Guelph Politicast

Open Sources Guelph - September 24, 2020

This week on Open Sources Guelph, it's a jam-packed news week, and there's a lot of ground to cover. In Ottawa, the government is trying to avoid an election, but the truth is that everybody wants to avoid an election because the number of COVID cases are going up at alarming rates again. And speaking of elections, a new wrench was thrown into the U.S. Election, and since that looks like its so much fun, the Premier of B.C. seems to have decided he'd like to see an election too.
This Thursday, September 24, at 5 pm, Scotty Hertz and Adam A. Donaldson will discuss:
The Swing Speech. Hoping that he can reset the agenda and his government, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau prorogued Parliament in August and set the stage for Wednesday's Speech from the Throne. Everyone agrees that no one wants an election, and why would you when two out of five major party leaders have the virus, but what can Trudeau say to divert a potential election, and what can the Liberals do to win back the public trust after the WE scandal?
The New Wave. Fall is here, and predictably COVID-19 has come roaring back with a vengeance with new cases being diagnosed daily at a rate not seen since the spring. Forget about the Americans because we've got problems here at home; long lines at COVID assessment clinics, big gatherings with hundreds of people at parking lots, and didn't the Ontario government just recently release their plan for fighting the fall wave? How concerned should we be right now?
RBG. The passing of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg has prompted people to pay tribute to her decades of service on the court, and her tireless work to achieve gender equality. At the same time though, her passing has opened a new front in the culture wars with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and President Donald Trump looking to ram through a replacement before Ginsburg's even been buried. What effect will the court fight have on the election?
Horgan's Run. Two weeks ago, Blaine Higgs led his Progressive Conservatives to a majority government in New Brunswick built mainly on his positive approval ratings in responding to the pandemic. It seems that other provincial leaders with minority governments have learned that lesson, and B.C.'s NDP Premier John Horgan has called an election for October 24. What about the confidence and supply agreement with the Green Party? How craven is this move by Horgan?
Open Sources is live on CFRU 93.3 fm and cfru.ca at 5 pm on Thursday.

End Credits - September 23, 2020 (Tenet)

This week on End Credits, we take on a daring adventure... to the movie theatre. For the first time in the pandemic era, we will watch something on the big screen, and it's hard to get much bigger than the latest Christopher Nolan picture, which is Tenet. That's the review, and before that we will thoughtfully rank all of Nolan's other movies.
This Wednesday, September 23, at 3 pm, Adam A. Donaldson and Peter Salmon will discuss:
Run the Series: Christopher Nolan's Movies. From a man with no short-term memory to the the hopeless beaches of France in World War II; from the crime-filled streets of Gotham City, to the endless streets of impossible dreams, the works of Christopher Nolan have covered a lot of ground. This week on "Run the Series" we will rank Nolan's first 10 films before...
REVIEW: Tenet (2020). It was supposed to one of the biggest hits of the summer, but it's now the canary in the coal mine. Tenet is Christopher Nolan's latest attempt to turn James Bond spy action into a trippy science fiction mind-bender where two spies try to stop a future war involving tech that allows the user to literally travel backwards in time. It's got all the trappings of another great high-concept thriller from Nolan, but has time run out for the auteur?
End Credits is on CFRU 93.3 fm and cfru.ca Wednesday at 3 pm.

GUELPH POLITICAST #239 - On COVID-19 and Local Poverty

Eliminating poverty has been made more difficult because of the COVID-19 pandemic due to the increased number of people who have found themselves jobless, and the difficulty in delivering services to people when physical distancing being a priority. But no matter how complicated you think your life is now because of the pandemic, it’s made the life and routine of people living in poverty in Guelph almost twice as hard.
The plight of the homeless was cast in stark relief when the order came for everyone to lockdown in their homes. How do you lock down when you don’t have a home? Where do you get clean water when public facilities are closed? Where do you get out of the cold for a cup of coffee with nowhere allowing dine-in service? How do you know what's open and closed, or if the Consumption and Treatment Site was open and safe to use? The pandemic isolated people that already feel isolated, so how have they coped?
The complex series of issues facing the homeless and those living with poverty is what we’re talking about on this week's podcast with Dominica McPherson, the Co-ordinator for Guelph and Wellington Task Force for Poverty Elimination. We will go down the list of issues faced by those living in poverty during the pandemic, and how the pandemic has exacerbated pre-existing concerns about people in poverty. We will also talk about how the pandemic had a positive effect at raising wages and treatment for low pay workers, at least for a while, and why solving poverty needs to be a priority in any economic recovery effort.
So let's learn about more about how the pandemic has affected those living in poverty in Guelph on this week's Guelph Politicast!
You can find out more about the work of Guelph and Wellington Task Force for Poverty Elimination at their website. And if you haven’t already, check out last week’s episode with Drop In Centre executive director Gail Hoekstra, and the recap of last week’s town hall about supportive housing.
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 - September 17, 2020

This week on Open Sources Guelph, the roof is on fire, and so is everything else. Yes, we will tackle the implications of the wildfires spreading across the U.S. west coast, and we will consider the successful gambit of the returning champion Progressive Conservative Party in New Brunswick. After those two issues, we will have another remote chat with our Member of Parliament about federal concerns on the local level.
This Thursday, September 17, at 5 pm, Scotty Hertz and Adam A. Donaldson will discuss:
Higgs Will Fly. New Brunswick wrapped up the first provincial election of the COVID era Monday with a successful return to power for PC leader Blaine Higgs whose party will now govern with a majority. The Liberals seemed to be the big losers, and the apparent star-power of former Sargent-at-Arms Kevin Vickers seemed to have little effect on the electorate, at least not so much as the appearance of good pandemic management. So did Higgs just show other minority governments the way to majority?
Fire Stressed. Wild fires along the west coast of the United States are now a regular occurrence, but have they ever been this bad? Because of the millions of acres ablaze, the western states now have the worst air quality in the world, and the effects of the smoke can be felt all the way in our neck of the woods. Meanwhile, U.S. President Donald Trump could only give Californians assurances that the temperature will go down soon (sound familiar?). Might this finally raise the alarm about climate change in the States?
Watch the Throne Speech. This time next week, we will have heard the Speech from the Throne, and the Federal government's new COVID-era agenda for Canada. This week, Guelph MP Lloyd Longfield will give us an in-depth preview of the Speech... just kidding! Seriously though, Longfield will tell us what he's looking for in the speech, the work to supporting non-profits and charities during the pandemic recovery, and whether or not his Liberal colleagues have learned any valuable lessons from the WE scandal.
Open Sources is live on CFRU 93.3 fm and cfru.ca at 5 pm on Thursday.

End Credits - September 16, 2020 (Bill and Ted Face the Music)

This week on End Credits, we have to face the music. Make that Bill and Ted Face the Music. The sequel almost 30 years in the making is the movie we're reviewing this week, and we'll see if it's nostalgia or innovation for the win. Speaking of nostalgia, we will start a whole new series of listicles that will rank the entries in some of the greatest (?) franchises of all time.
This Wednesday, September 16, at 3 pm, Adam A. Donaldson and Candice Lepage will discuss:
Run the Series: A Nightmare on Elm Street. In a new ongoing feature for the show, which we definitely didn't steal from a well-known pop culture news website, we will rank some the most famous, and longest-running film series that Hollywood has ever produced, and this week, we will kick things off with some Halloween flavour with the Nightmare on Elm Street films.
REVIEW: Bill and Ted Face the Music (2020). Over 30 years ago, a man from the future told two high school metal heads that their music would save the world. They're still working on it. Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter reprise their classic roles as Bill and Ted, who now have a deadline to get that killer song written and recorded before all of reality falls apart. Can the boys save the future and their own legacy? And can you still capture lightning in a bottle three decades later?
End Credits is on CFRU 93.3 fm and cfru.ca Wednesday at 3 pm.

GUELPH POLITICAST #238 - The Future of Parkview

At the August 24 city council meeting, money from the affordable housing reserve was given to the St. Joseph’s Housing Corporation to help complete a project to provide 65 affordable units to seniors. As a delegate at that meeting, the executive director of the Drop In Centre announced that her non-profit was working on a deal of its own for supportive housing, and that became the story.
This week on the podcast, Gail Hoekstra will join us to talk about the Drop In Centre's project to buy the Parkview Motel at Woolwich Street and Marilyn Drive, and turn it into supportive housing. It’s important to note that supportive housing is housing, not shelter. It's defined by the Ontario Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing as “a combination of housing assistance and supports that enable people to live as independently as possible in their community.”
The immediate aftermath of Hoekstra sharing her news about the project was the usual NIMBY concerns and extremely stereotypical and hurtful comments that otherized the people that this project is meant to help. Bad things are born in an information vacuum, and before a narrative about this project gets too solidified in a package that people have pre-made for it, we’re going to lay out the facts on this Parkview supportive housing project.
In this week's podcast, Hoekstra will take us through the timeline and tell us how did this project come about, how far along are they in the process, and what resources have they brought to bear on the project. We will also talk about what resources the Drop In Centre will need to complete the project, and why social services are moving away from emergency shelter systems and towards supportive housing models. And finally, we will discuss the outreach to the neighbourhood, and overcoming politics to create more supportive housing in Guelph.
So let's learn more about the possible transformation of Parkview on this week's Guelph Politicast!
To learn more about the project, you can tune in to the Ward 2 town hall on Thursday at 7 pm, and you can find the link to that remote meeting here. A report on this project is likely coming to the October 26 council meeting, and that agenda will be released on October 15.
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 - September 10, 2020

This week on Open Sources Guelph, we're going Back to School. Not really, but it's a theme, and we're going with it as one of the topics of this week's show. We're going to talk about the concerns about kids going back to school, and we're going to talk about Indigenous-Settler relations on an important anniversary. In the back half of the show, we will look at a big issue closer to home in Guelph with one of the representatives from Ward 2.
This Thursday, September 10, at 5 pm, Scotty Hertz and Adam A. Donaldson will discuss:
Back to School Concern. Labour Day is usually a time of excitement because it means all students are heading back to school, but Back to School 2020 is a minefield of concerns from coast to coast to coast. Here in Ontario, teachers are still concerned that their classes are too big, bus drivers are still concerned that their buses will be too packed, and parents are concerned that their kids will be back home by the end of the month. Are we looking at the beginning of the second wave?
Caledonia Sweep. Just down the road in Caledonia, there is a land dispute underway as First Nations land defenders are standing against the Town and the OPP to stop the development of a residential neighbourhood. Hot on the heels of the Wet’suwet’en protests earlier this year, and renewed interest in social justice for BIPOC people, the demonstrations also come on the 25th anniversary of the death of Dudley George at Ipperwash. So how well have we learned the lessons of reconciliation?
The View on Parkview. It was kind of a surprise when the executive director of the Drop In Centre announced at the August 24 city council meeting that they might be buying the Parkview Motel to establish supportive housing. Now there's a debate raging in the neighbourhood, and one of two people caught in the middle is Ward 2 Councillor Rodrigo Goller. Goller will join us this week to talk about the Parkview debate, and the struggles to create housing for the homeless in Guelph.
Open Sources is live on CFRU 93.3 fm and cfru.ca at 5 pm on Thursday.

End Credits - September 9, 2020 (She Dies Tomorrow)

This week on End Credits, the movie theatres are re-open, but we're still physically distant. All this concern about being locked down and contracting a potentially deadly virus is good grist for the mill artistically speaking and we might see that in this week's review, She Dies Tomorrow. Before that though, we'll have the news!
This Wednesday, September 9, at 3 pm, Adam A. Donaldson and Tim Phillips will discuss:
Back to Normal-ish(?) There was once high expectations that we would be back to so-called normal by now. Nope. Still, as you'll see in this week's news, we have box office numbers for the first time in months, and some details about the partially virtual Toronto International Film Festival. But if you think the pandemic is over, we're here to tell you that Batman now has COVID-19.
REVIEW: She Dies Tomorrow (2020). What if you knew with absolute metaphysical certainty that you were going to die tomorrow? Writer/director Amy Seimetz plays with that idea in her new independent movie that is being marketed as a horror-comedy, but is not especially scary or funny. You can't easily peg She Dies Tomorrow in any kind of genre, which makes it something rather unique, but it is a rewarding experience just the same, or is just a timely bit of experimental cinema?
End Credits is on CFRU 93.3 fm and cfru.ca Wednesday at 3 pm.

GUELPH POLITICAST #237 - It's Vaccine Hesitancy, and It's Not New

What if we told you that vaccine hesitancy didn’t start with Jenny McCarthy? In 1722, not long after the first successful vaccination efforts were started in the west, there was an English preacher who argued that diseases were God’s punishment for sin, and any attempt to stop them with a vaccine was going against His will. That may sound crazy, but so do the modern world’s reasons for not getting your kids vaccinated.
This week on the podcast, we're joined by University of Guelph professor Maya Goldenberg who sums up her research with the question “How do we know what to believe?" In other words, she studies how medical information is presented by doctors and how they’re accepted patients.
Much of her research has been specifically about women’s healthcare, but Goldenberg’s been spending more time on a growing area of medical skepticism, which technically goes by the name vaccine hesitancy, but is more universally known as anti-vaxing. That's not a term Prof. Goldenberg uses, but it does fit with other issues where people have trouble following the best advice of their doctor, whether that's vaccines or cancer treatments.
As you will hear in this episode of the podcast, it’s not the lack of intelligence in people that believe in the conspiracy theories so much as it might be the fault of medical professionals that can’t take the time to answer questions about a treatment. When people can’t get answers from a doctor, they go out and search for them on the internet, and that’s not always a great idea. So how do we keep people out of internet rabbit holes?
Goldenberg will tackle that and other questions this week on the podcast, including why people trust their own doctor over the medical profession as a collective, and why your family doctor might be too overburdened to make battling conspiracy theories held by their patients a priority. She will talk about how the pandemic has calcified some of those false beliefs about medicine, what it will take to start changing minds, and the Venn diagram between vaccine hesitancy and what we could start calling mask hesitancy(?).
So let's talk about vaccine hesitancy and other issues between patients and doctors on this week's Guelph Politicast!
Maya Goldenberg's book - Vaccine Hesitancy: Public Trust, Expertise, and the War on Science - comes out in the spring. You can follow her on Twitter here, and you can check out a list of some of her scholarly writings by visiting her U of G faculty page 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 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 - September 3, 2020

This week on Open Sources Guelph, there's no rest for the wicked before this Labour Day weekend. We're going to head back to the United States where the intersection of racism and police brutality is busy again thanks in no small part to the disinterest of the man in the White House. We're also going to talk about the concerning conspiracy sharing of a sitting MP, and we'll talk to an expert in how we think about why it feels like QAnon is winning (and how we can reverse the effects).
This Thursday, September 3, at 5 pm, Scotty Hertz and Adam A. Donaldson will discuss:
American Carnage. The shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, WI released a new wave of protest by Black Lives Matter and other social justice groups and activists across the United States, and even a few places in Canada, but it also unleashed something else. From Kyle Rittenhouse, to the so-called Trump Caravans in Portland, to the President's own refusal to denounce his supporters doing violence while attacking activists, we'll look at all the angles on the renewed fight for justice in the U.S.
Findlay Fire. "The closeness of these two should alarm every Canadian." That's what Conservative MP Kerry-Lynne Findlay said about a clip from a 2009 interview featuring now Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland talking to George Soros. Soros has been cast as the boogeyman in multiple conspiracy theories, which has long been understood as anti-Semitic, but there's a bigger problem. Seeing the takeover of the conservative party in the U.S. by conspiracy theorists, are we starting to see that here in Canada.
Cognitive Theory. Speaking of QAnon, it's become clear that this is not going away like a miracle anytime soon, there was even a QAnon-esque gathering here in Guelph last weekend. But what is driving this belief in not just unfounded conspiracies, but out-right deranged narratives about secret Satanists? Christopher DiCarlo, a cognitive behaviourist and expert in critical thinking will join us this week to tell us why, and tell us how we can help people find their way back to some semblance of reality.
Open Sources is live on CFRU 93.3 fm and cfru.ca at 5 pm on Thursday.