The Return of the Living Dead was one of the first of its kind, a meta-horror movie that satirized the zombie genre and was also more than a little funny. It came out the same year as Day of the Dead, the third entry in the zombie saga created by George A. Romero, and although it treated the material a little more seriously, both movies had the same theme: How the inability of institutions to fix a problem gives way to cruelty and indifference.
Imagine my surprise this week when my best laid plans for a quiet August rest from matters of council business gave way to a new meeting scheduled by Mayor Cam Guthrie. Why? We have to talk about the Public Spaces Use Bylaw once again.
Yup. It’s back from the dead.
To recap, there was a special meeting in February where this bylaw was discussed, but the matter was deferred until after the Ontario Court of Appeal rendered a decision about a similar bylaw in Kingston. One of parties in that appeal pulled out of the case, so there was no further legal action, and Guelph staff, not being given direction on what else to do on this file, let the moment pass.
But now Mayor Guthrie is putting it back on the front burner, and I can’t say what’s different about the issue other than the fact it’s four months later. The concerns and complications raised by the implementation of such a bylaw remain, including, and certainly not limited to, its constitutionality. The Guelph Wellington Legal Clinic is already throwing hints on the socials that they’re warming up their legal library.
In the midst of summer and its usual distractions, a week after council supposedly rose for a month-long break, Guthrie was out campaigning for this new old policy with a full court press. A social media post about public drug use on Tuesday led to some TV attention where the mayor laid out the hellscape reality of Guelph’s laisse-faire approach to people with addiction issues.
"Mothers pushing their strollers with kids that are getting meth smoke blown in their face,” Guthrie said. “I've got Little League baseball diamonds that are being taken over by people doing drugs all around as the kids are trying to play. As kid’s birthday parties are at parks, these issues are playing out.”
Human sacrifice. Dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria!
The media rollout continued on Wednesday with the announcement about the Aug. 28 meeting. Here, in the last week of summer vacation, as people are enjoying their last days off or getting the kids ready for back to school, Guthrie hopes that council will approve this highly controversial and punitive bylaw when so many people might be distracted with other things.
The timing of this meeting is also really inelegant for another reason, it’s one day before community members will gather downtown for the annual commemoration of Drug Poisoning Awareness Day and the memorializing of those people who were killed by dealers and criminals who exploited their addiction. Now, 24 hours before hand, those people and their loved ones will have to hear from the mayor about how their existence is ruining everyone’s good time.
It's another indignity in this whole process because part of the work that staff was supposed to do before the plug was pulled on the Kingston appeal was getting feedback from people with lived experience, something that didn’t happen the first time around because staff had to draft a bylaw in less than a dozen business days.
The point about getting the feedback of people with lived experience drove much of the outrage back in February, and the Accessibility Advisory Committee believed in it so strongly that they passed their own resolution demanding that this work be done. What feedback will be gathered from all these people in need over the next few weeks? Have staff been directed to reorganize their workloads to gather those insights?
How much do you want to bet right now that this is another urgent motion that’s deferred for months until staff has time to gather the material council needs to make an informed decision?
And speaking of those in need, there is another issue this week that the mayor could have lent his substantial political weight to, and it’s an area that’s well within his ability to act.
On Brant Avenue, residents have raised the alarm about renovictions in their buildings. The new landlord has used the promise of a slap of paint and maybe a new dishwasher as justification to evict the tenants and bring some new ones in for an extra thousand bucks a month in rent. The same landlord, mind you, that has been trying to push tenants out of a Frederick Street building in Kitchener with new parking fees and other measures.
While the City of Guelph was tooling around with the Public Spaces Use Bylaw the first time, the City of Hamilton was passing a first of its kind bylaw to stop “bad faith” evictions and ensure any need to vacate a unit for improvements is done in the cause of safety while also ensuring the rights of the tenant through the process.
Many municipalities in Ontario are now looking at the Hamilton model, and while I can’t say I did an exhaustive search, it does appear that no one has taken Hamilton to court over it. Unlike, say, bylaws barring encampments.
So instead of stopping predatory landlords who are exacerbating the housing crisis we’re going to be further criminalizing and marginalizing the people already struggling. Not only will the Public Spaces Use Bylaw solve none of the underline problems it’s supposed to address, and not only will it sink the city into a legal morass before the courts, but it’s an expression of limited thinking: We can’t solve the problem, so we might as well sweep it under the rug.
So after seven months of solutions that went nowhere, we’re raising the dead and we’re interrupting everyone’s summer vacation to do it. It’s nearly impossible not to see this as the inevitable result of the limited ability of local governments to solve massive systemic and societal issues, so now we’ll do what comes easy and villanize the people with the least power and make the debate about their choices instead of the government’s.
