The new City Hall finally, and officially,
opened for business last Tuesday April 7; that is if you don’t
count that big brown patch of land where the landscaping has yet to be done.
Regardless of the aesthetics and the trim, the important thing is that all city
services are now under one roof rather than spread out across five buildings
downtown. "It’s the first stop for anyone visiting City Hall," says
ServiceGuelph Supervisor, Markham Wismer. "People can purchase transit
passes, sign up for recreation programs, buy dog licenses, pay parking tickets
and property taxes and more." ServiceGuelph is now open Monday to Friday, 8:30 am to 4:30 pm.
And along with convenience comes some
impressive Green credentials for the new building: a green roof, living wall,
eco-friendly building materials and fixtures that use 30 per cent less water
than a typical office building. Guelph’s City Hall is built to the LEED Silver Standard set out by the
Canadian Green Building Council. Also a first, the City Hall is the first
building in Guelph to be bottled-water free. For a closer look visit the City of Guelph website at http://guelph.ca/cityhall.
No-PIRG, they didn’t. Did they?
Who would have guessed that a simple Board
of Directors election for a small community activism group out of the University of Guelph would
generate the kind of electoral fervour not seen since Bush V. Gore. Here’s the
skinny: recently the Guelph-branch of the Ontario Public Interest Research
Group (OPIRG) held elections to fill vacancies on its Board of Directors.
Controversy erupted after OPIRG extended the nomination deadline after it had
passed. According to OPIRG, the deadline was extended because they had not
received enough nominations to fill two community member seats on the Board.
However, some are accusing of OPIRG of playing partisan politics in order to
keep four members of Guelph Campus Conservatives from being
elected.
Now why would OPIRG,
granted a left-leaning organization, want to keep out four eager and
community-minded youngsters from joining their esteemed group? Well, it
apparently has something to do with a Conservative conspiracy and some audio recordings, photographs and documents that were leaked
from a recent Conservative Party student workshop at the University of
Waterloo. Among those present at the workshop were Member of Parliament for
Kitchener-Waterloo, Peter Braid and his campaign manager, Aaron Lee-Wudrick.
Reportedly Lee-Wudrick can be heard on the recording saying, "If it's
possible if, in one fell swoop, to take over the Board of Directors [of OPIRG],
I think that it would be pretty impressive, and you'd be a hero to the
Conservative movement if you can pull that off."
Two executives of the
Central Student Association, External Affairs Commissioner Cailey Campbell and
Local Affairs Commissioner Arden Hagedorn, believed that the four members of
GCC were taking those words to heart and sent out e-mails accusing them of
trying to usurp OPIRG mandate. The four young men though say that there was no
hanky-panky with their decision to run for OPIRG’s Board, and that they didn’t
even know about the content of the U of W workshop; they simply wanted to make
OPIRG-Guelph more transparent and less partisan.
Needless to say though,
that’s not the end of it. On his blog, the Christian Conservative posted a
letter received through his anonymous source of the Request for Discovery
filled by the four Conservative to the OPIRG-Guelph Appeals Board. Amongst the
papers being requested by the appeal are minutes and notes of all Board of
Directors meetings from March 19th to 31st; all
resolutions made by the BoD both in and outside Board meetings during the same
time period; and e-mails between OPIRG staff, Board, Campbell and Hagedorn. The
response to this appeal was not known by deadline. For more information as it
develops head to my blog at guelphpolitico.blogspot.com/
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