Open Sources Show Notes for Thursday August 17, 2017

So what did you do last weekend? Chances are you neither stood for, or against, Nazism and white supremacy, but on this week’s edition of Open Sources Guelph, we will look at someplace that’s change the face, or perhaps revealed the face, of modern America this past Saturday in Virginia. We will dedicate some overtime to that subject this week, and then we will talk about why it’s hard out there to be Conservative in Ontario right now, and what an east coast newspaper’s going to do now that a very long-term strike is over.

This Thursday, August 17, at 5 pm, Scotty Hertz and Adam A. Donaldson will discuss:

1) Progressive Inconsistency. With less than a year to go before the provincial election, the Ontario Progressive Conservative party is getting its slate of candidates together to take on Kathleen Wynne and the Liberals. Or at least they should be, but it seems like they’re too busy fighting themselves right now. There are allegations of ballot stuffing in Hamilton and Ottawa, and executive members in Newmarket quit en masse in protest of their own nominating process. Here in Guelph, one of four people up for the PC candidacy quit because he didn’t like what’s going on in his own party, which begs the question: What is going on with the PCs? Former Guelph PC nominee Thomas Mooney will join us.

2) Strike Off! After over a year-and-a-half on strike, the workers of the Chronicle Herald are heading back to work. Well, not all of them. Of the original 61 reporters, editors, photographers, columnists and support staff when the strike began, only 52 remain, but not all of them still have a job with the paper; 25 are returning to the newsroom, one is going to the Cape Breton Post and 26 are being laid off. Is this the deal these workers wanted when they hit the picket line almost two years ago? Unlikely, but was it worth it? That is the question that will persist going forward, and that’s the question we’ll tackle this week on the show.

3) Charlottesville. It was a long time coming… The resurgent white nationalist movement that’s been gaining steam in the last couple of years held a demonstration in the Virginia town over the fact that a Robert E. Lee statue was about to be removed. The inevitable clash with anti-racist protestors led to an even more startling event in the death of Heather Heyer, an Ohio man a little too infatuated with the losing side of World War II allegedly ran over her and 19 others. To top it all off, President Donald Trump did next to nothing to counter the hatred, and then he blamed the media for making a big deal out of it. So there’s an awful lot to explore, and we’re going to spend the first half of the show exploring it.