False spring cleaning

Wait, does that mean the spring is false or the cleaning is false? Think about your headlines before you write them, Chris!

This is the fifth edition of The Incline after my rebrand from The Sewer Socialists. I’ve really appreciated the positive feedback I’ve heard from folks in person, though I was surprised to see a drop off in my email correspondence. And then I remembered that I changed the email address I send the newsletter out from and I haven’t checked that since I created it back in January. D’oh. So I opened it up and found 50-odd unread emails in there. Double d’oh. I’ll work my way through those shortly, so apologies to anyone with pressing concerns or immediate asks that I have seemingly ignored. My email communication has always been a tad spotty, but, as I noted before, I’m working on it.

I’ve also noticed a number of folks still subscribing to my archived Substack. I’ll make sure to keep reminding everyone over there that I’m now over here so folks can stay current with each edition.

Other than that, things have been going swimmingly. The Incline’s Bluesky follower list has been growing (that’s mainly where I do my promos) and I appreciate everyone who is kind enough to send me a cash tip over on kofi.com (again, no obligation whatsoever…your readership is what I really care about).

I will likely keep editions to one main piece for the next while, with some exceptions. There are a few things I’d like to dive into in more detail and I don’t want to burn out by cramming a billion little things into one edition when I can focus on one topic and give that the attention it deserves.

One last thing: I’m hoping to have more information soon, but I’m in talks to do something a little different in addition to the newsletter. It could be a chance for folks to gather, chat, and have a conversation about interesting topics here in Hamilton. I’ll provide more information when we hammer out the details, but I think it could be a really fun opportunity to build community and share in the conversation. Stay tuned!

Carneydemonium

At 11:00 AM on Friday, March 14, 2025, Canada will have its 24th Prime Minister in the form of Mark Carney, the economist and banker who has been touted as the Liberal Party’s best chance of staving off the electoral oblivion many had, for the past two years, predicted was inevitable. Carney is a numbers man, so it only makes sense to place his ascension in the same context: he’ll be the seventh Prime Minister in my lifetime, the fourth to assume the office without a seat in the Commons, and the first to have been born in the Northwest Territories.

And, in practical terms, he’s been credited with bringing the Liberals back into competition. While some of the newfound Liberal success has come at the expense of the floundering NDP (more on that later), it’s the Tories who have really felt the pain. From January 1, 2023 to December 31, 2024, the Conservatives had an average polling lead of 14 points. That lead maxed out at an unheard-of 30 points last November. During that same time, the Liberals averaged out at about 26% support but, since the start of Carney Fever…Carneymania?…let’s go with Carneydemonium…in February, the Liberal polling average has shot up to 32%. The trendlines show a consistent Liberal increase with a consistent Tory decline and a complete freefall for the NDP (which has now adopted the strategy of presenting itself as a centrist option).

All of this has the Conservatives in panic mode. Even before Carney won the Liberal leadership, their “Carbon Tax Carney” ads were running non-stop on every imaginable television station, though the best pejorative they could come up with for the banker-turned-politician was “sneaky”. Wow, what a burn. A once-jubilant Pierre Poilievre is now scrambling to regain his polling lead, even as senior Tories are telling the Toronto Star that, “If the ballot question is the same as it was in Ontario - who can best deal with Trump and prepare the economy for the tough road ahead - that might be better for Carney than Pierre.” But don’t worry; other senior Tories are insisting that there isn’t anything wrong. “Believe me, no one is panicking,” one told the Star, which is reassuring because calm and confident campaigns always have to insist they aren’t panicking.¹  Smash cut to local activists in New Brunswick very publicly resigning from the Conservative Party after the central office once again meddled in a local nomination race, apparently supporting an out-of-province candidate over area partisans who had been campaigning for months to earn the nomination.

Over on the far-right social media site Twitter/X, right-wing “influencers” are also showing signs of panic, having just lost their favourite whipping boy, Justin Trudeau. Their pivot has been clunky and they’ve resorted to trotting out some rather tired conservative attacks that really only play well with a certain segment of the population that has vivid memories of a world when the Soviet Union still existed and has been steadily radicalized by the Internet over the past decade. Their insistence that Carney, a man who prior to winning the Liberal leadership, was vice chair of Brookfield Asset Management (a corporation with a market cap of nearly $120 billion) and chair of Bloomberg (having been appointed by the arch-capitalist Michael Bloomberg himself to lead the giant corporation that is apparently worth billions), is somehow a secret communist seems desperate, even for them, but I’m sure it’ll go a long way to ensuring they capture most of the “weird uncle” vote.

***

Carney pulling off a win will still be a challenge, in large part because he’s inheriting an undisciplined and rowdy caucus. Any pundit claiming “it’s all over for Poilievre” would do well to remember that the Liberal Party is very well-versed in the art of self-sabotage.

Case-in-point: Carney’s first move was to appoint outgoing MP Marco Mendicino as his interim chief of staff - a move that has been resoundingly unpopular thanks to Mendicino’s lengthy list of controversies, including his publicly splitting with the Liberals because they aren’t “pro-Israel” enough for him and his poor handling of the decision to move serial killer Paul Bernardo to a medium security prison. In response, a gaggle of Liberal MPs ran off to the Star’s Althia Raj to complain, no doubt a hold-over from their days of running off to reporters to complain any time Trudeau did anything unpopular.² Either that, or some of them have big money riding on a BetMGM wager that Poilievre becomes the next PM. Regardless, MPs publicly kvetching about the man mere hours after he won the leadership is not a good sign.

To even have a shot at winning the election, Carney will have to keep his caucus in check. It shouldn’t be hard (theoretically), since most of them endorsed him anyway and 35 Liberal MPs have already announced their retirement, giving him the chance to find candidates with star power who will be loyal enough to drown out the griping from the permanently aggrieved backbench. Without discipline, though, the angry minority in the Liberal ranks might do more to ruin their party’s chances than a million Tory negative ads could ever hope to do.

***

In one of the most Canadian scenes possible, I learned Carney had won the Liberal leadership whilst curling. As the phones of everyone on the ice began buzzing with news notifications, everyone began talking excitedly about the outcome. Few, if any, seemed prepared for the the magnitude of Carney’s victory.

Carney’s leadership win was impressive, not just by Canadian political standards, but by all standards of western democracy. He won with 131,674 votes, amounting to 86.8% of the popular vote among participating Liberals. That’s a higher percent than Poilievre won by in 2022 (70.7%), nearly four times the number of votes Jagmeet Singh won during the NDP’s leadership race back in 2017 (35,266), and more than Trudeau himself won when he took over the Liberals in 2013 (81,389 votes and 78.8%). The last party leader in Canada to earn that level of support (aside from Michael Ignatieff’s 2009 near-acclamation) was Paul Martin, who captured 93.8% of the vote in the 2003 Liberal leadership against longtime rival, Hamilton East MP Sheila Copps.

Despite the candidacy of Karina Gould, the young and capable MP for nearby Burlington, and her securing the endorsement of local political figures like Copps and Hamilton Mountain MP Lisa Hepfner, Carney carried every Hamilton-area riding with ease.

Of the nearly 3,000 voting Hamilton Liberals, Carney won an impressive 2,570 votes to Chrystia Freeland’s 163, Gould’s 126, and Quebec businessman Frank Baylis’ 71.

Unsurprisingly, the riding with the most Liberal voters was Hamilton West-Ancaster-Dundas (HWAD) where 889 party members participated. That was the riding that gave Carney his biggest victory in the area, as well as being in his top 10 ridings in Ontario and top 40 in Canada. In HWAD, Carney got the ol’ “DPRK Special”, earning the support of 90.2% of party members.

The nearly 900 party members who cast ballots this time around in HWAD eclipses the paltry 192 who voted in the 2023 Ontario Liberal leadership race (the parties aren’t formally connected, but the Venn Diagram of federal and provincial party activists is quite nearly a circle - check out my edition from December 7, 2023 for more on the provincial leadership numbers in Hamilton). This result could be thanks to years of signing up members by outgoing HWAD MP Filomena Tassi. Then again, Tassi did not publicly provide an endorsement of any candidate, which means that the work might have been done by Carney’s team independently of Tassi’s organization. No matter which way you slice it, HWAD will absolutely be a Liberal target in the next federal election - as evidenced by the fact that Carney’s big campaign stop in the area during the leadership race was to McMaster Innovation Park in the HWAD.

Surprisingly, the riding with the next highest number of Liberal voters in the area was Hamilton Centre. With 724 votes, it placed 54th in terms of number of votes cast - higher than 83 other ridings currently held by Liberal MPs. The sheer number of Liberal ballots cast in Hamilton Centre is worth noting, especially considering how little effort the federal party has put into the riding. In February, the Liberals quietly announced they would be acclaiming Aslam Rana as their candidate. There is scant information about Rana online, though from his still-active Twitter/X account (which lists his location as Toronto) it can be gleaned that he’s an engineer who seems to be mainly involved in Liberal politics in Mississauga and Peel Region. Fast-tracking the nomination of a little-known parachute candidate at a time when the NDP’s poll numbers are cratering and there’s palpable frustration in the community over NDP MP Matthew Green’s publicly backing Independent candidate Sarah Jama over the NDP’s own Robin Lennox in last month’s provincial election seems like a wasted opportunity on the part of the federal Liberals. Then again… see above comment about Liberal self-sabotage. 

Carney handily won the Centre, pulling in 85.5%. It was Gould who took second, surprisingly, earning just three more votes than Freeland to capture 6.4% of the vote.

The other area riding where Gould placed second was Hamilton Mountain, which saw a modest turnout of 400 party members. While Carney won 89.3%, those numbers were startlingly low for a riding with an incumbent Liberal MP who has indicated she will be running again. The Mountain has seen noticeably low Liberal engagement for some time; only 81 party members voted in the 2023 provincial leadership up there. Lisa Hepfner only won the Mountain by 835 votes and her insistence on living in Oakville while serving as the riding’s MP has been a source of controversy since her narrow victory in 2021. Only mustering 400 party members to vote (over 1,000 Liberals voted in Calgary Centre, a riding that has been Conservative/Reform for all but 4 of its 57 year existence), managing to pull just 19 votes for the candidate she backed, and then being conspicuously absent from Carney’s first visit to Hamilton since winning the leadership when her other two Liberal colleagues showed up does little to dispel rumours that Hepfner is a “phone-it-in” MP. All this should give the Mountain NDP and Tories some hope (though, with the PC’s capturing the provincial riding in February, the more hopeful of the two camps should be the Tories, who are presently deciding between Asuf Khokhar and Jacob ten Brinke as to who will be their candidate and, thus, completing their entire regional roster).

Contrast the results on the Mountain with those coming from the new Frankenstein’s monster of a riding that is Flamborough-Glanbrook-Brant North. A solid 552 Liberals voted out there in what would be Carney’s worst showing in Hamilton (he still won 85%). Transposing the 2021 results on FlamGlanBranNor (you, sir, are a mouthful) shows the Tories would have still won that election if the riding had the same boundaries and 338Canada lists it as a “Safe Conservative” seat (remember to always be cautious with sites like that since they rarely take into account local dynamics and are just reflective of country-wide polling trends). The fact that the Liberals could bring over 150 more supporters out to vote in FlamGlanBranNor, a seat they have little chance of winning, than they could on Hamilton Mountain, a seat they hold and remain competitive in, speaks volumes to their organizational state in Hamilton.

Which brings us to Hamilton East-Stoney Creek, the rebellious cousin in the story of Hamilton’s politics. Ahh, HESC, you rascal you.

Currently held by Chad Collins, the federal riding has a long history of Liberal dominance. If we trace the riding’s lineage back to the OG Hamilton East, it has been in Liberal hands almost exclusively since the 1960’s, save the brief Wayne Marston interregnum when the NDP held the riding from 2006 to 2015. But HESC had the lowest turnout of Hamilton-area ridings in the leadership race with just 365 votes cast. Collins provided a tepid, conditional, barely noticeable endorsement of Carney, who was able to carry the riding with 88.5% of the votes cast.

And, with Carney’s victory, comes some local political clarity as well. Collins’ endorsement came along with the declaration that, “If Mr. Carney is our leader…I’m running again.”³ As recently as December (when the Liberal poll numbers averaged 21%, a solid 11 points lower than where they are today), Collins was almost assuredly going to jump ship and run for mayor in 2026. Ever the temporizer, Collins will probably now re-offer in HESC (currently back as a “Liberal likely” seat on 338Canada), campaigning against the Conservative candidate Ned Kuruc, who is being backed by his Liberal predecessor, Bob Bratina. Awkward.

***

Carney’s resounding victory has scrambled the political chessboard in Hamilton yet again. Months ago, it seemed like Matthew Green would hold a small outpost of orange in Hamilton Centre surrounded by deep Tory blue in every other local riding. Local MPs were announcing their retirements (Tassi), openly speculating about a career pivot (Collins), or riding high on their party’s meteoric rise (FlamGlan’s - and soon-to-be FlamGlanBranNor’s - Tory MP Dan Muys). Now Collins is back in the HESC race, Hepfner has a shot at holding Hamilton Mountain, and the Liberal candidate search out in the HWAD is undoubtedly focusing on high-profile contenders who can keep the riding red. Local Liberals have wind in their sails for the first time in two years (likely a welcome change of fortunes after their dismal showing in the provincial election). Hamilton’s Tories are now facing the prospect that a two year polling lead has, like their chances of winning four seats in the city, entirely evaporated. Indeed, we could walk out of the next election with Hamilton’s political map being identical to the one we got after 2021.

Local New Democrats are…well…angry, and rightfully so. On-the-ground activists and long-time partisans are being ignored, the party is doing little to correct its mistakes, and the more emboldened social conservatives among the labour traditionalists have already begun alienating the progressives who, for a long time, were some of the most active and engaged members of the party.

To cap it all off, the party’s leadership is not inspiring confidence. Two weeks ago, federal leader Jagmeet Singh gave a press conference where he insisted that, despite calls for him to step aside he “absolutely should be leading” the party into the next election. He then tried to tie all the country’s current woes - the threat of annexation, the impact of tariffs, the continued presence of Doug Ford - to our system of universal healthcare.⁴ All this is despite “healthcare” barely registering on the top issues of current national concern - considerably far behind US relations and jobs/the economy - and not having been the main issue Canadians care about since early 2023.⁵  

This constant harkening to universal healthcare has become a stale reminder of how out-of-touch the party continues to be at the federal level. A rallying cry for universal healthcare just doesn’t carry the same weight it once did. When Tommy Douglas campaigned on universal healthcare, he was promoting a vision of a better, more inclusive, more compassionate system. In the time since, every Canadian has come to experience the system as it is: a far cry from the Douglasian ideal, bloated by bureaucracy, undermined by malicious provincial authorities, reminding us of some of the worst moments in our lives, stuck in waiting rooms, suffering or watching our loved ones suffer. Yes, we are happy to have universal healthcare, but campaigning on protecting what currently exists is putting your stamp of approval on something everyone - patients, doctors, nurses, experts, advocates - all know can be improved. When Singh talks like that, he sounds like he’s been drawing from the Harris campaign playbook. What’s worse, he’s giving fodder to opponents of universal healthcare by appearing to uncritically support a flawed system, driving disappointed voters into the arms of people who will promise to “fix things” by taking a sledgehammer to them. The old ways just ain’t gonna cut it now.

By all accounts, this should be the NDP’s moment to shine. In the United States, Bernie Sanders is drawing crowds of thousands, even in Republican-held districts, to his “Stopping Oligarchy” tour where he’s passionately speaking about the need for a working class movement to protect jobs and democracy. People on both sides of the border are desperate for an alternative that addresses their immediate concerns and gives them something to believe in again. A left movement that has a plan for creating meaningful local jobs, protecting Canadian sovereignty, making housing and life more affordable, providing value for the investments of everyday citizens, and respecting the environment should be leading in the polls. But, instead, we have an NDP that is not listening to its members, not responding quickly enough to issues of concern for voters, and that has only nominated candidates in 41% of ridings, despite the fact that an election will likely be called in a matter of days.

***

In politics, things can change quickly. The Tories still lead in some polls, Carney is untested as a campaigner, and the NDP might be cooking up something truly unique. Anything is possible right now.

But with the large outpouring of support Carney saw in Hamilton, it’s clear a shift is happening. The challenge now is for Carney to position himself as the best person to protect Canadian sovereignty and stave off the American threat. How well he does at that will determine how Hamilton’s voters respond when we go to the polls in the next few weeks.

Buckle up, Hamilton. It’s only getting started.

1  _{Robert Benzie. “Pierre Poilievre’s Tories insist ‘no one is panicking’ at Mark Carney’s rise” Hamilton Spectator/Toronto Star, March 10, 2025 (Spec link)}

2  _{Althia Raj. “Mark Carney fumbled his first decision as leader — and some Liberals are not happy” Hamilton Spectator/Toronto Star, March 11, 2025 (Spec link)}

3  _{Matthew Van Dongen. “Liberal leadership race will also decide whether Hamilton MP runs again” Hamilton Spectator, March 8, 2025 (Spec link)}

4  _{Judy Trinh. “Singh says he’s still the right person to lead NDP despite falling support” CTV News Politics, February 24, 2025 (Link)}

5  _{“Nanos Weekly Tracking - March 7, 2025” Nanos Research (Link)}