But first, a word from the Sewer

Hello cool internet people! This is just a brief note to let everyone know that The Sewer Socialists will be off for the next two weeks. I have a little vacation time scheduled, so there won’t be another edition until August 15. I need time to rest up, work on some projects, and not engage with online things to prevent my brain from leaking out of one or both ears.

And, I mean, nothing important really happens in the summer anyway. Oh, except for…you know…all the important things that have just happened. Speaking of which…

Democracy, ever so slightly burdened by what has been

Last Sunday, at 1:46 PM, US President Joe Biden released a statement on X/Twitter announcing his withdrawal from the upcoming American presidential election. Within 48 hours, it was apparent that Vice President Kamala Harris would be the Democratic Party’s nominee to replace him.

The whole transition from Biden to Harris shows us just how quickly things can change in politics. Last week, the media and American voters seemed obsessed with questions about the President’s age and his ability to effectively take on Trump, whose electoral success would almost certainly lead to the dismantling of American democratic institutions and a backslide into authoritarianism like what’s been occurring in Hungary and Türkiye for the past few years.

This week, it’s coconutposting and Charlie XCX/Kamala crossovers and a kind of political enthusiasm not seen in the States since the candidacies of Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders.

The whole narrative has shifted so damn quickly. Politics can be like that sometimes. One minute, the ship of state seems hellbent and determined to plow into the iceberg. The next, Captain Stubing and Doc Bricker are trying to set the iceberg up with a stern, but lovable widower played by Lloyd Bridges. It’s a wild ride!

Up on this side of the border, there’s been a lot of tumult in our political landscape. Doug Ford’s strong mayor powers turned 1 year old recently (they’re entering that terrible phase a little early), there’s been considerable pundit chatter about the need for a new progressive political party, a long-time Toronto councillor was found to have broke elections rules in 2022 but won’t face any consequences, and some right-wingers in Regina have been copying from the “Concerned Hamiltonians” playbook (a playbook written in crayon on the back of a campaign ad for a Hamilton Mountain Conservative Party candidate, but a playbook nonetheless).

So why don’t we sit back, blend up a piña colada, and take a look at our democracy, which is ever so slightly burdened by what has been.

One year of little buff mayors

This past week, we were all treated to a flurry of one-year-on retrospectives about the extension of strong mayor powers to 44 mayors of larger municipalities in Ontario. After originally just testing the powers out on Toronto and Ottawa, the Ford government extended them to a smattering of other cities, towns, and municipalities across the province. Not the largest, mind you. For some baffling reason, the province stripped out Newmarket, Norfolk, Haldimand, and Cornwall, replacing them with Woodstock, Innisfil, and a selection of the Gwillimburys, including Bradford West and, of course, the Brad-less East.

And by “baffling reason”, I mean “that’s where development is likely to happen so let’s make it easier for developers to pave, baby, pave.”

After a year of these new powers, it is evident that strong mayor powers are not being used the same way across the municipalities to which the powers have been granted.

In Peel Region, for example, Patrick Brown of Brampton, Annette Groves of Caledon, and Carolyn Parrish of Mississauga have taken full advantage of the powers, using them to rule their cities like God Kings. Collectively, the gang (self-anointed as “The Three Musketeers of the Modern Day” by Parrish) has used their powers 59 times since July 1, 2023.

More consequentially, they’ve used the powers granted them by the province to take full control over hiring and firing, dismissing municipal employees at will to replace them with their own hand-picked cronies. Brown has taken almost complete control over upper-level staffing matters in Brampton. And Parrish fired Mississauga’s Chief Administrative Officer less than 24 hours after being sworn in last month. Her hack-and-slash approach to governing given her narrow margin of victory has Parrish seeming more like a vindictive, cartoonishly evil emperor than a mayor.

Which, I guess, explains this now-deleted post on Parrish’s official X/Twitter account.

***

Of all the Peel Region problems, though, the case of Caledon is the most egregious.

Caledon’s mayor, Annette Groves was, for the most part, an unassuming figure in the town. First elected to the town’s council in 2000, she launched a long-shot bid for mayor in 2010 and lost badly to incumbent Marolyn Morrison by over 22 points. She returned to council in 2014, recapturing her old council seat by just 79 votes. She held onto that seat until 2022, when she ran for mayor again, this time after incumbent mayor Allan Thompson announced his retirement.

Groves’ campaign focused on her experience, her positive relationship with constituents, and her desire to be a champion for the people. “I believe Caledon’s residents deserve a mayor that will put their needs first and not the wants of developers and special interests,” she told the Caledon Enterprise.1 Groves won the election with just under 58% of the vote.

Within a month of being granted strong mayor powers, Groves began using them with reckless abandon. She fired Caledon’s Chief Administrative Officer (CAO), quickly replacing them with a new hire that became her de facto second-in-command. The new CAO was given a golden contract, with a yearly salary of $270,000, a huge overtime allowance, and a severance package that offers three years of pay - $810,000 - if fired “without cause”. The CAO, whose contract specifies answers only to Groves and not to council as a whole, then had all hiring and firing powers devolved to them.

With those powers, the CAO hacked through the municipality’s civil service. The town clerk, solicitor, and chief planner were all fired, and the communications manager, public works commissioner, bylaw director, and HR manager “all left for better opportunities”, according to the town. In the wake of this bureaucratic Night of the Long Knives, five municipal departments were cut and the whole government was reorganized.2

A restructured and paired-down municipality in place, Groves then took the incredible step of using her strong mayor powers to quickly approve 12 rezoning applications on land around the future Highway 413, which would have allowed 35,000 new sprawl-oriented homes to pop up in undeveloped lands along the town’s border with Brampton and north of its population centre, Bolton.

Residents were not having any of that. Within a month of Groves’ announcement, local residents had organized a group called Democracy Caledon and began pressuring Groves to reverse her decision. Frustrations and questions continued to mount as local journalists found regional reports indicating servicing for these new homes would cost into the billions - nearly $13 billion for water services alone. Remarkably, the provincial government even stepped in to ask Groves to cool it since her approvals directly threatened their plans for the much-hated Highway 413. After hundreds of residents appeared at a meeting to oppose the plans, Groves finally withdrew her strong mayor approvals, instead opting to pursue approval of the rezoning through council.

She’s still a strong proponent of the rezoning. Democracy Caledon is particularly frustrated about this, considering she won because her platform, in part, was based on her assertion that “Caledon’s residents deserve a mayor that will put their needs first and not the wants of developers…” Her in-office 180 has the community rightfully angry.

The whole saga has shredded any goodwill Groves had and mobilized residents to such a degree that she, and any councillor who backs the plans for 35,000 new homes, will face significant and organized opposition in 2026.

***

Groups like OpenCouncil.ca are logging every use of strong mayor powers in the province, but have provided few updates since March 7 of this year. Groves’ approval of the zoning changes and Parrish’s flurry of invocations are not on there, though the group dedicates an entire section on their “Strong Mayor decision tracker” to Mayor Horwath’s tie-breaking use of the powers regarding the Lake Avenue South fiasco in Stoney Creek.

But it’s actually worth looking at Horwath’s use of strong mayor powers, because it shows a significant flaw in how we’ve been discussing the issue.

Horwath has used her strong mayor powers 20 times since those powers were authorized. The first instance was on August 18, 2023 and the most recent was on April 24, 2024. While that might seem like a lot, it is important to understand what each of those uses was regarding.

Half of the “mayoral decisions” were to simply approve by-laws that were already passed by council. For example, Horwath’s third use of her strong mayor powers - MDE-2023-02 - gave written approval to a slew of by-laws that came before council on September 13, 2023. Those by-laws were passed unanimously by council. So it isn’t like the mayor was “subverting the will of the people”.

Two decisions related to appointments - appointing herself and Mike Spadafora to the West Harbour Development Sub-Committee and then appointing a city manager. Four decisions actually delegate appointment authority away from her office and two more decisions direct staff to do something they were going to do anyway (because, under the legislation that created strong mayor powers, certain things became mayoral responsibilities even if they were going to happen anyway…things like preparing a budget).

Only two of her decisions have been vetoes - one to announce the veto and one to actually veto the Lake Avenue South decision which, again, was just a tie vote. In essence, Mayor Horwath used these powers to rework what a tie vote on council means, turning it from a rejection of the bylaw to an approval of the bylaw. But that’s it. That’s the only instance where our mayor acted in a way that circumvented council and it was the only instance in the province (as far as I can tell) of a mayor actually using the legislation to break a logjam.

Strong mayor powers have been unequally applied and remain baffling to the general public. At best, they’re an unnecessary bureaucratic imposition on mayors. At worst, they’re a blank cheque for mayors to abandon all pretense of democracy and reshape municipalities as they’d like.

They’ve only been around for a year. Hopefully, we get a government in 2026 (or whenever the provincial election will happen) that will give us some clarity on these rules and maybe show a willingness to engage in more meaningful reforms at the local level.

The party’s on the left

There’s been considerable chatter about the politics of progress in Canada as of late.

As the world faces down countless far-right threats, people are searching for compelling, coherent, and capable alternatives that can win elections, govern effectively, and safeguard our hard-fought rights.

Here in Canada, we’re looking at the upcoming federal election with unease, as the country’s traditional progressive voice - the NDP - has been floundering.

Even today, after I had started writing about this, a CBC article came out, focused on the glaring disconnect between the federal party and its provincial wings. While the NDP governs in BC and Manitoba and is a strong opposition in Alberta and Saskatchewan, the federal party has been losing ground, weighed down by the millstone of the party’s confidence-and-supply agreement (as close as you can get to a coalition without it being a coalition…basically the Westminster version of a situationship) with the Liberals that, despite getting modest results, remains wildly unpopular with the electorate who are just…riding on vibes these days, I guess.

In the past week, I’ve come across a series of articles, each identifying the weakness of the federal NDP as a problem and all offering different solutions to the problem.

Rick Salutin, writing in Star-affiliated papers, urges us to put the “social” back in “socialism” (and here I was, thinking we needed to put the “sewer” back in “socialism”…) and focus on collective solutions to collective problems, rather than continuing to idolize the individual. Honestly, that’s the initial bit of Harris’ viral “coconut tree” comment that always gets cut out: “…none of us just live in a silo. Everything is in context.”

Professor Ajay Parasram of Dalhousie reminds us in a piece in The Conversation that voters - particularly young voters - are “exhausted, angry and frustrated with incumbents” and that the French electoral coalition model might offer an alternative Canadians could get behind.

Freelance journalist Taylor Noakes takes it a step further, suggesting that the confidence-and-supply agreement is a “de facto merger of the two parties” and that we need a brand new progressive party, free of the baggage of the past, focused on bold ideas for the people. “An open door, big tent, progressive party where shared values and goals serve as the main attraction, rather than the personality cults of career politicians, would be a welcome and refreshing change of pace,” he writes.3

Hamilton’s election results at the federal level show that the party just isn’t breaking through on a mass-scale anymore. Amid the Conservative sweep in 2011, the NDP earned nearly 40% of the vote across the city and elected three strong, experienced MPs. Over the next two elections, the party’s support slumped and then plateaued, before dropping even further in 2021.

This decline in support isn’t across-the-board, though. The party remains strong in Hamilton Centre and is building an impressive base in Hamilton West-Ancaster-Dundas (full disclosure, I was NDP candidate Roberto Henriquez’s CFO in the last election and think he’s an all-around awesome guy).

But the consistent decline in NDP support in Hamilton East-Stoney Creek and the upsetting forfeiting of Hamilton Mountain in 2021 has left the party with just 1 local MP and the support of barely 1/4 of the city’s federal electorate.

If this past week has taught us anything, it’s that politics can change in a heartbeat. So there’s always time to turn things around. But the NDP needs to start working on that like…yesterday. It can be hard to position yourself as a credible alternative when you’re seen as part of the government already. Hell, there’s a reason the Tories won’t shut up about the NDP-Trudeau Coalition, which you’ve all just let them get away with *gestures broadly to the media, the NDP, everyone, himself*.

There are a few options for Canadian progressives going forward. And, by progressives, I mean people firmly to the left-of-centre. While people often lump partisan Liberals in with the progressive crowd, we all know the party is a big, big, big tent. There are Liberals willing to critique the system. But there are also other Liberals who are less ideological and more…their own thing. These are folks in the “No-Girls-Allowed Hamilton East Liberal Bro Club”. They’re Liberals like Vito Sgro and Bob Bratina and Larry Di Ianni who are (or were) “Liberal” because it’s a convenient brand, but whose politics are decidedly right-wing and corporate-friendly.

Anyway, the options moving forward are pretty broad:

1. Commit to the NDP and begin changing the party: This one is hard, since there are a lot of entrenched party elites resistant to change. But if progressives want to stick with the NDP, then the party needs to be reformed from within. Committed activists need to join riding associations, work for forward-thinking and dedicated candidates, bring responsible resolutions to conventions, and run for positions in the party leadership. By “responsible resolutions”, I mean things that will address concerns Canadians have, maintaining a commitment to progressive values, and distinguishing policies from other parties. I’m talking right-to-repair, immediate electoral reform, federal investments in co-op and social housing, huge investments in transit and national train service, promoting workplace democracy, expanding the national park system, etc. Unique, interesting, compelling ideas. The brand is there and Canadians know about it, for better or for worse.

2. Break off and form a new party: It is hard to build a new party in Canada. Most of the “new” parties we’ve seen have really been re-branded old parties. The Reform Party was a 90s update to the Social Credit movement. The Bloc Québécois was initially a nationalist Red Tory project. The People’s Party was just a breakaway faction of all the fringe weirdos in the Conservative Party. Starting a new party is hard because you’re starting from scratch. The only way this would work is if existing elected NDP MPs were the ones to break away. Even then, they’d need to work incredibly hard to build the infrastructure necessary to support campaigns in all 343 electoral districts in the next election.

3. Jump to an existing party: The most logical choice would be the Greens. Though, as I wrote about two weeks ago, the federal Greens are a little messy right now. Still, there’s a case to be made for progressives to follow the lead of the European Greens and reorient the party toward the left in a meaningful way. That effort would require similar steps to committing to the NDP, especially considering the resistance within the Greens to internal changes.

Ultimately, we have to do something. Sitting around and resigning ourselves to Prime Minister Poilievre isn’t okay. But deciding which course of action to take is challenging. And time is running out.

Rules? Who needs rules!?

It’s the fall of 1985. Back to the Future hits theatres and becomes a cultural phenomenon, earning over $210 million at the box office. Whitney Houston’s “Saving All My Love for You” tops the Billboard charts. The Peterson/Rae coalition government at Queen’s Park slowly begins their tenure, ending 42 uninterrupted years of PC rule in Ontario.

And, that November, a 35-year-old bookkeeper and neighbourhood association president named Frances Nunziata is elected to the school board in the then-independent City of York. Over the years, Nunziata would earn a reputation as a king slayer, winning a seat on York City Council by defeating an incumbent in 1988 and then taking the mayor’s chair from another incumbent in 1994. Nunziata would serve as the last Mayor of York before the suburb was amalgamated into the City of Toronto, but transitioned seamlessly onto the new municipality’s council, where she has served ever since.

Nunziata has always been a controversial figure. She sued colleagues during her tenure on York’s council, slung mud with such vigour during her 1994 mayoral run that her opponent refused to even congratulate her when she won, and had to appear before the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario for her treatment of a member of her staff. In the latter instance, while the Tribunal found she was “rude and demeaning” to the staff member, she had not formally violated their rights. Still, not great.

Despite her decades-long grip on power in Toronto, Nunziata hold has been slipping. In the last municipal election, she faced off against Chiara Padovani, a popular community organizer and tenants’ rights advocate who also ran against her in 2018. In 2022, Nunziata beat Padovani by only 94 votes - a mere 0.4% of the vote.

Last week, Toronto’s Integrity Commissioner, Jonathan Batty, released four reports relating to complaints about elected officials in that city. One of those reports - the most serious - was in regards to Nunziata’s 2022 municipal campaign.

The complaint was lodged by a constituent who signed up for Nunziata’s council newsletter to learn about what was happening in their ward, York South-Weston. When election time rolled around, the constituent suddenly started receiving campaign emails from Nunziata. Two days after the election, the constituent sent the complaint to the Integrity Commissioner, concerned that their information had been used for campaign purposes without their consent.

In late November, Nunziata’s office informed the Integrity Commissioner that she believed the complaint was politically-motivated and that, even if there was legitimacy to the complaint, his office had no authority to investigate it. Throughout 2023, there was considerable back-and-forth between Nunziata’s office and the office of the Integrity Commissioner with the councillor digging in, denying any wrongdoing, and then finally accepting that, yeah, it probably happened, likely from a staffer downloading confidential information to a USB thumb drive.4

For the improper transference of thousands of emails from the councillor’s official mailing list to their campaign list (the official list apparently had +40,000 names on it), the Integrity Commissioner has recommended a formal reprimand for Nunziata. Basically, a bad note in your permanent record. But, like…is that enough? This is someone who has been in elected office for 39 years. After that long, you kind of lose the ability to claim you have no idea what the rules are, right?

The report acknowledges that she’s been on council for a long, long time, but actually frames that as a positive:

That’s it!? A slap on the wrist because it hasn’t happened (been flagged) before? And, if it had been, then the worst punishment is withholding pay?

Toronto’s council agreed (though this speaks more to a problem with the legislation - there is almost nothing they can do to force a councillor to resign) and voted 14-0 to reprimand Nunziata. 11 council members, including Nunziata, did not vote on the matter.

Padovani posted her reaction to the findings on Instagram, noting how she refused to call for a recount after the narrow election loss in 2022 because she believed in the integrity of the system. Now, her faith is shaken. Because of course it is. Losing an election by just 94 votes and then finding out, two years later, that your opponent improperly used a database of voter information (that you did not have access to) in order to remind voters to re-elect them days before the vote would shake anyone’s confidence.

Progress Toronto, the almost-but-not-quite-a-political-party operating municipally in the city (which endorsed Padovani’s campaign), echoed this on Wednesday, asking the very fair question: “If Nunziata hadn’t broken the rules, would she have won? 🤔”

This kind of electoral nonsense is not okay. It diminishes faith in the system and smacks of a bygone era in municipal politics where entrenched elites used every kind of shady tactic to their advantage, all to ensure they maintained power and kept their wealthy donors happy.

What this really shows us is that something has to change. This kind of politics can’t continue unchallenged. We need provincial legislation to allow for the replacement of municipal politicians, local electoral reform to allow for ranked ballots, and possibly the uploading of responsibility for municipal elections to Elections Ontario so things can be standardized and applied fairly across the province.

Until that happens, though, her constituents should pressure Nunziata to resign and people from across Ontario should encourage Padovani to run again.

Concerned Reginans?

A secretive, dark money organization running ads targeting the “wasteful spending” of council, railing against imagined tax hikes and fees and social problems without revealing who they are? You mean “Concerned Hamiltonians”?

Nope. This time, it’s “Advance Regina”. Yeah, there are more of them.

On Monday, CBC Saskatchewan released the results of an incredible investigation into a shadowy group that’s been running ads with very familiar-sounding phrasing like “can we afford this city council?” and talk of defeating the “radical left”.

Unlike in Hamilton, Regina’s local media actually dug into this group and produced some fascinating, if not entirely expected, results.

Turns out, “Advance Regina” is just a municipal front group for Conservative Party and Saskatchewan Party (the province’s right-wing populist governing party) politicos keen to replace progressive councillors with hand-picked right-wingers. The group started back in 2021 when a progressive councillor - Ward 6’s Dan Leblanc - proposed banning fossil fuel companies from advertising on city facilities. The province’s corporate elites were outraged at the idea and launched an all-out war against Leblanc, who has since been fired from his law firm and removed from some municipal committees in acts of blatant retribution. The Sask Party’s former Director of Communications, who now works privately in the public relations industry, launched “Advance Regina” to take aim at “left-wing activists” and defend the right-wing Leblanc pile-on.

Where “Advance Regina” went wrong was that they started accepting donations, which allowed CBC Saskatchewan reporters to follow the money. Said money led directly to other high-profile right-wingers, including former Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer’s riding association president, his campaign financial officer, former Conservative Party candidates, and the Saskatchewan Party's Director of Training.

But the Sask Party’s shenanigans aren’t just confined to Regina. They’ve started a front group in Saskatoon called “A Better YXE” (after their airport code) that’s being run by a different gaggle of Tory/Sask Party kids-in-short-pants.

One big takeaway from this investigation is that right-wing populists feel the need to hide their true intentions no matter where they are in Canada. Like, you all don’t like taxes and “woke” things and government, so why not just come out and campaign on that, letting the people decide if they agree? Why all the clandestine nonsense, lurking around in the shadows and pretending you’re not actually Conservative Party members? Why try to hide that? What does that say about your movement? How can we trust you if that’s how you present yourself to the people?

Ooof, too many rhetorical questions there. We all know they’re hiding who they are because if people dug down deep enough, they’d realize all their policies eventually boil down to “make the rich richer, you horrid little peasants.”

Anyway, here in Hamilton, we are all-but-certain that “Concerned Hamiltonians” is also a front group for the Conservative Party. But local media hasn’t dug into the group the same way it has in Saskatchewan. Even though “Concerned Hamiltonians” has dropped over $42,000 on print ads since the summer of last year, they have not been the subject of meaningful scrutiny.

Part of the reason could be that they’re way more amateurish than “Advance Regina” and “A Better YXE”. Both of those groups have websites, branding, and a coherent message. A “Concerned Hamiltonians” ad typically had all the logic of a Truth Social post and they forgot to buy their own domain name (so I got it, muahahaha!). They’ve stopped updating their truly terrible (and, frankly, boring) social media accounts since April and haven’t had a print ad since May.

While almost everyone I’ve spoken with is convinced “Concerned Hamiltonians” is a project of Conservative Party-affiliated folks on Hamilton Mountain, there isn’t an easy way to determine if that’s 100% true. I’m glad local media in Saskatchewan has dug into their own versions of these shadowy right-wing populist groups trying to sway municipal politics, but it would be great if the same would happen here.

Over to you, wonderful folks at CBC Hamilton and The Spec! I’m always around to help with your investigations.

Cool facts for cool people

• We got two awesome opinion pieces in The Spec over the past few days: one from Environment Hamilton executive director Ian Borsuk on sprawl and housing, and one from Kojo Damptey (now in Mac’s Office of Community Engagement) on reconciliation and Indigenous issues in the city. Check them out if you can! They’re timely, smart, and important pieces. Way to go, friends!

• A new survey is up on the Engage Hamilton portal, soliciting feedback from residents about the new Lime Ridge Mall Transit Terminal. The project outline indicates they’ll be shnazzing the place up quite a bit, with more seating, public wi-fi, charging outlets, landscaping, and wayfinding. Check out the survey on the Engage Hamilton portal here or visit project reps at the mall until July 28.

• The Library of Parliament released a really cool report on Monday that offers a look at co-op housing in Canada. What’s really fascinating about this report (aside from the fact that it reminds us co-ops are dramatically more affordable than for-profit rentals) is that it shows there’s been basically no new investment in co-ops in Ontario since 1996, when responsibility for funding co-ops was devolved to the provinces. Almost all the growth in the co-op sector since 2002 has been in Quebec. Part of the reasoning for this report was the launch of the federal Co-operative Housing Development Program, which will hopefully get more off the ground. I’ve said this a trillion times, but co-ops are the way we can fundamentally change the housing market in this country. By removing the profit motive and fully embracing the notion that housing is a need and a right, we can create the conditions where Canadians of all ages, in all places, no longer need to worry about finding a safe, affordable, secure place to live. You can read that report here.

• Conspiracy theorists who claim queer folks are “evil perverts” inundated the New Brunswick Minister of Education with unhinged and disturbing emails immediately before that Ministry launched a transphobic “pronoun policy review” in 2023. Apparently some fringe conspiracy aficionados on Facebook latched onto the idea that drag performers are agents of Satan and used their warped beliefs to actually change government policy in the province. New Brunswick’s Progressive Conservative government - easily one of the most right-wing and fringe-pandering governments in the Confederation - has been battling the province’s queer population for some time, seemingly at the urging of everyone’s unstable, ultraonline, un-approved-silver-supplement-addled aunt. Good news: the New Brunswick Liberals are currently leading in the polls in the run-up to that province’s October 21 election. Bad news: they’re still Liberals, who are being dragged down by the federal party with whom they share a name.