It was a pretty low-key planning meeting this month at Guelph City Council, and the one bit of friction had nothing to do with the one big planning project that was on the agenda. Yes, parking it always a sore spot in Guelph, but this week it was even a bigger sore spot than usual when the debate came down what was good procedure and what was fast and easy to achieve. Also, we had back to the north side of the Baker redevelopment. Let’s recap!
Planning Meeting of City Council – November 12, 2025
Delayed a day because of Remembrance Day, the November planning meeting of Guelph city council was split between two big portions, the open session and the closed one.
In an inversion of how this usually goes, and in an inversion of how it was laid out on the original agenda, council started with the open session and quickly approved the update to the Sign Bylaw and two new heritage designations. The meat of the meeting though was the updated zoning bylaw amendment and the urban design master plan for the portion of the Baker District that is not the new main library building.
Senior Planner Lindsay Sulatycki laid out the changes from the original plan received by council in December 2023, which will see extra height, additional units and a podium parking structure that will connect the two buildings with a bridge on the second and fourth floors. The building will retain the commercial space on the first floor and the One Plant Living certification for the project’s dedication to social and environmental sustainability. Inside the two residential towers – one 17 storeys and one 19 – there will be a total of 401 residential units, and if all goes according to plan at least one-in-four of those units will meet the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation definition of affordability.
The only delegates were from the development team behind the project; they talked about the changes made in this updated plan, and how vehicular, pedestrian and bike traffic will all flow through the property. Council was interested in learning which units would be assigned as affordable, how many commercial spaces will be created, and the timeline for the project in terms of getting shovels in the ground. Councillor Carly Klassen was especially interested in how parking attached to Wellington County’s offices in the old post office on Wyndham might be better integrated with the project, but City staff confessed that they have very limited authority to exert on the County or their property.
Council eventually approved the new urban design master plan and received the zoning bylaw amendment. Mayor Cam Guthrie summed up the mostly favourable views of the project saying that there are a lot of people in Guelph who want to see construction on this portion of Baker Street get started.
Before the closed session, there was one additional item put on the agenda by Mayor Guthrie, a spot in The Ward where staff posted new signs that reinforced parking restrictions on a portion of Arthur Street South near the site of a trio of small businesses including the Standing Room Only bar. For the last several years people have been parking along Arthur at this location despite the fact that Guelph’s on-street parking regulations barred it, and then several weeks ago new signs went up reintroducing people in the area to the rules of parking on this road.
Guthrie noted that this wasn’t really changing anything, but merely restoring parking on this portion of Arthur to the way it’s been enjoyed for years. Why come straight to council? Staff have been pausing all traffic reviews on individual streets because a city-wide review of on-street parking rules in Guelph is about to begin in 2026, plus Guthrie and the Ward 2 councillors were directly petitioned to make these changes. Guthrie believed that this was pretty straightforward, but some of his colleagues weren’t so sure.
Councillors Leanne Caron and Erin Caton both tagged in saying that there’s supposed to be a process for reviewing changes to on-street parking, and there was both a lack of commentary from staff and a lack of input from area residents in the form of official statements and correspondences. The two sponsored a referral of the changes until staff can come back with a formal recommendation sometime in March and many of their colleagues agreed saying that the way this motion came forward created a double standard that was going to be tough to explain to residents demanding traffic control on their own street and being forced to get in the queue with everyone else.
In the end, the refer vote failed 6-7, but only five held out and vote against the changes to the parking regulations on Arthur Street.
Council then went for a dinner break and held an in-camera discussion on two topics, one about downtown land disposition in the Baker District and possible municipal boundary expansion. At around 7:30 pm council emerged, and the mayor said they gave direction to staff about the former and received information about the latter.
Click here to see the complete recap of the meeting.
Guelph Politico 