Kristin Mead

Apr 25, 2024 | monitormag.ca | Stuart Trew |Kristin Mead |Katherine Scott

On April 21, the Ecuadorian people resoundingly rejected their government’s plan to bring the country back under the thumb of international investment arbitration. The vote in Sunday’s national referendum should put an end to Canada’s plans to include investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), which allows investors to sue governments before private tribunals for lost profits, in a planned free trade deal with Ecuador. In fact, the entire project should be put under the microscope.

Apr 2, 2024 | monitormag.ca | Thorben Wieditz |Kristin Mead |Katherine Scott |David Macdonald

#Blocksidewalk was a grassroots campaign that formed in 2019 after a Toronto Star article reported that Google-subsidiary Sidewalk Labs was after hundreds of acres of publicly owned land along Toronto’s eastern waterfront. The company's goal? To build a “smart city”—a sensor-laden test bed to extract behavioural data from Torontonians.

Apr 2, 2024 | monitormag.ca | Craig Pickthorne |Stuart Trew |Kristin Mead

My hometown of Ottawa boasts a pair of scenic and winding roadways on both sides of the Rideau Canal. One of them is the Queen Elizabeth Parkway, on which you can drive six kilometres from Old Ottawa South to the downtown core and only hit two lights. Until 2020, that is. With COVID-19 came a promising zeal for “Active Use” programs in cities across the world. In Ottawa, our Queen Elizabeth Parkway was closed to vehicle traffic in the daylight hours of the summer months.

Apr 2, 2024 | monitormag.ca | Simon Enoch |Stuart Trew |Kristin Mead

If the supposed global “War on Cars” was true, then there is probably no city in North America where the automobile has won a more astounding and total victory than in Regina, Saskatchewan. The hostility towards cyclists and pedestrians in the Queen City is the stuff of legend. Beer cans launched from trucks at unsuspecting cyclists. Catcalls and insults fired at pedestrians from speeding vehicles for having the temerity to walk the city’s streets.