Guelph just made history electing the first Green MPP to Queen’s Park. However, if we truly care about climate change, water, parks and the environment, the electorate needs to pay close attention to what is really happening at city hall.

Twitter photos of a folksy mayor in a bee costume and endorsements of zero carbon goals mask the developer-first, environment-last plans and policies that are prevailing in our municipality.

At the end of 2017, a major change in our Official Plan came into force. Buried in this lengthy update was a cut to minimum parkland requirements from 8.8 hectares per thousand people to 3.3 hectares. Even moving the goalposts by more than 60 per cent, did not help us meet the required minimums. City-wide we still have a 25 per cent shortage of neighbourhood and community parks.

How is it then that the Clair-Maltby plan to develop the last significant greenfields in Guelph only includes one-fifth to one-third of the new parkland minimums required by our Official Plan for the projected population that will be added? This scenario maximizes profits for developers, but shortchanges citizens and the environment.

Mayor Guthrie set the tone for this direction in 2014 when he campaigned to “Get rid of the Guelph factor.”

The "Guelph factor" first surfaced as a term coined by developers in a consultant’s study completed in 2011. Generally, it can be understood as whatever gets in the way of the developer agenda.

Among the feedback received by the consultant: “ … there is a sense among some that Guelph prides itself on being perceived as the ‘granola capital of the world’ and an ‘unabashedly green community’ — and, though not mutually exclusive, that this works against the impression of being business friendly.”

Although the Guelph factor is open to wide interpretation and gets used in both a positive and negative sense by locals, the development community heard the “business friendly” dog whistle loud and clear.

Financial filings from the 2014 election show that Guthrie received more than four times the corporate donations of Farbridge, many from developers and construction companies.

That investment has paid off in spades, not just in reduced parkland for Clair-Maltby, but in an unexplained delay to the update of a bylaw that decides how much parkland, or “cash-in-lieu” developers are required to hand over for each new project.