Greetings from sunny Saskatchewan! I know I said I was going to take this week off, but a few news stories popped up that were living rent-free in my head. Yeah, I know living rent-free is an aspiration, but these stories were pissing me off more than anything. So I put together another newsletter!

I’ll take next week off (note to the news: stop happening) instead.

On with the show!

The Red Shirts of Anger

The Furlanites are at it again. We got an opinion piece in Saturday’s Spec from Jean Fair entitled “Sacrificing poor neighbourhoods”.

The article reads as expected.

A nefarious plot by all of Hamilton to “move the homeless” to Ward 3. Then letting them “spill over” into Stinson (Fair’s neighbourhood of residence).

The rest of the article is much of the same. Slamming the Hamilton Alliance for Tiny Shelters (HATS) for drawing money from the community and “hitting on” the former Dominion Glass factory site (near Barton and Lottridge) as a possible HATS location.2 Attacking the 541 Eatery and Helping Hands for earning a community grant that could have helped businesses and residents that “are just as deserving of financial support as those two”. Saying LRT construction is a “key cause” of homelessness in town. It ends with this quote:

No love for her neighbours without homes. Equating the movement of people to “damage” done to Ward 3. A fixation on history and heritage without acknowledging economic inequality and stigmatization of those living on the margins or with mental illnesses or addictions are just as much a part of this community’s history as old buildings and grand boulevards.

Throw in a reference to “the Westdale elite”, people “coming in from Toronto”, and “those clowns at city hall” and you have a bog standard Hamilton populist argument.

Fair was a donor to Walter Furlan’s 2022 campaign and appeared before the city’s Board of Health earlier this year to oppose a proposed Consumption Treatment Services (CTS) site in Ward 3, in line with the other talking points from other Walter-affiliated folks. During that meeting, which was covered by one of the city’s right-leaning digital news outlets, she asked “councillors a list of questions about ensuring that local retail businesses will not be disaffected and how children will be kept safe from drug dealers.”4

Here’s the thing: this isn’t an isolated incident. This is part of a larger campaign to influence the city’s politics and establish a reactionary presence in town. In essence, Fair is campaigning on behalf of a political party…the “Walter Furlan Party”, for lack of a better name.

I’m calling this a party for a few key reasons. Anson Daniel Morse, an early scholar in the study of political parties, wrote in 1896 that:

Scholars Sarah Anzia and Olivia Meeks have advanced a theory of parties, based on some contemporary scholarship, which maintains that parties have four key characteristics, three of which are relevant in this context:

1. Parties are coalitions of like-minded interest groups and activists, where the grassroots is paramount.

2. Parties have policy goals that are desired by their grassroots.

3. Parties do not limit themselves to lobbying, but actively seek to nominate and elect candidates who will support their policy goals.6

The Furlanites check all the boxes.

• They’ve been organizing for years around opposition to social services and the policies of Councillor Nrinder Nann (durable and united by common principles)

• They’ve gathered together groups of people fixated on local history and heritage, and activate the grassroots through call outs to attend meetings, write letters to the Spec, and mobilize around different issues of importance to their group (like-minded interest groups and activists)

• They oppose specific policies advanced by the city and the current councillor while also proposing their own policies, such as “no go zones” for social services in their community, better funding for businesses in their area, and a halting of most new development in Ward 3 (policy goals desired by the grassroots)

• They have run a candidate in the past (in the form of Walter), have supported other conservative council candidates/right wing councillors, and will almost certainly be running people again in 2026 (actively seek to nominate and elect candidates)

They’re a right-wing, conservationist, reactionary, NIMBY party that is actively seeking to influence debates in Hamilton, run candidates for office, and maintain an active presence in plenty of aspects of the city’s politics. They’re delegating to council, writing frequent letters to the Spec, and working to advance their cause in their community. They even have a colour scheme, as evidenced by their attempt to influence the downtown encampment meeting with bright, red, Canada flag adorned shirts which was discussed in the June 29th edition of this newsletter (as noted in that edition: they’re taking cues from the Convoy, then?).

As part of their efforts, they’re collecting email addresses of people sympathetic to their cause through petitions, a time-honoured way of building a list among activists in political parties.

At least, I think that’s what they’re doing. They may have abandoned trying to change Hamilton and have moved on to shifting the conversation in a multiverse version of the city where a wealthy businessman named George Hamiltin bought land where the government wanted to create a county seat and then the city, named after him, created “tax paid Family Parks”.

And I just have to bring this up: aah, the old “family” line again. Folks who don’t interact with those of us in the queer community might not understand just how much of a dog whistle that is. Under the auspices of “protecting families”, queer folks have been attacked and marginalized for decades. Our very bodies in public spaces have been deemed a “threat to the family” and public policy, hiding behind the mythical settler-colonial “family”, has been activated to push us out of view. Our love, our expression, our identities are some how “inappropriate” for impressionable children and delicate mothers, as if being gay in public is some disease that can be transmitted to all but the burliest of high testosterone dudes.

The Furlanites are employing the same language when discussing people experiencing homelessness, which should terrify every queer person in Hamilton. Because you know they’ll whip that out and use it against us when we make them feel weird. They may as well say that people experiencing homelessness are “grooming” children into a life of deviancy and drug use. Shameful nonsense.

Anyway, these folks constitute a hard right party, aiming to influence the debate here in Hamilton. Think of the Walter Furlan Party as a classic Reform Party. Maybe the angrier wings of the provincial Tories or like a “Trillium Party” (the now deregistered right wing populist party in Ontario before the pandemic). But they’re a party nonetheless.

Speaking of which, let’s check in with Hamilton’s local small-c conservative party!

The Beleaguered Blue Taxpayer Machine

Following Fair’s opinion from the perspective of the Walter Furlan Party, we got a Monday editorial opinion from Spec resident columnist Scott Radley telling Hamiltonians to expect a one hundred billion million gazillion percent tax increase next year and every year from now until the heat death of the universe.

That is, of course, petulant over-exaggeration, but, considering we don’t have any idea what next year’s property tax increase will be, that’s about a good a guess as any of the councillors quoted in the article could provide.

Fridays for the hard right fringe, Mondays for the established conservatives.7

Interviewing many of Hamilton’s right wing councillors, Radley’s article is a laundry list of scare points and hypotheticals given to the paper directly by elected officials looking to kneecap their council colleagues.

And, it is worth remembering the Hamilton City Council breakdown for the 2022-2026 term:

There are more right-leaning councillors (6) than progressives and moderate or “swing” councillors (meaning those who might change their vote based on circumstance and issue). And council’s right can rely on Jeff Beattie fairly consistently, so the numbers are closer to 7 for them. They aren’t the majority, but the math is easier for them when it comes to winning on particular issues.

Hamilton’s local paper gave them all a platform to speculate wildly and enthusiastically about taxes and who should be given the boot in 2026 because of what they guess will be a possible double digit tax increase. A tax increase which they say will be all because the radical fringe will foist their loony left tax and spend ideas on the hardworking taxpayers of the city.

JP Danko says Hamilton’s tax increase will be around 10%. Matt Francis one-ups him and says it’ll likely start at 10%. Brad Clark agrees, but astutely notes that provincial downloading is a major cause (shoulda told Mike Harris not to download things when you had the chance, Brad).

Radley points out that taxpayers are on the hook for irritating expenses like paying city employees. Then he lets the councillors settle some personal and professional scores.

Matt Francis hucks a semi-professional spitball at Alex Wilson by saying discussions about “free transit” might influence the tax discussion. Esther Pauls laces up her running shoes to kick Craig Cassar in the bike seat over spending on “climate initiatives”, to which she says: “Sure we need this. Sure we need that…But at what cost right now? Right now, people are struggling.”8 Tom Jackson and Mike Spadafora chime in with the double whammy of “this will hurt people” and “there’s gotta be a limit!” serving us a little populism and a little austerity in the same breath. Then we finish with Brad Clark, ever the Tory salesman, using the old line “it’s like a family that’s using a credit card...”9 Because every family spends around 15% of their multi-billion dollar household income on a private security force.

The local paper and council’s right wing, teaming up to stoke fear and anger amongst a population that has scant access to any other ideas from a local perspective. A proud Hamilton tradition since 1846.

So what’s this all about?

Well, first off, we now have a council that realizes we need to pay for things like sewers and sidewalks and roads and parks and emergency services and not just pass the bill off to the next group in the hopes that someone will forget they never paid it. We have chronically underfunded our basic services for decades and we’re finally at the point where things are breaking. Taxes are going up now because they didn’t for too long.

Similarly, things got weird after the pandemic. Supply chains got all messed up, backlogs got backloggier, and Canada’s weird quasi-monopolistic, hyper-capitalistic, overly-centralized system meant that there were precious few alternatives for us to rely on when it came to sourcing much needed materials, hiring companies, and securing skilled labourers needed to fix the things that are breaking.

Add to that the fact that we’ve built our city in such a broken way that we all end up subsidizing new suburban development that draws more public resources than it provides in tax revenue because we collectively agreed that we want more strip malls, cul-de-sacs, and powercentres instead of dense, efficient, healthy communities.

Yeah, urban sprawl causes higher local taxes.

A 2013 report from Environmental Defence indicates that taxpayers in cities that permit sprawl end up covering the costs for that kind of development, which ends up being a subsidy for developers of low-quality suburban minimansions. And a 2021 report from Ottawa indicates that sprawl development costs $465 per person in the capital while high-density infill actually gives the city $606 per person.

That context is not in the Radley article. And the councillors quoted haven’t pointed to any of those issues as reasons for tax increases. Instead, they’ve conjured up some paper dragons to slay, each of which represents an area of focus from one of their progressive colleagues who have not been quoted in the paper and do not have a corresponding venue in which they can express their perspectives. I haven’t checked, so I don’t know if they weren’t called up, opted to not speak with Radley, or simply weren’t quoted, but their absence is felt.

This wasn’t a news story. Thi was a PR press release from the elected caucus of the Concerned Taxpayers of Hamilton - in essence, another political party operating at the local level here (Hamilton’s version of Vancouver’s NPA or ABC). They were provided space in the local paper, for free, to point fingers at everyone else for the possibility of massive tax increases on the horizon.

All these councillors didn’t mention their support for the massive budget increase for the Hamilton Police Service. They didn’t tell the Spec about their own little ward-based pet projects. And they sure as hell didn’t mention the fact that every one of them got money from local developers in their 2022 campaigns because of how friendly they are to urban sprawl.

Matt Francis has the audacity to throw shade at Alex Wilson over “free transit” (which has not and likely will not come to council in the near future), but thinks his zealous opposition to any new development in lower Stoney Creek that isn’t of the “two-storey, four bed, three bath, two car garage, set back on a postage stamp lot, surrounded by Kentucky blue grass” variety has absolutely nothing to do with what he sees as “astronomical tax increases” on the horizon.

Here’s the issue:

We have a local paper that prints right-leaning editorials on the front page. Yes, leftist perspectives get space in the paper too, but you aren’t ever going to see one of my opinion pieces above the fold on the front page of the Saturday Spec (someone pitch Paul Berton on having Scott and I write competing columns in the Spec…I’d do it for free. Hell, I’d even pay them).

We have right-leaning councillors enthusiastically using the favourable coverage they get in the local paper to set the agenda, dictate the talking points, and tilt the whole Hamilton political scene in their favour. They then point fingers and blame their colleagues, which is printed without any context, fact-checking, or alternative positions presented. The paper is then hand-delivered to the doors of subscribers, in essence spoon feeding Hamiltonians a buffet of right wing grievance politics intended to keep eyes on the page and votes coming in for out-of-touch conservatives who think that trying to lessen some of the worst effects of the already inevitable climate catastrophe we’re facing is too much because “people are struggling” (people whose houses burn down or are blown away or get hit by some other freak storm will be struggling too, Esther. This isn’t COVID…you can’t just close your eyes and pretend it isn’t a thing.)

All of this speaks to the need for a few things in Hamilton:

• A robust and regular progressive press - yeah, I’m trying to provide some progressive perspectives, but I’m one very, very, very tired postdoc with some giant student loans and a whole heap of instability. We need left-leaning voices to get the same kind of traction that right-leaning ones do in the Spec. Bring back the Herald or the Labor Times or something. We need alternative news sources.

• Progressive organizing on a city-wide scale - The Walter Furlan Party and the Concerned Taxpayers of Hamilton caucus need to be opposed by an organized, efficient, effective, disciplined, ambitious progressive movement across the whole city. It worked with Stop Sprawl, it has been working with push back on reactionary nonsense in the encampment discussion, but it can’t stop now. A Hamilton-based version of Progress Toronto or Horizon Ottawa is necessary if we don’t want to lose ground in 2026.

• Calling right wing councillors on their nonsense - some of the right-wing councillors in the Spec article say that constituents are calling them, griping and moaning about their tax bill. But those people do not constitute a coherent majority. Progressive-leaning Hamiltonians have to speak up and speak out. Phone zaps, letter writing campaigns, petitions, whatever. They can be a great way to show these councillors that not everyone in their communities thinks the same way. The majority of residents in every ward did not come out to vote and, in some of their races, vote totals were close. Reminding them about the diversity of opinions in their community is a great way to engage in the democratic process, try to influence debate in the same way the reactionary NIMBYs are, and remind these councillors that their threats about unseating their opponents in 2026 go both ways.

These are things I’ve mentioned before. And I’ll keep bringing them up. Because Hamilton deserves nice things. We deserve a local government that works with people to make this city the best possible place to live, to thrive, and to try ambitious new things.

The chorus of cynics - those same names in that Radley article - has sung with vigour for decades. They tell us we need to tighten our belts, put our heads down, and keep our big mouths shut. Don’t dream, don’t plan, don’t try anything new. This isn’t Toronto or Montreal or Vancouver, they say, so just button up and put in your time. Drive to the store, drive to work, drive home. Be happy with what little you have. Yeah, the planet might be on fire. Yeah, there might be encampments in parks in the dead of winter when it is -15 degrees. Yeah, the bus might be ineffective and expensive. Yeah, city staff might not be able to afford rent here and need to take second jobs to make ends meet. Yeah, things might suck. But you deserve it. Because this is Hamilton. Now quit asking for anything better, they say with a smile. Because they know there isn’t another paper for us to read or candidate for us to vote for.

Well, I have one response to said chorus: fuck that.

I want a city with housing options and free transit. I want a city of mixed use walk ups and clean, thriving, alive waterways. I want a city with a robust biodiversity plan and strong climate change mitigation incentives. I want a city where I can walk to a local store to buy local goods made by people who didn’t need to fight city hall for a business licence. I want a city of co-ops and car shares, a city where council staff are well paid and free from abuse, a city where the police make due with what they have while new funds go to our libraries and community centres and social housing.

And we deserve that. We deserve a city that works, that takes care of everyone, that reflects the vibrant diversity of our lives. We deserve to hear a variety of voices in our public discourse. We deserve better politicians who won’t spend time slamming their colleagues in the local paper with baseless fairy tales, where they’re all white knights in glittering armour, saving us from those dastardly progressive barbarians at the gate.

Sure, they’re out there warning Hamiltonians about a “huge tax increase on the horizon”. But I’m here, warning them that Hamiltonians aren’t so easily fooled. And that, in 2026, we’ll fight like hell to keep forging ahead with the progress we’ve already started.

AGI: Absolutely, Grotesquely Inhumane

There’s a heartbreaking story in Friday’s Spectator about a single mother of two, living in this CLV Group-owned building at 1170 Fennell Ave. East in the Huntington neighbourhood.

The mother, named Shelley, spends almost all of her monthly income on rent. The CLV Group’s website indicates that rent for 1 bedroom units in that building start at $1,995 a month, which works out to $23,940 a year. Statistics Canada indicates that the median after-tax household income for one-earner households (like Shelley’s) in that dissemination area (basically all of the Huntington neighbourhood) is $39,200. With those figures in mind, it is important to note that rent at 1170 Fennell East would constitute 61% of the median household’s after-tax income.

The Spec article includes these profoundly upsetting paragraphs:

Another building in a state of disrepair, owned by another faceless behemoth of a company, with tenants stretched to their breaking point, subject to another above-guideline rent increase.

An above-guideline rent increase (AGI) is any rent increase that goes beyond what the province sets as a maximum for rent increases in any year. That maximum is presently 2.5% of your rent if your rental unit was constructed any time before November 15, 2018. If a landlord has done anything major in terms of renovations to the property or installed security cameras/key fobs/hired guards or if the property taxes on the rental unit have increased dramatically, they can apply to increase the rent by more than the guideline states. This can be abused (obviously), and there have been plenty of stories about landlords applying for AGIs multiple times over the course of a few short years.

The AGI application is just one way that landlords get around Ontario’s rent control laws. Well…not really “rent control”. More “the vague semblance of something resembling a regulation that is somewhat like something that tastes similar to, but is not legally, a La Croix flavoured ‘I can’t believe it isn’t’ rent control” laws. And these AGIs are adding more methyl bromide-treated deconstructed shipping pallets to the ongoing dumpster fire that is Ontario’s housing crisis.

Turns out, we’re not the only ones dealing with this problem.

Down in New South Wales, Australia (the state where Sydney is located), their Labor government is proposing a host of reforms to deal with their skyrocketing rental housing costs. After coming to power in March after 12 years of Liberal/National Party rule, they proposed a slew of reforms to address the ongoing rental crisis there.

Okay, side note because it’ll bother me if I don’t address it. but feel free to skip this next paragraph if you don’t want to know more about Australian politics:

Australian politics is bizarre. Voting is mandatory and they use Instant Runoff Voting, or what we’d call “ranked ballots”. They usually list their results as “two party preferred”, which is their weird way of announcing results; it basically means the two highest ranked parties after all the other votes have been distributed. They have to major parties: the Liberal/National Coalition and the Labor Party. The Coalition is two distinct parties: the Liberal Party, which is a more urban/suburban based conservative party, and the National Party, a more rural right wing party reminiscent of our Reform and Alliance Parties. Imagine the PCs and Alliance hadn’t merged but, instead, decided to split their efforts, where the Alliance would run in rural ridings and across the west while the PCs would run in urban ridings and in the east. That’s the Coalition. And their Labor Party is like if the Canadian Liberals and the NDP adopted a child right before they were going to get a divorce. Some soft social democratic stuff with a solid commitment to maintaining the market and tinkering with it where they can. They’re joined in the Legislative Assembly by The Greens, a decidedly more left-wing party than what we have in Canada. If Labor is like the child of a broken Liberal/NDP home, then the Greens are like the adopted child of every leftist New Democrat who has ever protest voted for the Canadian Greens. That was a long side note, but whatever.

The housing situation there is bad, though there are some unique issues they’re dealing with. There was actually a legal loophole that allowed landlords to increase rent multiple times in one year. People were getting evicted without cause and some landlords had bizarrely strict rules regarding pets.

The new Labor government is proposing to change all that, create a public database of all rent increases, and force landlords to offer a fee-free way to pay for rent online. While the Coalition is obviously opposed, the Greens are calling for Labor to go further, recommending a rent freeze and a permanent limit on rent increases.

And it isn’t just Australia that’s seeing state actors moving on the housing crisis.

The government of the Netherlands fell a few days ago, but, before it did, their housing minister proposed a radical new restriction on home buying. The government was pretty right wing, made up of conservative and traditionally liberal parties. The minister himself, Hugo De Jonge, was a moderate member of the centre-right Christian Democratic Appeal. But, to tackle the housing market problems they’re having there, De Jonge proposed a law that:

The proposed law was defeated, but certainly had people talking. Such a law would prevent wealthy investors from nabbing houses to flip and would make it harder for large corporations to buy homes, renovate them, and rent them out for exorbitant sums.

So other places are starting to throw out new ideas on how to fix the problem. But, here, Shelley is still living in a run-down apartment where the corporate leviathan that owns the building is applying for another AGI, despite already renting the building for more than people in the neighbourhood can afford.

The question remains: how many more Ontarians will have to be forced onto the streets or the couches of relatives or into substandard, exploitative housing until the provincial government acts? How many more giant corporations will come along and scoop up rental housing, jacking up prices and squeezing tenants even further, all to provide a healthy return to their wealthy shareholders and unethical pension fund investors? How many more horror stories do we have to hear until we start demanding real change?

Because, for people like Shelley, and thousands of Ontarians like her, there’s precious little time left. It is time to act. Now.

Climate Dissonance

An absolutely perfect combination of stories popped up right beside one another on my Reddit feed a couple of days ago:

The first story, from Natasha Bulowski at the National Observer, is full of quotes from environmental activists and political leaders about the absolutely miserable climate change situation in which we find ourselves. In the story, there’s a huge emphasis on the burning of fossil fuels as one of the biggest contributors to the climate crisis.

This is backed up everywhere. The US EPA estimated that 29% of Greenhouse Gas Emissions south of the border were caused by burning fossil fuels for transportation and that, of those 29%, nearly 60% came from light-duty vehicles, meaning personal automobiles. And right here in Hamilton, the Bay Area Climate Change Council estimates that 17% of our carbon pollution comes from the personal automobile.

In essence: the personal car is one if the single largest contributors to the climate crisis.

The second story comes from the Ancaster News. Residents around 111 Fiddler’s Green Road are angry that a developer has proposed building a two storey, mixed-use building on the site with 6 residential units and 32 parking spaces. Why are they angry? As one resident told the Ancaster News:

A mixed-use building. Still featuring ample parking. And everyone is worried…that there won’t be enough parking.

I’ve been to public meetings where people have said “well everyone has two cars so how will your proposed building accommodate that?” so this isn’t surprising. The area residents seem to have this mentality as well. There’s little consideration that folks might live in a one car household or may even be a car-free household.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, but the Canadian obsession with the private automobile is killing us. There’s a rather uncreative assumption that, in order to get around, we must use our cars. We can’t even conceive of people walking or cycling or taking transit or checking out a car share vehicle or scooting along on a little Bird scooter to run basic errands, get to work, or find entertainment.

Neighbours see a new development and immediately think “so that means more cars”. Not “more neighbours”. Not “a unique new local business”. More cars.

In order to truly address the ongoing climate crisis, we are going to have to change our collective mentality around transportation. We must provide as many incentives as possible to get out of your car and try getting around a different way. There will always be folks who might need a car (people with disabilities or with mobility issues) and there will always be places that it will be more efficient to get to using a car. But we need to reduce “indulgent car use” - the car use that sees someone drive two blocks to the store and back or drive to anything that could easily be accessed in another way.

Part of doing that means engaging in community retrofits that bring services closer to people and ensures those services a geared toward serving people who arrive by active or sustainable transportation. Rather than giant grocery stores, we focus on neighbourhood grocerias. Rather than another Tims surrounded by a drive-thru, we have local coffee shops in mixed use buildings, surrounded by patios. Rather than another Shoppers with an ugly parking lot and a fake street-facing façade, we build local pharmacies and shops on the ground floor of a five-over-one.

A mixed-use building in Ancaster where the emphasis is on sustainable transportation is a good thing. Yes, the residents are concerned, but they need to recognize that we can’t build around the car and for the car anymore.

Let’s start building a city that’s walkable, sustainable, and community-oriented. Hopefully then, we’ll move away from asking “where will all the cars go?” and toward asking “how did we ever care so much about the car?”

Cool facts for cool people

• If you only read one more Twitter thread before the site implodes, let it be this thread about Toronto’s first cat. The story is very cute and part of a larger project about Toronto history that’s right here on Substack! Link to subscribe is below:

• There’s some campaign finance drama going down in Niagara. Two Catholic trustee candidates - Natalia Benoit and Jolanta Pawlak - are the subject of a campaign finance review after two St. Catharine’s residents filed complaints about their paperwork. The two candidates listed no expenses, but had professionally-designed signs and literature during last year’s campaign. But the drama doesn’t stop there. One of the complainants, Ann-Marie Zammit, had her complaint withdrawn because of questions about her elector status. While Zammit says she’s a Catholic board supporter, a representative of the candidates found out she was actually a public board voter. Gasp! But another complaint about the candidates was submitted, so the review of their finances will go ahead. If the committee looking into those finances finds that there were issues, it could be bad news for Natalia Benoit, who actually won her seat in 2022. There’s the possibility that she could be removed from office over this, which would be abundantly dramatic!

• Pierre Poilievre supports Straight Pride. Well, his team says he “rejects” the message that was on the shirt of a supporter who posed for a photo with him at the Calgary Stampede. But, let’s face it: if someone who wears a shirt that says “thank a straight person for your existence” is looking to take a photo with a politician, they’re probably going to go up to the guy who has actively courted the far right back into the Conservative Party fold by lending legitimacy to anti-vaxxers, supported the transphobic legislation coming out of New Brunswick, and has used the word “woke” so much, it may as well be on his family crest. That guy wanted to take a picture with you because he knows you care more about his vote than his abhorrent views, Pierre.