GuelphToday asked those running for city council in the Oct. 22 municipal election to supply a brief biography and outline their platform and/or why they are running.
THE PERSON: I grew up just south of Morriston and attended Centennial C.V.I. in Guelph. After high school, I enrolled at the University of Toronto, where I graduated with a degree in mathematics and philosophy. Since returning to the Guelph area in 2012, I’ve run my own small business, developing apps for Blackberry and Android devices, while also working as a technical services specialist for a small financial services company.
I’ve been passionate about politics at every level of government for my entire adult life and have been a keen debater for decades (both formally and informally). My commitment to challenging the status quo is matched only by my enthusiasm for that aspect of government that most find unbearable: the numbers.
My other interests include photography, electronics, robotics, board games, history, film, and fitness. I’m a member of Guelph’s finest karaoke society, The Golden Throats, and an expert in the area of party lighting. I currently live in Ward 5 with my partner Anne, her son Simon, and our adopted cat Cookie.
THE PLATFORM: While there are many important issues facing our city, I’d like to focus on making improvements to a few key areas over the next four years:
Transit: Simply take a gander at the Guelph Transit Facebook page, and you’ll find that the citizens aren’t exactly pleased with the way the buses are operating. At the moment, there’s a comprehensive review of the transit system underway and while that’s a good start, simply having a review isn’t enough. The council needs to actually read the recommendations, and then act on them in a way that will improve things. Our first priority should be to increase reliability. A missed transfer or a full bus can ruin someone’s day, or worse, get them fired, so people need to know that the bus will get them to work or to school on time, every time.
Crime: The crime rate has fallen nearly everywhere over the past ten years, but in Guelph it’s gone up. The opioid crisis has come to town and the meth crisis hasn’t left. If you leave your bike somewhere, there’s a good chance it won’t be there when you return, and if you park downtown, when you get back to your car, you might find that someone’s smashed out your window so they could steal 45 cents from your cup holder and your copy of Big Shiny Tunes 2. Everyone -except, it seems, the city council- saw what was happening, and the reaction should have been far quicker and more decisive. But, now that we have these problems, how are we going to fix them?
I’ve heard good things about the Downtown Guelph Welcoming Streets Initiative, but I’ve also heard that it needs to be expanded. We’ll also need (in association with the provincial and federal governments) to free up more funding for addiction treatment and poverty reduction. It’ll be a significant investment, but prevention will work better than incarceration. Besides, would you rather that the person who stole your bike got locked up for six months, or that your bike hadn’t been stolen in the first place?
Infrastructure: Our infrastructure is in rough shape. Most obvious is the dreadful state of the roads and sidewalks, and the fact that they’ve been ignored for so long is simply mind-boggling. My personal pet peeve is the potholes, some of which are nearly a decade old, and are annoying to drivers and downright hazardous to cyclists.
We now have a special infrastructure levy to pay for the backlog, which I support as long as it’s actually used to fix what needs to be fixed. Unfortunately, things were left to degrade for so long that we either pay for it now, or we pay much more for it later. Four years from now, I want Gordon Street to be a totally smooth ride; the way it looks today cannot possibly be encouraging anyone to move to town or set up a new business here.
Affordable Housing: Rental prices in Guelph have risen at an obscene rate over the past few years. Single-family homes are being turned into houses for three or more adults, as speculators snatch up properties and rent them out for exorbitant prices. The university makes us especially vulnerable to that here in Ward 5. We need to encourage the construction of more purpose-built affordable rental units to help ease some of the pressure on the market. Otherwise we’ll wind up with more and more people jammed into houses that weren’t designed for them.
