Kevin O'Donnell's blog

It makes sense for the media to refer to governments by the name of the prime minister or premier. The Harper Government proposed to do this. The McGuinty Government announced cuts to that. Saves time and confusion.

This news release encouraging Ontarians to prepare for storm impacts needn't be styled McGuinty though. We all know who the premier of Ontario is - sort of - at least until the end of January. Read more »

“Ho-hum, it’s politics.”

Within hours of the announcement last week that Dalton McGuinty has resigned as the Premier of Ontario, this was the refrain that rang out – no, sang out – no, murmured consistently – around Ontario. It’s politics. Of course it is. But it’s more: Read more »

The city has determined that all of the public art money attached to the Churchill Avenue reconstruction will be used for installations at Churchill and Byron. The city's public art coordinator was at the information session and was kind enough to forward these details for where exactly the installations might be. Click to embiggen: Read more »

The Q3 open data bike stats are up. Here they are in fancy Google widget format. I've broken them down by weekday/weekend but it occurs to me that many of the dips in the 'weekday' chart correspond to long weekends. If you'd like to hack a "workday/weekend" version of this you can make a copy of this Google spreadsheet. Let me know - would be happy to share the results. Read more »

Dwight Duncan provided this quote, which I've fixed (bold) to be more factually correct:

Mr. Duncan said the legislature is missing only about 18 sitting days by proroguing for an indefinite period, and it also sat an extra 12 days last summer, but also ends the investigation of a contempt of parliament charge and the death of over a hundred pieces of legislation.

I'm very excited to run once again for the Green Party in Ottawa Centre. We have much to do to improve our environment, our health, and the conditions we'll pass on to the next generation. Thanks to everyone who came out tonight - and a special thank you to Mike Schreiner for coming up from Toronto for the meeting. Read more »

Why does the city's portion of the widened Shannon Avenue have to come away from Byron Park, but the private lane portion on Ashcroft's property go further out? One idea to limit the impact on Shannon residents is to have the city's portion of the road match the alignment of Ashcroft's driveway. Perhaps that's the idea, but Ashcroft's site plan doesn't reflect the city's actual plans for their part of the road.

All the details are here. Read more »

This is 9-minutes of mandatory listening on the real reason behind the prorogation: Read more »

Going into the Churchill reconstruction public information session I had four questions. Here are the four answers. You may want to consult the great big design PDF.

Raised Intersections? Read more »