Open Sources Show Notes for Thursday February 23, 2017

This week on Open Sources Guelph, we will ponder a week a week without Trump, or at least we’ll try to. It’s hard to separate the larger-than-life current POTUS from just about any discussion about the news, but we’ve heard your cries for relief and we’ll try and give it to you… In the second half of the show. First, we’ll talk about how White House policy is making people run for the border, and not in a delightful Taco Bell way, and then we’ll look at how alt-right darling Milo Yiannopoulos finally went too far. After the break, it’s all about electoral reform Guelph-style, and why the NDP can’t seem to shake the Mulcair-effect, even if they want to.

This Thursday, February 23, at 5 pm, Scotty Hertz and Adam A. Donaldson will discuss:

1) Fleeing From America. Looks like Canada now has to worry about streams of people coming over our southern border. Spurned by President Donald Trump’s much maligned executive order banning travel from seven majority Muslim countries, and the unprecedented widespread rounding up of undocumented immigrants by Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) agents, hundreds of people are fleeing across the 49th parallel. Refugee centres in Manitoba and Quebec are filling up, people are braving extreme cold weather and suffering the effects in order to make into Canada, and relief agencies are being overwhelmed by the influx. So what is Canada to do, and how much of this can be blamed on You-Know-Who?

2) Milo, Sell High. He’s a man so horrible that U.C. Berkley threw a riot to keep him from speaking, but just when it looked like Milo Yiannopoulos was going to be the unstoppable face and voice of the alt-right, he went and shot himself in the foot. Both feet actually. After making some inappropriate comments where he basically tried to normalize pedophilia, Milo lost his speaking spot at C-PAC and he then he lost his book deal. It’s good news for Milo-haters who saw him as being just shy of the new incarnation of the devil himself, but is Yiannopoulos just part of a new wave of pundit that sees more dollar signs being hated than being fair and balanced?

3) Local Solutions. Last Thursday, a group of Guelphites concerned about the lack of desire to move forward with electoral reform, decided to take matters into their own hands and workshop a potential solution. Democracy Guelph thinks they have the answer to resolve all the conflicting goals of everyone on the issue in a new voting system called Local Proportional Representation, and now they want to take to the people, and more importantly, Guelph MP Lloyd Longfield, who wants to continue acting on the issue despite his leader’s hesitancy. Might LPR be the electoral reform silver bullet we’ve all been waiting for? And might there be widespread support to get Justin Trudeau to check it out? Learn more about LPR on Guelph Politico.

4) Should He Stay or Should He Go? Last year, only 48 per cent of the New Democrats gathered in Edmonton wanted him to stick around as the leader of the NDP, but Tom Mulcair may still have political life after that stinging rebuke. Perhaps in the midst of a so far lackluster (perhaps barely existent) leadership race, a number of NDP members are warming again to Mulcair as suggested in a recent National Post story, but while the people are starting to love him again, Mulcair is staying firm that he read the writing on the wall, and he plans to leave political life at the end of the year. So now the question is, will he have any other choice but to stay?