We are one with the plume

Saturday, October 28, 2023 - 15:21 to 15:35.

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This past Saturday, folks in Hamilton noticed a rust-coloured cloud billowing out of the Industrial Sector. It took a while for information to trickle out, but, by Sunday, ArcelorMittal Dofasco announced a 14 minute long “incident” had occurred. By the company’s account, an “emission…comprised primarily of iron oxide” occurred as a result of a “malfunction in the process of blowing oxygen”. This apparently happened in the plant’s KOBM vessel or “oxygen steelmaking furnace” which is, according to the internet, two years old.

The company’s general manager of environment (their title, apparently) told The Spec that such plumes have “generally not been associated with health effects.” The facts indicate that, when inhaled in close proximity with little ventilation, iron oxide can cause respiratory issues and can have effects similar to household irritants. But this plume was dispersed over the city, rather than concentrated in one place.

Hamiltonians have lived with the environmental impacts of industrial production for over a century and a half. Ask any Hamiltonian and they’ll have a story about the air smelling funny or seeing chemicals spilled in the harbour or the unnaturally high rates of cancer in their family. I, myself, remember seeing plumes from the Plastimet fire while standing at the front door of my grandparents’s house on the east mountain a few days after my seventh birthday, thinking it was a thunderstorm approaching. It says something that one of my earliest memories is of industry and how it can shape, and reshape, our world.

So let’s look at Hamilton’s industrial history and how the October 28 plume represents a comparatively banal event in this city’s long and complicated history with manufacturing - an industry that’s impacted our air, our water, our soil, and our bodies in so many ways.

The Flight of the Beasley

Hamilton’s status as an industrial centre is thanks, in large part, to the city’s 1862 bankruptcy.

The years preceding 1862 were heady and ambitious, with civic leaders pouring money into competing with Toronto as a regional centre of commerce and mercantile exchange. Despite warnings as early as 1849 that the city was barreling toward a debt crisis, successive councils purposefully kept taxes low while spending lavishly on vanity projects.

That all reached a fever-pitch in 1860, when council decided to ignore the advice of their own finance committee. That summer, council approved a low tax rate of $0.18 on the dollar instead of the $0.25 required to keep the city afloat. At the same time, they leveed a new 1 cent tax to host a reception for the 19-year-old Prince Edward who was set to open the city’s opulent new Crystal Palace on Locke Street (in today’s Victoria Park, which was then the local fairground) during a three-day visit to the city, which began on September 18, 1860.

Giant flagpoles were erected, gas lights illuminated every corner of the city, a new waterworks plant was built, carefully-maintained elm saplings were relocated to what is now Prince’s Square, and glittering new hotels were opened. As a final show of Victorian decadence, the city held a ball in the Prince’s honour, complete with a seventy-five dish meal. The pageant lasted until 3:30 in the morning, as the future king danced with every daughter of every reputable family in the city, doubtless giving socialites something to gossip about for the rest of their lives.

The whole spectacle was an attempt to show that Hamilton, once a tiny bureaucrat’s outpost with little more than a courthouse and some farms, was a city that mattered. Come bankers, come investors, come merchants of every stripe, Head-of-the-Lake is calling you!

But that three day party set the stage for the city’s near complete financial collapse.

Tax rates had not kept up with the city’s growing municipal needs, leaving less and less income to be spread over more and more services. To help pay for the spending spree in 1860, the city cut the police force to eight, reduced staff salaries, and slashed municipal “relief” (local governments were responsible for what little social assistance existed back then). That still didn’t work, so council asked the colonial government for help and begged creditors in England to not call in their debts.

By 1862, the colonial government decided to end subsidies to Hamilton (the death of the city’s chief advocate - Sir Allan Napier MacNab - that August hadn’t helped) so, by November 1 of that year, the city’s property was auctioned off. Council chambers were cleared out, city fire fighting equipment was sold, and the sheriff even took the drastic step of selling off all the furnishings in the city’s hospital to cover Hamilton’s debt.

Council was shocked by this, having assumed that Hamilton’s importance (as demonstrated by the party they threw just two years prior) would ensure the colonial government would continue to come to their assistance. But the day came to pay the bill and the council was fixated on one thing: keeping taxes low. They knew that, if the sheriff got his hands on the city’s assessment rolls, he’d force council to collect back taxes and raise the basic rate to pay back those the city owed money.

In a drastic measure, some members of council met in secret and convinced the young city clerk, one Thomas Beasley, to skip town with only copy of the assessment rolls. The move sharply divided council, with one of its members, Dr. John Mackelcan, resigning in disgust over the caper. But the rolls were returned (making Mr. Beasley a folk hero in town for his flight to the far off and exotic locale of…Ancaster) and a program of brutal austerity kicked off.

The city slashed budgets in creative ways. A visit by the Governor General saw the city spend just over $100, asking prominent citizens to hold banquets at their own expense in a sharp departure from the reception the future King received. Money spent on orphans was cut and the city sent word to local farmers that they could rent the services of those parentless loafs, aged 8 to 12, who were more than capable of earning their own bread, thank you very much. And the city entirely cut things it saw as unnecessary frivolities, like the Board of Health and infrastructure maintenance.

Better not get sick whilst working, young orphan. Plus the hospital is pretty much an empty building now, so be extra careful. And stop complaining! This is the Victorian Era, so common thinking is that it’s kinda your fault you were born poor.

But it wasn’t all charity banquets and orphan rentals for Hamilton. A financial plan devised by three of the city’s wealthiest men - Isaac Buchanan, Thomas Stinson, and Samuel Mills - enabled the city to better manage its debt while expanding its tax base to prevent future catastrophe. Recognizing the importance of the city’s position on the railways and the interest companies like the Great Western Railway had shown in Hamilton (also thanks to MacNab, who invested in the company), council was encouraged to do something that had been their economic policy for decades - cut taxes. But this plan was more dramatic. This one didn’t just involve lowering taxes. This one involved providing a tax exemption for any new industrial ventures, as well as low water rates and other economic incentives, for five years. Five years of benefiting from the city’s public resources while not contributing a dime to their maintenance.

Great Western responded by opening a new rolling mill at the end of Queen Street on the waterfront the following year. Other businesses followed, like Morton’s soap factory, the L.D. Sawyer & Co. farm equipment factory, Gurney’s foundry, the Hamilton Glass Works, and Tuckett’s Tobacco. Tuckett did so well, in fact, that he was able to build what is today’s Scottish Rite to serve as his palatial home and leverage his fame to become mayor in 1896.

By the eve of Confederation, word had spread that Hamilton was a place to make things. The city had cut costs after 1862, but slowly began to reinstate services and infrastructure once manufacturers drew more residents and, eventually, began to pay their own taxes. The city was able to restart the Board of Health, hire more police officers, turn on the fancy gas streetlights that went dim following Prince Edward’s departure, and build a new city jail, which opened in 1875. Hamilton was a city on the move!1

Brummie o’er ‘eer

The push for industry became a point of pride for Hamilton, particularly among the city’s business elite who stood to gain from the expansion of manufacturing in the city. In 1892, they worked to publish a book called Hamilton: The Birmingham of Canada, highlighting the incredible investment opportunities in the city. The decision to publish in 1892 was significant; it was sold to those eager travelers who would be forced to pass through (and hopefully stay in) the city on their way to the World's Columbian Exposition (aka the Chicago World's Fair) in 1893.

The same year the World’s Fair enthralled visitors in Chicago, two ambitious businessmen - John Tilden and John Milne - got word that city council wanted to bring an iron-smelting operation to the city. Tilden and Milne already ran foundries, so knew the ins-and-outs of the business. They worked with an extremely receptive local government who eventually handed the pair $100,000 cash and 30 hectares of free waterfront land for their new venture (around today’s Sherman Ave. and Burlington Street), which opened for business as the Hamilton Blast Furnace Company in 1896. A quick expansion and a merger in 1899 had the pair return with outstretched hands to council, which worked speedily to provide the new company with 42 more hectares of waterfront land at an affordable price. That new company - the Hamilton Steel and Iron Company - earned a reputation as a business that did not sit still. It gobbled up little firms across Canada until 1910 when, after a series of amalgamations, it became the backbone of a new venture called the Steel Company of Canada, which was soon to be known by a catchier name: Stelco.

Other companies flocked to the city, which had earned a reputation for having a staunchly pro-business city council that offered generous exemptions and incentives, even going so far as to trying to poach companies from other cities. The city nabbed Westinghouse, for example, with the promise of a ten-year tax exemption.

But the province got wise to the whole “poaching” deal and soon implemented laws requiring municipalities get taxpayer approval before handing cash and tax breaks to big corporations. Probably good to ask folks what they think before wandering into a corporate office with a wheelbarrow full of money, right? When the city tried to lure the Deering Harvester Company from Chicago in 1902, Hamilton’s offer of $50,000 in cash was defeated by an electorate uninterested in handing the people’s money with no strings attached to a company that had a spotty labour record.

The voter’s rejection of the Deering plan was a blow to civic leaders. But the city would still get its hands on some of that sweet, sweet farm equipment manufacturing money. Deering merged with some smaller companies and, with money from the high priest of capitalism, J.P. Morgan, created the International Harvester Company. And International Harvester was interested in Hamilton. So council used a tool that allowed them to bypass pesky provincial regulations.

They just yoooink…up and took land from Barton Township.

Council annexed land from the township on the city’s eastern border, created a new industrial district, and decided to keep the tax rate as low as it was when it was an undeveloped, rural locale. In moved International Harvester and the Graselli Chemical Company (DuPont by the late 1920s) and National Steel Car and Firestone Tires, drawn by virtually no taxes and a council willing to do almost anything for industrial investment.

That was evidenced by council keeping on and doing what it could to make the whole city more appealing for industrialists. Dredging and wharf expansions and filling in those annoyingly alive inlets with their fish and wildlife were all on the agenda. In 1919, Burlington Bay was officially renamed Hamilton Harbour to signal the city’s dedication to the power of industry.2

Water, earth, air

We know where the story goes from there. Hamilton’s industry continued to boom, slowed during the Depression, and then kicked back up again for a few decades before hitting a peak in the early 1970’s. After that, we began the slow and sad decline in which we are presently mired.

But, during all that time, industry shaped and changed the landscape of the city and, consequently, the residents of the city.

As early as the 1860’s, Hamiltonians were dealing with the southwestern arm of the Sherman Inlet, which residents had taken to affectionately calling “Coal Oil Inlet”.

That was around when future Liberal MLA (what MPPs were originally called), James Miller Williams, established an oil refinery roughly on the spot of the Birch Ave. Off-Leash Dog Park today. The refinery wasn’t known for the integrity of its production facility, with regular oil leaks turning the adjacent inlet into an oily, disgusting cesspool. The city responded by building a sewage treatment plant at the other end of the inlet and allowing semi-treated waste to flow into the water as well. If you can’t fix it, screw it up more!

Actually, it gets even better, because the workers at the treatment plant took the sludge from the processing of the sewage and scattered it on the marshy soil around the plant, basically throwing concentrated human waste onto wet soil that fed directly into the inlet. Yum!

By 1895, the city had agreed on a plan to fill in the most polluted areas around Coal Oil Inlet with garbage. This was a process completed by the 1920’s, after which the new land was handed over for more industrial development.

Noulan Cauchon, one of the first real urban planners in Canada, devised a plan for the Harbour in the spirit of the Coal Oil Inlet plan. His plan was to fill in almost the entire bay for industrial use, carving shipping canals through the newly infilled land and allowing a small river to continue to supply Cootes Paradise, reducing the harbour to a small lagoon. Cauchon’s full plan was never realized, but Hamilton has still filled in over 725 hectares (+1816 acres) of the bay, almost entirely for industrial use.

As the city dedicated more and more resources, land, space, time, and energy to industrial development, those industrial firms operating in the city dumped mild-boggling amounts of waste into the city’s soil, air, and water.

In 1974, for example, the government measured the particulate levels in the air in Hamilton. Particulate is matter that is, as the Government of Ontario notes, “primarily formed from chemical reactions in the atmosphere and through fuel combustion.” The ‘74 levels downtown reached 97 micrograms per cubic metre (represented by this cool symbol - µg/m3). In the industrial district, they were at 162 µg/m3.3 As of 2021, the WHO indicated that the annual average concentration of this fine particulate shouldn’t exceed 5 µg/m3 and that 24 hour exposure shouldn’t exceed 15 µg/m3 for more than 4 days a year. Cough.

It was during that time, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, that Dr. Victor Cecilioni was caring for Hamilton’s workers. As a general practitioner, he had started observing troubling patterns. Cancers seemed to be impacting those who worked in or lived closest to the city’s heavy industry.

Cecilioni knew about industry; he was a child of the Brightside neighbourhood, a working class and majority-immigrant community whose inhabitants worked at the surrounding plants, including Stelco and Dofacso. Those two firms would eventually gobble almost the entire neighbourhood up, displacing residents for more industrial space. His father worked in the coke ovens, helping provide Cecilioni both a chance to attend medical school and a deep connection to the people who laboured in this city.

The story goes that Cecilioni first became suspicious when three neighbours contracted lung cancer in one summer. After conducting tests and performing research, Cecilioni realized that people living closest to the plants had incidents of cancer four times higher than those living further from Hamilton’s industry. His advocacy helped end Stelco’s toxic fluorspar emissions, linked to the worst of the health impacts, but high cancer rates would continue. Later, as a physician with the Occupational Health Clinic for Ontario Workers, Cecilioni completed a multi-year study in 1989 that showed Hamilton had cancer rates up to 20% higher than Ottawa.4

Cecilioni became so well-known for his advocacy, the city’s Environmentalist of the Year award was named after him. The award this year was won by Stop Sprawl HamOnt (very well deserved, imho).

A few years before Cecilioni’s report, Keith neighbourhood residents regularly dealt with what can only be called “kishfall” events. Kish is the dusty mix of graphite, slag, and iron that comes from steelmaking. Through the 1980s, it was falling, like snow, over nearby neighbourhoods, turning city streets into what the Toronto Star described as “a silvery wonderland”. As one clever resident told a reporter, the kishfall happened on weekends, with residents waking up to a changed landscape: “We have a black cat in the neighbourhood that just turned gray overnight.”5 Stelco and Dofasco both denied responsibility for the kish events.

The kish event was reported on in 1986, the same year in which the Canadian Wildlife Service (CWS) conducted an experiment for the federal government in the harbour. Twenty five ducks were released around the Windemere Basin to determine if the area was safe for fauna or if wildlife was absorbing industrial pollutants. Within a few weeks, six were dead, 11 were “weak and emaciated”, and 8 were missing. “It's possible the basin's contamination was the killer,” a CWS researcher told the Canadian Press.6 

That November, over 250 environmental groups held a conference to develop a strategy to tackle industrial pollution and invited Hamilton’s labour groups to participate in the discussion. They received a dressing-down from Hugh Mackenzie of the Steelworkers who chided the environmentalists as “middle-class academics” who ignored workers and jobs, acting like “environmental kamikazes.”7

Therein laid the challenge. Even during a period of incredible economic decline, Hamilton’s industrial giants still employed people. At the 1981 Census, 34% of Hamiltonians worked in manufacturing - the single largest group of workers in the city. Industry provided opportunities to a city where nearly 2/3 of residents had a high school diploma or lower and where only 7% of residents had a university degree.

People were willing to accept some health impacts in exchange for the economic security that came along with manufacturing. But that security wouldn’t last for long. By 1996, only 11% of Hamiltonians would work in the field, overtaken by sales workers, those in business and finance, and workers in trades and transport.

A year prior, the Spec reported that Stelco, which had made over $2.8 billion in 1994, had been subject to four provincial environmental offences and was fined a total of $610. The company pled not guilty to the infractions, but came to an “agreement” with the Ministry of Environment and Energy (as it was then called) and paid the tickets.8 For polluting our environment, Stelco was fined 0.00002% of that year’s income.

Two months later, Environment Canada released a report indicating that Stelco and Dofasco pumped an average of two metric tonnes of benzene into Hamilton’s air every day.9 That’s hard to conceptualize, but that’s like blending up a hippopotamus every day, vapourizing it, and spreading it over the city.

Wait, hang on. I feel like that actually might be harder to conceptualize now, so I apologize. The point here is that benzene is a known carcinogen that also impacts the immune system.

Then, two years later, we had the Platimet fire, in which 400 tonnes of plastic burned over four days. The firefighters who attended the scene suffered the worst of the fallout. Captain Bob Shaw, one of the firefighters who battled the blaze, died in 2004 from esophageal cancer directly linked to the fire and the struggle to ensure first responders to industrial disasters were given some level of compensation was one of the first big fights led by Andrea Horwath, back in her junior MPP days.

We’re the Children of the Plume

There have been efforts to clean up Hamilton’s industrial areas since then, but many have run into predicable and frustrating roadblocks.

For example, the fight over Polychlorinated Biphenyls or “PCBs”. These chemicals are a big, big problem and have been banned for decades for the host of medical problems they cause. In 1995, the Ministry of Environment (MoE) became aware that there were toxic chemicals, PCBs among them, around the “Strathearne” slip, one of the canals for ships in the industrial sector in the east end. By 2008, the MoE and Environment Canada realized there was an “ongoing source” discharging the chemicals into the water. Five years later, they traced the problem to some properties around Barton and Strathearne owned by Union Gas, Coca-Cola, and Rosart Properties.

The main site of the PCB leak was 1565 Barton Street East. From the 1940s to the 1970s, it was owned by Aerovox Canada, a company that manufactured electrical conductors. But the original building was demolished and has since been replaced by a strip mall which houses a grocery store. It is important to note here that the PCBs are underground and are leaching away from the property, but they are leaching into the harbour, so still…not great.

After the 2015 report, many of the companies involved tried to wash their hands of direct responsibility (though not with harbour water, they’re not that ridiculous). And, credit where credit is due, Coke and Union Gas are only connected to the leak because they own properties adjacent to the main site. The company that owns the mall, Rosart, pushed to have Aerovox Canada’s “successor”, the AVX Corporation, pay for the cleanup, but that company has simply ignored the government’s requests to participate. They’re a South Carolina-based company that’s been involved in multiple cases of environmental mismanagement, so opening a case against them would be costly and time-consuming.

The order to clean up the site got trapped in the province’s Environmental Review Tribunal until appeals were withdrawn in 2021, allowing the province to proceed with the cleanup. Lynda Lukasik, then director of Environment Hamilton, pointed out that the Ministry knew of the issue for decades before alerting the public and beginning the work needed to stop the leak.10 The problem, complicated as it might have been, should not have been allowed to continue for 26 years.

The soul-crushingly slow process for identifying and fixing these problems is a huge issue. And, while it was a problem for the PCBs in the Strathearne slip, it is best exemplified by Randle Reef.

The reef began forming not long after those two plucky business boys, Tilden and Milne, were handed their $100,000 and 30 hectares to start their blast furnace. For over 100 years, Hamilton’s industrialists pumped toxins into the harbour, coal tar prime among them. The “reef” got its name when Harvey T. Randle, a tugboat captain who helped guide ships in and out of the harbour, caught a strong wind and ran aground on the sludge pile in 1964. Only in 1985 did the government list it as an “area of concern”. Ten years after that, groups like the Bay Area Restoration Council were holding meetings to chat about what to do with it.11 The decision to entomb it, Chernobyl-style, didn’t come until 2002 (earlier plans were to dredge and burn it which would have been great for our collective health). Designs weren’t chosen until 2006, federal funding didn’t come through until 2012, and the tomb wasn’t started until 2016. Early estimates that the project would be done by this fall have abandoned, and now, the whole thing is expected to be done some time in 2025.

Randle Reef, which started forming in 1893 and became so pronounced that a ship crashed into it in 1964, was listed as an “area of concern” in 1985 and won’t be capped until 2025. To put that in perspective, the reef started forming around the time my great-grandfather was born, got its name when my mother was a toddler, became concerning the year she got married, and won’t be dealt with until I’m 35.

When all is said-and-done, the Randle Reef sarcophagus will be around 60 hectares - double the amount of land Tilden and Milne were given to start what would become Stelco.

So there are some of the problems with Hamilton’s industrial sector. Corporations, lured to the city with promises of abundant land, low taxes, and a supportive local government, did what they could to turn a profit, even if it meant poisoning our air, our water, and our soil. They then closed down, sent production overseas, or were swallowed up by national or multinational corporate leviathans. They left a legacy of toxic waste that, once discovered, became someone else’s problem. Our governing institutions, half-heartedly listening to the pleas of local environmentalists and people whose cats have been turned silver by dust and the workers breathing in hippo-loads of poison, are too slow to act when they can be convinced to do anything at all.

Granted, I’m focusing on the bad. There have been some incredible successes in addressing the problems of manufacturing and the human impact to the harbour in particular. Portions of the Sherman Inlet were restored with special membranes and matting to allow pollutants to filter and plants to root. That effort has helped create a pollinator garden and the bee-utopia that helps the Humble Bee, all-around cool folks doing great pollinator work in town, and the place where Colin and I get all of our honey. And the success of the Windermere Basin restoration should serve as a model for other remediation efforts along the waterfront.

But there’s still so much to do. As of March of this year, Hamilton Harbour is still considered an “area of concern” for the federal government. When clean-ups take time, people become discouraged. Especially when those people are still suffering the consequences of polluted air, water, and soil.

And so we sit and wait. Wait and watch, as rusty orange plumes belch from the remnants of the city’s steel plants. Watch and listen as the Luxemborugers in charge tell us to not worry, its just a little iron oxide, nothing you’re not used to, and nothing your body can’t handle. Listen and hope that one day, with any luck, sooner rather than later, we’ll be able to swim in our bay, breathe in our air, and feel confident there isn’t anything toxic in the soil below us. We may be Children of the Plume, but we deserve that, at the very least.

By-by-by election fever!

On November 1, the premier’s office announced that the Kitchener Centre provincial by-election will be held on November 30. That seat was vacated by MPP Laura Mae Lindo, who was re-elected with the NDP with about 41% of the vote in 2022. Lindo stepped down for personal reasons in July.

The seat is a big target for both the NDP and the Greens. The NDP aim to hold the seat (showing off new leader Marit Stiles and how well they’re weathering current controversies) with their candidate - Kitchener’s Ward 9 city councillor Debbie Chapman. The Greens would like to take the seat (they hold it federally) with their candidate - Kitchener’s Ward 10 city councillor Aislinn Clancy. It is a battle of the councillors in Kitchener!

The Greens are hungry for the seat, hoping their advocacy on the Greenbelt issue and frustration with the NDP will deliver votes to them, so they’ve taken the step of making Clancy the Deputy Leader of the Green Party on October 30 to show Kitchener Centre voters they’re serious. With an expected low turnout and general frustration with the political establishment, the Greens might actually be able to pull this one off. If they do, they have the potential to be a major force in the 2026 general election, with expected Liberal leader Bonnie Crombie likely to pull the party to the right.

The Ontario PCs have helped the NDP and Green cause by nominating Rob Elliott to be their candidate. Elliott is the PC candidate, despite his resigning from the party in 2017 over frustration with their nomination procedures and his living in Keswick, Ontario on the shores of Lake Simcoe. That’s about 160 km away or around 5 or 6 ridings to the northeast of Kitchener. Elliott has assured CityNews that the community “is personal” to him because he went to university there.

But the Kitchener Centre provincial by-election isn’t the only fun on the horizon.

On Halloween, a report dropped that Neil Lumsden, former pro-footballer with the Argos, Ti-Cats, and Edmonton Elks and 7th place finisher on the third season of The Amazing Race Canada is in the running for a new job.

Chris’s producer quickly hands him a note.

Wait, I’m being told Lumsden is also the MPP for Hamilton East-Stoney Creek?

Another note is quickly pushed onto Chris’s desk.

AND he’s the Minister of Tourism!? That’s odd. Thanks to my producer for that information.

Chris’s producer quietly grooms himself because he’s a cat.

Lumsden was elected in 2022 after disgraced incumbent Paul Miller decided to run as an independent. While the break-up was long in the making, Miller was removed from caucus earlier in the year for allegedly being a member of an Islamophobic Facebook group. The years of bullying he engaged in toward his staff, including running his very mean spouse against his former assistant in a school trustee race probably didn’t help, but it was his social media activity that finally got him the boot.

Lumsden has, in essence, just followed the PC playbook of keeping his head down, not speaking much to the media, and advancing the party’s goals. But now he’s apparently being floated as a candidate for President…of the Edmonton Elks CFL team.

The Minister’s response to the Canadian Press asking questions about his possible new job was interesting, as it kind of reads like he was almost talking himself into it before realizing it would be impertinent to do so over the phone with a reporter:

The Ontario PCs may be riding high in the polls, but their scandals will inevitably catch up to them. And it wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility that we see a 2026 matchup between Lumsden and, say, Chad Collins, who might not be Liberal MP for Hamilton East-Stoney Creek after the next federal election if the polls keep on going where they’re going.

If Lumsden were to take the job in Edmonton, he’d be able to resign for something better (and likely easier) than being a Minister in Doug Ford’s cabinet. But, if that happened, we’d be headed for a by-election in HE-SC.

And who said provincial politics wasn’t fun!?

Cool facts for cool people

• Tune into Kojo’s Corner, this Friday (November 3rd) from 5 to 6 as he chats with some amazing local reporters about the future of journalism. Check it out on X/Twitter or on YouTube!

• Ontario’s Premier, Doug Ford, held his first press conference in six weeks on Halloween and it went over like an absurdist Monty Python sketch. Reporter: “Mr. Ford, can you comment on the Greenbelt scandal?” Ford: “Olivia Chow is a nice lady, we build batteries here, I have a friend named Colin. FOLKS!” But, importantly, Ford’s conference was to announce an extension to the gas tax cut until 2024. That’s just bad policy. Rather than providing people with alternate options and disincentivizing mindless car use through higher taxes on gasoline, the current government is further subsidizing the automobile and fossil fuel corporations and forcing Ontarians into unsafe, community-killing, disastrous situations where we are entirely reliant on cars. Deeply shameful and backward.

• Last week, I wrote about the ongoing issue with York Catholic District School Board (YCDSB) trustee Theresa McNichol, who has been accused of anti-Italian discrimination and was barred from attending YCDSB meetings for the rest of her term in office (until 2026). McNichol actually showed up to the YCDSB’s October 30th meeting and the board has agreed to “reconsider” the motion to bar her, meaning the decision is “stayed” and she gets to return to the board. The saga doesn’t seem to be over, though, as the board voted, during that same meeting, to amend their trustee code of conduct to require any trustee who seeks outside counsel to pay their own legal bills (McNichol has hired an outside lawyer, so this seems targeted toward her). This thing will keep on going, it seems. Stay tuned for more trustee drama!