Guelph Politicast

End Credits Holiday Special - December 20, 2023

This week on End Credits it's Christmas! Obviously. Maybe you're relaxing, or maybe you're out and about doing some last-minute shopping, but in any case, we've got your soundtrack. Like we do at this time every year, we've got the Christmas hits (sans that one from you-know-who) that will remind you of some of your favourite holiday movies. "Have yourself a merry little Christmas"? You will after this show.
This Wednesday, December 20, at 3 pm, Adam A. Donaldson will discuss:
Sounds of the Season. Every Christmas comes with your favourite holiday movies. Consider this touching tale: A young boy learns the value of family after getting left behind when they depart in a whirlwind for Christmas vacation. Fortunately, it's this point he finds his calling as a moral enforcer as he elaborately tortures two burglars who make the mistake of crossing paths with him. We all love Home Alone and it's blood thirsty idealism, and as usual this Christmas week we will highlight music from this and our other favourite holiday movies. Merry Christmas!
End Credits is on CFRU 93.3 fm and cfru.ca Wednesday at 3 pm.

GUELPH POLITICAST #402 – Christmas With Mark

It’s time for our annual fireside chat with a prominent member of the Guelph community, and since we’re run the gamut of local political leaders over the last few years, we turn to the new head of the hospital. It’s a massive challenge, but in keeping with the spirit of the season, and the need to help people who can’t help themselves, we're going spend Christmas week with the president and CEO of Guelph General Hospital, Mark Walton.
Walton hasn’t been the head of the Guelph General Hospital for even a year yet, but he had to hit the ground running. He’s already appeared at city council twice, once to talk about offload delays at the hospital, and the other to talk about how homelessness and poverty create more work for hospitals as lagging indicators. And then there's the ongoing demand for a new hospital facility, which is complicated, but it’s another one of those things that’s on Walton’s very busy desk.
But let’s back up for a minute, who is Mark Walton? Before coming to Guelph earlier this year, he served as the Senior Vice-President, COVID-19 Pandemic Response as well as the Regional Lead and CEO of Local Health Integration Networks in the region with Ontario Health. We always associate hospitals with people with stethoscopes, but there are a lot of people with all kinds of experiences and expertise who make hospitals work, and this Christmas, we’re going to talk to one of them.
So on this holiday edition of the podcast, we sit and chat with Walton about his background, and what brought him to Guelph. We will also talk about where pandemic planning fell short, and the paradox of running a hospital in that you have to make an attractive place that no one wants to visit. He will also talk about the hospital’s role in fighting poverty, how fighting the affordability crisis is changing his job, and what the future of Guelph General, and a future Guelph hospital, both look like.
So let's spend some quality Christmas time with the head of the hospital on this week's Guelph Politicast!
To learn more about Guelph General Hospital, you can go to their website, and you can learn more about fundraising to support the hospital at the website for the Foundation of the Guelph General Hospital. While you’re there, you can buy tickets for Black Tie Bingo or take part in some holiday giving.
And speaking of which, Merry Christmas to all you listeners. Thanks for tuning in all year and stay tuned as we keep cranking out new episodes over the holidays and on into 2024.
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, Google, 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 #454 - December 14, 2023

This week on Open Sources Guelph, it's a time for gift returns. What? It's not even Christmas yet! Well, the provincial government has been doing a lot of returning lately, taking back policy that they themselves developed and they were at it again this week. We'll talk about that, plus the scapegoating of international students, and for the interview this week, we will roll out the red carper for one of the city councillors who represents CFRU at 1 Carden Street.
This Thursday, December 14, at 5 pm, Scotty Hertz and Adam A. Donaldson will discuss:
Student Counsel. Last week, Immigration Minister Marc Miller announced that international students are going to need even more money in their pocket if they want to study here. International students are getting blamed for a lot: the housing crisis, more demand on food banks, etc, but what about the blame for post-secondary institutions that have been using international students like cash cows. Is there a way we can help students and without breaking the system?
Peel Back. Although they announced just six months ago the plan to dissolve Peel Region, the Ontario government announced this week that - Surprise! - they're not going through with it. This is the third major policy flip-flop for the provincial government recently, and it comes on the same week that the Province is also looking at getting some new green energy projects going, another flip-flop. Well, at least we'll now be able to buy beer at the corner store! We'll discuss all that.
A Christmas Caron. Guelph City Council has begun their holiday break with the approval of over 500 new units of housing. It's a pretty pointed comment on a year where housing was the big issue, and how municipal councils took much of the blame for being obstructionist in the creation of more housing. Ward 5 Councillor Leanne Caron thinks that's a bad wrap and she will join us this week to talk about Guelph's housing moves and why the issue is still more complicated than approving new developments.
Open Sources is live on CFRU 93.3 fm and cfru.ca at 5 pm on Thursday.

End Credits #325 - December 13, 2023 (The Boy and the Heron)

This week on End Credits, we're going to Japan. Our friends on the other side of the Pacific are having quite a movie moment right now with two of the three movies in the Top 5 at the North American box office being Japanese. On this show, we're going to talk about one of those movies, The Boy and the Heron, and we're going to look ahead to some of the movies coming out next year, be they Japanese or not. 
This Wednesday, December 13, at 3 pm, Adam A. Donaldson and Peter Salmon will discuss:
Best of 2024. (Too Soon?) It's almost the end of the year, and while our Top of 2023 is still a couple of weeks away, it's never too early to talk about what some of the best movies of 2024 might be, or even just some of the movies that we're looking forward to. It's going to be an unusual movie release calendar next year with the Writers' and Actors' Strikes both creating delays, but if you look at what's coming you'll see that there's still a lot to look forward to. We're going discuss some of the movies to watch in the next 12 months.
REVIEW: The Boy and the Heron (2023). In 2013, Hayao Miyazaki announced that The Wind Rises was going to be his last film, and 10 years later, here we are with his latest film. The Boy and the Heron follows a lot of the same beats as previous Miyazaki works, but it's also been called his most biographical film, set during World War II as a young boy tries to find his way after the tragic death of his mother. In the midst of his grief, he's led to a magic kingdom by a gnome-like creature disguised as a grey heron, but will the boy find peace there, or more danger? For that matter, will our reviewers?
End Credits is on CFRU 93.3 fm and cfru.ca Wednesday at 3 pm.

GUELPH POLITICAST #401 - How the Greenbelt Was Won

There was a lot to complain about when it comes to the Ontario provincial government in 2023, but complaints were always the loudest when it came to the decision to open the Greenbelt to development. Thousands and thousands of Ontarians were unified in their desire to make the Greenbelt whole again, and then the strangest thing of all happened, they won.
It’s almost exactly one year ago that the first protests began in response to the Ontario government's plan to remove parcels of the Greenbelt and allow for new housing development despite Doug Ford’s promise that his government would not touch the Greenbelt. Here in Guelph, hundreds and hundreds of people came out on a cold Sunday morning to express their outrage and it wasn’t for the last time as protests continued all over Ontario for much of the last year. 
Then things started changing this past summer. Ontario’s auditor general released a scathing report into how the Greenbelt land swap came about, and that started a chain of events ending with Ford putting all that land back. This was a few weeks after a massive protest outside Fordfest at Bingemans in Kitchener, which was organized in part by the Grand River Environmental Network. They pushed hard to save the Greenbelt, but they're still pointing out that there's a lot of work left to do.
This week we're joined by Kevin Thomason, who is the vice-chair of the Grand River Environmental Network. He's going to talk about how GREN worked hard organizing people, why so many people took the encroachment on the Greenbelt so personally, and why Fordfest in Kitchener was Doug Ford’s Waterloo, so to speak. We will also talk about why climate change isn’t a bigger issue after the wildfire season we just experienced, and whether the provincial government has learned any lessons in the last year.
So let's take a victory lap for the Greenbelt on this week's Guelph Politicast!
You can learn more about the Grand River Environmental Network at their 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, Google, 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 #453 - December 7, 2023

This week on Open Sources Guelph, are we even real? Maybe this show has been one, big nine-year conspiracy. Not that we're trying to put thoughts in your head, but it turns out that we don't even really need to try that hard because so many us are ready to believe a conspiracy theory. We're going to talk about that, and we're also going to talk about the latest from the war between Israel and Hamas. Closer to home, we're going to talk to the newest member of the Ontario Legislature.
This Thursday, December 7, at 5 pm, Scotty Hertz and Adam A. Donaldson will discuss:
Back to Your Regularly Scheduled War. Despite the accomplishment of a nearly one-week long ceasefire and prisoner exchange, the fighting is back in Gaza and it's even more fierce as Israeli Defense Forces are now moving on the southern end of the Strip. The difference this time is that Israel is feeling the heat. The international community that was once so supportive is now trying to get Benjamin Netanyahu to take it easy, but can the pressure work?
We Want to Believe. The polling firm Leger has discovered something interesting: An almost shockingly big number of Canadians believe in at least one conspiracy theory. That includes five per cent who think the Earth is flat, and 11 per cent who think humans never landed on the moon, which is to say nothing of the 34 per cent who think the government is withholding a cure for cancer. How concerned should we be about the electorate's inclination towards conspiracies?
Take a Clancy on Me! It was big news last Thursday when it was announced that Aislinn Clancy would become the new MPP for Kitchener Centre, beating her nearest competition by just over 5,000 votes. It creates a Green Party beachhead in southwestern Ontario between Clancy, Guelph MPP Mike Schreiner, and Kitchener Centre MP Mike Morrice and now everyone's looking at Kitchener and wondering, "How did they do it?" Clancy will join us this week to talk about how she helped turn Kitchener Green and what comes next when she joins Schreiner in the Legislature.
Open Sources is live on CFRU 93.3 fm and cfru.ca at 5 pm on Thursday.

End Credits #324 - December 6, 2023 (It’s A Wonderful Knife)

This week on End Credits, we bring you season's grievings! See what we did there? If we're making generic holiday salutations with a dark twist, then you know the time has come for another Christmas horror, and this year that happens to be It's a Wonderful Knife, which you can now watch on Shudder. In other end-of-year matters, we will kick-off this last month of 2023 by talking about some of the stuff that happened in 2023. 
This Wednesday, December 6, at 3 pm, Adam A. Donaldson and Candice Lepage will discuss:
Your Trend Till the End. It's our first show of December, and it's one of our last shows of the year, so you know what that means: It's time to recap! What kind of year has it been? That's what we're going to talk about as be begin this episode, the movie trends of 2023. Was this year the end of the comic book movie as we know it? Was it the year of Taylor in concert? Barbenheimer? M3GAN? Come to think of it, there were more than a few killer A.I.s and other automatons this year. We'll get to the bottom of the meaning of 2023.
REVIEW: It's a Wonderful Knife (2023). In 1946, Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life came out and while it bombed at the box office, it has since become a cherished holiday movie tradition. Nearly 80 years later now we have It's a Wonderful Knife, a slasher-inspired take on the classic. When Winnie stops a masked killer, it looks like life goes on in the small town of Angel Falls, but Winnie now feeling out of place wishes that she was never born. You probably know what comes next... Can Winnie defeat her sadistic serial killing nemesis again and get back to her home reality in time for Christmas? What time of year is it again?!
End Credits is on CFRU 93.3 fm and cfru.ca Wednesday at 3 pm.

GUELPH POLITICAST #400 – The Last Man on the Mercury

It makes sense to take some time now to talk about the media picture here in Guelph, and across Canada. While the Government of Canada reached a deal last week with Alphabet, the parent company of Google, to help fund the Online News Act there are still a lot of people in the news business who are going to be laid off at the end of the month including staff at the Guelph Mercury Tribune. But one person remains...
It’s fitting that this topic has come up for the 400th episode of this show. When the daily Guelph Mercury closed down in January 2016, Guelph Politico was in the process of transforming from a personal expression of Guelph political stuff to something a little more formal. When the old Merc closed on January 29, 2016 uncertainty weighed on many people in the community; what would happen to daily news coverage in the city? What would happen to the Mercury’s vast community and institutional knowledge?
Some of those issues were resolved when Metroland tagged the weekly Guelph Tribune paper with the "Mercury" branding, and though it wasn’t the same as a daily paper, the small cadre of Tribune tributes persevered. For a time. In September, Metroland announced that in an effort to stave off bankruptcy they were cutting print editions of those weekly papers plus 60 per cent of their workforce. They also left a lot of unanswered questions, even for the staff members that were sticking around.
On this week’s edition of the podcast were joined by Guelph Mercury Tribune reporter Graeme McNaughton who will help us parse some of those questions. He will talk about how it’s going these days on the job, what the current editorial structure looks like, and whether or not he’s privy to the corporate strategy at Metroland as it’s trying to restructure. He will also talk about his plans for being the last man on the Mercury, how much of a say he’ll have about what he covers, and whether or nor he has any regrets. 
So let's talk about the news on this 400th episode of the Guelph Politicast!
You can read Graeme McNaughton's work at the Guelph Mercury Tribune. You can also follow him @iamgmcnaughton on Twitter, Mastodon, Blue Sky and Threads, and you can send him a tip or message to gmcnaughton [at] guelphmercurytribune.com.
(And on the occasion of this 400th episode let me just say to everyone thanks for listening! I’m always amazed and humbled when someone tells me that they listen to this show at work or while commuting, and that’s the kind of feedback that keeps me going, and will hopefully keeping me going though to 500 episodes this time in two years.)
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, Google, 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 #452 - November 30, 2023

This week on Open Sources Guelph, we grab some canned programming off the shelf. It's a pretty busy week at city hall so we can't really dive into the news as much as we would like to. Instead, we put a call in to a new friend and an old friend to round out our time and chat around the news. First, we will talk to someone uniquely placed in the fight against gender-based violence, and second we've got another Green fellow named Mike who's having a very busy time lately too!
This Thursday, November 30, at 5 pm, Scotty Hertz and Adam A. Donaldson will discuss:
A Man's Work. Nest week is the 34th anniversary of the attack that killed 14 women at L'École Polytechnique in Montreal, which is now known as the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women. It's an important reminder that there's a lot left to do in the mission to eliminate gender-based violence, and this week we will talk to one of the people leading the way. Our guest is Humberto Carolo, executive director of the White Ribbon campaign, and he will explain why men need to carry their weight in this struggle.
Don't Bore Us, Get to Morrice! It's a pretty busy time up the road in the riding of Kitchener Centre, there's a provincial by-election wrapping up as we're going to air. Green Party supporters are hoping for a breakthrough, and this week we're joined by the man who pointed the way, MP Mike Morrice. Kitchener Centre's federal rep will join us again to talk about the federal government's action on housing and affordability, Canada's influence on the war between Israel and Hamas, and how he's proved to the people in his riding that Green leadership can work for Kitchener.
Open Sources is live on CFRU 93.3 fm and cfru.ca at 5 pm on Thursday.

End Credits #323 - November 29, 2023 (Napoleon)

This week on End Credits, we've got a complex. We've got a long movie about a small man, and all the violence and psychological issues that drove him to try and take over Europe. We're going to talk about that guy, Napoleon, and the new movie that bears his name, and we will also talk about our homework for the next couple of weeks, as we work towards the end of the year and a robust discussion about the best films of 2023. 
This Wednesday, November 22, at 3 pm, Adam A. Donaldson and Tim Phillips will discuss:
To Be Concluded... This is the last show of November, and that means we're about month away from the finish line of 2023. In the case of End Credits, the "finish line" means our Top 5 of the Year show that airs on the last Wednesday before New Year's Eve, and in order to make the best possible lists we can, we've got to spend the next couple of weeks cramming. So before we dive into this week's movie, we're going to list off some movies on our "Must See" list before we take final look at 2023 at the end of December
REVIEW: Napoleon (2023). Napoleon Bonaparte followed the same path of a lot of men of history; he went from rank and file soldier to general to government leader to dictator. Along the way he enjoyed some incredible victories, overcoming tremendous odds in the different fields of battle across Europe. It's a story tailor made for Ridley Scott, the director of such epics as Gladiator, Kingdom of Heaven and Robin Hood, who captures Napoleon's 30-plus year journey from the Terror to his last stand at Waterloo. But after years of waiting for Napoleon to get his Hollywood minute, we ask the question: Was it worth it?
End Credits is on CFRU 93.3 fm and cfru.ca Wednesday at 3 pm.