The War on Drugs

Drugs, drugs, drugs. Everyone’s talking about drugs. From British Columbia to Ontario’s big city mayors to some incredulous Hamilton city council members, everyone’s got drugs on the brain.

It’s worthwhile unpacking all this to understand what people are thinking in this moment and where it looks like public policy is moving. The first two sections focus on “involuntary care”, which is fast becoming the default position for many reactionary politicians. The third section is on Hamilton city council and how simple tools to save lives have become fodder for council’s right-wing “moral entrepreneurs”.

Let’s dive in.

Splendour, diminished

I didn’t watch the British Columbia party leaders debate live. There was a time that I would have tuned in and hunkered down with some popcorn, a couple of lagers, and my coziest “debate watching” sweats. They have bears on them!

Those days are long gone, unfortunately. Now that we’re entering a new dark age of Canadian politics, it is getting harder and harder to muster the same enthusiasm I once had for campaign traditions.

The situation in British Columbia is particularly bleak. For those who are unaware, the political scene there has undergone more change in four years than most provinces endure in a person’s lifetime.

In 2020, the BC NDP under the leadership of the gruff-but-reliable Premier John Horgan, won a convincing majority over the BC Liberals of Andrew Wilkinson (a budget stand-in for Victor Garber). The BC Liberals had, since the mid-1990’s, been the province’s centre-right party, presenting themselves as a “free enterprise” coalition that was less extreme than the socially conservative Social Credit (SoCred) Party, but more fiscally prudent than the NDP. The overlap with the federal Liberals was minimal, at best, but they shared a name, colour, and branding which they had adopted in the early 90’s as a way to hitch their wagon to the supersonic jet that was Jean Chrétien’s Liberals.

In 2021, Horgan announced he had an aggressive form of cancer and stepped back from the role of Premier to deal with his treatments. By the next year, his cancer was in remission, but he resigned and was quickly appointed Ambassador to Germany by the Prime Minister.

Two leadership elections happened that would set the stage for today’s situation out west. The first was the election of Kevin Falcon to the leadership of the BC Liberals. He set about rebranding the party to distance them from the federal Liberals and, by April of 2023, the party would become BC United. The second leadership election started in the early summer of 2022 to replace Horgan. Facing off were the moderate David Eby, the Attorney General of BC, and the progressive Anjali Appadurai, who came within 431 votes of being elected to parliament as a federal NDP candidate in the riding of Vancouver Granville in 2021. While Eby was seen as the front-runner, Appadurai’s campaign started gaining momentum and, by late summer 2022, it was anybody’s race. Dramatically, on October 20, Appadurai was disqualified from the race by the BC NDP executive on very shaky grounds that she was doing too much outreach and might have had support from some BC Greens. The party moved to quickly ratify Eby as leader and he was sworn in as BC’s Premier less than a month later.

By February of 2023, things started going badly for the newly-rebranded BC United. A few months earlier, Falcon had ejected long time Nechako Lakes MLA John Rustad from the party’s caucus after he engaged in climate change denialism (he loves carbon a weird amount). Two days after Valentine’s Day 2023, Rustad announced he was joining the BC Conservatives, a party that had been in the political wilderness since the 1960’s. After BC’s right-wing voters moved to the Liberals and SoCreds, the BC Conservatives kind of just…languished, occasionally picking up weirdos who had been ejected from other parties for being too extreme. They had been taken over by a coalition of “alt-right” fanatics in 2022 and stacked the party’s executive with a host of fringe extremists including anti-vaxxers, People’s Party members, anti-gay crusaders, and internet neofascists who realized the only way to make their dark vision of a pure society a reality was to get out from their basements and actually get involved in real-world politics. This gaggle of terminally online dudes elected Rustad their leader in March of 2023 and, shortly thereafter, the BC Conservatives began to climb in the polls. Much like the BC Liberals of yore, this formerly fringe party had become associated with federal party - this time, the federal Conservatives and the growing backlash against Justin Trudeau - and saw their fortunes improve in tandem. By this time last year, they had overtaken BC United in the polls and, as of this spring, they started beating the NDP in some match-ups.

In August, BC United threw in the towel and suspended their campaign, allowing all the province’s right-wingers to coalesce behind a party run by a bunch of Canadian MAGA die-hards.

As of a few months ago, it looked like the NDP would sail toward a convincing victory and keep the far-right fringe at bay. Now, the polls show a dead heat with the possibility that Rustad will become their Premier and lead the furthest right-wing provincial government in Canada outside of Alberta. And not just any old flavour of right-wing. We’re not talking a Mulroney or Harper right-wing. This is a right-wing party with former and current candidates who believe COVID was a hoax, that the US election was stolen from Trump, that the NDP will force feed children bugs, that 5G towers will cause a “genocide” in the population, and that “they” control the weather.

One of the BC Conservative Party’s more mainstream obsessions is drugs. It’s a huge part of the federal Conservative messaging strategy (Poilievre recently came out in favour of jailing children and forcing them into rehab against their will) and is a hot topic out west. That’s in large part because BC had been running an experiment that decriminalized the possession of small amounts of drugs since January of 2023.

That month, Health Canada gave BC a three-year exemption from the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act under very strict guidelines. Adults over 18 would not be arrested for possessing under 2.5 grams of opioids, crack, cocaine, meth, or MDMA so long as they were only using them at home, at an overdose prevention site, or in an outpatient addictions setting. As the government press release noted: “Public drug use is illegal. People are not allowed to use or possess illicit drugs in public spaces, such as hospitals, businesses, transit, and parks.”

Almost immediately, conservatives began blaming the policy for public drug use. Every instance of someone using drugs in public was blamed on the policy. Horror stories about fights between people using drugs and other residents, parks littered with crack pipes, and overdoses on public street corners proliferated. The tide turned with such speed, it was difficult to parse the fact from the hysteria. The BC Conservatives (and BC United before they self-immolated) jumped on the issue, labelling supervised consumption sites as “drug dens”, accusing the government of being a drug dealer, and spreading extreme stories of public debauchery that seemed exaggerated, at best.

The hysteria over the project reached a fever pitch this past spring. Eby announced his government would be terminating the plan two years ahead of schedule without evidence that it would make anyone safer or stop drug use at all. Then, a few weeks ago, Eby announced a change to NDP policy, allowing the Conservatives to set the agenda and committing to “involuntary care” for those with “severe addictions”. This amounts to forcibly confining people and subjecting them to a possibly life-threatening period of treatment without their consent.

The BC Conservatives, angry that the NDP was stealing their policy thunder, said they would go even further.

The only voice of reason in the debate, Sonia Furstenau of the BC Greens, said “Eby was following Rustad off a reactionary cliff”. They highlighted the fact that, in addition to over 20,000 people already under “involuntary care” in psychiatric facilities, Eby’s plan would add around 400 beds to prisons so people can be confined and forced into rehab while in detention.1

That brings us to the BC leaders debate. Rustad spent the night trying to set the agenda, throwing baskets of red herrings out onto the stage like some kind of clumsy fisherman. He was all in on involuntary care and committed to “bring an end to decriminalization and safe supply. We need to bring an end to government being a drug dealer.”2 Instead, he said, a government under his leadership would focus on “regional recovery communities”. While he walked back an initial pledge to close every overdose prevention site in the province, he did double down on his commitment to force treatment on those “who are unable to make life-saving decisions on their own.”3 He claimed that, on his way to the debate, he watched a person overdose and die at the corner of Robson and Hornby in downtown Vancouver. When both the BC Coroners Service and Emergency Health Services told the media that a) no body died at that corner, and b) no body even overdosed at that corner, Rustad changed his story and said the overdose happened at a different location. Again, this was fact checked and found to be exaggerated, at best.4

No matter who forms government in BC after their election on October 19 (unless the NDP are held to a minority and require the support of the Greens to pass legislation), widespread involuntary care will soon be that province’s primary way of responding to the drug crisis.

That makes sense. As Garth Mullins of the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users told the BBC during a story on BC’s oscillating commitment to alternatives to the war on drugs: “Scapegoating and vilifying people who use drugs has [historically] been a real good vote-getter.”5

Mayors say no to drugs

And that brings us to Ontario. You know our slogan: Like A Clown Car Except Instead Of Hundreds Of Clowns Coming Out It’s Hundreds Of Weird Little Politicians.

A gaggle of those weird politicians saw the moves from BC and thought “hey, let’s do a little of that here!”

Some background here: the advocacy group “Ontario Big City Mayors” (OBCM) is a lobbying and advocacy group made up of the mayors of the 29 largest municipalities in the province. They work to push the province on legislation that will work for Ontario’s urban residents. The municipalities they represent constitute over 70% of the province’s population, so they’re speaking to the municipal concerns of a majority of Ontarians.

In August, the OBCM launched a campaign called “Solve the Crisis” that aimed to raise public awareness around provincial responsibilities on the homelessness, mental health, addictions, and community safety front. The goal was to remind Ontarians that municipalities can’t act alone and that they need willing and enthusiastic provincial partners to address these issues. Provincial funding cuts and downloading are a big part of the reason there’s a crisis at all. To that end, part of the campaign encouraged Ontarians to “send a letter” to those provincial politicians with the ability to act on those fronts.

The “asks” of the Solve the Crisis campaign are admirable and would go a fair way toward addressing the issue. They include:

• Creating a new ministry/appointing an existing ministry toward addressing the crisis and serving as a “single point of contact” on the file,

• Striking a task force with input from municipalities, healthcare providers, first responders, community advocates, businesses, and tourism with the goal of creating a “Made in Ontario Action Plan” on the crisis,

• Providing municipalities with tools and resources to help people transition from encampments to stable housing,

• Funding the services people experiencing homelessness, addictions, or mental health crises need, and

• Creating 24/7 Community Hubs or Crisis Centres to relieve pressure on the overburdened healthcare and support system.6

The campaign was a big success and has given the OBCM a lot of fodder for their lobbying efforts.

Unfortunately, it also gave people like Patrick Brown an idea.

Brown, the man who went from Barrie city councillor-to-MP for Barrie-to-leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservatives-to-disgraced former PC leader-to-possible candidate for chair of Peel Region-to-last minute Brampton mayoral candidate-to-Mayor of Brampton-to-federal Conservative leadership candidate for about twenty seconds-to-still Mayor of Brampton, is spearheading a controversial push to have the OBCM sign onto a call for the province to adopt a “system of mandatory community-based and residential mental health and addictions treatment.”7

Brown’s proposal seems to have been developed in conjunction with Rowena Santos, a Brampton councillor and former staffer with the Ontario NDP. At their press conference announcing this proposal, they both explicitly said they were inspired by the BC NDP’s reversal on the addictions front. While Santos said she wanted to see involuntary rehab used “as a last resort…when less intrusive measures have been completely exhausted,” and only used in conjunction with “broader initiatives addressing the root causes of addiction and homelessness,” their calls for the province to change the legislation around it opens the door to it being used instead of any other “less intrusive measure” all the time.8

They’ve put this call out into the wild, but there’s little likelihood the OBCM will sign onto it. Because there are only 29 mayors in the caucus, they make decisions by consensus, and there will almost certainly be a few mayors who think such a drastic measure is unwarranted. But, still, Brown and Santos, as well as a bunch of other big city mayors, think this is a completely acceptable path to trod.

The key fact is this: what Brown and Santos and Eby and Rustad are calling for it a rollback of civil liberties. They’re asking us to endorse a restriction on personal freedom in response to a state failure. We could invest in addictions treatment. We could invest in mental healthcare. We could invest in housing. We could invest in our communities, promote local and sustainable jobs, encourage people to focus on wider support networks…the lists go on. We could do the hard work to make it so that people don’t need to fall back on drugs to deal with the misery of life, give them affirming ways to stop using, and not treat a healthcare problem like a criminal justice problem.

Just last week, the Hamilton Police Service arrested a minor who was dealing fentanyl beside the Booth Centre on York - one of the area’s largest shelters. People who have been evicted or are suffering from mental health crises or have no where else to go are being targeted by dealers who take advantage of the system’s failure to make money. And, in response to those failures, more and more elected officials are turning around and blaming the victims. They’re calling for the state to round up people suffering from addictions, strip them of whatever dignity they have left, and force them into programs that may or may not work for them. And they’re doing this, despite having the power to invest in real, lasting, long-term solutions.

They could invest in programs and services that stop addictions before they start. They have that power. But they’re making it seem like they have no power over the situation, positioning the new approach as their only policy option. They’ve rejected every other avenue as possibly being too expensive or too labour-intensive or too difficult and are guiding us down their preferred route - one that falls back on punishing people who live with addictions - because it is easy and dramatic and means no one else in society has to think about their role in this crisis.

We’re being sold solutions from the 1820’s to deal with the problems of the 2020’s.

The mountain is aghast

Speaking of outdated ways of thinking…

Hamilton city council met on September 30 as the “Board of Health”. The agenda they had before them was pretty straightforward, though there was a delegation request regarding the province’s forced closure of supervised consumption sites. That, and a single slide in a larger report on public health, was enough to sidetrack any of the hard work we need to do on that front and, instead, turn the conversation into one about drugs.

Around two hours into the meeting, the Board of Health had a staff presentation from the Greater Hamilton Health Network (GHHN) on their 2024 progress so far. Most of the presentation was pretty standard stuff - outlining the work they’ve been doing to bridge the gaps between healthcare providers, social service agencies, different funding sources, etc. They do a lot of complex and thankless work, and their impact on the community is huge.

Fifteen minutes into the presentation, they had gotten to the bottom of slide 15. One tiny little line referenced “HealthBoxes”, which, like a vending machine, would provide access to harm reduction, hygiene, and health supplies all the time without needing to go through someone first. The presentation touched on it for under a minute and then moved on to strengthening the region’s primary care network. Standard stuff.

Then we moved to questions from councillors. Ward 4 councillor Tammy Hwang asked a thoughtful question about the recruitment of primary care physicians. The HealthBoxes were part of Ward 3 councillor Nrinder Nann’s question, but that was a quick clarification before she moved to a question about wrap-around services. Ward 9 councillor Brad Clark focused on mental health supports. Ward 11 councillor Mark Tadeson asked about including people living with disabilities in health discussions.

And then we got to Ward 8’s J.P. Danko.

***

At around 2 hours and 40 minutes on the council livestream, Danko is recognized and starts his question.

“Just going back to the presentation, there was one mention that I’m not sure if I…I must have misunderstood. I believe there was mention of free vending machines that would be giving out drug supplies. Did I understand that correctly?”

The folks from GHHN respond, saying that the HealthBoxes will provide safe supplies but that the supply list itself was still being worked out. The boxes could include things like Naloxone, condoms, and other items that could try to reduce the harms related to drug use.

“Okay, thank you, so Naloxone, condoms, that kind of thing, but…they’re not going to have needles and crack pipes that kind of thing…” Danko says before trailing off.

The presenters respond that those things are part of safe consumption supplies, so they will be in these boxes.

Danko stares into the camera for a noticeable beat. He’s pausing for effect. Like a reactionary right-wing Jim Halpert.

“These are just going to be available in a vending machine, handing out needles and crack pipes…” he states. Once again, the experts have to say yes, that’s what safe supply means.

The performance continues with flourish. “Sorry chair, I don’t really know what to say to that…umm…follow-up question would be ‘is that through city funding?’,” he asks, a Tucker Carlson-level of bafflement washing across his face. The GHHN folks tell him that it is not through city funding, but rather through funding from the provincial Ministry of Health.

Danko is indignant. He says that the “number one” issue among residents is walking into parks and “finding needles all over the place, finding crack pipes all over the place”. If there are vending machines providing those supplies, he said, “residents are going to have a huge problem with that”.

After a question from Tom Jackson about long-term care, Ward 7 councillor Esther Pauls gets her chance to go after the “HealthBoxes”.

Pauls asks whether the supplies would be free or for purchase. When she’s told they’ll be free, she becomes animated and angry. Her words, as spoken and without corrections, are:

“I just wonder what kind of message…messaging we’re telling our young people. You could try those things, those pipes. I don’t understand it. I…I…first of all, do we have to do it just because Toronto has done it? Do you think we have to do it? Or what other cities are jumping into this? Or should we take a closer look at we’re messaging our young people to stay away from drugs or are we saying ‘if you want to try it go ahead, its free, take it.’ Whether we’re paying it or not, that’s not the issue. The issue is what messaging are we sending to our young people, our young minds, [preposterously loud text notification pings] that are in this confusing world, what are we sending the message?”

Councillor Maureen Wilson, in the chair, needs to sift through Pauls’ rant to find an actual question to direct toward the GHHN. They try, desperately, to remind Pauls that the goal here is to prevent the transmission of blood-based viruses and infections, that we’re pursuing evidence-based policies, and that safe consumption supplies are already provided free of charge across the city. This isn’t something new, this is just a new way to offer a service we already offer. They really try to hammer home that this is a policy that is backed by evidence.

Never one to let evidence stand in her way, Pauls says she wants to vote against it because (and, again, I did not edit this): “I don’t understand why we are…impressionable minds, young people…saying ‘okay here it is if you need it take it’. I don’t understand that and, uh, you know…I just want it to come before council before we do a pilot project like that.”

Pauls’ lengthy diatribe consistently returned to “young people”, “inquisitive minds”, and “impressionable youths”. Serious “won’t somebody think of the children” energy.

It was Ward 2’s Cameron Kroetsch who asked a clarifying question to provide context to his colleagues, asking staff to provide information on just how long safe consumption supplies had been distributed in the community. The response was “decades”. Councillor Wilson asked a follow-up about the role of Board of Health (which was repeated by Councillor Clark), to which the response was that this pilot program is part of harm reduction, which is a provincial directive, which means they don’t need approval from a bunch of local politicians to make it happen.

Clark then returned to Pauls’ point, asking “if a young person, 15 years of age, could come in with the drugs in hand, and we would assist them in administering the drugs?” The answer there was no, but he pressed on, asking if “we provide the materials they need to inject it…we stand there while they heat it up and put it in their veins, is that not correct?” Again, that’s not what happens with these programs.

He pressed on and on and on, not relenting, saying at one point: “So we’re providing clean equipment, we don’t verify that they’re not under the age of 16. I have family that are 12 years old and they look much older than that. They could walk in, get a clean needle, and use a drug for the first time. No one watching over them, no one verifying their age, we just enable it.”

Pauls gets a second crack at it, asking what’s stopping someone from gathering up all the free supplies and selling them. Big market for second-hand condoms in Ward 7, apparently.

Councillor Wilson has to cut her off and the group finally gets to voting on the report. It passes unanimously.

Shortly after the meeting, Danko posted a notice of motion on X/Twitter that blames the provincial Progressive Conservatives for “funding the unsupervised distribution of drug paraphernalia in #HamOnt” and would, if passed, ban the “unsupervised distribution of drug paraphernalia” across the city and create avenues for the defunding of any organization that participates in such distribution. In a follow-up post, Danko claims “Unsupervised distribution of needles and crack pipes is enabling drug use and causing enormous harm to #HamOnt neighbourhoods.”

***

So there are a few things to unpack here. The first is the notion that distributing safe consumption supplies will lead to an explosion of “finding needles all over the place, finding crack pipes all over the place” in parks. This is already a complaint among residents with regard to encampments. People are already saying this, even without the provision of supplies through HealthBoxes. While this is a common complaint, it is one that falls in the “they’re bussing in homeless people” camp of unverifiable, at best.

Yes, one might see a needle or crushed pipe in a park on occasion. But “all over the place” is a dangerous exaggeration. We have absolutely no hard data indicating that there are mountains of used needles in municipal parks, crushed crack or meth pipes along our streets, or instances of large numbers of people being harmed by said needles. In one instance, an effort by the City of Prince George, British Columbia to seek an injunction against an encampment, in part because of concerns about used needles and pipes, was dismissed by a judge who:

All of the news articles about needles in parks come from the perspective of residents who are angry with encampments or drug use, but include no real facts or figures. This isn’t to say that people aren’t finding some paraphernalia in parks; this is to say that one needle does not mean people are “finding needles all over the place”.

But the evidence on this is light. If you search any combination of “drug paraphernalia” or “needle” or “crack pipe” and “public park” or “litter” or “waste”, this is the result you get on Web of Science, one of the world’s largest databases of academic papers:

When you really broaden the terms, you get three papers: two about Vancouver’s supervised consumption site, Insite, and one about a similar site in Boston. The papers on Vancouver indicate a noticeable decrease in the number of “publicly discarded syringes” while the paper about Boston notes a slight decrease, though it was not statistically significant.10

These places distribute safe consumption supplies, generally for use within the facilities, but also as part of their general mandate. So when supplies are distributed from a supervised consumption site, instances of “publicly discarded syringes” declines in the surrounding community. If the Board of Health really wanted to stop people from “finding needles all over the place”, then they should really be pushing back on the Ford government’s evidence-less decision to close consumption sites instead of drafting culture war-ish motions telling public health workers how to do their jobs.

The second issue is the bizarre obsession with “our youth”. Pauls and Clark demonstrated a deeply outdated way of thinking through their questions. The notion that a vending machine with safe consumption supplies would act as an invitation to someone to just dabble in meth or crack or heroin is frankly insulting to the public’s intelligence.

A team of researchers from York, Memorial, the University of Victoria, and the University of Windsor recently published an article (which is open access and is available here for you to read) that found this exact claim - that youth are being supplied drugs by an indifferent and out-of-touch coalition of liberals, the government, and medical elites - is little more than a “moral panic” being advanced by those who are “moral entrepreneurs”.11 These are people who are “disturbed by conditions and/or behaviours they feel affect the moral order, seize the issue to try to regain control of the public agenda or to (re)impose or maintain their values and code of conduct”.12

The Mountain Caucus is playing this role. They’re fixated on “moral degeneracy” and see the provision of safe consumption supplies as a threat to the existing moral order. They’re lashing out and trying to impose their moral code on everyone, evidence be damned.

Importantly, the aforementioned paper notes that “moral panics, rooted in broader cultural anxieties, orient toward, and often culminate in punitive or reactionary policy responses with widespread negative impacts on [people who use drugs’] health and equity.”13 That’s exactly what’s happening here. Pauls and Clark (and, to a certain extent, Danko) are advancing a moral panic without any grounding in reality or fact that will harm people who actually need help. In their effort to fight an imaginary problem, they’re going to make an existing one even worse.

And that leads us to the third point here: that providing safe consumption supplies is merely enabling drug use.

People are already using drugs. And if we believe that people who use drugs don’t deserve to die or be harmed or live in misery simply because they have addictions, then we should do what we can do provide them with healthy options in the hopes that, one day, their addiction itself can be treated. We all know that long-term drug use is harmful to a person, but it can be so much worse when society shuns you and denies you a chance to use safely until such time as treatment is an option.

So, no, providing clean needles from a vending machine won’t be facilitating drug use. But it can save lives. That, like with so many debates in this city, is one thing that is consistently forgotten. Lives.

We’re talking about people. People who are experiencing homelessness. People who live in unaffordable housing. People who are hit by motorists in their cars. People who breathe our air and drink our water and live on our soil. People who use drugs.

It is easy and politically expedient to “other” the problem, turning people into foreign invaders of low moral standing or the reality of life on-the-ground into market trends or competitive advantages or customers.

It would be much harder to gather evidence, consult with experts, have conversations with community members, provide proof, and develop policy based on all that. But that’s the difficult route.

***

During his question, Danko told the Board of Health that “residents are going to have a huge problem” with the HealthBoxes. But residents will only have that problem because we have councillors who fail to pursue that difficult route. We have councillors who fail to gather any evidence before making claims and writing motions. We have councillors who feed into hysteria instead of engaging in dialogue with their communities. We have councillors who fall back on their own moral code rather than consider the diversity of opinions and perspectives in our communities. And, worst of all, we have councillors who are uninterested in thinking critically about public policy, community benefit, and their own role in the system.

That, I would argue, is what residents should have a huge problem with going forward.

Concerned on the precipice

Back during the 2022 municipal election, I put together a spreadsheet to help voters get to know their school board trustee candidates a little bit better.

Not to horn my own toot or anything, but I was so satisfied with the end product. Through the process of creating it, I got to meaningfully engage with a whole host of trustee candidates, which allowed me to fill in gaps and help inform people about races that, far too often, did not get any media attention. The spreadsheet was my way of trying to stay involved and make amends for my own disastrous run for school board trustee in 2014. I would have loved something like that spreadsheet working to raise awareness during that campaign.

I didn’t know when I’d have a chance to do something like that again…until…

Last Saturday, everyone’s favourite “dark money” right-wing populist rage bait group, “Concerned Hamiltonians” had their 35th ad run in the Spec. Buried on page A14, this one was a throwback to some of their earlier work - another “what if bike lanes are causing the climate disaster!?” piece. Delightfully dystopian stuff from those deep-pocketed oddballs.

But this ad brings us to a very concerning precipice.

If there’s another “Concerned Hamiltonians” ad in this Saturday’s Spec, by my estimates (based on the figures I got from Metroland), they will have broken $50,000 in spending.

This should worry everyone in Hamilton. There’s a group placing ads in our local paper - a group that refuses to provide any information as to their membership, the source of their funding, or their motivations - that has enough resources to blow $50,000 on print ads alone.

They have a lot of pet peeves - the Dankos, property taxes (even though they’ve spent nearly 10 times the average city property tax bill in 2024 on ads), bike lanes, encampments, the “sanctuary city” policy (that one’s interesting, because they ran an ad blaming this council for the sanctuary city policy in March, which was a few months before Joe Mancinelli did the same). And they keep saying they want this council removed from office. Hell, on March 9, they even called for a return to two-year council terms (which we haven’t had since 1980) just to get rid of this council. And because this is “dark money” spending outside an election period, they can throw more cash into their amateurish campaign than they ever could into an actual council or mayoral campaign.

We aren’t going to get transparency on this group any time soon. But the least we can do is keep track of their spending and ads.

That’s why, tonight, I’m introducing the “#HamOnt "Concerned Hamiltonians" Ad Tracker”: a resource for Hamiltonians to keep up-to-date on the advertising campaign of the eponymous shadowy right-wing populist group trying to undermine the foundations of our democracy!

Every week they run an ad, I’ll update the linked Google Sheet and the concernedhamiltonians.ca website I bought in an effort to bring a little bit of transparency to this pitiful saga. I’ll be there when they break $60,000 in spending. I’ll be there when they break $75,000 in spending. I’ll be there when they take another extended break, lulling the city into a false sense of security before reappearing to annoy us once more!

And stay tuned as I think up more and more creative ways to keep these manipulative weirdos honest!

e-by-election

Nominations for the Ward 4 Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board (HWDSB) trustee by-election are open! Nominations close on November 22, 2024 and election day will be January 6, 2025.

I confirmed with the city that there will be a running list of all the people who have registered to contest the seat on the city’s website. As of October 11, there are no candidates listed anywhere, so I only presume that no one has registered yet.

Importantly, council has allowed the city’s elections department to run an internet voting pilot program if they can get it up and going in time. That would be a huge positive for this election and might help prevent below-5% turnout.

We’re looking at a January election for a school trustees seat that was held by the same man for decades, so it was already going to be a struggle to get people out to the polls. But allowing people to vote from the comfort of their homes might actually help boost turnout, even if just a small amount. Research I’ve been working on for my professional gig seems to show that the first internet election held by a municipality usually sees a big boost in turnout, followed by a steady drop back to normal levels. But each municipality is different and there’s no guarantee that will be the case here.

Anyway, if you’re a Ward 4 resident with interest in public school board issues, sign up to run!

A good tweet

The owner of Twitter showed up on stage with Donald Trump to make the case that the Republican presidential nominee - you know, the man with the enemies list and sweeping plans to jail his political opponents, critics, and anyone who has been slightly mean to him ever - is the champion of free speech. But we live in a Whose Line Is It Anyway? version of reality where the rules are made up and nothing real matters, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Regardless, here’s a good tweet:

Cool facts for cool people

• Fill out the Cycle Hamilton Vulnerable Road User Survey here!

• Check out this TVO profile on Marit Stiles. Steve Paikin seems to think she’s the real deal!