I will spare you the obvious joke about how a debate involving fireworks policy descended into rancour, and there are also a lot of jokes about how laws, or in this case bylaws, are made, but sometimes there’s just nothing to mock about watching the way the proverbial sausage gets produced.
I wanted to dedicate this time to the 2025 Guelph budget, but then Tuesday happened. In the last few days, I’ve realized that the issues may be tied together along with the Public Space Use Bylaw as examples of the limited ability of the current administrative state at city hall to make effective change. This week, the three matters collided on the proverbial front page.
For the fireworks, we’ve talked in depth about this already. I was apathetic about the matter, but I understand that more than half the people who participated in public engagement were fine with a ban and that there’s also a lot of people for whom fireworks is their source of income. Decisions are made by the people who show up, but this it was one of those times were both sides showed up and there was really no compromise; either we have fireworks, or we don’t.
These issues are the trickiest of all to solve because you know that you’re going to make a significant portion of the electorate angry, but I can’t imagine anyone was happy with the way council handled the fireworks file. A carefully crafted, months-long investigation of the issue and the development of a proposed policy was thrown out and a whole new policy was created on the fly.
Was making people get a permit to set off a few firecrackers in the backyard a little bit on the draconian side? Probably, and I think the majority of council was leaning that way. My question though is why no one was apparently working on alternatives the last two weeks when there were no council meetings?
After rejecting the staff recommendation, council kept descending into new levels of absurdity: Let’s add days! No, let’s take days away! What’s the deal with Victoria Day anyway?! None of which got to the point of having this discussion in the first place, which is all the misuse of fireworks.
If the goal, as Mayor Cam Guthrie said at committee, was to end the status quo, then council missed the mark, and when one councillor tried to raise that very point, Guthrie quite snippily shot them down. Councillor Rodrigo Goller noted that council just told all the community members who gave feedback on fireworks to eat a sandwich, but Guthrie said that was out of order and then dared council to challenge him, stopping just short of saying, "Come at me, bro!”
I find that this has been the mayor’s attitude with the budget process this year too.
The 'It’s affordability, stupid' budget – as I’m calling it – is an expression of one very limited definition of affordability. It’s an expression of the short-term thinking that pushed Guelph into this budget crunch to begin with, and though we might try and shovel a lot of that blame on other levels of government, it’s not Doug Ford or Justin Trudeau’s fault that we’re building a new main library and rec centre 20 years after we were supposed to at three-times the original cost.
That fault lies in previous councils who couldn’t see past the magic three per cent number. That was the line when it came to the year-over-year tax levy increases and there was hell to pay if you crossed it. But while discussions about costs are valid, and it’s always safe to assume that there’s some wasteful government spending somewhere, we have to admit that the definition of what’s “affordable” is always very subjective.
For example, let’s talk about transit.
With the exception of a dedicated transit line that connects downtown to Conestoga’s Speedvale campus – which, I confess, is genuinely needed – almost all new transit spending is paused or deferred. Last year, staff made the 10-year route and schedule strategy a 12-year plan, then council made it 14. So is there even a point in moving forward with a 10-year plan that might take twice as long to achieve?
Having said that, there was money in the budget for a pilot project to make transit free for high schoolers weekday evenings and weekends and free for seniors on Thursdays. There are a lot of budget questions that staff need to answer, but this one belongs to the mayor: If there’s not one penny available to fix transit for everyone, why is there thousands of dollars available to help a few?
And speaking of the few, we know that D-Day is coming for encampments in the downtown core, and it’s Nov. 13. Unlucky for some.
I have a couple of notes. First, it’s increasingly clear that Guthrie’s “A-four-dable” budget strategy will not apply to the Guelph police budget. It’s a funny coincidence this week that on Monday GPS announced more intense coverage downtown, on Tuesday there was a big drug trafficking bust out of St. George’s Square, and then on Wednesday bylaw started handing out evictions.
Oh, and some members of the Ontario Big City Mayors, including the mayor of this big city, want the provincial government to use the notwithstanding clause of the Constitution to stop charter rights challenges to the forced clearing of encampments. Cool normal stuff.
Second, Guthrie spent a portion of Tuesday’s meeting backpedalling, saying that the Public Space Use Bylaw was never meant to solve encampments downtown by directing them to parks instead, but that was absolutely the implication people were inevitably going to take away. This was another city policy developed on the fly in less than two weeks, then dropped, and suddenly resurrected again months later with none of the promised public input and approved.
This is what happens when you flail your way through policy development, it has the veneer of someone taking action, but we don’t just elect a government to take action, we elect them to think through the potential consequences of their actions. How much of what’s happening at council these days is so myopic that we’ll looking back disappointed five years from now?
Stay tuned.
