If June Hofland was in a conflict when council discussed a planning application for the old LaFarge lands, then so were Kovach and Bell in their separate situations.

When our city councillors get their teeth into year two of this term, conflict of interest ought to be high on their to-do list. Any policy of this nature needs to be clear and consistent. It must be easy to understand, easy to follow and equally applicable to everyone.

In 2008, during her first term in office, Coun. Hofland was faced with a decision about whether or not to get involved in a debate and a vote over development in her neighbourhood. At the time, Costco was on the verge of locating on land adjacent to Howitt Park.

Before her election, Hofland was the president of the Howitt Park Neighbourhood Association. It had campaigned against the development as it stood at the time. She got advice from her lawyer that she ought to declare a “pecuniary interest” because of the impact the development could have on property values in the area.

Fair enough. She followed legal advice. There were enough other votes at the table to make sure the city’s interests were looked after. I bring this up now only because of the interpretation of pecuniary interest.

Compare it to the Police Services Board. Councillor Kovach’s daughter is a police officer. The board negotiates and sets salaries, benefits and working conditions for all officers. Kovach was representing the employer on decisions that affected her own daughter. She had a legal opinion that this did not constitute a conflict of interest. Again, fair enough.

Two lawyers, two opinions. Both different.

Now enter Bob Bell. He sits on the board of the Guelph Non-Profit Housing Corporation. He wasn’t appointed to the position by council. He tells me he sits on it as a private citizen. He doesn’t live in non-profit housing. He has a very nice place on the river side of Arthur St. N. He doesn’t develop new housing. He doesn’t personally benefit from any housing decisions made by either council or the corporation.

Yet he was thought to be in a conflict when a council committee was discussing an affordable housing initiative. I can’t see it, but maybe a third lawyer could.

Hofland, Kovach and Bell. Three different situations. Three different interpretations.

Yet where there is money involved, even if slight, it can pass without notice. Police Services is one of two public boards that puts extra money in a councillor’s pocket. It’s only a couple of thousand dollars a year, but it helps pay the bills.

The Grand River Conservation Authority pays a per meeting rate plus expenses, for about $2,500 a year. Bell tells me the rest pay nothing.

Councillors who want to put their names forward for either of these positions should declare a pecuniary interest and stand aside from the decision.

Better yet, council should adopt a policy that they will not accept any additional remuneration for sitting on a board. Not take the money and voluntarily give it to charity. Don’t take it at all. That’s what their salary is supposed to cover.

A clear conflict of interest policy should not restrict councillors from arguing passionately about causes they support. That’s what politicians are do. The policy separates public and personal interests and protects both.

It’s one of the good fences that make good neighbours.

Some deal with matters in which the provincial government needs to get involved.

Two key ones are the public health board and the Ontario Municipal Board. It is too late now for anyone to prevent surrounding municipalities from spending our money without our consent. It is not too late to ask our MPP, Liz Sandals, to step up and do what it takes to make sure this can’t happen again.

Let’s hope it is not too late for the municipal board to change its focus away from the health of large developers and towards supporting the goals and objectives of cities.

We are going to be coming up against this very soon. The company that wants to build two gigantic rooming houses on the corner of Gordon and Stone has already announced its intention to go to the OMB. The city has not issued a formal decision on their application, but did go beyond the established deadline for doing so. Council should now clearly and firmly express its opposition to the proposal and commit itself to a vigorous defence of its position at the OMB hearings.

The residences are clearly rooming houses, not apartments. Bedrooms with private baths and shared living rooms are rented to individual students. It is a clear violation of our rooming house bylaw. The university, the Central Student Association and the surrounding neighbourhood association all expressed valid objections to the construction.

The Ontario Municipal Board should not have the power to come into a community and run roughshod over its wishes.

I am not the first person to say this. Dalton McGuinty did in 2002 when he was leader of the opposition. He called for reform of the municipal board as recently as the last provincial election. But it still hovers around in the background, substantially unchanged.

When local politicians consider planning and development issues, they should look exclusively at where they want to bring the city. They can’t do that if they must constantly have an eye out for what the OMB might decide. They are second guessing themselves before coming up with their first guess. That’s not fair to anyone.

The time has long passed for the provincial government to live up to its promises. Both the Liberals and the NDP are officially in favour of OMB reform. They should make it happen now.

There are other relationship repairs in the hopper, for which we should all be grateful. The city has told the County of Wellington that it  “is interested in being an active participant in the development of the 10 year Housing and Homelessness Plan” required under the new Housing Services Act. This is the Liberal legislation that finally replaces the old Conservative Social Housing Reform Act.

The County of Wellington is the defined “service manager” for social housing providers in the city and the county. They do a good job of it. While the city moves forward with its own affordable housing strategy, it should also look for more ways to work closely with Wellington and Guelph Housing Services. It is much better to co-operate and share resources than to reinvent the wheel.

If the city is still in the mood to fix things up and do business differently, I have another renovation to suggest. It’ll have to wait until next week, though.

It was always good. The Thai-inspired orange chicken curry never disappointed, but the West African lamb curry usually won an internal debate about what to order. Put a plate of chicken satay in front of Lynne and she’ll be your friend forever.

The restaurant (the car in this little comparison) was 35 years old. The city – the truck – is 185. It’s been in the shop a lot lately. Robbins claims it collided with him just as it was coming out from a major overhaul.

He says he is a casualty of the lengthy construction project at city hall. Businesses up and down the street were hit hard over the past few years. There’s no doubt about that. But was it the fatal blow? Like many collisions, there were several contributing causes.

It doesn’t make sense that construction would be the sole cause. If it was, why wait until it is all but over? Why tough it out for all those years, only to close up when the street is getting back to life again, regaining the vitality that has always made it a prime retail area?

We ate there many times over the past few years. Every winter we get the Borealis Series at the River Run. Five concerts, with supper. Carden Street was always busy. We always had to reserve a table. The customer base was as loyal as any owner could want. The place was packed all last weekend, right up until the doors were locked for the last time.

Some staff members were willing, eager even, to buy the business and keep it running. They considered it back in 2007, but an assortment of personal reasons worked against the purchase. Robbins bought it. He was working there at the time.

A similar sale now would have solved two problems. It would have kept the business running, and it would have relieved at least some of Robbins’ stresses.

Another factor was more compelling than the construction and any offers to purchase. The building owner, Milan Lesic, wanted a five-year lease. Robbins wanted shorter. Rather than spend time debating the matter, the landlord signed with someone else who will open a different restaurant in the same location.

Lesic didn’t get where he is by being the first to blink in a standoff over leases. There are shopkeepers all over downtown who know this.

One thing sours the taste of the cheese cake. It’s one blemish in the legacy. They were still selling gift certificates right through the Christmas shopping period. More than one Guelph fireside stocking held one when Santa climbed back on his sleigh on Christmas morning. If they weren’t used by last Sunday, they never will be.

Leading into the holiday, Robbins knew his lease wasn’t being renewed. He had already begun looking for people to buy the fixtures. So why take money for something that would probably never be used?

Within the past month, two of my favourite eateries have closed. First, Latino’s. Then Carden Street. It is sad, but it’s the nature of the business. Good new restaurants will rise to fill the void. Some might live for 35 years, many won’t. I’ll miss the ones that close. I’ll welcome the new ones that open.

As far as the collision goes, don’t blame the truck driver. It wasn’t all her fault.

There are over 9,000 co-ops in Canada with more than 18 million members. Thirty-two of them are in Guelph. Most local co-op activity is in three key areas: housing, banking and agriculture.

We have six housing co-ops with a combined capacity of about 375 homes. In addition to this, the Guelph Campus Co-operative provides housing through 40 apartments and seven houses with a total of 47 rooms.

Credit unions are financial co-operatives, and Guelph has several. Meridian, the largest credit union in Ontario, has four branches in town. Your Neighbourhood Credit Union, DUCA Financial Services and St. Stanislaus – St. Casimir’s each have one. Guelph’s co-operative community includes the headquarters of one of Canada’s  largest full-service insurance companies.

There are six co-ops in town providing child care services. The three Planet Bean outlets are owned by the Sumac Community Worker Co-operative.
In addition to these, there are agricultural co-ops such as Gay-Lea Foods, Ag Energy, Genex, Ontario Lamb Producers, Organic Meadow and UPI Energy.  We have a car co-op, a natural burial co-op, an energy co-op, a solar power co-op, and a technology and design cluster co-op.

The story of co-ops in Guelph goes back as far as 1904 when the Guelph Bakery Co-op was formed. The owner of the Royal Knitting Mill and a former mayor of Guelph, Samuel Carter developed other co-ops in the early 20th century. In 1909 he was elected the first president of the Co-operative Union of Canada.

The theme adopted by the UN for 2012 is “Co-operative Enterprises Build a Better World.” It’s true. They do. In the financial meltdowns of 2008 and 2011, when many privately owned banks went under, no credit unions failed. Quite the opposite. Lloyds, the giant British bank that received a government bailout in 2009, is now owned by The Co-operative Group.

Co-operatives are businesses, and, like any other, they exist to turn a profit. The difference is in where the profit goes. Not to distant shareholders. Not to speculators and market manipulators. All surplus is returned to the members. The people who own and control the business.

The International Co-operative Alliance provides some statistics to show the strength of the sector. It has over a billion members around the world. The 300 largest co-ops have a combined revenue of just over a trillion dollars. Co-ops employ 100 million people worldwide, 20 per cent more than multi-national corporations. Thirteen per cent of the world’s population belong to financial co-operatives that have combined assets of $1.35 trillion.

Considering the scope of the international co-operative movement, it is surprising that so little is known about it in North America. If the United Nations gets its way – and it usually does – that will change this year. The change starts a week from today, on Thursday Jan. 12. That’s when the Canadian launch of the IYC takes place in 14 cities across the country.

The official Ontario kick-off is at Guelph City Hall at 11:30 a.m. The event starts with a speech from our mayor and includes the distribution of small, hand-held flags and raising the official IYC flag. At noon, an invitation-only event moves over to the Co-operators building on Macdonell Street to watch the live ceremonies from Ottawa and have lunch.

Come out and celebrate the co-op spirit. You probably either belong to, or do business with, one of them. More than 18 million of us do.

Every year it was a variation on what, I am sure, is the most common annual theme: becoming a better person through a healthier lifestyle. A noble goal.

For me, it usually involved a pledge to stop smoking. I did eventually quit six years ago, but it wasn’t a resolution that did the trick. A heart attack made me realize smokers are a dying breed. We get to choose between smoking and breathing. We can do one or the other, but not both.

That heart attack did me so much good I’m inclined to make a resolution to have a few more.

As I think about that, I’ll also mull over some noteworthy occurrences of the year.

For example, our governing Conservative Party. They brought dishonesty and profligate spending to a new level. This past year we have seen the following lies, and many more: Peter MacKay about using a search and rescue helicopter as his personal taxi; John Duncan about the situation in Attawapiskat; Tony Clement about wild spending on frivolities in his home town during the G-8 meetings in Huntsville; and Peter Kent about the Kyoto Protocol.

They should try to go a full month without telling a whopper, just to see if they can.

We learned about the amount of spying the government does on its own citizens. Undercover police infiltrated some of the more radical groups planning protests against the G-20 meetings in Toronto in the summer of 2010. It turns out the infiltrators urged them on to more and more ludicrous and dangerous forms of protest.

If the mayhem in Toronto was a top story in 2010, the role of our government in organizing it should top the 2011 list. Except that it still hasn’t been properly investigated.

At the provincial level, the big story for Guelph should be the Health Protection Act allowing Wellington and Dufferin counties to spend our money without our consent. Their plan to add $10 million to our tax bill revealed a gaping flaw in the governance of public health in Ontario. The province should shoulder some responsibility for this and give some relief to the city.

A breaking provincial story as we move into 2012 is the preservation of the old-growth red pine forest in Temagami. Mining interests want to plunder the area, and Natural Resources Minister Michael Gravelle is playing footsie with them. Premier Dalton McGuinty can’t be just a little bit green. He can’t work for the environment through a Green Energy Act, then work against it when it comes time to protect sensitive areas such as this. Consistency has always been his Achilles heel.

The municipal story of the year should be how city council – and through them our mayor – gets blamed for everything that goes wrong. Senior staff turnover, construction delays, smelly compost, the GO train pulling in three minutes late. It’s always the mayor’s fault.

Will she also get the credit for the biggest story to close out the year? Some university researchers in Toronto compared 378 North American cities to see which would be most suitable for Santa Claus if global warming forced him off the North Pole.

One of the researchers said they “used data from Statistics Canada and the United States Census Bureau to determine the number of cookie factories; milk producers; doll, toy and game manufacturing factories; postal workers and couriers; and department stores in each city.”

Guelph came first. Again. Thank you, madam Mayor and councillors.

The most deserving recipient of a lump of coal this year has to be our downtown stable mate. The downtown daily should be thoroughly embarrassed by its 59 Carden St. blog.

For those who don’t know, a blog is an Internet thing where you can comment on the content. I have one, and every week I post these columns to it. Anyone can post a response, but few do.

The Carden St. one is a cesspool of anonymous and ignorant comments. A few people post over their real names, but not many. Some anonymous comments are thoughtful and well presented. Most are not. It is a cacophony of complaints posted by obstinately mindless blowhards.

The paper never prints anonymous letters to the editor about its articles. It shouldn’t allow anonymous blog comments, either. I say that after having done so twice during a discussion of economic inequality.

Mind you, most online news outlets that allow reader comments are in the same boat. The CBC website, for example, can be just as bad.

These forums are ditches on the edge of the information superhighway, and the comments are the litter and broken beer bottles clogging them up.

No editor should moan about a decline in the quality of public discourse while allowing this to continue.

What about the mugs of eggnog? There are several deserving recipients out around town.

I’ll raise a glass to all those who did their Christmas shopping in locally owned independent businesses. They bring a whole new dimension to the “occupy” movement that dominated the news for much of the second half of the year.

Opinion polls showed that a majority of Canadians supported the goals of the movement. December is a good month to put our money where our mouths are.
We can stop feeding the “one per cent” by refusing to give them our money.

The majority of the retail sector is controlled by a few giant corporations. There are a lot of local enterprises much more deserving of our financial support. Downtown is full of them, but they can be found all over.

Except for the east side, of course. It’s practically devoid of shops, big or small.

Some eggnog should also go to the city councillors and staff people who endured a steady barrage of unwarranted criticism over construction on Carden Street and at the organics composting plant. Both were plagued by problems, but the city will be a better place when they are completed.

It was tough to tell the Carden Street merchants to be patient, that better days are around the corner. They are turning the corner now, and their businesses will be better for it. It is just as hard telling it to the residents on Stone Road. They will also get to the corner soon. It’s Maple Reinders’ job to get them there quickly.

A final toast to all those who have a five-month old puppy roaming the house. My wee Westie is charging around my desk right now, attacking a squeaky toy with great gusto.

I bought a book on puppy training at the Friends’ giant book sale in October. He ate it.

Will I ever be able to leave my socks on the floor again? Can my table legs hold up for another few months?

Here’s to Charlie and to all of you. Have a good one on Sunday.

Councillors just completed the first year of this term, and their second budget. Contrast this year’s budget process to last to get an idea of how far they have come.

Last year they went to midnight on two consecutive evenings. This year was more orderly, a lot less confrontational, and achieved a better result.

No budget ever makes everyone happy. The most recent one is no exception. Even still, it met many present needs and laid the ground for future ones. It showed a maturity that is far too often lacking in local governments. Our councillors, and the city staff who help them get things done, should be congratulated.

There are defining characteristics of maturity, whether personal or institutional. One is the ability to see yourself as you are, and to use this awareness to make improvements.

This council prides itself – and often reminds us – that it is “doing business differently.” Although I don’t always agree that different is necessarily better, they are getting results.

Last week when a manager put in his resignation, after less than six months on the job, he publicized a report that he thought would show how poorly the city is run. In fact, it does the opposite.

First and foremost, the report showed that council recognized there is trouble in the system that needs to be fixed. That’s a good thing, isn’t it?

It also shows that our councillors keep a watchful eye on developers. They don’t shut them out, but neither do they give a free pass. If the development community had its way, we’d have 18-storey condos up and down Gordon Street and all around the downtown. Another reason to be glad we have the council we do.

The developers need to sit back and listen to their old Rolling Stones records. You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes,  you’ll get what you need.

It’s the job of government to put in the checks and balances that protect the public interest while allowing the private sector to operate.

In my youth I would occasionally do something that brought unhappy consequences. If I tried to avoid them my mother had a simple response. “You made your bed,” she would say. “Now lie in it.” The logic was as inescapable as the trouble I faced.

Gloria Kovach should have known my mother. If she had, she might now be more willing to accept that her time on the Guelph Police Services Board is over.

At a meeting of city council on Dec. 13, 2010, councillors split up their responsibilities on committees and public boards.

Kovach had been on the Police Services Board for eight years. She wanted more, but other councillors wanted their turn. She made a case that the board chair was leaving, the deputy chief was retiring and the chief would soon follow. There was a need for continuity during the transition.

Her colleagues agreed and offered her a chance to stay another year. She accepted.

Now the chickens are coming home to roost. She is being called on her agreement. In all her public wailings about being treated unfairly, she relies on the motion that appointed her for four years. She has not denied she made a decision she now regrets.

Government demands integrity. We saw it when council faced up to the need to find ways to improve the way the city operates.

We don’t see it in Kovach’s refusal to lie in the bed she made.

A lot of people still get excited at this time of year and moan about great Canadian traditions being taken away from us. It’s not happening. There is nothing to be afraid of.

If you want to say Merry Christmas – or Happy Hanukah, Calm Kwanzaa, Serene Solstice, or whatever – to everyone you know, cut loose and do it. Have fun. Celebrate. No one is stopping you. No foreign culture is taking over the country and telling you what you can or can’t do.

Holiday observances are annual milestones on the winding road that takes us all from here and now to there and then. Enjoy them on your own terms and at your own pace. Let other people have their own fun at their time of the year. Stop pretending there is some sort of thought police killing your fun. They’re not out there.

Stores and institutions that deal with the public need to recognize all these cultural observances, many of which converge at this time of year. Listing them all would take too much ink and steal space from the important information, like what’s on sale this week.

The flyers that come with the Trib every Thursday already weigh in at about two kilos a week. It’s easier for them to lump it all together into one Happy Holidays message. You don’t have to. Let’s not make it any more complicated than it needs to be.

If you want to worry about a precious Canadian tradition being under attack, worry about our Parliament. It is supposed to be a sanctuary for truth and honesty. It is supposed to be the place where the governing party  is held accountable for its actions. Or so the story goes.

Recent episodes with Defence Minister Peter MacKay and Minister of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development John Duncan show how severely this institution has been damaged.

Duncan says his department only became aware of problems in Attawapiskat on Oct. 28. Chuck Strahl, the former Minister of Indian Affairs, told CBC Radio the town “has been a slow-moving train wreck for a long time.”

Peter MacKay says he used a rescue helicopter for important government business and to practise their search and rescue abilities. He was really trying to save himself about an hour and a half of travel time from a ritzy Newfoundland fishing camp.

Anyone who truly cares about the erosion of traditional Canadian values and institutions should join the demand for their resignations.

Movember is over and done with and my lip is bare again. Today is the last day for making last-minute donations to your favorite MoBro.

There were lots of us trying to pick up money for prostate cancer research, and a lot was raised. As of last Sunday, 246,398 Canadians had brought in $36.3 million. Thanks to many generous friends, colleagues and family members, I took in a total of $1,054. Pretty respectable, I think. It put me in the top 5,000 nationwide.

Internationally, over 850,000 people brought in $105.5 million.

Now that I’ve seen it up close and personal, I have an idea. We can declare the first month of the year to be Janubrary and use it to raise money for libraries across the country.

If public institutions can’t rely on government funding from the tax base these days, they’ll have to go directly to the public. Hospitals have been doing it for a while.

The time has come for libraries to get in the queue.

The first is to come to grips with the odour problem. The city planners and the engineers who designed the composting facility should have seen this opportunity from miles away.

Homeowners in the Stone and Watson neighbourhood didn’t want it there 15 years ago, and they still don’t want it today. They have zero tolerance for anything that might or could go wrong. When something did, they seized the opportunity to have the place shut down.

The second is that we now have a chance to measure the effectiveness of P3s, public-private partnerships. It is not good enough for these things to be successful only on easy projects like building roads, railway stations and libraries. If they can’t be made to work on complicated and controversial things like waste management, we shouldn’t rely on them at all.

We should look for other ways to take advantage of the opportunities presented by cash-starved governments.

Maple Reinders is the private company hired by the city to build and operate the composting facility. They say of themselves: “An increasingly attractive alternative to landfill, composting nonetheless offers challenges in terms of acreage requirements and odour production. As an environmental leader, Maple Reinders is helping overcome these hurdles.”

They claim to have done it before in other places. We are paying them $32 million to do it again here.

The idea behind a P3 is not to give the private partner all the glory when things go well and the city all the blame when a disguised opportunity slows things down.

The idea is that the public sector ensures the private sector does the job it is paid to do and earns the right to profit from the end result.

With the Ministry of the Environment, the city and the neighbourhood’s Waste Management Coalition, there are plenty of eyes looking over Maple Reinders’ shoulders. Between them, they should be able to get it right.

They don’t have any other choice.

The changes coming to our collection system are necessary. It never made sense that disposable diapers – things that are built so they don’t fall apart – should be put into our green bags. There is so much plastic in them that they never properly decompose. They shouldn’t have been in the organics stream in the first place. They still shouldn’t.

At least they got picked up every week. Back then, the clear bags were for non-organic, non-recyclable material. It was alright to pick them up every two weeks because they weren’t supposed to contain stuff that would go bad. Now they hold the disposable diapers, and young parents hold their noses.

If the folk out on Stone Road think it smells bad there, they should sit on a porch where a bag of used diapers has been out for a week and a half.

There are a lot of changes coming to our waste collection whether we like it or not. Most are good. All will be manageable once we get used to them.

Now is as good a time as any to make one that will lift a lot of stress from families.

If the city can’t collect all three bags every week, they should pick up the green and clear and leave the blue bag for every other week. It’s the only one these days that’s not supposed to contain yucky things.

It still seems that a lot of people are having a hard time wrapping their minds around the extremes of richness and poverty that exist. I thought of this last week while at a concert in the River Run Centre.

Lori Cullen and her band put on a very nice show. They do enjoyable and approachable jazz. While introducing Gord Lightfoot’s “Pussywillows, Cat Tails,” Cullen spoke about him going to the Occupy Toronto encampment to support his daughter. Cullen was doing fine until she speculated that Lightfoot is part of “the one per cent.”

He’s not even close.  Not just in terms of wealth, either. He also differs from them in that he made his money honestly, by writing and selling good songs.

If you look at the Forbes list of the world’s billionaires, you’ll get a better look at who controls the wealth. There are some Canadians on the list that many of the occupiers wouldn’t object to. People like the head cheeses at Research in Motion or Lululemon. Many probably spent some of their money on products developed by Jim Balsillie or Chip Wilson. I know I have.

The one per cent are the hedge fund manipulators, the bank swindlers, the money market movers and shakers. The people who have used globalization and deregulation to amass wealth and power most of us can’t imagine.

Poverty, on the other hand, is something we think we know about. Think again. There is a website, globalrichlist.com, that will calculate how your earnings measure up on a global scale.

A single mother of two on Ontario Works would get a basic needs allowance of $692 per month. There are other allowances that factor in, but all this puts her among the top 14 per cent of the richest people in the world.

Jim Balsillie’s annual income of $5.1 million lands him in the top 0.001% on the global leaderboard.

Ontario’s welfare mothers are not living in the lap of luxury. Far from it, but 86 per cent of the world’s population are even poorer than they are. At the same time, wealth and power are being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. That’s what the recent protests were all about.

While I was enjoying the Lori Cullen concert, a large group of people were meeting on Carden Street to talk about how to keep the momentum up.

The Occupy Guelph protesters may not have been a large group, but they kept one advantage over those in Toronto and other large cities. They packed their tents and left on their own terms.

In other places, it is the city, the courts and the police who are setting the exit strategies. A movement to bring fairness to the global financial system is ending in a squabble over access to public spaces.

If they were looking for my advice, which they weren’t, I would have told them the most important part of any protest is the organizing that goes on before and after. The protest event itself is a test of how well the real work was done. It should have a focus, a clear beginning and a clear end.

Making the world a better place is a fine goal, but it’s fuzzy. To get to it, there have to be smaller, measurable goals along the way. Develop a plan for getting from one to another. Then follow it.

It’s called politics, and it’s an honourable thing to do.