Municipal Politics

[afterfostercare]

I am interested to see if people are interested in starting a Municipal Politics forum here as well as the Federal and Provincial forums.

[Charles Anthony]

I would like to see a Municipal Politics category.

[geoffrey]

It'd be neat. But suprisingly, most of our posters seem to be from outside of the major metro centres. I don't know of any from Toronto or Vancouver that regularly post (there was one that's son was a cop in Abbotsford, forget who though... that's as close to Van City as I've heard). We have one from Montreal to the best of my knowledge.

So the big cities aren't really important to these posters. And if we have a combination of Calgarians whining about housing and roads, Regina folks complaining about an overgrowth of wheat crops and St. John's residents worried about a cod invasion... well... it doesn't make for an interesting forum.

Too many little cities, too few people from each to actually debate. I've used the provincial forum to discuss a few Calgary regional areas, I think we should keep it as is, no harm in using that forum.

[theloniusfleabag]

Dear geoffrey,

I concur, municipal issues represent too small of a 'sphere' to interest all but a very few. If they are important enough, or have broader implications, they may warrant 'provincial' or even 'federal' politics threads.

[Charles Anthony]

A Municipal Issues discussion would start with a bunch of people posting discussions to which most other members of the forum will NOT relate. Eventually, the only threads that will continue will be ones that evolve into:

1) common universal municipal themes

2) members giving advice on how THEIR municipality dealt with issues

Threads that are too esoteric will die quicker than in the Provincial or Federal Issues category.

As an aside, municipal politics are more important to people on a day to day basis than federal politics. We can live without our federal government a lot longer than we can without our municipal government.

[Greg]

I think a local politics, or municipal section is a great idea. However, I won't be implementing any major changes to the forum structure till after the redesign of Maple Leaf Web is complete. With the redesign of this site in progress, we hope to have everything completed by the end of August.

Thanks,