A Survey of Viva CalleSJ Participants: San Jose, California, 2017

This report presents the findings from a self-complete paper survey of participants at the Viva CalleSJ open streets event held on Sunday, September 17, 2017. The survey was designed to provide information that would help the City of San José assess the success of the event, guide planning for future Viva CalleSJ events, and inform potential funders and community partners about the benefits of Viva CalleSJ. A total of 860 adults at the event completed the one-page paper survey. Survey findings provide detail about how people traveled to the event, their reasons for attending, what they did at the event, how much physical activity they got, and how much money they planned to spend while at the event. The survey also collected data on respondents’ gender, age, and race/ethnicity. Notable findings include that over three-quarters of respondents expected to be physically active at the event for more than an hour, over one-third expected to spend more than $20, and 22% volunteered that they played Pokémon GO, an augmented-reality game played on smart phones. The game maker enhanced the game along the 2017 Viva CalleSJ route for that day. This Pokémon GO factor likely explains why more people traveled from outside the City of San José to attend Viva CalleSJ in 2017 than did in the preceding two years

Designing Road Diet Evaluations: Lessons Learned from San Jose’s Lincoln Avenue Road Diet

This report analyzes traffic impacts from the 2015 implementation of a pilot “road diet” on Lincoln Avenue, in the City of San Jose, California, comparing data on traffic volumes and speeds from before and after the road diet was implemented. The analysis looks at impacts on both the road diet location itself and on surrounding streets likely to have been impacted by traffic diverted off the road diet segment. The results within the road diet zone were as expected, with falling volumes and numbers of speeders. The all-day data aggregated by street type (e.g., neighborhood streets, major streets) showed limited overall negative impacts outside the road diet segment. These summary results do not tell the entire story, however. Individual locations, particularly among the neighborhood streets, saw more noticeable negative impacts. The report ends with recommendations for best practices in designing and conducting road diet evaluation studies

The Battle for the Wrong Mistake: Risk Salience in Canadian Refugee Status Decision-making

Canadian refugee status adjudicators must choose between two opposing bodies of law, one of which resolves doubt in the claimant’s favour and the other at the claimant’s expense. How do they decide which to prefer? How do they decide whether it would be better to risk accepting an unfounded claim or to risk rejecting a well-founded one? This paper explores one potentially relevant factor: the salience of the harms that decision-makers associate with potential risk outcomes. A brief account of recent events in Canadian refugee law history, beginning with the refugee law reforms of former Conservative Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, shows how risk salience can be manipulated. For each refugee claim to be heard on its own merits, the law cannot leave adjudicators to decide for themselves which kind of error to prefer. It must recognize that sending a refugee home to persecution is the wrong mistake

Sin of Omission: Exploring a Key Credibility Inference in Canadian Refugee Status Rejections

Refugee claimants in Canada must submit a “Basis of Claim” form to the Refugee Board before attending a hearing with the adjudicator who will decide their claim. On this form, they are expected to produce a written narrative that explains “everything that is important” about their experiences. At their hearing, many claimants encounter, for the first time, a key principle of Canadian refugee law: The omission of any “important information” from this narrative suggests that they have invented their claim. This study takes a close look at how this “omission from the narrative” inference is operating within a set of judgments by Canadian refugee status adjudicators. It provides the first quantitative overview of the role that this inference plays in a sample of Canadian decisions as well as the first in-depth analysis of this kind of high-stakes legal reasoning. Negative credibility findings were at the heart of the decision to reject a large majority of the claimants in these decisions (72 per cent; 217/303), and the adjudicators in these cases relied on an “omission from the narrative” inference in almost half of the decisions in which they concluded that the claimant was lying (49 per cent; 128/259). The major premise underlying this inference is that, in drafting their narrative, the claimant would have understood what information the Board expected them to provide. The claimants in these decisions raised strong challenges to this premise, and the adjudicators did not identify compelling support for it. At least in the context in which it currently operates in Canadian refugee hearings, adjudicators cannot, therefore, reliably infer deception from the fact that a claimant has added even important new information at the hearing. This conclusion has implications for the Canadian refugee system’s administrators; for adjudicators; for appellate-level decision makers and judges; for legal aid systems; for counsel who represent refugee claimants; and for researchers who study refugee status adjudication

The E-Team Project: A Teamwork Approach to Clinical Legal Education

In this article the author argues that the University of Toronto’s Emergency Team (E-Team)—a student pilot project created to assist people facing deportation on short notice—provided a critical service to its clients and gave its student members a unique opportunity to learn real-world legal skills. The first part of this article reviews the project’s outcomes and concludes that it was a success: the E-Team won nine of its ten cases, and its members credit the project both with teaching them crucial legal competencies that they did not encounter elsewhere and with fostering their passion for social justice law. The second and third parts analyze the E-Team’s structure, identifying the organizational principles that allowed the students to work well together and arguing that teamwork, in a context marked by urgency and high stakes, offers exceptional pedagogical opportunities. In the final section, the author suggests that while the refugee law context is unusual in many respects, the E-Team model could nonetheless be applied in other areas of law practiced in Ontario’s student legal clinics, and in particular, could be adapted to be useful in less urgent situations where the stakes are lower

Investing in California’s Transportation Future: Public Opinion on Critical Needs

In 2017, the State of California adopted landmark legislation to increase the funds available for transportation in the state: Senate Bill 1 (SB1), the Road Repair and Accountability Act of 2017. Through a combination of higher gas and diesel motor fuel taxes, SB1 raises revenue for four critical transportation needs in the state: road maintenance and rehabilitation, relief from congestion, improvements to trade corridors, and improving transit and rail services. To help state leaders identify the most important projects and programs to fund within those four topical areas, we conducted an online survey that asked a sample of 3,574 adult Californians their thoughts on how the state can achieve the SB1 objectives. The survey was administered from April to August 2019 with a survey platform and panel of respondents managed by Qualtrics. Quota sampling ensured that the final sample closely reflects California adults in terms of key socio-demographic characteristics and geographic distribution. Key findings included very strong support for improving all transportation modes, reducing air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from transportation, and more convenient options to travel without driving. Respondents placed particular value on better maintenance for both local streets and roads, as well as highways. Finally, the majority of respondents assessed all types of transportation infrastructure in their communities as somewhat or very good

Los fallos de un sistema “modelo”: la DCR en Canadá

El sistema de refugiados canadiense se considera, a menudo, un modelo para la determinación de la condición de refugiado. Aunque hay mucho que aprender de lo que hace bien, también hay mucho que aprender de sus fallos

Parks Canada’s adaptation framework and workshop approach: Lessons learned across a diverse series of adaptation workshops

In 2017, the Canadian Parks Council Climate Change Working Group, a team of federal, provincial, and territorial representatives, developed a Climate Change Adaptation Framework for Parks and Protected Areas, guiding practitioners through a simple, effective five-step adaptation process. This framework was adapted by Parks Canada into a two-day adaptation workshop approach, with 11 workshops subsequently held from September 2017 to May 2019 at Parks Canada sites in the Yukon, Quebec, Manitoba, Alberta, Nova Scotia, British Columbia, Newfoundland, and Ontario. Lessons learned from each workshop have been integrated into the approach, with the development of tools and guidance for each phase of the process, and a shareable, visual “placemat” that describes each step of the framework, acting as a map for those navigating the process

Effectiveness of Holistic Interventions for People with Severe Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease: Systematic Review of Controlled Clinical Trials

Despite a well-recognised burden of disabling physical symptoms compounded by co-morbidities, psychological distress and social isolation, the needs of people with severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) are typically poorly addressed.To assess the effectiveness of interventions designed to deliver holistic care for people with severe COPD.We searched 11 biomedical databases, three trial repositories (January 1990-March 2012; no language restrictions) and contacted international experts to locate published, unpublished and in-progress randomised controlled trials (RCTs), quasi-RCTs and controlled clinical trials (CCTs) that investigated holistic interventions to support patients with severe COPD in any healthcare context. The primary outcome was health-related quality of life (HRQoL). Quality assessment and data extraction followed Cochrane Collaboration methodology. We used a piloted data extraction sheet and undertook narrative synthesis.From 2,866 potentially relevant papers, we identified three trials: two RCTs (from United States and Australia), and one CCT (from Thailand): total 216 patients. Risk of bias was assessed as moderate in two studies and high in the third. All the interventions were led by nurses acting in a co-ordinating role (e.g. facilitating community support in Thailand, providing case-management in the USA, or co-ordinating inpatient care in Australia). HRQoL improved significantly in the Thai CCT compared to the (very limited) usual care (p<0.001), in two sub-domains in the American trial, but showed no significant changes in the Australian trial. Exercise tolerance, dyspnoea, and satisfaction with care also improved in the Thai trial.Some 15 years after reports first highlighted the unmet needs of people with severe COPD, we have been unable to find robust trial evidence about interventions that can address those needs. There is an urgent need to develop and evaluate holistic care interventions designed improve HRQoL for people with severe COPD.PROSPERO (CRD42012002430)