Open Sources Show Notes for Thursday June 15, 2017

This week on Open Sources Guelph, Anarchy in the U.K.! Moments after the show ended last week, the returns in the U.K.’s snap election started coming in, and they were surprising. We’ll break down the results and what it means for Brexit, the young people who were against it and the old people that have forgotten they were for it. We’ll also talk about *why* you might have to celebrate Canada 150 sober, why you can now blaspheme to your heart’s content, and maybe why Ontario should have just one Board of Education.

This Thursday, June 15, at 5 pm, Scotty Hertz and Adam A. Donaldson will discuss:

1) Jeremy Ain’t Broken. In a surprise upset that once again disgraced the good name of pollsters, Theresa May’s slam-dunk electoral victory, and Jeremy Corbyn’s swift trip to oblivion was not how the snap U.K. election turned out. In what’s been considered a swift blow to growing populism, May lost her majority, was forced to team-up with the ultra right DUP to form a government and is now in a weak position to begin to negotiate Brexit next week. Corbyn, meanwhile, delivered the greatest Labour victory since 1945, and all the centrist members anxious to get rid of him now have to kiss his ring. What happened?

2) Drinks Up! A strike at the LCBO five days before the start of a long weekend?! Quel horreur? What will our province do if precious libations are kept from them on a summer holiday weekend? Here’s a better question: What is this planned job action by LCBO employees represented by the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU) planning on striking against (or in favour of)? Bet you don’t know because there’s been a pathetic lack of explanation from the mainstream media. So we’ll do the work they won’t. What’s this strike about? What’s the Ontario government holding out from the union?

3) Free Blasphemy. At long last, the people of Canada can blaspheme without the fear of Johnny Law coming down on them like a ton of bricks. Okay, so there hasn’t been much of a chance of that for at least two decades, but that’s Canada, around the world you can still get in trouble for, to use the textbook definition, “the act or offense of speaking sacrilegiously about God or sacred things.” Stephen Fry was basically investigated in Ireland for talking like an atheist, and a man is going on trial in Denmark for burning a Koran. So why is Canada seemingly like the only place in the world that’s basically making it okay to be thoroughly secular?

4) Board to Death. Spontaneously, a couple of different think pieces have been written in the last week asking a simple question: Isn’t it time for one school board in Ontario? The idea of getting rid of the Catholic Board of Education was a boutique issue in the last provincial election, and with another vote coming up next year, might the issue get more prominence? Is it past time to merge the boards into a singular, secular school system and stop divesting our resources? Would it solve some of the other problems with the education system, lack of French teachers for example, if we weren’t separating our efforts into two equal piles? (Good thing that blasphemy law’s been repealed.)