Guelph Politicast

The weather has been pretty good reminding us this past week that winter is dangerous, especially when driving on snowy icy streets. That’s why we salt, but the evidence is building that we salt our roads too much and it’s had a profoundly negative impact on our rivers and streams. So are we sacrificing our water quality for winter road safety, and is there a way that we can have both? It was about two years ago that a study was released in the journal Facets that found levels of salt in rivers and streams exceeded federal exposure guidelines in 89 per cent of samples from four different watersheds in the greater Toronto area, and that one-third of the studied sites showed that one-quarter of all species are impacted. The real concerning part though was these sample were taken in the proverbial dog days of summer, late July and August. If salt levels are hitting dangerous levels in summer, what must they look like in the winter with all the winter maintenance? Or what happens in a winter like this, where we g

From the Open Sources Guelph archive, it's our very first political movies show from 2015. On this one, we cover the struggles of standing between competing parties in the Danish parliament and comedic efforts to beat the odds and be elected President of the United States. We also have the struggles of a Communist fighting the Spanish Civil War and the reconsideration of an American pariah. From Thursday, December 24, 2015, at 5 pm, Scotty Hertz  and Adam A. Donaldson discussed: 1) Scotty’s Pick #1. Borgen: Birgitte Nyborg becomes Prime Minister of Denmark through a political fluke and has to learn the ways of power, quickly. She’s an altruistic public servant in an old boys club and must master the art of the deal overnight, manage her image and understand that she has advisors but no real friends. She also must perform the impossible juggling act of maintaining a family life while serving as Denmark s first female Prime Minister. The rigors of public life and the press may attract some of Denmark s finest

This week on End Credits, we grab our hat and our bullwhip and our leather jacket and head out on one last ride. As we wait for the movie machine to rev up again later this month, we spend this week's show catching up with everyone's favourite archaeologist and adventurer in his two most recent films, both of which are now steaming on your favourite app that starts with a "D". This Wednesday, January 10, at 3 pm, Adam A. Donaldson, Tim Phillips, Candice Lepage, and Peter Salmon will discuss: Run The Series: Indiana Jones Part 2. We conclude our review of the Indiana Jones series this week by tackling the two 21st century Indiana Jones movies. First up is Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the much maligned fourth entry from 2008 that introduced aliens, Russian psychics, and Indy's greaser son Mutt. After that, we're talking about Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the $300 million final(?) entry in the series that was widely seen as a box office disaster. This week, it's the last word on

A quick note about the state of the Guelph Politicast.

This week on Open Sources Guelph, we start 2024 by looking back at 2023. It's that time again for our annual political awards show, and for nearly 10 years we've given out the hardware in some very specific categories that capture all the best and the worst of a given year, and as usual there might be more of one than the other. You know what? Let's keep hope alive because we're now in our tenth year of doing this and we're still going strong! This Thursday, January 4, at 5 pm, Scotty Hertz and Adam A. Donaldson will discuss: Worst Politician of 2023. Every year, the number of nominees for this category far exceeds the number of slots available, and this past year was an incredibly good year for politicians being bad and behaving worse. A banner year you might say. So as we kick off this first show of 2024, we will look back at the last year and see who went from bad to worst, maybe it was the prime minister of a country at war, or maybe it was the prime minister of our own country. Good News Story of the Ye

This week on End Credits, we welcome you to 2024 with a trip to the past! It was a hard year for sequels and franchises in 2023, and the series we're going to be talking about for the next few weeks is a primary example of that. On this episode of the show, and on the next, we're going to review one of the most interesting, successful, and consistently popular movie series of all time! This Wednesday, January 3, at 3 pm, Adam A. Donaldson, Tim Phillips, Candice Lepage, and Peter Salmon will discuss: Run The Series: Indiana Jones Part 1. In the summer of 2023, a movie called Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny was released in theatres everywhere, and there were some... mixed results. In the lead up to Dial of Destiny, we spent each week of the show tackling one of the four previous Indiana Jones and collected here for the first time are those reviews. This week, we will focus on the "original trilogy"; Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Nex

Although this is now technically 2024, we’re going to spend this week’s show having the last word about 2023. We plowed through a lot of news in last week’s clip show, but this week we will bring some much needed analysis: What will 2023 be remembered for? Who were the players? Who failed when it was their turn to play? And what’s going to happen next as we go into 2024? Much of the year seemed to be focused on one topic in particular, and that’s housing. Whether that was more social housing for the people in greatest need, or the generation of more market units to increase supply, it seemed like no council meeting went by without the issue getting name-checked. Council had two different long meetings about housing this past fall and the only real conclusion they came to was that they don’t have the powers they need to take any real action on the problem.  But there were the usual politics too even though there were no elections this year. Consider the full court press to get our MPP Mike Schreiner to ditch

This week on Open Sources Guelph, we're taking the week off, and you probably are too. If you've entered the usual post-Christmas/pre-New Year's boredom, then this is the show for you because it's our annual Political Movies Show! For the last eight years, we've used one of our last shows of the year to talk about some of our favourite politically-minded movies, and this year will not be any different. So tune, drop out, and bring on the flicks! This Thursday, December 28, at 5 pm, Scotty Hertz and Adam A. Donaldson will discuss: Adam's Pick #1: First Blood (1982). "A veteran Green Beret is forced by a cruel Sheriff and his deputies to flee into the mountains and wage an escalating one-man war against his pursuers." Directed by Ted Kotcheff. Starring Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna, and Brian Dennehy. You can stream First Blood on Paramount+ or rent it on VOD. Scotty's Pick #1: Between Two Worlds (2021). "Based on French journalist Florence Aubenas's bestselling non-fiction work Le Quai de Ouistreham, inv

This week on End Credits we say goodbye to 2023, and what a year it is. Great movie year? That's to be determined. As per usual at the end of the year, your favourite cast of characters on local radio will gather for a December celebration of the greatest movies of the year, and the pickings were actually pretty good. From tales of lost love to tales of greed and obsession, we will deliver the Top 5 of 2023. This Wednesday, December 27, at 3 pm, Adam A. Donaldson, Tim Phillips, Candice Lepage, and Peter Salmon will discuss: The Best of 2023. We have reached the end... of the year. You know what that means: Lists! As per usual for the last show of the year, the whole gang is here to talk about the best films that came out in the last 12 months. What rose to the top of cinematic taste in 2023? The story about a doll come to life, or Barbie? (That was a reference to M3GAN, by the way.) It was also a good year for Canadian movies, whether that was the tech story or the movie about the kid working in a video stor

On this holiday week, you're probably listening to a lot of reruns and year-end recaps on your podcast feed, and that's why Guelph Politico is demonstrating its incredible efficiency by combining both things into one podcast. This week, we will review the 2023 soundbites that made the news in Guelph; the announcements, the arguments and the silliness that helped define the last 365 days in the Royal City. On this edition of the podcast you're going to hear from many different voices including our city's mayor, Cam Guthrie, plus our Member of Provincial Parliament Mike Schreiner and even the premier of the whole darn province. Their fates were kind of intertwined earlier this fall, and so was the commencement of construction on two big projects in Guelph.  Bike thefts, parks, pickleball, housing and so much more await you as this long-running series brings you a lousy clip show for holidays! So let's listen to some clips on this week's Guelph Politicast! Happy New Year! The Guelph Politicast will continue to

This week on Open Sources Guelph, we've got one more before Christmas break. On this, the shortest day of the year, we will dig into this epically long strike in Quebec that looks to roll on into the new year, and we will also talk about everyone's favourite 2023 controversy, which is pronouns. For an additional Christmas present, we will end the year (of interviews) with another conversation with our local Member of Parliament. One of the last... This Thursday, December 21, at 5 pm, Scotty Hertz and Adam A. Donaldson will discuss: General Strike Back. Meanwhile in Quebec, labour strife is even more strify than usual. Teachers there have been on strike for weeks, and other government workers, including those in healthcare, had a week long job action last week and promised that if things don't change, there might be a general strike before the end of the year. Despite the support, many Quebec teachers are saying that they're worn our from the fight, so this Christmas, we give Scotty the gift of labour talk. Ho

This week on End Credits it's Christmas! Obviously. Maybe you're relaxing, or maybe you're out and about doing some last-minute shopping, but in any case, we've got your soundtrack. Like we do at this time every year, we've got the Christmas hits (sans that one from you-know-who) that will remind you of some of your favourite holiday movies. "Have yourself a merry little Christmas"? You will after this show. This Wednesday, December 20, at 3 pm, Adam A. Donaldson will discuss: Sounds of the Season. Every Christmas comes with your favourite holiday movies. Consider this touching tale: A young boy learns the value of family after getting left behind when they depart in a whirlwind for Christmas vacation. Fortunately, it's this point he finds his calling as a moral enforcer as he elaborately tortures two burglars who make the mistake of crossing paths with him. We all love Home Alone and it's blood thirsty idealism, and as usual this Christmas week we will highlight music from this and our other favourite holid

It’s time for our annual fireside chat with a prominent member of the Guelph community, and since we’re run the gamut of local political leaders over the last few years, we turn to the new head of the hospital. It’s a massive challenge, but in keeping with the spirit of the season, and the need to help people who can’t help themselves, we're going spend Christmas week with the president and CEO of Guelph General Hospital, Mark Walton. Walton hasn’t been the head of the Guelph General Hospital for even a year yet, but he had to hit the ground running. He’s already appeared at city council twice, once to talk about offload delays at the hospital, and the other to talk about how homelessness and poverty create more work for hospitals as lagging indicators. And then there's the ongoing demand for a new hospital facility, which is complicated, but it’s another one of those things that’s on Walton’s very busy desk. But let’s back up for a minute, who is Mark Walton? Before coming to Guelph earlier this year, he se

This week on Open Sources Guelph, it's a time for gift returns. What? It's not even Christmas yet! Well, the provincial government has been doing a lot of returning lately, taking back policy that they themselves developed and they were at it again this week. We'll talk about that, plus the scapegoating of international students, and for the interview this week, we will roll out the red carper for one of the city councillors who represents CFRU at 1 Carden Street. This Thursday, December 14, at 5 pm, Scotty Hertz and Adam A. Donaldson will discuss: Student Counsel. Last week, Immigration Minister Marc Miller announced that international students are going to need even more money in their pocket if they want to study here. International students are getting blamed for a lot: the housing crisis, more demand on food banks, etc, but what about the blame for post-secondary institutions that have been using international students like cash cows. Is there a way we can help students and without breaking the system?

This week on End Credits, we're going to Japan. Our friends on the other side of the Pacific are having quite a movie moment right now with two of the three movies in the Top 5 at the North American box office being Japanese. On this show, we're going to talk about one of those movies, The Boy and the Heron, and we're going to look ahead to some of the movies coming out next year, be they Japanese or not.  This Wednesday, December 13, at 3 pm, Adam A. Donaldson and Peter Salmon will discuss: Best of 2024. (Too Soon?) It's almost the end of the year, and while our Top of 2023 is still a couple of weeks away, it's never too early to talk about what some of the best movies of 2024 might be, or even just some of the movies that we're looking forward to. It's going to be an unusual movie release calendar next year with the Writers' and Actors' Strikes both creating delays, but if you look at what's coming you'll see that there's still a lot to look forward to. We're going discuss some of the movies to watch in the

There was a lot to complain about when it comes to the Ontario provincial government in 2023, but complaints were always the loudest when it came to the decision to open the Greenbelt to development. Thousands and thousands of Ontarians were unified in their desire to make the Greenbelt whole again, and then the strangest thing of all happened, they won. It’s almost exactly one year ago that the first protests began in response to the Ontario government's plan to remove parcels of the Greenbelt and allow for new housing development despite Doug Ford’s promise that his government would not touch the Greenbelt. Here in Guelph, hundreds and hundreds of people came out on a cold Sunday morning to express their outrage and it wasn’t for the last time as protests continued all over Ontario for much of the last year.  Then things started changing this past summer. Ontario’s auditor general released a scathing report into how the Greenbelt land swap came about, and that started a chain of events ending with Ford put

This week on Open Sources Guelph, are we even real? Maybe this show has been one, big nine-year conspiracy. Not that we're trying to put thoughts in your head, but it turns out that we don't even really need to try that hard because so many us are ready to believe a conspiracy theory. We're going to talk about that, and we're also going to talk about the latest from the war between Israel and Hamas. Closer to home, we're going to talk to the newest member of the Ontario Legislature. This Thursday, December 7, at 5 pm, Scotty Hertz and Adam A. Donaldson will discuss: Back to Your Regularly Scheduled War. Despite the accomplishment of a nearly one-week long ceasefire and prisoner exchange, the fighting is back in Gaza and it's even more fierce as Israeli Defense Forces are now moving on the southern end of the Strip. The difference this time is that Israel is feeling the heat. The international community that was once so supportive is now trying to get Benjamin Netanyahu to take it easy, but can the pressure w

This week on End Credits, we bring you season's grievings! See what we did there? If we're making generic holiday salutations with a dark twist, then you know the time has come for another Christmas horror, and this year that happens to be It's a Wonderful Knife, which you can now watch on Shudder. In other end-of-year matters, we will kick-off this last month of 2023 by talking about some of the stuff that happened in 2023.  This Wednesday, December 6, at 3 pm, Adam A. Donaldson and Candice Lepage will discuss: Your Trend Till the End. It's our first show of December, and it's one of our last shows of the year, so you know what that means: It's time to recap! What kind of year has it been? That's what we're going to talk about as be begin this episode, the movie trends of 2023. Was this year the end of the comic book movie as we know it? Was it the year of Taylor in concert? Barbenheimer? M3GAN? Come to think of it, there were more than a few killer A.I.s and other automatons this year. We'll get to the bott

It makes sense to take some time now to talk about the media picture here in Guelph, and across Canada. While the Government of Canada reached a deal last week with Alphabet, the parent company of Google, to help fund the Online News Act there are still a lot of people in the news business who are going to be laid off at the end of the month including staff at the Guelph Mercury Tribune. But one person remains... It’s fitting that this topic has come up for the 400th episode of this show. When the daily Guelph Mercury closed down in January 2016, Guelph Politico was in the process of transforming from a personal expression of Guelph political stuff to something a little more formal. When the old Merc closed on January 29, 2016 uncertainty weighed on many people in the community; what would happen to daily news coverage in the city? What would happen to the Mercury’s vast community and institutional knowledge? Some of those issues were resolved when Metroland tagged the weekly Guelph Tribune paper with the "Me

This week on Open Sources Guelph, we grab some canned programming off the shelf. It's a pretty busy week at city hall so we can't really dive into the news as much as we would like to. Instead, we put a call in to a new friend and an old friend to round out our time and chat around the news. First, we will talk to someone uniquely placed in the fight against gender-based violence, and second we've got another Green fellow named Mike who's having a very busy time lately too! This Thursday, November 30, at 5 pm, Scotty Hertz and Adam A. Donaldson will discuss: A Man's Work. Nest week is the 34th anniversary of the attack that killed 14 women at L'École Polytechnique in Montreal, which is now known as the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women. It's an important reminder that there's a lot left to do in the mission to eliminate gender-based violence, and this week we will talk to one of the people leading the way. Our guest is Humberto Carolo, executive director of the White Ribbon camp