Welcome to the Guelph Politico Tip Sheet, a thrice-a-week newsletter meant to “tip” you off about some of the important stuff going on in the Royal City. It arrives directly in your inbox on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday mornings.
Regular Meeting of City Council – January 31
There was something different about this week’s council meeting. It was being streamed from the City’s website instead of a third-party like Facebook or YouTube, and it featured the return of “O Canada” to the meeting instead of just a couple of seconds looking at the flag.
As to the substance, council approved new appointments to the Downtown Guelph Board of Management and the Library Board of Directors, and then they heard from two delegates on a Committee of the Whole report about the 2022-2026 Economic Development and Tourism Strategy. One delegate wanted more funding for economic development in Guelph, and the other wanted to enhance the Goderich to Guelph (G2G) biking trail.
Council would eventually reaffirm its commitment to the strategy, but not before looking at some pet tourism projects and how staff will decide to prioritize them, do we go with biking tourism first or making Guelph a “Music City”? There was also some teasing about next week’s debate about the Municipal Accommodation Tax, the proceeds from which will be used to fund a lot of promotion and place-making efforts through the strategy.
The last item on the agenda was a motion endorsing a legal challenge to Quebec’s Bill 21, and that the City of Guelph considers the bill discriminatory. Some councillors were enthusiastic about voting for the motion given recent events (see below), but Councillor Mark MacKinnon took a principled stand that “feel good” motions like this were out of scope for a municipal government in Ontario and abstained from the vote. The rest of council voted in favour.
Click here to see the complete recap of the meeting.
The next meeting of city council is February’s Committee of the Whole meeting on Monday. You have until this Friday morning at 10 am to register with the clerks office as a delegate or to send a correspondence for that meeting, and you can see the agenda on the City’s website here.
For more information on Guelph City Council meetings, from agendas to live-tweets to recaps, you can visit that page on Guelph Politico here.
It was a mad, mad, mad, mad weekend in Ottawa. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau condemned the so-called “Freedom Convoy” for various actions including flying Nazi flags, protesting on top of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, stealing food from the homeless, and using downtown Ottawa as a bathroom.
On the same day that Ontario started to re-open, Guelph MPP Mike Schreiner said that the government needs to do more for businesses than letting them have 50 per cent capacity.
A break-in at the Sleeman Centre, and the theft of two trailers full of alcohol were among this weekend’s police highlights.
Let’s preface these updates with a general word that the official numbers released do not represent the true number of COVID-19 cases, which are likely higher due to limited testing.
The number of active cases in Wellington, Dufferin, and Guelph is now just 662, and that’s despite 199 new cases logged in the region over the weekend thanks to 270 recovered cases on Monday a lone. If you worry that those numbers are not representative, the 7-day moving rate of confirmed cases is also down to 166 per 100,000 and the test positivity rate is 19.2 per cent. Still, there was one new fatality, bringing that total to 139 since the start of the pandemic.
So what’s the good news on vaccines? Now 89.5 per cent of people in the region aged 5 and over have gotten one shot of a COVID-19 vaccine, 84.8 per cent have two shots, and 48.2 per cent have been boosted. In Guelph alone, 86.9 per cent of people 5 and over have gotten two shots and 60.8 per cent of people 18 and over have been boosted. Last week, public health gave out almost 9,500 shots, over 6,000 were boosters.
In terms of the provincial picture, Ontario had just over 3,000 new cases of COVID-19 on Monday, which was down from almost 4,000 cases the day before. The better news is that there were just 2,983 patients in Ontario hospitals, which is a dip from 3,861 this time last week (even though not all hospitals upload data on the weekend). The number of institutional outbreaks is also down 15 to 30 per cent from a week ago.
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Here’s last week’s Police Notes entry.
No Guelph schools in the Upper Grand District Board system were showing absenteeism in excess of 30 per cent on Monday, but it should be noted that yesterday and today are turn around days for local high schools as they change semesters.
On campus, wastewater testing for COVID-19 shows that levels of the virus are down in three residences, up in one, and unchanged in the other five.
The City of Guelph is shopping for a builder for the South End Community Centre.
Orpha Thrasher finished her 100th walk before her 100th birthday.
The brother of man found dead in a car wants the public to know that his brother was a human person with very real problems we need to reckon with as a society.
The Charter challenge of COVID-19 restrictions by two Waterloo area churches that refused to follow the rules last spring is being heard for the next few days in Ontario Superior Court in St. Thomas.
Coming up this week on the Guelph Politicast, we will be joined by Fae Johnstone, the executive director of Wisdom2Action. It’s Winter Pride in Guelph this month, and while that is a sign of growing acceptance for LGBTQ+ people, there’s still a lag in many areas of equality and one of them is trans healthcare. Johnstone will talk about the issues, and how a new Ontario private members bill hopes to change things.
Get the latest edition of the Guelph Politicast on Wednesday.
Also on Wednesday, tune in to CFRU at 3 pm for another episode of End Credits. This week, Candice Lepage cohosts as we don't talk about Bruno, but we do talk about the new animated Disney movie Encanto, which is now streaming on Disney+. And since we’re talking about animation, we will also tell you where you can find other underappreciated animated films at other streaming sites *and* Disney+.
Listen to all these shows any time by subscribing to the Guelph Politicast channel on your favourite podcast app at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.
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And finally, feel free to reach out to me by email at adamadonaldson [at] gmail [dot] com, or find me on Facebook, Twitter, and, of course, GuelphPolitico.ca!