The Tyee ran ten leftist ideas for the new year. Most of them are crap, but there are two urban proposals that I’d like to draw attention to:

Slow Towns

Small, tourism-oriented towns declare themselves “slow”, giving them an excuse to ban things like Walmart and white bread. Cowichan Bay really is a perfect case for this as they transform from a fishing village to a purveyor of pretention (not that I don’t shop there!). But Victoria is pretty lazy, maybe a slow city is a possibility?

Municipal Wards

This is an acute problem in Vancouver where the low voter turnout in the Lower East Side keeps them from having a representative on council. Given the high number of ex-Neighbourhood Association Chairs that ran in the last Victoria election I think it’s clear that we’d prefer to think globally, vote locally too.