P.E.I. Premier Wade MacLauchlan says a binding referendum he's proposed to be held in conjunction with the next provincial election won't be able to force the next provincial government to change electoral systems, no matter what the outcome might be.
MacLauchlan put forward the idea in a motion currently under debate in the provincial legislature. It is his response to a plebiscite on electoral reform in which 52 per cent of voters chose mixed member proportional representation.
MacLauchlan has questioned the results of the plebiscite based on voter turnout of just 36.5 per cent.
"A clear question in a binding referendum on democratic renewal will give all Islanders the confidence of knowing that there is broad-based support for a new electoral system," his motion states.
But Tuesday during question period Green Party Leader Peter Bevan-Baker asked the premier how his proposed referendum could circumvent what's known as parliamentary sovereignty, a legal principal that states any government can change or repeal laws put in place by previous governments.
MacLauchlan's immediate response didn't seem to settle the issue.
Victoria-by-the-Sea will receive almost $650,000 from the federal government to help it capitalize on its tourism potential.
The money, provided by the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, will go toward upgrading the 90-metre-long seawall, creating a pedestrian pathway to connect the waterfront with green-space and business areas, developing recreational greenspace with visitor parking, and upgrading the historic Victoria schoolhouse to serve as regional rental space and source of revenue.
The community will contribute $480,000 toward the project, with $20,000 coming from the South Shore Tourism Development Fund.
P.E.I. MP Wayne Easter said the money will enhance the tourism experience in Victoria.
"This picturesque community is certainly a treasure along our rural landscape," he said. "The community and business owners are proud of what they have to offer and they want to share it."
“New London: The Lost Dream” details a Quaker colony’s ambitious beginnings in the late 1700s, leaving a question of how different the province would now look if the group had continued to flourish.
Author and historian John Cousins said the book’s research began as an interest of his own family connections to the settlement located at what is now the Cape Road in French River.
“I knew nothing about them but there were always vague references to Quakers,” said Cousins. “No one had written about this community in its early days.”
Quakerism was a branch of Christianity with many social differences from other Christian denominations. They didn’t have clergymen and preferred to worship in meeting houses rather than “steeple houses” their term for churches. They were also being early believers in gender equality.
The Quakers also had a new vision for their P.E.I settlement.
“The plan was not to start a farming community but an industrial village,” said Cousins.
A sewing needle has been found in a dish of cooked P.E.I. potatoes, the latest in a string of incidents involving metal objects discovered in Island spuds.
Halifax police Const. Dianne Penfound said they received a report Sunday evening that a sharp object was found in the potatoes after they had been peeled and cooked at a local home.
She said the bag of potatoes was purchased at a Giant Tiger store on Nov. 6 and that the potatoes were from P.E.I., but offered no details on the brand or origin. She added that no one was injured in the incident.
Alison Scarlett, spokeswoman for Giant Tiger, said they have pulled the potatoes from the store's shelves.
“Giant Tiger Stores Limited has reached out to the Halifax Police Department to get more information on the matter and is currently working directly with our potato vendors,” she said in an email.
Before time was standardized around the world, Toronto’s public clocks, such as the one at St. Lawrence Hall, were set based on the position of the sun observed at the Toronto Observatory at University College. Photo from the Toronto Public Library, E 9-234.
The approximately 17-and-a-half minutes between 11:35 and 11:52 a.m. on November 19, 1883, didn’t officially exist in Toronto.
When the time reached 25 minutes to noon on that day a little over 133 years ago, the city’s public clocks at St. Lawrence Hall, Osgoode Hall, Union Station, and at various fire stations quietly skipped almost 20 minutes ahead.
This was the day the Toronto switched to standard time, abandoning forever its own hyper local time calculations in favour of a system synchronized with towns, cities, and countries around the world.
Remarkably, and quite improbably, the origin of this chronological shift lies in a typographical error in a train timetable in the 1876 Official Irish Travel Guide.
I am not the first BBC reporter to pop in here. In fact, Green Bank is a source of constant fascination for journalists all over the world. Recently, several people in the town told me, a Japanese crew baffled everyone when it appeared to set up a game show-style challenge in the area.
Outsiders come here for two reasons. One, to marvel at the science. Two, to ogle at the unique people who have chosen to live here.
Green Bank sits at the heart of the National Radio Quiet Zone, a 13,000 square mile (33,669 sq km) area where certain types of transmissions are restricted so as not to create interference to the variety of instruments set up in the hills - as well as the Green Bank Observatory, there is also Sugar Grove, a US intelligence agency outpost.
For those in the immediate vicinity of the GBT, the rules are more strict. Your mobile phone is useless here, you will not get a TV signal and you can't have strong wi-fi - though they admit this is a losing battle. Modern life is winning, gradually. And newer wi-fi standards do not interfere with the same frequencies as before.
But this relative digital isolation has meant that Green Bank has become a haven for those who feel they are quite literally allergic to electronic interference.
CBC/Radio Canada has submitted a position paper to the federal government proposing the public broadcaster move to an ad-free model, similar to the one used to pay for the BBC in the United Kingdom, at a cost of about $400 million in additional funding.
"We are at a critical juncture in our evolution, continuing to operate under a business model and cultural policy framework that is profoundly broken," said the CBC's document, released on Monday afternoon. "At the same time, other nations are moving their cultural agendas forward successfully — and reaping the benefits of strong, stable, well-funded public broadcasters."
The additional money CBC is asking for would largely be "replacement funding" if the media organization eliminates advertising. The proposal requests $318 million to replace advertising revenue: $253 million in lost ad sales plus $105 million to "produce and procure additional Canadian content" to fill the programming gaps in their absence. CBC is also asking for $100 million in "additional funding of new investments to face consumer and technology disruption."
However, the proposal notes that removing ads will also result in savings of $40 million in the cost of selling advertising.
Total government funding for CBC would equal an investment of $46 per Canadian every year — up from the current $34 per Canadian it currently receives, the document says.
Two-thirds of the ad revenue given up by the CBC, the proposal argues, "would migrate to other Canadian media, including private TV and digital, for a net gain to them of $158M."
First-time homebuyers could be hit with hundreds of dollars in additional closing costs if Toronto “harmonizes” its land transfer tax with the province’s, the Toronto Real Estate Board (TREB) is warning.
The difference could add $750 to the average home transaction and add an upfront expense that would hit first-time buyers particularly hard.
A city manager’s report that suggests Toronto could “harmonize” the municipal and provincial land transfer taxes is actually an increase, since the provincial tax is higher, said Von Palmer, TREB’s chief communications and government affairs officer.
“They use the word harmonization like it’s a break-even proposition. It is not. It’s an additional $100 million (for the city),” he said.
Toronto is already making $500 million a year more on the tax than the original $350 million estimate when it was introduced about eight years ago, Palmer said.
Toronto’s only true dead mall can be found at Dundas and the East Mall, almost directly across the street from Cloverdale Mall. Where the latter shopping centre has managed to carve out a lasting purpose in the shadow of the far busier Sherway Gardens, the former has fallen into virtual ruin after being closed down completely a few years ago.
Prior to being fenced off, Honeydale Mall spent its last years in a sort of zombie state, not fully alive but not entirely dead either. The majority of the vendors had cleared out, leaving only a weekly flea market as the action in the sprawling retail space.
During these years, Honeydale served as a playground for photographers looking to capture its peculiar end-of-the-world aesthetic rather than as a bonafide shopping destination.
It wasn’t always this way. While the mall was never the type of wildly popular destination as Yorkdale, back in the mid 1990s, the presence of Wal-Mart, a major grocery store, and a host of independent retailers meant that it served a valuable community presence, even as the older Cloverdale was always more popular.
When Wal-Mart moved out in 2004, the major decline began. The No Frills hung on for about a decade, but eventually things got so dismal that it packed it in as well. The entire property was finally fenced off at some point in 2014, leaving only the hulking shell of the former mall to be viewed from a distance. It’s remained that way to this day.
Cuba's capital, Havana, was a glittering and dynamic city. In the early part of the century the country's economy, fueled by the sale of sugar to the United States, had grown dynamically. Cuba ranked fifth in the hemisphere in per capita income, third in life expectancy, second in per capita ownership of automobiles and telephones, first in the number of television sets per inhabitant. The literacy rate, 76%, was the fourth highest in Latin America. Cuba ranked 11th in the world in the number of doctors per capita. Many private clinics and hospitals provided services for the poor. Cuba's income distribution compared favorably with that of other Latin American societies. A thriving middle class held the promise of prosperity and social mobility.
There were, however, profound inequalities in Cuban society -- between city and countryside and between whites and blacks. In the countryside, some Cubans lived in abysmal poverty. Sugar production was seasonal, and the macheteros -- sugarcane cutters who only worked four months out of the year -- were an army of unemployed, perpetually in debt and living on the margins of survival. Many poor peasants were seriously malnourished and hungry. Neither health care nor education reached those rural Cubans at the bottom of society. Illiteracy was widespread, and those lucky enough to attend school seldom made it past the first or second grades. Clusters of graveyards dotted the main highway along the foothills of the Sierra Maestra, marking the spots where people died waiting for transportation to the nearest hospitals and clinics in Santiago de Cuba.
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