It’s the first week of the year! Have you set your New Year’s Resolutions yet?
I haven’t.
I stand on a matter of principle that if you want to change, then you shouldn’t wait for some arbitrary date to get started, but in the spirit of the occasion I thought it might be interesting to set some New Year’s Resolutions for Guelph city council and staff. I’ve got four for them…
1) Stop Letting Doug Ford Set the Agenda.
Before disappearing for Christmas vacation two weeks early, the Premier of Ontario seemed confused. He was going on American TV to talk about matters of international trade, his government had just passed new laws about bike lanes, and he announced his intention to end homelessness by just getting rid of encampments.
In other words, Ford doesn’t know if he’s the Premier, the PM or the Mayor of Toronto, and when he does remember he’s the Premier, he’s embracing cruelty and enmity. Ford and his colleagues left the job of solving the housing crisis to private developers and you can’t even say the results are mixed; while housing starts in Canada went up by eight per cent in December, the went down in Ontario, and instead of doing something to fix that, Ford decided to attack the victims.
One of two things is going on at Queen’s Park, either Ford has no further ideas about solving the housing crisis, or he just doesn’t give a damn. So stop letting him call the shots, get in his face and demand action at any and every opportunity. Also, if at all possible, could the mayor stop letting himself be used as a prop for any more of Ford’s announcements until the Premier decides to get serious about housing and affordability?
2) Get Tough with the County.
I know Mayor Cam Guthrie thinks it’s a big deal that the City of Guelph and the County of Wellington are collaborating through the Social Services Committee again, but as a Guelph resident I’m not seeing a lot of benefit for the city, and when I go to those meetings, it’s the county that’s doing the loudest complaining.
It’s been almost a year since the county hosted its health and housing symposium and no formal report has been released, and the portions of the symposium that were supposedly recorded for later public consumption have yet to be posted. Meanwhile, there’s a group organizing to support unhoused people and they’re using City of Guelph money approved by council to do it, but we have no idea who they are.
At the same time, the grassroots push to build a tiny home project in the mould of A Better Tent City hit a stone wall at the county because it fails to fit into their carefully ordered provincial mandate, which forgets the fact that their own symposium speakers demonstrated that the current shelter system isn’t working because the problem has changed so completely. Meanwhile, the county is sweating about the impact on ambulances once the CTS closes, and while they should, they only seem to care about these things when it impacts *them*.
If this is a partnership, then it needs to start looking like a partnership, and that means the same minimum of openness and transparency we’ve come to expect from the city, and that includes (finally!) recording their damn meetings and making them available for people to watch online!
3) Get some consistency with the council meeting schedule again!
In December there were three council meetings, and only one of them was at the usual time; the planning meeting, due to its massive agenda, started at 4 p..m. and the regular meeting was at 9 a.m the next day.
Coming this January there are five meetings including a Wednesday meeting that starts at 9 am, and a special noon-hour meeting that starts before committee of the whole. Oh, and there’s another 4 p.m. start time for this month’s planning meeting, which implies another long agenda, and that meeting will be followed by the aforementioned 9 am meeting the very next day.
It’s worth noting that there was exactly one council meeting last January, and out of that came the initiation of the Public Space Use Bylaw, which was the cause of at least two hastily scheduled meetings, including one in August when there are typically no council meetings.
Part of building trust in government is creating consistency and regularity. Yes, there will always be cause for special meetings and last-minute meetings, but we really need to get back to Tuesday being council meeting day and starting those meetings at 6 p.m. If there’s a possibility that we’re going to be there till midnight-ish, then we can start looking at additional meetings, and with more of a clear and early explanation about why this is happening.
4) More openness and transparency period.
At one of December’s meetings, Mayor Guthrie stumbled on an insight I’ve had for a long time with a note about delegations on the Affordable Housing Strategy: Sometimes, people just want to be heard. It would not be an unusual thing for a city council to have an open mic night, and I think that should be something council could try this year.
I will also make my perennial request to pierce the veil of the closed meeting process. As we saw up in Stratford last year, some bad things can happen in closed session where councils think no one is watching, and there’s been at least one time at Guelph council where a decision made in closed led to some confusing consequences in the open session.
So let me again propose something radical by suggesting that there should be no closed meeting of council without a report telling us what the meeting is about and what council is being asked to discuss. We don’t need to hear what everybody says in point form, but reading the subject line and saying, “There, now you’re informed,” is not enough.
This should be a rebuilding season for our local democracy, and in a sense it already will be. The review of the Advisory Committees of Council will come back in March, and that will be a bellwether for city hall’s intent: Are the ACOCs meant to give the people greater access to policy making, or are they meant to rubberstamp the will of council and staff?
It’s a new year, which means there are lots of new opportunities. Here’s hoping that our civic leaders might try and seize them, and maybe, for once, listen to my advice.
