What have we become?

One of the main characters in this week’s big arena story below is former Mayor Jack MacDonald, who pushed for a new downtown sports complex during his four years as mayor. For much of his life, he lived at 129 Reid Avenue South in the Glenview neighbourhood, a sleepy little 1.5 storey home that backs on to the Red Hill Valley Creek.

How do I know this? Because when candidates used to register to run for local office, their full addresses and professions would be published in The Spectator.

It would be impossible to do so today.

Violence erupted at the North End Hamilton Alliance for Tiny Shelters consultation on Monday, September 11. Members of city staff, residents, and journalists were threatened and attacked by a group of bullies who aimed to intimidate and frighten everyone involved. The police were called, the mayor and ward councillor were told to stay away because of threats to their safety, and the democratic process was shut down. The ward councillor, Cameron Kroetsch, is now the target of such intense and sustained online and real-world violence that a separate town hall in Durand has been moved online due to safety concerns.

This is bigger than Cameron. This is bigger than HATS. This is bigger than the homelessness and encampment crisis.

This is democratic decline.

People’s fears are being amplified and exaggerated in part by the city’s entrenched elites (developers, investors, former politicians) and in part by utterly broken social media platforms like X (where antisemitism and racist violence are now encouraged) and Reddit (which has seen a major decline in quality and a huge uptick in unhinged, unsubstantiated, and unhealthy hate). Those fortunate few who own property see any intervention as a threat to their increasingly valuable (and often only real) asset and lash out with passionate intensity against anything that might disrupt the deeply irrational market.

This slide into violence is the precursor to authoritarianism. As fear morphs into anger which morphs into violence, more and more people will simply turn away from their communities and from the democratic process. Who wants to attend a community meeting where loud men intimidate everyone with a different viewpoint? Who wants to stand as a candidate when your life will be threatened with regularity? Who wants to vote when members of fringe political groups will automatically claim there was fraud and seek to invalidate your vote? In a situation like that, a strongman can easily sweep into power as engagement declines and political violence becomes the norm.

This trend of political violence in Hamilton is disgusting and shameful. And the only thing that will challenge a politics of anger is a politics of radical happiness. We must fight hostility with strong policy, fear with solid facts, anger with boundless love.

I, for one, am not going to sit back while we slouch toward authoritarianism. I choose a politics of love. And I hope you do too.

That’s Entertainment

I can’t say I’m familiar with the work of Sonu Nigam. From what the Internet tells me, he is one of the most successful and famous Bollywood “playback singers” of all time. Those are people who sing music specifically for movies. He’s had a thirty year career and, in 2008, became one of the first Indian singers to tour Canada solo.

I also did not know that he was performing at the First Ontario Centre on Sunday, August 27. Not, that is, until I found myself downtown, watching an ever-growing traffic jam spread further and further from the core, crowds of eager fans exiting cars and walking briskly toward the former Copps Coliseum faster and faster with every second the clock ticked closer to the 7:00 PM showtime. The lines of cars stretched into Central, into the Durand, into Kirkendall, into Strathcona. My own street, which is admittedly an appealing cut-through road for folks who want to try and bypass traffic on York, King, or Main, was briefly bumper-to-bumper as folks made their way down to the stadium.

The Google Maps traffic layer gives you an only somewhat realistic picture of the traffic chaos caused during the event.

Admittedly, Sonu Nigam likely has fans across Southern Ontario who travelled into Hamilton to see the show. The First Ontario Centre stop, the only Canadian location on this part of the tour, was sandwiched between one in Atlantic City and one in Fairfax, Virginia.

But the traffic and crowds of people (the show was nearly sold out and capacity was capped at 7,000) got me thinking about stadiums, music venues, and events of public spectacle. Considering so much effort is being poured into turning Hamilton’s core into the “Downtown Entertainment Precinct”, I thought this would be a good time to check in with stadiums and see if all this effort is really worth the fuss. Do large stadiums really provide “spillover” effects for local businesses? Do these venues make money? And are there ways to provide space for such venues that improve local communities?

A great many coliseumses…colisei? Coliseupodies!

The FirstOntario Centre began its life as Copps Coliseum. Built in 1985 for the equivalent in today’s currency of $92.2 million dollars, Copps was intended to replace the city’s old sports centre, the Hamilton Forum across from Woodlands Park on Barton Street. That one was torn down in 1977, which is the reason there are a bunch of weird, non-conforming front-split bungalows on Barton and Bristol.

Despite being demolished in 1977, plans had been brewing since 1971 for a new pro hockey arena. Some of the folks behind the upstart World Hockey Association were keen to locate a team in Hamilton, but didn’t view the Forum as a suitable venue for their dynamic new hockey league. A businessman from St. Catharines offered up some land in the east end, but that deal went nowhere and Ottawa was awarded Hamilton’s WHA team that everyone definitely remembers because that team definitely lasted longer than one season in a league that totally lasted more than seven years.

But the idea of a new arena caught the attention of investors and local politicians. The “Hamilton Coliseum Group” was created in 1972 to advance the project which, by then, was proposed for a spot south of the Stoney Creek Traffic Circle (yeah, there used to be a traffic circle where today’s hellish junction of asphalt and concrete that is the QEW/Red Hill Parkway/Centennial Parkway rat king tail of a merger is) roughly where the Centennial GO Station is located today.

The whole project spiraled out of control. A Toronto-area businessman got involved, offered to move a WHA team to Hamilton, said the arena would be the “biggest in Canada”, and that it would be opened by Elvis Presley.

Some local observers began to ask questions about this fantastical new arena. Questions like “why are we selling this land to this shady group for $15,000 an acre when it is probably worth $70,000?” and “why hasn’t this group provided us any financial details?” and “Elvis?”.

But Mayor Victor Copps was a big proponent of the arena. He was a former CHML sportscaster, after all. So he made a new agreement with the group and in a squeaker of a council vote, had the deal approved. And the new Hamilton Golden Horseshoe Arena (which was pitched as the new name) would become the largest in all of Canada, with Elvis taking up residency here for the rest of his long, happy life as the Hamilton Toros hockey team maintained their endless winning streak in the immensely popular WHA.

Something about September makes me extra sarcastic.

Obviously none of that happened. By April of 1976, it was evident that the Hamilton Coliseum Group wasn’t going to make an east-end arena happen. Decidedly un-fetch. Council cut off negotiations but was still keen on getting a new sports facility built. The city’s new acting mayor, Vince Agro wanted a new arena and convention centre, which became core planks of his mayoral campaign in 1976. His more conservative opponent, Jack MacDonald (former Controller, multi-time mayoral candidate, and his generation’s Fred Eisenberger) also supported the arena plan, but wanted more provincial buy-in.

Complicating the matter was the fact that council had decided to throw a referendum question on the ballot asking people if they wanted to build a new arena in a spot once slated to become senior’s apartments after being leveled in a fit of urban renewal-inspired demolition mania. The referendum was controversial. Because who in the world, everyone thought, would want an ice hockey arena on the southeast corner of York and Bay?

On December 6, 1976, voters in Hamilton swept Jack MacDonald into the mayor’s chair and resoundingly opposed the arena scheme with 58% of voters giving the idea a thumbs down.

Still, Jack MacDonald pushed forward with plans for a downtown arena. By 1979, the federal Liberals were trying to shore up support in anticipation of an election and were throwing money out where they could. In February of that year, the federal government announced a big ol’ pot of money for Quebec City, Edmonton, Winnipeg, and Hamilton if they wanted to build new arenas. Hamilton East MP Johnny Munro was instrumental in getting Hamilton added to the list, but council had soured on the idea and turned the money down.

The Liberals were swiftly booted from office and then quickly returned (well welcome to the 1980s, indeed). MacDonald, on the other hand, did not fare so well. His abrasive personality, relentless devotion to the Progressive Conservative Party, and hatred of anti-smoking laws didn’t sit well with the electorate. The 1980 mayoral election was a landslide defeat for the two-term mayor, who lost to Conservation Authority chair Bill Powell, 62% to 34%.

Powell was similarly supportive of an arena, though, so when the Liberals came knocking with more federal funds for a downtown arena, council accepted the cash and Copps Coliseum was born.1

What’s all the HUPEG about?

32 years after it opened, Copps (subsequently renamed the FirstOntario Centre) had become a bit of a burden for the city. The 2014-2018 term of council tasked staff with looking at ways to offload the arena.

By the time the 2018-2022 council was installed, the wheels of privatization were in motion. Between 2020 and 2022, deals were struck with Vrancor and the newly created Hamilton Urban Precinct Entertainment Group or HUPEG. According to the city’s website, HUPEG is:

This new consortium made up of investors and developers was handed control of what was once a public asset, securing a lease from January 1, 2023 to December 31, 2072.

One of the very first things HUPEG made news for was trying to “honour and enrich the communities they build in” by asking the Salvation Army’s men’s shelter across the street from the arena to kindly relocate to someone else’s backyard. Those plans have gone nowhere, but it was still a very unneighbourly thing to start off with.

Everything that has happened since has done little to inspire confidence in HUPEG and the arena redevelopment plans. An inordinate amount of time was taken up by the longshot bids for the city to host the 2026 and 2030 Commonwealth Games, a proposal that was advanced by a group called Hamilton 100, led by PJ Mercanti, President of both the Carmen’s Group and HUPEG. Margaret Shkimba noted in 2022 that HUPEG is light on the details and even more stingy with its public relations efforts. Last summer, renovation plans were pushed back to this summer and then pushed back again to some time in 2024. Two of the teams that play in the arena, the Bulldogs (hockey) and the Honey Badgers (basketball) have all fled permanently (or so they say), in part because they don’t have confidence in HUPEG to actually get renos done on time and on plan. While it was anticipated that the Toronto Rock (lacrosse) were also going to leave, they now say they’ll play the whole 2023-2024 season at the FirstOntario Centre.

A Spectator editorial from February of this year took the position that the arena needed to be updated, that the renos are being done with private dollars right now, but that the whole situation “isn’t a great look for Hamilton, HUPEG and City Hall.”

But HUPEG will come before city council on September 20 to present the updated timeline for the renos and how progress has been coming along in general. At that point, hopefully the public will get some answers.

A more important question, though, shouldn’t be “what’s the deal with HUPEG and the arena?” It should be “do we need an arena at all?”

Stadium love

There are a lot of claims made about the power of sporting facilities. That they can revitalize failing downtown cores. That they encourage spectators to patronize nearby commercial venues. That they can raise property values. They they can breathe life and hope into cities, amplifying civic pride, and bringing people together over their love of sports.

In a glowing interview with the Hamilton Mountain News, Mercanti said of the arena renovations: “The project will fundamentally, positively change the city of Hamilton…It is a generational project.”3

But the evidence doesn’t really back this up.

Research has looked at the claim that sports facilities are “public goods” that are worthy of our investment. A 2019 article in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management notes that it is difficult to even call arenas “public goods” considering the low rate of return for the public (while private investors seem to always get a decent return). The author notes that, beyond the “esoteric” value of fandom and the “feel good” effects of having a sports team that bares the name of a city, there is nothing that justifies the amount of money poured into these facilities. The article includes these banger lines:

Damn! Academic burn.

What about the claims that stadiums and arenas boost property values? Again, nope. An article in the journal Economics of Governance looks at a brand new baseball stadium with accompanying mixed-use entertainment and housing development built for the Atlanta Braves. Touted as a major investment that would increase the value of everything around it, the new field ended up not being the “home run” its proponents claimed it would be. Indeed, the author notes that the study’s findings “contradict the claim that the stadium would generate a sufficient return on investment through County property tax revenue to more than recoup tax funding.”5 The only real benefit the study’s author found was, again, a “social benefit” of having a team nearby. In essence, these stadiums and arenas are really only good for giving people a warm, fuzzy feeling about a privately-owned sports team that carries their city’s name.

How about the idea that a sports facility benefits local businesses? Yeah, no. A huge study in Regional Science and Urban Economics looked at 121 sporting facilities for baseball, football, hockey, and basketball. All they were able to find was an increased positive spillover for baseball and football stadiums for entertainment-related businesses very close to sporting facilities. And by “positive effect”, they mean for every 100 visits to a football stadium, 40 people might visit a restaurant within 3 km of the venue. For baseball, its only 29 visits. For basketball and hockey, the only benefit was for similar businesses within 1 km of these arenas and, in this case, actually had a negative effect on businesses slightly further away.6 Not only do hockey arenas like the FirstOntario Centre not generate positive impacts for most nearby businesses, they can actually hurt those businesses operating further away.

Because, let’s be honest, if someone is dropping a couple of hundred on tickets, parking, and a beer at the game, why would they then want to struggle through traffic (I’m not even going to pretend that anyone attending a sports game outside of downtown Toronto is going to even think of public transit as an option) to go to another restaurant nearby and spend more money? The big investors in these sports facilities know this because they’re the ones making bank when people just stay in their captive space, spending $12 for a Bud Lite. Sure, they might sell a new arena or revamped space as a net positive for the whole community, but they know that the success of others dampens their profits.

The evidence is clear: sporting facilities do not increase property values, provide a return on investment for the public, or benefit nearby businesses. The only people who win with sports facilities are the private investors who either convince the public to pour money into their misadventures or swoop in an nab a flagging public resource at a discounted rate. Local leaders often go along with these nonsense schemes because people love “our” sports teams, even if those teams are privately owned and used to enrich people.

Ahh, the irrationality of it all. The same people who rage upon hearing about tax increases demand more public money be spent on facilities that end up costing all of us in the long-run.

Take me out to the ball game

I don’t know if there’s a way to do stadiums, arenas, and sporting events “right”. The sports entertainment industry is massive and is able to throw their weight around when it comes to public conversations about the facilities they need.

It doesn’t matter if the claims they make are more focused on feelings than they are on facts. It is a business model that has worked for them for years. People seem to go along with it, determined to have a sports facility no matter the cost.

It may be impossible to provide space for these facilities in a way that enriches communities under the current model.

But maybe an alternative would work. It could be something like this: A sports team, run as a community non-profit, serves as an “anchor” occupant of a sports facility that is used by local amateur athletes, community groups, and students. That facility is owned by the public and operates on a break-even model, incorporated into the urban landscape in such a way that allows for mixed-use development and strong connections to transit. This facility can be overseen by a dedicated board of directors who care about providing a high-quality resource to the people. The municipality, local school boards and post-secondary institutions, and community groups can all have an ownership stake in a facility that is used for public good and advances the goal of community and athletic achievement, rather than just being a tool for investors to make more money.

I’m not a sports economist, but I do know that if people want these facilities, we’re going to have to find a better way to build, maintain, and manage them. With the amount of time and energy that’s spent talking and complaining about arenas and sports facilities, you’d think we would have figured out a better way by now. Instead, we seem to keep striking out.

Sports reference.

Not So Great Scott!

Fun fact: Former Ward 7 councillor and NDP MP for Hamilton Mountain Scott Duvall and I share a birthday! Well, kinda. He was born 33 years before me. That puts me squarely in the “millennial” camp.

A birthday is about all we have in common. Sure, we were both involved in the NDP for a while, but I supported a different candidate in the Hamilton Mountain federal nomination race back in 2015. Since then, I’ve let that membership lapse (so you can stop crowing on about that, random internet people) and Scott…well, Scott’s also straying from his old political home. Or so it would seem.

As I wrote about on May 18 (in “The Money Edition”), during his 2022 run for Ward 7 councillor, over 50% of the money Duvall raised came from people who have worked in politics. Not surprising for a former MP. What’s strange is that he ended up collecting quite a bit from high profile Tories. By my calculations, Duvall actually raised more money from people who donated to the Conservative Party in the past (28%) than people who donated to the NDP (23%). Pretty weird for a guy who was an NDP MP for six years.

And then, of course, there’s his social media.

This interaction popped up on my feed on the 5th and it seems…strange. Environment Hamilton (EH) retweets (re-x-es? I don’t know, I’m so tired) a Global reporter who is posting something about the Greenbelt. EH captions it by noting that the city and Indigenous leaders have also spoken out about the Greenbelt cuts.

Duvall responds with a post seemingly directed at Cameron Kroetsch, asking about the HATS project on Strachan.

It is genuinely hard to tell if this post is neutral (as in just asking a question) or also in opposition to the HATS project. Insert very obvious comment about someone being on council for 11 years and maybe pushing for more affordable housing and blah blah blah…

Duvall’s “likes” on that terrible social media platform (that I keep going back to like an idiot) are mostly of NDP MP’s posts and promotional things from unions. But then he’ll throw a like to a random anti-bike lane tweet or some tweet calling out the “nonsense at city hall”.

His replies are even weirder. In between the NDP talking points, fighting with a Jagmeet Singh parody account, and repeatedly tweeting that Doug Ford is “lower than a snake’s belly” (is that a real phrase?), he’s firing off these seemingly right-wing, anti-tax comments that are really, really strange.

Like this one to Mayor Horwath about a tax increase that hasn’t happened yet (and echoes those weird Mountain News ads):

Or this weird one that starts with an attack, then calls the programs he was attacking great, then pivots back into an attack:

Or simply responding “Unbelievable!” to the idea that city hall staff deserve a fair wage.

While I initially viewed this as a shift in Duvall’s politics, I think that’s an oversimplification. Sure, there’s the old adage that one becomes more conservative as they grow older, but I think this has been Duvall’s politics all along.

And I think he doesn’t see that as being antithetical to being a New Democrat.

Every party has “factions” that represent a different current within the movement. The NDP has ecosocialist factions, third way-ists, social conservatives, Trotskyists, pocket-book issue obsessives, electoral reform crusaders, etc. etc. etc.

Duvall is, put simply, a labour traditionalist. It is what a lot of the folks following Walter Furlan are like. The Furlanites, if you will.

Cut to Chris, weeks later, found buried under the weight of all the angry emails he got from saying “Furlanite” again…

They are people who have always been on the side of labour but aren’t interested in the new currents in the movement. From their perspective, all this focus on the environment and transit and social justice and minority issues and queer rights and urbanism just doesn’t jive with their worldview. They come from a time (or maybe just idolize a time) when the left and the right had pretty similar views on social issues and when the Liberals were the ones pushing all that “rights for the historically marginalized” stuff. Remember, it was Pierre Trudeau who said that “there's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation” the same year Tommy Douglas said that queerness was "a mental illness... [and] a psychiatric condition". Granted, they both voted in favour of Bill C-150, which decriminalized homosexuality the next year, but still.7 

I knew a lot of people like Scott while I was involved with the NDP. Like the woman who proudly had an NDP sign on her lawn every election but told 18-year-old me that she didn’t want to “know where the NDP stood on all that homo stuff.” Or the labour folks who came out swinging against LRT because it was all part of the radical urbanist “war on cars”. Or the folks who see nothing wrong with standing alongside striking workers one day and delegating to council about how awful homeless shelters and consumption treatment services sites are the next.

In the past, these folks would be moderately reliable allies and would usually stick up for what was right, falling in line with the party’s general message when it came time. But we’re seeing less and less of that now. That older way of doing things is not as common, and, especially in situations where there isn’t a party line to follow (like on social media and in the context of municipal affairs), these labour traditionalists end up siding with the hard right. The current leadership of most unions is deeply and passionately on the side of progress, but it is people like Duvall who are piping up to become the loudest voices in the room sometimes.

And sometimes the things they say just make you scratch your head.

Math

Now I’m no mathematician, nor am I a member of the Liberals, but these numbers seem slightly off.

Even if there’s some semblance of truth to what each camp is reporting, Crombie is the frontrunner in what could possibly be a multi-ballot election on December 2. And if Crombie and Naqvi are the two leading the group, the OLP might very well be doomed.

Best of luck to all of them!

Cool facts for cool people (everywhere but Hamilton edition)

• Let’s start in Durham, where a proposed homeless shelter is being opposed by residents because of…say it with me now…a lack of consultation. A vacant nursing home in Whitby is the proposed site of a new shelter in a region with very few supports for people experiencing homelessness. Residents are opposing the plan because they weren’t consulted, echoing the same old tired lines “we need this, but not here”. If only there was a handy acronym for that kind of mentality… Listen, just as I rage tweeted at likely 2026 Ward 2 council candidate (if the legions of 12-follower Twitter/X accounts that stan every post she makes are any indication) Victoria Mancinelli on Monday before all hell broke loose in the North End, all this chatter about “transparency”, “consultation”, and “accountability” is nothing more than shiny PR spin on NIMBYism that makes it seem like those opposed to life-saving public investments are just “asking questions in the service of democracy”. It is the property-owning Boomer version of being an internet edgelord. You’re not standing up for democracy by standing in the way of progress. Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining.

• Off to Ottawa now for an opinion piece in the UOttawa student newspaper. Penned by 2022 trustee candidate Keith de Silvia-Legault, this piece puts a human face on the current centre-right Ottawa mayor’s disinterest in cycling infrastructure. It is a clever way to frame an auto-centric municipal policy and reminds us that “not declaring a war on the car”, which defines Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe’s policies on this front, doesn’t mean leaving cyclists with unsafe roads either.

• Now to Alberta, where a trustee with the Red Deer Catholic Regional School (RDCRS) board got into trouble by equating the queer community with Nazis. Ahh, at least we’re back to the good old tropes now. Monique LaGrange has angered her colleagues with a Facebook post (of course) that said “brainwashing is brainwashing” over two photos, one of children holding Nazi flags and another of children holding Pride flags. The RDCRS board has sent a letter to the Education Minister asking to LaGrange to be removed from office and she’s been removed as a director of the Alberta Catholic School Trustees’ Association. If there’s any justice in the world, LaGrange would resign and visit a Holocaust museum to learn about what the Nazis did to queer folks. More likely, she’ll wind up as a UCP candidate one day.

• Finally, we’re off to Vancouver, where their public libraries scrapped fines for overdue books. Despite worries that the move would damage the library system, the VPL is actually reporting only a slight increase in “missing” items and notes that “The impact on our bottom line has been negligible from a financial perspective.” More importantly, the VPL reported: “From a social benefit perspective, the impact has been very positive. We have received many positive comments from patrons who now feel more welcome to use the library and express gratitude for the fine-free service.” I guess we don’t need to be endlessly punitive to have better cities then, eh? Knowing Vancouver’s new hard right local government, though, I’m sure they’ll replace the fines with mandatory beheadings for late magazine returns or something.

• See. Told you September makes me more sarcastic.