This weekend is Labour Day, and boy is there labour activity these days. From the Canadian Media Guild workers at TVO to employees at Toronto area Metro grocery stores to municipal workers in Cochrane Ontario, it’s been non-stop labour action in 2023. Our podcast this week isn’t about any of those strikes, but it is about someone who held deeply the cause of advancing workers rights. Continue reading “GUELPH POLITICAST #386 – Alan’s Box (A Labour Day Special)”
It happened again on the August long weekend. Offload delays at the Guelph General Hospital created some long line-ups for ambulances, and a couple of days before that there was another Code Red. The story has been repeating itself for over a year now, too many ambulances lined up at the hospital and not enough available in the community, but how do the paramedics themselves feel about the pressure they’re under? Continue reading “GUELPH POLITICAST #Repeat – The Ongoing Paramedic Stress”
In August, there’s usually no council business to talk about but there are unusual times so on the same day the annual mid-year council recap goes live we get a super-unusual August council meeting. In this very busy first year of a new council term, perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that council business would burst over the side and flood the vacation months, and it all comes down to a single word: housing. Continue reading “GUELPH POLITICAST #385 – The Year at Council So Far…”
“Hot enough for ya?” A charming conversation starter in summers past, but here in August 2023 it seems more like a damning curse. Last month was the hottest month on the planet in a few hundred millennia, forest fires rage out of control in several provinces, smog from those fires choke cities in the south, and now there’s the threat that the Gulf Stream may be gone by 2025. What can we do on the local level in the wake of all these developments? Continue reading “GUELPH POLITICAST #Repeat – Counting Down to (Net) Zero”
“John Galt, novelist, colonial promoter. Galt was superintendent of the Canada Company, a colonization company created to settle part of Upper Canada. During that time, he founded the town of Guelph (1827); the town of Galt was named after him.” That’s what the Canadian Encyclopedia tells you about Galt, but it doesn’t tell you a lot about who he really was. Continue reading “GUELPH POLITICAST #384 – The Immortal John Galt”
As you may know, Ontario has set the goal of building 1.5 million houses by 2031, and Guelph’s share is 18,000, but there’s a difference between setting a goal and having the means to reach it. One of the people that’s been trying to promote that idea is a man named Mike Moffatt. You might have heard have him. Certainly everyone concerned about housing in Ontario has! Continue reading “GUELPH POLITICAST #383 – The Housing Guru”
Dhwani, which in the Gujarati-language means “The Voice” or “The Sound”, launched back in March and it immediately tested a few assumptions. Could you successfully start a newspaper in the year 2023? Is there an audience for a community paper that’s specifically pitched to an ethnic community? It turns out the answer to both questions is “yes”, but how big can it get? Continue reading “GUELPH POLITICAST #382 – સમાચાર (The News)”
There’s been a lot of discussion around the council table lately about the future of cycling in Guelph and whether or not staff and council are serious enough about taking on the challenge, and some of that debate centred around the G2G Trail. While the trail is 99 per cent complete, the one per cent of the portion that’s incomplete is exclusive in that second “G” in the trail’s name, Guelph. Continue reading “GUELPH POLITICAST #381 – G2G Trail Fail”
For decades, Crime Stoppers has offered itself as a kind of investigative middleman: If you didn’t want to go to the police yourself for whatever reason, you could leave an anonymous tip with Crime Stoppers and they would pass it along. Our local Crime Stoppers is admittedly pretty successful at what they do, and they have the awards and statistics to prove it, but what’s their role 35 years from where they started? Continue reading “GUELPH POLITICAST #380 – Cops and Stoppers”
Coming out of the pandemic, the future of sports and recreation has been top of mind because we were all encouraged to get outdoors during the lockdowns. It was the safest, and in some cases only, way to interact with other people and even in these non-lockdown times we’re still jonesing for outdoor experiences. That brings us to the Good Games. Can Guelph be a sports destination in these very sporty times? Continue reading “GUELPH POLITICAST #379 – Good Games, Great Podcasting”
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