…but first it’s Ward 8.

I can’t blame you if you haven’t heard of the gameshow Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister.

The show’s origins are in an essay contest called “As Prime Minister, I would…”, which launched in 1995. The contest was the brainchild of controversial Austrian-Canadian businessman Frank Stronach and ran through his auto-parts manufacturer, Magna International. The essay contest prize was a varying sum of money and an internship with Magna, ostensibly to give winners connections to the worlds of politics and business in Canada. After dabbling in politics both here and in his native Austria, Stronach’s star has faded; he is currently on trial after having been accused of multiple instances of sexual assault from 1977 onward, including by some former Magna interns, though details as to whether they were also contest winners are spotty.

An irrelevant, albeit interesting fact about the essay contest is that the 1999 winner was an ambitious young second-year University of Calgary student named Pierre Poilievre, who triumphed with an essay entitled “Building Canada Through Freedom”. The future opposition leader’s proposal included slashing taxes, reducing the size of the state, and reforming the senate. Indeed, the entire essay read like a short stump speech any Reform Party-aligned politician would make in the 90’s. “Politics should not be a lifelong career, and elected officials should not be allowed to fix themselves in the halls of power of a nation,” the young Poilievre wrote. Five years later, he would be elected to Parliament where he has served non-stop since, save for a four month breather earlier this year.¹

In 2006, the essay contest was thrust into the 21st Century when it was turned into a gameshow on CTV. Hosted by the granddaddy of gameshows himself - Alex Trebek - it switched the format, encouraging youth from across Canada to ditch the word processor and submit short videos outlining what they would do if they held the office of PM. In 2007, the show bounced over to the CBC, where comedian Rick Mercer took over hosting duties.

Then, in 2008, a call went out for new applicants. As a bright-eyed young nerd who conveniently turned 18 during the application period, I threw all my energy into an application. With the help of my family, I filmed a short video entry about what I would do as Prime Minister. My whole entry revolved around my idea to provide a better deal for cities. At this point, I don’t even remember the details, but it involved a call to provide municipal governments with the power they need to improve the lives of everyday Canadians.

The application process didn’t stop at the entry video. For that year’s contest, there were a host of new requirements. Aspiring contestants were encouraged to upload YouTube videos “debating” their fellow contestants, launch social media campaigns to get people on board with your entry, host community events that promoted your idea, and engage with elected leaders and community members in campaign-style appearances. For my part, I delegated to Hamilton City Council, held events in the community as though I were running for actual elected office, and contacted local media to let them know about the contest.

A few months after “launching my bid” to be on Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister, my media outreach strategy paid off. The editor of the Hamilton Mountain News, the weekly community Metroland paper atop the escarpment, reached out to say he wanted to do an interview to highlight my entry into the contest.

So I laced up my shoes, threw on my preppiest peacoat, and set out on the long journey east to the coffee shop - a quaint little local establishment called le Tim Hórton - closest to my childhood home where I, at 18, still resided. The Tims was a good 3 kilometres from my home, but I was used to the walk, having made the voyage back-and-forth nearly every day for my shifts at a Fortinos across the road.

By the time I got to the Tims, I was buzzing with adolescent energy. In my excitement, I blocked out the specifics of the interview, and was, for a time afterward, unable to recall anything I had said. All I remembered was travelling with the paper’s editor to a park near my home for some photos to accompany the article.

When the paper came out a few weeks later, I was surprised (though not entirely) to learn that I had announced I would be running for city council in Ward 8 in the 2010 municipal election.

The contest…did not go well for me. After a grueling series of phone interviews to whittle down the initial entrants, the last interviews were scheduled during the fall final exam period - my very first post-secondary exams ever. In the stress of it all, I had caught a nasty cold. On the day of my final interview, my head was swimming, partially from my sickness and partially from the cold medication I had taken to alleviate my symptoms.

From an echoey stairwell on McMaster’s campus, I struggled through the phone interview, providing disjointed, confused, and chaotic answers to an increasingly baffled panel of judges. I hung up knowing I had likely blown my chance and months of work. The rejection email a few weeks later confirmed my suspicions, leaving me dispirited.

I likely avoided becoming embroiled in a significant televised mess, though. Not long after my disastrous interview, a story broke in the Globe and Mail about how the show was struggling. I was evidently one of the only unique entrants, with most aspiring contestants having been recruited by producers and from the ranks of political parties in an attempt to round out the numbers and ensure some camera-worthy, skilled young politicos would make it to the final. Some entrants told the Globe that they had been approached, recruited, and encouraged to participate even if they violated the show’s rules, like the stipulation that anyone applying must not have been a candidate for elected office in the past. Some of these recruits were later disqualified, despite getting the all-clear from producers, leading to threats of lawsuits and boycotts.²

The whole affair, and a general lack of interest from the public, impacted the contest, which was quietly wrapped up after that season, never to air again.

As for me, I ended up getting a job with the student paper on campus the next year, giving up my role as president (and sole member) of the McMaster Campus NDP and my aspirations for elected office in Ward 8.

Even though I had made such a big deal of wanting to run for office in the 2010 election during my Mountain News interview, I found myself in an entirely different place in my life when the chance rolled around. While I was covering the local election for the paper, three people registered to run against two-term incumbent councillor Terry Whitehead.

In the end, two candidates unofficially dropped out, leaving Whitehead alone against local accountant Kim Jenkinson. Whitehead won a commanding victory on election night, earning over 67% of the vote. He would remain in office for another 12 years.

***

In the time since, I’ve thought a lot about running for city council.

I came close in 2014, slowly building my profile in the community and putting feelers out to see what kind of campaign organization I could build to contest the open Ward 1 seat, having moved to Ward 8’s lower city northern neighbour when I started grad school in 2012. I ultimately decided to not move ahead with that, in part because I became involved in school board affairs and, in part, because three eminently qualified candidates with whom I connected and who all had long histories in the community - Aidan Johnson, Sandy Shaw, and Jason Allen - stepped up to run. I, instead, made my one bid for real elected office, running for the open Wards 1 & 2 school trustee seat. My efforts there were unsuccessful and I placed last with just over 12% of the vote.

My fascination with local government clearly did not end there. The next decade of my life was dedicated to studying and understanding local government. I interviewed council candidates, published papers on municipal affairs, worked with advocacy groups on issues around local voter engagement.

Through it all, I held out hope. I still carried that spark of enthusiasm for municipal government that propelled me into the Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister contest and to announce, at age 18, that I wanted to be a city councillor. There was still a glimmer of that floating around in everything I did.

I’ll be the first to admit that, as of late, that glimmer has been dimming. It’s hard to remain enthusiastic amidst everything that’s happening in our community and in our world. Politics is becoming harder, less pleasant, more irrational. The conversations being had about our world don’t make sense anymore. Amidst a dramatic decline in voter turnout, the small minority of people who do exercise their democratic rights are fixated on solutions to problems that have no grounding in reality and facts. And it’s getting harder and harder to cut through the noise and have real conversations about actual ideas.

These thoughts began forming long before Monday, September 22. It would be a stretch to say the campaign for, and outcome of, the Ward 8 council by-election has even substantively changed my thinking in one direction or another. But there are some things about that particular democratic expression by a small, small group of voters in one of Hamilton’s mountain wards that do warrant consideration.

And so, let us gingerly and oh-so-carefully take a look at the Ward 8 by-election and what it might mean for this fascinating place called Hamilton.

***

Two weeks ago, the voters of the ward were called upon to head to the polls and select a city councillor to replace J.P. Danko, who was sent to Ottawa to serve as MP by the voters in Hamilton West-Ancaster-Dundas this past April. Danko was, at the time of his election to Parliament, in the back-half of his second term as Ward 8 councillor. The councillor-turned-MP had a strong mandate, having been decisively re-elected in the 2022 election with support of nearly 2/3 of the scant few who bothered to cast ballots in Ward 8. Only around 30% of eligible voters in the ward turned out in that race.

With Danko off to Ottawa, his council seat was declared vacant and his former colleagues saw fit to call a by-election, rather than open up an appointment process whereby a member of the community (usually a former councillor) would be hired to serve out the remainder of Danko’s term. The choice to hold a by-election in a year when Hamiltonians had already voted provincially and federally - and around one year until the general municipal election - was one council was allowed to make, though certainly not one I expected or believed was apt.

The city’s residents, media, and political institutions clearly felt the same way, as the by-election campaign started and ended with a whimper. There was scant interest from Hamilton’s legacy media, no debates, and few in-depth write ups on the race, with one notable exception (more on that shortly).

All this was despite the registration of 26 candidates, making the Ward 8 by-election the longest ward ballot in Hamilton’s municipal electoral history, beating the previous record (the 2016 Ward 7 by-election in which Danko first made his electoral debut) by four candidates.

***

The new Ward 8 itself is an aberration, created in a flurry after the 2014-2018 council spent a quarter of a million dollars on a ward-boundary review that they ultimately rejected. After local residents appealed council’s decision, the now-defunct Ontario Municipal Board imposed a new ward boundary map on Hamilton, trading local gerrymandering for gerrymandering of the provincial variety.³

Geographically, socially, economically, historically, and practically, this iteration of Ward 8 - a far cry from the Ward 8 in which I grew up and had my initial political aspirations - makes no logical sense. It is a cartographic nightmare, consisting of a thin sliver of the mountain, 2.5 kilometres wide, so hard-to-place that the city’s official name for it is the “West/Central Mountain Area”. How poetic.

It includes some of the oldest developments on the mountain in the Centremount neighbourhood and some of the city’s newest homes built on former farmland in the northeast corner of Rymal and Garth. The ward’s spine is Upper James, one of the most chaotic commercial corridors in Hamilton, regularly clogged with cars and trucks flying in from the airport and Caledonia to the south, fighting their way north, into the city, down the ever-crumbling Claremont Access. As confusing as it is, the ward’s current configuration is likely to remain in place, given that there is no appetite in this community for meaningful electoral reform that ensures representation by population and a commitment to respecting communities of interest (because experts will almost inevitably say that is only possible by adding one to three councillors and, in this age of rage against government, that is likely a nonstarter).

***

The City of Hamilton, for their part, used the by-election to try some new things. Rather than require voters to cast ballots at a polling station assigned to a designated geographic area, any voter in Ward 8 could vote at any of the ward’s five general polling station. Only the residents of St. Elizabeth’s Village - the gated retirement community in the southwest corner of the ward - had a defined and exclusive polling station. While untethering polling stations from designated communities likely caused a headache for campaigns and their canvassers (using information from previous elections at the polling division-level is a great way to identify where your supporters are and maximize campaign efficiency), the move to a “vote-anywhere” system is believed to remove one more barrier to political participation that could incentivize a voter-of-convenience to cast a ballot.

Each of the vote-anywhere polls also served as advance polls, essentially creating a multi-day election that was likely believed to remove another barrier to participation.

This decision provides us with a results map that is wildly different than any map Hamiltonians would be used to seeing after a municipal election. Instead of neat lines around communities, showing the precise location of support for candidates, we instead get a map that looks like an abstract stained glass art piece.

The areas around each poll are represented as “Thiessen Polygons” or “Voronoi Cells”, indicating the “area of influence” around a point. In this case, the “point” is a polling station, and the “area of influence” is the likely zone in which the residents who cast ballots at that polling station lived. While uncommon to Hamiltonians, this form of visualization would be more recognizable to Vancouverites, who have cast ballots at “vote anywhere” polls for some time. Their municipal election map on Wikipedia, for example, shows an array of Thiessen Polygons.

Sorry, I know that’s a lot of electoral geography, but I don’t get to talk about that as much as I would like anymore!

***

The 26 candidates were an interesting mix of personalities; among the contestants were a healthy number of fringe and perennial candidates, two “ghost candidates”, and four former elected officials looking for a comeback.

As reported by Joey Coleman, only 12 of the 26 candidates were confirmed Ward 8 residents.

The ward was spackled with election signs, creating the impression that there was a groundswell of enthusiasm for a hefty chunk of those 26 candidates. And yet, when the dust had settled, it became obvious that the enthusiasm was imagined. Only one out of every five voters in Ward 8 bothered to make it to the polls. Over 22,000 voters simply stayed home, despite the cacophony of choices offered to them.

Among those choices were some high-profile names. Former Catholic school trustee and member of one of Hamilton’s most recognizable political dynasties, Ralph Agostino; former Ward 7 councillor and NDP MP Scott Duvall; former Burlington City Councillor Barry Quinn; and the man against whom I pledged to run way back in 2008, 19-year veteran of Hamilton city council, Terry Whitehead.

***

Whitehead was the second-to-last person to register, surprising nearly everyone in the city with his reappearance just three years after he unceremoniously retired from city hall amidst a veritable sea of controversy.

The last years of Whitehead’s tenure in local government were consumed by his erratic actions and, in the words of the city’s integrity commissioner, “a repeated pattern of unacceptable bullying and harassing behaviour.” During one of his many leaves of absence, council worked on creating a “safety plan” to ensure elected officials and staff were kept safe in the event he returned to 71 Main Street West.⁴

Whitehead’s campaign was one of the only ones to receive substantial media attention. Less than a week before the election, The Spec’s Mac Christie published an extensive look at Whitehead’s controversial past and comeback attempt. In his email exchanges with Christie, Whitehead indicated he’s no longer suffering from his “incurable” medical problem (he has never indicated what that problem is and, when pressed by The Spec in this interview, obfuscated), that he’s become an “evolved” person, and that he’s found strength in those places into which politicians tend to retreat when faced with a crisis. As Whitehead told Christie: “…through family and faith, I’ve rebuilt my health, my focus, and my energy, and know I’m ready to stand up for Ward 8 taxpayers again.”⁵

***

Few other candidates were able to break through the noise in a meaningful way, though some certainly tried. Hamilton’s urbanists quickly rallied around local entrepreneur Lohifa Pogoson Acker. An energetic and charismatic figure in the community, Pogoson Acker was involved with Keanin Loomis’s 2022 mayoral campaign, even serving as the MC for his campaign kickoff.⁶ With the backing of Loomis and many of the city’s Liberal Party-affiliated elected officials (including MP Danko, who backed Pogoson Acker with less than two weeks to go until election day) , one could logically surmise that the Pogoson Acker campaign was the best chance the Loomis mayoral team would have to shake off the dust and gear up for 2026. Loomis did win Ward 8 in 2022 and carrying it by a more substantive margin next year could very well make him mayor. But, in the low-information, low-interest atmosphere of a municipal by-election, even a candidate as compelling as Pogoson Acker was unable to quickly capture the momentum needed to win.

Some of the few candidates who were able to generate any real media attention did so for all the wrong reasons. The fourth candidate to register, Waleed Ali, was called out back in June for posting a “map” of Ward 8 on his website that was a jumbled AI hallucination, placing the ward in the city’s east end, bounded by roads like “Uppel Tames W” and “H8uǝure W”, and hemmed in by the “Niapare Escaromert”. Ali’s internet troubles didn’t end there; in July, an account posted on the r/Hamilton subreddit with a glowing review of a conversation they claimed to have with Ali, writing: “I belive [sic] he is the right choice…He also studied political science in university of Toronto so that's a plus.” Other redditors were quick to point out that, while the recently-created account had a standard Reddit-generated handle, the name on the account was “Waleed Ali”.

Ali, Whitehead, and one of the three 2022 candidates in Ward 8 who contested the by-election, Sonia Brown, were called out by Joey Coleman in early September for, as he put it, “falsely claiming to live in Ward 8 when they do not.”⁷ Coleman compared election registration forms with the candidates’ comments to The Spec. The city’s paper of record did a short survey of candidates, asking, among other things, if they lived in the ward. While all three said they did live in Ward 8, Coleman noted that both Whitehead and Brown live in neighbouring Ward 14 while Ali, who used a Ward 3 business address to register, could not confirm he even lived in Hamilton. Brown dug in, spending the remaining weeks of the campaign accusing Coleman of spreading “misinformation” about her residency, despite Coleman providing copies of Brown’s nomination form, listing a home postal code on the west end of Ward 14.

***

Among the front runners in the Ward 8 by-election was Brown’s 2022 campaign chair and single largest donor, Rob Cooper.

Cooper has been involved in conservative politics in Hamilton for years, but, until this point, had mainly been a behind-the-scenes organizer. For decades, he led the provincial Progressive Conservative operation on Hamilton Mountain, shepherding the party out of the wilderness after some disappointing election results a decade back. After hitting their low-water mark of 18% in the 2014 provincial election, the Mountain PCs steadily increased their support under Cooper’s watchful eye, fielding future councillors Esther Pauls in 2018 and Mike Spadafora in 2022 as their candidates for MPP. With his help, the PCs built a solid conservative base that, by 2025, paid off and helped the party capture the Mountain seat.

Cooper’s electoral wizardry extended to the federal Conservatives as well. In addition to leading the provincial Tories, Cooper was in charge of the federal group on Hamilton Mountain, serving as the party’s reliable spokesperson when the media came calling. In 2015, during the hotly contested federal election campaign that year, Cooper was quoted in the Stoney Creek News as saying Hamilton’s working people needed to switch from NDP to the Conservatives, telling Metroland reporter Kevin Werner: “It is time for a change…Hamilton has lost 20,000 high paying union jobs since the NDP has been in power in the city.”⁸ It’s worth noting that, when Cooper made those comments, the Conservatives had been in power for over a decade.

The relationship between Cooper and Werner was something that I wrote about two years ago (looking back on that story was a great reminder of how much I’ve grown as a writer in the past few years). Cooper would appear as a “Mountain resident” in some of Werner’s stories, providing anecdotal stories about issues in the community before critiquing a city policy or the actions of J.P. Danko. In a 2023 story, Cooper told Werner that his “street has become an encampment,” all because of, in Cooper’s perspective, the city’s rental licencing bylaw. Cooper provided no proof and Werner did nothing to fact-check or analyze the claim in any detail, nor did he note that Cooper served as the campaign chair for Danko’s 2022 opponent, Sonia Brown.⁹

***

From the moment the campaign launched, Cooper maintained a spot at the front of the pack, coming out strong and asserting his campaign’s strength throughout. Despite Cooper’s attempt to convince the City of Hamilton to ban election signs in 2021, the ward was absolutely packed with his bright yellow and blue lawn signs.¹⁰

The overwhelming show of force was noticeable, reminiscent of the kind of campaign an incumbent councillor or a well-known figure in the community would be able to muster. Given Cooper’s comparatively low profile, this was noteworthy. The sheer number of signs for Cooper across Ward 8 was a hot topic for the posters on the r/Hamilton subreddit, with one commenter musing: “I wondered what all the Rob Cooper signs were for around Mohawk College. I can't recall the last time I've seen so many signs for a city election.” Others complained that Cooper signs began appearing on lawns without the permission of owners, sharing that Cooper’s organization told them some signs were being put up by someone “without the authorization of the campaign.”

A possible explanation for Cooper’s very visible presence in Ward 8 came from McMaster University political scientist Peter Graefe, who told the Spec that Cooper “likely had an advantage due to his long history with the Tories and benefited from the party’s databases — in addition to his networking skill as a former riding association president.”¹¹ Graefe’s comments are in reference to the extremely common occurrence “list sharing” - providing access to a database of identified supporters - between all major political parties and municipal candidates. Without confirmation from the campaign, it is difficult to tell the level of coordination between Cooper’s partisan connections and his non-partisan municipal campaign, though he himself did say he “parked” his Conservative and Progressive Conservative affiliations for the campaign.

Even though Cooper may have downplayed his Tory connections, his campaign was still well-funded and visible. In addition to the signs, Cooper was able to place a front-page ad in the Spec on the Saturday before election day.

***

Despite his front-runner status, Cooper’s platform was decidedly light on specifics. Consisting of just 99 words, Cooper ran on a six-point platform:

1. Tackle Violent Crime 

2. Repair and Rebuild Roads

3. End Tax Increases Exceeding Inflation

4. Scrap the Rain and Vacant Unit Taxes

5. Confront the Housing Crisis

6. Expand Public Transportation

Cooper echoed his focus on crime in his post-campaign interview with the Spec, saying that, while canvassing, he found some Ward 8 residents “were afraid to come out of their homes,” for fear of violent crime.¹¹

A study from Wilfrid Laurier University, commissioned by the Hamilton Police Service (HPS), echoed what Cooper was saying: Hamiltonians feel unsafe and believe their neighbourhoods are becoming less and less safe. The survey found that almost 68% of Hamiltonians are worried about vehicle theft, 55% about break-ins, and 45% about gun violence in their communities. Particularly telling was that many respondents to the survey expressed concern about “disorder” - namely people visibly using or impacted by drugs, people experiencing homelessness and/or mental health crises, and the general presence of encampments in the community.

The only problem is that those worries do not correlate with the reality of crime in the city.

In the Spec’s report on the Laurier study, they noted that crime is down in Hamilton, despite increased concerns.¹² The HPS’s own 2024 Year End Report confirms that crime is on the decline and that serious crimes in Hamilton are down substantially. Homicide is down, robberies are down, assault is down, property violations are down. Yes, there was a 14% increase in the number of stolen cars and the clearance rate for those crimes is quite low, but things like counterfeiting, identity theft, and harassment over the phone and email have both climbed much higher and quicker than car thefts, meaning there’s a dramatic disconnect between what we focus on and what’s fast becoming a real problem.

While people are transfixed by the dramatic Ring camera footage of late night car thefts that plays on a loop on CP24, their elderly relatives are having their identities stolen and their family members are cyberbullying people with increasing intensity. People are frightened when they see people using drugs on the street or experiencing mental health crises in public spaces, but there’s no correlation between visible disorder and the city’s crime rate. People are scared, but seem more frightened about the idea of crime rather than the reality in which we live.

Still, the Spec’s Scott Radley published an op-ed a few days after Cooper was elected noting that crime and taxes will define the next election. “…If Monday’s result is any indication of the way people are thinking, we may just have seen the template for the citywide campaign next fall. And the issues that’ll drive it,”¹³ Radley wrote.

What Radley is saying - based on what Cooper indicated after his victory - is that, despite falling crime rates, crime will be a major topic in the next election.

***

While that might be confusing, Radley’s comments on taxes are far more clear: “It’s entirely likely that many of those seeking office will see what happened on Monday and decide fiscal restraint must be a key plank of their platform. Or they’re deciding to run because of this,” the Spec’s city hall columnist opined.¹³

On taxes, Cooper’s limited platform was simple: keep property tax increases as low as possible and cancel other taxes designed to address the housing crisis and make up for a financial shortfall due to years of underinvestment in the infrastructure needed to ensure our municipal infrastructure has the support needed to function.

When contrasted with Cooper’s other platform planks - tackling crime, improving roads, providing housing, and expanding transit options - there seems to be a mismatch. It appears, from a cursory reading of the 99 words of Cooper’s platform, that he advocated for more services and less tax which, by itself, seems like it will be challenging to accomplish.

The roads budget is ballooning precisely because of years of undertaxation and underinvestment in essential infrastructure. The police budget is the single largest municipal budget line - a line that increases, without fail, every year. The housing crisis remains a challenge for the municipality to address on its own, and yet Cooper is advocating for the abolition of a tax specifically designed to incentivize people to rent out their vacant units or sell properties they aren’t using efficiently, using financial incentives to change consumer and owner behaviour - making the Vacant Unit Tax a decidedly pro-market, pro-capital, conservative idea.

But it wasn’t just Cooper. As Radley points out, the top three candidates - Cooper, Whitehead, and Barry Quinn - all made public safety, improved services, and low taxes the hallmarks of their campaigns. Fifth-place candidate Asuf Khokhar went even further, promising a property tax freeze, absolutely no new taxes, and massive infrastructure and service upgrades. Only Pogoson Acker took a different approach, calling for better communication with residents, budgeting based on ensuring a solid return-on-investment, and building community through investments in youth, seniors, and newcomers.

Now that’s he’s won, it’ll be interesting to see how Cooper squares the contrasting components of his platform and faces the increased challenges of providing municipal services in Doug Ford’s Ontario.

Maybe Radley is right. Maybe the 2026 election will see voters demand more for less, quality on a budget, fiscal restraint and increased spending. Maybe voters will expect more police, smooth roads, on-time garbage collection, upgraded infrastructure, and abundant housing, all for a fraction of what they’re paying now. And maybe, as Radley ominously portends, candidates are gearing up to run precisely because this is the demand from the community.

***

Hamilton’s conservative-leaning establishment has been nothing short of overjoyed at Cooper’s victory. The Bay Observer’s John Best wrote that Cooper’s background would be an asset in the city’s upcoming budget discussions, noting that Cooper: “brings a level of business background to the council table not seen in decades.” Despite noting Cooper’s Conservative and Progressive Conservative affiliations, Best styles him as a “centrist” candidate.¹⁴

Declared and prospective right-wing candidates across Hamilton have been celebrating Cooper’s victory as an indication that the tides are turning and that conservative candidates will clean up at the polls in 2026. Participants in the Spec’s comments section - which has become, in tone and style, little more than a members-only, pay-to-access Facebook comment clearing house - echoed this as well, celebrating a return to business principles and a rejection of “activism”, “far-left ideologues”, and the “organized Marxists [who have taken] over much of our local Council.”

While the city’s right is justified in celebrating the election of a conservative voice to city council, any prognostication about what Cooper’s victory might mean for next year’s municipal election would be overly simple if it resulted in little more than a belief that conservatives will increase the size of their caucus at 71 Main West.

And this is because there has been little consideration for the way the votes split in the election or for the margin of Cooper’s victory. Cooper beat Whitehead by just 87 votes - a margin of just 1.5% of total votes cast. And while 87 votes is more than any one of the bottom 16 candidates in the race was able to earn on their own, and more than the vote total for the bottom 6 candidates in the race combined, it’s still a very, very narrow margin.

Cooper’s victory is as much a win for the first-past-the-post electoral system as it is for the political right. Indeed, earning just 19.4% of the vote means that Cooper enters office with the single smallest mandate of any city councillor in the amalgamated city’s history, beating the previous low that Donna Skelly earned (19.6%) when she beat 22 candidates for the open Ward 7 seat in the 2016 by-election.

Cooper earning just 19.4% means that over 80% of Ward 8 voters wanted someone else to represent them. And, with voter turnout at 20.9%, that means that Cooper was elected with the support of just 4% of Ward 8 residents.

All that said, Cooper will get another shot at convincing voters shortly; after being sworn in on September 29, Cooper will serve a total of 413 days, 179 of which (or 43.3% of his term in office) will be during the 2026 municipal election, in which he will likely run for a full term.

***

What the results also show is that 17.9% of Ward 8 voters (3.7% of eligible voters) were willing to give Terry Whitehead another chance in office. Despite Mac Christie’s mid-campaign profile of Whitehead that outlined, in detail, his troubled time at city hall, 1,042 voters were willing to take a chance on the seasoned civic politician.

His flashy campaign likely helped remind Ward 8 voters of their erstwhile councillor. Much-discussed campaign ads from September 15 are the perfect encapsulation of the lengths Whitehead went to in his attempt to return to office.

In one, dramatic music plays as headlines from local crime news stories flash across the screen. Stories about car theft rings, home invasions, and gun fights appear as Whitehead, in a voice over, says “Superheroes cannot fix the out-of-control crime in the City of Hamilton”. Then, smash cut to, Whitehead, sitting in the driver’s seat of a replica “Batmobile” that appears to be parked in some kind of storage facility’s parking lot. “I’m not afraid to stand up to the criminals and gangs that are ravaging our city. I’ve done it before. I’ll do it again,” he says, as the camera cuts between close-ups and wide shots of the Batmobile. He ends with a call to residents: “Join me to take back our streets and restore respect for our taxpayers.”

In another, Whitehead says that “Hamilton’s not Gotham and Batman’s not real, but crime in Hamilton is very real.” After listing crimes, Whitehead says “When I was on the Police Services Board, I stood up to criminals and gangs and I was tough on crime and I will do it again.” It’s worth noting that members of the police services board do not have any interactions with criminals in any formal capacity, nor do they have the power to direct the Chief of Police or police officers to “get tough” on crime. The end of the ad is a confusing jumble of logos surrounding a quote: “Crime is out of control, while our Politicians are silent” and the words “This Ends 09.22.25”.

The ads were met with near-universal derision from the r/Hamilton subreddit and from Bluesky users when Coleman posted about the ad after they were released. But his Instagram account features a healthy mix of other kinds of ads. Interspersed between his endorsements - from the Chedoke Bocce Club, the Sweet Paradise bakery, and his successor, Ward 14 councillor Mike Spadafora - are ads where Whitehead stands on a trail, talking about assaults that happened on similar looking trails, or ads where Whitehead pauses during canvassing to discuss car thefts (this one’s hard to hear over the buzz of cicadas in the background), or ads standing in front of houses where the candidate chats about the impact of tax increases on seniors.

Whitehead’s online ads were only a small portion of his campaign’s focus. For all his issues, Whitehead is a savvy politician who recognizes that few of the people who were likely to vote in the Ward 8 by-election were spending significant amounts of time on social media. That’s why his message - “crime is out of control” and “respect for taxpayers” - was simple, reflected the beliefs in the community (even if those beliefs don’t always jive with reality), and could be repeated easily. But he made himself visible in plenty of ways; Whitehead’s sign game was one of the few that came close to matching Cooper’s and many of Whitehead’s posts online referenced his canvassing schedule. Indeed, his “packed” schedule was cited as a reason why Whitehead pulled out of a scheduled interview with Christie for the Spec story detailing his comeback attempt.⁵

In the end, his strategy almost paid off. Whitehead won the count at three of the ward’s polling stations, including a decisive 27.4% in the polling station for the area south of the Linc. But Cooper’s vote efficiency at the polling stations closer to the Escarpment, combined with Pogoson Acker’s strong performance in the Centremount and Inch Park neighbourhoods and Barry Quinn’s absolute sweep of the St. Elizabeth’s Village retirement home poll (the former Burlington councillor won 80.5% of the votes cast there) cut off Whitehead’s path to victory. If 87 votes had switched from Cooper to him, though, we’d be looking at Ward 8 Councillor Terry Whitehead once again.

***

What becomes of the “also rans” is somewhat of a mystery. Much was made (including by me) of former councillor and MP Scott Duvall’s entry into the race. But, much like former mayor Bob Bratina’s comeback attempt in 2022, Duvall’s attempt to return to municipal politics after time away in the halls of power of higher orders of government fizzled from the get-go. In the end, Duvall only managed 5.5% of the vote and could not break double digits in the raw vote count in two polls. Former trustee Agostino’s performance was similarly muted, with the candidate earning just a single vote in both the Mohawk College and St. Elizabeth’s Village polls.

Overall, it was a dismal night for all but the top four candidates. There were a host of names known to political watchers in Hamilton that contested who fell well behind relative electoral newcomers. Some candidates who had a visible sign presence and Spec ads, like Kevin Gonci, earned under 100 votes. Other candidates with fewer resources, but who relied on their connections in the community and extensive political experience, like Alex Ballagh, performed much better. But, with 26 candidates and a wide distribution in the vote total, few were able to make any sort of mark at all. It’s telling that the median result for candidates in the Ward 8 by-election was just 49 votes and just 0.83% support.

***

Seventeen years ago, I dreamt of winning Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister and using the profile generated from my success as a springboard to civic politics. I would run against Terry Whitehead, throwing my youth and passion into the race, and connecting with engaged residents who would admire my ideas and judge them based on their merit. I would convince people with well-argued points and a well-researched platform. At the doors of the west mountain, I would meet engaged citizens ready to hear my points with respect and enthusiasm. With some help from my friends, my political allies, and keen neighbours, I would come out on top and win a seat on Hamilton city council at the tender age of 20. I would finally have a chance to do some good.

Today, I can recognize how naïve I was. The recent by-election in Ward 8 featured a campaign where well-connected candidates talked about fighting rising crime, even though crime is falling. Where promises were made by many to lower taxes and increase services. Where former politicians with troubling pasts attempted comebacks and nearly prevailed. Where conservative activists and local media interpreted the results as a fortuitous sign of things to come despite upsettingly low turnout and a decidedly indecisive result.

It is possible that the Spec’s Scott Radley is right that, if by-election’s “result is any indication of the way people are thinking, we may just have seen the template for the citywide campaign next fall. And the issues that’ll drive it.”¹³ It might be that a groundswell of conservative activists will seek council seats across Hamilton, running on campaigns to lower crime, slash taxes, and improve services. And, with low voter turnout, low civic engagement, and a deeply flawed first-past-the-post electoral system, those candidates might eke out victories and guide our civic conversation until 2030.

I don’t know what will happen in 2026 or if the Ward 8 by-election means anything in the grand scheme of things. But what I do know is that none of this - not the by-election results or the issues raised or the campaign - is helping me rekindle the spark of enthusiasm I once carried for civic government. Indeed, sometimes I feel like I’m back there in that echoey McMaster stairwell, congested and confused, trying desperately to hold on to what I had worked toward, feeling like it’s all slipping away.

Then again, maybe I’ll be able to tap into that youthful enthusiasm again. Maybe the spark can be rekindled and grow again. Maybe some new development or policy change or issue will have it all come flooding back. Maybe. Hopefully.

In the mean time, I, like so many Hamiltonians, will just have to wait and see what council’s new dynamic is now that the Ward 8 seat has been filled. And, as we march ever closer to the 2026 municipal election, we’ll all have to give some serious thought to what kind of city we want. And how we’ll turn those thoughts into reality.

1  _{Clark, Campbell. "The making of Pierre Poilievre, conservative proselytizer". The Globe and Mail, September 16, 2022 (Globe link - Paywalled).}

2  _{Dixon, Guy. “Who wants to be PM? Not many.” The Globe and Mail, January 14, 2009 (Globe link - Free).}

3  _{Moro, Teviah. “OMB rejects Hamilton council’s ‘preferred’ ward boundary plan” Hamilton Spectator, December 13, 2017 (Spec link - Paywalled).}

4  _{"" “Ethics probe blasts Hamilton Coun. Terry Whitehead for ‘unacceptable’ harassment, bullying” Hamilton Spectator, June 21, 2022 (Spec link - Paywalled); "" “Hamilton council wants ‘safety plan’ for Terry Whitehead — who announced he’s taking another sick leave” Hamilton Spectator, June 22, 2022 (Spec link - Paywalled).}

5  _{Christie, Mac. “Former Hamilton councillor harassed and bullied council colleagues. He says he’s changed and wants a comeback — others are skeptical” Hamilton Spectator, September 16, 2025 (Spec link - Paywalled).}

6  _{Werner, Kevin. “Hamilton mayoral candidate Keanin Loomis says he will be fighting ‘the forces of status quo’” Ancaster News/Metroland suburban papers, June 15, 2022 (Spec link - Paywalled).} 

7  _{Coleman, Joey. “Election Documents Contradict Three Ward 8 Candidates’ Residency Claims” The Public Record, September 9, 2025 (TPR link - Free).}

8  _{Werner, Kevin. “Orange is the new blue for Hamilton’s workers” Stoney Creek News/Metroland suburban papers, September 7, 2015 (Spec link - Paywalled).}

9  _{"" “Hamilton Mountain resident Rob Cooper says neighbourhood has seen more homeless people” Hamilton Mountain News/Metroland suburban papers, June 30, 2023 (Spec link - Paywalled).}

10  _{"" “Hamilton Mountain Tory executive Robert Cooper wants city to ban election signs” Hamilton Mountain News/Metroland suburban papers, October 12, 2021 (Wayback archive link - Free).}

11  _{Christie, Mac. “New Ward 8 councillor says he parked Conservative affiliations, but political-scientist says party data gave him edge” Hamilton Spectator, September 24, 2025 (Spec link - Paywalled).}

12  _{Bron, Sebastian. “Half of Hamilton residents feel their neighbourhood is becoming more dangerous: survey” Hamilton Spectator, September 30, 2025 (Spec link - Paywalled).}

13  _{Radley, Scott. “Byelection offers hints at issues that’ll matter in 2026” Hamilton Spectator, September 30, 2025 (Spec link - Paywalled).}

14  _{Best, John. “Rob Cooper tops the polls in tight Ward 8 byelection” Bay Observer, September 23, 2025 (Bay Observer link - Free).}