…but first, a word from The Incline.

Note to self: insert semi-regular apology about my posting schedule here but don’t leave this in because this is a very serious newsletter and you’re a very serious newsletter writer so definitely remember to delete this. And if you leave this in as a bit, chances are, it’ll fall flat.

I haven’t been very consistent with my publishing schedule as of late. Since 2026 began four thousand years ago, I’ve posted once on a Monday, twice on Thursdays, and one time each on a Friday and Saturday. And now it’s Tuesday! Absolute chaos.

Some of that is thanks to when things happen in the community. Some of it has to do with how much research I need to do for a piece to get it ready. And some of it has to do with the trillion little projects I have on the go at any one minute.

All that is to say, I apologize if the somewhat erratic posting schedule of this newsletter isn’t to your liking. I am doing what I can to keep this newsletter going. Despite some ups and many, many downs, I’ve managed to make it through 119 of these editions, albeit on a somewhat less-than-consistent schedule.

The note here today is to say that expect more inconsistency over the next while. This is a municipal election year and I’m doing what I can do help inform the community in the lead-up to October 26. But it’s also…you know…a municipal election year and I’m not one for sitting on the sidelines. I help out where I can, provide advice when it’s asked for, and, in some instances, participate in academic research on the candidates and campaigns. While I’m not working directly for any one candidate at any level in any capacity at the moment, I’m keeping myself open to helping when and where I can. That could mean that this newsletter might not come out as frequently as we get into campaign season come summer.

But this note is also to say that this edition is coming out today for a reason.

From what I understand, there will be at least one big municipal election announcement coming shortly. Political watchers across Hamilton would be wise to keep their eyes on things over the next while. I don’t want any edition of my newsletter competing with any announcements, so you’re getting a Tuesday edition instead of the usual…umm…whenever edition.

So thanks, as always, for reading. And for sticking with me as long as you have. I appreciate all the insights, the comments, and the support. My work on this newsletter helps to remind me just how wonderful this city of ours can be, especially when people come together with a common purpose.

And, with that, enjoy today’s edition.

In Decline

Anyone who flippantly says they don’t pay attention to Canadian politics because it’s “too boring” is simply not paying enough attention. What’s transpired over the past week itself would be enough to round out a full 12-episode season of a show about Canadian politics, though some of the events are more suited to comedy while others are distinctly in the category of tragedy.

Federally, things have been going exceptionally well for Progressive Conservative Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney. This is, in large part, because of how terribly things are going for Reform Party Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre.

Poilievre faced a leadership review at his party’s convention back at the end of January. The delegates decided to stick with him, with 87 percent of those assembled voting to retain him as party leader until their next convention. While he may be super appealing to the party base, a recent Angus Reid poll shows 62 percent of Canadians think he’s doing a poor/very poor job of being the Conservative leader. That makes sense, considering that, for the past year, Canadians have been watching as Poilievre stumbles at every possible hurdle. Just this month, he’s fallen flat on his face more times than not.

Over the past few weeks, Poilievre has been struggling to even mount an effective defence against one of his own MPs. The increasingly MAGA-aligned Bowmanville-Oshawa North MP Jamil Jivani (a close personal friend of American Vice President JD Vance) scooted off to the States for some weird unsanctioned diplomatic mission and said the whole “elbows up” response to the existential threats to our sovereignty coming from the American administration were a “hissy fit”.

The comments made during Jivani’s trip to Mordor required Poilievre to issue a stinging rebuke against his own MP. Poilievre knows he needs to project strength to fend off the weak, albeit consistently circling wolves, but he also needed to show an ambitious underling he still has some fight in him. Jivani undoubtedly has his eyes on the Conservative Party’s leadership (a Jivani-led party would be both terrifying thanks to his extreme right-wing views and laughable because of how easy it would be for a savvy opponent to brand him a Quisling), so Poilievre couldn’t just sit back and let him carry on with his shadow campaign.

Adding to his woes, Edmonton Riverbend’s Conservative MP, Matt Jeneroux, announced on February 18 that he was crossing the floor to the Liberals. Jeneroux was one of the early Conservative MPs rumoured to be considering a switch after the last election. But, after his name was leaked, he announced he would be resigning instead. This most recent announcement seems to have cancelled out his previous one, meaning he’s going to stick around to back Carney’s agenda for the foreseeable future. His “jk lol nevermind (^_^;)” moment happened after, as he said during his press conference with the Prime Minister, he had serious chats with his family over the holidays and after Carney’s world-order-defining Davos speech. "For me it felt disingenuous and quite simply wrong to be sitting on the sidelines anymore.” he said.¹ Probably has nothing to do with the fact that the Liberals are actually competitive federally in Alberta for the first time since the 1911 federal election.

With Jeneroux on the government benches, the Liberals are just three seats shy of a majority. Helpfully, there are three by-elections on the horizon. Two of those are likely Liberal wins, while the third (the Montreal-area riding of Terrebonne where the 2025 election results were annulled by the Supreme Court because of a 1 vote difference between the winner and runner-up) could go either to the Liberals or the Bloc. And there’s the possibility that Alexandre Boulerice, the NDP MP for the Montreal riding of Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie will resign to run in the Quebec provincial election this fall, which opens up another chance for the Liberals to increase their seat count (Boulerice is the only NDPer elected east of the Red River and politicos have speculated that he held onto his seat because of his personal popularity, not because he was affiliated with the party).

So, all-in-all, it has been a good few weeks for Carney.

In Ontario, on the other hand, Premier Doug Ford has had a…scattered few weeks. Ford, famous for his insistence that youth don’t need no fancy book learning, earned a little bit of scorn after his government announced sweeping changes to the way post-secondary institutions are funded. Then, after hearing from concerned students across the province, Ford doubled down and made comments about students needing to not take “basket-weaving courses” (a line reliably thrown out by your most out-of-touch drunk uncle during Thanksgiving dinner after he doesn’t get any response to his comments about how many genders there are now - he just wants validation and another bottle of Ex, galdernit!). The Premier’s sad standup routine angered everyone from already pissed off students to Indigenous craftspeople.

But Ford is nothing if not a master of “flooding the zone”. A little fight with Ontario’s future can’t get ol’ Uncle Doug down! Especially when there are a trillion little distractions he can toss out to keep us asking “what will he do next?!” A totally good a normal way to run a government.

One of those distractions was a genuine surprise. Or, at least, it would have been to a sadist who slipped into a coma in 2023 and only just now emerged, ready to get back to what really gets them going: consuming as much news as possible.

During a press conference with Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow, Ford publicly said he wouldn’t meddle in municipal democracy (*the collective groan from school board trustees can be heard as far away as Saskatchewan*) this time around. "I'm not getting involved in the municipal election. All I can tell you: I've had a phenomenal relationship with [Chow]," he told reporters.² Chow has gone to great lengths to not provoke the Mayor Premier of Ontario and has, in some instances, even gone out of her way to placate him. This has given her more latitude to advance her own agenda and puts her in a good position to win re-election in October.

• Side note: a Mainstreet poll came out today about the Toronto mayoral race. Chow leads John Tory 43% to 34% with hard-right councillor Bradford Bradford in at 17% and far-right populist candidate Anthony Furey at 6%. Even though Mainstreet’s poll has Chow leading, they note that “a majority of Toronto voters indicate they preferred the direction of the City under Tory”. Mainstreet frames this as a problem for Chow, not realizing that, for all the money at his disposal, Tory can’t make it 2015 again. Cool that people said they liked it better when Tory was mayor, but that world is dead and gone. Unless something dramatic changes, Chow’s in a great spot.

Chow’s strategy to keep Ford occupied while actually getting things done gives her a chance to run as both a progressive and a pragmatic leader - someone who is doing everything she can to keep Toronto on track despite a cratering housing market and looming economic uncertainty. While her opponents, like Bradford and Furey, will do everything they can to make the October election about Toronto’s decline and the rise of “dangerous” social disorder, Chow’s record gives her a chance to run as a positive, responsible, city-building candidate.

In other places, municipal candidates won’t have to do much work to frame the election as a choice between stability and decline.

smash cut to…

A couple of stories came out recently that have the potential to impact Hamilton’s upcoming civic election. More specifically, they lend credence to the cries from the city’s right-wing contingent that Hamilton is in decline and that decline began the second our current mayor and council took office.

This isn’t hyperbolic; a striking example comes from the first response on Bluesky to local journalist Joey Coleman’s story about the floated closure of the Central Branch of the Hamilton Public Library, in which an anonymous user blamed Ward 2 Councillor Cameron Kroetsch “and friends” for the concept of public drug use.

I suppose I have to update my idea of history. I didn’t realize all laws were suspended, government policy changed, and public drug use kicked off on November 15, 2022. But if an anonymous reply guy account with 7 followers says that this is the first council in Hamilton’s history to serve only drug users and ruin the city with “ideology”, then I guess it’s true!

***

The first story that’s worth considering comes from The Spec. On February 9, the city’s paper of record put a call out to their readers asking for tips on “Hamilton’s worst pothole”. Anyone who has used or been in a motor vehicle on the city’s roads knows that would be a fierce competition, particularly after the brutal winter we have just endured.

The results of that survey were published 10 days later. That’s the story we’ll focus on here. The article goes over a sampling of the results from the paper’s survey, noting that “roughly 20 people” responded to their call for tips.

Oof.

We don’t have updated circulation reports for The Spec, but that does not seem great. Sure, the paper’s online content is heavily paywalled and the original call for tips did not appear in the print edition, but 20 is a low number of respondents for complaints about potholes in Hamilton, considering people in this city tend to talk about potholes more than the weather, the housing market, and insert sports team here.

***

A bit of a longer side note here, but I’d argue the response to the Spec speaks to the health of our civic democracy in the city. Only 20 people are willing to help identify a problem so it can be brought to light, but there are over 40 comments combined on the article calling for tips and the article featuring the results. The majority of those comments complain, once again, about the current council and mayor, sometimes for even pursuing the solutions they want them to pursue.

Roads need to be fixed, they shout, but the plan to fix Barton Street is a “political stunt”. We need to hire more people to fill potholes, but it won’t help because potholes are purposely filled incorrectly so “city workers will always have a job.” We have to improve the quality of our roads but “spending millions…converting Main St to two way” isn’t good because we should be spending “the money on repaving our existing roads” even though part of the money dedicated to the conversion will be for repaving. The city is spending hundreds of millions of dollars maintaining a sprawling, out-of-date, overengineered, unproductive, dangerous, and illogical network of over 6,500 kilometres of roadway, but our civic leaders “do not like people who drive cars,” they smugly clack into the ether as the mild-melting blue light of their computer screens tricks them into believing it’s a substitute for real, meaningful, in-person connection.

In the second episode of season six of Parks and Recreation, Amy Poehler’s character, Councillor Leslie Knope, is trying to improve her standing in the community amidst a recall campaign by some of her well-funded opponents. She decides to, in a nod to Rob Ford’s style of hands-on politics, do everything she can to help her constituents with a program called “No Problem Too Small”. One of her more outspoken neighbours, Gretel, comes into her office with a complaint: “There are slugs everywhere on the sidewalk in front of my house. I want them gone, but not killed. I love animals. But get rid of them. They're gross. But make sure they're happy…but not too happy.” So Knope goes out, finds a humane and safe slug repellant, and does what Gretel asks. Upon seeing this, Gretel is outraged, and yells “I didn’t want all the slugs gone! I wanted most of them gone!”

I try to remember that episode every time I make the mistake of scrolling too far down on a story and glancing at the Spec’s comments section because it’s cheaper than flying to Türkiye, getting a hair transplant, coming home, and then tearing it all out with my bare hands in frustration. For some, complaining endlessly and finding fault with every single thing a municipality does is their way of participating in democracy. Having civic watchdogs is great, but there’s a big difference between being Lassie and Cujo.

Anyway, back to potholes.

***

The state of Hamilton’s roads is a source of constant frustration and aspiring civic politicians seem to be taking note. Ward 12 candidate resident Fred Bennink’s campaign concerned citizen page has, as his first platform point concern, “1. Build Roads That Work”. It isn’t a stretch to imagine a host of right-wing candidates for council across Hamilton promising to be better roadbuilders.

And Vito Sgro’s pre-campaign period mayoral candidate “news personality” Facebook page includes a recent video of a “tour” he went on of some of Hamilton’s potholes of note. “Our taxes have increased by a whopping 30% this term, but are our roads getting better? From massive potholes to sudden sinkholes, our city's infrastructure is crumbling,” he writes. What’s the plan, Vito? How are you going to deal with aging infrastructure and all the problems caused by decades of deferring essential roadwork by councils packed to the gills with members who voted for artificially low tax rates to help their re-election efforts? Are there any real ideas or are we just resting on the clunky hashtag “#DemandABetterHamilton”?

The city’s infrastructure is in dire need of improvement and the political gamesmanship around deferring much-needed maintenance will only make the situation worse as time goes on. Clearly and effectively communicating the cost of maintaining the road network we have is absolutely essential to keeping Hamiltonians informed about the needs associated with their infrastructure. But addressing this issue will take a leader with long-term vision and short-term savvy.

Shortly after coming into office, Mayor Chow in Toronto launched a “pothole blitz”. The blitz was both a very public reminder of what a municipal government can do and an acknowledgement that it takes hard work to fix the problems we face. These blitzes are now yearly events in which the mayor herself participates, putting on a hi-vis vest, a hard hat, and helping to maintain the city’s infrastructure. Just this week, she announced another blitz to address the huge potholes caused by this year’s painfully harsh winter.

That’s the short-term savvy.

But we need long-term vision too. We aren’t getting that from some of the candidates in the field and councillors around the horseshoe right now. We’re getting complaints about tax increases paired with complaints about poor services. The same people who are painting a picture of a city in decline are the same advocating the loudest for deferred maintenance and lower taxes - the same kind of unbalanced thinking oozing from the Spec’s comments section.

The second story comes from the CBC. In a piece with some excellent on-the-ground reporting from Samantha Beattie, CBC Hamilton outlined the concerns and issues held by tenants of First Place, a CityHousing Hamilton senior’s building constituting the entire block between Main, King, Wellington, and West Ave in the far southwest corner of the Landsdale neighbourhood.

Some of the residents have self-organized a program - Senior Watch - that checks in on their fellow tenants who might be isolated or have specific needs. But, in early January, the program was put on hold due to increasing concerns from residents about the state of their building. The volunteers who check in on their neighbours have complained about “needles, pipes, blood, vomit, spilled food and drinks, garbage…the remnants of fires” and excrement, an encounter with the latter of which being the reason the program coordinator put Senior Watch on hold.³

City staff jumped into action and worked with the volunteers to restart the program. But they noted that they only have two full-time and one part-time cleaners on staff and they’re fighting an uphill battle when it comes to limiting access to the building to just tenants. Beattie and a resident even found “a side entrance that appeared to have recently been broken into” while touring the building, leading to an on-the-spot call to First Place’s security.³

Providing safe, accessible, and affordable housing is getting harder and harder for municipalities. Far too much of the burden falls on municipalities, which do not have the funding streams available to adequately maintain the housing stock they have and build new, modern units for people. The province is starving the public housing sector in a blatant, ideological attempt to shift responsibility to non-profits and the private sector. And while it’s all well and good to bring that up, it doesn’t change the day-to-day experiences of people living in existing social housing units. We can have these debates until the end of time, but, when residents of one of the city’s landmark towers are calling it “Last Place” and are desperately seeking alternative housing, it’s clear we need real action, and soon.

***

That ties into the third story. This one was first published by local independent journalist Joey Coleman. Last week, the Hamilton Public Library’s (HPL) Chief Librarian Paul Takala openly speculated that the Central branch - the HPL’s flagship and one of the cornerstones of the core - might need to be “temporarily closed” to, as Coleman reported, “disrupt the pattern of drug use…before someone is accidentally poisoned by unintentional exposure.”⁴

Takala provided stats, including the fact that there’s been a 60 percent drop in the number of children’s materials checked out of the Central branch. Coleman’s reporting also included a laundry list of other incidents that have been connected to drug use in the core, including Hamilton Police Service (HPS) notices of “drug dealers” being arrested in and around Central and Jackson Square, the closure of the downtown Federal Court due to fears of “random violence”, and the library’s decision to close on Sundays due to understaffing and safety concerns.

The CBC picked up the reporting and, just yesterday, published an update. Central will not be closed in any capacity, but the HPL is exploring other options to better manage the space, such as requiring people to show their library card to access the space. The HPL’s librarians - truly some of this community’s most dedicated and passionate civic employees who deserve as much support, praise, and compensation as we can provide - are doing what they can with the resources they have, but they can’t do it alone.

***

Complaints about open drug use, particularly in the core, are commonplace now. In the thread on the r/Hamilton subreddit about the aforementioned CBC article, users overwhelmingly express relief that the Central branch won’t be closed, but have still shared some of their stories about uncomfortable experiences in public places. Public drug use is jarring for many and, in the case of those who have struggled with substances in the past, may be deeply triggering. When combined with untreated or poorly treated mental health issues and the host of other factors some users contend with, it can create situations that are, at the very least, unpredictable and unsettling for everyone.

The flippant responses from the more online of our community’s somewhat…militant commenters that people simply “get over it” doesn’t take into account the fact that people know very little about drug use aside from what has been fed to us by moralizing agencies and law enforcement. Couple that with the fact that drugs are changing rapidly and that, since the start of the COVID-19 Pandemic, the whole system of social service provision and treatment have been thrown into chaos, and you get the situation we are in now. Mocking those residents who express concern about drug use also doesn’t do anything to help those who are impacted by the less-public-facing side of open drug use: the toxic drug crisis.

Just yesterday, the Spec reported on the ongoing work of McMaster and Hamilton Health Sciences researchers who have been monitoring the number of deaths in the community of people experiencing homelessness. Hamilton lost 32 people between June 2024 and May 2025 - 148 since they began collecting data in 2022. 11 of the deaths in the recent study period were from overdoses, leading the researchers to note that such losses make it “difficult not to reflect on the provincially mandated closure” of Hamilton’s consumption treatment services (CTS) site.⁵

Opioid toxicity deaths in Ontario began spiking during the COVID-19 Pandemic. While they began to decline as we left the worst of the Pandemic behind, they have begun to trend upward again as the clumsy provincial shift away from CTS sites to their abstinence-only services has been slow, uncoordinated, and challenged by medical professionals who actually know what they’re doing. Without safe, supervised places to use and scattered addictions supports, people using drugs where they can and where it’s warm. That means the Central library or the stairwells of First Place or the food court at Jackson Square.

That clearly gives people the impression that downtown isn’t safe. I’ve written about this before, but, despite falling crime numbers, people say they feel unsafe because of, in the words of the HPS, “concerns about social disorder, open drug use, and property crime”. If people feel unsafe, then they don’t venture downtown, don’t patronize shops, don’t go to shows, don’t check books out of the library, don’t consider moving into the lower city. They retreat to their fortresses with their Ring cameras and their fast cars and avoid their neighbours. We lose a sense of community and the revenue that comes with people engaging in commerce. Things hollow out, there’s less of a desire to invest in social services, and the situation gets worse. It becomes a never-ending cycle.

And that’s where the perception of “a city in decline” comes from.

***

We know that candidates in the upcoming election will weaponize the perception of decline. They’ll point to every article from the Spec or the CBC or every post from Joey Coleman that highlights something negative happening in the city as evidence that the clock on Hamilton’s decline started on November 15, 2022.

That may be a cynical political move by predominantly right-wing candidates, but it may be effective in the absence of a concerted effort to share meaningful ideas on how to fix the problems we face. So candidates and community members have to get on countering the narratives with real policies, real perspectives, and real plans of action.

With regard to our roads, it’s about combining something like Chow’s short-term savvy with that long-term vision I mentioned earlier. That means reimagining what a city’s infrastructure network needs to look like and how roads can be built to minimize damage over the long term. While the commenters on the Spec and some members of council may bemoan the presence of bike lanes in Hamilton, the fact is that they help keep long-term infrastructure costs down. Safe, connected, accessible cycling infrastructure helps take cars off the road and a cyclist would need to make 17,000 trips to have the same impact as just one car trip does on the road. Removing some of the overengineered roadways in the industrial district that were designed for far more traffic than they see now can help, as can devoting more space to transit-only lanes, which carry more people more efficiently than general purpose lanes do.

On housing, candidates for council need to position themselves as relentless advocates who will push other levels of government, unlock all available non-profit funding, and work tirelessly to ensure money goes where it’s needed. New, innovative developments like some of the projects from Indwell like their “community bonds” initiative can bring the community together to provide housing for all. And everyday residents can remind their friends, coworkers, and neighbours that the city can’t provide housing all by itself. Pressure needs to be put on government MPs and MPPs to step up and do what’s right. Just because it’s a municipal election year doesn’t mean they’re off the hook for doing their jobs.

And, on drug use, candidates again have to act as advocates and educators, reminding the community that the problems we face are fixed by provincial action. The province needs to pursue evidence-based policies, listen to healthcare providers, and work to break the cycle of addiction in a way that supports everyone. The two points tie into one another; providing people with safe, affordable housing can be one of the best things for ensuring an individual takes sobriety seriously - another point noted in yesterday’s Spec article on the mortality rate for those experiencing homelessness.⁵

***

It isn’t impossible to counter the messaging that Hamilton is in decline. In fact, it’s pretty easy. Smart, honest, policy-based campaigns that lean into optimism and hope can quickly quash the chatter about our city’s imagined fall from grace.

Hamilton isn’t in decline. We’re facing issues like every other municipality. The Pandemic, the global economy, and the ideological priorities of other levels of government have made things harder. But those problems didn’t start when this term of council was sworn in on November 15, 2022. And they certainly won’t be fixed if we replace every member of council this October.

If we work together, we can address these issues we face - not by endlessly complaining about imagined decline, but by rolling up our sleeves, buckling down, and keeping our eyes on a better tomorrow.

1  _{Catharine Tunney. “MP Matt Jeneroux leaves Conservatives to join Liberals, citing 'national unity crisis'“ CBC News, February 18, 2026 (Link).}

2  _{Mahdis Habibinia. Ford coy on Chow's bid for re-election. Toronto Star, February 19, 2026 (Star link - Paywalled).}

3  _{Samantha Beattie. “In this city-run seniors' building, Hamilton residents say needles, urine, feces are only steps away” CBC Hamilton, February 19, 2026 (Link).}

4  _{Joey Coleman. “Hamilton’s Library Board Considers Temporary Closure of Central Library in Response to Problematic Drug Use” The Public Record, February 18, 2026 (Link).}

5  _{Teviah Moro. “With 32 more deaths, researchers behind Hamilton homeless mortality-data project make call for action” Hamilton Spectator, February 23, 2026 (Spec link - Free Access).}