EQ Journal

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County of Renfrew Reborn

Here are the slides from a talk on economic renewal that I am giving for the County of Renfrew on Monday September 17, 2012 at 10 am at the Best Western Renfrew Inn and Conference Centre. The challenges facing the county are not unlike small towns elsewhere in rural Ontario and, for that matter, in [...]

Artifex

Professional Artpreneur Gala We want to take this opportunity to thank all the sponsors of Artifex in advance of this very special event that will take place on June 20th, 2012 at the National Gallery Of Canada. These organizations make it possible to celebrate the essential role that the arts play in building better, more [...]

Carp Road Corridor Business Improvement Area

We have in Ottawa a BIA (Business Improvement Area) focused on improving the Carp Road corridor. It’s an important stretch of road connecting the fast growing suburb of Stittsville and the historic Village of Carp. It is a mostly rural area but there are municipal services at both ends but not along much of the [...]

The Arts

What is Beauty? We came to Vancouver a few days ago to celebrate early stage career Hnatyshyn Foundation Award winners at an event held at the VSO School of Music. The concert hall at the VSO (Vancouver Symphony Orchestra) is acoutistically and virbationally isolated not only from street traffic outside its downtown location but from [...]

Private versus Public Ownership

(Why Starfleet is Wrong) (Pre-Conditions for Economic Takeoff in Nations) Private ownership of a ‘thing’ can be viewed as private stewardship of that thing. As a former owner of a National Hockey League franchise, I never felt like I owned it and, frankly, I was always uncomfortable with the notion that hockey players under contract [...]

What if…

(Blogger Graeme Nichols challenged me and 19 other people to answer the question: ‘What if?’ For example, what if the NCC, the National Capital Commission, had said ‘yes’ to putting the Palladium on their lands at Lebreton Flats in downtown Ottawa instead of being constructed on the suburban Kanata site where Scotiabank Place (as it [...]

Want Higher Density Communities?

Then First Build Out not Up (This is an article I wrote in 2003 concerning the policy direction of then Kanata Councillor, Peggy Feltmate who continued in a long line of municipal politicians to oppose building the City outwards in the mistaken belief that this would prevent building upwards. Her goal and mine were the [...]

Rent Curves

How Developers can Make More Money and Urban Design can Improve by Exploiting Vertical Rent Curves It has always amazed me that many developers, those veritable profit maximizers, don’t understand that neo-urbanist principles* can improve their returns while at the same time making them better city-builders and I suppose better corporate citizens. For example, most [...]

Entrepreneurship, Economic Development and Sustainability

(From a speech originally given to: Kiwanis Club of Ottawa, Friday September 12, 2003, Fairmont Chateau Laurier Hotel) Entrepreneurship is more than just a key engine for economic growth; it is the most efficient means of producing a sustainable community, not just in Canada but in developing nations as well. Countries that have city-state economies [...]

Russian Dachnik Movement

Introduction The Russian Dacha and the Dachnik movement have been around for more than 100 years and the home garden for more than 1,000. The Dacha is typically a one-room cottage perched on one hectare of land—large enough to grow fruits and vegetables to support a single family via intense, mostly manual labour. One-room Russian [...]

Livable Cities Versus Mono Cultured Suburbs

This article was originally written for the Conference on Social Harmony, Ottawa Public Library, December 4, 2001 It wasn’t long after my wife and I and our five kids moved to a western suburb of Ottawa in the late 1980s before a group of our neighbors circulated a petition in the neighborhood. They were concerned [...]

Tree’d City

Question: How long does it take to grow a tree? Answer: As long as it takes. That is what makes trees so precious. Years ago, my wife and I bought a lot in Kanata Lakes (in the west end of Ottawa) on a golf course for our growing family. Although, we only had two children [...]