By Mike Crawley, CBC News Ottawa, December 27, 2016
People across Ontario will be paying more to fill up their cars and heat their homes starting Jan. 1, when the Liberal government's new cap-and-trade plan takes effect.
A study commissioned by the province projects cap-and-trade will drive the price of gasoline up 4.3 cents per litre, and push up costs for people who heat with natural gas or furnace oil by an average of $5 per month.
By Susana Mas, Ottawa Citizen, December 27, 2016
Canadians are divided over the choice of the grey jay as the national bird as proposed by the Canadian Geographic magazine last month, according to a new poll.
The Forum Research poll shows half of Canadians disagree with the choice, while one-third agree and one-fifth don’t know what to think.
Canadian Geographic magazine proposed five birds from more than 450 species across the country in its bid to find a national bird in time to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Confederation in 2017.
By Elizabeth Payne, Ottawa Citizen, December 27, 2016
City road crews were working into the night on Tuesday trying to clear icy residential streets and sidewalks after freezing rain coated the city on Boxing Day.
Luc Gagne, the city’s director of road services, said major roads and sidewalks were in good shape — “mostly bare and dry” — by Tuesday afternoon, but that more work needed to be done on residential streets and sidewalks.
By Ryan Tumilty, Ottawa Metro News, December 26, 2016
Ottawa’s long-awaited LRT system will move from paper to concrete reality in 2017.
The Confederation Line’s years-long construction process will largely wrap up next year, according to Steve Cripps, the director of the light rail implementation office.
“By the end of 2017, the majority of the true construction or the heavy civil work will be complete,” he said. “It’s going to look like a light rail system and you’re going to see trains on the line.”
By Erin McCracken, Ottawa Community News, December 23, 2016
The Belfast train maintenance yard in Alta Vista’s Eastway Gardens neighbourhood continues to be a hotbed of activity with the assembly of the city’s light-rail trains.
Six of 34 of the vehicles are either already done or in the works. The entire fleet will be phased in over the next 18 months in advance of the opening of the Confederation LRT line in 2018.
By Tom Spears, Ottawa Sun, December 23, 2016
This winter, the Sun's Tom Spears looks at snow and ice and wildlife to find out what makes our coldest season tick. It’s a series we call The Science of Winter. Today, we look at why tiny animals don’t turn into tiny ice cubes when the temperature falls.
As you stand in cold of minus -25 C, it’s easy to feel pity for chickadees that weigh only a few grams, and can’t come in from the cold at night.
Don’t bother. They’re fine.
By Tom Spears, Ottawa Citizen, December 26, 2016
This winter, the Sun's Tom Spears looks at snow and ice and wildlife to find out what makes our coldest season tick. It's a series we call The Science of Winter, and today we chat with a man who's still wrestling with why the tiniest pinch of salt changes the shape of an icicle.
There's a lab at the University of Toronto where people grow icicles and try — so far without success — to figure out why they grow in the shape that they do.Stephen Morris is a physicist, the J. Tuzo Wilson Professor of Geophysics, and he has been wrestling with this problem for years. But so far his long, complicated theory isn't enough to explain the shape, and specifically what he calls ripples on the side of the icicle.
"The reality is, we know more about the mass of the Higgs boson than about the ripples on your garden-variety icicle," he says.
He studies icicles “for the same reason as people climb Mount Everest, because it’s there. … What gets me out of bed in the morning is that these are beautiful things that we can spend time puzzling ourselves about. It’s an appreciation of nature.“I’ve always been interested in the physics of everyday natural objects you see beside the road. I’ve worked on things like washboard roads. I’ve worked on lava that cracks into columns. … If you have your eyes open for unexplained patterns in nature, the bumps or ripples on an icicle are something that jump out at you.”
By Elise Von Steel, CBC News Ottawa, December 24, 2016
Users of the pedestrian crossover at Somerset and Bay streets say they don't feel safe using the walkway.
The crossover was installed six months ago, but most drivers still don't know what to do when they encounter it.
By CBC News Ottawa, December 26, 2016
Sharing the road was a major story in Ottawa and Gatineau in 2016. New cycling lanes have opened and new rules have been introduced.
One new rule: Vehicles must remain one metre away from cyclists while driving.
This caused some uproar as drivers worried about narrow roads such as Somerset Street West and Bank Street where vehicles also park on the road.
By Victoria Walker, Ottawa Citizen Letter to the Editor, December 25, 2016
Project will hit several neighbourhoods hard
Re: New Edinburgh Gets the Shaft, Dec. 12.
Kelly Egan’s article rightly notes that City Hall’s decision to turn our quiet neighbourhood into a massive quarry site has hit hard. Two points of clarification: Our objection is not the Combined Sewage Storage Tunnel (CSST). The project is important for the health of Ottawa’s rivers, and we knew it would require major construction work in the middle of New Edinburgh. Our argument is against the city’s decree to make Stanley Park the “staging area” (big hole) for all the tunnelling work.
By Kenneth Watson, Ottawa Citizen Letter to the Editor, December 23, 2016
Climate change is the least of Kiribati’s problems
Re: Migration with Dignity, Dec. 17.
I found the article on Kiribati interesting. However, permit me to add a few details in the spirit of helping understand these issues. First, most of Kiribati’s GDP is mainly government revenue from tuna fishing licences to Japanese and American fleets; and over-fishing may destroy the economy long before climate change has any impact.
The worst pollution in Tarawa is the fine sandy dust thrown up by cars on the sole road, and lung disease is endemic. These flat islands are ideal for bicycles but people who can afford them love cars. The Chinese have just constructed a new road but the drainage was dropped from the project because the road went over budget, so it will likely be heavily damaged (and dusty) after one or two cyclone seasons.
By Susana Mas, Ottawa Citizen, December 23, 2016
Going to the hair salon or barber shop is a ritual as old as time itself.But what happens to all that hair after it’s been swept off the floor?
Or the metal foil hairstylists use to give you that ombré hair or balayage? And what about all that extra hair product that’s left sitting in the mixing bowl?
For the most part, it goes down the drain and into the water system, or in the trash and then in a landfill.