At Least Guelph Transit Uses Social Media...

In the year 2017, if you want to complain, you go to social media. A whole industry there is built on rating what rocks and what sucks, and that includes the way you get around your city. Online, there's often not a lot of love for Guelph Transit, so I was curious, where do other municipalities stand when it comes to interacting with their customers online? It turns of that Guelph Transit is a leader in that regard. 

What's the Deal with the Gordon/Gibson Twitter Kerfuffle?

After the previous meeting, a nice quiet productive meeting was on the books as council discussed matters of two planning applications and an endorsement of $5,000 in support for the victims of the wildfire in Fort McMurray and surrounding areas. And then Councillor James Gordon raised a point of order. 

Transit Users Not Pleased - Okay Pissed - This First Week Without Peak Service

If users rated your service a 1.8 out of 5 on your own Facebook business page, would you try to make your service better? If your Guelph Transit the answer is 'no'. It's a paradoxic move for the service even as it moves into council mandated budget cuts for the summer and the loss of twice-a-day peak service. The reaction from the public in the last week though has not been good, as the cuts are being blamed for delays and missed transfers by the City's dedicated bus riders.

LIVE BLOG: City Council Meeting for February 22, 2016

City council will be getting together again to discuss matters of importance to the City of Guelph. On the agenda this Monday are reports from the integrity commissioner and the audit committee, as well as action on infrastructure and a parking agreement with a downtown business. You can click here for the amended agenda from City Hall, and you can click here to read Politico's preview of tonight's meeting. For the complete blow-by-blow of tonight's council meeting, you can follow me on Twitter, or follow along below via Storify.

LIVE BLOG - City Council Decides on 2016 Budget

A number of tough choices lie ahead for Guelph's city council tonight. Many on council want to keep any potential tax increase inline with the rate of inflation, others are concerned about making too many significant cuts in city services. Meanwhile, there are a lot of people in the city worried about losing transit services, or paying more for them (not to mention paying more for just about anything else). So many tough decisions, what will the 13 members of city council do? 

Press Release - New Mayor's Blog Launched

Having an active internet presence is key for any modern politician looking to get his or her message out to the masses, not to mention keeping their community up-to-date with key points of information. Mayor Cam Guthrie is no stranger to this idea, and during his political tenure he's been active on Facebook and Twitter and maintained a news blog for his Ward 4 constituents. Eager not to lose that connection to the people, Guthrie and the City of Guelph has just announced the launch of the new Mayor's mayor's blog. Details and links to follow.

Local Reactions to Events on Parliament Hill

Today's events in Ottawa, which are still unfolding, is a startling reminder that shocking acts of violence can happen anywhere, even Centre Block on Parliament Hill. Even where we are, several miles away from the nation's capital, Guelphites are affected by events, glued to social media, glued to TVs, digesting any update great or small, rumor or fact. Here's some local reaction to the events.

Twitter Fails for Party Leaders

This election cycle (for me) kicked off with some Twitter talk - who's on it, who's not on it - so it seems apropos to revisit the topic of social media and its impact on the election. Things went to a whole other level yesterday when the CBC posted a story about some Americans being inundated with tweets because they have the good, or unfortunate, fate to share the names of the two frontrunners for the job of Ontario's Premier: Kathleen Wynn and Tim Hudak.

To Dare Not to Tweet

With the Ontario Election now officially underway, expect to hear from every major party as to what they plan to do, and how, and when, and why for the people of the Province of Ontario. One of the ways candidates get that word out is through social media platforms like your Reddits, your Instagrams, and your Pinterests, but the most ubiquitous seem to still be Facebook and Twitter.

Twitter's becoming more common, following along the same promotional trajectory as Facebook. That is to say that if you have anything to promote, you need a Twitter account. It is, after all, the most direct and succinct way to get your message out, so it really seems like a must have. But not all of Guelph's provincial election candidates have a Twitter account, and it seems that some of us, apparently, are pretty upset about it.

GrassRoots Guelph meets with Ministry Members

As previously reported, a new voter engagement group called GrassRoots Guelph has opened up shop here in the Royal City and they are pursuing a course that assumes there's some fishy accounting at City Hall. In a press release sent out last week, GRG says that they've followed up a petition they sent in to Ontario's Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing (MMAH) by having a meeting with ministry representatives, but was it a simple acknowledgement of the petition, or is, as GRG puts it, the beginning of an investigation.

Robocall: Notes From a Year Later

A couple of weeks ago I was on Twitter and I read a post by Andrew Prescott, AKA: the blogger Christian Conservative. He addressed the tweet to Donald Trump and asked The Donald to come to Ontario where he can continue the good work fighting wind mills as he did in Scotland. Forget that Trump is basically fighting an entire Scottish town on this so that he can open some ghastly golf course he'll undoubtedly drive into bankruptcy, but as I said a few weeks ago on "Beyond the Ballot Box," if Trump comes to Ontario to protest wind mills, I'll support him so long as he campaigns to see Stephen Harper's birth certificate while he's here.

Joking aside though, I find these kinds of posts from Prescott as irksome as I find them tiresome. Not just because he's one of the few people in the free world that continues to beatify Trump - whose own kids after his election day meltdown last November told him to pucker up - but because in midst of Prescott's identification of so call liars and "Fiberals" he seems to forget that he, himself, has a lot to answer for.

Oh, The (Cost of) Humanity

The more Don Cherry talks about politics, the more I wish he'd stick to being wrong and pig-headed about hockey.

Twitter Breakdown

Donald Trump got a lot of press - and let's face it, that's what we likes best - about his now deleted, explosive and borderline treasonous reaction to Barack Obama's re-election on Tuesday. "He [President Obama] lost the popular vote by a lot and won the election. We should have a revolution in the country," Trump Tweeted as the vote was still being counted before adding, "Lets fight like hell and stop this great and disgusting injustice! The world is laughing at us."

But would you believe that Trump wasn't alone as high profile conservatives tweeting crazy things on election night?

More Disasters in Tweeting

Yesterday, I talked about Danielle Smith's unfortunate tweet suggesting that the tainted beef from the XL plant in Alberta could be cooked and served to the homeless rather than deposited hook, line and sinker into a landfill. But Smith's slip of the tongue looks rather benign next to something the Toronto Sun's Sue-Ann Levy said on Twitter about Barack Obama Monday night.

You know Sue-Ann Levy, she's the Sun columnist that's constantly whiny about how her precious tax dollars are being spent on the homeless and city employees, and people not as lucky as her to sit behind a computer all day and spew her (mostly) misguided opinions. Like this one:

I Hope They Serve Beef in Hell

So this was the kind of royal screw up that Twitter was invented to exploit...

Ford Sticks Foot in Mouth. Not That Ford. And No, Not That Ford Either...

There's been a lot of discussion about the naked ignorance of some of our brethren south of the border when it comes to the issues of sexual assault and human biology, but it seems that some people in Canada really know how to step in it, in a proverbial sense, as well. 

Krista Ford, niece of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford and daughter of Councillor Doug Ford, spoke out with some, ahem, advice for women on how to keep themselves safe. There have been a series of rapes recently in the Annex area of Toronto, so naturally, women in the neighbourhood are on guard. It's also natural that another woman, especially with the high profile of being the Mayor's niece, would want to reach out at a time of such tremendous fear, and give some comfort and words of support. 

Ben Knows Politics

I something funny on HuffPost today: Ben Mulroney was talking about politics. 

You can read the entire exchange at the above link, it's an inane Twitter back and forth about how a former staffer under Ben's father Prime Minister Brian Mulroney might have misstated something about pensions with Ben sticking up for his dad. What's weird about this situation though is that Ben Mulroney is talking about politics, because I could have sworn that he knew about as much about the subject as he does about pop culture. 

No Tweets from Cam (For a While)

While reviewing my Twitter feed today, I came across this:  

Typically, someone, anyone, taking a Twitter break isn't newsworthy, but Ward 4 Councillor Cam Guthrie has blazed new ground locally for availability and accessibility via social media by our politicians. Hopefully, whatever might be keeping Cam from tweeting will resolve itself and allow him to tweet again soon.