Pedigree Chart for Mary Alma Mattice

pedigree chart Mary Alma Mattice

Our double standard in gender clothing

Every time I go shopping at No Frills, I notice women that are dressed in the tradition of their ancestors. It might the floral print dress and bonnet of the Mennonites, or the sari of the south Asians, or the hijab or niqab of the Muslims. Then I look at the men who are with them. Typically, they are dressed in jeans, or a jacket, or pretty much what their secularized neighbour would wear.

I usually wonder, “Why are the men allowed to fit in, but the women are not?” or “Why do the women have to draw attention to their ethnicity but the men do not?” There seems to be two standards of dress, one for the men, and one for the women. Implied in my wonderings, is the assumption that the men are determining the major components of both male and female wardrobes.

Initially, I patted my secularized self on the back thinking that most Canadian women have more freedom and can wear what ever they choose. They do not have to choose their clothes from a different wardrobe than their westernized husbands or brothers or fathers. It seemed that our secular society had found an answer that these other cultures should share.

Then, I was reading an essay by an imam about this same topic. Except, he critiqued our secular society. He wondered why western women are expected to expose more of themselves than the men. Maybe the imam had been watching coverage of the most recent Vanity Fair Oscar party where the stars, like Rita Ora and Jennifer Lopez, seemed to be “reveal as much as possible” while most of the men kept most of their bodies relatively private in full tuxedos. The imam wondered why western women are forced to draw attention to their bodies while the men are not.

Of course, I had never thought of it this way, but when I did my air of western superiority went out the window, where it belonged. We also have a double standard for gender clothing.

It seems that in many cultures, the male wardrobe is closer to a universal average while the female wardrobe tends toward some extreme, either to extremely hide or to extremely reveal the female form.

In both cases, outsiders attribute the extreme wardrobe to male dominance. Modernists criticize the way in which religious women are kept covered, and the religious criticize modernists for wanting women to be scantily clothed. And in both cases, the women defend their wardrobes as something of their own choosing. Whether covered or uncovered, the women explain that their clothing choices are their own and make them feel more feminine.

In the natural world, we also see a “double standard” but there the male appearance tends to grab our attention while the female tends to blend in with the surroundings. The bright red of the male cardinal contrasts the muted red of the female, and the illustrious sheen of the male peacock contrasts the soft colours of the hen. There is no male-dominated religious council or market-driven share holders imposing any fashions on either gender; only the pattern of natural selection that works for the survival of the species. Biologists tell us that the more brightly decorated male will attract more females and get to spread his seed, and that the quietly garbed female will be less noticeable to predators as she sits on the nest.

Perhaps once upon a time, humans needed a similar pattern of male boldness and female blandness because of their differing roles in the wilderness, but those days are passed. Both men and women need to know and understand what forces, e.g. market or religious, are shaping their wardrobes, and be able to preserve their own dignity by making healthy choices according to their tastes and careers.

We take our housing for granted

I was recently tending a garden in downtown Guelph. The plot was close to a building and I happened to notice a shopping bag in a basement window well. Curious, I pulled the bag out of the well, and then two more bags full of clothes, and shoes and tall fashion boots, and a basket full of cosmetics, and feminine hygiene products. I could only conclude that I had found the personal closet of a homeless woman. Feeling rather awkward, I tucked everything back where I had found it.

How common is homelessness in Guelph Wellington?

A recent report by the County of Wellington, which looks after housing for both the city and the county, revealed a sampling in mid-April that estimated that there were 359 people experiencing homelessness on the day of the sample, including 55 children under the age of 18. As much as I would hope otherwise, the woman of the window well was not alone.

No doubt the extremely low apartment vacancy rate in Guelph plays a role in the problem. Guelph has the lowest vacancy rate in Canada at 0.6 per cent. Victoria and Vancouver, two of the costliest cities in Canada, are next with about twice as high a percentage, around 1.2 per cent apartment vacancy.

The county released its first affordable housing strategy in 2005. It was renewed through extensive consultation and planning to produce the 10-year Housing and Homelessness Plan in 2014. It contains the vision statement that “Everyone in Guelph Wellington can find and maintain an appropriate, safe and affordable place to call home.”

This plan contained 8 key short and long-term goals. To prevent these goals from collecting dust bunnies on the bureaucratic shelves, the county will be reporting annually on their progress. The first report was just published, and the progress indicators are encouraging on several dimensions.

One of the goals was to help low-income households close the gap between incomes and housing costs. To reach this goal, the county has entered into some significant community partnerships. Dunara House is one of the partners and provides on-site supports in a shared living environment to individuals experiencing mental health challenges. Guelph Hydro is another partner that helps make accommodations more affordable through the Low Income Energy Assistance Programme. This program subsidizes utility deposits, and replaces older appliances with models that do not cost as much to operate.

Another goal is to provide a variety of supports to rescue people at risk of losing their homes. Actions have included $177, 343 and over 500 services to prevent eviction. A Housing Stability Programme used $458,682 for 841 individuals and families to get or to remain in housing. Another partnership involves Sister Christine’s Drop-In Centre which finds housing and supports for up to 20 persons at any given time. Landlords in the region are also partners, and have been involved in landlord information sessions to better understand their role.

More affordable housing options for low-to-moderate income households was another goal. Advocacy work resulted in an increase in the affordable housing reserves in the 2015 municipal budgets. The city had been neglecting the affordable housing reserve fund, so this was a welcome change under the new mayor and council. The Investment in Affordable Housing Programme helped fund the new Michael House which will provide 8 affordable units and supports to young mothers. The county and city have also granted reduced tax ratios on multi-residential properties in hopes that the landlords will keep units more affordable.

Homelessness is a humiliating state for anyone. It is good to see that the county is leading the way, and that they have the city and other key partners to help realize their vision. Having “an appropriate, safe and affordable place to call home” should be considered a right. No one in a prosperous city like Guelph should have to live out of a window well!

The Victorian Era lurks around the corner

I attended university during the free-thinking seventies. It was very common for professors and students to wag their heads knowingly at the hypocrisy of the Victorian era. The Victorian upper class went to church on Sunday and gave alms to the poor from the profits made on the backs of those same poor people. Leaders in society professed the importance of family but winked at the their extra-marital affairs as long as they were discrete. Today we learn about Victorian hypocrisy on the popular television series Downton Abbey. We are all glad that we are no longer in living in such a judgemental society; we are free to exercise our freedoms from such religious morality, and to act on our genuine interests and desires.

But I sometimes worry that the hypocritical judgemental society is making a comeback.

I recently bumped into a friend of mine and her son in No Frills. We were near the frozen food section, and chatted for a moment. The next day she sent me an email explaining what they were doing carrying a package of chicken nuggets. Suddenly I felt like a priest hearing confession! This friend is probably one of the healthiest people I know on any dimension that could be measured. What could have given her the impression that one must excuse the purchase of chicken nuggets? But sadly, I understood her feelings exactly.

I shop for a handicapped friend of mine. This person’s medication that can dull the senses. He feels much better if he drinks Coke, so I often have 8 large bottles of Coke in my shopping cart. I put them in my cart last, and head straight for the checkout, hoping that no one sees them. At the checkout, I have to fight the urge to explain to the clerk why I am buying all this Coke.

Many people I know would not want to admit that they buy chicken nuggets, or drink Coke, or shop at Walmart. But market research shows that millions of us do. Guelph City Council fought tooth and nail to keep Walmart out of Guelph, but who were they representing? Anytime I drive by, the parking lot is full!

It seems that we are entering back into a Victorian era where the leading voices claim one moral code while society is actually dominated by another. Of course, the moral code is no longer identified with an organized religion. It is identified by secular religions like environmentalism, healthy foodism, multiculturalism or feminism. Before you drag me before the Inquisition, I need to explain that I actually support the main tenets of these “isms.” But you have to admit that there is a lot of hanky panky going on.

Take environmentalism for example. Automakers are boasting about their fuel efficient cars. We all applaud ourselves on such signs of progress! The only problem is that January sales figures in Canada show that sixty-nine per cent of all vehicles sold by the big three automakers were actually trucks and SUV’s. They have big motors and big appetites for fuel but if you ask the manufacturers, they will tell you that they are responding to consumer demand.

Our professed worship of healthy foodism is equally suspect. When it first started gaining converts, even Tim Hortons offered low fat muffins. I bought them regularly, but their shelf is now filled with things like Skor brownies! Why aren’t they selling a healthy muffin? Customers did not want them! We all profess to be more health conscious but the sales of fatty foods like chocolate and bacon have never been higher.

According to my university professors, the Victorian era was characterized by a judgemental moral code on one hand, and hypocrisy on the other. I hope we are not heading back into that era, but I would not want to be the judge of that!

Pursuing Food Security for Everyone in Guelph

Our food distribution system in North America is broken.  Recently I heard a speaker from a large produce company in Burlington estimate that up to thirty per cent of the farm harvest does not make it to the table.   This number applies to fresh and processed food. Skids and skids of canned food sit in warehouses, not making it to the shelf before its expiry date.  On one hand,  we have people going hungry and on the other hand, we have food going to waste.   Of course, the food industry has to build the cost of the waste food into its pricing structure.  Ironically, this pricing structure makes the food in grocery stores that much more expensive, and out of reach of the poor.

Some of the problem is caused by consumer pickiness.   We only want fruits and vegetables that conform to our picture of perfection.  Everything else goes to waste.  Until now.  Grocery stores in Europe have been selling ugly produce at reduced prices for several years now, and recently the leading food chain in Canada started selling “naturally imperfect” apples at roughly half the price of “perfect “ apples.  Score one for common sense, and for food security. Next step might be to train consumers that a “best before” date does not mean “toxic after.”  Most expired foods are still quite edible.

We need to find more ways to get  food efficiently from farms and canning factories onto families’ tables.  Emergency food providers are only a stop – gap measure, and even they come in different shapes in different cities.

A food bank in Woodstock works on a unique model. It has switched from handing out food to handing out food certificates.  In Woodstock, Operation Sharing hands out food cards and the people shop for themselves in retail stores and use their food card to pay.  The food cards are funded by ongoing donations collected at grocery check-out counters. This approach preserves dignity, and it also reduces the need to gather food in food drives, sort it, store it and run a storefront.

The Food Bank of Waterloo Region works on yet a different model.  It is focused more on distributing food through its member agencies than on direct handouts to needy families.  It collects and distributes food all over south-western Ontario through other Food Banks, and through neighbourhood groups.

In Guelph, we have one big Food Bank that rounds up food from producers and retailers and distributes it directly to needy families, as well as to neighbourhood groups.  Additionally, we have a number of emergency food providers that work independently of the Food Bank, such as the Salvation Army , and Hope House.  They meet needs outside of the Food Bank  and take it upon themselves to find their own sources for food and hygiene products, like the Spring Food Drive coming up at the end of May.

Guelph is  unfolding yet another model for addressing food security.  The city and the county have been working with Neighbourhood Support Coalition and the Guelph Wellington Task Force for Poverty Elimination to create a central food resource called the Seed Community Food Hub. The Hub aims to “create a space to bring people together with food to improve health, community, access and advocacy efforts.”  It will be able to create  a larger scale organization that can attract funds for cold-storage and refrigerated trucking.  So much of the fresh produce that is discarded by producers and processors could go to the emergency food providers if they had cold storage.  The Seed hopes to address that gap.  One of its unique goals will be to advocate for policies and programs that will address systemic issues.

Hopefully, concerted community efforts like the Seed will be able to move beyond the stop-gap efforts of emergency food providers and start to address the complexities of  our broken food distribution system.

Maybe the Anglican Church should repay millions in tax subsidies

While weighing in on the St. Matthias debate, the local Anglican bishop recently referred to the almost 200 years that the Anglican denomination has served Guelph.

Oddly enough, almost 200 years ago,  the Anglican Church used to own the whole township in which the St. Matthias property would have been situated! This land was part of the colonial clergy reserves set aside to support the Anglican Church.  This privilege upset a lot of people because the Anglicans were not the only denomination in Ontario; though they did make up about 30 per cent of Guelph at that time.  This injustice was one of the inciting factors of the Rebellions of 1837 (in which my direct ancestor was sentenced to hang).  Out of the rebellion came an act which reduced the Anglican share down to one-third of the clergy reserves, or about 5 percent of all the land in the province.

Times have changed. Today, it is very difficult to find institutional space in Guelph.  While the principal of a Christian school in town, I was involved in the difficult search for institutional land, and from time to time I sat listening to  local religious leaders lament having no place to locate their congregations.  Congregations can  only settle on property that is zoned institutional.  There are very few open institutional lots left in Guelph.  We can’t afford to lose any.

From its beginning, Guelph has been a planned city.  As the planners and politicians figured out the plan, some land was zoned for institutional use.  Only places for education, religion and health care are allowed in this zone, and nowhere else.  City leaders have an interest in setting enough land aside for institutional purposes because these uses contribute to the well-being of the city.  They also have an interest in not designating too much institutional land because these uses do not pay property tax.

The current debate over the use of the St. Matthias property is rather ironic.  Once upon a time the Anglican Church held this property as part of the clergy reserves.  Then in 1854, the government took control of the land, and the church was told to get in line for institutionally-zoned property.  So, the Anglican Church successfully applied for this specially-zoned land and erected the building that is there today.  And, in keeping with the privilege of institutionally-zoned land, the church paid no property taxes.  How many millions of dollars have the residents of Guelph paid to subsidize those property taxes?  And we did it gladly, because of the benefits of community space and the care of souls offered there.

Various people engaged in this debate have been making this point, and it is very valid.  When the Anglican Church obtained this land it was zoned institutional.  They knew that and they used it appropriately. They were happy to accept the limitations on that zoning at the time. They were also happy to accept the tax subsidy that went with that zoning. Now the Anglican Church wants to sell it.

Suddenly, the denomination has forgotten that the site is zoned institutional and wants to sell it to a residential builder, and one that wants to build over density in an area that is not designated for intensification!  Suddenly, the denomination has forgotten that the people in the neighbourhood  invested in that site for all these years, and it wants to cash in. Suddenly, the denomination has forgotten that this property has been subsidized all these years by the neighbours who did pay taxes, and it wants to cash in.  Maybe City Council should pass a by-law that if an institution sells its property to a non-institutional buyer, it has to pay back the property tax subsidies for all those years! If the Anglican Church wants to treat the sale of St. Matthias as a business proposition, then let the city get its fare share of the profits.

Places to Grow will demand community spaces like St. Matthias – 641 words – Bob Moor

The neighbourhood concerns over the loss of community space at the St. Matthias Anglican church building are quite valid but some of the arguments being used in the discussion belong to a different era.

The valuable contributions of churches to the city’s quality of life should be enough to convince our councillors to not re-zone the property at the corner of Edinburgh and Kortright.  It was zoned institutional for valid urban planning reasons, and nothing has changed; the neighbourhood still needs that institutional space.

Many of the reasons being given by the neighbours, however, relate to issues that probably no longer warrant the councillors’ attention. These are the issues that are raised every time someone wants to replace, or add to, a current building – more traffic, more noise, loss of privacy, shortage of parking, incompatibility with the neighbourhood, lower property values, cut-throat contractors, etc.

The reason that the councillors can no longer give these concerns the credibility that they once did is that the Queen’s Park has sent down a master plan for growth that applies to the whole province. This master plan is called Places to Grow, and we had better get used to it.

Places to Grow was released in 2006 and updated in 2013.  It is a comprehensive plan to preserve green belts by forcing  population targets on the existing urban areas.  Urban areas will must grow inward and upward but not outward.

In Places to Grow, each urban area was given population targets.  Guelph has been told to grow to 177, 000 by 2031, 184,000 by 2036, and 191,000 by 2041.  In 2014, Guelph’s population was about 129,000.  We are currently growing at about 2 per cent per year, and if we sustain that growth, we will reach the Places to Grow target of 177, 000 by 2030 but where will we put all the people if we can only grow in and up? What will that growth look like?

That kind of growth will create more density than we might like. It will mean more traffic, more noise, less privacy, scarcer parking, and more awkward, perhaps ugly, infills and additions.  Many of the complaints being brought against projects like the six-storey building on the St. Matthias’ site, or an apartment building at 15 Mont St.,  will carry little weight as Places to Grow takes over. In fact, Places to Grow is in its ninth year and those complaints do not carry much weight even now.  Of course traffic, noise and parking are not directly caused by denser housing; they are caused by our much-beloved automobiles.  As more people start walking, cycling, skateboarding and riding the bus there will be fewer complaints about traffic, noise and parking!

Another complaint is that such projects will lower property values.  Really?!  The law of supply and demand will force all property values up within all of the urban areas. If  property values in Guelph go down, it will be part of a province-wide decline. Anybody moving from the GTA will notice a huge discount and not the 3-storey addition or a six-storey low-rise next door.

And of course, some Guelphites will curse the builders.  But how are we going to reach the Places to Grow goals without new buildings? And without the builders?  No business should be given carte blanche to do as it pleases, but we are going to have to be noticeably more open to new housing ideas than Guelph’s reputation would suggest we have been.  Guelph’s zoning by-laws and building regulations have to be re-written so that the densities and flexibility implied by Places to Grow become the new baseline, and so that the builders do not have to fight to get them.

Reflective community spaces like St. Matthias need to be preserved as Places to Grow inevitably forces a more intense lifestyle on our urban centres.

I called for an ambulance and a fire truck showed up!

If someone in your neighbourhood has a serious asthma attack and calls 9-1-1,  a fire truck and four firefighters will show up! And we all wonder why.  Can you imagine calling for a taxi and having a city bus pull up at your front door?

Often someone calls for an ambulance and a fire truck shows up, the emergency services labels this a “tiered medical” response.  It is a medical call, but the response teams shows up in tiers, first the fire truck and then the ambulance.  Tiered medical responses started some thirty years ago in Ontario.

The Twitter page for @GuelphFireCalls  shows the history and type of all dispatches by Guelph’s Emergency Services. If I start to tally the calls in groups of 10, I see some averages – for any 10 calls, there are about 7 that show up as tiered medical,  1 or 2 show up as fire alarm or vehicle collision,  and 1 or 2 show up as medical only.

We are all thankful for fire fighters who reliably show up when there is a fire, or a  problem with a smoke detector or a fuel spill, but why do four fire fighters and a huge truck  show up when we call an ambulance?

When I asked a city employee this question, I was told that a fire truck is always closer to your house than an ambulance because there are six  fire halls distributed evenly across the city but only two ambulance stations.  Case closed.  But you always have to ask “Why?” one more time than an official wants to answer it.

Once upon a time, fires were considered more of an issue than health crises.  Guelph had a great fire almost 100 years that wiped out the Stewart Lumber Company and 20 other downtown businesses.  Back then, all cities lived in fear of the great fire. Due to the successful efforts of Fire Marshalls,  fires and fire fatalities are on the decline.   According to Ontario government statistics, between 2004 and 2013 the provincial population rose by 9 per cent but  building damage fires declined by  14 per cent, and fire fatalities by 22 per cent.  Every one of those fatalities was important, but in the twenty-first century there are considerably more deaths due to health emergencies than to fires.

Times have changed and you are now more likely to die of a heart attack than a fire. In fact, heart disease, as expressed in heart attacks and strokes, is the number one killer of males over 44, and of females over 64 years of age.  For the protection of life, ambulances should take precedence over fire trucks.  So why aren’t ambulances distributed as evenly across the city as fire trucks?

Guelph is not the only municipality that sends a fire truck and four fire-fighters to deal with an asthma attack.  Most municipalities across Canada, even North America, do.  Only a few municipalities in North America have employees who are qualified as both fire-fighters and paramedics with  ambulances at the fire hall.  Research into such changes show that turf wars make them almost impossible. When you blend the paramedics into the fire-department staff, to which union will the cross-trained employees belong?  Will some fire-fighters lose their jobs?  Will some keep their jobs but lose their seniority to the newly-immigrated  paramedics? Cincinnati tried for two years to work through these questions but gave up after too much resistance from the unions.

There really is no logical reason why a fire truck is always closer to your house than an ambulance,  but no City Council would be wise to enter the quagmire of trying to bring  a more rational model for emergency delivery services to its jurisdiction.  It would take a bold provincial initiative to create a system that sends an ambulance and two paramedics as the first responders to the next medical crises in your neighbourhood.

St. George’s Square will separate leadership styles

St. George’s Square was one of the last topics for the old City Council and one of the first for the new.  The last Council passed the concept in principle, and it looks like the new Council won’t get a chance to re-open the topic.  To me, the project is one of those dividing lines between different types of leadership.

Some leaders have their own vision of the way things should be and lead the charge out ahead of the masses. Some leaders let the popular sentiment define the way things should be, and then they put the mechanisms in place to bring that to pass.

We often think that populist leaders are conservatives but actually they have been found wearing every political stripe.  Populist federal politicians in Canada have included: William Lyon Mackenzie King, Canada’s longest serving Prime Minister and a Liberal; John Diefenbaker, the Conservative Prime Minister in the late 50’s and early 60’s; and Tommy Douglas, founder of the NDP.

However, Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau who brought home the Constitution was a visionary.  Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper likes to portray himself as a populist, but is actually a visionary, or at least an ideologue  with his own definition of Canada that is not up for discussion.

How does this relate to St. George’s Square?

While running for Council in the fall, I talked with over 1000 voters.  On the topic of St. George’s Square, the responses fell into three groups.  Some people showed no interest; they never went downtown and did not care what happened there.  Most people had a  concept of downtown, but did not support the change.  They thought the problem in the square was the social climate not physical layout.  Business owners did not support the change because it is unclear how the square will actually be used.  They remember that the Sleeman Centre was supposed to attract people downtown but it sits empty outside of hockey season. Others did not see the square as a spending priority and also resented the higher maintenance costs for the new configuration. Some felt that Market Square provided for the benefits that any square could bring.  Only a minority of people wanted the new square and were willing to pay for it.

Those who wanted the new square usually appealed to what they had seen as tourists in  Europe.  Countless cities in Europe have a square in the centre that is the social and cultural heart of the city. Oddly enough, I met a lot of European immigrants in Ward 3, but if they spoke about the square, it was usually in opposition to the 6 million dollar expense. Some supporters referred to the Market Square in Pittsburgh that was a successful remake of a downtown space.

So the populist leaders on Council would listen to the overwhelming majority of the people who do not support a re-make of the square.   It really would be an easy decision because the popular sentiment is so obvious.  The streets would be torn up for the  new infrastructure, and everything would be cleaned up and put back the way it is now.

The visionary leaders on Council would  go out in front of the majority and appeal to their own perception of what is better.  The majority of people may not want the expense of re-doing the square, but visionary leaders can see that it will never be cheaper to re-create St. George’s Square.  The majority of people think that Guelph already has a positive city-image, but the visionary leaders  hope that a new square would make it even better. The visionary leaders also have a sense of being entrusted with the City’s heritage, and want to enshrine John Galt’s European vision for a central meeting place.

The choice is clear: populist or visionary.  There is no middle ground on St. George’s Square.

Time to trim, not add, executive positions at City Hall

Recently I wrote a column comparing Guelph with Barrie and Kingston, two similar-sized single-tier cities, and showed that they were alike in many respects until one considered the provincial $100,000 “Sunshine List” .  Kingston has 50 positions on the list, while Barrie has 54, but Guelph has 84!  I concluded that over the years, Guelph City Council has allowed our bureaucracy to become top heavy.

To look a little deeper into this situation, I grouped the staffing positions into general categories and looked at positions and salaries within each category.  I am not looking at individuals because the City Staff that I have met are dedicated workers. That is not my point.

All cities have a group of employees who provide legal and court services, so let’s make that a category.  Both Barrie and Kingston have 3 positions in this category and their salaries total $400,000 give or take.  Guelph has 6 positions in this category with a total salary of $733,000.  You can see that average salaries are not the problem; we just have too many people drawing those average salaries.  Maybe we could blame the previous administration for being quite litigious, e.g. fighting the Public Health Unit  and then Urbacon. We can only hope that, after losing these cases,  we have learned our lesson to be less litigious, and can bring our staff size for this category in line with similar-sized cities.

Sometimes we do have more “Sonshine” positions and are paying more at the same time. For example, Barrie shows one Library CEO at $124,000 on the list. Guelph shows three librarians on the Sunshine list – an Assistant CEO near Barrie’s figure, but then a CEO at $147,000 and a Director of Branch Bookmobile Services at $105,000.

Usually, Guelph just has more middle managers who have made it onto the Sunshine list.  Let’s look at Information Technology.  Barrie shows a Director and a Manager on the list for about $255,000.  Kingston shows a CIO and a Director on the list for about $255,000. Guelph shows a General Manager, 2 Managers and  2 Specialists for a total of about $560,000.

Human Relations shows a similar pattern. Barrie has a Director and a Manager whose salaries total about $261,000.  Kingston has a Director and a Manager at a total cost of  about $255,000.  Guelph has an Executive Director, a General Manager and 2 Managers at a total of $438,000.

I was a Chief Operating Officer for 25 years, so I know the pattern.  It is appealing to hire more employees to do the existing jobs that never quite get done, and then to add new responsibilities to justify the job description.  Instead of working smarter, it is easier to just hire another staff member.  Remember that the salary figure mentioned for the new position needs to be supplemented by almost twenty per cent  for benefits. Remember that last year’s contributions to the reserve for post-employment benefits for today’s employees, i.e. medical and dental benefits for eligible retirees, WSIB benefits, and retirement benefits, cost $3.7 million.  In order to keep covering the large staff and their benefit contributions, capital budgets suffer and overdue infrastructure projects keep getting put off.

Guelph is a very amicable city. The residents of Guelph are friendly people and they like to be liked by others. The desire to be amicable and to be liked have led Council to create too many well-paid middle management positions over the years. The proposal to create more managers at Guelph Municipal Holdings (GMH) is a case in point. When   GMH was proposed all executive roles were to be covered by existing city officers. It is time for Council to say, ‘No more new management positions. Let’s use attrition and lateral moves to trim existing  management positions, and empower front line staff to make more decisions. Let’s bring our corporate structure in line with similar-sized cities.”