Tag Archives: Fire Pits

A Record Month for Calgary City Council.

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It has been some time since I have seen our intrusive city council get on such a roll of covering so many self-important, expensive and intrusive initiatives that we really don’t need and that really don’t fall within what I see as their mandate as a city council.

Below is a clip from the Alberta Municipal Government Act mandating what the role of a municipality should be:

Municipal purposes
3 The purposes of a municipality are:

(a) to provide good government,

(b) to provide services, facilities or other things that, in the
opinion of council, are necessary or desirable for all or a
part of the municipality, and

(c) to develop and maintain safe and viable communities.

Now the above statement is pretty broad and yes leaves a great deal open to interpretation. It greatly empowers council in that it allows things to be done “in the opinion” of council which pretty much lets them judge themselves empowered to do damn near anything (and it shows in their actions).

What is outstanding in the document is also that the mandate is simple. The complexities in city governance are grown and created by busybody city councils that feel that they should be mandating, regulating and banning whatever practices among Calgarians they please.

Personal special interest mandates are showing clearly as city councilors waste their tax funded time on petty issues while major issues languish by the sidelines.

Council extremist Brian Pincott is a specialist in pushing these foolish, narrow initiatives. Pincott wants the law to tell you how many lights you can have turned on and at what time. Pincott wants to ban your right to use fire pits on your own property and perhaps even ban your wood burning fireplace. Brian Pincott wants ban cutting of trees on your own property and now Pincott feels it is his right and obligation to tell you what you are legally allowed to eat! 

Yes, I do understand that the practice of shark finning is repellent and inhumane. That being said, is it the role of a municipal council to ban the consumption of a legal product? Where do we stop? Veal? Foie Gras? Meat altogether? Non-organic foods? Non free range eggs? The list is endless and the precedent has been set. Sorry, I am grown to the point where I no longer will even let my mother tell me what I can or can’t eat, I sure as hell will not let a gang of busybody clowns in city hall tell me what to eat.

Despite a lack of need or demand, city hall will be spending a fortune closing even more lanes downtown for bikes and has set a timeline to pursue the expensive and proven loser called “bike sharing” that has proven to be a catastrophe around the world. 

Now in a stroke of genius despite the City of Calgary’s $3 billion debt and constant tax increases, Nenshi and city council have happily decided to pour tax dollars into golf courses to subsidize green fees. Hey, I like golfing but I don’t expect taxpayers to keep the cost of my game down. Is golf a need? How many Calgarians are served in this move? Is there a giant hidden surplus out there?

What can we look forward to in the next month as these nuts work to control more aspects of our personal lives on private property?

It is past time to clean house on Calgary city council. The next election is a year away. I do hope that a good fresh slate of people come forward as we really can’t afford these fools much longer.

City of Calgary priorities.

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 In light of the shameful federal election turnout, it is rather clear that Canadians need to begin to pay attention to politics more closely on all levels whether they like it or not.

 I see a direct correlation between low turnouts and political idiocy in our municipal government. In the 2007 civic election, a pathetic one in five or so Calgarians took the twenty minutes out of their lives to vote and look at the collection of fools that we have populating city hall now.

 We have been watching the economy slow rather dramatically lately. Naturally property values have followed suit. Now city hall will be faced with a large drop in revenue and in light of their past performance, it is very unlikely that our alderman and mayor will have a clue how to deal with this.

 Bronconnier has never been able to conceive of anything more creative in policy aside from whining with his hand out to every level of government for more transfers of funds. Annual tax increases have come along with Bronconnier’s simplistic beg, tax and spend strategy. We can be assured however that our simplistic mayor will retain his job as long as he chooses to as Calgarians are by and large much too lazy to pay attention to municipal politics much less put in that terribly heavy effort of voting.

 Even worse than Bronconnier with his lack of creative initiative is when our Alderman decide to get creative. Nobody typifies this more than Brian Pincott.

 Due to Erskine resigning with next to no notice within days of the municipal election, Pincott got lucky and was elected before any rational candidates could get organized and make a run for the seat. Now Calgary has it’s very own version of lunatic Darwin award winner Tooker Gomberg (wanted to flood Edmonton’s streets in winter so people could skate to work and save the environment).

 It has been a challenging year for Calgary. Gangs have been roaming our streets, infrastructure is well behind, traffic is a mess and on and on.

 Instead of dealing with these issues, Pincott has focused on a strategy of banning and spending. Pincott wants to ban you from fertilizing your lawn and killing anthills. Pincott wants to violate your property rights and ban you from cutting trees on your own property. Pincott was happy to support spending a million dollars to have artistic decoration at Calgary’s sewage processing facility and wanted to go one step further by hiring a city of Calgary poet for $250,000 per year. Pincott happily supported spending $50 million dollars on pedestrian bridges downtown while we have countless unfinished infrastructure projects in every sector of the city. Pincott has howled for a review of Calgary’s off-leash dog parks. Apparently they are cutting in on the pleasures enjoyed by his latte-lapping buddies doing their daily jogs who feel that the thousands kilometers of dog-free pathways in the city are not enough for their chosen jogging routes.

 With the coming cash crunch in Calgary’s city hall, is Pincott finally beginning to show some common sense and planning? Not for a second.

 Brian Pincott’s latest crusade is the banning of backyard fire pits. While city hall is considering pissing away a fortune in licensing fire pits in this non-issue, Pincott feels this is not enough and we must ban them. Apparently, city hall has had over 300 complaints in a year about fire pits. Hmmm, out of a million people, how much of an issue is this? How many of the 300 complainants are the kind of folks who call the city when a neighbor leaves their outdoor light on one minute past 10pm?

 Hours will be wasted in debate and countless thousands wasted in trying to enforce new regulations. The real reason for Pincott’s push here is his environmental extremism of course. How dare people burn the carcasses of deceased trees!!! This celebration of the passing of one of Gaea’s creations is repugnant and must be banned!!!

 As with Elizabeth May, Pincott is of the Sierra Club alumni. This “green” version of PETA is churning out record numbers of nuts who realize that in partisan politics they would be exposed as the nuts that they are thus they have gravitated to civic politics where they can slip under the radar.

 Pincott has pulled off quite a collection of idiotic notions and motions in his short year in office. Doubtless he will be doing a great deal more in the way of policy pollution in his remaining two years in office. Perhaps a policy enforcing the mandatory wearing of organic clothing and veganism by Calgarians will be next.

 The time to arrange an opposition to nuts like Pincott is now and it is important. Had there been any indications that the  electorate in Calgary is awake, I would feel somewhat confident that the residents in that ward would already be determined to turf this loon at the next possible chance. Unfortunately I am not so confident in this and it will take and effort to dislodge this tax-draining parasite.

 We are clearly coming into a period where fiscal restraint is going to be critical on all levels of government. The city of Calgary is no exception and we need to clean house in city council. NDP Bob Hawkesworth and Druh Farrell are well worthy of removal as well but Pincott does indeed stand head and shoulders above them in waste and foolishness. Our future comfort as Calgarians depends on our municipal management. Will we take the reigns and fix it?