Guelph Politicast

Open Sources Guelph #309 - January 14, 2021

This week on Open Sources Guelph, the hits just keep on coming. The blows are physical if you happen to be in Washington D.C., where the Capitol looks like a demilitarized zone due to the actions of the newly re-impeached 45th President of the United States, and let's not forget the suffering close to home, which is mostly in the form of people coming down with COVID-19. After that, we will remember the man who was called. "The Voice of Guelph."
This Thursday, January 14, at 5 pm, Scotty Hertz and Adam A. Donaldson will discuss:
Strange Coup. This time last week, the attempted insurrection on Capitol Hill was still not 24 hours old. Then things started moving fast and furiously with Trump sort of conceding, getting a permanent ban from all social media, and then getting impeached again by the House. At the same time, there are new security concerns about future attacks, and accusations that politicians and police were part of the attempted coup. We'll try and recap all the insanity from Washington.
Deja Flu. This week, Doug Ford and the Provincial government announced new restrictions to prevent the continued spread of COVID-19. The new modelling that Ford warned would make us "fall off our chair" does show a dangerous situation developing in Ontario hospitals, but critics say that the new rules are a tepid response and have sewn more confusion than offering genuine clarity. Has Ford and company bungled this dangerous new phase of the pandemic?
Norm. Last Friday, Mayor Norm Jary passed away. If you were to make a list of Guelph's all-time favourite political figures, there would be no doubt that Jary would come in first place. Not only did he oversee a time of incredible growth in Guelph, he was respected and appreciated for his dedication to civil discourse and for being a genuinely kind and generous man. This week, we will play a portion of Jary's December 2019 interview with the Guelph Politicast in his honour.
Open Sources is live on CFRU 93.3 fm and cfru.ca at 5 pm on Thursday.

End Credits #181 - Janaury 13, 2021 (Palm Springs)

This week on End Credits, we live vicariously through others by going on a trip to the desert. While we can't identify with a vacation these days, we can certainly identify with being stuck in one place, so this week's movie might be the perfect choice for the time. Before that though, we will optimistically look forward to the future, and movies we might like to see later this year.
This Wednesday, January 13, at 3 pm, Adam A. Donaldson and Tim Phillips will discuss:
Coming Soon in 2021 (Hopefully). So the best laid plans for movie releases was seriously upset in 2020, and you know what they say about the best laid plans. Acknowledging that COVID-19 could still throw a lot of the calendar out the window as the case count continues to grow, we will spend the first part of this week looking ahead through the next 12 months and what movies tickle our interest.
REVIEW: Palm Springs (2020). If you feel like you're stuck living the same day over and over again, then this is the movie for you! In Palm Springs though Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti are stuck in a literal time loop, re-living the same day at a destination wedding over and over again to the point of insanity, and perhaps the discovery of true love. Reliving the same day over-and-over-again is a pretty well-worn concept in cinema, so does Palm Springs bring anything new (or funny) to the table?
End Credits is on CFRU 93.3 fm and cfru.ca Wednesday at 3 pm.

GUELPH POLITICAST #256 - Racism Wasn't Defeated in a Year

It’s impossible to look at the events last week in Washington D.C. outside the lens of White Supremacy. Even President-Elect Joe Biden affirmed in a press conference that if the insurrectionists that broke into the Capitol, vandalized, and threatened the lives of elected representatives had been Black, there would have been a lot more arrests, and a lot more than five deaths. Shockingly, 2020 wasn't the end of racism.
This week on the podcast, we're joined by Kevin Sutton, who is an equality and inclusion workshop facilitator, a spoken word performer, workshop facilitator, and a communications professional. If all that isn’t enough, he’s also a radio host, a politico, an activist, and the co-founder of Black Lives Matter Guelph. Sutton joins us for one more look back at 2020, and what we can look forward to in social justice in 2021.
What happened in 2020 may be best summed up by Sutton in an op-ed he wrote for the Guelph Mercury Tribune last August:
“Is it fate that one pandemic has at long last exposed another? Because of COVID-19, many non-racialized people have been able to step back and witness their system of racism in action for the first time. In the COVID-19 response, and in the response to peaceful protest, a multitude of folks born into the systemic dominance of 'whiteness' finally saw the horrors that racialized people had been detailing for generations.”
But is this a moment in time, or is it the beginning of a movement?
This is going to be one of those episodes where we meander from one point to another, and for a topic like this, maybe that’s okay. Sutton will discuss what gives him hope and optimism about the future, and how joy is sometimes an act of rebellion. He will also talk about the difficult necessity of having uncomfortable conversations, and how we can make room for minority voices in the local discourse without making people think it’s just tokenism.
So let's consider the last year and the progress to equality on this week's Guelph Politicast!
You can find episodes of Sutton’s show The Great Pause on CFRU’s website. You can find Sutton himself all over social media and links to his writing and engagement all over Google. As you heard, he is also taking up a post at Guelph Neighbourhood Support Coalition as Community Resilience Co-ordinator. Stay tuned.
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 Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Play, 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 #308 - Janaury 7, 2021

It's a new year here on Open Sources Guelph, our seventh year to be precise, and it feels like not much has changed from the last. We've still got a pandemic, and we've still got pandemic problems, not to mention politician problems, which wouldn't be so bad if they were able to start ramping up vaccination. In the second half, we will talk about out lingering issues with you-know-who, and for something completely different, we'll talk about "demolition by neglect".
This Thursday, January 7, at 5 pm, Scotty Hertz and Adam A. Donaldson will discuss:
Vacation Mental. We're back from our winter break having not gone anywhere or seen anyone outside our own households, you know, as instructed by all levels of government. From Ontario, to Alberta, to Parliament Hill, politicians across parties and across the country couldn't take their own advice and stay home, and many of them are now paying the political price. Why did so many politicans think that the rules protecting us from COVID are for thee and not for me?
Needle For Speed. It was supposed to be the moment we've all be waiting for, and the government had months to plan for its imminent arrival, but there still seems to be some difficulty actually rolling out the shots. In Ontario nearly three-quarters of the province's vaccine supply sits in freezers, and even a small province like P.E.I. has just vaccinated a little over one per cent of their population. Why has the easy part of fighting the pandemic ended up being so hard?
Sedition: Impossible. U.S. President Donald Trump is maximizing the scandals with his last few weeks in office by having another "perfect phone call", this time with government officials in Georgie whom he tried to press into overturning their election results. Meanwhile, several Republicans in Congress were threatening to make the pro forma counting of the Electoral College ballots on Wednesday a last ditch (and pointless) effort to overturn Joe Biden's victory. Is it January 20 yet?
Demolition? Man! Down the road in Cambridge, the holiday crisis was as much about heritage as it was about COVID. The Preston Springs Hotel, abandoned and deteriorating for over two decades, was demolished after an emergency order was issued on Christmas Eve. It's sad given the hotel's history, but was there any way it could have been avoided, and what about the circumstances of giving the controversial demo order right in the middle of the holiday season?
Open Sources is live on CFRU 93.3 fm and cfru.ca at 5 pm on Thursday.

End Credits #180 - Janaury 6, 2020 (Recapping 2020's Top 3)

It's a new year here on End Credits, although we acknowledge that it's a new year for everyone else too. We're going to take it slow getting into this new, and hopefully better year by revisting some old favourites from 2020. Tales of a cow, soldiers, and zombies made the cut as you will recall from last week's Top 5 episode, and this week, we will replay the original reviews to remind you why they floated to the top.
This Wednesday, January 6, at 3 pm, Adam A. Donaldson, Tim Phillips, Candice Lepage, and Peter Salmon will discuss:
Recapping the Best. We know it's a week later, but we're still recovering from New Year's Eve and 2020, so this week we will make the case for why you should visit, or re-visit, three of the movies we consider the best of 2020. From a yarn about stealing milk on the Oregon frontier, a story about four Black soldiers returning to Vietnam years after the war, and a speculative tale about how First Nations people will save us from the zombie apocalypse, we'll take one last kick at 2020 before moving on with the show.
End Credits is on CFRU 93.3 fm and cfru.ca Wednesday at 3 pm.

GUELPH POLITICAST #255 - An End to Demolition By Neglect

The last council meeting of 2020 dealt heavily with the protection of heritage, including one particular case of the Old Crawley farmhouse. Perhaps the fall of the Preston Springs Hotel in Cambridge over the holidays portends a similar fate for valuable heritage buildings in Guelph, but one thing is certain: If we care about our heritage buildings and features, time is running out to save them.
Now obviously, there are no cabinet positions on city council, but if Guelph had a Minister of Heritage, it would be Ward 5 Councillor Leanne Caron. Her ward contains what is presently Guelph’s only heritage district, and her in-depth knowledge of Guelph history has been called upon many times in council debates. It will likely be tested again next week as the Cultural Heritage Action Plan (CHAP) is discussed at Committee of the Whole.
The question is can we preserve our cultural heritage, do so in a way that reflects all concerns, and implement it before "demolition by neglect seizes endangered properties? On the one hand, we have situations like the Crawley farmhouse and the old Drill Hall on Farquhar Street, but we’ve also had great heritage preservation successes like the Petrie Building and the facade of the Gummer Building. How can we have less of the former and more of the latter?
This week on the podcast, Caron will talk about her own love of history, and the dedication to heritage in the Guelph community. She will also talk about our long history of shortsightedness on heritage, and why only some get saved. And finally, she will talk about how the CHAP might be able to resolve heritage protection issues, and how she might have been banking on Heritage Guelph's rejection of the plan.
So let's talk about the politics of saving our cultural heritage on this week's Guelph Politicast!
Council will be taking up the matter of the Cultural Heritage Action Plan at Monday’s Committee of the Whole meeting. You can read the coverage of last month’s Heritage Guelph meeting here, and you can follow live coverage of the meeting on Monday at 2 pm here on Guelph Politico.
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 Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Play, 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 #307 - December 31, 2020

This week on Open Sources Guelph, we’ve made it! We’re at the end of 2020!! We still have to make it to midnight, and a lot can happen between now and then, but this year is almost history, and hopefully so are most of the troubles that went with it. Before all that though, we will do what we do every year at this time, and have the annual Open Sources awards, which we still don’t have a name fore, but are very prestigious just the same.
This Thursday, December 31, at 5 pm, Scotty Hertz and Adam A. Donaldson will discuss:
Worst Politician of 2020. Always keeping in mind that you-know-who, the 45th President of the United States, is ineligible for any awards, we couldn’t choose the most obvious person in the world to serve as the worst politician of the year. Fortunately, there are always politicians behaving badly, or not living up to their commitment to do what’s right for the people that elected them. So surely some other names will come to mind.
Good News Story of the Year. Was there good new this year? You may have to dig under the surface, like really far under, but there is some good news to be had in 2020. Maybe we can take some solace in the basic goodness that most people have displayed during the pandemic, or perhaps we look back with some pride that there was good progress this year on social justice issues, but there was indeed some good news in 2020!
Dumpster Fire of the Year. In the end, hasn’t the entirety of 2020 been one big dumpster fire? It started with Australia burning down thanks to climate change, and then COVID hit, and while some governments did better than others, the one south of the border dumped gasoline on a fire, and then started burning marshmallows. Or was that fake news? Perhaps the biggest dumpster fire is the one that people don’t acknowledge as real at all.
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Best Politician of 2020. A once in a century pandemic, a once in a lifetime struggle for equality, all those issues, and many more, made the year, and some of our political leaders actually managed to rise to the occasion. Expectations are huge, and the consequences for failure are even bigger, but there are some people in the world that are managing to still make people believe that there is hope for a better tomorrow. So who are these rare people we’re honoring this year?
Open Sources is live on CFRU 93.3 fm and cfru.ca at 5 pm on Thursday.

End Credits - December 30, 2020 (Top 5 of 2020)

This week on End Credits it's the end... of the year! Maybe we shouldn't joke about that. You know what else is not joke? The quality of the movies released in 2020! There was a lot of quality in terms of the new films released in the last calendar year, even though we say most of them on our TVs, tablets, laptops, and phones. As usual at this time of year, we will check our lists, check them twice, and give you our Top 5 of the Year!!
This Wednesday, December 30, at 3 pm, Adam A. Donaldson, Tim Phillips, Candice Lepage, and Peter Salmon will discuss:
The Best of 2020. Although we spent most of the year at home, it was actually a pretty good year at the movies. There were timely movies about social justice, a pandemic apocalypse, and a fierce Black woman trying to find her voice. There were stories from the frontier, stories about potential alien encounters, and stories told from the point of view of a Zoom call. From a documentary about disabled kids, to dramas about lost fame, to a tale about the lasting effects of war, we're going to cover the best movies of 2020!
End Credits is on CFRU 93.3 fm and cfru.ca Wednesday at 3 pm.

GUELPH POLITICAST #254 – Guelph Stuff (2020 Year in Review)

When we look back at 2020, we will remember the pandemic. Full stop. We will remember locking down, making masks a regular part of our wardrobe, and the economic tumult created by so many people losing their job, or working from home, or having to radically reorient their business models in order to stay afloat. But what about the rest of the year's news?
The year started with a pair of violent homicides downtown, which made everyone in Guelph question the safety of the core. Before Black Lives Matter, Guelphites came out in big numbers for another matter of social justice, supporting the hereditary chiefs of the Wet'suwet'en territories. And do you remember when Public Health had to test a thousand people because of contaminated tools at Stone Road nail salon? It really was quite a year, wasn’t it?
Graeme McNaughton, who is the city hall reporter for the Guelph Mercury Tribune, knows it's been a busy 12 months because he was on duty to witness most of this year's news as it was happening. On this week's podcast he’s going to talk about the news, his impressions of the year's events, and the challenges he experienced covering them in the midst of the global pandemic.
McNaughton will go in-depth on his Freedom of Information requests to the Guelph Police, the reaction they provoked from the Service, and why these insights into the operation of Guelph Police should matter. He will also consider if there's anything else from 2020 that’s not COVID or social justice related that will float to the top of our minds in the years to come, and what stories we might have come up short on in the last 12 months. And finally, he will talk about his thoughts on virtual council meetings, and why we might not go back to in-person meetings until after the next election.
So let's get into some Guelph Stuff from 2020 on this year end edition of the Guelph Politicast!
You can check out Graeme McNaughton work on the Guelph Mercury Tribune website, and you can follow him on social media @iamgmcnaughton. You can also visit Guelph Politico for more Year in Review coverage, including the Top 10 News stories that are neither COVID nor social justice.
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 Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Play, 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 - December 24, 2020

It's the end of the year, and it's Christmas Eve, so you'll forgive us if we don't tuck in behind our remote microphones for this week's edition of Open Sources Guelph. Like usual, we will fill one of our two holiday slots with the sixth annual edition of our political movies show. Sit back and relax, as we look at our political past through the lens of liberal Hollywood, and, in at least one instance, stark raving socialists!
This Thursday, December 24, at 5 pm, Scotty Hertz and Adam A. Donaldson will discuss:
Scotty's Pick #1 - The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel (2020). "From Joel Bakan and Jennifer Abbott, filmmakers of the multi-award-winning global hit, The Corporation, comes a just-in-timely sequel that exposes how companies are desperately rebranding as socially responsible - and how that threatens democratic freedoms."
Adam's Pick #1 - Lincoln (2012). "In the final four months of Abraham Lincoln's (Daniel Day Lewis) life and presidency, the full measure of the man came to bear on his defining battle: to plot a forward path for a shattered nation, against overwhelming odds and extreme public and personal pressure. In an act of true national daring, Lincoln exerts enormous political will to end the Civil War, not merely by ending the battle but by fighting to pass the 13th Amendment to permanently abolish slavery."
Scotty's Pick #2 - The Front Runner (2018). "Senator Gary Hart (Hugh Jackman) captures the imagination of young voters and is considered the overwhelming front runner for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination when his campaign is sidelined by the story of an extramarital relationship. As tabloid journalism and political journalism merge for the first time, Senator Hart, and the country, are left with the profound and lasting impact on American politics."
Adam's Pick #2 - Selma (2014). "In 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (David Oyelowo) leads a dangerous campaign to secure equal voting rights in the face of violent opposition. The march from Selma to Montgomery culminates in President Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) signing the Voting Rights Act of 1965, one of the most significant victories for the civil rights movement."
Open Sources is live on CFRU 93.3 fm and cfru.ca at 5 pm on Thursday.