Open Sources Guelph #458 - February 15, 2024

This week on Open Sources Guelph, we're not feeling the love this day post-Valentine's. We're going to start local where the Mayor of Guelph declared himself strong, and just in time for a very complicated and emotional meeting about public policy around encampments. Also (sorta) local, we will talk about the impact of the latest round of media job cuts and then it's off to Queen's Park for another adventure!

This Thursday, February 15, at 5 pm, Scotty Hertz and Adam A. Donaldson will discuss:

Stronger Than Yesterday. Last week at the annual State of the City, which is mostly a networking opportunity and a chance for the mayor to talk up Guelph, Cam Guthrie announced that he's a strong mayor now. Using powers granted by the provincial government, Guthrie said that he's doing it to advance some key policy objectives on housing and homelessness, but is he sacrificing local democracy to achieve them?

Camp of Approval. Across the country, there seems to not be a war on poverty, or a war on homelessness, but a war on encampments. Here in Guelph, the battle space was the council chambers this week as council debated a bylaw to rid public spaces like St. George's Square of homeless encampments. We will talk about how Guelph's response is a microcosm of government failure on the issue of housing.

The Bell Tolls. Last week, Bell Media announced that they were cutting nine per cent of their workforce. In practical terms, that means no more noon hour news for anywhere other than Toronto, and no weekend news for anywhere that's not Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. People are taking this as another bad sign for local journalism, so how can local news be saved and why does nobody seem to want to fix it?

124 No More. Next week, the members of the Ontario legislature will roll back into Queen's Park for more law-making, which will now include the repeal of the highly-controversial Bill 124. An Ontario appeals court confirmed it was unconstitutional, and the Ontario government seemed to decide to give up. That's just one of the many controversies coming to Toronto next week, and we're going to try and dig into them all!

Open Sources is live on CFRU 93.3 fm and cfru.ca at 5 pm on Thursday.