Mark Carney's line "Countries earn the right to principled stands by reducing their vulnerability to retaliation" sounds good. It's also at the heart of his US strategy. Unfortunately, at least for Canada, it promises a fantasy.

Winnipeg, MB: amid all the other ****, more evidence of City growth; 5th fastest growth in Canada. And oh yeah, something that got missed before Xmas: we bent the rental supply curve (events helped, but CMHC also credited growing supply) and late '25 vacancy is back up to 2.3%, up from 1.8% in '24.

Safe Parkside is reporting another high speed crash today. Doug Ford’s Ontario &, apparently, the one Ontario voters want. Tho Toronto not off hook here - city & local councillor did nothing long before Ford’s meddling despite pleas for them to act.

I will always, always read about municipal service delivery governance

I think some Toronto YIMBYs who find Chow insufficiently to their liking have been talking themselves into fanfiction where Bradford is the viable alternative and I really need folks to understand it's gonna be Chow v. Unrepentant Suburban NIMBYism, that's the ballot.

Toronto would do well to use the Bill 212/60 cooling to upgrade all its existing cycling infrastructure. From paint to protection where space permits, and to permanent poured concrete in place of existing pinned curbs and posts.

If it takes mayoral intervention to get a single-stair building with three stories and six units approved in Toronto despite all these safety features (few of which are required even in the US) even after years of warming them up in various forums, current Toronto building and fire staff needs to go

Strip away all the noise and the reason people hate speed cameras is they make drivers go the limit www.ctvnews.ca/ottawa/artic...

I'm super curious how Canadians will actually react to the new market choices

“Wonderful! Just wonderful! … So much for instilling them with a sense of awe.”

For social scientists interested in LLMs for text classification/coding, the process here is potentially very helpful (even if you don't use the product itself). Their core technique: Contradictory Example Training Their training method: Binocular Labeling More details in the linked post below.

File under: no sh*t The Ford government is making our streets more dangerous www.ctvnews.ca/ottawa/artic...

One frustrating thing about governments now saying "Housing isn't our fault. Developers just aren't building!" is that, years ago, I met with multiple politicians who assured me that it was fine to add requirements and costs, saying "Do you really think developers are just going to stop building?"

OK, this is super neat: "Toronto's Linguistic Heritage" from @uoftcities.bsky.social! It tracks the histories and geographies of linguistic communities in Toronto. Greek, Hungarian, Arabic...and way more! Bravo Aniket Kali & Jeff Allen! schoolofcities.github.io/languages/to...

One thing that really strikes me about people who shallowly argue for trams in N-America is how little they realize that the way we manage traffic here will seldom produce the level of ease of access they experience in European trams and long for Example: accessibility of stops, Paris vs Toronto

i love that #toronto uses the barriers that protect bike lanes as canvases.

Still two days left for people to contribute their thoughts and ideas on the future of the Marlee-Glencairn area. www.toronto.ca/city-governm...

"Infrastructure deterioration is a problem across Canada...But Calgary’s situation is particularly severe as the fastest-growing major city in the country, with a low density resulting in more kilometres of pipe per resident than any other major Canadian city." #yyccc www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

What jumps out at me from this graph is that (at least from the selected cities) there doesn't seem to be a relationship between population and vehicles/100k residents. Transit is transit.

I think when evaluating pedestrian safety we need to be more clear about the dynamics we think are at play. Otherwise you mistakenly think all movement is bad. Which is how you get the TTC putting restrictions on Finch LRT intersection speeds. 5/

A run through Eglinton-Lawrence tonight reinforced to me that the biggest impact of the neighbourhood retail by-law won't be the few places where corner stores are allowed inside neighbourhoos, it's the retail that will now be allowed on capital M Major Streets in the inner suburbs.

This doesn't seem sustainable, both in Vancouver and elsewhere

Sailing Rigs xkcd.com/3193/

Last night, Toronto Police were blitzing working delivery cyclists and ticketing them for parking on the road AND on the sidewalk (in front of food pick up spots on Yonge). 2 hours later one of the ticketed cyclists captured a pic of officers on a Timmies run while parked in a bike lane. No tickets.

All Toronto's growth should be going in the (comfortable) blue places; the reality is precisely the opposite. Intensify the house neighbourhoods and heavily restrict cars. The right answer by every metric.

Introducing CanViz, my little side project over the break to make StatCan tables more accessible.

The Alderville Black Oak Savanna is a pocket of a rare ecosystem in southern Ontario that was nearly lost to colonialism. It relies on fire — and dedicated stewardship — to flourish. thenarwhal.ca/alderville-b...

Something different for the TL. For a period in the 60’s and 70’s this is how some cars were loaded onto trains. A truly insane but visually satisfying way to do it

Extrapolating from this growth, we'll be seeing 2 million trips a day by April

toronto parks vs the wind

Oh hell yeah

We really do a disservice to ourselves when we call our history boring and uninteresting.

This is probably the best summary of how the American right wing has depicted, and will continue to depict Canada. An atomized, mongrel country ruled by henpecked judges, rife with 5th columnists and unable to define itself. Probably doomed even if we’re not put out of our misery by Washington.

"The actual people who actually sold the public on subways wrongly claimed, for years on end, that building subways would be both cheap and easy — and voters repeatedly endorsed a costly delusion rather than grapple with reality." — @jm-mcgrath.bsky.social

Hell yeah!

Yeah this kind of thing is good stuff

An owner that denies problems. An operator that has no ability to fix problems. And a maintainer that just doesn’t respond to questions. Doesn’t seem like a great way to run a railroad. www.thestar.com/news/gta/why...

friends, on this most tram of Tuesdays, let me take you on a little journey into a tale of two new tram systems here in Ontario, just 80km apart as the crow flies but a world apart in operations: the Kitchener-Waterloo ION tram, and the brand new Toronto Line 6 Finch West tram

Gotta be "Shōgun"

Canada, this could have been us! It still can!

And we're live, Lecture A1 is online. Introduction to Bayesian workflow, generative models, estimands, estimators, estimates, error checking, beginnings of probability theory and Bayesian updating. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztbY...

If it snows a decent amount, you can in fact make a snow angel yourself.

Took three full days, but they finally managed to pick up the recycling in our neighbourhood. Wild stuff! That's called "getting it done".

Like look at this. Edmonton permitted 8-plexes (not towers, not midrise, 8-plexes!) and smaller lot sizes near transit and it very visibly bent the whole curve of where housing gets built in 1 year. Incredible.

Did a very little bit of reading about european society in the middle ages and the concept of 'unfreedom', of various levels and kinds, experienced by peasants and others, keeps coming back to my mind.

I get that, for Canada, U.S. belligerence is incentive to try to further diversify oil exports to overseas markets. But at some point we may need to take into account that the geopolitical situation is also incentive for most countries to try to accelerate their shift away from oil reliance.

The entire point of approving 3-year bike plans is thrown out the window when individual projects still need approval in the quarterly cycling updates. If they really wanted to avoid local projects being subject to individual councillor whims they need to get rid of that stage of approval.

The approach to e-bikes by most transit agencies is too broad and generalized. The problem has been battery explosions and fires with improperly modified e-bikes or e-bikes not meeting stringent safety regulations. Rather than just banning ones without proper certification, they’re going after all.

Managed to submit a ticket online which was immediately marked resolved. Still no pickup in the area. Not an auspicious start, Ontario!

Two crash scenes 50 meters apart from each other on Vaughan Rd. at Winona, right next to a school, park, & apartment complexes. Vaughan Rd is dangerous, even if you are on the sidewalk. This is an urgent community safety issue. @joshmatlow.bsky.social #topoli #visionzero #walkto #onpoli #biketo