…but first, a word from the Sewer

Sorry for the late edition here. This week has been rather busy and a very mild mid-week cold had my brain all fogged up when I should have been completing this edition. I’m all better now, but any errors or jokes that don’t land can be blamed on my stuffiness.

The next edition will be my 75th, which both seems like a lot and nothing at all. I don’t know if I’ll do anything special (I have another busy week…or three…coming up), but I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who has been along for the ride up until now.

Tell you friends, tell your acquaintances, tell your mortal enemies. And make sure they subscribe.

Okay, on with the show!

Doug’s Deadcat Deadlift

Werkout

There is some debate in the “lifting” community about the length of rest intervals during weight training.

Some people are fans of the “superset”, which is where you alternate rapidly between different exercises in a short period of time. The rest interval there is shortened because you’re jumping from, for example, cable rows to lat pulldowns to pushups without a noticeable break. While that kind of workout is more common in the CrossFit community, some gym die-hards will load up their workout with supersets to cram more lifts into a smaller timeframe.

Some folks swear by the short interval. One minute max, but usually around 30 seconds. Pump some iron, take a breather, pump some more iron. By the end of a workout, you should feel like Jell-O. Accomplished, but tired.

Others will advocate for a reasonable three-to-five minute break between sets. Give yourself some time to recoup and then put your back into it when you start up again. This might mean a longer workout, but if you have the time, then why not take a second and have a nice breather? If you go up in weight and do some particularly challenging dumbbell curls, for example, then giving yourself a sizable break can help you keep going and hit your goals.

A peer-reviewed Sports Med paper from 2009 found that the type of rest interval might actually depend on what you want to get out of a workout. While a longer rest can be safer, result in the ability to lift more volume over time, and provide a greater overall increase in absolute strength, shorter rest intervals are associated with higher rep velocities and improved torque, which can help with quicker muscular hypertrophy (gains). A healthy mix of all types is probably best, though, allowing the trainee to get some variety in and remain encouraged to keep working out.

I personally find my rest intervals change based on what’s playing on the TV screens sprinkled around my gym. I’ll say right off the bat that it’s a great local business, very small and well-designed, with attentive and dedicated staff. Highly recommend it.

But the televisions there alternate between sports channels and CP24.

If there’s something interesting like baseball or curling or pro-wrestling (which I consider a subsection of drag) on a screen in my sightline, then my rest intervals can get a little long. Last Saturday, I spent so long watching curling instead of working out that I genuinely forgot where I was when they cut to commercial. But it did inspire me to put some hammer curls into my workout. Curling joke!

CP24, on the other hand, usually drives me to “rage lift”. And that’s because there’s a good chance that, if I look up at a TV screen set to CP24, the face of Premier Doug Ford will be staring back at me. I can complete a set in record time while he’s on screen - standing at a lectern in a field in front of construction workers, standing at a lectern on a street corner in front of construction workers, standing at a lectern in a factory in front of factory workers dressed like construction workers - because I know whatever hairbrained scheme of Ford’s that CP24 is reporting on will be all the province talks about for the next day, until he comes up with a new scheme to distract us with.

The late, great Mr. Mistoffelees

After Ford mused about building an impossibly large tunnel under the Highway 401, Sean Marshall called him on his tactic. As Marshall notes, for the past few weeks (or longer, depending on who you ask), Ford has been deadcatting.

“Deadcatting” is a political tactic that comes from Australia, popularized by the wily right-wing campaign strategist Lynton Crosby. Crosby has a long history of advising conservative parties and was briefly tied to the Canadian Conservative Party’s 2015 campaign (though Crosby and our own Tories denied this).

The strategy is simple. Say you’re running in an election or trying to get a policy passed through the legislature. Maybe there’s a scandal or maybe your numbers don’t add up or maybe the campaign just isn’t inspiring anyone. How do you turn the tables and get people talking about you? Instead of working hard to develop policies that will work for everyone, Crosby’s strategy is to throw “a dead cat on the dining room table.”

This was summarized by the undisputed master of this strategy, the former London mayor and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson (for whom Crosby worked), who said:

Do something so outrageous that they can’t stop talking about what you did rather than talk about the thing you can’t defend. It gets you back in the spotlight on your terms, forces your opponents to respond, and can energize your base if it’s outrageous enough.

Over the past month, the people of this province have endured a veritable tsunami of former felines from the Premier. This helps distract from the fact that life in Ontario isn’t getting any better, that his plans benefit a small group of his wealthy donors, and that he’s facing serious criticism over his government’s closeness with developers and those who stand to profit from his policies.

In early September, Ford’s government refused to cooperate with the City of Toronto’s request to allow them to use more automated speed cameras to help with traffic law enforcement. The delay became so pronounced that Toronto Star columnist Matt Elliott penned a piece saying should just “activate more cameras now to at least capture better data - and to ensure we've got the tech in place to immediately start issuing tickets whenever Ford gets around to changing the rules.”

Then two weeks ago, Ford’s government announced they were “looking into” overriding a municipality’s right to make its own planning decisions and, instead, impose a ban on bike lanes where any lanes of car traffic would be removed. Experts immediately came out against this plan, which they say has no grounding in reality and will do absolutely nothing to improve congestion. All this plan will do will make the loudest curmudgeons in mid-sized cities around Ontario happy because they won’t have to see happy people riding their bikes any more. When pressed on this by the CBC, Ford’s Transportation Minister, Prabmeet Sarkaria, provided anecdotal evidence about how hard it is for him to now drive from his riding of Brampton South to Queen’s Park now that there are bike lanes.

Couple of quick facts:

• It would take Sarkaria approximately 20 more minutes to take transit from his Brampton constituency office to his Queen’s Park office than it would to drive the same distance

• Sarkaria would have to drive on city roads for less than 4 KM of the 40 KM commute from both points

• There are bike lanes on only 2 KM of that - on University Avenue - and those bike lanes are not new.

Anyway, facts don’t matter to the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party, so let’s move on. As Edward Keenan noted of Ford’s plan:

The dust had barely settled on that plan before Ford wandered into a parking lot to stand behind a lectern flanked by bored looking members of his party to announce he was tasking his government with investigating the feasibility of building a big ass tunnel under the Highway 401. A viral post shortly after Ford’s announcement simply referred to Ford’s proposal as “pure conservative id”.

The tunnel, which would likely cost somewhere in the range of $60 billion to $120 billion and, if completed, would become the longest road tunnel in the entire world, was announced shortly after a Toronto Star investigative piece from Sheila Wang revealed that the Ford government manipulated the routing of the Yonge Subway extension so that it would dart dramatically to the east and, conveniently, through property owned by prominent developers. The new routing, which will be more expensive and less time-efficient than the originally-planed route, will benefit the family of Angelo De Gasperis, a developer who has been tied to the Ford government and whose company hired former Progressive Conservative MPP Frank Klees to lobby on their behalf.

When pushed by reporters on the idea of a huge, unnecessary, bafflingly expensive tunnel (the tunnel would eat up around half of the total provincial budget for 2024), Ford simply replied that he was a dreamer and that those nasty opposition parties keep holding up progress: “I know this is an ambitious idea and that some people will say it can't be done or that we shouldn't even try…But these are the same people who oppose every project...Every proposal to get people out of gridlock and get our province moving, they say no.”2

Before the opposition could even muster a vigourous defence, the Ford government had lobbed another bag of ex-tabbies into the mix.

The next day, the government announced a new temporary music venue at the former Downsview Airport north of the Highway 401. While it is technically connected to the Sheppard West TTC station, the project will be mostly car-centric.

Then, on Wednesday, Ford, standing behind a lectern in a ditch flanked by construction workers, announced the province would be upping the speed on all 400-series highways to 110 KM/H. At the same press conference, he threw out vague plans to turn Niagara Falls into the “Las Vegas of the North”.

All this was followed by what happened yesterday. As crews pulled down trees at the former Ontario Place, Ford’s government announced the details of their 95-year lease with Therme Canada regarding their new “water park and wellbeing destination” on Toronto’s waterfront. The deal includes building between 1,800 and 2,500 parking spaces by 2030 and huge punitive fines to be paid by the province if they don’t meet this requirement.

It is genuinely hard to keep up with all of this. Which is the point.

You’re going all in on car development because it’s easy and makes your wealthiest donors more money? Cool, because no one’s talking about the July report from the Toronto Region Board of Trade that found the city’s traffic has reached “crisis levels”. We’re just talking about Big Ass Tunnel™. And, soon, we’ll be talking about whatever crackpot scheme he comes up with next, like plans for hovercars and lake-spanning gondolas and the building of Toronto II somewhere between Wawa and Timmins on the Highway 101.

LET CHAOS REIGN! LET THERE BE NO MORE RATIONAL DECISION-MAKING IN THIS PROVINCE! LET US ALL LABOUR UNDERGROUND IN FORD’S INNOVATIVE GRAND TUNNEL! FOR THE PEOPLE!!!

It's Doug, hi, he’s the problem, it's him

Put simply, this tactic is working for Ford.

A poll conducted by Angus Reid that was released yesterday show Ford’s Tories ahead with 40% support, the New Democrats and Liberals basically tied, and the Greens back at 7%. An election held today would see the NDP and Liberals swap a couple of seats, leaving the PCs with a legislative supermajority.

There has not been a single poll since the last election where the PCs have not led the opposition. The absolute closest an opposition party has come to being in the lead was in early December of 2023 when the NDP was just 2 points behind the Tories. But the average lead for the Progressive Conservatives has been 11.7% since the first post-election poll came out just three weeks after the June 2022 election.

So why are the Ford Tories riding so high in the polls? Are their weird pronouncements resonating with a silent majority of Ontarians? Are people thirsty for some excitement in their lives and need the unpredictable schedule of bizarre policy proposals to make them feel alive again? Is it that Ontarians can’t go a day without a daily press conference held from a ditch filled with construction workers!?

Or is it that we just aren’t hearing about other parties and party leaders?

I sifted through the NexisUni and ProQuest archives of five major provincial papers - the Hamilton Spectator, Toronto Star, Toronto Sun, Globe and Mail, and National Post - for all articles that mentioned any of the four major party leaders from January 1 to October 1 of this year.

In total, there were 3,249 articles (including letters, op-eds, and features) that mentioned Doug Ford, Marit Stiles, Bonnie Crombie, and Mike Schreiner. Of those articles, 96% referenced Doug Ford. Each article might mention multiple leaders, so 13.7% mentioned Crombie, 12.3% mentioned Stiles, and 5.5% mentioned Schreiner. But the papers in this province can’t stop talking about Doug. There were just 132 articles about the party leaders that didn’t mention Ford once.

In terms of raw numbers, it was actually the Spec that referenced the party leaders the most, with 1,381 articles making some note of them since January 1, 2024. Some of those are reprints from Star articles, but many are unique instances (like my June opinion piece about Ford’s fiddling with the alcohol market he said, shamelessly). The Post and Globe have the fewest mentions of the party leaders (288 and 266 respectively), but that is because they’re national papers and can’t spend all their time focusing on Ontarian issues like some newsletter writer.

Ford is mentioned in between 93.5% and 97.75% of articles that discuss the party leaders. Crombie’s best showing is actually in the Sun, where she’s mentioned in 18.6% of the articles (but I doubt they’re all overwhelmingly positive). Stiles and Schreiner do best in the Star at 17.25% and 9.6% respectively. But Ford is the far-and-away winner of the media war.

Even locally, our own MPPs are eclipsed by the shadow of Ford. Only Sarah Jama gets traction, having been referenced 50 times in the Spec since January 1 (likely because of the controversy attached to Jama). Hamilton West-Ancaster-Dundas MPP Sandy Shaw has 13 mentions, Minister Neil Lumsden has 11, Flam-Glan’s Donna Skelly has 10, and Hamilton Mountain’s Monique Taylor has 7.

In the same paper, Doug Ford has 1,331 mentions. The Shaw-to-Ford ratio is more than 100 to 1. The Jama-to-Ford ratio is more than 26 to 1.

Part of this is the “Americanization” of our politics. In the Canadian parliamentary tradition (as reflected in Ontario), your local MPP should be the most important figure to you. You aren’t voting for the Premier directly like they’re a governor; you’re electing a local representative who should be able to reflect the political wishes of your constituency. But MPPs are now loyal acolytes of whomever the leader is, and the fixation on the position of the leader means that campaigns don’t revolve around thousands of candidates presenting their perspectives on how to make communities better - they revolve around four people, selected by party activists, and the personalities they bring to the table.

That’s why the NDP’s whole campaign going into the next election is about their leader. This is a party that, in 1975, ran on the slogan “Tomorrow starts today” and advanced a bold campaign around rent control and rights for tenants. Today, the party’s slogan is “It’s Marit”.

I don’t think that’s the best strategy, but it’s also the one people most expect right now. The media is hyperfixated on leaders, turning everything into a mini version of the US Presidential race. So maybe that’s what we have to do going forward.

If I were a major party leader, I would focus on recruiting qualified candidates with standing in their communities who can put in the hard work of getting their names out there before the election. Volunteers, community advocates, people who have started movements or charitable organizations or groups that benefit their communities. I’d task party officials with finding campaign staffers with experience, but also folks who are willing to try new things. The caucus would be reoriented toward proving we’re a government-in-waiting by advancing our own policies and forcing the current government to respond. And, most importantly, we’d ignore every dead cat lobbed our way.

Doug wants a tunnel? “Well thanks for the question. This shows that we all agree we need to address congestion in this province. That’s why we have a costed and expert-backed plan to expand the GO network, provide people with affordable and reliable transit, and get more cars off the road to get you where you’re going faster. Between investing in public transit and bringing the Highway 407 back under the control of the people of Ontario, we can fix this crisis and make life better for all Ontarians.”

See? Not hard. It just requires a different approach.

And we need a new approach. Soon.

We are facing a teacher shortage that, by 2027, will become dire.

We have ER wait times of up to 22 hours.

We have a housing crisis that is getting worse and worse by the day to the point where it is now being called “absurd”.

As OPSEU President JP Hornick said when Ford announced plans to turn Niagara Falls into the “Las Vegas of the North”, “This guy will do anything except give people affordable housing, accessible health care, and cheaper groceries.”

Don’t get distracted by Doug’s dead cats. Just focus on the future and how we can finally change the conversation in this province.

All the news

Briefly before we go this week.

A short while ago, the owners of Bardo announced they would be closing their James Street North location. After rebranding from Bread Bar earlier this year, the group behind the iconic restaurant - Pearle Hospitality - announced that their Locke Street location would serve as the chain’s flagship and that a fourth branch would open in Elora sometime next year. The group has a lot of holdings around town, also running the Ancaster Mill and Spencer’s at the Waterfront in Burlington.

So it was a blow to the community when Pearle announced the closure of the James Street North branch so soon after their big rebrand.

There were two stories about this in local media that deserve to be highlighted. We’ll start with the second story first. That one comes from the Spec’s Fallon Hewitt, who is a diligent and thoughtful member of the paper’s staff. The article is a brief explanation that lets the community know about the issue. Hewitt interviews Bryar Hind, the director of marketing for Pearle Hospitality, who said that Pearle opted to close the location by “did not provide further details on the reason for the closure.”3 The article includes quotes from Hind about how the chain wants to grow and succeed in their other locations and a post from the location’s social media that reads, in part: “Thank you for an unforgettable five years…We have cherished every memory, meal and guest who has joined us.”

That’s the second article. The first article comes from Kathy Renwald at The Bay Observer, the online publication with a distinct right-wing perspective.

The article - entitled “Bardō restaurant closing on James St. North another sign of downtown struggles” - takes a more aggressive stance. It begins with a rather confusing sentence, presented here without alteration: “Even though Covid was turning things upside down  the core of Hamilton and James North in particular were on an upswing and enjoying a sort of hipster Renaissance.”

The Bay Observer article includes a similar interview with Hind where many of the same sentiments and lines are repeated, but also interviews a former owner who has not been involved with the business for some time. That person referenced some of the issues they had with homelessness and crime in the core “even before encampments started to grow in the city.”

The short article attributes the closure of the location to “the decline of James Street North” and includes vivid descriptions of graffiti and homelessness in the core. The article’s commenters overwhelmingly blame Andrea Horwath and Cameron Kroetsch for the business’ failure.

The Bay Observer is recommended to me on my Google News feed. Its stories are posted in the r/Hamilton subreddit like they’re news. Under a vellum-thin coating, that conservative newsletter presents itself as an impartial news site. But let’s be clear: The Bay Observer is a homegrown version of Fox News.

My newsletter provides unapologetically progressive commentary. I’ve always been up-front about that. This isn’t so much the “news” as it is “commentary about the news”. I’ll do research, dive into history, and try to get my facts in line, but you know where I stand.

The Bay Observer does not clearly state its political position, instead saying it aims to “provide a fresh perspective on news and opinion of interest to readers in the Hamilton Burlington area as well as the broader GTHA.” But when you post an article about a local business closing and contort it into a post about “downtown’s decline” without providing any other evidence, you’re taking a position.

When you write about the mayor “angrily” chastising Matt Francis during a council meeting, when you distort the results of the Magnolia Hall survey to make it seem like council was purposefully ignoring the will of the people, and when you equate the decision to convert the Lake Avenue parking lot to housing with the decision to add e-bikes to the SoBi fleet and frame both as bad, it really shows what side you’re on.

The Bay Observer is just another right-wing rage outlet in a city inundated by right-wing rage.

Which reminds me: isn’t their favicon interesting? While they have pretty uniform branding across most of their socials, their favicon - the little icon beside the website’s name on a tab - sure seems familiar. Kinda looks like a Canva logo.

Now where, oh where, have I seen a logo like that before?

Cool facts for cool people

• What if you held an election and nobody came? Yes, that’s the plot of José Saramago’s Seeing, but it’s also a challenge for municipalities in Quebec. Across the province, small municipalities are having a difficult time finding anyone willing to actually run for local office. This shouldn’t be surprising, as 74% of municipal politicians surveyed by Union des Municipalités du Québec, one of Quebec’s municipal advocacy organizations, reported experiencing harassment on the job. Things are so bad that 10% of elected officials in the province have quit since their last municipal elections in 2021. So the Government of Quebec has responded by allowing municipalities under 2,000 people to just…cut the size of their councils. The new bill allows municipalities to chose if they want to cut councils down to four members instead of the obligatory six. That’s a solution! Instead of fixing polarization and the tenor of the conversation in municipalities, why don’t we just work toward eliminating government altogether? Brilliant. Great. I don’t see any problems with that at all.

• If you’re still on X/Twitter, go check out Ward 2 councillor Cameron Kroetsch’s Heritage Thursday piece on the Roach House in Central. Hamilton has so many wonderful old estates and homes that have such incredible history and this is a fun and informative way to let the community know about the heritage all around us.

• Lululemon founder and all-around mean person Chip Wilson has a giant sign outside his Vancouver mansion that calls the NDP a “Communist” party. That’s because you don’t need to be smart or thoughtful to make a lot of money.