Will there be parking spaces in hell?

Resting on one’s hardy laurels

Last weekend, a column ran in the Spectator penned by two of Hamilton’s most experienced politicians. The column detailed their perspective on Mayor Horwath’s use of her “strong mayor” powers to break the council deadlock over the 5 and 13 Lake Avenue South parking lot issue in Stoney Creek.

Written by Ward 9’s Brad Clark and and Ward 15’s Ted McMeekin, the column lambastes the mayor for her decision, offering the alternative perspective that “Leadership is not about being in charge, it’s about working with others to care for those in your charge.”1

Leadership is something in which both Clark and McMeekin are well versed, bringing years of work at the municipal and provincial levels to the table. Combined, the pair have 48 years of experience, having contested nearly 20 elections in the area since 1976. In fact, one of the two has been in office without break since 1994, save for a brief five month interlude after McMeekin’s loss to Sandy Shaw in June of 2018 and Clark’s recapturing of Ward 9 from Doug Connely that October (and being sworn in the following month).

Both served as cabinet ministers; McMeekin held four ministerial positions in the cabinets of Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne (including a two-year stint as Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing) while Clark served in the cabinets of Mike Harris and Ernie Eves (including as Minister of Transportation in the cabinet of the former).

Similarly, both Clark and McMeekin have experience across the city. McMeekin’s first political win came in 1976, when he won the Ward 7 alderman’s seat being vacated by longtime CCF/NDP activist Bill Scandlan. Even then, McMeekin had experience. As the Spec noted: “Although excited by his win, Mr. McMeekin is no stranger to politics. He served as executive assistant to Wentworth MLA Ian Deans for 18 months and was his campaign manager in the last provincial election.”2 Two things of note about that first win: 1) Deans was a New Democrat and McMeekin was quite involved with the NDP when he first started out, and 2) the municipal election on December 6, 1976 was also the day McMeekin turned 29.

McMeekin didn’t run again in 1980. There were ward boundary changes and, with the abolition of the Board of Control, long-time Controller Jim Bethune wanted to keep a spot on council, opting to run for one of the Ward 7 alderman seats (he previously represented part of the mountain before being elected to the BoC). But, in 1994, McMeekin became Mayor of Flamborough and, as discussed last week, moved to Queen’s Park in 2000.

Clark was elected to provincial parliament for the riding of Stoney Creek in 1999, but was defeated by CHCH anchor Jennifer Mossop in the Liberal sweep of the province in 2003. After a stint in radio, Clark carried on the Ward 9 tradition of toppling the incumbent and was elected to council.

Just a side note on Ward 9: it was created after amalgamation as one of the 2.5 Stoney Creek wards. In the first election, Stoney Creek’s last mayor, Anne Bain, beat her former Stoney Creek council colleague Paul Miller (yeah, that Paul Miller) as well as former Hamilton Ward 6 alderman Bob Charters to become the ward’s first councillor. Then, in 2003, Bain was defeated by one of the people who worked for the municipality of Stoney Creek from 1978 to 2000 - Phil Bruckler. Then in 2006, Clark beat Bruckler. Then in 2018, Clark beat Doug Connely, who had replaced him in 2014. That means that, for the seven elections that Ward 9 has existed, the incumbent has been defeated three times and the only incumbent to be re-elected has been Brad Clark. Cool, eh?

Back to it: Clark ran for mayor in 2014, capturing a considerable amount of support from suburban voters with his campaign to stop LRT, be a conscious steward of tax dollars, and encourage council to “spread their focus beyond downtown Hamilton.”3 Both Clark and McMeekin have long histories working for the people who reside in the suburban communities around the old city of Hamilton and have both been required to assume important leadership positions, not just locally, but provincially.

That’s the political experience behind last weekend’s piece in the Spec.

As opinion columns go, it had the potential to be a solid and compelling piece of writing. It gets straight to the point, doesn’t bog readers down with details, and has a kind of disarming folksy charm (“Although we appreciate the mayor’s intent as one of genuine concern for our housing crisis, we all know that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”4).

That said, there are a few identifiable issues with the piece that, unfortunately, serve to confuse the debate around 5 and 13 Lake Avenue South and work to further undermine confidence in our local government. The body of the piece is a rapid-fire laundry list of adjacent issues, presented in an attempt to conflate other housing decisions with the 5 and 13 Lake Avenue South one, playing a rather shallow game of “oh yeah, but what about…”, all to muddy the waters and distract from the authors’ vigourous defence of 57 parking spaces.

There’s one line in particular that’s interesting, though not for the reasons they intended. So let’s unpack the column and use one of its main arguments in a creative way.

Thanks to that single line in their piece, I think found a way to possibly get around 660 more housing units built quickly.

Let’s dive in.

A critical analysis

Clark and McMeekin’s column presents the following case:

“The mayor indicated, during the 2022 municipal election, that she would not use strong mayor powers. This is good, because Hamiltonians deserve a small-s super mayor. But now the mayor is being undemocratic. The Stoney Creek BIA and a number of residents opposed the 5 and 13 Lake Avenue South parking lot redevelopment. More residents than opposed the Vrancor development at King and Sanford. And, besides, Matt Francis buckled down and worked to come up with a new proposal. He even worked with the Hamilton Wentworth District School Board and with MPP Neil Lumsden on a “made in Stoney Creek” plan. Other cities are doing interesting things. Waterloo is working with Habitat for Humanity to build 10,000 units, Kitchener has A Better Tent City, and London is housing people in trailers on a golf course. And what about HATS? Let’s put shelters on a parking lot in downtown Hamilton. The mayor lost these votes and now she’s forcing this on the community. In doing so, she’s deepening the divides on council.”

Okay, a lot to unpack there. But let’s break them down one-by-one:

1. Andrea Horwath is using strong mayor powers she originally did not want to use.

2. There is widespread community opposition to the 5 and 13 Lake Avenue South parking lot redevelopment.

3. Why are we ignoring the 3,000 residents who oppose this plan but are respecting the wishes of 35 Ward 3 residents who opposed Vrancor’s King and Sanford plan?

4. Why are we ignoring Francis’s “Made in Stoney Creek” housing plan?

5. What about the “innovative and creative housing options” being pursued in nearby municipalities?

6. Why don’t we put HATS on a parking lot “in Hamilton”?

7. This will make council more fractious and divisive than before.

Some of these can be addressed more philosophically while others are easily challenged as hyperbolic, political spin intended to confuse and obfuscate.

1 - Andrea Horwath is using strong mayor powers she originally did not want to use.

The introduction of strong mayor powers was…weird. Doug Ford had said he would implement something like strong mayor powers all the way back in 2016, when he expressed admiration for the powers of mayors in America in Ford Nation, his strange autobiography/manifesto. But, like much of his policy, it wasn’t something he campaigned on directly, opting instead to just spring it on the people and deal with the fallout later.

The issue came up in the mayoral campaign. Among the three frontrunners, Horwath was the least supportive of strong mayor powers. Bratina was all in and Loomis was cautious and skeptical, but Horwath called the idea “pretty dangerous, frankly.”5 In the lead-up to the July 1, 2023 extension of strong mayor powers to Hamilton, Horwath again expressed general opposition, saying she preferred to be a collaborator, saying that the job is about “trying to find common ground to move forward. It’s about engagement.”6

But then Lake Avenue happened. Twice, the chamber was tied. 8 for redevelopment, 8 for parking. Some suburban councillors and most right-wing councillors dug their heels in and refused to budge. So the mayor used the powers granted her by the province. In her own column about the issue in the Spec, Horwath wrote:

Remember that, when the first vote happened, Hamilton became the laughing stock of Canada. The CBC article about Hamilton’s councillors prioritizing 57 parking spaces over affordable housing shot to the top of the CBC’s “most read” articles list because people across the country were baffled. We’re in a housing crisis. More and more people are struggling to find affordable housing and far too many are slipping into homelessness because of the crisis in the market. The decision by those 8 councillors was embarrassing. But the failure of those motions was not because a majority of councillors voted against it. It was because it tied. That’s failure by technicality, not a reflection of the democratic will of the people. So Mayor Horwath used the tools afforded her to get council out of the logjam and find a solution.

She may not have wanted to use her “strong mayor” powers, but when, as my friend Kojo Damptey wrote in the Spec, “councillors see themselves as mayors of their wards,” it became necessary for the mayor to use those powers to prevent further stalling and division.8

2 - There is widespread community opposition to the 5 and 13 Lake Avenue South parking lot redevelopment.

I have written about this before and will write about this again and again and again: it genuinely does not matter what project is proposed, someone will always speak out against it. Two weeks ago, amidst the uproar over Doug Ford’s rejection of “three storey towers”, I wrote that new developments across Hamilton will face opposition no matter what is proposed. A new single detached home, a senior’s apartment, a subdivision, a condo, a half-dozen townhomes…it genuinely does not matter. People will oppose anything new because change is scary.

There’s a philosophical debate about the role of elected leaders. On one side, some argue that a leader must simply represent the will of the people who elect them, acting as a kind of voice of the masses. On the other, there are those who argue that an elected leader must also lead, sometimes taking policy positions that are uncomfortable and possibly unpopular, but prove to be right in the long run. The best kinds of politicians blend those two concepts, listening to people and adjusting their stances when needed, while also making hard decisions when the time comes.

Just because there’s community opposition to the conversion of 57 parking spaces into affordable housing does not mean the community is right. The arguments in favour of the parking spaces are couched in reactionary fears about a loss of storage for their cars. Most of the lot will remain. Most of the medical businesses around Lake Avenue have their own lots and are on major bus routes. Most of “Veteran’s Lane” will remain.

We cannot simply respond to every cry of “won’t somebody think of the children!?” with an immediate, knee-jerk change to policy. Being a leader means educating people on why a program is good and why the loss of 57 parking spaces doesn’t mean much in the long run. In writing this, Clark and McMeekin have indicated they are giving up their responsibility to engage with the public and, instead, are content to echo the sentiments of a small minority in the Stoney Creek community.

3 - Why are we ignoring the 3,000 residents who oppose this plan but are respecting the wishes of 35 Ward 3 residents who opposed Vrancor’s King and Sanford plan?

This is, simply, not true. Frankly, raising this point was cheap and diminishes the overall quality of the piece.

In the op-ed, Clark and McMeekin write:

I think I’m most angry at these two lines because they deliberately mislead the public into thinking that Nrinder Nann and 35 Gibson neighbours brought down a project that would have provided 231 affordable units. This is a cheap shot aimed at a councillor who is an easy target for the populist right for obvious reasons.

Councillor Nann did not veto Darko Vranich’s proposed vanity project at King and Sanford; Darko Vranich pulled his own project because he did not like that city staff asked him to amend the design. Vrancor was only willing to move forward with the project if the city let them flout the rules and build something that, ultimately, would have made Darko Vranich even wealthier. Indeed, Nann sent a letter to the Committee of Adjustment reflecting the fact that neighbours wanted density on the site, but did not like the plan as it was presented because it “reads as a maximization of inside, profitable space, and a lack of amenity space for tenants, public realm, shaded by trees, containing green space that could contribute positively to the local area.”10 Rather than put the work in needed to have the proposal fit better on the site, Vranich packed up his toys and went home.

The debate over Vrancor’s King and Sanford project is entirely different. In no way was it the case that 35 downtown residents stopped one project because they didn’t like it. Saying so is, at best, playing a political game of false equivalency and, at worst, deliberate misinformation.

4 - Why are we ignoring Francis’s “Made in Stoney Creek” housing plan?

Are we? Because it does not have to be one or the other. We can replace 57 parking spaces with housing AND investigate Francis’s plans for the Lake Avenue Elementary/Dominic Agostino Riverdale Community Centre redevelopment.

Here’s the issue with that: the plan dates back to before the 2018 municipal election. It is a whole term of council + 2.5 years old. It was initially proposed by Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board (HWDSB) trustee Todd White before he lost to Carole Paikin Miller (yeah, that Carole Paikin Miller). Only when the Lake Avenue South issue came up did Francis raise the prospect of the Riverdale Community Centre renovation factoring into the city’s housing plans. Since then, the HWDSB has voted in favour of pursuing discussions about the site.

But that’s the thing. It’s still just in the discussion phase. It will require the HWDSB, city, and province to sit down and hammer out a deal, which could take years. Hell, the new affordable units on Lake Avenue South could be done and occupied before all three parties are even ready to think about signing a deal for a new Riverdale hub.

Clark and McMeekin call the Riverdale plan “a potential win-win compromise”.11 Right now, it is being used as a political obfuscation tactic. By all means, pursue housing on the Riverdale site (which, again, might be called a “Made in Stoney Creek” plan, but is clearly in “old” Hamilton), but don’t do so at the expense of getting more units built on an existing site that will be far easier to convert than a jumble of buildings owned by the city, HWDSB, and, if we extend our gaze further, the Catholic board as well.

It does not need to be one or the other. It should be both. But don’t let one be an excuse for not doing the other.

5 - What about the “innovative and creative housing options” being pursued in nearby municipalities?

What about them? Seriously, what’s the point here?

Clark and McMeekin bring up three “innovative and creative housing options” nearby: a Waterloo partnership with Habitat for Humanity, a Kitchener-based tiny shelter project, and a London project to house people in construction trailers at a golf course.

So about that Waterloo Region project: it is called “BUILD NOW” and it aims to build 10,000 “attainable” units. Not “affordable”, but “attainable”. The idea is that the homes will be placed on the market, for purchase, for roughly half the normal price of a home in their area. Based on current estimates, that means the 10,000 homes will sell for around $400,000. It is a step in the right direction, but even those supporting the project say it is simply one part of a larger strategy, with Cambridge regional councillor Pam Wolf saying “This is a great initiative to take, but we can't let it close our eyes to the bigger picture.”12 The idea is that BUILD NOW will focus on attainable homes for the middle class while the region still focuses on building the kind of affordable housing that we will be on the Lake Avenue South sites.

One more caveat with the BUILD NOW program: they don’t have any land. It is literally just a goal to build homes. They’re working on getting the land on which to build those homes, but they do not have any at the moment. Indeed, the last news update from the initiative was a Laurier University press release about how some alum are helping the project from September of last year. So, if work is still being done on this project, it is happening behind-the-scenes and is not ready for the public.

This does not mean it is not an admirable goal. We should have a similar goal of providing a wide variety of housing types for all different kinds of people within the same communities. But BUILD NOW is not some magical replacement for the very real units that could be built on the already identified, almost-ready-to-go, city-owned land on Lake Avenue South that is (say it with me) just being used for the temporary storage of cars.

As for the other projects, they’re temporary stopgaps intended to transition people from homelessness to housing. A Better Tent City is 50 units that is on city and school board-owned land in Kitchener, but only has an agreement to exist there for another year. And the London example is a temporary, winter-only shelter for 30 people that’s an hour walk from any services in the middle of the Fanshawe Golf Course that opened in 2021 and has no further information online past 2022. I couldn’t even find any indication that project operated this past winter.

These are not “innovative and creative housing options” that we can pursue instead of the Lake Avenue South redevelopment. One is a goal and two are temporary shelters. Once again, these are other examples that are being raised to muddy the waters and confuse people, rather than address why parking is more important than housing.

6 - Why don’t we put HATS on a parking lot “in Hamilton”?

Let’s face it: HATS is likely dead in Hamilton. I hope to be proven wrong but, after the Anti-HATS North End crusade, it is unlikely the organization will find a suitable location for their project.

Even if they could, HATS was always intended to be a temporary measure while we sorted out the housing crisis. By voting against the parking lot conversion, both Clark and McMeekin have signaled that their interest in solving the crisis is conditional. To vote down an affordable housing initiative and then turn around to say “let’s work on HATS” is damn near shameful.

But let’s return to the parking lot issue in a second.

7 - This will make council more fractious and divisive than before.

Council is divided. There’s no denying that any more. There might be a couple of swing votes here and there, but we’re facing two and a half more years of a pretty even split on council. Council’s right-wing has dug in, content to swat at council’s progressives at every turn. Time and time again, council’s progressives come to the table with meaningful alternatives and compromises while council’s right-wing stops and hollers and refuses to budge, insistent that the only acceptable way forward is their way.

The mayor’s decision to use her strong mayor powers won’t divide council. Council is already divided. I would have hoped that two of council’s most experienced political leaders would be working to find compromise and trying to collaboratively solve the problems we face. Instead, they’ve penned an article that tries to deflect blame, saddle the mayor with council’s failures, and distract the public with unrealistic alternatives.

Sure, we may not have political parties operating out in the open at the municipal level. It might even be the case that both Clark and McMeekin are sufficiently removed from their partisan days as to not be “whipped” by the party anymore. But that doesn’t mean they’ve stopped acting like partisans. This op-ed is a little piece of Queen’s Park tomfoolery brought down to 71 Main West.

So let’s build housing

Here’s the line I wanted to really dig into: “Perhaps there is a city-owned parking lot in Hamilton that can be used for [the HATS] transitional housing initiative.”13

I’ll do you one better.

How about we take just 20 municipal parking lots across Hamilton, Ancaster, and Dundas and convert them to housing right now?

Sure, we could hand over one of the lots to HATS, which would require finding suitable sanitation facilities, working with communities to discuss the responsibilities and expectations of everyone involved, ensuring the site is suitable for HATS’s needs, etc.

Or we can rip up 20 of the city’s surface parking lots and build permanent, sustainable, long-term housing.

I took a look at the city’s available dataset of municipal parking lots. The city lists 57 lots of varying shapes and sizes from Cope in the east to King and Hatt in Dundas. Some are pretty large, like the lot on Vine and MacNab, are fairly large (about 3,750 m2). Some are a little more modest, like the lot off Upper James and Brantdale that’s just under 1,000 m2.

So what could we do with them?

Well, the city’s memo on what could be done with the other lots discussed at the same time as 5 and 13 Lake Avenue South gives us an idea. The original plan was to address six properties: the Lake Avenue South lot, two parking lots at 171 Main East and 70 Hope Avenue, and two vacant lots on “Clarence Street” (presently an alley off Queen North) and on Garth Street near the Linc.

The lot at 171 Main East was stripped out to be reexamined, but the plan was to sell it for market-rate housing. The rest would be rezoned and, in partnership with non-profit housing providers, new affordable units would be built. The memo had all the details about lot size, building footprints, estimated number of units, and loads of important information.

I took all the specifications for the proposed new buildings and averaged them out. They mostly called for three-storey buildings with between 24 and 54 units that were either studio apartments or 1-bedrooms with an average of about 17 parking spaces per new building.

Here’s where some fun planning math comes in. The lots would be rezoned “DE-2” which, in our zoning bylaw, means “Multiple Dwellings”. I took all the zoning requirements, ran a few equations on them, and figured that, even if the most restrictive interpretation of the bylaws is applied and even if we copy and paste the average specifications for the four identified lots the city wanted to convert to housing, we could squeeze about 661 new units out of those lots. And still have almost 300 parking spaces for new tenants.

Take the lots along Ottawa Street North.

By my mathematically conservative estimates, applying the same rules to these four lots as we did to others and sticking to the zoning bylaw, we could easily get 131 units from these lots. If half of those units are occupied by two people and the other half by three, we can provide housing for over 325 people.

Apply that same logic to every unit on those 20 redeveloped surface parking lots and we have housing for 1,650 people. With thousands of households on the CityHousing waitlist, that could go a long way to providing real housing to people in need.

But Clark and McMeekin’s op-ed spends more energy gesturing broadly at vague policies from neighbouring municipalities and pointing fingers at imaginary NIMBYs in Ward 3 than it does trying to come up with real solutions.

Finding solutions to the housing crisis should not be hard. Sure, I have a Masters in Urban Planning, but Clark and McMeekin have access to the immense resources of the City of Hamilton’s planning department, who could easily draw up plans for them if so directed. They could have led the charge to convert downtown lots to housing. Instead, they have become focused on the mayor’s use of her powers and a distracting, 1/8th finished plan from Matt Francis, the leader of city hall’s opposition.

Speculating that a downtown lot will become a site for HATS as though that’s some kind of threat is offensive. So why dedicate energy to that when they could, instead, focus on coming up with permanent solutions to this crisis?

The city we want

I strongly disagree with the op-ed published by Clark and McMeekin last week. More than that, though, I find myself disagreeing with their vision for the city.

The op-ed they’ve penned represents a kind of politics that’s entirely inappropriate in this present moment. It is a politics of placating the loudest, most privileged voices in an attempt to maintain a careful status quo - a status quo that isn’t working for the vast majority of Hamiltonians. It is a status quo where the market provides what we need and all city hall must do is facilitate the growth and expansion of business. If we build wide roads, keep taxes low, and placate homeowners, then our economy will keep trucking along and everyone will be better off for it.

This is outdated logic - precisely the logic that brought us to this point. We’re a city where encampments are growing, young people are fleeing unaffordability, and those with means are doing everything they can to forestall progress. We’re a city that has endured a multi-decade struggle to build just one rapid transit line, where every discussion about making our streets safer is stalled by proponents of our “competitive advantage”, and where Vision Zero is more a suggestion than a goal. We’re a city where the comfort of those motorists who want access to 57 more parking spaces behind a half-vacant clinic in an otherwise walkable downtown core of an incredible community is prioritized over building housing for our neighbours.

Clark and McMeekin’s op-ed might have been framed as a critique of the mayor for her use of the strong mayor powers granted her by the provincial government. But it was, in reality, an homage to doing politics in a way that no longer works.

“We all know that the road to hell is paved with good intentions,” they wrote in their Spec article. But, much like that phrase, their intentions come across as dated, distractingly conservative, and, increasingly out-of-touch.

The road to hell may be paved with good intentions but, thanks to Clark and McMeekin, at least we know there will be 57 parking spaces waiting for us there when we arrive.

Public, private, preposterous

On April 17, Hamilton’s General Issues Committee will meet to discuss, among other things, the operation of our B-Line LRT.

In anticipation of this, the Keep Transit Public Coalition this week released the results of a survey they commissioned from Mainstreet Research, which polled Hamiltonians on who they think should run the system. Across the board, Hamiltonians prefer the LRT be run by the HSR, with 67% of respondents preferring the public option over just 7.7% preferring a private operator.

Ward-by-ward, the poll breakdown shows overwhelming support for an HSR-run LRT. Support for a private operator was lowest in Wards 11 (0% - small sample size there), Ward 3 (1.2%) and Ward 1 (2%). The only ward where a majority or plurality didn’t support a publicly-run LRT was Ward 15, where 48% of respondents said they “didn’t know” who should run it (again, small sample size).

The heavy majority in favour of a public LRT in wards with moderate/swing vote councillors on this issue indicates they might have a difficult time selling their support for a private operator to their constituents.

Then again, they should think twice before even considering a private operator or public/private partnership (P3). Research from the University of Toronto on P3 projects in Ontario indicates a mixed bag when it comes to end results. Michael Himmel and Matti Siemiatycki examined 50 P3 projects across the province from new public buildings, highways, and transit lines, and found that, while the private sector can provide some advantages in terms of innovation and design, there are notable drawbacks that make the long-term operation of these projects challenging.

The authors note in their concluding remarks:

We’ve seen P3s fail to meet expectations across Ontario. Take Ottawa’s problem-plagued LRT, for example. The consortium hired to build the LRT - the Rideau Transit Group (RTG) which included, among others, SNC-Lavalin and Ellis Don - failed so miserably that a public inquiry was established to figure out what went wrong. The final report from the Ottawa Light Rail Transit Public Inquiry found that the RTG repeatedly provided the city and residents with “unrealistic” timelines, did not coordinate with subcontractors, selected the wrong trains for the system, and did not provide “adequate maintenance” for the line.

This was coupled with an “adversarial” relationship with the city, which was under pressure to finally provide the transit project they had been promising for years. Ultimately, as noted in the CBC coverage of the commission’s findings, Justice William Hourigan of the Ontario Superior Court, who led the commission, noted that “all levels of government [should] examine whether a public-private-partnership (P3) contract model, used here for the first time ever in a transit project in Ontario, is appropriate.”15

In the case of Hamilton, the debate is whether to allow a private company to run the LRT, rather than have it run by the HSR.

Any move to privatize transit is wrong. Public transit is a public good that should not be operated for profit by a company or consortium of companies who will attempt to squeeze as much profit from the system as possible. If the LRT system is placed in the hands of a for-profit corporation, we will no longer have the ability to effectively maintain public oversight or make the changes necessary to suit the needs of the people of this city.

Remember that, for much of Hamilton’s early history, our transit was run privately. The radial railway to Brantford, the electric railway to Dundas, the escarpment incline railways, and the HSR were all private enterprises. When it was no longer profitable for those companies to maintain operations, they simply closed up shop, leaving commuters stranded. Only because of how integrated it was into the city was the HSR saved by bringing it into public ownership.

Hell, all we need to do is look at the fiasco around Hamilton’s SoBi system in 2020 to understand the dangers of privatization. After Uber gobbled up a series of smaller cycling startups, it signed a contract with the city in February of 2020 to operate the system. Just three months later, they decided they didn’t want to follow through and walked away, leaving SoBi users stranded. Only through community-based grants and a local activism campaign did we manage to get the system back up and running. Now, SoBi is thriving because it is locally-based and run by a not-for-profit, rather than a corporate leviathan that is only concerned with profit.

I strongly urge any councillor considering privatization to ask if they’d be okay with handing LRT over to an operator given the risks, potential for disruption, major problems facing other systems, and overwhelming community opposition to privatization.

I believe in our LRT project. Not just the “transformative potential” of it, but the fact that it has the real possibility to get people out of their cars in a meaningful way. It can revolutionize transportation in this city. We’re long, long, long overdue for real rapid transit, which is why we need to start work on this LRT project yesterday. So understand me when I say that I do not mean this lightly: if council moves forward with a private LRT operator, I would be hard pressed to care if the project was cancelled again. Better not have it at all than to have it done poorly and entirely for profit.

#WeNeedPublicLRT

Hittin’ the boards

The newest member of the Hamilton Police Services Board is the real McCoy.

What an odd saying.

Apparently, no one knows the origins of the phrase “the real McCoy”. Some believe it has to do with pioneering Black Canadian-American engineer Elijah McCoy, who marketed his best-selling invention as a “real McCoy” steam engine lubricator. Others believe it is a version of a Scots phrase to do with whiskey. Apparently Robert Louis Stevenson included “the real Mackay” in his writing. Or it could be attributed to rum-runner Bill McCoy, who was famous for the purity of the illegal alcohol he would smuggle into the States from the Caribbean. There are dozens of possible origins for the phrase, none of which have been identified as the real source for the phrase

Regardless, the Dundas hockey team is called the “Real McCoys” and they’re owned by local realtor and deeply-involved Liberal, Don Robertson. Keen newsletter readers will remember Robertson as the man who came within 85 votes of beating Le Bloc Deamalgamation candidate Dave Braden in Ward 14 in the city’s 2000 municipal election.

And, as of April 1, Robertson is the newest member of the Hamilton Police Services Board (PSB). Robertson takes over from Pat Mandy, who did not have her term renewed by the province.

At this point, I’m reserving commentary until I see how Robertson fits into the board. He has behind-the-scenes political experience as a former vice-president of the Ontario Liberal Party and he has campaign experience from his Ward 14 run in 2000, but I don’t know how he’ll do in this role yet.

All I can say is that, with his appointment, there’s the possibility that the board might see some substantive change. There’s also the possibility that the PSB’s PC Block might get some crossbench support. How this goes is anyone’s guess!

iElect, youElect, weElect, theyElect

I love studying the history of this city. There’s a richness in our shared past that is too often ignored, perhaps because a working city of 600,000 isn’t considered the most appealing of cases for those who do not have a personal or professional interest in this place.

But one of the things that I really, truly love about studying our shared history is the optimism in it all. There’s a sense of unbounded hope and deep, palpable excitement about the future of our city when I look back through old newspaper archives and council minutes and photos from the 1910’s, the 1930’s, the 1960’s. Our civic leaders and business owners and labour officials all talked about this city like it mattered. Like there was only one way to go and that way was up and that anything was possible if we reached out and grabbed for it because every moment was and always will be our moment.

When I’m feeling down, I like to wrap myself up in those newspaper clippings and old photos and try to recapture some of that hope. I’m not one of those guys who would ever say anything like “I was born in the wrong era” because obviously, but I try to draw some inspiration for how bright eyed some of those figures from history seemed.

And then I come back to the real world and see how bafflingly pathetic the state of our civic discourse is in the present moment. The ambition of the past has long faded away, replaced with the shadowy pall of selfishness and short-term thinking from unambitious little fish who think they’re sturgeons in this pond we share. Those with a spark of optimism have to fight, every day, for millimeters of gain while a cadre of self-interested and self-important cynics throw spitballs from the sidelines.

Last Sunday, former councillor Scott Duvall was the one loading up spitball after spitball on what remains of Twitter/X. Duvall was cosplaying as the worst first-year journalism student/best Toronto Sun reporter and thought he had his big gotcha moment when he tweeted this at local activist and friend-of-the-newsletter Graham Crawford.

I feel compelled to remind everyone that Scott Duvall was a Member of Parliament for six years. A Member of Parliament. A job I’ve literally dreamt of having (he said, surprising no one). I know folks don’t have the best view of politicians these days, but that’s an office that should carry with it even just an iota of dignity. We don’t get to have the high-minded world of Borgen or The West Wing, but like…have some self-respect and decency, man. Not even funny enough for Veep, hot damn.

And “Stop the Spin?” Someone’s been taking notes from Poilievre.

But that’s not really the point here. The point is that Duvall, like all too many of those who remain in the #HamOnt Tweetosphere, are haunted by the spectre of iElect like it is the vengeful ghost of Sir Allan Napier MacNab, ready to take revenge for us not treating his railways and great-great-granddaughter, Queen Camilla, with respect.

For those not in the know, iElect was a volunteer-led group of local activists who sought to change the conversation about our civic priorities before the 2022 municipal election. It was not a “slate-making” body and, instead, polled Hamiltonians on what they wanted to see changed in the city, which they followed by asking candidates where they stood on those issues. After collecting over 2000 survey responses from residents, the group sent questionnaires to mayoral and council candidates asking where they stood on the issues. They received responses from a wide cross-section of candidates, from the decidedly right-wing John Vail, Kevin Geenen, and Peter Lanza, middle-of-the-road candidates like Mark Tadeson and Laura Farr, and progressive candidates like Kojo Damptey, Eric Tuck, and Chris Slye. Each of the priorities iElect discussed dealt with an issue of local importance and, while they took stances on certain issues (and appreciated the Loomis campaign from afar), endorsing or funding candidates was not in their mandate. They worked to improve awareness and turnout and have been mainly dormant in the time since the election, no matter what Duvall says.

To those on the right-wing of #HamOnt’s tweetosphere, though, iElect was nothing less than a UN-backed plot to force evil globalist social(ist) development goals on the helpless, God-fearing patriots and taxpayers of Hamilton. Literally.

Well, at least that’s what this PPC sock puppet account thinks:

Oh no! This free thinking hero just figured it out! Someone call Soros, the plan has been revealed! And we were just starting our plans to usurp the 2026 election so we could microchip everyone to make them okay with our one-world currency backed by the Chinese Communist Party because António Guterres is absolutely fixated on our city that he totally knows about and thinks would be the perfect test case for all his evil rootless cosmopolitan ideas. Damn! /s

The “thanks” at the end is fun. Like putting a maraschino cherry on top of bowl of guano.

I have complained - and will continue to complain - about the low-quality of our civic discourse on social media since Twitter/X’s purchase by You Know Who. But #HamOnt’s Hard Right Wing Tweetosphere™ has always been like this, riddled with over-the-top hate-filled sock puppet accounts (fyi: a “sock puppet” account is “a false online identity used for deceptive purposes”).

We all know the characters. Fake profile photos of dogs or medieval knights or stock photo models, profiles that say things like “free thinker” or “classical liberal” or “just asking questions”, incessant replies to Joey Coleman or Laura Babcock or The Spec’s tweets, conspiratorial posts and hate-filled responses to their mortal enemies whom they call “Horvath” or “Crotsh” or “Willson”.

I can count on one hand the number of them who have the courage to put their own name to the bile they spew like the cretinous Dilophosauri they are.

The hour I spent going down the wormhole on some of these accounts last weekend is an hour of my life I’m never getting back. These are accounts that do little more than reply to the tweets of people actively engaged in the community and re-tweet memes or posts from either the Conservative Party or the People’s Party. The very, very small group of people behind these anonymous accounts remain hidden, like cowards, from public view, sniping from the sidelines like a baker’s dozen of smarmy little gnats. They are not contributing anything of value to this city, they are not adding anything of substance to the discourse, and they are not worth even one second of anyone’s time (further frustrating me that I spent as long as I did looking at their accounts).

I can mostly ignore them. Most people in positions of power can ignore them. But some people - slightly hapless former politicians and baldly ambitious soon-to-be-politicians who would never miss an opportunity to fight on the front lines in the culture war, for example - sometimes engage with the conspiracy theories, lending their adherents a morsel of legitimacy.

That tweet, by the way, was responding to an accusation that no one in the city has spoken up against anti-Semitism which, itself, was a reply to a tweet in which the above poster re-tweeted an article from a far-right Toronto Sun columnist. May as well break out the chips and pita and crudités because that is a multilayer dip right there.

Here’s the issue: I’m hungry. No, wait, hang on.

Here’s the issue: conspiracies around iElect secretly running this city are our own homespun hyperlocal version of QAnon. They’ve taken the bare bones basics of something, applied a healthy heap of conspiracy to it, and have allowed it to turn into something much bigger, and much more sinister, than it really is in their heads. A group of concerned citizens trying to advocate for change has been transformed into a shadowy cabal of communists who have somewhat illegitimately forced progressives onto council who do their bidding in an attempt to take rights and money and property and freedom away from regular, everyday, hardworking people who just want to go to work and raise their kids and not accept domination by Marxists and Satanists and icky girls.

The core group of people advancing this conspiracy are fringe, extreme right anonymous posters on social media. It is easy to say they don’t matter. A problem arises, though, when terminally online mainstream political figures pay lip service to these conspiracies in an effort to signal their position on certain issues. It is straight out of the Donald Trump playbook.

Victoria Mancinelli says the “new guard council” is run by iElect because that’s her way of virtually winking at the populist right, telling them she’s in the know about the sinister plot they’ve uncovered, and will be a champion for them if elected. Scott Duvall badgers Graham Crawford about his participation in iElect because…well, in this case, I think Duvall might have actually fallen into a bit of a right-wing populist wormhole from which he needs to be extricated, but he’s still someone who once carried political weight in this town. Someone call the Hamilton Mountain NDP in for an intervention, stat!

Because the conspiracies around iElect are so hyperlocal at this point, and because the far-right fringe on #HamOnt X/Twitter is a combination of decentralized, overinflated, and ineffectual, it can be hard to see how this matters. Sure, the hate these accounts spew hurts because we’re human and it sucks to have people wish ill on you because of what you believe, but, beyond feelings, it might be tough to see why this is even worth writing about.

But let’s return to QAnon. For those who haven’t spent time looking into this world (one of my academic areas of focus is right-wing populism and online spaces…lucky me), QAnon started with a single post on a 4chan board on October 28, 2017. Claiming to come from someone high up in the US government with “Q” clearance (the highest level of clearance someone in the US government can have), the post informed readers that an arrest for Hillary Clinton was imminent and that right-wingers should prepare for mass demonstrations and violence.

It was just one more weird, fringe post on a weird, fringe website until it reached a small far-right YouTuber, who shared the posts with her audience. From there, as the ADL backgrounder on QAnon reads:

As the movement spread on social media, Trump himself clicked in that it was a rallying cry for people who supported him. Though he likely barely understood the convoluted web of a conspiracy theory it had become, he still paid lip service to the Q people in an effort to maintain a base of support, no matter how dangerous that base was becoming.

The scales we’re looking at here are a little off. The QAnon theory was spread through a global network of right-wing conspiracy theorists and amplified by the President of the United States. The iElect conspiracy is…not that. But still, the fringe weirdos in #HamOnt’s active far-right X/Twitter space regularly interact with larger far-right figures on the platform. They engage with former anti-trans and anti-“woke” school trustee candidates from Hamilton and beyond who have thousands of followers. They keep poking and prodding larger right-wing extremist accounts to be part of the conversation and see if they can’t inject their own odd ideas into the grog of hate percolating in these spaces.

When people like Victoria Mancinelli and Scott Duvall start feeding into their conspiracy, it increases the likelihood that it “breaks containment” and spreads across the web, becoming a rallying point around which fringe extremists, frustrated about feeling powerless and left out of the economic system and political decision-making, can flock and, if so motivated, cause real damage. Remember that, six years ago, an armed QAnon extremist, blockaded the Hoover Dam, demanding that an internal memo about the way the FBI handled the Hillary Clinton email scandal be released, assuming it was a key piece of the Q puzzle. He was just one of a dozen US-based and international Q extremists who hurt or threatened to hurt people since the theory burst into the mainstream.

Scott Duvall’s sad temper tantrum over the weekend does not signal that the #HamOnt iElect conspiracy is at the same level of QAnon. That said (and I’m cribbing this from Monday’s Garbage Day newsletter) there’s a theory that, as social media platforms decay, things will inherently become more and more conspiratorial as news is broken up into little bits for people to consume in snippets. They’re not seeing the whole picture. They can’t just open up The Spec and read four columns summarizing the last council meeting because we don’t have that any more. And, even if we did, it is entirely possibly they’d just dismiss The Spec as “evil globalist mainstream media”.

The posts those #HamOnt ultraonline weirdos keep reposting and replying to are just pieces of the news. They see iElect in the gaps of what they’re not paying attention to, either because local journalism is being gutted by corporate greed or because they’ve never really fully understood what’s going on anyway and a conspiracy provides them with a smartish-sounding answer to the complicated question: “why is our local government making the decisions it makes?” What one does not understand easily becomes a conspiracy.

Once again pulling from Garbage Day, there’s a tweet from 2022 that reads “climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you're the one filming it”. We might have to look at the iElect conspiracy the same way. We can sit back and watch the QAnon or Kategate or The Eclipse Wasn’t Real conspiracies play out, but how long until we’re the ones staring down bevested people from across Ontario who have descended on City Hall’s forecourt to demand a judicial inquiry into iElect? And with no shortage of political figures in this city who pander to extremist, potentially dangerous, fringe movements, all to serve their own aims or soothe their own bruised egos, are we going to see our own Trumpian figure emerge from the mists to be their messiah?

Then again, we might not have the critical mass necessary to sustain a conspiracy that enters the mainstream. Most of our local conspiracy people more easily glean onto bigger trends and movements (see: the Hamilton-based energetic light workers who ran for the PPC who echoed Mother God-esque spiritualism).

I’m sad to see Scott Duvall tweeting this way. I got my start in politics when many in the city’s progressive and labour-oriented movements held him in moderately high regard. I’ve written in the past about Duvall being a “labour traditionalist” - someone who advocates strongly for the rights of working people but maintains a somewhat socially conservative bent. But this new conspiratorial streak is upsetting.

Trustee time

It has been a while, but there’s been plenty of school trustee news from Hamilton, so let’s all fill up our backpacks, grab our lunchbox, and hop on the big yellow school bus to Trustee Time!

1968 Mulholland Drive

Ray Mulholland might be one of Hamilton’s longest serving municipal politicians. It is hard to tell (Dr. Harry Paikin might have him beat, but not sure yet…need to run some numbers), but the Ward 4 Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board (HWDSB) trustee is certainly among the longest serving politicians in Hamilton.

Mulholland first ran for the office of trustee for Ward 5 in 1968, running as Raymond “Squibb” Mulholland, using a childhood nickname on his campaign literature. In that election, the Spec reported that he was a 35-year-old plumber at Stelco who was taking night classes to earn his Grade 12 diploma. His campaign platform included a school board-led Block Parent program, a yearly report on his actions on the board, and supporting maintaining water fluoridation in that year’s municipal referendum on the matter.17 On election night, Mulholland placed third with nearly half the votes of first-place finisher Dorothy Cooke. In 1970, after ward boundaries were realigned, Cooke moved to Ward 4, but Mulholland tried his hand in Ward 5 again, only to come in last.

When Ward 2 trustee Bobby McDonald resigned in mid-1972, Mulholland was appointed as his replacement. He registered to contest the Ward 2 seat in that fall’s municipal election. But, just three months after taking office, he was defeated again, this time by one of the other applicants for the vacant Ward 2 position he was granted.18

Finally, in 1973, he won election to the board in Ward 5, defeating incumbent trustee Ted Scandlan. He was finally victorious! One problem - Scandlan defeated him again in 1976 by just 120 votes. In 1978, he settled on running in Ward 4 and it finally stuck. Since that point, Mulholland has served as Ward 4’s public trustee without interruption.

On April 8, though, the HWDSB trustees approved a leave-of-absence for Mulholland that will last until the end of July. Until then, HWDSB chair Maria Felix Miller will assume his responsibilities.

Based on the way his age was reported in the Spec during his campaigns (35 in 1968, 45 in 1978), it is safe to say Mulholland is around 90 or 91 years of age. At that point, health issues start to crop up more often and people tend to slow down. While serving on the HWDSB might not be akin to…being President of the United States…it still carries with it quite a few responsibilities.

Hopefully Trustee Mulholland is being mindful of his health and his wellbeing right now. And, hopefully, he’ll take into consideration his age, duties, and legacy over the next 928 days before the 2026 election. His trustee victory might have been hard won, but after 46 years of continuous service, he’s more than made up for a few early career fumbles.

There is no war in the HWDSB

Beyond the issues with Mulholland, it has been hard to understand what’s going on with the HWDSB over the past while. It is hard to untangle the threads that have become all wrapped up with one another, but it is important to try and keep it all straight so we understand exactly what’s going on right now.

When the armed conflict between Israel and Hamas militants began in October, Ward 2 HWDSB trustee Sabreina Dahab posted regularly on X/Twitter, reflecting her stance on the issue.

Okay, pause. I’m sorry for my stilted language here, but I genuinely don’t know how to phrase this effectively so that my point isn’t lost. I’m trying to make a point about the response by the HWDSB to Trustee Dahab’s advocacy, but it is extremely difficult to do so when every word and sentence, if constructed the wrong way, can lead someone to believe you have beliefs, sympathies, affiliations, connections, or stances that you may not. Peace is the only acceptable resolution to this conflict and the global community should be doing everything it can to stop the suffering in Gaza.

At the end of October, HWDSB trustees felt it appropriate to launch an external investigation into Trustee Dahab’s social media activity. On November 14, 2023, Dahab posted about this investigation on X/Twitter. This, one would assume, makes sense; a public official is the subject of an investigation, which may impact their ability to communicate, advocate, or legislate. That public official will want to make a statement about that to maintain a degree of transparency with the people who have elected them to do a job.

But, it turns out simply saying you’re the subject of an investigation can be considered a violation of the HWDSB’s code of conduct. By informing the public about the investigation, Dahab evidently triggered a brand new investigation and was informed by her colleagues on March 25, 2024, that, if she wants to participate in any in-camera portions of the meeting or any committees, she would have to delete the post from November.

Trustee Todd White was the only member to vote against the March 25 ultimatum (Trustee Graeme Noble was not at the meeting). White told the CBC that the code of conduct process:

White has a point here. I’ve written about code of conduct investigations before, usually in the context of right-wing populist trustees saying transphobic or hateful things. Even in these situations, the whole process feels weird.

The use of code of conduct investigations points to the “Human Resources-ification” of school boards. Rather than have honest conversations about the issues, board members jump immediately to formal inquiries and investigations, many of which are handled by outside consultants. These investigations are sterile, clinical, and overly sanitized affairs, resulting in legalese-riddled reports that read like if the Ides of March was about a student union.

In one sense, we can see how these bodies - the last of the Agencies, Boards, and Commissions to be directly elected in Ontario (save for the Police Village of Russell) - may want to appear professional, rigourous, and detailed in their trusteeship of public money. Any conflict should be examined by a neutral party and decisions should be made with the public purse in mind.

In another sense, it isn’t hard to see how this could just be a further example of “bureaucratic creep”. By that, I mean the unelected side of the board works to relegate elected representatives to the role of ineffectual rubber-stampers, either biding their time until a new position comes along or filling a seat to provide an allied politician or political party a helpful tool in their legislative toolbox. Management-level bureaucrats in weak or niche systems begin to assert themselves, subtly encouraging elected members to be “part of the team” and “work for the good of the institution”. Saw it first hand in student union politics, where “teamwork” became a synonym for “sit down, shut up, and don’t rock the boat, you twerp”. In this conceptualization, directors and managers and associate directors and anyone with words like “success”, “achievement”, “improvement”, or “stakeholder” in their titles might strongly suggest pursuing a more formal conflict resolution mechanism that shields the institution from liability and bad press. Institutions with this culture are inherently anti-democratic, tending more toward being semi-public mirrors of corporations that are hard to reform unless there’s a wholesale replacement of upper management.

It would seem like the HWDSB is fighting itself here. The board is sticking to the letter of the law, assuming that, by speaking about the October investigation, Trustee Dahab has broken a policy and must be punished to ensure such violations do not happen again. But Trustee Dahab, by commenting about the October investigation, was working to keep her constituents informed about board actions as they pertained to her, their democratically-elected representative.

And now it has been escalated, with Dahab working with her legal counsel to appeal the board’s decision. What could have been solved with a basic conversation will now take months and a nearly immeasurable amount of resources that could have otherwise been spent advocating for education.

This was a poor decision on the part of the HWDSB, who have made themselves the centre of controversy entirely unnecessarily. But, until these institutions decide what they want to be - little pretend-a-corporate-boards with minimal community input or truly democratic institutions where elected officials can participate freely in debates - this kind of thing will keep happening.

An open letter to trustees expressing disappointment in their decision to further marginalize Dahab is circulating online (you can sign here if you so wish). How the HWDSB trustees respond to this will provide some indication as to what kind of board they want to be.

Cool facts for cool people

• In the January 25 edition of the newsletter, I included a “cool fact” about some municipal drama happening in Sainte-Pétronille, Quebec. Just to catch everyone up: the small town of about 1,000 people on the western tip of the Île d'Orléans in the St. Lawrence River issued formal legal notices to 10% of the municipality’s population and the local newspaper, demanding they stop asking questions about the town’s newly hired general manager, Nathalie Paquet, despite some serious allegations levelled against Paquet when she was an employee of a different Quebec municipality. Well, this week, we’ve learned more about the situation, which has boiled over in a very dramatic way. Turns out the saga began last August when the town council received a request for reimbursement from a volunteer with Sainte-Pétronille’s library. The town council turned down the request because it was for booze the volunteer bought at an after-work event. It was only after that denied request that residents began asking questions about Paquet. After the legal notices were distributed, a petition was circulated that was signed by over half the town asking the council to…you know…not threaten residents. Quebec's Municipal Affairs Department is investigating Paquet, but residents are still raising hell over the way the town is being managed. So, last Tuesday, three of the town’s councillors resigned, leaving the 7 member body with only 4 members. The town’s mayor, Jean Côté, announced the resignations and, after members of the public gallery cheered, became frustrated, telling the chamber: “It's not easy to be a municipal elected official.” The municipal situation in Quebec as a whole has been weird; the provincial government estimates that almost 9% of all elected municipal officials in the province have resigned since 2021. It sounds like the residents and government of Sainte-Pétronille need to sit down, have an honest conversation about their expectations of one another, and find a way to move forward. Otherwise, it could be a whole season of maudit câlice tabarnakkkkk in town halls across Quebec.

• Yesterday, MPs killed a private member’s bill - C-347 - that would have made swearing an oath of allegiance to the British monarch optional before public officials take their office. For the Hamilton-area, only Hamilton Centre MP Matthew Green voted in favour of the bill, while the city’s four other MPs came out as staunch monarchists. Upon the bill’s defeat, some MPs began singing God Save the King, which is both embarrassing and eye-opening. All I can say to that is: Vive la République du Canada! We should strive to ensure that Canada becomes a free and independent Republic in our lifetime. Out with the monarchy and in with government by, for, and of the people!