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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.

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.

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?

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.

I stumbled across a timely post at Potter Gold, the blog of MacLean’s magazine columnist Andrew Potter. Apparently, Charlottetown city council is at the cutting edge of a new trend where tap water is the new bottled water at fancy-schmancy restaurants in places like San Francisco.