“I’d rather lose a vote telling you what something costs than win it by pretending it’s free. I’ll stick to what council actually controls. I won’t promise a zero tax increase, and instead of saying “efficiencies” I’ve shown you exactly where I’d start looking. […] Ward 5 is where I grew up. Every school I went to is in this ward, and so was my first job. I’m out knocking on doors most evenings. If you want to argue about any of this, leave the porch light on.”
Why do you want to be a city councillor?
For the past six years I’ve served on the board of Hopewell Support Services, three of them as chair. Hopewell provides housing and wrap-around supports for people with developmental disabilities, and most of those years went into getting the organization into a funding position where it could grow. Growing, for us, means houses. Buy one, renovate it, make it accessible, and people come off the registry and into a home.
The past couple of years, we’ve had multiple issues with the city. Last November we filed the occupancy paperwork for a house in Ward 5. The permit came before Christmas. We opened the house in April, and the fire department walked through and saw no issues. Then we were told we had the wrong type of permit, warned about fines, and asked for the same forms we had already sent. Move-ins were postponed. At the end of April the City confirmed the classification we’d had all along, and the business licence came through on May 1.
No individual at the City was the villain in that. But while that went back and forth, the folks who had waited years for somewhere to live were now waiting on a form.
It was at the ribbon cutting for that house that I reconnected with Leanne, Ken and Cam, and got some encouragement to run for council.
Since July I’ve been asking the City questions that started with a broken sidewalk in Ward 5 and ended at a $9.8 million software project the City’s internal auditors have never reviewed. It’s the same pattern. The people repairing the sidewalks are good at it. The system around them isn’t working, and fixing that should be a council priority.
What is your background and experience, and how do you think that will serve you as a city councillor?
I went to school here, grade 5 all the way through the University of Guelph. Three schools, all of them in Ward 5: University Village, College Ave, then Centennial. My first job was making pizzas and salads at East Side Mario’s on Stone Road. So if you had one of the unlimited salads about 25 years ago, there’s a good chance I made it.
Since then it’s mostly been operations: multi-unit restaurants, training business owners, then building and opening them. My wife Jaime and I owned the Firehouse Subs in the south end. When Covid hit, our sales dropped 40 percent overnight, and we put our house up for sale to keep the doors open and our staff paid. Government supports landed just in the nick of time and we never had to sell, but you don’t forget a year like that. Jaime runs The Ten Spot on Quebec Street downtown now, so I’ve watched up close what years of construction outside your door does to a small business.
In 2020 I co-founded Bidmii, a home-renovation marketplace that deals with contractor licensing and consumer protection rules every day.
What that adds up to for council: I’ve been on the hook for budgets where the money had to come from somewhere real, and when a number doesn’t make sense to me I ask for the records and read them.
Council is thirteen people, though, and a group that size works best when the experience around the table is varied. Being good in one area doesn’t mean you fit the group. At Hopewell, when we recruit a board member, we start with a skills matrix: what’s missing, and who fills it.
Judged by this campaign, the gap I’d fill on council is tenacity. I pull on a string until I understand what’s going on, what went wrong, and where we go from here. If I don’t understand it, I keep pulling on that string. The sidewalk adventure over the summer are the clearest example. Seven questions, then 43 more. That habit will serve me on council. I think it serves council too.
Given Strong Mayor Powers, how do you see your role as a city councillor when the mayor can override the will of council with just three votes?
Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, start. Strong mayor powers are a cheat code.
If you’re a truly exceptional mayor then you’re never even tempted, because a good idea plus the work of bringing people along gets you there anyway.
I don’t like these powers, and I’d advise any mayor who has them not to use them.
Mayor Guthrie used them to cap the City’s share of the 2025 budget under four percent, and again to push the 2026 share down to a proposed 2.85 percent before council added half a point back. Last December he used them to put winter clearing of the bike lanes back in. One person’s call, each time. Whatever you think of any of them, I’m not going to criticize him for using a tool the province handed him. I know what it’s like to have a deadline, a problem, and a shortcut sitting right there. My argument is with the tool. Not the person holding it.
Most people assume these powers are about housing and developments. In Guelph, most of the uses have been about the budget, and those are the ones that reach your tax bill. The mayor proposes it, council has 30 days to change it, the mayor can veto a change, and it takes nine of thirteen to overturn a veto.
My job doesn’t change either way. Anyone with a good idea and the patience to do the homework can find the votes. The homework is the hard part. Working out what every stakeholder at the table actually needs, then finding the version where the most people win. That’s where most good ideas die, and it has nothing to do with who holds which formal power.
I’ve been proving that during the campaign, before I even have a seat. I asked the City fifty written questions about sidewalk repairs, published what came back, and proposed a fix (it’s my answer to question 10). Eleven other candidates have put their names to it so far. Four of them sit on council today, and three of the six people running for mayor are on the list.
If I can build that type of a coalition while I’m running for council, surely I can do it from a council seat, strong mayor powers or not.
Affordability is important to a lot of voters, and municipal budgeting can be very difficult. How will you balance the needs of a growing city with the demands for low or zero tax increases over the next term?
Here’s the answer that’s not going to win me any votes: taxes are going to go up over the next term. Anyone who tells you otherwise either hasn’t read a city budget, or is counting on you not reading the budget. Most of the budget is locked in before council sees it: multi-year union agreements, long-term contracts, debt payments, and the cost of serving every new subdivision. Council has the pleasure of arguing over what’s left.
The goal of zero is impossible. It’s keeping the increases in line with inflation without cutting programs, and making sure people can see the value they’re getting that is the tricky part.
For scale: the 2026 increase was 7.87 percent, about $402 on the median single detached home. About $171 of that was City services. The rest went to the local boards, police and the library among them, and a hospital charge the City collects.
If I’m going to talk about taxes, I should be able to point at something specific. The City has spent $9.8 million so far trying to replace the software it uses to track asset repair and maintenance work. A $3 million contract to set it up, ended early. A $935,807 software licence, not in use, which makes it the most expensive unused gym membership in Guelph. About $1.9 million of what council approved isn’t committed to anything yet. And the City’s internal auditors have never reviewed any of it.
The fix is my answer to question 10, and the votes for it are already lined up. It won’t take a dollar off next year’s bill. What it does is get someone with the power to demand answers looking at what the first $9.8 million bought, while $1.9 million of the approved money is still uncommitted.
One more. Last November council turned down a data architect position, 10 votes to 3. Staff had told council the City’s data sits in a lot of separate systems, some of them old, and nobody’s job was to tie them together. One hire was never going to fix that. The tools to join that data up already exist. If nobody on staff can use them, we bring in people who can. If it isn’t a priority, council makes it one. And if I’m told it can’t be done, I’ll build it and show them how, the way I did this summer with the City’s own sidewalk records.
Council this past term has done a lot of housing policy, but that hasn’t translated into more shovels in the ground. How will you help close the gap over the next four years?
Construction started on 531 homes in Guelph in 2025, the fewest since 2011, against a provincial target of 1,800. This is the same city that hit 98 percent of an earlier target and collected $4.68 million for it. The policy homework got done. Then costs, supply chains and labour turned, and building dropped right across Ontario. Faster permits won’t, on their own, get the shovels moving.
Now the part I can do something about. The builders who actually get shovels in the ground at scale, all tell me the same thing: give them a box with a thousand rules and they’ll build a profitable house inside it. What stops them is the box changing halfway through. A site plan in Guelph goes to a review committee of thirteen City disciplines, plus up to ten outside agencies. The story I hear most is one department asking for a grading change, a second objecting to the result, and the builder refereeing in the middle. This equates to countless delays and increased costs. The friction for larger developments is before the permit, in the months of comments and resubmissions. The fix isn’t fewer rules. It’s one set of rules, fixed at the start, and one answer from the City, agreed between its own departments before it goes back to the builder. I’d push for that in year one, and count the resubmissions before and after as a key indicator as to whether or not we’re succeeding.
Two more things council controls. Get the pipes and roads in ahead of the streets where the City wants apartments, so approved projects can start the day the financing does. And measure the development charge deal council backed in August: a grant covering 30 percent of the fees builders pay for pipes and roads, running to 2029, in exchange for about $74 million of water and wastewater work. It may be the right trade. Count the homes it actually produces before anyone signs up for the next one.
Council also spent the spring on whether to allow five or more homes on corner lots. I’d have voted with the seven who stopped that study. Guelph already allows four on a regular lot, and by May the City had issued two permits for four-home projects since the rule passed in December 2024. Two. If that’s the missing middle, it’s still missing. What people are actually building is the smaller stuff, 285 additional-unit permits in 2025 alone. The province no longer lets the City review the design of anything with ten or fewer homes, so the zoning rules decide fit and parking. Get those right for four homes, and the argument about five gets a lot easier.
Aside from the demands for more housing, land use planning also means assuring that there’s enough room to account for growth in business, institutional and commercial land uses, how will you balance all these priorities?
Let’s start with the math. Homes alone don’t bring in enough tax to cover what they cost to service. Land zoned for jobs, the shops and warehouses and labs, pays a share of that bill that would otherwise land on homeowners. When land set aside for jobs gets switched to housing, it can feel like a win that day and show up as a tax increase later. I’d want that trade written into the staff report in dollars, every time, before council votes.
The Guelph Innovation District, the big piece of land across from the University that the City planned for a mix of jobs and housing, is where this is playing out. In 2023 the Province changed that plan, moving land from jobs to housing, then offered to undo the change and asked council what it wanted. Staff recommended undoing it. Their report said the change would cost 26 hectares of employment land, and with it roughly 1,500 to 2,000 jobs. It said Guelph didn’t need the extra housing to meet its own growth forecasts out to 2051. And it said the change had never been checked against the City’s water supply plan, which already says supply is tight. In December 2023 council voted 7 to 6 to keep the change. I’d have been with the six.
On the first two sections of that land, the jobs projection has since gone from about 4,200 to about 2,400, and the number of residents expected has gone from 4,600 to about 10,100. The developer’s rezoning application came back to council on September 15, with staff recommending it be turned down until the developer can show that about 4,700 new homes can sit safely next to Cargill, the City’s waste facility and the other industry around them. On the night, council approved the high-level plan for the land but deferred the zoning, with a 60-day timeline written into the motion. That’s the right order: show the homes and the plant can be neighbours, then zone the land.
Universities and hospitals need room to grow too, and in Ward 5 a lot of that is the City’s relationship with the University of Guelph. U of G has a long-term plan that could add thousands of student beds here, and transit and servicing need to be ready before those beds fill. Universities don’t pay property tax. The province sets a flat fee instead, the heads and beds levy, and it has been stuck at $75 since 1987, when David Peterson was premier and $75 was real money. Inflation alone would put it past $170. Students aren’t the problem in that equation. The province underpaying for them is, and the first step is putting a dollar figure on what the freeze costs Guelph every year and taking it to Queen’s Park with the other university towns.
Water availability is a growing concern. How will you ensure that Guelph has the capacity it needs to support this growing city?
Guelph is one of the largest communities in Canada running almost entirely on groundwater. We’re not sitting on a lake. We’re sitting on a very large, very slow sponge, and it’s easier to drain than to refill.
We’ve also essentially maxed out the supply inside our own city limits. The City’s water plan says we used about 49,000 cubic metres a day in 2021, and expects about 68,000 a day by 2051. So the plan looks to new wells in two neighbouring townships, Puslinch and Guelph- Eramosa, and both have already raised formal concerns, because those wells would sit in their ground, next to their own private wells and their own growth plans. A Guelph-Eramosa councillor put it this way in 2022: “put a well in your box, don’t do it in our box.”
No staff report closes that on its own. The way through is to sit down with both townships, understand what they’re actually worried about, and find something that works for everybody. Slow, unglamorous, and I don’t see another way to do it.
Keep the water conservation programs funded too. The cheapest litre is the one we never use, and conservation is an easy line to cut because nobody sees the damage for ten years. And don’t approve growth today that the water can’t serve in five years. That’s how Guelph avoids ever having to stop approving homes because the water isn’t there.
Trust in government and institutions is major issue. How will you keep your constituents well informed about city hall business, and help them feel included when it comes to decision making?
Showing people how their councillor voted is the easy part. I built a free tool that does it, and the City should be publishing that itself. A vote count doesn’t tell you why something was decided, and the why is what people keep asking me about.
Here’s what I’d push for.
If council is being asked to decide something, people should be able to read why before the vote, not after it. I’ve spent the summer reading agendas, and the items with no report behind them are the ones nobody can ask a question about.
Closed meetings. Council can meet in private for certain things, like legal advice and land deals. In June council voted 13 to 0 to have the City Clerk review those private-meeting rules as part of a wider review of how council works in 2027, with the goal of telling the public more. What I’d want out of it: once a decision made in private can be talked about, say what was decided and why, as far as the law allows.
Information items. Council lets staff sign a lot of contracts without a council vote, and once a year staff give council a list of the ones they signed. Reports like that arrive as “information items”, which means council receives them but doesn’t discuss them unless a member asks. In 2023 council changed its rules so that a member now needs the chair’s approval first. That change passed 8 to 3, and it’s still in the rules council rewrote in 2025. Needing permission to ask a question is an odd rule for a room full of people who were elected to ask questions. I’d bring a motion to take that approval step out. The reports about decisions council never voted on should be the easiest ones to bring to the table.
If you write to me, I’ll answer you myself within two business days. Faster if you’re mad.
What would you say is your issue? What is the one thing you want to talk about on the campaign trail this fall and have a thorough debate about it before this election is over?
Who checks the big projects after council approves them. I know: nobody has ever put “internal audit” on a lawn sign. I might be the first.
The one I know best: Council approved $14.1 million to replace the software the City uses to track repair and maintenance work, along with part of its purchasing system. To the end of August it had spent $9.8 million. The contract with the company hired to set it up was ended early, after $1.7 million had been spent on it. A software licence the City bought for $935,807 isn’t being used. The finish date is now mid-2029. In 2023 a councillor asked what the City would get back for the money, and staff said they’d come back with more. The City now says those figures were never worked out. Guelph’s Internal Audit department is two people, it answers day to day to a deputy CAO inside the administration it audits, and it has never reviewed the project.
What I want to debate is who has the power to find out what happened. An Auditor General reports to council, can see every record, and has the legal power to get an answer. Ontario lets any council appoint one, and Hamilton did it with the auditor it already had, in one by-law. Nobody can tell you today what that money bought, and that includes me. Finding out is exactly what an Auditor General is for. Eleven other candidates have signed on so far, three of them running for mayor, and their own words are on the page at jonchristensen.ca/eleven-years. I’d like to hear the case against it.
The everyday version of this is the work order behind a pothole, a plow route or a broken sidewalk. Those work orders are what this software is supposed to run. In the City’s own survey, when residents are asked to name the biggest issue without being given a list, roads are now tied for first, and snow clearing is the lowest-rated service in that survey, which anyone with a side street could have told you for free. In Ward 5 the bus belongs on that list too. The University is a main transit terminal and some of the busiest routes in the city run through this ward, so service has to keep pace with the new student beds before they fill.
What perspective do you think you will bring to council that is not currently reflected?
I’m the guy who goes and gets the file.
When the City couldn’t tell me when one broken sidewalk would be fixed, I sent seven written questions. Then 43 more. (I’m told I’m very fun at parties.) The City answered in writing on September 11, and the report I published is built on the City’s own answers and reports. It’s at jonchristensen.ca/eleven-years, and it took a summer.
I’ve also run small businesses where a bad month meant finding the money yourself. After that, a line in a budget never feels like just a number.
And I build things. People at the door told me they couldn’t find out how their councillor voted, so I built a free tool for it. They didn’t know which ward they lived in either, so I built that one too and opened it up to every candidate. There’s a public map of reported sidewalk problems. All of it is free, and it’s all at jonchristensen.ca.
Is there anything else you want to tell voters as they make their decision?
I’d rather lose a vote telling you what something costs than win it by pretending it’s free.
I’ll stick to what council actually controls. I won’t promise a zero tax increase, and instead of saying “efficiencies” I’ve shown you exactly where I’d start looking.
One example. In 2021 council pledged to cut Guelph’s emissions per person 63 percent below 2018 levels by 2030. The City’s own scorecard says we were at 921,949 tonnes in 2018 and 917,927 in 2023. The target needs us near 416,000, with four years left.
The Guelph and District Labour Council’s candidate survey asked us to pledge to hit it anyway. Five of the nine other Ward 5 candidates checked yes. So did someone running for mayor. I checked no, and wrote down why. I priced the cheapest possible route using the City’s own numbers and its consultants’ plan: about $1.8 billion over four years, and it still closes only half the gap. That’s $80,000 per household over four years.
I’m for net zero by 2050. That one is costed, and the plan behind it says it pays for itself. A 2030 promise nobody can keep is not a climate plan. Spend each climate dollar on the cheapest tonne, publish the cost per tonne every year, and people can see what they bought.
Ward 5 is where I grew up. Every school I went to is in this ward, and so was my first job. I’m out knocking on doors most evenings. If you want to argue about any of this, leave the porch light on.
