people using the “F” word with every breath. Moreover, young people called out to pedestrians as they drove by, making fun of how they looked or dressed and assaulting them with crude comments. Not only is this rude behavior in general, but I was very surprised that I encountered such poor manners in Canada. I have made perhaps 15 trips to your beautiful country over the years and have always been met by friendly, kind, generous, well-mannered citizens. The behavior I noted during the Festival of Lights was rather shocking.

I would suggest that you re-evaluate the way you celebrate Canada Day in Charlottetown. I am sure that the citizens are not so rude–Scott, Heidi, and Fiona at Hillhurst Inn are wonderful people–but you are attracting to your fair city people who just don’t know how to behave because of the musicians you are headlining during this weekend.

Best regards,

[name withheld]

Something needs to give. I’m not suggesting the Festival of Lights be scrapped, but in a province so heavily dependent on tourism — and in a world where everyone is a potential travel writer — we need to re-focus this festival to showcase the best of our community, not the worst.

At last night’s council meeting I brought up the issue of University Avenue, specifically the intersection at the UPEI entrance and Brown’s Court. I travel in that area regularly as I’m currently working on site at Holland College Royalty Centre and I’ve been amazed at the now common site of bumper to bumper traffic lined up to the north all the way to the Charlottetown Mall and beyond. I’m assuming part of the “problem” is the re-designed intersection at the Peter Pan corner allowing for more effecient flow of incoming traffic from the Winsloe and West Royalty directions. This is a good problem to have; however, the bottleneck at UPEI is caused by the almost constant flow of students on foot crossing University Avenue. There are now so many students living in the apartments on the other side of University Avenue that the volume of pedestrians is virtually constant for a large part of the day. The crosswalk button is pressed so often the light doesn’t stay green long enough for efficient flow of traffic. I believe an underpass would be an ideal solution, and I stated this in council. Of course, the lights would still be required to manage vehicle traffic exiting the university and Brown’s court but it would take the pedestrians out of the equation (and hopefully convince some of the students who dash dangerously across four lanes of traffic to take the safe route). The biggest obstacle, as always, is cost — which I also acknowledged. The chair of Public Works assured me they are aware of the issue and are working on possible options to improve the situation.

What would you suggest?

All of city council was just copied on a recreational hockey team’s intra-team email, which reads in part:

Sorry to say that in light of the “beer ban“, I will not be playing in the
Confederation League this year. A guys gotta stick to his principles.

Council voted unanimously on this issue. We are not the first, and surely not the last, municipality to introduce this type of policy. When Charlottetown made national headlines with this issue last month, Nicole Vanbergen, a “spokeswoman for the Ottawa-based Canadian Adult Recreation Hockey Association, said she isn’t aware of any bans on drinking in hockey dressing rooms”. The City of Ottawa promptly replied with a letter to Vanbergen, CC’d to Charlottetown city staff, outlining their policy which strictly prohibits drinking in dressing rooms and other public places. Charlottetown’s manager of Parks & Recreation was also approached by a number of peers from other municipalities at a national conference who indicated they had similar policies in place. In this day and age, with our increasingly litigious society and skyrocketing insurance rates, the city really had no choice.

Of the few visitors I get to this website, many are looking for information about bottled water bans in general, or specifically the ban put in place by the city of Charlottetown. I know this because my statistics application identifies the search engine string a visitor used that led them here, among other interesting data about visitors. For example, I noticed that someone using a computer on the Radio-Canada network had visited last night and this morning after having searched for “city hall charlottetown bottled water“.

I assumed a reporter was doing some research for a story. By mid-morning I received a call from Sophia Harris who was putting together a story for Compass (our local CBC evening news show), which was also to be part of a larger story being produced for The National (our national CBC nightly news show). I agreed to meet Sophia at City Hall around noon where I had a priorly scheduled meeting. We shot some staged footage of me and HR Director Andrew Thompson filling our paper cups with Charlottetown’s finest municipal H2O, and I answered some questions to the best of my ability.

This was the second time this summer a reporter had tracked me down via this website to discuss our bottled water ban. Several weeks ago, I received a call from Kim Arnott, a freelance writer for the Municipal Information Network, who wrote a story about the current trend away from bottled water.

Given the almost daily visitors here who are curious about the issue, I expect we’ll hear more and more stories in the media and very likely many municipalities following Charlottetown’s lead. For me this ban makes perfect sense from four different perspectives:

1. Purchasing bottled water reflects badly on us, as the purveyor of clean water services in Charlottetown. We should enthusiastically endorse our own product because it is excellent;
2. Bottled water is expensive;
3. Bottled water is not an environmentally benign product. The particular brand that the city used to purchase was shipped from western Canada, which leaves a huge carbon footprint, not to mention the waste in landfills;
4. We should discourage the effects of market forces on something every human needs. It shouldn’t become the new oil.

There will be a resolution before council at our regular monthly meeting on Monday, August 13th, to officially make the cosmetic pesticide report public.

The City of Charlottetown would require an amendment to the Highway Traffic Act to allow us to double fines for school zone speeders. At a meeting of council on Monday night, it was decided to send a renewed request to the new provincial government for enabling legislation for the use of photo radar (the City has made no decision on the use of photo radar, but we would like the ability to use it if we wish to).

An argument was made that we should not ask for both photo radar legislation, and an increase in fines in school zones, as we were unlikely to be granted both, an argument I did not understand. My position was that the province should be willing to give munipalities every tool we require to deal with a problem that many see as a growing safety concern. In the end, it was decided to send an official request for both; photo radar legislation, and an amendment to allow for the doubling of fines in school zones (and construction zones). This request will be sent by City administration, but I have taken the time to write personally to my MLA (Premier Ghiz) about the issue. If you feel that one or both of these requests are important, please contact your MLA as well.

The following items are part of my proposal that was sent for consideration by the Police Committee, and the Public Works Committee. Each member of council was also sent a copy. If you have any questions, comments or concerns, please get in touch or leave a comment on this post.

1. That the city of Charlottetown define the specific geographic boundaries of the school zone surrounding each school in the city. The perimeter of the school zones should be clearly defined, and wide enough to provide for the safety of the many children who walk to our schools on city streets, sidewalks, and crosswalks. In Ward 3 — and possibly in other wards — there is a sufficient number of schools within such a small area, that it may be possible, even desirable, to create a zone that encompasses more than one school.
2. That we enshrine the guidelines for defining school zones, and the definitions of the new school zone boundaries in a policy document or bylaw, whichever is appropriate or necessary.
3. That we establish guidelines for clearly marking the entry/exit points for vehicle traffic, using signage, lights, street painting, etc. All vehicles should be made aware, as clearly as possible, when they have crossed the boundary into, or out of, a school zone.
4. That we make the necessary bylaw changes to increase the fines for speeding violations within the newly defined school zones. The increase of fines would need to be clearly posted, with an accompanying public awareness campaign. This could be limited to periods between 8 – 4, Monday to Friday, or whatever is deemed appropriate.

I’ve been on vacation so I haven’t paid much attention to news of any kind. I only became aware of the brouhaha over the non-release of the report from the ad-hoc committee studying the issue of cosmetic pesticides when my inbox began filling up quickly with angry emails. Apparently, some of the news reports were using none-too-suptle words like “secret” and “bury” to describe what council intended to do with the report. This is not true. What occurred when the report was presented last week to the Committee of the Whole Council (i.e. everyone on council and the Mayor) was a disagreement on process. It was felt by many on council that the correct process would have been for the ad-hoc committee to present their findings to the standing committee responsible for the issue — the Water, Sewer and Environment Committee chaired by Councillor David MacDonald.

Personally, I decided it was appropriate to allow the report to be reviewed and discussed by the Environment Committee before releasing the document publicly. But I was very clear with the rest of council that I believed the report should be released immediately upon review by the Environment Committee. I did not sense any consensus amongst councillors that the report should be kept confidential, as was apparently reported.
I have heard that media reports later in the day yesterday did a better job of explaining the process that council intends to follow. This would also explain why the river of emails I was receiving from concerned residents of the city trickled off this morning. In any case, someone has already released the report and the main recommendations are now publicly known. Council will now start the process of making a decision on those recommendations.

If you have any suggestions or comments on my proposal for school zones in Charlottetown, please leave them in the Comments. Feel free to use this as a discussion area for the topic.