I’ve been going to meetings of the PEI Electric Vehicle Association since the spring, and always find them interesting. The PEIEVA is an informal mix of EV owners, EV-aspirants, and the EV-curious, and the meetings are casual and conversational and a great place to ask and answer questions.

The December meeting promises to be a more-than-usually-interesting one, as it’s being hosted by Maritime Electric and, in addition to the regular program, the company will provide a brief presentation on its “technology roadmap.”

The meeting is Wednesday, December 18, 2019 at 6:30 p.m. in the boardroom at Maritime Electric headquarters, 180 Kent Street in Charlottetown.

All are welcome to attend: you need not own an EV; indeed you need not know anything about electric vehicles. There is step-free access to the boardroom by elevator.

Nearest EV chargers are in the underground parking garage of the Delta Prince Edward. T3 Transit Route № 1 stops nearby at the corner of Great George and Fitzroy and has service until 10:00 p.m.

Here’s a poster suitable for printing; here’s an image suitable for sharing.

In case you missed it, season one of Слуга народу (Servant of the People) is available on Netflix in Canada. It’s a sitcom starring Volodymyr Zelensky, who plays a humble school teacher who accidentally becomes President of Ukraine.

Zelensky, of course, went on to become the actual President of Ukraine, running for a party called Слуга народу (Servant of the People).

More recently he’s been embroiled in the impeachment drama of another TV-star-turned-President.

You might assume this means Zelensky, like his American counterpart, is an untalented blowhard; on the contrary: he’s a talented actor, and the sitcom is well-produced and entertaining.

We had a holiday party to go to in Victoria last night, presenting us with the first opportunity to, at least relatively speaking, engage in long distance travel in our Kia Soul EV: Victoria is 39 km from our house, meaning the round trip journey would be just under 80 km.

We left the house with a fully charged battery, with the “guess-o-meter” on the Soul’s dash showing 137 km of range (it was -5ºC outside, hence the reduced figure over the 158 km we’ve seen when it’s warmer). After clearing the windows with the defroster, we kept the heat off for the journey out, relying on the heated seats and heated steering wheel to keep us warm (upon reflection, we should have told our guest passenger that he could have turned on his heated seat!).

When we arrived in Victoria the car showed 89 km of range remaining; when we arrived back home after the return journey we had 34 km of range.

In other words, the car’s prediction was ambitious: we arrived home with 23 km less range than predicted. That can likely be accounted for by two factors: the range estimate is based on previous driving habits, and all of our driving to that point had been stop-and-go city driving with a lot of regenerative braking, and on the way home we used the heater for about 10 minutes to warm up the car.

While there are no public EV chargers in central Queens County, our friend–and PEI EV pioneer–Harry Smith has a charger in South Melville that he’s generous with, so had we got stuck that would have been a backup. As it turned out we had no need.

When we returned home, we plugged the car into the regular 110V outlet in our driveway (our level 2 charger is being wired up this coming week); here’s what the charge looked like:

The charge started at 8:30 p.m. Saturday night and finished at 1:30 p.m. on Sunday afternoon, running 17 hours (on the chart the Y-axis is watts and the X-axis is time).

A late afternoon, late fall walk to buy a battery for my car’s key fob before heading into Central Queens for an evening event.

The sun seemed to be complaining about being forced to set at such an early hour.

Our friend and neighbour Carl Phillis has died.

I couldn’t tell you how I came to know Carl: I just kind of woke up one day and he was ever-present in my life; we would often find ourselves walking along Richmond Street together from our neighbourhood toward Queen Street, and would chat about whatever was on his mind that day. Reading others’ messages of condolence, I realized that I was but one of hundreds of people he had a similar relationship with: having a regular chat with Carl was something, it seems, many of us shared.

I also knew him as a potter, of course. And as an activist. And as enthusiastic Green Party volunteer (the last time I saw him was when we sat beside each other at the federal candidates debate at UPEI in October where we cheered for Darcie together; he had his sketchbook at the ready, as he always seemed to, and sketched throughout).

Carl was opinionated, passionate, an enormously talented artist, and the kind of person you treasure as a neighbour.

I will miss him.

I came home from a late nite work session around 11:00 p.m. and went to empty the dishwasher before going to bed, as is my habit.

Except the dishwasher hadn’t drained, and no amount of pushing “drain” and wishing hard would make it do so.

My father was nothing if not up for a daunting home maintenance challenge and so, despite the hour, I got out the toolbox and set to work in his image.

An hour later I’d found the problem: a tiny piece of plastic, smaller than a nickel, lodged in the first hose along from the sump. It took a lot of clamp-undoing and manual-water-draining and tube-sucking and tube-blowing to unearth this as the cause of my woe.

Thirty minutes later I had the dishwasher back together and now we’re back in business.

I’m happy to have inherited a little of my father’s indefatigability.

Prince Edward Island’s motto, since 1769, has been Parva sub ingenti, Latin for “the small under the protection of the great.”

Former Premier J. Walter Jones described the origin of the motto, in a speech to the Empire Club in 1952, like this:

When King George III proclaimed a seal for “The Island of St. John in America” in the year 1769, he decreed a motto taken from Virgil’s Georgics, Verse 19, namely, “Parva Sub Ingenti”. The Island of St. John became in 1799 “Prince Edward Island”—named after the father of Queen Victoria and “Parva Sub Ingenti” was pictured as three saplings growing under a large tree, and was symbolic of the three counties of Prince Edward Island under the great British Empire. Later, when Prince Edward Island became part of Canada in 1873, the symbolism was taken as of the three counties of Prince Edward Island under Canada.

Jones went on to put the “small” in a not-entirely-positive light, but he did admit that smallness has its virtues:

I should not like to leave the impression that to be small in a federation of large states is always a bad condition. The small size makes for a government close to the people and public opinion easily influences every part of the administration. The goodness or the badness of politicians, clergy, civil servants, teachers—can be easily transmitted. Government “of the people—by the people” gets a better chance than in a larger area.

On Prince Edward Island there are concentrations of effort impossible of accomplishment in any large area. At the Royal Winter Fair—before our people got into the hog-growing game—I have seen Ontario running off for a number of years with all the prizes. We got into it, and of the ten first prizes in hogs, nine of them went to Prince Edward Island this year.

I don’t believe I’ve ever met an Island politician or activist who has not, at some point, used what former Premier Wade MacLauchlan refers to as the “gift of jurisdiction” to make an argument. Many times a year one hears “we’re so small that we can test things here that can then be scaled up to the rest of the world.”

I have long been suspicious of this approach. I don’t doubt that our small size and interconnectedness makes it easier to grow prize hogs; I’ve wondered, though, whether something that’s achieved at small scale necessarily upscales as easily as everyone thinks it will.

A crack appeared in my suspicious nature this week, however, when it was announced by Sobeys, Canada’s second-largest food retailer, that it is spreading its sensory-friendly shopping hours program, which started at a single store in Summerside, Prince Edward Island to all of its stores across the country.

What a great example of how people with autism and their carers, along with organizations like Autism Society of PEI, can work together to dramatically improve the lives of thousands of autistic people. And, indeed, to all of us who benefit from less stimulation while shopping. Sobeys too deserves credit for being a company with a nature that affords viral spreading of good ideas; it’s not every company that has the capacity to do this.

And it all started on Prince Edward Island.

Maybe there’s something to this after all.

Ingenti sub parva!

A group of enterprising Charlottetown Farmers’ Market vendors have followed Brett Bunston’s better-utilize-the-resource effort and are opening for take-out lunch on Wednesdays.

Regular market-goers know and love the Wednesday market in the summertime and are always sad to see it close in October, so this is excellent news.

It’s not a full-blown market by any means, and the focus, at least right now, is on take-out lunch: today Claudia’s La Sazon de Mexico was making fresh tortillas and serving tacos, Lori at Grandma Jaworski’s Foods was serving perogies, Abby’s Catering was there with noodles and spring rolls, and, of course, Brett was there, as he is every weekday with excellent coffee.

If you’re as enthusiastic about this effort as I am, and want to see it continue, vote with your lunch and come along next Wednesday between 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m.

The overlap between what I write here and the regular everyday world is, most of the time, unidirectional: I write, you read. Other than Oliver and my mother (and mother-in-law) I’m never 100% sure there’s anyone out there reading, beyond the occasional comment or two.

But sometimes the regular everyday world speaks out.

On Monday night at City Cinema my friendly ticket-taker, Linda, unlurked herself as a reader, said kind words, and we had a nice chat.

This afternoon I had to go break it to Dave and Dorothy at Dave’s Service Centre that I’d cut the gasoline from my diet. Dave already knew. He’d read about it online. (The Kia Soul is still, engine aside, a car, and Dave and Dorothy will still look after that part for me; I have an appointment to have Dave install the snow tires on Tuesday).

My eyeglasses have been falling off my head more than I’d like, so I stopped in at Matheson Eyewear for a tune-up (Greg Matheson did a masterful job repairing my eyeglasses earlier this year); on my way back to my car I was stopped by Kevin, reader-of-blog, who handed me a Garnet Rogers-Archie Fisher CD (I’m listening to it right now; thank you, Kevin!).

Earlier this year I wrote a post about salted capers; Jeremy, from Rome, left a comment there; he’d come in the door via Ton. I started following Jeremy’s blog, and listening to his podcast. Today I realized  that Olle and Luisa are in Rome and conspired to connect them with Jeremy; Ton chimed in. I’m hopeful they’ll have coffee.

Sixteen years ago I asked you readers to out yourselves; 137 of you did, and it made for fascinating reading. If you are so-moved, you are welcome to leave a comment below and say hello and tell us a little bit about yourself.

And then go listen to this, and maybe buy a copy.

One of the lovely things about participating in a grassroots movement like the PEI Home and School Federation is the pride one can take for seeing the collective will of parents, guardians, teachers, administrators and staff result in real changes to the PEI education system.

There have been two great examples of this in recent months.

The call for a return to elected school boards that PEIHSF members expressed in the 2018 resolution Request for a Revision of the Education Act and a Return to Elected School Boards saw practical action taken today with the announcement that elected school boards will, indeed, return.

And, in a move I take particular pride in helping work toward, over many years, the 2017 resolutions School Food Guiding Principles and Provincial School Food Strategy, and the 2015 resolution Establish a Provincial School Lunch Program for All Island Children, after some false starts and a lot of work by many, many people in and out of government, will finally be realized in 2020 with the announcement in the Legislative Assembly by Minister of Education Brad Trivers that “it is definitely my goal to have a universal school-food program in every school across Prince Edward Island by September 2020.”

The tiny kernel of the seed of this project started on a fall day in 2013 when parent Lisa MacDougall came to a home and school brainstorming meeting at Montague Consolidated School. At that meeting we talked about resolutions and policy making, and Lisa got engaged, ultimately spearheading the original resolution on the topic. By 2016 Lisa had become President of the PEIHSF, with the support of a broad team of people across the province, pushed the issue forward to the point where it achieved momentum and, ultimately, became government policy.

I believe strongly that deliberate, broad, inclusive policy-making can result in positive change, and the PEIHSF, which has been doing this for more than 65 years, is a good example of this: resolutions start in small meetings at local schools, get distributed to every school across the province for discussion, and are then debated at an annual meeting each spring. When a PEIHSF resolution passes, its grassroots provenance makes it more likely to be taken seriously. It can be a slow process to see concrete action taken–both the examples cited above started being discussed well before they reached the resolution stage–but it works.

If you’re involved in education in PEI and you have an idea, bring it forward to your local home and school: there’s a good chance that it can become a better idea as a result, and that the better idea can change the lives of thousands of children.