A Shift In Power

Warren Kinsella: Ipso facto, voters have misgivings about all of the parties.  So, none of the parties is definitively ahead.

The rest of Kinsella's analysis talks about how the Convervatives will become competitive again, with the focus being on someone eventually becoming the people's choice.  That's how the system works, isn't it?  You gotta have a government, it's gonna be a party, so it's just a matter of choice.

Martin Regg Cohn: Canadians everywhere — everyone, it seems, except the federal government — are moving into that political vacuum. A lack of leadership and an absence of empathy have left the field wide open for others to respond decisively at every level of government, and especially at ground level.

This in response to an emerging reality:

An urgent humanitarian response is only human, but it is not enough. We must also reduce the causes of mass migrations (conflict and chaos), and avoid making those migrations even more dangerous (by tempting people to start a stampede) because people will die in the crush, drown on the high seas, suffocate in sealed trucks.

See, we can't keep playing the starfish-throwing game and patting ourselves on the back righteously - it isn't enough.  

The world is changing - literally - and it's impacting us all in more pervasive ways than at least we in the West are used to.

Which means that the way governance works needs to change and adapt.  As happens always, it's an organic process - as existing systems fall behind need, others step up to fill their place.

We live in interesting times...

Lego my City! A Great Idea for Co-Design

The planners used the toy bricks to help people figure out how to run their health facility more efficiently, before construction, with real bricks, begins.

 

Smart.  Lego is something accessible - you don't need to have a masters in engineering or city planning to see how blocks fit together to make a complex whole, and what that whole will look like.

 

As a citizen, you can more readily see how a given framework will impact you and offer comment based on that, not on dense reports full of jargon.

 

You can also test out more things in advance - is a space wheelchair accessible?  Is a layout too confusing for easy navigation, requiring additional signage?

 

Empower people to be part of the process and you get better results. 

 

Then everyone gets to say, we did build that.