In City Journal, Steven Malanga recounts how two very different New York mayors – Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg – recognized how harnessing detailed data could dramatically improve the effectiveness of civic services ranging from fighting crime to locating storm-downed trees. New York’s past record of success offers lessons for Canadian cities – but only those with a mayor driven by an uncompromising sense of purpose.
Blueprint for Alberta?
Writing in Jewish World Review, Frederic Fransen reminds Americans of a key lesson from Revolutionary War-era pamphleteer Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. “The colonies need to declare independence,” Fransen summarizes Paine, “because so long as their goal was seen as reconciliation, foreign governments would consider the Americans as rebels and the conflict an internal affair.” But a unilateral declaration of independence, Fransen notes, instantly converts mere complaints from an aggrieved group into a negotiation between sovereign states.
