Last Thursday, I began and ended the day with Cam Guthrie. He wasn’t there, but he was very much top of mind for the people who were there.
In the morning at the weekly Breezy Breakfast at Rise & Shine there was at least one person that was ready to storm the proverbial Bastille because they were so upset about proposed budget cuts stemming from the (strong) mayor’s directive to shave the 2025 budget down to four per cent or less.
The monthly Green Drinks event also put its spotlight on the budget albeit through the lens of local climate action. Five members of city council were there to provide context and answer questions, but the tenor of both these gatherings was clear: The city’s influential and progressive political class is coming for Guthrie.
Now, I’m tapping the keys for this column with the knowledge that some of you don’t like my Guthrie-bashing (though that’s not what I’d call it). I heard from some of you last week about the supposed “small potatoes” of several reports against the mayor to the city’s integrity commissioner. You also don’t like how I seem to be nitpicking at the mayor because he’s “doing a good job.”
You’re entitled to think that the Mayor of Guelph is doing a good job, but if I, as a city hall columnist, can’t pick at the mayor, his ideas, and his policy directions, I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing.
It’s not personal. I personally like the mayor on the basis of one-person dealing with another, and in an act of cosmic fate I recently found in some old files that he and I were both appointed to the community editorial board of the Guelph Mercury at the same time; the threads of our fates have been tied together in some kind of Gordian knot from the start.
More broadly, I will say that as a resident of Guelph I am deeply invested in the success of the mayor. His success is our success, and I do believe that Guthrie is invested in the project of Guelph’s success, and unlike a lot of people, I don’t believe that the mayor is hiding deep seeded ambitions for higher levels of government. I think he’s exactly where he wants to be.
That might be the issue.
This October will mark 10 years of Guthrie’s mayoralty, and the decade mark is the typical expiration date for any political leader no matter how good they are. Also, at least a few of those years have been the hardest years that any Guelph mayor has ever had in the last two centuries outside of a world war or a great depression.
Guthrie’s use of Strong Mayor Powers is an expression of his tiredness, especially considering his repeated, emphatic declarations that he had no intention to use them and the relative tepidness with which they were deployed. Nearly two months later, I’m not sure what’s really changed from where we were the day before the State of the City, and if the whole announcement wasn’t done to give the appearance of immediate, systemic action.
Having said that, the implications of proceeding with the budget actions requested by the mayor are real, and it won’t take much to make those requests actual cuts.
Although 38 per cent of council was there last Thursday with the rebels, it’s worth remembering that under the new rules of municipal budgeting that council can only propose amendments. This really is the “mayor’s budget” and even if eight councillors disagree with it, all the mayor needs are four to side with him and it stands.
Is it really so hard to believe that there aren’t four councillors that will choose austerity in the name of short-term lulz to tout their dedication to affordability, even if that’s not what we get in the long-term?
The A-word hasn’t really been thrown around at Guelph council (intentionally at least) since the mayoralty of Kate Quarrie, who was elected with a centre-right council in 2003 on a pro-business, anti-Guelph Factor platform, especially tied to the rejection of big dollar items like a new library and the decade-long battle over WalMart. That council was voted out at the first opportunity with 10 out of 13 positions around the horseshoe getting replaced.
Now some of that had to do with the internal disfunction of that council and the way that the personalities had difficulty gelling even when the councillors were aligned politically, but it also had to do with voters being shown what happens when zero is the only number a council cares about. We also saw that last year in Toronto when Mayor Olivia Chow took the cuffs off after a decade of fiscal restraint to show just how far behind curve the city was in terms of investments.
Continually, we’re being presented with the idea that tackling problems ignored for decades is the root of unaffordability now. We see that on Westwood Road and the small group of people protesting the carbon tax nightly despite all the evidence that a price on carbon has only a small impact on household budgets. They apparently haven’t given a second thought to the idea that if they don’t like the cost of trying to stop climate disaster, they’re definitely not going to like the cost of actual disaster.
It's also true in the small scale of our city where big investments have been put off time and time again, and now that they’re really expensive, the suggestion is to kick the can a little further down the road. Getting the budget to four per cent or less for 2025 still puts a lot of pressure on 2026 and 2027, so any affordability gains are short lived, as they usually are. So the question is, what kind of long-term harm does all this do?
And that brings us back to the mayor because he’s been doing this job long enough to see how short-term gains become long-term pains and now, nearly a decade-and-a-half since he first joined council, he’s got to be thinking about what he’s leaving for the next person who’s mayor. It certainly seems like the community is.
