Where Ward 5 needs council to build something.

Density on the right corridors

Yes to density on Gordon, Stone, Victoria, College and the other arterials, with proper community-benefit negotiation and infrastructure that keeps pace. That's where the city's Official Plan has always pointed, and that's where most of the new housing Ward 5 needs should go.

The May 2026 five-plex vote

On the May 2026 five-plex vote: Jon supports more housing, and on the substance he'd have voted with the seven councillors who defeated the original motion, for the reasons Councillor Downer set out in her follow-up, which passed unanimously. The city's own analysis showed only about 530 of 32,000 low-density corner lots could realistically support a five-plex, the four-unit rule is already in place across the city, and the right move is to measure what the four-unit rule produces, and where five-plexes naturally fit, before changing the rule again. The data work points where the housing should go. Let's go build it there.

Active Ward 5 files

Three files where this is landing right now. 210 College Avenue East: a proposed 10-storey, 153-unit private residence next to Cutten Fields, with an April 2026 public meeting and still in review. ALMA Phase 2 across from Stone Road Mall: Forum Asset Management's $15.5M development-charges dispute is at the Ontario Land Tribunal. The Dairy Bush first-year residence at College and McGilvray: scaled from 1,500 to roughly 1,250 beds in U of G's February 2026 update, site preparation began March 2026, occupancy targeted for September 2029. Each of those files has specific answers attached to it. The councillor's job is to go find them.

What Jon brings to this

Jon works with the contractor licensing, consumer protection, and municipal permitting system every week through Bidmii. He knows what makes housing buildable and what makes it bog down. That's a useful thing to bring to this file.

A partnership with the University

The neighbourhoods around the U of G footprint have a direct stake in every project that moves through council. The job is to be at the table early and often, and to make sure the relationship delivers real benefits to the residents who live alongside it.

Infrastructure before density

Transit, sidewalks, water and storm capacity have to be ready before the buildings fill. Not after the residents move in.

The heads-and-beds levy

Queen's Park has held the heads-and-beds levy at $75 per student per year, frozen at that rate since 1987. If the levy had even tracked inflation, Guelph would receive substantially more revenue every year for the services we provide to the University's footprint. Lobbying for an updated rate is a winnable provincial fight that puts real dollars on Guelph's books.

Every line, every year

Every department, every line item, gets the same scrutiny. That's the job council is elected to do. Compensation is roughly forty-seven per cent of the operating budget. Consulting spending is sizeable. There's headroom across the budget if council is willing to do the work, and none of it requires cutting the services Ward 5 residents rely on.

Three places to start

Question every line, every year, not just when there's a controversy. Publish the metrics that matter to residents before the vote, not after. And rebuild the in-house capacity that consulting spending has chipped away at, year after year. That last one is the easiest political win of the three, frankly.

Not about pinching pennies

None of this is about pinching pennies, and it's not about cutting the people who keep the city running. It's about recovering room to invest without pushing tax bills up faster than wages can keep up. The long-tenure homeowners and the retirees on fixed incomes who make up so much of this ward feel that gap first.

What the City's own survey says

When residents were asked, with no list read to them, to name the most important issue facing Guelph, infrastructure and road maintenance jumped from 7 per cent in 2024 to 16 per cent in 2026, tying housing for first. Of the twelve services the City measures, road and sidewalk snow removal scored lowest at 51 per cent satisfied, with road and sidewalk maintenance close behind at 55 per cent. The City's own pollster flagged road maintenance as a top priority to improve across two surveys running, per the 2026 Satisfaction Survey.

Snow, sidewalks, and lighting that actually get fixed

We need sidewalks that work for strollers, walkers, and wheelchairs. We need lighting that gets fixed when it breaks. And we need snow cleared on a published schedule, one that covers the sidewalks and accessibility routes that get forgotten whenever the city only measures road plowing.

Better value, not a bigger bill

Getting the basics right isn't about spending more or cutting somewhere else. It's about getting real value from the dollars already in the budget, the same discipline behind Priority 03.

What Jon brings to this

Jon has spent two decades running complex operations and making them deliver for the people who depend on them. Plowing routes, sidewalk repair, and snow schedules are exactly the kind of service-delivery problem that work prepares you for.

Back the bylaw, fix the process

Full support for the April 2025 Private Tree Protection Bylaw amendment, which adopted a 30 cm diameter threshold on private property of any size, instead of the 50 cm staff had recommended, covering roughly fourteen per cent of private trees, up from four per cent.

Where it needs work is the experience of using it: clear rules, reasonable permit timelines, and approvals that don't drag. A protection that's a headache to comply with loses the public support it needs to last. Making that process work for homeowners is how the canopy actually stays protected.

Public-realm extension

The same logic should apply to city-owned trees along boulevards, schoolyards, and the trail network. Mature canopy is always cheaper to preserve than to replace once it's gone.

Parks and trails

The Hanlon Creek natural areas, the Speed River parkland, the Arboretum interface, the trail network through Old University. These are the assets that make Ward 5 what it is. They need dedicated capital funding, not just operating maintenance.

Part of that investment should go toward native species restoration and invasive removal. A healthy urban canopy isn't just about keeping trees standing — it's about what species are doing the work. Replacing invasives like Norway maple, buckthorn, and dog-strangling vine with native oaks, maples, and understory plants builds a canopy that supports local wildlife and holds up over the long term. The city's own urban forest strategy points this direction. Council's job is to fund it.

Services and enforcement, together

Concrete commitment: daytime warm space, mental-health crisis response, and the Guelph-Wellington Paramedic Service partnership get funded in the same budget cycle as any public-space enforcement measures. Same cycle, not the one after. Do one without the other and neither works.

The 2024 bylaw

The 2024 Public Space Use Bylaw was a serious attempt to deal with a serious problem. It passed 10–3, with both Ward 5 incumbents voting in favour. A framework like that can work, but only when the services behind it are funded in parallel. Enforcement without alternatives just moves the problem to the next park. And services without any framework around them leave both residents and shelter-users without clear ground rules.

What Hopewell taught Jon

Jon has watched the developmental-services system up close as board chair of Hopewell Support Services. That work taught him to tell real help from the kind that just looks good in a press release. Supportive housing with services attached, paramedic-led mental-health response, daytime warm space. None of that is luxury spending. It's what the rest of the policy needs to stand on.

What Ward 5 deserves

Old University, Hanlon Creek, the Speed River trails: public space residents can use every day, with supports in place for the people who depend on those same spaces for shelter. That's what Jon would push council to fund.

Specific asks, in plain language

Full reimbursement on the social-services costs the province has shifted to the County levy. A paramedic-services funding model that tracks actual cost growth rather than 2018 baselines. Predictable transit operating funding tied to ridership rather than political cycles. An updated heads-and-beds levy that reflects today's student population, not the $75 rate frozen since 1987.

Honest with residents

Being honest with residents about why their tax bill is climbing, and naming the parts of that story that trace back to the province, is how council keeps faith with them. The alternative is to absorb the cost in silence and let residents assume it's the city's fault.

The frozen assessment that quietly tilts your bill

Here is a provincial problem most residents never hear named. Your property tax is still calculated on what your home was worth on January 1, 2016. Ontario has frozen MPAC assessments at that decade-old value and keeps postponing the update.

A reassessment would not raise a single extra dollar for the city, because by law it is revenue-neutral. But it would re-balance who pays to match what homes are actually worth today. Because detached homes have appreciated faster than condos and townhouses since 2016, the freeze leaves some homes under-assessed while others quietly carry more than their fair share. That is Queen's Park's to fix, not City Hall's, and a councillor's job is to name it honestly rather than let residents assume the city set it.

Publish the assumptions

Publish the assumptions behind staff reports, not just the recommendations. Show the trade-offs council weighed, not only the conclusion it landed on.

Open budget deliberations

Open up budget deliberations in plain language, including a quarterly 'big lines' update so residents can see what's happening between budget years.

Voting records that work

Make voting records easy to find and easy to follow. The city already records every council vote in its meeting minutes. That part works. The problem is that tracking how one councillor has voted across an issue means digging through dozens of PDFs. Aggregating those existing votes by councillor and by issue, in a usable form on the city's website, is what turns a technical disclosure into something residents can use. Jon commits to publishing his own record that way from day one, whether the city follows or not.

Transit on Ward 5 corridors

Transit service on the Ward 5 corridors (Gordon, Stone, College, Victoria) has to keep pace with the new student beds before they fill, not after. Same principle as Priority 02: infrastructure before density.

More GO trains, faster

GO trains to Toronto: yes, we need more of them, and we need an express that gets to Union faster. What slows the Guelph-to-Toronto trip isn't train speed. The limits through Brampton's urban grade crossings are provincially set, and they aren't coming down. It's the number of stops. Today's Guelph-to-Toronto service stops at nearly every station along the way; an express run that skips intermediate stations at peak would meaningfully cut the trip without touching any speed limit. This is a fight Guelph can win at Metrolinx, and the Ward 5 councillor can be one of the loudest voices in it.

The U-Pass deserves a fresh look

Every full-time U of G student pays a mandatory transit fee that funds a meaningful slice of Guelph Transit's revenue. Does that fee cover what student ridership actually costs the city, including the extra buses, staff, and maintenance the school year demands? Jon wants the numbers before he'll say whether the current deal is fair to Guelph taxpayers. The students who come here are good for the city. The deal should be honest in both directions.

Climate without pricing residents out

Net zero is a serious goal, and it needs a funded plan to match. If the cost lands on the people who can least afford it, we haven't done the job. The way to fail this file is to end up with affluent retrofitted homes on one side of the ward and people sleeping rough on the other, and call that progress.

Specific positions, plainly

Stormwater and flood resilience around Hanlon Creek: yes. That's durable infrastructure that protects residents and only gets more important as the storms get bigger. EV chargers funded by city property tax on public land: no. Let the private market and the provincial programs handle that, the way the gas-pump network got built. Net zero overall: Jon supports the direction, and he won't support unfunded targets that end up pricing homeowners out of the city we're trying to build for them. That's the standard he'd hold council to here: ambitious goals, honest costs, infrastructure that lasts.

Fund the rebate

Ontario allows municipalities to offer Heritage Property Tax Rebates under the Municipal Act, plus matching grant programs under the Heritage Act. Toronto runs a rebate for commercial heritage properties; Kitchener offers both a rebate and a grant; Centre Wellington runs a grant program. Guelph offers neither. Council's own 2021 Cultural Heritage Action Plan recommended a financial incentives program. Five years on, it still hasn't been funded. Funding a residential tax rebate is the right call. It makes voluntary designation worth saying yes to. And it lowers property taxes for the homeowners who choose to participate.

Voluntary only

Voluntary designations only. The city's job is to make designation attractive, not to mail tight-deadline letters to owners who never asked for them. With a well-funded rebate, the owners who care about their homes' heritage character will opt in. The ones who don't won't be pushed. The 2027 date becomes a target for enrolling people, not a cliff for forcing them in.

Finish the HCDs already in motion

Brooklyn and College Hill is the model: designated after a public process that withstood three OMB appeals, all dismissed in November 2015. The Downtown HCD passed in January 2026. Ward West and Ontario Reformatory are next. District designation has been easier than individual: owners go in together, with shared rules and shared benefits.

On the insurance question

Six in ten heritage owners across Canada report difficulty getting insurance after designation. That's mostly an industry problem, but it isn't one council is helpless on. The City of Guelph has successfully written letters to insurers who tried to charge designated properties higher rates, and gotten them to back down. The Insurance Bureau of Canada also has an appeal process homeowners can use, and brokers are being called to task on this issue right now. There's three pieces to council's job here. Fund the rebate generously enough that the net is clearly positive for owners. Keep writing those letters when insurers misbehave. And make sure homeowners know the appeal route exists in the first place.