Advanced polls start today in the municipal election, and if you’ve come here for advice, you should know that I don’t believe in endorsements. But if you’re looking for endorsements, the incumbent mayor had one for you this week: Vote for councillors who will think and act exactly like him.
One would think that Cam Guthrie might have had his fill of dabbling in council politics after a slate of Cam-approved candidates in the last election, but this time it’s about something bigger, and that’s the housing crisis.
At the Guelph and District Association of Realtors debate this past week, Guthrie explained that one of the biggest obstacles to creating more housing solutions is council itself, and the fact a majority of councillors in this term voted against approving over 700 residential units.
This claim is specious at best, but it also turns our housing issues into a classic “us vs them” scenario that’s childishly simple and doesn’t acknowledge the complex web of inputs and circumstances that have brought us here. And then there’s the thing that Guthrie won’t tell you…
He’s voted against approving some residential units this term too…
[Thunderclap!]
[Lightening flash!]
[Wolf howl!]
I’m sure Guthrie had his reasons, everybody does whether they’re voting for or against something. The problem here is that I’ve already heard some other candidates quote Guthrie’s 700-plus number as a critique against incumbent competitors not looking for solutions, but like any statement by any political candidate there’s more than meets the eye here.
Supply is the easy part because Guelph has historically always been close to zero vacancy. Housing prices haven’t skyrocketed in the last few years because of a lack of supply, and in the recent past, Guelph has not been as affordable as people think it was. Not for everyone.
And supply is more than what gets approved at council. Currently, there are thousands of units that have been approved by council waiting for a shovel to be put in the ground. Blame the developers if you like, but even this branch of the issue is complicated by another issue council has precious little control over, which is the availability of skilled labour.
Council also can’t presently do anything about the supply already available, and I would refer to a story in the media earlier this year that revealed that one out of every five homes sold last year went to someone buying it as a second home, looking to create a rental property, or just parking their money somewhere safe for a while.
If we apply that ratio to those 700 units Guthrie keeps talking about it, then 140 of those units would be earmarked in ways that will not help solve our housing crisis.
But hey, let’s forget for a moment that there are a lot of people out there that see housing not as a human right, but as an investment opportunity. If council had approved absolutely all the units proposed this term, and if every single last one of them were constructed in short order, would we be dancing the Charleston and popping champagne corks because we solved the housing crisis?
No matter how many homes you approve, the vast, vast, vast majority of those units were bound for the for-profit housing market, and no matter how many homes you build, if the average asking price is still a million dollars, they’re going to be just as unequally available as the current number of vacant homes right now.
In other words, we’d still have a by-name list, we’d still have people living in sub-standard housing, and we’d still have people paying exorbitant prices for even menial accommodations. A market fire, like the real thing, will keep spreading until it runs out of fuel, and in this case the fuel is a province that’s half-a-million units behind the times.
Mayor Guthrie is interested in fire too. In this case it’s the bridges he’s burning, and not just with the council candidates – challengers and incumbents alike – who might have a different point of view than him on how best to rectify Guelph’s housing problem.
In a time of tremendous skepticism about political power and authority, skepticism further cued up by the extraordinarily undemocratic “Strong Mayor” powers being pushed by the province, the incumbent mayor is telling the electorate that you don’t need “Strong Mayor” powers if he just has a slate of councillors who will do what he says and think how he thinks.
Dear God, is that cynical.
It also undermines, in advance of the next council, the one most powerful tool a municipal council has to affect change with upper levels of government where most of the power lies: A united front.
If you believe in democracy, and you’re leading a democratically-elected government, you must deal with people who think differently than you, and if you’re the leader of a democratically elected group, then it’s incumbent on you to lead the group to consensus.
Whipped votes and a lack of ideological independence (voting your conscience) is one of the things people hate about the partisan politics at Queen’s Park and Parliament Hill. At the local level, we vote for people, not parties, and that’s the reality that any mayor has to embrace with every new council.
Council approved nearly 1,000 units this year, which is every project that came back to council for final approval between February and September except three; Guthrie also voted against two of those three projects.
Now one could go out on the campaign trail and demand a mayor that would vote in favour of those 563 units, but I don’t think you should. That was a consensus decision too, and we’re going to need more like it to really get us out of this housing crisis.
