Guelph Politicast

GUELPH POLITICAST #95 - Brad Evoy, OPIRG

You've heard the name, but what do you know about OPIRG aside from it being a group in Guelph that likes hugging trees and being total SJWs? Okay, so those things are technically true, and OPIRG is proud of it thank-you-very-much! But if you've ever wanted to go inside OPIRG and get the bigger picture about how and why they tick, then this podcast's for you.
OPIRG stands for the Ontario Public Interest Research Group, and Guelph's office is one of several branches of the OPIRG tree across the province. Guelph's wasn't the first, but it was one of the first. University of Guelph students were inspired by the example of Ralph Nader, the legendary activist that brought his consumer message to campus the year before, to create a formal (ish) progressive advocacy organization at the U of G.
This was back in the mid-70s, and hope about the future was in short supply. There was economic malaise, concern about the worsening environment, and a growing civil rights struggle particularly among queer communities. In some ways, it almost seems like the last four decades never happened, right? Well they have, progress has been made, and OPIRG has been a part of that positive change on the local level.
So this week on the show, we hear from Brad Evoy, who is the Organizaional Co-ordinator of OPIRG. Evoy is relatively new to Guelph, but he has about 10 years of experience fighting the good fight for accessible, environmental and economic causes. Of course, OPIRG is a campus-based organization, and we've just begun another school year, so Evoy and I talk about what's on OPIRG's plate going into fall, and the ongoing challenges in fighting for social justice in the year 2017.
So for the benefit of you, the listener, let's put the P. and the I. and the R. back into OPIRG for this week's Guelph Politicast.
You can learn more about OPIRG, its programs and activities by going to their website here, and you can see the full slate of upcoming OPIRG events by visiting their Facebook page here.
The theme music for the Guelph Politicast is from the KPM Klassics collection by Syd Dale.
The host for the Guelph Politicast is Podbean. Find more episodes of the Politicast here.
Remember that the Politicast Podbean channel is also the host for podcast versions of Open Sources Guelph. The previous Thursday's episode of Open Sources will be posted on Mondays.

Open Sources Guelph - September 7, 2017

Scotty Hertz will be taking some much needed vacation time for the next couple of weeks, which leaves Adam to wonder, "When did Open Sources Guelph add vacation time for staff?" Joking aside, the show, as they say, must go on. And for this week Adam will not fly solo by filling Scotty's shoes with a pair of special guests, one person to talk about civic matters, and another to talk about science matters. 
This Thursday, September 7, at 5 pm, Adam A. Donaldson will discuss:
1) Six Tutor. City council started up again this week after the summer break, and while there was a lot of backwards looking about budget variances and re-organizing strategic reserves, the future looks jam-packed with potential labour difficulties, a realigned transit system, and a big budget discussion (the last before next year's election). Helping to make sense of all those expectations and responsibilities is Ward 6 Councillor Mark MacKinnon. We'll welcome back MacKinnon to the show, as his ward welcomes back its student citizens, and we'll find out what he did this summer, and what he might do at city council later this fall.
2) Harvey Boys. Hurricane Harvey has come and gone, leaving a terrible terrible cost to people and property in its wake. If that wasn't enough bad weather for you, then Hurricane Irma looks good to hit Florida this weekend, and Tropical Storm Jose looks to be on his way after that... It's almost like there's something wrong with the weather, right? It's like the climate is, I don't know, changing, or something. We've talked a lot about this with politicians on past shows, but this time, we've found a scientist! University of Guelph emeritus professor Barry Smit will join us to talk about hurricanes, climate change, and his area expertise, how the effects of climate change might impact the way we live in the immediate and not-too-distant futures.
Open Sources is live on CFRU 93.3 fm and cfru.ca at 5 pm on Thursday.

End Credits - September 7, 2017

We take a break from your regularly scheduled format for End Credits this week because there was nothing good coming out in theatres last weekend. So in lieu of the usual movie news and movie reviews, let's go on a journey into the future of the new release calendar...
This Thursday, August 31, at 10 am, Adam A. Donaldson will discuss:
1) (Potential) Legends of the Fall. From world leaders to world famous detectives, from killer clowns to killer storms, from the dark and desperate future to the not-to-distant past, 'tis the season for new, and (slightly) more serious fair at the multiplex, and we're going to look at some of the offerings coming soon to a theatre near you. But it's not all serious, of course! We've got kingsmen, gods of thunder, justice leagues, ninja LEGOs (or something), and all the tiny colourful horses you can handle. There are dramas about real people, comedies with a message, and since Halloween's next month, there are more than a few scary movies to boot. Let us this week countdown all the big hits and small pleasures of the autumn box office.
End Credits is on CFRU 93.3 fm and cfru.ca Thursday at 10 am.

Open Sources Guelph - August 31, 2017

This week on Open Sources Guelph, we laboured to make our pre-Labour show Trump-free, but the man can't let a week go by without blowing the doors off another political norm, and last Friday he broke about 12 even as a hurricane was bearing down on the U.S. We'll have to discuss Trump's latest move to undermine common decency, but we'll also talk about the new faces (and positions) in the federal cabinet, and the new routes and schedules for Guelph Transit with the man who runs that service. 
This Thursday, August 31, at 5 pm, Scotty Hertz and Adam A. Donaldson will discuss:
1) Trouble Shuffle? Although it was initially billed as a huge re-organization of the government front bench fairly close to the halfway point of the federal Liberals' mandate, the biggest news of this past Monday's cabinet shuffle was that now there's not just one, but two, ministries overseeing Indigenous affairs. Carolyn Bennett is now the Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs, and Jane Philpott moves from Minister of Health to Minister of Indigenous Services, so clearly Justin Trudeau has heard the criticism of his government's work on that file. Having said that, what's the separation of powers on these new cabinet position, and will it do any good at all?
2) Joe's Deportment. As Hurricane Harvey bore down on the Gulf states with a fury not seen since Hurricane Katrina, President Donald Trump thought it was a great time to do a couple of pretty vile things. The first was to make his transgender soldier ban in the U.S. military official, and the second was to pardon controversial Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Of course, calling Arpaio "controversial" is like calling Hurricane Harvey a "rain storm" because of his reckless, completely racist persecution of immigrants in Maricopa County, which includes the Great Phoenix area. Here's the question: was Arpaio's pardon a dog whistle to Trump's racist fanbase, or was it a test run for future pardons relating to the Russia investigation?
3) Transit Spice. Guelph Transit is realigning this Sunday with new routes and new schedules, and a lot of people are very, very curious about whether or not this is the answer the City is looking for in order to a) make transit more responsive to the ones who are using it, and b) if successful, whether or not these changes might convince more people in town to take the bus. We'll talk to Transit general manager Mike Spicer about those questions, and we'd like you to send in your questions so that we can ask those too. Worried about losing service on your street? Have an idea of what transit needs to do in order to win more riders? Have a question about how regional transit options are coming along? Let us know!
Open Sources is live on CFRU 93.3 fm and cfru.ca at 5 pm on Thursday.

End Credits - August 31, 2017

This week on End Credits, we issue a death note... to summer! Yes, it's our last show of the summer, and it's our last show in our temporary Thursday time slot, and we tee up the fall with a delightful new horror pick about teens that kill people magically with the help of a demon. In other news, or rather *the *news, this week, we talk about some marriage drama, the changing way we see movies, and the perfectly stupid idea of telling a super-villain's origin story. 
This Thursday, August 31, at 10 am, Adam A. Donaldson with Candice Lepage will discuss:
1) Lost Whedon. Although we try not to dive into gossip with this show, it's hard sometimes to ignore the bigger cultural implications, like this case of Kai Cole, ex-wife of Joss Whedon, penning an op-ed about why her former husband does not deserve his feminist laurels. Whedon has a huge film and TV nerd following thanks to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Serenity, and The Avengers, and his success in some way is owed to creating wonderful and complex female characters. So how should we feel about this? Is this a personal matter with a couple airing their proverbial dirty laundry in public, or does this change what we're meant to think about Whedon and his work?
2) Movie Fail? A company called Movie Pass lowered its monthly price to $9.95, garnering a huge bump in new subscriptions and dumping huge barrel on cold water on the heads of major theatre chains in the U.S. What is Movie Pass? You pay 10 bucks per month and you can go to the movie theatre once a day and see a movie. So it's pretty scary for theatre chains, who are now trying to build a (pay) wall between them and the newest digital business intrusion on their out-of-date business model. Are theatres right to be concerned, and can they stop the inevitable?
3) Joker's Vile. The director of The Hangover, the screenwriter of 8 Mile, and the man that made Taxi Driver, Mean Streets, Goodfellas, The Departed, and on, and on... are teaming up for a Joker movie. Yes, that Joker. Separate and apart from Jack Nicholson, Heath Ledger, Jared Leto, or any other version of the character done before, it seems that the team of Todd Phillips, Scott Silver, and Martin Scorsese are going to make a movie all about how the Joker became the Joker, which has so far never worked whenever the comic books have decided they need to explain it. We'll talk about why its a bad idea, and there will be a surprising revelation about Candice too!
REVIEW: DEATH NOTE (2017): Based on the Japanese manga of the same name, You're Next, The Guest, and Blair Witch director Adam Wingard "Americanizes" the story of a teen that finds an enchanted book that lets him kill anyone in the world just by knowing their face and their name. Nat Wolff plays Light, who with his girlfriend Mia (played by Margaret Qualley), decide to right - and write - the wrongs of the world, but soon a super detective called 'L' (Lakeith Stanfield) is on their trail starting a deadly cat-and-mouse game. All this, and Willem Dafoe as a grinning demon too in this new fantasy/horror/teen drama now available to stream on Netflix.
End Credits is on CFRU 93.3 fm and cfru.ca Thursday at 10 am.

GUELPH POLITICAST #94 - The Chairs of Guelph's School Boards

It's the last days of August, which also means that it's the official end of summer. If you're a student anyway. This time next week, students of all ages will back at class, making new friends, learning stuff, and begrudging that their summertime freedom was taken away from them just when they were getting the hang of it. So who do we blame for this madness?
Well, society in general, the provincial government a bit more specifically, but locally our schools are overseen by two school boards: the Upper Grand District School Board and the Wellington Catholic District School Board. This week on the podcast, I host the Chairmen of the Boards, who are presently Mark Bailey of the UGDSB and Marino Gazzola of the WCDSB.
In all seriousness, there are serious things to talk about in regards to our local boards, not the least of which is the fact that these are people elected by our community every four years to monitor the proper dispensation of funds to give our local pre-kindergarten to grade 12 students the education they need and deserve. School boards sometimes seem like a forgotten democratic institution, and we seem to gloss over their existence in an era when newsroom resources are dwindling, and in danger of becoming non-existent.
So we're going to put the spotlight on our local school boards in this week's edition of the podcast. For those of you that wonder how the school board works in relation to the administration of an individual school, we have an answer for that. If you're wondering why you should care about what happens at the local school board if you don't have kids or have non-school aged kids, we have an answer for that. And if you're curious about what the chairs of our local school boards think about the possibility of amalgamating, at the end of the show, there's answer for that too!
So let's go back to school with those responsible for our schools on this week's Guelph Politicast.
So the first day of school is on September 5. To find out more about what's going on with the Upper Grand District School Board click here, and to find out what's going on with the Wellington Catholic District School Board, click here.
The theme music for the Guelph Politicast is from the KPM Klassics collection by Syd Dale.
The host for the Guelph Politicast is Podbean. Find more episodes of the Politicast here.
Remember that the Politicast Podbean channel is also the host for podcast versions of Open Sources Guelph. The previous Thursday's episode of Open Sources will be posted on Mondays.

Open Sources Guelph - August 24, 2017

This seems about right. If there's one image to sum up the Trump presidency, let it be a picture of the man himself staring at the eclipsed sun despite literally hundreds of thousands of warnings to do the exact opposite. As for the show, this week on Open Sources Guelph we'll talk about Trump's not-new war policy, refugee concerns from the moderate to the alt-right in Quebec, and we'll welcome to the show, for the first time, another Liberal Member of Parliament. 
This Thursday, August 24, at 5 pm, Scotty Hertz and Adam A. Donaldson will discuss:
1) Afghan Shrug. Hoping to change the subject from a very, very bad week, President Donald Trump went to Fort Myer in Virginia to announce a new policy for the war in Afghanistan that was very much like the old policy except without numbers, deadlines, benchmarks, and possibly war with Pakistan (?). Trump was more than a little vocal in the past about pulling out of Afghanistan completely, but in this bold flip-flop he's now declared that the U.S. is in it to win it. Still, can we say that almost 16 years into this war is there any end in sight? On top of that, what's behind Trump's sudden change of heart in terms of war policy? Have the globalists won (as some recently fired people might say)?
2) Mean Wolf. A duet of problems in Quebec last week saw the province struggle with the incredible influx of refugees, mostly Haitian, across the southern border taxing local resources, while a demonstration in Quebec City by the far-right group La Meute (or "The Wolfpack") threatened a repeat of the events in Charlottesville. It was a stark reminder that Canada is not immune from some of the white supremacy toxins we're seeing in America, which is weird because the problems those groups are sweating in Quebec are very much caused by the same sentiments being uttered in the United States. We'll dig into the Catch-22, and talk about how Canada's dealing with the refugee crisis, and how we're dealing with our own racist ideologues.
3) Gabbin' with Marwan. This week, we welcome to the show Marwan Tabbara, the Member of Parliament for Kitchener South-Hespeler. At 32 years old, the Lebanese-born Tabbara is one of the younger people in the Liberal caucus, and he was one of a number of new Liberal faces that came to represent Waterloo Region after the 2015 Federal Election. We'll talk to Tabbara about what's going on in his backyard, and we'll get his insight on the latest in federal matters including the refugee crisis in Quebec, trade issues, the economy, and what the government's got on tap for the fall session including (maybe) help for struggling media and new election rules.
Open Sources is live on CFRU 93.3 fm and cfru.ca at 5 pm on Thursday.

End Credits - August 24, 2017

This week's episode of End Credits is going to be sick. Big sick! In the last days of summer as we try to find something to get excited about, we'll review the wonderful new romantic comedy The Big Sick. And speaking of comedy, we spend the first half of the show trying to remember if there's anything good from this summer, and it turns out there just might be. 
This Thursday, August 24, at 10 am, Adam A. Donaldson with Tim Phillips and Peter Salmon will discuss:
1) Summer is a Pity. That was a rough one. The usual fanfare of the summer movie season, and all its blockbuster offerings, seemed to come more to a fizzle, but there were a few notable exceptions. To begin with this week, we'll use one of our last summer shows to talk about the best movies that have come out over the last couple of months, and they cover a wide-range of offerings including heist flicks, documentaries, bio-dramas, wonder women and galactic guardians. Adam, Tim, and Peter will each give their Top 3 of the Summer of 2017.
2) REVIEW: The Big Sick (2017). Based on the real-life love story of Kumail Nanjiani and his wife, Emily V. Gordon, the couple wrote the script for the fictionalized account of their romance. Nanjiani plays a version of himself, a struggling stand-up comic in Chicago who unexpectedly finds a love match in Emily played by Zoe Kazan, a therapist in training. When Emily gets sick and is put in a medically-induced coma, "Kumail" has to sort out his feelings, deal with his strict Pakistani family, help Emily's parents through the most difficult time in their lives, and figure out the relationship he didn't know he wanted. It's the best romantic comedy you've seen in a while!
End Credits is on CFRU 93.3 fm and cfru.ca Thursday at 10 am.

GUELPH POLITICAST #93 - Scott Thomson, Guelph Jazz Festival Artistic Director

September is coming, and everything will get back to normal. Then again September starts with one of the biggest cultural events of the year: the Guelph Jazz Festival. Now in its 23rd year, the Jazz Fest is getting ready again to fill the downtown core with the finest improvised and creative music from across Canada and around the globe, but this year, things might sound a little bit different.
This week on the Guelph Politicast, I'm joined by Scott Thomson, the new artistic director of the Jazz Festival. 2017 is his first time programming the five-day line-up, following in the footsteps of Ajay Heble who was the founding artistic director of the festival. Those are some big shoes to fill considering the Jazz Fest's reputation locally and globally as a stage for the best, most eclectic jazz you can hear in any one place.
Thomson is a musician by trade. He plays the trombone, and that brass has put him in contact with a lot of great Canadian and international musicians over the years including Lori Freedman, William Parker, Roscoe Mitchell, Han Bennink and Anthony Braxton. He's one of the founders of the Association of Improvising Musicians Toronto, or AIM, which was formed to support performance opportunities, education, and outreach within the creative and improvised music scene, and he was the founder and director of Somewhere There, an influential venue for innovative jazz. So he's got the right background, and on top of that, he's a proud Gryphon from the class of '94.
So on this week's podcast, Thomson and I talk about how he got from his days at CFRU and the U of G to becoming the artistic head of the Guelph Jazz Festival. We also talk about his musical experience, what the job of artistic director means, and how he plans to set himself, and the festival, apart from what's come before under Heble. We also talk about how to get into the Jazz Festival as a jazz novice, and what he's looking forward to with this year's festival.
So let's see what the jazz is all about with this week's Guelph Politicast!
The Guelph Jazz Festival takes place from September 13 to 17. You can find schedules, artist information, and Thomson's podcast about the festival over at the Jazz Fest website by clicking here.
The theme music for the Guelph Politicast is from the KPM Klassics collection by Syd Dale.
The host for the Guelph Politicast is Podbean. Find more episodes of the Politicast here.
Remember that the Politicast Podbean channel is also the host for podcast versions of Open Sources Guelph. The previous Thursday's episode of Open Sources will be posted on Mondays.

Open Sources Guelph - August 17, 2017

So what did you do last weekend? Chances are you neither stood for, or against, Nazism and white supremacy, but on this week's edition of Open Sources Guelph, we will look at someplace that's change the face, or perhaps revealed the face, of modern America this past Saturday in Virginia. We will dedicate some overtime to that subject this week, and then we will talk about why it's hard out there to be Conservative in Ontario right now, and what an east coast newspaper's going to do now that a very long-term strike is over. 
This Thursday, August 17, at 5 pm, Scotty Hertz and Adam A. Donaldson will discuss:
1) Progressive Inconsistency. With less than a year to go before the provincial election, the Ontario Progressive Conservative party is getting its slate of candidates together to take on Kathleen Wynne and the Liberals. Or at least they should be, but it seems like they're too busy fighting themselves right now. There are allegations of ballot stuffing in Hamilton and Ottawa, and executive members in Newmarket quit en masse in protest of their own nominating process. Here in Guelph, one of four people up for the PC candidacy quit because he didn't like what's going on in his own party, which begs the question: What is going on with the PCs? Former Guelph PC nominee Thomas Mooney will join us. 
2) Strike Off! After over a year-and-a-half on strike, the workers of the Chronicle Herald are heading back to work. Well, not all of them. Of the original 61 reporters, editors, photographers, columnists and support staff when the strike began, only 52 remain, but not all of them still have a job with the paper; 25 are returning to the newsroom, one is going to the Cape Breton Post and 26 are being laid off. Is this the deal these workers wanted when they hit the picket line almost two years ago? Unlikely, but was it worth it? That is the question that will persist going forward, and that's the question we'll tackle this week on the show.
3) Charlottesville. It was a long time coming... The resurgent white nationalist movement that's been gaining steam in the last couple of years held a demonstration in the Virginia town over the fact that a Robert E. Lee statue was about to be removed. The inevitable clash with anti-racist protestors led to an even more startling event in the death of Heather Heyer, an Ohio man a little too infatuated with the losing side of World War II allegedly ran over her and 19 others. To top it all off, President Donald Trump did next to nothing to counter the hatred, and then he blamed the media for making a big deal out of it. So there's an awful lot to explore, and we're going to spend the first half of the show exploring it.
Open Sources is live on CFRU 93.3 fm and cfru.ca at 5 pm on Thursday.