Every question I’ve been asked. Every answer I gave.

Ward 5 is where I grew up. I came here in grade 5, went to school in the ward from University Village through the University of Guelph, and got my first paycheque making pizzas and salads at the East Side Mario's on Stone Road. Today I live in Ward 2, along the river, and my kids go to Sacred Heart. My work with Hopewell Support Services takes me all over the city, and we just opened a new home in Ward 5. It's the part of Guelph I know best and am most passionate about.

Over 25 years, all told. I came here in grade 5 and every school after that was in Ward 5: University Village, College Ave, Centennial CVI, then the University of Guelph. My first paycheque came from the East Side Mario's on Stone Road, making pizzas and salads. I left for a few years early in my career, came back in 2010, got married at the Arboretum, moved into a row house on Grange and started a family.

I went to school here, grade 5 all the way through the University of Guelph. Three schools, all of them in Ward 5: University Village, College Ave, then Centennial. My first job was making pizzas and salads at East Side Mario's on Stone Road. So if you had one of the unlimited salads about 25 years ago, there's a good chance I made it.

Since then it's mostly been operations: multi-unit restaurants, training business owners, then building and opening them. My wife Jaime and I owned the Firehouse Subs in the south end. When Covid hit, our sales dropped 40 percent overnight, and we put our house up for sale to keep the doors open and our staff paid. Government supports landed just in the nick of time and we never had to sell, but you don't forget a year like that. Jaime runs The Ten Spot on Quebec Street downtown now, so I've watched up close what years of construction outside your door does to a small business.

In 2020 I co-founded Bidmii, a home-renovation marketplace that deals with contractor licensing and consumer protection rules every day.

What that adds up to for council: I've been on the hook for budgets where the money had to come from somewhere real, and when a number doesn't make sense to me I ask for the records and read them.

Judged by this campaign, the gap I'd fill on council is tenacity. I pull on a string until I understand what's going on, what went wrong, and where we go from here. The sidewalk adventure over the summer is the clearest example. Seven questions, then 43 more. That habit will serve me on council. I think it serves council too.

For the past six years I've served on the board of Hopewell Support Services, three of them as chair. Hopewell provides housing and wrap-around supports for people with developmental disabilities, and most of those years went into getting the organization into a funding position where it could grow. Growing, for us, means houses. Buy one, renovate it, make it accessible, and people come off the registry and into a home.

Last November we filed the occupancy paperwork for a house in Ward 5. The permit came before Christmas. We opened the house in April, and the fire department walked through and saw no issues. Then we were told we had the wrong type of permit, warned about fines, and asked for the same forms we had already sent. Move-ins were postponed. At the end of April the City confirmed the classification we'd had all along, and the business licence came through on May 1.

No individual at the City was the villain in that. But while that went back and forth, the folks who had waited years for somewhere to live were now waiting on a form.

Since July I've been asking the City questions that started with a broken sidewalk in Ward 5 and ended at a $9.8 million software project the City's internal auditors have never reviewed. It's the same pattern. The people repairing the sidewalks are good at it. The system around them isn't working, and fixing that should be a council priority.

Yes, I intend to stay on at Bidmii. The business is nearly fully automated now and we're at a point of sustainable, profitable growth.

On whether I'll have enough of it, judge me on what I've already done rather than a promise. Since July I've put fifty written questions to the City about sidewalk repairs, read every answer, and published a report built on the City's own records. I built a free tool that lets anyone look up how a councillor voted, then another that tells you which ward you live in, and opened both up to every candidate in the city. And I'm knocking doors most evenings, all of it on top of the day job.

Write to my council office and you'll hear back from me inside two business days. Faster if you're mad.

Hopewell Support Services: six years on the board, three as chair, still serving. My kids' school parents' council, now rotated off. Bidmii set up a bursary for women in skilled trades at Conestoga College that ran for three years. In 2023 I was awarded the Most Philanthropic CEO award at the SickKids Tech4Giving Awards.

On the parents' council, a few of us leaned on the board until the yard got its maintenance, then ran the fundraisers that paid for a new play structure. I've rotated off. It's still going strong without me, which is the part I'm proudest of.

I've voted for, contributed to, and been a member of every major party at some point. The Liberals, Conservatives, Greens and even Jack Layton's NDP. He was an honest man who walked the walk. I've never run for a party, or worked for one. No party has a claim on me, and none of them is on Guelph's ballot, which is how municipal elections ought to work.

What I've found is that parties shift their priorities depending on which way the wind is blowing. I haven't. I think government should mostly stay out of your life, and otherwise run like a service organization: clear accountability, fiscal restraint, and someone answers the phone. Do those things well and you won't have a problem picking your neighbour up when they're down.

I'll take every provincial dollar Guelph can get. And when a decision in Ottawa or at Queen's Park puts pressure on the city, I'll say so. Owing nothing to any party is what makes the second part easy.

We own our home with a mortgage.

Before the pandemic Jaime and I opened a Firehouse Subs in the south end. We sold our house and moved into a rental to do it. The restaurant did well enough that we bought another house. Then Covid hit, I got laid off from St. Louis, and our restaurant sales dropped 40 per cent overnight. Two options. Sell the house and keep the restaurant open, or close the restaurant, declare bankruptcy and keep the house. We chose to sell the house, because closing the restaurant meant putting our staff out of work in the middle of a pandemic. We listed the house. Got an offer we were comfortable with. We were about to sign when the federal supports were announced, so we pulled the listing and never sold. I know what the math feels like at the kitchen table at eleven thirty at night while the kids are in bed.

That's my own situation, and it isn't most people's. Council votes on a property tax percentage, but what lands on your kitchen table is a dollar amount, and the same dollar amount is an annoyance to one household and a real problem to another. A retiree on a fixed income can't go earn more to cover it. A renter never sees the tax bill, but it turns up in the rent anyway.

So before I vote on a tax rate or a user fee, I want to see the dollar figure on the household that can least absorb it. The average home tells you almost nothing.

It's a mix you rarely find in one place. A research university. Real nature runs right through the middle of town, the Speed River, the Arboretum, Hanlon Creek. An arts and music scene bigger than the city's size would suggest. An industrial base that still makes things. Residents feel it most in the green space: parks and trails are the best-loved service in the city. Most cities get one or two of these. Guelph has them all.

The one thing I most don't want to lose is the feeling that Guelph is still a community. Guelphites show up for each other, for their neighbours, their kids' schools, the local causes they care about, and run into people you know wherever you go. It's a rare thing, and fast growth, handled badly, can wear it away without anyone ever deciding to let it go.

Here's the answer that's not going to win me any votes: taxes are going to go up over the next term. Anyone who tells you otherwise either hasn't read a city budget, or is counting on you not reading the budget. Most of the budget is locked in before council sees it: multi-year union agreements, long-term contracts, debt payments, and the cost of serving every new subdivision. Council has the pleasure of arguing over what's left.

The goal of zero is impossible. It's keeping the increases in line with inflation without cutting programs, and making sure people can see the value they're getting that is the tricky part.

For scale: the 2026 increase was 7.87 percent, about $402 on the median single detached home. About $171 of that was City services. The rest went to the local boards, police and the library among them, and a hospital charge the City collects.

What I'd protect: roads, snow, sidewalks, water, transit. The services you notice the moment they stop.

Who checks the big projects after council approves them. I know: nobody has ever put "internal audit" on a lawn sign. I might be the first.

Council approved $14.1 million to replace the software the City uses to track repair and maintenance work, along with part of its purchasing system. To the end of August it had spent $9.8 million. The contract with the company hired to set it up was ended early, after $1.7 million had been spent on it. A software licence the City bought for $935,807 isn't being used, which makes it the most expensive unused gym membership in Guelph. The finish date is now mid-2029. In 2023 a councillor asked what the City would get back for the money, and staff said they'd come back with more. The City now says those figures were never worked out. Guelph's Internal Audit department is two people, it answers day to day to a deputy CAO inside the administration it audits, and it has never reviewed the project.

My first motion would be an Auditor General who reports to council, using the auditor the City already employs. An Auditor General can see every record and has the legal power to get an answer. Ontario lets any council appoint one, and Hamilton did it with the auditor it already had, in one by-law. Nobody can tell you today what that money bought, and that includes me. Finding out is exactly what an Auditor General is for.

I won't tell you that lowers next year's bill. It doesn't. What it does is put somebody with the power to demand records in front of the money while $1.9 million of it is still uncommitted. If I can find the above while running for council, just imagine what we can find if I'm on Council and we have an Auditor General.

23 candidates have pledged support so far, including 3 running for mayor. Their own words are on the page at jonchristensen.ca/eleven-years.

Essential is what your tax bill pays for before anything else. Roads. Snow. Sidewalks that work for a stroller or a wheelchair. Water. Transit on the corridors where people actually ride. Fire and paramedics.

Something I'd fund. School zone safety, using the $676,904 the province gave Guelph to replace the speed cameras it banned. Raised crosswalks, flashing beacons, cleared sightlines, proper signs. That money has to be spent by the end of March 2028 and there isn't more coming.

Something I'd decline. EV chargers built on city land and paid for out of property tax. The private market and the provincial programs can handle that, the same way the gas station network got built.

Something I'd defer. Roughly $1.9 million of what council approved for the City's new repair-and-maintenance software isn't committed to anything yet. Hold it until someone with the legal power to demand records has looked at what the first $9.8 million bought.

Rebuild the in-house staff capacity that years of consulting spend has chipped away at, which is the easiest fiscal win on the table. And on user fees, no to paid on-street parking downtown while Wyndham Street is a construction site through 2028.

Last November council turned down a data architect position, 10 votes to 3. Staff had told council the City's data sits in a lot of separate systems, some of them old, and nobody's job was to tie them together. One hire was never going to fix that. The tools to join that data up already exist. If nobody on staff can use them, we bring in people who can. If it isn't a priority, council makes it one. And if I'm told it can't be done, I'll build it and show them how, the way I did this summer with the City's own sidewalk records.

Then publish a cost-per-result number for every program.

I'm not going to tell you which way I'd vote, because I don't think I should be voting on it at all. That's the real problem here. Ontario law permits it. So it keeps happening.

What I'd vote for is bringing the citizens' committee back and making its number binding instead of merely a recommendation. Guelph had a residents' committee on council compensation for more than a decade. The last one was five residents chosen for their experience in compensation. They met eight times and came back with five unanimous recommendations. In March 2022 council voted to scrap it and hand future reviews to City staff.

Here's what has happened since. This February staff proposed $70,218 for councillors and $187,067 for the mayor. Both were defeated. Five weeks later, on March 31, a motion raising councillor pay to $59,137 for 2026 through 2030 carried 7 to 6.

As for what would justify a change, Guelph already paid for that answer and then ignored it. In 2021 the consultants council hired to review its own structure recommended eight single-member wards with full-time councillors, down from twelve part-timers, because full-time councillors would, in their words, make the position attractive to a broader range of residents. Thirty-five per cent of the residents who took part ranked that option first. Council rejected it and kept twelve. That's the decision I want made. It would take effect at the next election, not this one.

That review cost somewhere between $200,000 and $225,000 back in 2020. Council ignored the answer. Then this February it voted to have the City Clerk run the whole exercise again before the 2030 election, funded out of the 2028 budget. So before anyone spends another quarter of a million dollars asking the same question, read the answer we already bought.

Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, start. Strong mayor powers are a cheat code.

If you're a truly exceptional mayor then you're never even tempted, because a good idea plus the work of bringing people along gets you there anyway. I don't like these powers, and I'd advise any mayor who has them not to use them.

Mayor Guthrie used them to cap the City's share of the 2025 budget under four percent, and again to push the 2026 share down to a proposed 2.85 percent before council added half a point back. Last December he used them to put winter clearing of the bike lanes back in. One person's call, each time. Whatever you think of any of them, I'm not going to criticize him for using a tool the province handed him. My argument is with the tool. Not the person holding it.

Most people assume these powers are about housing and developments. In Guelph, most of the uses have been about the budget, and those are the ones that reach your tax bill. The mayor proposes it, council has 30 days to change it, the mayor can veto a change, and it takes nine of thirteen to overturn a veto.

My job doesn't change either way. Anyone with a good idea and the patience to do the homework can find the votes. The homework is the hard part.

Yes. I'll take every provincial dollar Guelph can get. And when a decision in Ottawa or at Queen's Park puts pressure on the city, I'll say so.

The province pays Guelph a flat fee for every student instead of property tax. It's called the heads and beds levy and it's been stuck at $75 since 1987. Social services costs keep getting pushed down onto the County levy, which all four Guelph members of that committee objected to this year. Your property tax is still calculated on what your house was worth on January 1, 2016, because the province keeps postponing the update. Strong mayor powers came from Queen's Park and I don't want them. And the province banned our speed cameras, then sent money to replace them.

Growth isn't the problem. Under-planning is. The demand is genuine: the University is expanding, and more than 7,000 new student beds are coming to the Ward 5 corridors. But we keep approving density and then scrambling on transit, water, and parks years after the buildings fill up. The City's long-range financial forecast shows the reserves that should pay for that growth falling from $235 million to $34 million by 2027. Match every approval to a plan and a funded budget, and growth becomes an asset instead of a strain.

Yes to more homes on Gordon, Stone, Victoria and College. Protect the established neighbourhoods in between. And give builders one set of rules and one answer from the City, so it moves faster.

Construction started on 531 homes in Guelph in 2025, the fewest since 2011, against a provincial target of 1,800. This is the same city that hit 98 percent of an earlier target and collected $4.68 million for it. The policy homework got done. Then costs, supply chains and labour turned, and building dropped right across Ontario. Faster permits won't, on their own, get the shovels moving.

Now the part I can do something about. The builders who actually get shovels in the ground at scale all tell me the same thing: give them a box with a thousand rules and they'll build a profitable house inside it. What stops them is the box changing halfway through. A site plan in Guelph goes to a review committee of thirteen City disciplines, plus up to ten outside agencies. The story I hear most is one department asking for a grading change, a second objecting to the result, and the builder refereeing in the middle. The fix isn't fewer rules. It's one set of rules, fixed at the start, and one answer from the City, agreed between its own departments before it goes back to the builder. I'd push for that in year one, and count the resubmissions before and after.

Two more things council controls. Get the pipes and roads in ahead of the streets where the City wants apartments, so approved projects can start the day the financing does. And measure the development charge deal council backed in August: a grant covering 30 percent of the fees builders pay for pipes and roads, running to 2029, in exchange for about $74 million of water and wastewater work. It may be the right trade. Count the homes it actually produces before anyone signs up for the next one.

I'd have voted with the seven who stopped that study. Guelph already allows four on a regular lot, and by May the City had issued two permits for four-home projects since the rule passed in December 2024. Two. If that's the missing middle, it's still missing. What people are actually building is the smaller stuff, 285 additional-unit permits in 2025 alone. The province no longer lets the City review the design of anything with ten or fewer homes, so the zoning rules decide fit and parking. Get those right for four homes, and the argument about five gets a lot easier.

Let's start with the math. Homes alone don't bring in enough tax to cover what they cost to service. Land zoned for jobs, the shops and warehouses and labs, pays a share of that bill that would otherwise land on homeowners. When land set aside for jobs gets switched to housing, it can feel like a win that day and show up as a tax increase later. I'd want that trade written into the staff report in dollars, every time, before council votes.

The Guelph Innovation District is where this is playing out. In 2023 the Province changed that plan, moving land from jobs to housing, then offered to undo the change and asked council what it wanted. Staff recommended undoing it. Their report said the change would cost 26 hectares of employment land, and with it roughly 1,500 to 2,000 jobs. In December 2023 council voted 7 to 6 to keep the change. I'd have been with the six.

The developer's rezoning application came back to council on September 15, with staff recommending it be turned down until the developer can show that about 4,700 new homes can sit safely next to Cargill, the City's waste facility and the other industry around them. On the night, council approved the high-level plan for the land but deferred the zoning, with a 60-day timeline written into the motion. That's the right order: show the homes and the plant can be neighbours, then zone the land.

U of G has a long-term plan that could add thousands of student beds here, and transit and servicing need to be ready before those beds fill. Universities don't pay property tax. The province sets a flat fee instead, the heads and beds levy, and it has been stuck at $75 since 1987, when David Peterson was premier and $75 was real money. Inflation alone would put it past $170. Students aren't the problem in that equation. The province underpaying for them is, and the first step is putting a dollar figure on what the freeze costs Guelph every year and taking it to Queen's Park with the other university towns.

Homecoming was the worst in years. The University should help pay what it costs the City, like Queen's does in Kingston. And transit, sidewalks and water need to be ready before new residences fill. The University should also build more student housing on its own land, and we hold it to that.

The City has to build more housing and build it faster, three ways. First, the builders: one set of rules at the start and one answer from the City, instead of refereeing between departments. Second, the City builds housing itself, on City land with fees waived, and non-profits run it with supports attached, the way Hopewell does. Ottawa and Queen's Park funded exactly that in the 1980s, and we push them to do it again. Third, the University builds more student housing on its own land, and we hold it to that. Income supports are provincial and federal money.

On rent caps: I want more subsidized housing built, and I'll support the city's tools to get it, including fee waivers, city land and faster approvals. But I won't commit to rent caps before there's an overall plan that shows who builds, who pays, and who covers the gap between capped rent and real costs. Plan first, then rules.

Housing that costs more than people earn, and the supports that used to catch people getting thinner every year: mental health, addictions, developmental services, discharge from hospital with nowhere to go. At Hopewell I've watched adults wait years on a list for a home. Prevention here means three things. Keep the daytime and winter programs funded so a bad month doesn't become a tent. Make supportive housing easy to build: City land, fee waivers, and a permit process that treats a group home as a home. And track the numbers publicly, so council knows whether it's working.

On encampments: services and enforcement get funded together, or neither does. Daytime warm space, paramedic-led mental health response and the public space rules go in the same budget. Move people only when there is somewhere real to go. Publish how many shelter beds are open, so residents can see when that's true.

Nobody in Guelph should sleep outside or go hungry. We need more social housing and shelter capacity, and I'll support every serious effort to build it. But shelters and social housing are funded through the County and the province, so this only works if every level of government shows up. I'll be loud about making sure they do.

Yes. A maximum temperature is a human rights issue, same as the minimum. Enforce it, and keep the cost out of rents.

Fund a property tax rebate for owners who designate their heritage homes, so saying yes pays. Enforce the new heritage districts. No forced designations; the province's 2027 deadline becomes a target for signing owners up, not a cliff. Keep the Yorklands' heritage buildings standing while the land question is settled.

Public land, kept public, as a national urban park. Council backed it in principle in 2024, 11 to 1, but never directed staff or the mayor to formally ask Parks Canada and the province. Nobody ever has. I'd move that in my first month.

Not as a default, and not again until the homework is finished.

One principle first. Build active transportation on the boulevard, off the road, and build it once. The routes people in Ward 5 are angriest about took a driving lane. The ones nobody complains about took nothing from anyone: the Woodlawn path, the trails, the College Avenue cycle tracks. I'd rather build fewer kilometres a year and have all of them standing and plowed in ten years than build fast and rebuild every spring.

On what's already built, keep the lanes and pull out the concrete curb separators. Painted buffers and bollards in their place. Those separators failed their first winter. On Scottsdale there's room for a boulevard path, which beats either option. The numbers on Scottsdale and Silvercreek: $487,779 to build 3.1 kilometres, roughly $58,000 in maintenance between January and August this year, bike trips up about 10 per cent, speeds down about 21 per cent.

Before the next project that takes out a driving lane, I want the Cycling Master Plan update finished and before-and-after counts published for the lanes we already have. Would I modify or remove an existing lane if the evidence went the other way? Modify, yes, and that's exactly what I'm proposing on the separators. Publish the counts street by street and I'll take the answer either way. What I won't do is decide it based on whichever side packs the room that night.

If we build it, we plow it. Winter clearing for cycling infrastructure cost $650,000 in 2026 and council has capped it at $300,000 from 2027 on. Council voted 6-7 against plowing these lanes, the mayor restored it, and a service-level review with public engagement reports before the 2027 budget.

A boulevard path gets plowed with the sidewalk. An on-road lane needs its own budget line forever. One more reason to build on the boulevard.

Last winter's debate turned into pro-bike versus anti-bike with no usage numbers on the table. Every city program needs a stated goal and a tracked return, and the return doesn't have to be dollars. It can be riders, trips, or roads people can finally get to. Count it, publish it, and let the results drive the investment.

Frequency and reliability on Gordon, Stone and College have to keep pace with 7,000 student beds. Fund it the way the U of G pass does, about $7 million a year: sell group passes to employers and Conestoga, then push the province for more ridership-based money. Frequency before free fares.

I'm a strong supporter of transit, and the targeted free programs for kids, teens, seniors and low-income riders make transit affordable for the people who need it most. I'd keep them. But fully free fares would cost on the order of $10 million a year in lost fares, based on today's ridership and fares, which is roughly a 3 percent tax increase on its own. The city's own review also found the free pilots didn't grow overall ridership. I'd rather put those dollars into more frequent, more reliable service.

Red light cameras: yes. Guelph has six, one per ward, in since 2021. The Ward 5 one sits at Scottsdale and Stone Road West. Staff told council in March 2025 the program had avoided about $40 million in societal costs in its first three years, mostly by preventing serious right-angle collisions. Revenue goes into a reserve for road safety work rather than general revenue. I'd keep them, and add one where an intersection's collision record justifies it.

Speed cameras: the province banned them. Bill 56 took effect November 14, 2025, Guelph's twelve cameras went dark, and they came off the streets the following week. Before that they'd cut average speeds in school zones by about 20 per cent. Whatever you thought of them, they're gone, and a city councillor can't bring them back.

So the argument moves to physical measures. Guelph received $676,904 from the province to replace the cameras, spendable until the end of March 2028. I'd put it into school zones first, because that's the work the cameras were doing. Raised crosswalks, flashing beacons, better sightlines, proper signage.

On humps and cushions, council removed speed cushions from the traffic calming policy in April, 9 to 3. Emergency response time was the argument that won, and it's a fair one. About 200 streets that were queued for traffic calming don't make the new list of 25 priority locations, and staff were directed to find cheaper alternatives for them and report publicly every year. That registry needs to produce work, not sit in a drawer.

What I'd go on is the City's own before-and-after speed studies, the annual collision report, and the measured speed on the street in question. Not the volume of email about it.

Stretching a ten-year trail plan to 2045 is another way of saying no. Both Ward 5 councillors told GCAT's survey in 2022 that the trail connection under the Hanlon was the ward's biggest barrier. In July 2026 it reached committee endorsement, still a rocky wear path a hand-cycle user had to flag. Endorsed is not built. With all new trail construction paused, I'd get the Hanlon underpass and the Silver Creek connection funded this term, and bring money that isn't the levy: Guelph's own railway pays the City dividends and nothing toward crossings on its corridor. My Rail Corridor Safety Fund fixes that.

Yes to giving staff the mandate and tools to carry out the Trails Master Plan, with capital money attached, and a fix for the Guelph Junction Railway crossings dispute so trail users aren't shut out of long-standing routes.

A woman in Ward 5 told me through her second-floor window that she'd been calling about the broken slab outside her house for about ten years. Each time, someone came out, painted it orange, and left. I reported it and asked the City for its repair records. It was fixed the next day. Then the records came back: 120 of 142 reported sidewalk problems in Guelph have been waiting more than a year, and the City can't tell you how old an open request is. So I built a public map. Anyone can report a broken sidewalk from their phone in about thirty seconds, it goes to the City in their name, and it sits on the map with the days counting.

The infrastructure mostly exists. The part that fails is keeping it fixed.

No to paid on-street parking downtown while Wyndham Street is a construction site through 2028.

No, and I wrote down why. In 2021 council pledged to cut Guelph's emissions per person 63 percent below 2018 levels by 2030. The City's own scorecard says we were at 921,949 tonnes in 2018 and 917,927 in 2023. The target needs us near 416,000, with four years left.

I priced the cheapest possible route using the City's own numbers and its consultants' plan. Buying every measure available, cheapest first, costs about $1.8 billion and still only gets halfway, because furnaces and cars outlive the deadline. Closing the rest means scrapping equipment that still works, which takes the whole thing to somewhere between $4.4 and $5.8 billion over four years. That's roughly $82,000 per Guelph household, or $1,700 a month.

I'm for net zero by 2050. That one is costed, and the plan behind it says it pays for itself. A 2030 promise nobody can keep is not a climate plan. Every climate dollar should buy the cheapest tonne of carbon, and the City's buildings and trucks are where it controls the outcome. Fund those first. Publish the cost per tonne every year, and people can see what they bought.

I won't put my name to a 2030 date no household in this ward could fund, and I'd rather tell you that than sign the form and hope you never checked.

Guelph is one of the largest communities in Canada running almost entirely on groundwater. We're not sitting on a lake. We're sitting on a very large, very slow sponge, and it's easier to drain than to refill.

Two things are true at once. The City's water plan says we used about 49,000 cubic metres a day in 2021 and expects about 68,000 a day by 2051. So it looks to new wells in Puslinch and Guelph-Eramosa, and both townships have already raised formal concerns. Meanwhile the actual numbers have gone the other way. Population grew 15 percent from 2014 to 2023. Water use grew under 3 percent. Conservation is doing the work the plan didn't count on.

So: build the Clythe treatment plant, $29.2 million, and the Guelph South well, $4 million. If the flat trend holds, that covers growth past 2090 without a well in anyone else's township. Keep the conservation programs funded. The cheapest litre is the one we never use, and it's an easy line to cut because nobody sees the damage for ten years. And don't approve growth today that the water can't serve in five years.

If the trend doesn't hold, sit down with both townships. Understand what they're actually worried about, and find something that works for everybody. Slow, unglamorous, and I don't see another way to do it.

The 2025 tree bylaw was right. Guelph's canopy was last measured in 2019 at 23.3 per cent, nearly half on private land. This year's scan covers street trees only. Count the whole canopy, then fund the planting; the 40 per cent target already slid from 2031 to 2070.

Hanlon Creek, the Speed River corridor and the Arboretum edge need their own capital funding, not just mowing budgets. Part of that should go to native species and pulling invasive plants like buckthorn and dog-strangling vine. Pollinator plantings on City boulevards and stormwater ponds cost little. I'd back them.

Yes for city-owned buildings, where council actually has the authority. For private homes, the province took that power away from municipalities in 2025, so the advocacy belongs at Queen's Park and I'll make it there.

The province passed a law in 2025 barring cities from mandating standards above the Building Code, and developers are suing Toronto over exactly this right now. Checking yes here signs Guelph up for an expensive lawsuit of its own, when patience will tell us for free whether cities even hold the power. Let Toronto's case land first.

Not on city land paid for out of property tax. The private market and the provincial programs can handle that, the same way the gas station network got built.

I want the composting facility to stay in public hands, and I take that seriously. But the operating contracts expire in 2028 and council decides next year with real numbers in front of it. I won't pre-decide that before the business case exists. And while I support better waste sorting, I'm not sending bylaw officers to fine residents over their green bins.

Yes to opposing any privatization of the water supply, and yes to resisting the contracting out of essential municipal work.

Two business days. Write to my council office and you get an answer from me inside two business days, including when the answer is no. Faster if you're mad. That was the City's own published standard on sidewalk reports until January, when the page carrying it came down. Anything I hand to staff gets a reference number you can follow and a call back either way.

One of the things that I think Leanne and Cathy did really well was the email newsletters and the quarterly townhalls. I will continue with those, but I'd like to take it one step further. A Ward 5 meeting every budget season, before the budget vote, plus a plain-language quarterly update on the big lines so you're not waiting a full year to find out how it's going. Standing meetings with the neighbourhood associations, scheduled, not just when something's on fire.

jonchristensen.ca/record holds every recorded vote since 2021: the exact motion, how each member voted, and what was said before the hands went up. 14,743 votes, 1,279 decisions, 372 meetings. You can search it, or just ask it a question in your own words. A vote count doesn't tell you why something was decided, and the why is what people keep asking me about.

What I actually want to change is who runs the record. The City does record every vote in its minutes, so nothing is hidden. But following one councillor across one issue means digging through dozens of PDFs. That's how I ended up building this myself. I'd push the Clerk's office to make it automatic and searchable, generated as the meetings happen rather than assembled afterward, and I'd help them set it up. Guelph shouldn't have to depend on a candidate with a database and an AI bot for this, and a City-run version outlasts me.

If council is being asked to decide something, people should be able to read why before the vote, not after it. I've spent the summer reading agendas, and the items with no report behind them are the ones nobody can ask a question about.

Closed meetings. Council can meet in private for certain things, like legal advice and land deals. In June council voted 13 to 0 to have the City Clerk review those private-meeting rules as part of a wider review of how council works in 2027. What I'd want out of it: once a decision made in private can be talked about, say what was decided and why, as far as the law allows.

Information items. Council lets staff sign a lot of contracts without a council vote, and once a year staff give council a list of the ones they signed. In 2023 council changed its rules so that a member now needs the chair's approval to discuss one of those reports. Needing permission to ask a question is an odd rule for a room full of people who were elected to ask questions. I'd bring a motion to take that approval step out.

I'll put every commitment from this campaign on one page, each one marked done, not done, or changed my mind, with the date and the reason. My own votes go onto the record page the same way from day one.

If I get something wrong, the correction goes in the same place I said it, not in a private note to whoever caught me, and the old version stays visible.

On holding colleagues to the same standard, let me be straight about what a councillor can and can't do. I can't discipline another member of council. Complaints about a member's conduct go to the Integrity Commissioner, and any member of the public can ask for that inquiry directly. If the Commissioner finds a breach, all council can impose is a reprimand or withholding up to 90 days of that member's pay. That's the entire toolkit. I'd use it where it's warranted, and I won't oversell it.

The consequence that actually bites is a record. Most misleading claims in municipal politics aren't outright lies. They're statements nobody can check. So publish the votes in a form residents can actually use, and appoint an Auditor General who reports to council and can demand the records. Then the claim becomes checkable, and an election, which is the real consequence, has something to work with.

Say so out loud, on the record, with the reason, in the same room where you heard it. I've already done that this campaign. A candidate survey asked me to pledge to hit Guelph's 2030 emissions target. I said no, and then I did the arithmetic, and published it.

The province banned ranked ballots in 2020 after London used them once, and I'd support council asking Queen's Park to give the option back. Whether Guelph switches should be the voters' call, by referendum, not a council vote on the rules it runs under.

Yes. Argue about ideas, hard, and leave the person out of it. That's how I've run this campaign.

Yes to the living wage goal, and to costing out certification for the city's own workforce, which is the part council actually controls. One correction though. Cities legally can't tie business approvals to wages. That power sits with the province. Where the city hands out its own incentive dollars, wage commitments are a fair conversation.

Yes to a Guelph-first procurement policy that lines up with the province's Buy Ontario directive.

Guelph has an arts and music scene that punches well above its size, and it is one of the reasons people choose this city over the next one down the 401. The arts are what make a downtown worth walking to at nine on a weeknight. My wife runs a business on Quebec Street. We know what an empty downtown costs.

Council approved Culture Plan 2030 unanimously in 2023. The City has since stretched its seven-year timeline to fifteen, and its own progress report says the initiatives deferred "for at least 10 years" include grants at the level of comparable cities, new studio and rehearsal space, and new public art. Full implementation is priced at $1.9 million a year. Meanwhile requests to the Community Grant program hit $983,000 this year. The fund covers 52 per cent of them.

Three concrete things. First, make "Connection, Expression and Belonging" in the new Community Investment Strategy an explicit arts and culture stream with its own envelope, so a youth orchestra is not scored against a food bank. Second, the non-financial supports cost almost nothing and I will vote for them the first time they appear: fee waivers for City space and a microgrant program, both marked "not in base budget" until the 2027 and 2028 budgets fund them. Third, stability. Council raised the Community Grant base to $500,000 in November 2024 and indexed it to inflation. I will protect that base and that indexing through every budget I sit on.

Now the straight answer on doubling the fund. No, not yet. I will not promise that number before I have seen the 2027 budget. I do not make promises on other people's money that I cannot show how to pay for. If the discipline delivers, the arts are near the front of the line for what it frees up. I would rather earn that than promise it.

Keep the City's daytime drop-in money and its cold-weather emergency grant funded. Every councillor should serve a meal at Royal City Mission or a place like it. Pour coffee, prep food, talk to people. You learn fast that most aren't who you assumed, and all of them deserve our care.

Double down on what works. In Ward 5, a resident runs a weekly food market for her whole building at Christopher Court. Expanding programs like that beats inventing new ones. Back The SEED's sliding-scale groceries, rescue surplus food, and open City land for gardens. Income supports are provincial and federal.

The SEED's sliding-scale model is smart and it works. City funding decisions belong in the open grant program, where 76 organizations compete fairly, and I'd welcome their application there.

Libraries choose their own books and programs. The library board decides that, not council and not the loudest room. I'll defend that independence and fund the library like the core service it is. If someone wants a book removed, the process is the library's, with the review in the open.

The Commission's 94 calls to action: start with the ones a city can deliver, and do them properly rather than announce them. Call 57 asks governments to train their staff on Indigenous history. Do it. Bring the Mississaugas of the Credit in early on land decisions like the Yorklands, where they've asked all three governments to work with the community. Fund Indigenous-led programs through the same open grant process as everyone else. Report every year on what got done, not what got promised. I won't claim expertise I don't have. I'll listen first, and show up when asked.

Make council a job a thirty-year-old can afford to take. The consultants council hired recommended full-time councillors; council said no. I'd bring that back. Hire University of Guelph students for the data work the City says it can't do. And fund youth spaces like skateparks as real infrastructure, not extras.

Build the park, bus stop and library space with the homes, not years later. Guelph checks water and sewer capacity before every approval; do the same for parks. Have builders finish the park before move-in. Report quarterly on the growth fund, forecast $81 million in the red by 2027.

A named staff contact and an answer within two business days. That alone would fix half of it. Regular meetings with the umbrella groups, the way I've committed to with Guelph's arts organizations. And fee waivers, City space and permits handled as if the City wants the project to happen.

Guelph's edge is the University, the agri-food and life-science firms around it, and a business park with room to grow. Keep job land for jobs. Give a company one set of rules and one answer from the City. Then go sell Guelph, starting with the graduates who want to stay.

Undecided. The City's top administrator chairs the board, and it hasn't served residents well. I'd broaden it. Barring non-residents outright could cost the railway needed expertise.

I'd rather lose a vote telling you what something costs than win it by pretending it's free. I'll stick to what council actually controls. I won't promise a zero tax increase, and instead of saying "efficiencies" I've shown you exactly where I'd start looking.

Judge me on what I've already done. I've put 50 written questions to the City about sidewalk repairs and built a free tool to look up any councillor's votes. Imagine what I can do on council.

Ward 5 is where I grew up. Every school I went to is in this ward, and so was my first job. If you want to argue about any of this, leave the porch light on.