Guelph Politicast

GUELPH POLITICAST #464 – Guelph Politi-Chat (feat. Morgan Dandie)

These are some heady political times. We’ve already made it through one election this year, and we’re now in the midst of another. As we’re going to air, the consumer carbon tax is gone, the major parties are duelling to see who can be the most moderate, and it appears that things like environmental stewardship and compassion are just not affordable. Maybe it’s time to re-calibrate.
Let’s talk about the last few weeks at city council for a moment. This week’s Committee of the Whole meeting tackled the new Private Tree Bylaw and the potential use of the Drill Hall as an art and cultural centre, which the staff report made it clear that these are things we can’t fully afford now. And last week, the Public Space Use Bylaw was amended so there’s definitely message emanating from inside the halls of city hall: We’re now in a time of austerity.
It’s a dirty word that activists don’t like hearing, especially if they’re on the progressive side. Not wanting to get lost in the mishegoss of the federal election happening right now, we're going to re-calibrate and focus on city hall stuff, and regular council observer and a semi-regular council delegate Morgan Dandie is going to help us with that. She’s often been a fly in the ointment at city council on all kinds of issues, so how is she feeling about the current political moment as a council observer?
Morgan Dandie will answer that and other questions as she talks about the state of city council, the state of Mayor Guthrie’s perceived relationship with the other members of council, and how “Gotcha moments” are in the eye of the beholder. She will also talk about whether or not she thinks her delegations have an impact, being open to learning new things, her own successful efforts to improve herself as a speaker and a politician, and what keeps her hopeful as an activist. 
So let's get into some Guelph Politi-Chat on this week's Guelph Politicast!
You can follow Morgan Dandie on Instagram. You can see what she said at Committee of the Whole yesterday and get other information about what’s coming up at city council meetings on the City of Guelph’s website. And a programming note: If you’re interested in hearing interviews with the candidates running in Guelph and Wellington-Halton Hills North (which includes parts of Guelph), tune in on Thursdays on CFRU 93.3 fm or cfru.ca, or download OSG on Monday on this feed. 
The host for the Guelph Politicast is Podbean. Find more episodes of the Politicast here, or download them on your favourite podcast app at Apple, TuneIn and Spotify .
Also, when you subscribe to the Guelph Politicast channel and you will also get an episode of Open Sources Guelph every Monday, and an episode of End Credits every Friday.

Open Sources Guelph #511 - March 27, 2025

This week on Open Sources Guelph, we are so back! Back on the campaign trail that is!! Yes, there's now a full-blown federal election across Canada and to kick things off on this show, we're going to talk about the opening moves by party leaders, the opening faux pas by a provincial leader, and how this election is going to look very different for all the voters in the Royal City no matter what riding they're in (?).
This Thursday, March 27, at 5 pm, Scotty Hertz and Adam A. Donaldson will discuss:
April Election Showers. Wrapping up his first couple of weeks as Prime Minister, Mark Carney decided that he's done everything he needed to do get the party election ready and visited the Governor General to start one. The date is April 28, and the first five days of the campaign have already been action-packed; from questions about conflicts of interest and potential election interference, plus the efficacy of Canada's third-tier political parties. What should we make of Campaign 2025: Week #1?
Ms. Smith Goes to Florida. As we're going to air, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is going to the Sunshine State. Again. Florida is ground zero for the MAGA movement, and Smith has been spending a lot of time there, but it's her recent appearance on a Breitbart podcast that not only has people calling her out for siding so blatantly with Donald Trump, but wounding the Conservative Party's first few days on the campaign trail in the process. So is Smith helping or hindering the Team Canada effort?
Now Twice the Guelph. It may surprise you to learn that depending on where you live in Guelph, you may not actually be in the federal riding of Guelph. Yes, the City of Guelph is now spread between the ridings of Guelph and Wellington-Halton Hills North, so that means you may have an entirely different set of candidates to vote for than your friends and neighbours. To wrap up, we're going to talk about the two Guelph ridings, their candidates, and the political considerations for the voters there.
Open Sources is live on CFRU 93.3 fm and cfru.ca at 5 pm on Thursday.

End Credits #384 - March 26, 2025 (Black Bag)

This week on End Credits, we get bad. Cue the Inner Circle music because we're heading back to the Halcyon days of the mid-90s to revisit a couple of bad boys. And then, in the here and now, we're going to talk about people behaving badly in the name of patriotic service with the new spy thriller Black Bag. God save the King and the movie-going audience! 
This Wednesday, March 26, at 3 pm, Adam A. Donaldson and Peter Salmon will discuss:
Bad Boys at 30! Could you have imagined that when Bad Boys came out three decade ago that we'd still be cranking out Bad Boys movies in the 2020s? Probably not. Bad Boys didn't look like a movie that would stand the test of time, another dumb buddy cop action movie, but it launched Will Smith to superstardom, Michael Bay to blank cheque status, and it became a franchise of surprising longevity. Today, we go back to the beginning.
REVIEW: Black Bag (2025). What if Steven Soderbergh took Mr. and Mrs. Smith seriously, but not, like, too seriously...? That kind of seems like the pitch for Black Bag, a spy thriller about married spies played by Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett where a man must determine whether his beloved wife is traitor, or whether it's one of their frenemies in the agency. It's high stakes, but done with the same Soderbergh light touch as his Ocean's 11 movies, so do we black bag Black Bag, or should all of you open the bag and dive in!
End Credits is on CFRU 93.3 fm and cfru.ca Wednesday at 3 pm.

GUELPH POLITICAST #463 – The End of the CTS, aka: Have a HART (feat. Melissa Kwiatkowski & Jean Hopkins)

In six days, the doors of Guelph’s Consumption and Treatment site will close for the last time. Unless a Charter challenge in an Ontario court succeeds, the Ontario government’s mandate to close a dozen different CTSes and replacement them with new Homelessness and Addiction Recovery Treatment, or HART, Hubs. Or at least that was the plan. Either way, what happens on April 1?
It was kind of a surprise last summer when the Ontario government announced that they were closing several consumption and treatment sites. The justification? Safety. Any CTS within 200 metres of a school or daycare has to close down and in their place is a HART Hub, which will provide primary care, mental health services, shelter and transition beds, supportive housing and more.
Looking at the numbers, the success of the Guelph CTS is clear; 41,000 visits, 1,000 referrals to primary care, 44 people per month referred to treatment, 311 drug poisonings reversed - only 12 requiring a follow trip to the hospital - and zero fatalities. While activists and advocates welcome the nearly $400 million in new funding, especially for the housing, but there’s still a lot of concern about what’s going to happen April 1.
To learn more, we're joined this week by Guelph Community Health Centre executive director Melissa Kwiatkowski and Wellington Guelph Drug Strategy manager Jean Hopkins. They will discuss the anxieties and concerns about the pending closure of the CTS, the impact on the services Community Health can offer, and what exactly will change on April 1. They will also discuss what the Guelph HART Hub will offer, how it’s not a replacement for safe consumption services, and how they’re planning on filling the gaps between the two.
Let's talk about these last days for the CTS on this week's Guelph Politicast!
You can learn more about the CTS at the Community Health website and you can find the Wellington Guelph Drug Strategy website here. There will be another drug poisoning and overdose response skills training on Tuesday April 29 at 6:30 pm at Art Not Shame downtown, and you can find direct links to more information about the transition from the CTS to the HART Hub here.
The host for the Guelph Politicast is Podbean. Find more episodes of the Politicast here, or download them on your favourite podcast app at Apple, TuneIn and Spotify .
Also, when you subscribe to the Guelph Politicast channel and you will also get an episode of Open Sources Guelph every Monday, and an episode of End Credits every Friday.

Open Sources Guelph #510 - March 20, 2025

This week on Open Sources Guelph, we've got Canadian Tire money to burn. Like Justin Trudeau! Who spent the first day of the first week of the rest of his life pretending he's a normal guy. As for his successor, he was going stuff this week, while south of the border there's this guy that keeps talking smack about Canada, and now he's rounding up people who are using their voices to be critical of foreign powers.
This Thursday, March 20, at 5 pm, Scotty Hertz and Adam A. Donaldson will discuss:
Arctic Blast. Nearly wrapping up his first week as the Prime Minister of Canada, Mark Carney did a whirlwind tour of France, the U.K. and Iqaluit where he announced a deal to buy a new radar system from the Australians to insure northern security. Meanwhile in Ottawa, the Conservatives are trying any and every strategy to get something on the new PM as his numbers keep going up and theirs keeps going down. So how is Carney doing after six days?
51st State of Play. Since U.S. President Donald Trump started talk about all this 51st state nonsense, there's been a persistent nagging question: How seriously are we supposed to take all this? While there are some serious implications from things like the tariffs and the trade disputes, what's the endgame here? Does Trump seriously want Canada to be a part of the United States, or is this just more of his patented trolling?
Khalil's Speech. You may not know the name Mahmoud Khalil, but he was one of the organisers of the campus protest at Columbia University last year demonstrating against the War in Gaza. Now he's the canary in the coal mine. Despite his status as a legal immigrant, and his marriage to an American citizen with whom he's expecting a child, he was arrested by government agents and is presently being held in detention with the administration promising more to come. Has the American nightmare arrived?
Open Sources is live on CFRU 93.3 fm and cfru.ca at 5 pm on Thursday.

End Credits #383 - March 19, 2025 (This is The Tom Green Documentary)

This week on End Credits, we're going out to the farm. Everyone yearns at some point for a more simple life on the land, and it looks like one of them is Tom Green... so he made a film about it. On this episode we're reviewing This is The Tom Green Documentary, and we will also take the unusual step of critiquing the critics and the rare times they've got it wrong.
This Wednesday, March 19, at 3 pm, Adam A. Donaldson and Tim Phillips will discuss:
Wrong Turns. The subject of this week's film is Tom Green, who once made Freddy Got Fingered, which was declared by one critic as "quite simply the worst movie ever released by a major studio in Hollywood history". Hyperbolic? Probably, which reminds us that sometimes critics are wrong, or at the very least over-the-top in their negative assessment of a movie, so to begin this week, we will talk about some critical misses.
REVIEW: This is The Tom Green Documentary (2025). At the turn of the century a simple man made a splash on Ottawa cable access TV with his out-there sense of comedy. Tom Green took his eponymous show to Hollywood and then they started putting him movies. The world was his oyster, but then he got cancer and his career never fully recovered. In his new documentary about himself, Green looks at his wild ride and his latest turn as a proud farmer in Eastern Ontario, but is the life of Tom worth celebrating on film?
End Credits is on CFRU 93.3 fm and cfru.ca Wednesday at 3 pm.

GUELPH POLITICAST #462 – Has It Really Been Five Years? (feat. Dr. Nicola Mercer)

Maybe you don’t remember, or want to remember, but it was this time five years ago that the world closed down as COVID-19 became so virulent that it required us to be sequestered for months or else keep six feet apart while wearing a mask or other PPE. Many of us have memory-holed those events, some have re-written it as an overreaction or, even worse than that, a conspiracy, but perhaps the time has come to face our trauma about the pandemic.
Here are some of the headlines from the March 20, 2020 edition of the Guelph Politico Tip Sheet newsletter: “All City of Guelph facilities are now closed to the public including City Hall", “The two remaining city council meetings for March have been cancelled”, and “The Guelph General Hospital, as well as other area hospitals, have initiated more stringent measures on who can visit the hospital and when”. There was a lot going on, and no one knew how it was all going to shake out in the end.
It may not seem like it, but on this fifth anniversary of the pandemic, COVID-19 is still around. Even once diligent maskers don’t mask anymore, even when they’re sick, fewer people are getting their booster shots, and when you talk to people about their pandemic memories it’s about how we took it too seriously and spent too much in response. Is that how you remember it? What should we be thinking about following our COVID experience now half-a-decade later?
The perfect guest to answer these and similar questions is Dr. Nicola Mercer, who is the Medical Officer of Health for Wellington, Dufferin, and Guelph. She's going to talk about the warning signs she saw in advance, what she and Public Health got right about the pandemic response, and what she thinks they might have done better in hindsight. We will also talk about the lessons learned, the current state of COVID-19, and how our experiences might inform the response to the next pandemic.
So let's rewind to 2020 on this week's Guelph Politicast!
You can learn more about Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph Public Health at their website, where you can find links to information about immunizations, health alerts, data dashboards, and agendas for the Board of Health meetings. You can also follow them on social media @WDGPublicHealth on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram.
The host for the Guelph Politicast is Podbean. Find more episodes of the Politicast here, or download them on your favourite podcast app at Apple, TuneIn and Spotify .
Also, when you subscribe to the Guelph Politicast channel and you will also get an episode of Open Sources Guelph every Monday, and an episode of End Credits every Friday.

Open Sources Guelph #509 - March 13, 2025

This week on Open Sources Guelph we order a side-helping of change and economic concern. The new prime minister and the new-old premier met this week to talk about their common enemy: the crazy person currently occupying the White House. For the other half of the show, we will look to more local concerns with one of the members of city council from the first (in numerical order) ward!
This Thursday, March 13, at 5 pm, Scotty Hertz and Adam A. Donaldson will discuss:
Carney in Charge. It wasn't exactly a horse race and in the end it seemed like a rocket ship, but Mark Carney is now set to be the next Prime Minister of Canada... but for how long? The once long odds for the Federal Liberals now look better with many polls showing a statistical tie between them and the Conservatives, and Carney already looks like a man of action even without yet being sworn into the role. Can Carney complete the greatest political comeback in Canadian history?
Ford Tough? Two weeks after winning his snap election call, Doug Ford has thrown himself into the tariff fight with the Trump White House, which resulted in a 25 per cent surcharge on electricity exports to the United States that were then paused when Ford secured a meeting with the U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick. What comes from that meeting is still to be determined, but Ford's role as Captain Canada seems minted even as we're asking: Does Ford know what he's doing?
Caton Expectations. Last week at Committee of the Whole, Guelph city council looked at an update to the Code of Conduct that will govern social media use, and there was a lot of confusion about what it was supposed to do. Also, there were some questions about the Accessibility Advisory Committee's desire for more autonomy and self-governance. We have the perfect person in mind for further discussion on these matters, and it's natural techspert, accessibility advocate and Ward 1 City Councillor Erin Caton!
Open Sources is live on CFRU 93.3 fm and cfru.ca at 5 pm on Thursday.

End Credits #382 - March 12, 2025 (Heart Eyes)

This week on End Credits, we're still having February thoughts. Although it's March now, we're going to revisit Valentine's Day with the rom-com/horror mash-up Heart Eyes, and because we can't escape the ramifications of what's going on everyday in the White House, we will talk about how Canadian cinephiles can do their part in the trade wars. 
This Wednesday, March 12, at 3 pm, Adam A. Donaldson and Candice Lepage will discuss:
Trade War Movies. You may have heard that there's a trade war happening. Anger at the U.S. President has extended to all things American, including streaming sites like Netflix and Prime Video, which people are cancelling in frustration. So in that spirit, we will start this week with some trade war programming. We will talk about where you can find some great Canadian movies on some great Canadian streaming sites.
REVIEW: Heart Eyes (2025). Two genres that play by their own well-established rules: rom-coms and slashers. Two great tastes that taste great together? That's the question at the heart of Heart Eyes, which essentially asks "What would happen if there's a Hallmark movie and suddenly there was a masked killer farting around?" The makers of Happy Death Day, Werewolves Within, and It's a Wonderful Knife answer that question, but whether or not that answer is satisfying for two well-known horror heads is a bigger question.
End Credits is on CFRU 93.3 fm and cfru.ca Wednesday at 3 pm.

GUELPH POLITICAST #461 - Dispatches From a Quixotic Legislative Quest (feat. Mike Morrice)

When we talk about the affordability crisis, you sometimes hear the term “legislated poverty”, meaning the state of social assistance rates like Ontario Works and ODSP that assure people can never get ahead because the amounts paid never cover all the real costs of daily life. That’s why Mike Morrice decided to act when he was elected to the House of Commons in 2021, but like all great quests, it hasn’t ended up the way he envisioned.
Can one person make a difference? This is the question when you elect anyone, but without a party whip or a legislative agenda, an MP pretty much has to follow their own north star and Kitchener MP Morrice followed his star to a private member’s bill called the Canada Disability Benefit Act. The goal was to offer low-barrier, additional assistance to people with disabilities to help get them out of legislated poverty, but as always happens, reality couldn’t live up to aspirations.
When finished, the act proposed that people with disabilities in Canada will receive *up to* $200 per month once they’ve been approved for the Disability Tax Credit and all the requisite forms have been filled. On top of that, there was even doubt for a while that disabled people would even start getting their $200 this summer because the Treasury Board hadn’t approved the regulations until last week, which wouldn't have happened at all in the event of a snap election.
So how does the man who sponsored the Canada Disability Benefit Act feel now that he’s on the other side? Morrice will talk about that, why he fought so hard for the act, and why, even though it’s watered down, it’s still going to be a game changer for people with disabilities in Canada. He will also talk about the ins and outs working with the government to get the bill done, fighting for key provisions to make the bill better, and the marathon the last few weeks to get the regulations finished before any potential election. 
So let's talk about how the proverbial sausage gets made on this week's Guelph Politicast!
You can learn more about the Canada Disability Benefit Act on the Government of Canada’s website. You can also check out Mike Morrice’s ongoing advocacy on this and other issues at his website.
The host for the Guelph Politicast is Podbean. Find more episodes of the Politicast here, or download them on your favourite podcast app at Apple, TuneIn and Spotify .
Also, when you subscribe to the Guelph Politicast channel and you will also get an episode of Open Sources Guelph every Monday, and an episode of End Credits every Friday.