Open Sources Show Notes for Thursday November 23, 2017

There are no easy answers on this week’s Open Sources Guelph. The year 2017 will likely go down as the one where everything changed for women in the workplace, and the allegations keep coming in against more and more powerful men, and we’ll talk about the latest on the political side of things. Also, college students are finally back at school, but the real question is what have they lost? We see again that these vaunted pipeline projects also lose, even if they win, and people in Toronto are wondering if they’ve gained something by getting rid of traffic from a key section of King Street.

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

1) It’s Worse Than You Think. What began with an expose on movie producer Harvey Weinstein and his decades of sexual assault, harassment and general abuse, has turned into what may be the defining issue of our time concerning gender relations. Trickling now into the political realm, we’ve seen several women speak out against Alabama senate candidate Roy Moore, some of who were underage when he allegedly preyed on them in 1970s. We’ve seen two women accuse Sen. Al Franken of inappropriate touching now, and earlier this week Charlie Rose was fired from all his gigs after multiple allegations were reported in the media. There’s even renewed pressure now on President Donald Trump for the multiple allegations against him. Two old white guys will offer analysis.

2) Back to School. After five weeks, the longest college strike in Ontario came to an unceremonious, and controversial, end when teachers, librarians and other employees of the province’s 24 colleges were ordered back to work. Originally aiming for an unanimous vote, the Ontario government had to be satisfied with a party line majority after a weekend debate session, but the result is the same as everyone is now back at work or back in class. The fallout of all this though is likely to persist for a while, as the underlining issues of the overabundance of part-time and contract work remain unresolved, but there’s also the issue of the students, and whether their semester can be saved with a truncated schedule. What’s next for Ontario’s colleges, their students and faculty?

3) Keystone Unlocked. In what was supposed to be the last major hurdle before construction could proceed, Nebraska’s Public Service Commission approved the route for the Keystone XL pipeline that was, admittedly, 30 kilometres east of the approved route, but a greenlight is a greenlight, right? Not so fast because the new route can open up the project to new legal challenges, which makes this not so much a done deal as another deal in progress. Meanwhile, already completed portions of Keystone have sprung a leak in South Dakota, which is not exactly going to rally support, no matter how enthusiastic that support is. So will we ever see the Keystone built, or is it damned forever to legal purgatory?

4) The King’s Street. The City of Toronto has begun a year-long pilot project to see if prioritizing street cars along a busy section of King Street might yield a better traffic flow. Predictably, this has not come without controversy. From the left, people are arguing that pedestrians and cyclists aren’t getting their share of fair treatment on the road, and from the right, it’s been said that the pilot, one week in, is “killing” restaurants and small businesses along King. The TTC says that streetcar users are loving the new commute, but mayoral prospect Doug Ford is saying he’ll terminate the project in the unlikely event he’s elected mayor. We’ll talk about the benefits and challenges so far in terms of making transit a priority.