I have been a board member of theFederation of Canadian Municipalities for a number of years. At the beginning of my second term, Christiane Sadler of the Regional Crime Prevention Council, of which I am a member, asked me to be a liason with FCM. I will be presenting some national municipal initiatives for the FCM to discuss at the fall meeting in Collingwood. I have also lobbied for such things as the gas tax, which has given us a lot of infrastructure funding, and pandemic prevention. I am a regional champion for Increasing Women’s Participation in Municipal Politics (More on that later, our next local campaign school is in November)
In Whistler, I took a tour of their composting facility, a type of facility which has been pitched to the Region as a solution for our composting problem. I am on the Region’s composting committee. When you are in person, you can smell the compost and learn from other councillors with similiar problems. For example I got an earful from a councillor who lives downwind from an incinerator, a growing popular solution to waste.
I found the composting facility not suitable for the Region. Savings of 40 million. By the way, I had to go on standby for this tour of the composting and the biological wastewater treatment plant. Only municipal councillors would fill up all the tours of waste facilities. I eventually got on an extra tour.
Although the FCM meetings have to be in the West at some point, in the last year I did not attend the meetings in Jasper and Victoria due to the cost. In other years I have attended meetings in Burlington and in Brandon Manitoba when it was 30 below. Brandon was particularly exciting, sitting under the plastic palm tree by the small hotel pool writing my notes. I managed to fly home just before a huge storm socked in all of Manitoba and Ontario.
Next year the conference will be in Toronto. I am taking the Greyhound to Toronto (as I usually do when I go to Toronto)
Jane Mitchell's Blog 
If GO gets approval for its expansion to Kitchener, VIA will apparently double the number of trains it runs as well (to six a day per direction).
Actually I’m taking VIA to Ottawa on Sunday. But I find that the times don’t always suit when I go to Toronto. If VIA would just add more train times, that would be a start.
Have you taken VIA to Toronto? It’s fast and comfortable, and just as convenient as Greyhound, and the scenery is much nicer. I like it much better than Greyhound, when the schedule fits with my travel plans (which it doesn’t always do, considering how few trains they run). But we will be getting more VIA trains soon, and GO, of course.