It is election time here in Ottawa and lots of election fliers are coming through our letter box, including one from the honourable Mauril Bélanger.
The flier includes a piece about his attendance at a fundraising cocktail reception for the Haitian Community's University of Ottawa Scholarship Fund. From where I jump to wikipedia which tells me that there is a huge Haitian diaspora spread across the Americas, with 20,000 in the Ottawa area. Had we come in July we could have done their festival (see http://www.haitienfete.ca/).
All of which explains the doctor I saw at the Rideau walk-in (see http://psmv2.blogspot.ca/2014/10/warf-warf.html). I had not realised that there was a Haitian diaspora, let alone a huge one, and I don't think that much of it has reached the UK - hence my surprise. Maybe they have made it to France.
That apart, local elections here seem to be interested in most of the same things that we are. In particular, what they call intensification and what we might call in back in Epsom back land development. That is to say, selling off most of your back garden for a nice new housing estate. Here the interest is more in new blocks of flats and offices in older, perhaps a touch shabby, areas and they have community zoning rules which say how many stories new buildings can have - rules which developers do not seem to have too much trouble working their way around, sometimes with lollipops for the community concerned. At least that is what the 'Ottawa Citizen' says about it.
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