What’s the matter with Vancouver?

A September Surprise

In late September, news broke that the Vancouver and District Labour Council (VDLC) would be dramatically changing how it worked with the city’s municipal political groups.

Vancouver’s municipal politics works a little differently than ours does in Ontario. Most of this will be a refresher for Sewer Socialists readers, but out in British Columbia, they have municipal political parties that run candidates for mayor, city council, and school trustee (and, in Vancouver, the city’s elected parks board). In their 2022 municipal election, 11 political parties nominated 108 candidates while 29 people stood as independents. They also don’t use wards, instead electing 10 councillors, 9 school trustees, and 7 parks board commissioners “at-large”. That means that, when you go to vote, you get to select as many candidates as there are offices. Here, it is one councillor per ward. There, it is 10 councillors for the whole city.

That means that some groups need to be strategic. That’s where the VDLC came in. For many years, the labour council was the body working between each progressive group to ensure the ideal number of candidates were nominated so that each had a shot at getting elected. Back in 2018, for example, they had brokered an agreement between four left-of-centre parties to ensure each party ran only so many candidates as would allow a coalition of all four parties to each get their candidates elected. The Green Party ended up breaking that agreement and running more candidates than they had initially agreed on, but they still tried to work with other progressives from the sidelines.

In 2022, the number of left-leaning parties in Vancouver had expanded to seven, leaving the VDLC in the awkward position of endorsing some, but not all, of the candidates from some of their former coalition partners.

That election was devastating for the city’s progressives, with the hard right A Better City (ABC) Vancouver party sweeping the election. Just eight non-ABC members serve in the 27 different elected positions in Vancouver’s municipal government right now.

Vancouver’s right-wing mayor, former police officer Ken Sim, has run wild with this unchecked power, using the brute force of his office to violently clear encampments, evict supervised consumption sites, use the courts to prevent sitting councillors from speaking about their policy goals, and hire a former staffer of far-right Alberta premier Jason Kenney who made life for Kenney’s opponents a living hell (and was the Alberta United Conservative Party’s gay face of their anti-gay policies).

Faced with this reality, the VDLC announced in September that, during the city’s next election in 2026, they’ll be backing just one political party: the progressive urbanist group OneCity. This is a huge shift and will likely spark plenty of dialogue in Vancouver about the future of progressive organizing at the municipal level.

But why talk about some niche issues in Vancouver’s municipal politics?

Well, for one, have you met me? But, seriously, the big issue here is that some local progressives are terrified that the fate which befell Vancouver’s left-leaning groups will be the same fate progressive councillors will face here in Ontario in 2026. Despite progress made on big issues, some folks fear that there will be a right-wing backlash in three years that will see the most aggressive, populist, smarmy, law-and-order, pro-business, anti-everything-else candidates elected to local office across the province.

But I don’t think that’s inevitable. In fact, I think Vancouver might be an exception and that, with a little refocusing, the future will look bright for municipal progressives in Ontario. I think that, instead of worrying about Vancouver, we should be looking to what’s happening in Montreal.

So let’s look at the issues: why Vancouver’s progressives failed so miserably in 2022, how the situation there is different than it is here, and why there might be better examples of progressive success that could inspire us.

Let’s dive in.

By sea, land, and air, they’re partisans

It wouldn’t be a Sewer Socialists piece (or, indeed, any conversation with me) if it didn’t start with a wee bit of history. And by “wee bit”, I mean 1,600 words of history. #sorrynotsorry

Vancouver’s first local council was elected in 1886, shortly after the city was incorporated. For the first twenty-odd years of the city’s existence, everyone pretended that all of the candidates for local office were true “independents”. Some of the city’s early mayors really were, like Malcolm MacLean (who moved west after running a general store in Dundas) or Fred Cope (who would drown in a lake during the Gold Rush after trying to save his horse).

By the early 1900’s, Canada’s political parties decided to flex their local muscles and became involved in the city’s municipal affairs. From 1908 to 1938, the city’s mayoralty switched between Liberals and Conservatives, with the parties engaging in spirited battles to essentially elect different versions of the same person to office.

One has a mustache! One has glasses! One has both! And they all hate East Asian-Canadians.

While the two big parties were duking it out for the mayor’s seat, something was bubbling beneath the surface. In 1932, a coalition of left-wing groups came together in Calgary to form the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation or the CCF (the forerunner to today’s NDP). The party created branches across the country and, in Vancouver, the local CCF worked diligently to consolidate with other left-leaning groups. By 1936, they had scooped up all the little labour and left-leaning groups in town and were ready to try their hand at municipal politics. After nominating candidates in that year’s election, they managed to win a few seats.

This had the effect of both inspiring the party’s supporters and absolutely terrifying both the city’s business establishment and partisans with the Liberals and Conservatives. In early November 1937, those terrified people met to determine how to prevent the left-wing from ever gaining control of council. They knew that, if they split their resources and fought each other, they’d let the left win. So they put aside their differences and united to create the Non-Partisan Association or NPA.

After a rocky start, the NPA became Vancouver’s party-to-beat, winning every election from 1940 to 1972,1 guiding the city’s growth and relegating Vancouver’s progressives to political obscurity. After being destroyed by the NPA, the CCF gave up on local politics and focused on provincial affairs (they would form the official opposition in BC from 1941 until the creation of the NDP in the 1960s).

By the middle of the 20th century, as was the case in many Canadian cities, the NPA jumped on the urban renewal train highway and tried to destroy much of Vancouver’s Chinatown with a giant freeway. This would have connected to a waterfront highway and a series of other expressways set on elevated viaducts throughout the city.

Proposed in the late 1950s, the plan had been dragged out for years until one public meeting in late 1967 when hundreds of Vancouverites came out to express their disapproval. Feeling like they weren’t being heard, a group of moderates and academics formed The Elector’s Action Movement (TEAM) which had a reform-focus and a proto-environmentalist spirit. In the city’s 1968 election, 2 TEAM members won election to council, 3 to the school board, and 1 to the park’s board. The era of NPA domination was coming to a close.

That same year, the VDLC and other left-wing activists organized to create the Committee of Progressive Electors (COPE). Suddenly, the NPA had to contend with moderates breaking for TEAM and the left organizing around COPE. By 1972, the opposition had cleaned up its act and was able to reduce the NPA to a single seat, with TEAM member Art Phillips winning the mayor’s chair.

After that point, Vancouver’s party scene became far more dynamic. While the NPA had a second golden age from 1986 to 2002, a diverse array of parties popped up and found success in the city’s municipal elections.

In 2002, Larry Campbell and COPE swept the city’s municipal elections, taking 9 of 11 council seats. Campbell was an interesting choice for COPE’s mayoral candidate: as a steelworker in Hamilton (it always comes back to the Hammer, doesn’t it?), he made a bet with someone that eventually resulted in him joining the RCMP. Despite being a cop, he quietly opposed marijuana prohibition and became frustrated that there wasn’t more being done to address the IV-drug-use-related-AIDS crisis in BC (where he was transferred three years after joining the Mounties). He became Vancouver’s chief coroner and, in that role, was a bit of an activist, challenging government policies and fighting “for the little guy”. His career was the inspiration for the long-running CBC drama Da Vinci's Inquest. Remember all the promos for that show? They were everywhere. I distinctly remember them coming up during Friday night comedy with Air Farce, This Hour Has 22 Minutes, and Red Green.

Anyway, Campbell was a moderate and quickly angered the executive of his left-wing party. By 2004, COPE had split into two factions: “COPE Lite”, led by Campbell, and “COPE Classic” led by councillor David Cadman. COPE Lite eventually became Vision Vancouver, a centre/centre-left-ish/green-liberal-esque party that swept the city’s elections in 2008 under the leadership of a charismatic NDP member of the BC legislature, Gregor Robertson.

Vison became the dominant force in Vancouver for years, marginalizing COPE Classic to the extent where they have been almost entirely without representation since 2008. After that year, there’s been consistent and considerable change in the city’s political scene.

During Vision’s reign, the NPA found itself in the political wilderness, barely electing more than a handful of candidates each election. At the same time, the Vancouver Green Party became a prominent force after electing former provincial party leader Adriane Carr to council in 2011. This was followed by the creation of OneCity, which broke off from COPE in 2014 after some members became concerned the party was being too dogmatic and oppositional to new housing in the city.

By 2018, things weren’t going well for Vision, which had started to languish under the crushing weight of the housing crisis and the myriad issues Vancouver was facing. In that year’s election, Vision collapsed entirely while the NPA came close to electing Ken Sim mayor. Sim lost a tight race against independent candidate Kennedy Stewart, an NDP MP from neighbouring Burnaby (and, full disclosure, someone I admire quite a bit as an academic-turned-dedicated progressive politician). Despite this, the traditional right-wing party was able to become the largest party on council, the opposition on the parks board, and tie for control of the school board with the Greens.

Then the party had what was supposed to be a fairly standard internal election for “directors”. These are the people who manage party affairs, help set policy, and work on candidate selection. The party veered hard to the right, electing far-right activists and anti-gay campaigners.

Sim, their past mayoral candidate, came out against the turn to the right and, within two years, all but one of the party’s elected officials had quit. They all split off in two directions: some followed Sim to his newly founded ABC while others joined councillor Colleen Hardwick to her TEAM for a Livable Vancouver (Hardwick’s father was a founder of the original TEAM, but this version was decidedly more conservative).

In the mean time, people were losing faith in the city’s political establishment. Michael Wiebe, a Green Party councillor, was at the centre of a controversy over a conflict of interest issue. Wiebe, a former parks board commissioner, voted on a motion that benefited a business he owned. When he was found to have acted unethically, he still refused to resign. Jean Swanson, an Order of Canada recipient who served as one of four elected officials from COPE (and their only councillor) had a reputation as someone who would fight for those experiencing homelessness, but faced criticism for not also addressing housing unaffordability more broadly and, unfortunately, siding with council’s right wing on NIMBY issues.

Kennedy Stewart, who had beaten Sim to become mayor in 2018, founded a new party called “Forward Together”, which also ran council candidates. Vision tried to come back onto the scene and two new left-of-centre parties also entered the fray: the more militant VOTE Socialist and the Affordable Housing Coalition (which was less a coalition and more just one guy who wanted to run on a single-issue platform).

So the scene was set for the city’s 2022 municipal election: 90 years of overt partisanship in Vancouver, layers of history and tradition, and a complicated new party scene. 24 left-wing candidates for council running with 7 parties. 25 right-wing candidates running with right-wing parties. The stalwarts like Vision, COPE, and the NPA all overshadowed by ambitious new groups like OneCity, ABC, and Forward Together.

Sim and ABC swept the board. 8 members of council, 5 members of the school board, 6 members of the parks board. Every single ABC candidate who ran won. Voters were so enthusiastic about ABC, they even elected Christopher Richardson to the school board because he was listed as an ABC candidate. Richardson had been dropped by ABC after ballots were printed because, in his professional life as an accountant, he apparently had “a long history of problems with the Canada Revenue Agency” due to his involvement with some extremely shady charities.

Councillors like Swanson and Weibe went down to defeat. Adriane Carr, the defacto Green Party leader who had received the most votes of any councillor in 2014 and 2018 slipped to 8th place, just under 8,000 votes away from losing a seat on council. Every single progressive who sought re-election lost votes, without exception. It was a definitive swing to the right for the city’s local government.

A post-mortem

So what happened to make Vancouver lurch violently to the right?

There are a lot of factors that went into Sim’s victory and the complete sweep by ABC. Social and economic issues that had been brewing for decades finally erupted into chaos in the years before and during the pandemic, which drove public opinion in such a way that enabled the hard right to assume control of the narrative and, thus, win the election.

These factors were, broadly speaking:

•  A growing homelessness crisis: Since 2014, Vancouver has seen 10 major “tent cities” pop up that were the cause of major concern for some in the community. Four of the most contentious tent city conflicts happened during the 2018-2022 term of Vancouver council. One of the first issues Kennedy Stewart needed to address was one such encampment in Oppenheimer Park. The NPA, which held two seats on the Parks Board, used their position to call for an injunction to remove the encampment from the park. John Coupar, the hard right parks board commissioner who became the unofficial spokesperson for the NPA, decried what he called the “weak response [of the] Green-COPE alliance” on the board and sought to undermine Stewart’s attempts to find a more compassionate solution to the crisis.2 In April, 2020, using the pandemic as a cover, the BC provincial government stepped in and shut down the Oppenheimer encampment. Two more major encampment clearings - one later in 2020 and another in 2021 - were initiated by the Port Authority and the Parks Board respectively, but each had the effect of making it seem like progressives were “weak on homelessness”.

• The housing crisis: Directly tied to the above issue, Vancouver’s housing crisis did not get better from 2018 to 2022. Stewart undertook measures to address this by championing a plan to allow four-storey walkups throughout the city, but even this was opposed from the left by COPE’s Swanson and from the right by the NPA-turned-TEAM’s Hardwick.3 Further zoning changes were blocked when a messy coalition of COPE, the Greens, and some members of the NPA teamed up to stifle a motion that would have allowed more rental housing on key commercial corridors.4 Later in 2020, the NPA led a charge to delay Stewart’s plans to build more housing for middle-income residents by allowing more units on a single lot.5 Then in 2021, the NPA and Greens teamed up to defeat a OneCity motion that would have made it easier to build co-ops and social housing.6 The lack of action on the housing crisis saw the average rent for a 2-bedroom in Vancouver jump to nearly $2,000 by the time of the 2022 election, all because progressives couldn’t put aside differences and challenge the dominance of the single-detached home lobby in the city.

• Council dysfunction: The political composition of Vancouver council right after the 2018 election was “mixed”. Elsewhere in the world, they would have called the chamber… “hung”. In Canada, we usually go for the less suggestive term “minority”. There were 5 members of the NPA, 3 Greens, 1 from OneCity, 1 from COPE, and 1 independent in the form of the mayor. While things seemed to be humming along pre-pandemic, by the summer of the first year of lockdowns, everyone was at their breaking point. A meeting in July of 2020 broke down after the NPA “weaponized” parliamentary procedure to, in effect, filibuster a move to stop police “street checks” (similar to the carding issue here).7 Even as the party was imploding, they began to become more and more adversarial, eager to halt the mayor’s agenda at every turn. This reached a fever pitch in 2021 when the NPA filed a lawsuit against Stewart for defamation, which was eventually dismissed (with Stewart being awarded $100,000 in a countersuit to cover his legal expenses).

• Taxes and municipal finances: COVID walloped Vancouver’s municipal finances. Prior to the pandemic, council’s progressives were assailed as “tax and spend leftists” for wanting to dedicate money to things like “the housing crisis” and “climate change”, all opposed by the NPA.8 During the pandemic, though, there was an attempt to tighten the ol’ municipal belt, which included a paltry $3.5 million cut from the Vancouver Police Department’s budget increase request. The police chief and the NPA both jumped on this, with the latter emailing donors and the media accusing Stewart and council progressives of attempting to “defund the police”.9

• An adversarial media: Vancouver has two English-language daily papers - The broadsheet Vancouver Sun and the tabloid Vancouver Province. They’re both owned by the right-wing Postmedia Network and often publish similar versions of the same articles. There’s a weekly paper out of SFU (The Peak) and UBC’s The Ubyssey that publishes every two weeks. And there’s the alt-weekly The Georgia Straight. But regular municipal coverage comes from the Sun and the Province. Those two papers have a long history of controversy (including the necessary shake-ups at the papers after they published a racist anti-immigrant op-ed). But all throughout Stewart’s mayoralty and the 2018-2022 term of council, the Sun and Province presented council affairs from a centre-right perspective, enthusiastically opposing everything from Stewart’s fundraising efforts to council’s attempts to deal with the city’s finances in a reasonable way. Then, days before the election, the Sun ran a hit piece on OneCity that claimed the party was using “QAnon” tactics to smear the reputation of a housing advocate based on some blurry screenshots of a conversation between a one time OneCity canvasser and others (most of which caution the canvasser against his clumsy tactics). It was shady journalism attempting to make a story out of nothing that ran in the only daily paper in the city just days before a municipal election (and the Hamiltonians say: “Where have we heard that one before?”).

Based on all of that, we have a picture of what happened in Vancouver to secure an ABC victory.

What happened to Vancouver?

From 2018 to 2022, Vancouver’s city council was split between multiple parties, none of which were natural allies, and was led by an independent mayor who was unable to move on key pieces of legislation because of an increasingly adversarial council. At various times, COPE and the Greens failed to back the mayor up in an apparent bid to appease a NIMBYish upper class of well-meaning liberals whose compassion ends the second their comfort and/or investments are impacted. Attempts to find compassionate solutions to problems or ask tough questions about municipal expenditures were attacked from the right as the mayor being “weak on XYZ issue”, all while the city’s right-leaning press gave voice to opponents of progressivism and viewed the mayor’s efforts with a kind of sneering bemusement that practically dripped from the pages of the daily papers. Some progressives started listening to these contrarian voices and ended up stifling their ambition to suit the needs of a small, but vocal, minority.

Plans were watered down, if advanced at all, leading to anger from both the left and the right, which was given more fuel by the breakdown in social relations during the pandemic and the absolute disinterest of other levels of government to provide municipalities with the tools they need to address each and every crisis we see on the day-to-day.

Was the problem that Vancouver was “too progressive” and “went too far, too fast?” Not even close. The problem was that an entrenched group of adversarial right-wingers blocked progress to both make the mayor look bad and create chaos which they could campaign on fixing in the next election. That wasn’t helped by some council members who ended up siding with the right in the name of cautious progress or long-time activists who let the “perfect” be the enemy of “good”. Vancouver city council, in short, didn’t have a uniform set of goals or ways to achieve those goals with some people on the same side of the political spectrum fighting each other because of a lack of communication or a misunderstanding about what the electorate really wanted.

All the while, regular people saw the crises continue to escalate. Housing became more expensive, little action was taken on transit, the world was getting hotter and hotter, more encampments appeared in more parks than ever before, and both renters and homeowners found that it was costing more and more to get less and less in the way of municipal services. All these folks were worn down by the miserable situation and either a) turned off and didn’t vote (voter turnout in Vancouver dropped 3.5% from 2018 to 2022) or b) sided with the right-wingers who came out with “common sense” solutions to the problems they allowed to get worse.

That’s the key thing here: the hard right put up roadblocks to progress every step of the way. They made it almost impossible for a progressive agenda to be implemented. Then they sat back and waited until the next municipal election where they promised a heavy handed response to the problems they helped make worse. Vancouver’s hard right has now been given a chance to govern and implement their punitive style of civic policy, knowing full well that clearing encampments and giving developers a free pass won’t actually fix problems, but will instead punt those issues down the road for some other bunch of politicians and future voters to deal with. All the while, this policy agenda is making their wealthy donors wealthier and maintaining a deeply broken status quo.

When, in the near-ish future, it finally comes time to turf the hard right, people will be skittish about electing progressives. Remember, I’m someone who door knocked for the Federal NDP when he was 18 and was told by people “I just don’t know about supporting them ever since Bob Rae” despite that man’s being elected when I was just over two months old. Because of this fear, skeptical voters will only elect a few progressives, while trying to “moderate” them by also electing some conservatives. This will allow the hard right block to block any progressive agenda, thus completing this pitiful little ouroboros of municipal dysfunction. It looks something like this:

So what happened in Vancouver?

In addition to the above issues that plagued the 2018-2022 term of council, the election made things worse.

The big issue here is that too many of the key people - candidates, campaign managers, campaign workers, supporters, and donors - were pulled in too many directions by the number of parties running in the election. That wasn’t the case for the right: just like those businessmen and partisans figured out in 1932, splitting resources leads to defeat. After the NPA imploded, ABC became the new right-wing standard bearer in the city. Progress Vancouver (rebranded from YES! Vancouver, a YIMBY outfit from 2018) didn’t have the recognition and Hardwick’s TEAM for a Livable Vancouver (aside from having a terrible name) suffered from the fact that Hardwick opted to run for mayor and positioned herself as the “say no to everything” candidate. ABC was able to capitalize on having most of the NPA’s previously elected members join them and the name recognition of a popular former mayoral contender. The city’s right lined up behind them, allowing them to steal the spotlight from other groups.

The city’s progressives, on the other hand, fought for resources and support when they weren’t fighting each other. Forward Together and OneCity aimed for a similar demographic (Gen X-to-Millennial-progressive-urbanists) while the Greens found it hard to distinguish their agenda from Vision’s or from, in some instances, COPE. COPE’s dogmatism and ideological inflexibility made them similar to VOTE Socialist, which just seemed content to be at worst, a spoiler and, at best, an loud but ineffective force like those Fightback people that hand out Trotskyist newspapers at NDP conventions.

Simply put: a divided left, weighed down by the baggage of the previous term, was no match for a shiny new conservative outfit (even if it was just the NPA with a new acronym).

Breaking the cycle

There are plenty of reasons why we shouldn’t assume Hamilton will follow in Vancouver’s footsteps. Sure, there are some similarities. Here, we have a fairly progressive council that was swept into power on the promise of change, but hopes of quick progress on big issues have stalled thanks to the dual forces of an obstinate crop of conservative councillors and the legislative equivalent of an Airborne Toxic Event that is the Ford Government. And, yes, we face similar crises in the form of a heated debate about encampments, growing housing unaffordability, rising taxes, deteriorating municipal services, and a local press that is being weakened by the corporate titans that gobbled up newspapers without knowing how to run them.

But there are key differences. First, Hamilton’s right has never been very good at winning campaigns (see the mayoral campaigns of Clark in 2014, Sgro in 2018, and Bratina in 2022). Second, fact that we have wards here offers conservative councillors little incentive to work together, as someone voting for a right-wing heavyweight like Tom Jackson doesn’t have the added bonus of boosting the candidacy of another conservative in a different ward. Third, it will be hard for any organized right-wing group to pin anything on the mayor because, and I’m not saying this to be mean, I’m not entirely certain the mayor has actually championed anything yet. I bet anyone a pint that, if you were to do a random poll of Hamiltonians asking them to name the mayor, the answers you would get would be: “Larry Di Ianni”, “Fred Eisenberger”, “Cameron Kroetsch”, “Sarah Jama”, “That nice man from the Chamber of Commerce”, “Laura Babcock”, “Olivia Chow”, “Doug Ford”, “Nardwuar the Human Serviette”, “I don’t know”, and “Andrea Horwath”, in that order.

But I think the key thing is that there really isn’t an “organized” right wing in Hamilton. Sure, there are occasional groups that pop up, but none of them have the humpf to mount a large campaign to throw out enough councillors to shift council violently to the right. Consider how difficult it would be for all the disparate conservative folks in the city to come together to get a whole slate of councillors elected in 2026. A right-winger from Ward 1 would have a difficult time understanding the complaints of a right-winger in Ward 3, who would find the complaints of a right-winger in Ward 10 difficult to empathize with, and who wouldn’t understand the irritations plaguing a right-winger in Ward 13, let alone any of the right-wingers on the mountain.

What will the unifying theme be for them? Bike lanes? Not all wards have decent cycling infrastructure. Encampments? Not an issue in some wards. Taxes? Unlikely, since the tax rate varies depending on property value and part of the city. Police funding? It keeps going up. The “woke elite” pushing their “UN/WEF social agenda”? Yeah, if you’re going after the handful of PPC voters in each ward.

Yeah, we’re talking about Montreal again

There is an unfounded concern that the voters of Vancouver pushed back against a council that was too left wing. As I’ve shown, that’s not the case. They sided with a flashy new right-wing outfit because the right, which was organized and methodical, stopped progress from happening and fomented chaos for their own benefit.

If there actually was a progressive takeover, things might have been different. Things might have turned out like they did in Montreal.

At the beginning of 2017, not many people in Montreal expected there to be a big change in that year’s municipal election. Mayor Denis Coderre had swept to power in 2013 promising to clean up corruption and bring investment to the city. As a former Liberal cabinet minister and long-time politician, Coderre was the kind of skilled, traditional politician for whom campaigning came naturally. He created his own political party - Équipe (meaning “Team”) Denis Coderre - and ran a slate of competent, if not mostly unknown, candidates loyal to him, winning 26 of Montreal council’s 65 seats. He was short of a majority, but he made the math work.

Like one of his predecessors, the nearly-dictatorial Jean Drapeau who governed the city nearly uninterrupted for 30 years, Coderre spent lavishly and sought to bring international attention to his city and, by extension, himself. His big showcase was the flashy “Formula E” event - a street race of electric cars in the summer before the election that cost taxpayers $24 million and resulted in ample complaints from business owners upset that city streets played host to a car race.

All throughout 2017, voters in Montreal were getting to know the new opposition party leader, downtown councillor Valérie Plante. Plante assumed the leadership of the progressive urbanist party Projet Montréal after one of the party’s founders and their three-time mayoral candidate, Richard Bergeron, resigned following nearly a decade as party leader. Nearly 20 years younger than Bergeron, Plante embodied a new kind of leadership - one that focused on urban issues, considered the environment, made commitments to equity, cared deeply about transparency, and was ready to start making the change necessary to make Montreal a more livable city.

From June to October of 2017, the gap between the Coderre juggernaut and the dynamic urbanist outfit narrowed. Projet’s campaign was ambitious. They called for a new Metro line, more social housing, and improving energy efficiency in municipal buildings to tackle climate change. Plante’s fiery performances in both the French and English language debates energized the campaign, as did the withdrawal of a centrist mayoral candidate who threw his support behind Projet Montréal. A poll conducted a few days before the election had Plante slightly ahead, which was a first for any Projet Montréal mayoral candidate.

On election day - November 5, 2017 - Projet Montréal won city council (with a minority, mind you) and Valérie Plante took the mayor’s chair with 51% of the vote. The progressives had won a clear victory.

Once they started governing, they didn’t back down, despite a sizable opposition on council. They pedestrianized streets across the city during the summer. They massively expanded the city’s cycling network. They devised a plan that would make Montreal climate neutral by 2050. That didn’t mean there weren’t hiccups along the way. The Pink Line was stalled when the new right-wing provincial government refused to chip in, their social housing plans didn’t progress thanks to a failure by other levels of government to provide reasonable funding, and the party was forced to expel a number of elected officials for poor behaviour.

But they held true and made serious, progressive changes based on their platform and based on facts.

In the city’s most recent municipal elections in 2021, voters rewarded Projet Montréal with 3 more seats on city council, giving the party an outright majority, and re-elected Plante with an even larger percent of the popular vote. And things have been going so well since (despite the city facing the same budget constraints every municipality in Canada is facing) that, last week, she announced she’ll be seeking a third term in 2025.

There are clear differences here: Kennedy Stewart, hindered by a right-wing opposition and a group of disunited progressives, was unable to advance his agenda during his four year term and was soundly defeated by an energized hard right opposition. Valérie Plante, leading a strong and united progressive party that faced minimal pushback from the left and a right-wing lacking coherent leadership, was able to move forward with progressive policies and was re-elected with an even larger majority and mandate after four years.

Advice you didn’t ask for

Should Hamilton’s progressives cower in fear of an inevitable deep blue wave come October 26, 2026?

My current bet is that a Vancouver-style knockout is unlikely. But we’re not Vancouver. And we’re not Montreal. We’re just the Hammer. The scrappy, oft-overlooked, always amazing, occasionally plagued by “the smell”, Hamilton.

It is hard to tell what the city’s right-wing will do over the next three years. They might get organized, put aside their differences, and mount a massive campaign to target centre/centre-left councillors. They might keep squabbling and fighting and focusing on their own little niche issues. They might ignore the local scene altogether and focus on knocking out MPs Chad Collins and Lisa Hepfner in the next federal election or work on keeping MPPs Donna Skelly and Neil Lumsden in office during the next provincial election.

But, honestly, it isn’t the right we should be worried about. We should be more worried about the loudest, angriest, most ill-informed voices in our community badgering our progressive leaders to the point where they give up, water-down their ideals, and/or start taking those loud, angry, ignorant people seriously. While the Spec’s Letters to the Editor page is somewhat reflective of the conversation happening among some people in some segments of the community, it doesn’t represent anything close to the reality on the ground. Nor do the bitter comments from anonymous Redditors, Blue Tick X/Twitter extremists, loud columnists, and “big-fish-in-little-pond” thought leaders.

Let’s be honest: even if you’re a hair left of centre, you’ll be called a “tax-and-spend liberal socialist radical” no matter what. Take, for example, Gloria Johnson, one of the “Tennessee Three”, the lawmakers who protested gun violence in their state legislature back in April. In September, she announced she was going to run for the United States Senate. The very day she launched her campaign, the incumbent Republican senator called her a “radical socialist”, even before she had rolled out any major policy positions.

So why not just go for it? Why not be a happy warrior like Valérie Plante and push for more bike lanes, better housing, strong transit, walkable streets, livable communities, robust social services, and a better local democracy all-around? Why not recognize the dire moment we’re in, where frustration with democracy is at levels not seen since the rise of fascism and far too many people are either tuning out or getting sucked down dangerous internet radicalization wormholes? Why not have some of the abundant optimism displayed by all those Vancouver progressives throughout history, even when they didn’t have council majorities and were facing all-but-certain defeat in their next election?

Wrapping up

The problem in Vancouver was that progressives weren’t united. They let the sneering partisan media and the inflexible right get to them and exploit the subtle differences between their brands of centre-left politics. This led to inaction on important issues and allowed the right to campaign on bringing “common sense” solutions to the table when, in reality, they share the blame for four years of inaction. The right was aided by a shiny re-brand and deep divides on the left, as progressives fought each other for resources and attention during a municipal election.

Contrast this with Montreal, where progressives stood together, implemented their agenda under the watch of a strong leader, and were granted a second term, this time with a clear majority, to continue their work.

Are Hamilton’s progressives all doomed in 2026? I don’t think so. The city’s right is far less organized than it is in Vancouver and the peculiarities in both our systems make an ABC-style knockout unlikely. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be vigilant. But it also means that our progressive leaders shouldn’t err on the side of caution because some of the chatter is seeming more right-wing these days.

We all have high hopes. Don’t let the improbable spectre of a Vancouver knock out throw you off course.

There’s something wrong on this street

It has been a news-packed couple of weeks, so this incredible story might have slipped under your radar.

The folks over at Canadaland did a really interesting look into “StreetPolitics Canada”, a YouTube channel that’s been doing really well, posting near daily anti-Trudeau videos to their nearly 70,000 subscribers. Over the past year, they’ve raked in over 10,000,000 views on videos that are crammed full of misinformation, but are equally full of the kind of sensationalist, right-wing populist, down dirty rhetoric that is like catnip to Canada’s perpetually-online conservatives.

Unfortunately, it was a scam. Well, not necessarily a scam, but definitely shady. Turns out, StreetPolitics Canada is run out of Cairo, Egypt by people who have never been to Canada. The goal is to drive engagement and earn YouTube ad revenue. The Canadaland piece (and really entertaining podcast version) goes into how the channel, which is part of a larger group owned by a habitual entrepreneur who is mostly trying to make it as a Twitch-streaming day trader, figured out who their best “marks” would be by posting about Trudeau, whose name apparently activates some people like a key phrase activating a sleeper agent in a cliché spy movie from the 80s.

Using hashtags like #trudeaumustgo, the account has found a base who is either too internet illiterate to know or too focused on their rage to care that the whole operation is just a vehicle to make money off ads. They haven’t stopped since the investigation, doubling down on their content, which is a mishmash of conspiracies and lies about the WEF, government scandals, and how Pierre Poilievre (whose name they misspell in many of their thumbnails) is a big strong boy who keeps DESTROYING weak Trudeau.

The thing that gets me about this is just how sad it all is. That people are so hungry for anti-Trudeau propaganda that they’re willing to get it from an Egyptian content farm with no understanding of Canada. The former employee Canadaland spoke to even said they use AI to write the scripts. I’m not saying I want this kind of content (at all even remotely for the love of all that’s good in the world don’t give me this content oh great algorithm in the sky), but this just makes Canada look like a joke. Like this country is some pitifully small backwater full of rubes just waiting for the next Harold Hill to come along and swindle us for all we’ve got, except we don’t have any big hearted librarians to fall in love with him because Scott Moe called them all groomers and had them fired.

It also signals just how dire things are for the Liberals. The latest polls have the Conservatives leading by 13 or 14 points, in large part because the Liberals seem almost paralyzed by their own indecision on important issues. Those same polls find that 64% of Canadians believe the federal government isn’t doing enough to deal with housing unaffordability, which is helping to contribute to Justin Trudeau’s 62% unfavourability rating. As the cost of living crisis continues to worsen and problems the Liberals promised to fix in 2015 remain unaddressed, Canadians are turning to the Conservatives out of frustration. The problem is, that’s a party whose base is uncritically watching StreetPolitics Canada’s misinformation videos and pushing their new, hyperonline leader further and further to the right. Poilievre has promised to defund the CBC, roll back trans rights, and gut social services to keep taxes low.

StreetPolitics Canada is filling a need among the Conservative Party’s base that doesn’t care if they’re being lied to or swindled along the way. They just want someone to validate their hatred of an ineffective political leader. And if the Tories win the next federal election, we’ll all pay for it. The only people who will come out on top will be day trading bros in Cairo.

Gettin’ Stoned

Ahh, school trustees. What a fun bunch.

I’ve mentioned Durham District School Board (DDSB) trustee Linda Stone in this newsletter before. She’s one of the three trustees for Oshawa who, in 2022, won the most votes of every candidate running for the office, despite carrying around a metric tonne of baggage.

Stone is a very vocal transphobe and connoisseur of many flavours of right-wing conspiracies. She, for example, doesn’t believe COVID-19 or climate change are real and has used her social media and trustee’s position to spread misinformation about almost every possible thing you can think of. She’s brought these conspiracies to board meetings and has asked board staff to report back on them, usually to be told they’re not real, which doesn’t seem to matter to her.

She was so transphobic and awful that her colleagues voted to censure her this past February to send the message that her views were harmful to the children these trustees are elected to protect. She was censured again in June (right after I wrote about her first censure) after the DDSB received 13 separate complaints about various conspiracies she’s shared, which included:

• a repost of a video from the far-right “Libs of TikTok” account, which she quoted with the words: “gender identity was made up by a pedophile psychopath”,

• reposts of misinformation about the safety of puberty blockers,

• claims that gender identity was like pedophilia,

• statements that “biological women” have lost their voices and will cease to matter, and

• mocking non-binary people’s appearance.

All of these were done from her social media accounts where she identifies herself as a school trustee. During the investigation into her, she claimed those who brought the complaints were “defending a pedophile” and diminishing the voices of women, despite most of the complainants being women and the whole Libs of TikTok pedophile thing was a lie concocted to make it look like gender affirmation was abuse. As a result of that censure, Stone was barred from attending meetings until the end of this year.

But she could still use social media and, oh boy, did she ever!

Over the summer, she Xed/Tweeted up a storm, reposting lies about students identifying as cats, retweeting J.K. Rowling transphobia from a burner account she had clunkily called “Freedom”, and badgered board staff about students from the DDSB…checks notes…oh, apparently it was about them identifying as cats again. This woman really does not like cats and trans children.

The exact text of one of these tweets from June 20 stated:

What are you even on about, you…elected official?

So, obviously, this morphed into the fourth integrity commissioner investigation into Stone. One of the complainants for this round was actually one of the student trustees, Ben Cameron. A high school student, Cameron had to go the DDSB meeting and state:

A high school student needed to be the one to say that. A literal teenager needed to stand up to an elected official who is acting like an internet bully.

But the board agreed with Cameron and Stone is now banned from meetings until December 31, 2024, which means she will have spent nearly half her term in office barred from participating in meetings because of her transphobia and weird catboy conspiracies (which have been widely, consistently, and unsurprisingly debunked).

It has come to the point where students are now the ones pushing back against this anti-child crusade launched by those on the far-right. Good for student trustee Cameron for having the courage to stand up to bullies like Stone.

But the real issue here is that we have a system that allows for hateful, bigoted people to assume positions of power and then use the platform they’ve been provided to dehumanize vulnerable people. We need better accountability mechanisms for these positions. If we aren’t planning on a serious overhaul of the school trustee system (which is out-of-date and plainly misunderstood by the electorate), then we need things like recall petitions so that people like Stone can’t keep using their office to spread hate unchecked for four years.

If you’d like to read the full report into Linda Stone’s actions, you can download it here:

The conflict

The crisis in the Middle East continues to dominate much of the conversation both here in Hamilton and elsewhere. Each day that passes after the events of October 7 brings new shock and horror. Calls for peace are punctuated by solemn reminders of those killed by Hamas or by events like the bombing of the al-Ahli Hospital on October 17.

The politicization of the conflict continues as well, with the Conservative Party attempting to open an investigation into the CBC because they avoid using loaded terms like “terrorist”. This attempt to use the state to force journalists to use particular language on the part of the Conservatives show just how authoritarian they’ll be to satiate the demands of their base, which they have radicalized by demonizing journalism.

Unfortunately, as journalists try to cover the events, the complete collapse of social media has made it increasingly difficult to find the truth, hear reasonable voices, or even know if what we’re seeing is real. As Ryan Broderick over at Garbage Day has noted, our feeds are broken and all we get is noise from obnoxiously loud voices and those seeking to manipulate us. Video game footage passed off as scenes from the war, viral images turning out to be months old and fake, and all the oxygen sucked out of the room by nonsense about porn stars being cancelled. We’re in this weird space where, as Kyle Chayka writes in the New Yorker, the internet isn’t “fun anymore” in part because we lost the magic of sharing stuff with real people but also because Musk’s move to paid verification had filled the platform with Blue Tick-ers who, as Ckayka notes, “now dominate the platform, often with far-right-wing commentary and outright disinformation.”11

Case in point: a few days back, I reported the X/Twitter account of a far-right Canadian commentator who has become one of this conflict’s most prominent keyboard warriors. Aside from appearances on the CBC, this person has told Sarah Jama to “go back to Somalia” and threatened leftist academics for their beliefs, attempting to equate progressive ideals with anti-Semitism in a disgusting display of someone using a tragedy to advance their own agenda. This person has been inciting violence and using the conflict to (as noted last week) settle nonsense political scores. While X/Twitter informed me that person’s account was suspended, as of today, they’re still tweeting and maintaining the same level of targeted hate that is helping to erode the foundations of our democracy.

Things aren’t much better in the provincial legislature, where Doug Ford’s government is trying to silence MPP Jama (and, by extension, all the people of Hamilton Centre) over her stance on Israel. The motion would require Jama to censor her social media and apologize to the legislature for her beliefs. If she doesn’t, the motion will give the speaker the power to ignore Jama in the legislature, meaning our democratically elected representative will be unable to participate in debates and discussions on the legislature floor. Ford is desperate for any distraction he can get as the criminal investigations into his government’s alleged corrupt dealings heat up.

Cool facts for cool people

• Monique LaGrange, the Red Deer Catholic Schools trustee who posted a meme comparing members of the queer community to Nazis has a good excuse for her actions: the Holy Spirit made her do it. LaGrange has said that the Holy Ghost told her to “go for it” so that she could challenge what she calls “the agenda of the United Nations and Planned Parenthood, which is an attempt to sabotage our youths’ identities and destinies and hijacks the LGBTQ’s original mandate.” Well, shit, folks, which one of you blabbed? How did she find out about our original mandate!? That mandate being “yas slay hunty werk that fierce snatch with your daddy’s poppers”. All joking aside, using your religion to justify prejudice is one thing, but literally blaming the Holy Spirit for your actions? Gurl, resign.

• The Richmond, British Columbia branch of the RCMP is being dragged for a wildly inappropriate road safety video they posted on X/Twitter on October 13. The video shows a pedestrian, crossing at a crosswalk, wearing a hoodie and listening to music. A driver, who is looking at his phone, nearly strikes and kills the pedestrian. It ends with saying “Pedestrian safety is a two-way street”. OOOOF. It should be pointed out that wearing a hoodie is not illegal but texting while driving very obviously is. This “everyone shares blame when a person is struck and killed by someone operating a 3,000 pound vehicle travelling 70 km/h” mentality is just another example of our unthinking car-centricity.

• After trustees with the Peel District School Board (PDSB) voted to accept a report entitled the Two Spirit & LGBTQIA+ Action Plan, many have received death threats and threats of violence directed toward them, their families, and the board. Multiple trustees have installed security cameras at their homes and are avoiding discussions about how they vote on matters in the wake of the threats. The report points out that queer students are more likely to feel alienated from their peers and have lower “emotional wellbeing scores” than their non-queer classmates. To address this, the report establishes some steps the board can take to make queer students feel more a part of the school community and have a safe learning environment. Many of the same anti-children protesters who marched against programs designed to make students feel more included attended that meeting and shouted down trustees when they sought to speak on the issue. Nothing says “save the children” like threatening to bomb schools full of them and murder the children of public officials!

• In April, after Elon Musk branded the American broadcaster NPR “state-affiliated media”, they left X/Twitter in protest. Now that NPR has six months of data, they’ve determined what the impact of not using X/Twitter any more is: almost nothing. The broadcaster reports that traffic to their site has dropped a single percentage point since April. Yeah…1%. As an editor with the Kansas City station of NPR noted, “Twitter wasn’t worth the effort, at least in terms of traffic.” Granted, NPR did other things like set up live blogs during breaking events and worked harder to engage with people on Instagram, which has helped keep people engaged and even helped with staff burnout. As staff reported, working on other platforms is better than increasing their efforts on “platforms like Twitter and Reddit, where snark and contrarianism reign.”