Pie Palace

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that Second Cup started sporting a Fair Trade logo on their signage. Being the kind of person that thinks people should be paid a reasonable wage, and knowing that coffee workers can be treated like serfs, I started stopping by Second Cup to grab the occasional cup of java. Then I started wondering. When I order myself a caramel corretto®, is it really fairly traded?

So I sent an email to Second Cup’s customer care. Their response was a little disappointing:

Thank you for your email and your interest in the Second Cup. I have included below our Fair Trade Coffee available through Second Cup. Currently this is the only coffee in our series that is certified. Please do refer to our website at www.secondcup.com to review our selection and how we are making a difference environmentally and socially.

So, even though Second Cup says “24 fairly traded coffees available every day”, they really mean they have one fairly traded coffee.

It’s back to Bridgehead, and their fully fair trade menu for me.

Remember the prorogation kurfuffle? No, not the one in 2009 one. The first one.

It looks like history is about to repeat itself.

Mr. Harper has announced that he wants to eliminate government subsidies for political parties. So far he’s only said that he wants to use that as a Conservative plank in the next election, but I’m betting that it will appear in bill form sometime before early March – just before a budget would have to be brought down.

Why? The first time the government tried to eliminate subsidies, the opposition parties freaked out and botched forming a coalition. This time around, instead of proroguing, Harper is going to force the vote and allow the government to fall on this handy dandy wedge issue. In the subsequent election, he can paint the other parties as pigs at a trough, and say “there are already generous credits and incentives in the tax system to encourage people to give to political parties today.” Oh wait. He just did.

I can pretend the move is antidemocratic: the subsidy means that everyone’s vote has value. In a donation-only system, only people who have spare cash can donate, so they’ll donate to parties that pander to their wants meet their needs. Poor folks (who can’t wait until tax time for their tax credits to be returned) won’t be represented as well.

But, in my heart of hearts, my main reason for supporting the subsidy is that it benefits the Green Party. The subsidy forms a substantial part of the our budget, so any reduction of the subsidy would cripple the federal party. I tend to think of that as a bad thing, but others would probably disagree.

Blogawa.ca now has three new contributors: our geeky pals at Zone 12, the highly fashionable Dare to Unravel, and the contentariffic Hello Ottawa. ((blogawa++)++)++

For some of us, making it big is getting cross posted to the Make blog. By that measure, the folks on Ottawa’s Zone 12 Project blog have made it with Nigel Vezeau’s fantastic child-size recumbent trike. (And yes, I’ve asked them if they’d be willing to have Z12 added to Blogawa)

Boo! After hours of hard work, I managed to get an AWN helper (nerdspeak for “a thing that shows stuff on my computer’s status bar”) for Workrave included in the official distribution (nerdspeak for “now everyone can use it”). I pinged OMG Ubuntu to say “hey! you like docks, and I wrote this thing! you should mention it,” and they did. They just left my name off the attribution. All that hard work and no cred to go along with it.

ScraperWiki just got a little more awesome. Dave0 put together a scraper that crawls the City of Ottawa website and makes the development applications machine readable.

A couple of years back I floated the idea of portable website scrapers that would be able to programmatically pull information off of websites regardless of language and platform. The folks at ScraperWiki have gone so far as to actually do it. Their version scrapes publicly available information (meaning that my use case of scraping my bank statements is out of scope) and stores the result in a publicly accessible manner. Props!

A post on Transit Ottawa reminded me of a recent poll on CFRA.

89.6% of respondents believed that Clive Doucet and Alex Cullen wanted to cancel road projects because “[they] aren’t interested in keeping taxes down; this is just a thinly veiled attack on car owners by a couple of public transit lovers.”

That’s the first time I’ve heard “transit lover” used as an epithet. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

David Chernushenko was elected as Councillor for my ward last night. Not only did he win, he rocked the ballot box with 41% of the vote.

My voting career has spanned almost two decades now. I think this vote was the first winning vote I’ve ever cast.¹ It’s good to know that I’m in the majority largest single voting block for once.

I was only at the victory party briefly, but there seemed to be a degree of shell shock. Lots of the folks in the room had supported David’s previous campaigns, and we didn’t quite know what to do when our candidate actually won. I’m glad that we got to see it.

Congratulations to David, his campaign team, and his volunteers. You all did a great job.

1. I believe that I may have voted for a winner in a decorate-your-office-door-for-christmas contest in 2001, but I don’t think that’s on quite the same scale as electing a representative. (back)

One of the few things I miss about my Citizen subscription is being able to read Dan Gardner’s op-ed pieces. They’re everything the main stream media should be: well thought out, well researched, and slightly contrarian. Add his blog to your feed reader. You won’t regret it.