It’s easy to dunk on city council; the amount of power they truly have to affect the big issues we deal with every day is widely disproportionate to the amount of scrutiny we give them sometimes. This might be less of an issue if upper levels of government showed any interest in taking real action, but this is the nature of downloading.
Having said that, I think there’s a massive disconnect between city council and the people struggling in this community. Do I think they’re sympathetic? Yes, of course. But do I think that council well and truly appreciates how hard it is for some of us to live in Guelph? No, not really.
The ultimately expression of this paradigm can be seen in my favourite issue, transit.
He’s not a member of council, but I feel like Lloyd Longfield’s tweet from a couple of weeks ago epitomizes the difference between living as a low income Guelphite and being a tourist in that life. He tweeted, “It’s great riding @guelphtransit seeing the message ‘City of Guelph receives $2m for three climate change related infrastructure projects’. And I’m on one of our new electric buses. Good news all around! (And excellent service.)”
First, the picture attached to this tweet was of the screen on the EV bus and showed that Longfield would arrive at the University Centre in minus 139 minutes. For the record, I have never seen these real time updates provide any kind of actual update, and they certainly haven’t been “real time”.
Second, I understand why people who only take transit once in a while say it’s an “excellent service”. When you don’t have to depend on transit to get around town, or if you’re just taking it to enjoy the ride, little things like making your transfer on time or not having to plan your hour-long cross-town commute with the precision of a military strike, go over your head.
Empathy is fine and good and necessary, but there’s no substitute for experience, which is why it feels like our council (and most politicians for that matter) feels so out of touch with the realities of the working-class poor in Guelph. Many of them are white collar professionals, and most of them are home owners. This isn’t an attack on their success, this is a reminder that privilege is real, and that some of us have it while many of us don’t.
Participating in local politics is also a matter of privilege. One must have the free time to examine the issues, read the reports, and engage with people who can answer your questions. It’s no coincidence that most of the time at council it’s the same small group of older, upper-middle class people delegating, people often involved in an advocacy group that specializes in a single issue.
There are almost 150,000 people in Guelph, but we just seem to hear from the same 20 over and over again.
Fair enough, decisions are made by the ones who show up, but when someone does show up with a different point of view than the accepted story of Guelph exceptionalism, they get slapped on the hands for stepping out of line.
I saw it happen again at this week’s Committee of the Whole meeting when community advocate and former council candidate Morgan Dandie urged council to think about what affordability really means to people in Guelph. She was following a representative from the Guelph Wellington Development Association who delegated that he and his colleagues were tired of shouldering the blame for the housing crisis.
Instead of acknowledging Dandie’s point of view and thanking her for her delegation, Mayor Cam Guthrie decided to pick a fight.
“To the delegate, do you know how many millions of dollars the city has given towards affordable housing and supportive housing over the last six years?” Guthrie asked.
Dandie said that she didn’t know the number off the top of her head, but what she did know is that the provincial government’s old definition of what’s affordable, 80 per cent of market value, is still unaffordable for a great many people. Now, the Ontario government did change that definition to take into account income and the local housing market, but it’s been almost a year since they did that. How many new affordable units have become available?
And let’s be clear, these supportive and transitional housing projects have been the only social housing projects built in Guelph in the last 30 years. Are they needed? Absolutely, but if your only issue is that you don’t make enough money to afford a place to live in Guelph, you haven’t been helped out a lot by any of those projects.
Still, Guthrie saw a chance to get one over on a critic and he decided to ask for a manager. Speaking as a critic, I do not like this version of the mayor who snaps at people who don’t agree with him and offer even a tacit pushback to the city’s messaging that they’re doing all they can on housing, especially when they’re not.
The big item at the meeting was the discussion of implementing a bylaw to stop “renovictions”, the phenomenon where landlords evict tenants, many of whom are long-term tenants enjoying some measure of rent control, in the name of completing major and necessary renovations on their units. Instead, unscrupulous landlords are forcing tenants out, doing barely cosmetic work on the units, and then renting the unit to a new tenant for a massive rent increase.
What I find interesting is that we got the Public Space Use Bylaw before even the exploration of a renoviction bylaw; the former was put together in a matter of days, the latter was presented in an information report to council at the end of July, came to council for a discussion this week, and will now be discussed further on Oct. 8 with no assurance that something will come of that.
See the difference?
Now I’m not saying that the City of Guelph doesn’t care about renters, but I am saying that there’s clearly an unspoken bias in that they move more swiftly to deal with the appearance of homelessness than they do to stop actual homelessness.
I’ve gotten dinged in some quarters for being a “bleeding heart” when it comes to the unhoused people in town, but that’s my bias coming through. You see, as a renter in Guelph, I’m worried that I might soon join them, and then nothing I have to say will matter on any issue.
