Let us wrap up a very busy, and a very difficult 2025 in the council chambers. You can click here for the amended agenda from City Hall, and you can click here for the Politico preview. For the complete blow-by-blow of today’s council meeting, you can follow along with the thread below, or you can watch the whole meeting for yourself by watching it on the City’s website here. Continue reading “RECAP: City Council Meeting for December 16, 2025”
It’s been over 10 years since Karen Farbridge left office, technically defeated in the 2014 election by then one-term City Councillor Cam Guthrie. It ended up being an end to her days in elected office, but Farbridge isn’t gone, and she certainly isn’t forgotten, and in the last few weeks she’s been the one doing the remembering with a new series of Substack newsletters about lessons she learned from her career in politics. But what more can she tell us? Continue reading “GUELPH POLITICAST #500 – Unfinished Agendas (feat. Karen Farbridge)”
For years now, we’ve seen the pressures of housing and affordability explode into a crisis, and the answers to that crisis never seem to make themselves known. Maybe things are changing. In November, the City of Guelph and Wyndham House announced that by this time next year, they will have effectively ended youth homelessness in Guelph. What makes them so confident? Continue reading “GUELPH POLITICAST #499 – Finally, a Good News Story in the Housing Crisis (feat. Kristen Cairney)”
There are 145,000 stories in the Royal City, and this is some of them. Looking at a week’s worth of media releases from the Guelph Police Service, there’s a lot going on in our little city crime-wise speaking, so let’s run down some of the charges, issues, and requests for information from the Guelph Police Service over the last seven days. Continue reading “POLICE NOTES: Distractors Outwitted, Another Bitcoin Scam and a Stolen Pizza Car”
Since the Ontario provincial election in February, we’ve spent a lot of time on this podcast trying to shine a light on some of the under-reported issues that the provincial government is ignoring, or actively making worse. Law and order though? That’s supposed to be under the Ford government’s bailiwick as they sell us a story of rampant criminality set loose on Ontario, but what if the real crime is happening inside Ontario’s jails? Continue reading “GUELPH POLITICAST #498 – The Problem With Ontario’s Jails (feat. Justin Piché)”
Plans and planning will on the agenda for this second-to-last meeting for 2025! You can click here for the amended agenda from City Hall, and you can click here for the Politico preview. For the complete blow-by-blow of today’s council meeting, you can follow along during the meeting on Blue Sky or recap the complete thread after the meeting below. You can also watch the City’s own live-stream of the meeting here. Continue reading “RECAP: City Council Meeting for December 9, 2025”
There were two main topics on the agenda for the last Committee of the Whole meeting of 2025 and they both had to do with money, this year’s money. Appropriate for the first meeting after the budget confirmation process that we continue on with money stuff, but if you’re looking for controversy then this is not the meeting for you. What went down was pretty straightforward. Short and sweet. Here’s the recap… Continue reading “This Week at Council: Money Matters, But Not Too Much”
There are 145,000 stories in the Royal City, and this is some of them. Looking at a week’s worth of media releases from the Guelph Police Service, there’s a lot going on in our little city crime-wise speaking, so let’s run down some of the charges, issues, and requests for information from the Guelph Police Service over the last seven days. Continue reading “POLICE NOTES: Fake Guns, Fake Bills and a Car Thieve with Wig”
Merry Christmas! City council’s present to you is a new vision for St. George’s Square assuming that they want to pursue it. That’s one of the items in what looks to be a fairly straightforward final meeting of the year, which will feature any final thoughts about the items from Committee of the Whole, a busy (and mysterious) closed meeting agenda, and some new appointments to the advisory committees. Continue reading “City Council Preview – What’s on the Agenda for the December 16, 2025 Meeting?”
We often hear how a budget tells us what a city values, and one of the things that residents clearly valued in the City of Guelph budget was funding for the park stewards program. We often talk about environmentalism and civic pride as big reasons to live in Guelph, so is the park steward program the ultimate expression of that, and if it is, why didn’t we talk about it before we almost lost it? Continue reading “GUELPH POLITICAST #497 – Park Stewards Never Say “Die” (feat. Margaret Middleton)”
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