I have no comment on the particulars of her federal story, but yes x1000 to this @SusanDelacourt point generally. A generation of 🇨🇦 pols & officials have paid a certain stream of consultants millions to train them to sound insincere, aloof & robotic. A non-partisan observation. Take the phrase structure I hate the most in #cdnpoli-speak:
"We're committed to..."
"Our govt is committed to..."
(Or the most appalling)
"Our govt is committed to ensuring..."
How non-partisan? THIS non-partisan...

So, I've been looking at this Berkeley, CA crypto thing, and yeah, it's more like Berkeley Bonds than BerkeleyCoin. Not dismissing it, but: we looked at issuing retail debt in my Wpg City Hall M/O days and the real problem was it was just uncompetitive...
govtech.com/biz/Berkeleys-… Issue came up b/c a persistent, retired finance guy kept hassling the Mayor on why we weren't issuing retail bonds, so I dove deep. If we cut retail investors a worse deal by giving them less interest, the costs of retailing ended up offsetting that benefit. And if we made it -

Most 🇨🇦/#cdnpoli city mayors have too little formal authority to lead change and meet rising expectations. My oped for @irpp / Policy Options on how "The Power to Propose" can start to fill that gap w/out radically altering our city govt structures... policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/janu… Typically, any proposal to empower weak 🇨🇦 mayors runs into fears of 'americanization' or bossism. "The power to propose" is the minimum possible change you could make w/out disempowering councillors' powers of oversight, amendment and so on.

Sidebar, Cdn health care & immigration policy. (1) This is great (2) other prov should copy ASAP (3) what does it say about how stupid we are as a country that there were 1,200 potential* nurses just in one province (!) who'd just out of the system b/c of credentials bickering?

https://twitter.com/ColinDMello/status/1480959223848648707

* That's the applicant count. Even if 50% don't make it because of one issue or another, and I can think of many, what an absurd waste of talent that 600 still represents.

Observation: financing for future public housing needs to include a quasi-trust fund assembled at the point of construction to be held back for life cycle maintenance. It's clear govts can't be trusted to keep up sufficient maintenance otherwise. /1 /2 Sidebar: truthfully, you could say the same about most North American public capital projects. Notably, one of the plus points of a Cdn-style P3s is supposed to how they build-in financing for that very same maintenance gap. People/govts who hate P3s could mimic that benefit -

This morning, Waterfront Toronto is hosting what feels like its 100,000th consultation on the Sidewalk Labs proposal for the Quayside site in Toronto, so this is as good a morning as any to trash this totally fictional thread.

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1232793196339453952

/2 Start with "Google." This is a Sidewalk Labs, which may be a company in the same corporate family as Google, but it's different people with a different mandate. Most of Sidewalk's leadership is ex-public service in city/state or provincial govt in New York, NYC or Canada.

#SundaySidebar ... yesterday, @ns_ahmed asked me a question about one issue that pops up in my news feed a fair bit, namely the "Chief _______ Officer" craze in various city governments. /1 /2 His question, paraphrased: isn't hiring a Chief Equity Officer (to take the example that popped up yesterday) merely a diversion of resources or a distraction from fully funding city operations or services to achieve better equity?

Today in pet peeves about provinces... while packing for the move, found my much-requested slide deck from my 'Economic Myths of Manitoba' speech several yrs ago. A couple of samples for the #mbpoli crowd... It was a blunt tirade, b/c those myths serve as a sort of reverse antibody, attacking healthy realities which try to invade the MB political bloodstream. Take the "Hydro defines us" silliness, even though MB ranks 4th or (most often) 5th in annual prov'l hydro output rankings...