- Manitoba Public Insurance is ordering its managers and directors back into the office full time. CEO Satvir Jatana justifies this with a bunch of platitudes about how being in the office "creates opportunities for quick conversations", ignoring the fact that a good chunk of the conversations that happen in the workplace have little or nothing to do with the actual work, as well as "faster alignment and more effective problem-solving" (with no actual proof of course). It's widely suspected that the corporation plans to do the same with its regular, unionized staff at some point in the near future. The heffalump in the room, though, is that forcing the corporation's roughly 2,000 employees back into the office five days a week is going to lead to more traffic, and hence likely more accidents, something that a public auto insurer ought to know. Whether Jatana has just been drinking too much of the corporate Kool-Aid, or whether this is an order that came straight from the government (either to placate voters whose jobs actually have to be onsite, or to prop up the commercial real estate industry) is unclear.
- The council of the United Counties of Prescott-Russell in eastern Ontario has passed a resolution to deny access to county land for the Crown corporation studying a possible high speed rail corridor, even to simply do an environmental assessment on the project. This follows an open letter in April from 12 municipalities (11 townships and the small city of Quinte West) opposing the project. They've made some vague bleatings about "rural character" and somewhat more concrete concerns about expropriation of land. They claim not to be opposed to high speed rail in principle. I suspect that they may be lying about that, though, and that their real fear is that their communities will become even more irrelevant than they already are if fewer people are driving through them. Or maybe it's just that trains are too woke for their liking.
- Robotaxis are starting to spread beyond Silicon Valley, and opposition to them is significant. There are real issues with them - they often can't cope when traffic signals aren't working, they sometimes get confused by construction and don't know how to reroute (even driving in circles), and they've been known to drive onto flooded streets and get swamped, stranding their passengers. Notably, their overall safety record is currently very good, but if they become dominant this could lead to more traffic overall (as instead of parking they will tend to drive around looking for passengers) which could lead to inefficiencies as well as undermining the gains in the safety department. Not to mention the number of people they could put out of work.
- Taxi drivers in Quebec are suing the provincial government for the abolition of the taxi permit system in order to allow "ride sharing" companies like Uber and Lyft to operate in the province. Previously, the permits often served as an investment that drivers could sell or rent out when they retired; while the province's move included a compensation package, the drivers say this is insufficient and that the abolition of the permits was a form of "disguised expropriation". The drivers won the first round, and lost on appeal; they now hope to have their case heard by the Supreme Court of Canada.
- Scientists are tracking subtle changes in the ecology of lakes in the far north in the face of climate change. As the surfaces of these lakes become warmer, the lakes become more stratified, which makes some species of diatoms (a group of algae) more viable and others less so. The ones that are favoured are smaller (larger ones are more likely to sink to the bottom of a more stratified lake, going too low to photosynthesize) and lower in nutrient value, with potential implications for the rest of the food chain.
