Open Sources Show Notes for Thursday August 10, 2017

This may be a shortened work week, but the length of Open Sources Guelph stays exactly the same. This week, we’ll welcome back out local provincial representative to the show and talk to her about all the things going on at Queens Park, and the countdown to next year’s election. In news, we’ll look at another election, the one to find a new NDP leader, and we’ll talk about a new develop in Syria and ask, are there any good guys left there?

This Thursday, August 10, at 5 pm, Scotty Hertz and Adam A. Donaldson will discuss:

1) Orange Gush. It’s getting close to crunch time for the four remaining candidates in the NDP leadership race, as the window to buy a membership and vote in this October’s leadership convention closes in just a couple of weeks. So how are things shaping up? Since last time we talked about this, the race has lost Peter Julian; his support had to go somewhere and, well, late-comer to the race Jagmeet Singh seems to have pulled into the lead. Money talks, and Singh’s got it right now, but Nikki Ashton, Charlie Angus and Guy Caron are not out yet, so why is this race still not making more noise? Is the NDP too nice?

2) Can’t Be Worse. “Everyone in Syria is bad now.” That insight comes from Carla Del Ponte, one of the three-member commission investigating human rights abuses in Syria. She just quit after five years because it “does absolutely nothing.” And Del Ponte was not some dyed in the wool optimist either. She’s investigated war crimes in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia too, but apparently things are so bad in Syria after six years of civil war, one of the people in that specialize in war crimes is now admitting that the country is a lost cause. If that’s true, what do we do? And if it’s not, who’s left that can be trusted?

3) Liz Laments. It’s been a while since we’ve had our local MPP in studio with us, and this may be the last time before Ontarians go to the polls on June 7, but we’ll welcome back Liz Sandals to the show this week as we talk about a variety of topics concerning the latest provincial matters. Since we were last joined by Sandals, she’s traded positions in the cabinet, helped announce a lot of good money in infrastructure and other investment coming to Guelph, and got into a wee bit of trouble talking about what kind of people do (and don’t) take the GO Train. We’ll talk about all that with Sandals, and try to suss out her plans for 2018, and maybe try one more time to get her on Twitter…