Month: April 2010

Categories
News

Green Energy Advisory Task Force Report Released

The BC Ministry of Energy,  Mines and Petroleum released the Green Energy Advisory Task Force Report on Wednesday.  The province also passed the Clean Energy Act (Bill 17) on the same day.  According to the BC News Release the Act builds on a number of recommendations from the task force, including:

  • Confirming our commitment to the Heritage Contract, to ensure B.C. ratepayers continue to receive the benefits of B.C.’s low-cost electricity assets.
  • Moving forward on critical infrastructure projects such as Site C and the Mica and Revelstoke upgrades.
  • Increasing B.C.’s clean energy supply to meet domestic and future export demand.
  • Better align implementation of policy between BC Hydro and BCUC and review the need for a separate transmission corporation.
  • Enabling utilities to implement initiatives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and/or improve energy efficiency, such as encouraging installation of high-efficiency heating systems like heat pumps or vehicle electrification and charging infrastructure.
  • Creating a First Nations Clean Energy Business Fund to support revenue sharing opportunities and to increase First Nations participation in clean energy resource development.

For another opinion read the article What Voters weren’t told about the Clean Energy Act from the Tyee.

Categories
Online Resource (Free)

More Open Data projects for Canadians

Two great new sites have just launched this month that will help Canadians have easier access to Federal government data.

openparliament.ca was launched on April 12th, by Michael Mulley, a Montreal-based web designer.  It provides a simple and attractive interface from which to find data culled from the Hansard (aka, official Debates) of the House of Commons.  You can browse by MP or search by name or postal code.  The main focus of the site is to keep citizens informed about the work of parliamentarians and its most useful feature to that end is its hyperlinked list of topics under current debate.  Are you curious to know what MPs were debating about most recently? According to Mulley, who has taken his information from the April 16th Hansard, topics included:

  • ethics
  • Afghanistan
  • Fairness at the Pump
  • sealing industry
  • Canada Post
  • agriculture
  • Chile
  • the environment
  • wine industry
  • and much more!

If datasets are your thing, check out http://www.datadotgc.ca/ Launched by David Eaves on April 14th, this site provides a home to a growing list of federal government datasets.  You can see which ministries share their data and which do not and you can see how many datasets each ministry has provided.  At present the lion’s share of available data come from Natural Resources Canada, but as the open data movement grows in Canada we will likely see more content added from other departments.   Supports keyword searching and you can browse by ministry or by tags.

Categories
News

BC Government keeps funding for shelters

The BC Liberal Government has agreed to keep the funding for  3 of Vancouver’s emergency shelters:

  • New Fountain Shelter (51B Cordova St.) – 28 beds, Portland Hotel Society
  • Central Shelter (240 Northern St.) – 100 beds, Vancouver Aboriginal Friendship Centre
  • First United Church (320 Hastings St.) – 200 spaces, First United Church of Canada.

Read the story from the Globe and Mail here

Read the BC News Release here

The City of Vancouver just finished it’s Homelessness Count last month. Figures have been released;  however,  the full report hasn’t been released yet on the City of Vancouver site but archived years are available.

Categories
Online Resource (Free)

C-SPAN Video Library

Interested in hearing Maher Arar’s testimony to the US House Committees on Torture?  Or watching Toyota executives testify before Senate?  Or perhaps you’d like to watch bank executives being grilled over the recent financial crisis?  Well you can watch all this and more on the C-Span Video Library website.

“Every C-SPAN program aired since 1987, now totaling over 160,000 hours, is contained in the C-SPAN Archives and immediately accessible through the database….”

Videos of Congressional sessions and committee hearings are posted alongside full-text transcripts of the events and a list of all participants.   Other types of content include press briefings/news conferences,  media interviews, clips of debates, ceremonies, public appearances, and even clips from foreign legislatures.  You can search for videos by “subject, speaker names, titles, affiliations, sponsors, committees, categories, formats, policy groups, keywords, and location.”

Categories
Online Resource (Free)

Canadian Tobacco Industry Documents

The site for the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, hosted by the University of California San Francisco, has just added over 3700 documents from the  Canadian Tobacco Trials:  “The Canadian Tobacco Trials collection consists of court records (transcripts, depositions, exhibits) from two major national Canadian trials – the 1989 Tobacco Products Control Act (TPCA) Trial and the 1997 Tobacco Act Trial.”

  • Click here to read about the collection
  • Click here to start searching the collection

Here’s  more information about the Legacy Documents Library:

“The Legacy Tobacco Documents Library (LTDL) contains more than 11 million documents (60+ million pages) created by major tobacco companies related to their advertising, manufacturing, marketing, sales, and scientific research activities….(and also) offers integrated searching of tobacco industry documents from a variety of companies…. These collections are comprised of tobacco industry documents from the late nineteenth century up through the present with the bulk of the collections dated 1950 through 2002”

Other collections besides the newly added Canadian Tobacco Trials include:

Huge thanks to the folks at the Resource Shelf for alerting us to this new content!

Categories
Online Resource (Free) Print Resource

Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples – hearing transcripts available online

The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples was appointed in 1991 and submitted its final, 5000 page report in 1996.  During its five year inquiry, the Commission “held 178 days of public hearings, visited 96 communities, consulted dozens of experts, commissioned scores of research studies, reviewed numerous past inquiries and reports” (Highlights. “A Word From Commissioners”).  You may be surprised to discover that not all of this work appeared in the final report – in particular, the hearing transcripts were not included.  The transcripts were made available as part of a CD-Rom publication, “For Seven Generations,” but have not been freely accessible online until quite recently.

  • Thanks to Commissioner Allan Blakeney, who donated his personal copies of the hearing transcripts and roundtable discussions, the University of Saskatchewan Archives and U Sask’s Special Collections units have recently finished a project to digitize and OCR these materials.  You can access them online from Saskatchewan’s cooperative public Archives site Our Legacy.
  • Kudos to Frank Winter at the University of Saskatchewan for alerting the Gov-Info list-serv to their fabulous resource!

You can  view the Commission’s Final Report, Highlights from the Final Report and the Address for the Launch of the Report online on Indian and Northern Affairs Canada’s website here .

    • UBC Library also has a wide array of print materials published by and about this Commission, including the Final Report.  You can view the list of available titles by conducting a keyword search using the terms: royal commission aboriginal peoples.
    • UBC Library has several copies of the “For Seven Generations” CD-Rom mentioned above, available at call number E78.C2 F77 1997 CD-ROM

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