Premier Doug Ford took a lot of guff about speaking in exasperated terms about the pandemic a couple weeks ago. “We are done with it,” he said. “Let’s just start moving on, cautiously. The world’s done with it, let’s just move forward.”
It’s refreshing when politicians are just nakedly honest, and while I’m sure public health officials appreciated that he threw a "cautiously” in there, Ford’s words were still the expression of a mental condition nearly two years in the making, no matter your political thoughts about the rightness or righteousness of public health measures.
That brings us to the announcement this week that the City of Guelph, as well as neighbouring municipalities, will be lifting the State of Emergency on March 1.
It’s kind of weird to realize that the State of Emergency’s been in effect this whole time. COVID-19 has become more a state of being in the last 23 months, but as Mayor Cam Guthrie said, this is “one more milestone in our journey to recovery.”
Guthrie went further in a follow-up interview with GuelphToday’s Richard Vivian and announced that council will be returning to in-person meetings starting next month. Naturally this appealed to me because the hows and whens we go back to in-person council business has been an internal debate in my head, and an external debate in this column.
To my disappointment though, the mayor did not have a lot of hard and fast details about the re-opening, especially on one specific question: If council and staff are meeting in-person, in the council chambers, will the media be allowed to be there?
I would like to propose that if council is meeting in-person again, the media should be there in-person too. In fact, we need to be there.
I had a phone conversation with city clerk Stephen O’Brien and was happy to learn that we’re on the same page.
The details, despite the mayor’s exuberance, are still being worked out, and we should hear something early next week, but I want to plant a flag in the ground here and now by saying that the complete functioning of city council includes the presence of those who represent and report to the people: the media.
I say this because I don’t feel like the inclusion and comfort of the media has ever been a priority in city hall. I’m not saying that there’s an anti-media bias, or that councillors and staff are unfriendly to the media, but even prior to the pandemic, it felt like the one relatively small media table in the council chambers was someone’s idea of the maximum amount of openness and accessibility allowed.
Obviously, it's not.
I know that city hall has social media accounts, and that they put out press releases, and that they even have a podcast now, but these are components of openness and transparency, not examples of openness and transparency.
While I commend the City of Guelph’s efforts to adapt to the pandemic, and indeed our clerks office was quicker to adapt than others, there’s been an essential ingredient missing to our coverage for the last two years: Access. The ability to look at people, gauge their body language, catch them off guard, and talk casually about the doings before the horseshoe.
Zoom and other platforms have been great for staying in touch, doing interviews, and gathering information, but there is a formality to that in the way you have to agree on a time to talk, and then send a video link. Spontaneity is sometimes the secret spice that makes the work of reporting on local governance pop, and it’s something that’s best done in person. (Where it’s hard to be avoided.)
And since it seems likely that the public gallery will still be closed to the public for the time being, it’s all the more important for the media to be there, acting as the eyes and ears for the people to get those insights and inferences that can only be gathered in-person.
And now for the hard part, and this was addressed in both the interview with the mayor and my own conversation with the clerk, not everyone’s going to be ready and willing to go back to in-person meetings just yet.
In a way, we’re entering a fascinating new phase of the pandemic that’s the opposite of some of the reactions summed up by inelegant labels like “anti-masker”. Despite the assurances of public health officials, some people are not yet prepared to meet in-person, or go maskless when the time comes.
I think there’s an appreciation that the end of the pandemic is not going to be like that gum commercial. You’re not going to get a push notification on your phone saying that it’s over, and life as you knew it circa February 2020 can resume. Being understanding as people get used to the new normal, and letting them claim it in their own time, is going to be key.
In the meantime, if the majority of council is meeting in that big room on the first floor of city hall, then the media has to be there. And I am eager to return.
