A Sewer Socialist correction

Last week’s lengthy look at the weird right-wing politics of Vancouver was a really fun piece to write. I want to thank the nearly 60% of subscribers who opened up that edition and gave it a read-through (Substack gives me weird stats and I don’t often know what to do with them, so there’s a random one for you!).

But I made a mistake pretty early on in the piece. Right after a fancy chart, I wrote: “Vancouver’s right-wing mayor, former police officer Ken Sim, has run wild with this unchecked power…” That was incorrect. Sim was a fairly standard businessman who co-founded something called Nurse Next Door, a home healthcare business that now operates around the world. It was Fred Harding, the NPA’s last-minute replacement candidate for Vancouver mayor in 2022, who was a former police officer. I unfortunately mixed up the career credentials of the 2018 and 2022 NPA mayoral candidates, so I apologize.

I have to admit, I make plenty of mistakes in these newsletters (and will likely be in this week’s too). They’re mainly of the grammatical, spelling, and formatting variety and that’s usually because I’m writing quickly, juggling a billion thoughts, and more often-than-not managing the erratic hunger levels/attention needs of two cats.

Still, I try to be responsible and get my facts straight. I appreciate it when folks reach out to let me know about mistakes and good points, corrections and positive comments. I’m not a journalist (I don’t have the stomach to do even half the work excellent journalists do on a daily basis), but, even though I’m just providing commentary, history, and perspectives, doesn’t mean I won’t always try to do my best.

The Party

A slow news week

Monday was a big day, so we should probably break down what happened because the ramifications of a few decisions will be with us for a long, long time.

First off, (actually “second” off, but more on that later) the Ford government announced it was reversing imposed changes to the official plans of 12 municipalities. These contentious and wildly unpopular changes forced Hamilton to expand its urban boundary, despite overwhelming citizen opposition. These changes amounted to government-mandated urban sprawl, so the reversal is welcome news that should have been the top story of the day.

Unfortunately, these changes were announced shortly before the provincial legislature was set to vote on a motion which would have censured Hamilton Centre MPP Sarah Jama (it passed and so MPP Jama will now be formally ignored in the legislature). This was a transparent bit of obfuscation from the government, as the Tories knew that their chest thumping about Jama would be an effective distraction from their sharp policy reversal. Unable to avoid the bait, journalists would likely fixate on the flashy censure motion relating to the controversial MPP rather than ask technical questions about urban boundary changes.

Instead of focusing on the utter disrespect for democracy that was the imposed urban boundary expansion, all anyone could talk about was the politically-motivated distraction tactic that was the motion to censure Sarah Jama and about her new status as an independent MPP.

After it happened, it was trending on Twitter/X and became the top story on the CBC for hours, even after Canada’s broadcaster published a story about how Hamas released two elderly Israeli hostages.

Later reports from The Trillium indicate that Jama was ejected from caucus following a speech she made on the floor of the legislature that differed from one she had submitted to the party. Evidently, a more cautious version passed party approval, but Jama’s speech on the floor was more explicit in its references to Israeli “occupation”. There have also been references to the fact that Jama’s original statement has been “pinned” to the top of her X/Twitter account despite assurances that she’d remove it.

The affair continued to spiral, making it into a House of Commons debate that same day when Deputy Leader of the Conservative Party Melissa Lantsman tried to tie Matthew Green and Jagmeet Singh to Jama, who she called an “anti-Semitic MPP”.

And, on Wednesday, NDP MPP Jill Andrews of Toronto-St. Paul’s announced that she was unaware of the decision to remove Sarah Jama from the NDP, that the caucus had no say in the matter, and that she does not support Jama’s expulsion.

A subsequent CBC article indicated that Former NDP MPP Laura Mae Lindo similarly opposed Sarah’s expulsion while sitting NDP MPP Doly Begum supports Stiles’s decision. But support for Sarah has been pouring in, from riding association presidents resigning in protest to people like Avi Lewis calling out the decision of the ONDP. On Thursday morning, the Kitchener Centre ONDP riding association took the step of asking Marit Stiles to resign, joining the Hamilton Centre ONDP riding association which called for Sarah’s return to caucus and a review of Stiles’s leadership, further deepening the divides in the party.

***

Remember how I said the urban boundary thing was the “second” story of Monday?

Even before the reversal of the urban boundary decision, Global released an investigation into LiUNA’s connection to the whole Greenbelt scandal. The investigation looks at Lucy Faiella, the executive assistant for LiUNA International Vice-President Joe Mancinelli, who owned 78 acres of the land that was re-designated for housing when the Ford government cut pieces from the Greenbelt.

Like the Mancinelli family, Faiella has donated to the Ontario PC Party. LiUNA was a big supporter of the provincial Tories, throwing wads of cash at the election and formally endorsing Doug Ford’s re-election bid. The fact that people who were so close to LiUNA just so happened to own land that became far more valuable after the party they endorsed won re-election and gutted environmental regulations should have been one of the top stories of the day, but it wasn’t.

What a week.

Trustee Time

I like to keep tabs on the news surrounding Canada’s least-understood and most-overlooked elected officials: school trustees. There are quite a few trustee-related stories this week that more folks should know about, so…class is in session!

An abundance of trustees

There’s been a lot of turnover on the Waterloo Catholic District School Board (WCDSB). In April, Wendy Ashby, who was then a trustee for Kitchener-Wilmot, apologized after far-right groups widely circulated screenshots of Ashby’s Twitter account, particularly a tweet sent a week before the 2022 election which read: "The most dangerous creature on the planet is the white Christian male. They're a threat to anyone that is not them."

Ashby is a Métis woman and a strong supporter of the queer community. Her tweets reflect a frustration many feel about the propensity for white men, hiding behind their faith, to be enthusiastically bigoted. It was likely even more difficult for Ashby to be a Catholic trustee, considering one of her Toronto colleagues - white Catholic male Michael Del Grande - tried to get the Toronto Catholic District School Board to formally equate queerness with bestiality and pedophilia.

Ashby apologized, deleted her Twitter account, and reaffirmed her support for the queer community in the face of unrelenting attacks from the right. But, at a board meeting in April, the Christian-nationalist group Campaign Life Coalition and the far-right, conspiracy group Parents as First Educators, as well as reporters for the far-right Rebel News YouTube channel disrupted proceedings and caused the whole thing to descend into chaos.

Her fellow board members got spooked and initiated a Code of Conduct review while the far-right pressure groups in the area kept up their campaign to force Ashby off the board. Not willing to allow this to distract from the WCDSB’s work, Ashby resigned a few weeks later.

The WCDSB appointed Julie Molenaar, who placed 5th in the 2022 election, to replace Ashby. But then, this week, Molenaar resigned for undisclosed reasons, meaning that a runner-up in a different ward, Winston Francis, will be appointed, marking the third trustee the area has had in under a year.

While both Ashby and Molenaar were declared “unsupportable” by the Campaign Life Coalition because of their support for “homosexual ideology”, Francis has been given their “green light” for his apparent “pro-family and [anti-choice]” beliefs.

Looks like the far-right was able to bully their way onto the WCDSB.

Sproporzionato e senza precedenti nella sua gravità

About a month ago, I wrote about the extremely harsh penalty trustees of the York Catholic District School Board (YCDSB) handed down to their colleague, Theresa McNichol. The entire situation around McNichol has been strange, with accusations of anti-Italian discrimination, requests for extra security at board meetings, and the YCDSB saying land acknowledgements were “an affront to their Catholicity”.

McNichol asked for the board of the YCDSB to perform a land acknowledgement before a meeting. According to McNichol, that was a request to which other trustees strongly objected, declaring it to be offensive to put anything before the Lord’s Prayer at their meetings. McNichol claimed that other trustees became heated, causing her to fear for her safety. She then took the odd step of asking for more security at meetings…on her Facebook page…in Italian. An independent report indicated that McNichol had referred to a group of her colleagues as “the Italian trustees”, had a history of using Italian in communication with some of her colleagues, saying that “it was the only way her colleagues would understand [her]”, and that the requests for extra protection also included implications her colleagues had ties to organized crime.

After the independent report was issued, her colleagues turned around and banned her from meetings for the remainder of her term, meaning the trustee who has served since 2003 and was re-elected with 66% of the vote in 2022, would not attend meetings ever again, unless she was re-elected in 2026.

But, according to her lawyers, the board didn’t follow proper procedure, initiating the investigation months after the alleged incidents. The anti-Italian comments were made prior to the 2022 election, after which a new crop of trustees decided, on their own, to launch an investigation, despite a formal complaint never being submitted. In fact, one of McNichol’s colleagues - Board vice-chair Maria Iafrate - only initiated a complaint after the report was released and 14 months after the alleged incidents. Her lawyers similarly note that the board used the wrong policies, accusing her of violating policies intended for staff, not trustees. On top of all that, barring a trustee for three years is actually not a punishment allowed by the Education Act (soon…the law was changed in June and isn’t in force yet, but the new Section 213.8 of the act limits the “you can’t come to meetings” bit to 90 days).

The board meets today to discuss how they’ll respond and make a final decision on McNichol this coming Saturday.

Brandon Behave

Finally, we turn to Manitoba, where the Brandon School Division (the Manitoba name for a school board) has been dealing with regular presentations from a group of people, central among them being Lorraine Hackenschmidt, an elderly woman (and former trustee who is a regular donor to the Conservative Party) worried about what she calls “transgender books” in the school library (book in French is “livre”, which is a masculine word, Lorraine) (also sorry for all the brackets here).

Back in May, a group of far-right folks (led by Hackenschmidt) tried to initiate a review of books in the school district, but the Brandon trustees voted against that in a 6 to 1 vote.

Since then, far-right activists and Christian Nationalists have been inundating Brandon School District meetings with requests to speak on anti-trans issues, creating pro-Christian classes, and other pet issues to the fringe.

On Monday, Hackenschmidt once again attended a board meeting where she once again tried to read from a homophobic speech and was once again stopped from doing so. Board chair Linda Ross said at the meeting: "We have to put a stop to it if people are just saying the same thing over and over again without presenting new information…Things like tonight, where people are just saying really hateful things, we have to put a stop to that."1

Now the board is taking steps to work with the Manitoba School Board Association on adapting their policies to address the regular disruptions from the far-right. But good on the current trustees for being so diligent in shutting down hate.

Six$$$

Matt Elliot of Toronto’s City Hall Watcher has a cool piece up on his Substack about the money that floated around in the Toronto mayoral by-election. There are some really cool facts in the in-depth investigation, including how:

• Ana Bailão spent loads of cash on swanky fundraisers

• Far-right candidate Anthony Furey raked in $112,400 from an event he held with Jordan Peterson

• Brad Bradford earned slightly more from a big event packed full of developers

• Xiao Hua Gong spent over $200 per vote and raised most of his money from people in “the 905”

• Chris Sky hates paperwork as much as vaccines and is disqualified from running in the city’s next election for failure to submit financial documents

Definitely give that one a read!

Party down

One of the first editions of this newsletter focused on the city’s extremely heavy-handed and overtly anti-student Nuisance Party By-law, which criminalizes people for seeking community rather than providing them with a healthy outlet. Adopting a laissez faire attitude toward the “university district” (as the by-law and police call it), local leaders and university admin have allowed private landlords to swoop in an exploit students, have sought to hinder the creation of suitable third-spaces near campus, and have an outdated and frankly unrealistic idea of what “student life” is, meaning that Mac students have to create their own celebratory gathering spaces, even if that means taking over city streets to do so.

The Nuisance Party By-law turns parts of Westdale and Ainslie Wood into veritable police states for a period of time, with utterly dystopian signage like this being put up:

But while scrolling through Instagram the other day, I saw a “reel” (likely a repackaged TikTok…I’m a millennial, don’t judge) wherein a student attended one of those “nuisance parties” during Homecoming carrying this sign:

Yeah, that’s a printout of the condescending email sent to students instructing them to “not attend street parties”, turned into a giant sign, like the ones people bring to raves.

Mac students see the Nuisance Party By-law for what it is: a joke. By cracking down on these events, we’re further widening the divide between “town” and “gown” that’s been caused by greedy investors and negligent authorities. It is long past time civic leaders, university officials, and student representatives sit down to have an honest conversation about building community on campus.

That’s not catchy enough to make it onto a sign held during the next block party, but you get where I’m coming from.

Cool facts for cool people

• Ontario’s Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, Paul Calandra, asked members of the NDP to call a phone sex line in the Ontario Legislature. Calandra, one of the smarmiest politicians in the country, thought he was being clever when he told the Ontario NDP to “call your friend in Ottawa, Mr. Singh, Jagmeet, 1-800-Jagmeet, and say ‘remove taxes…carbon taxes, because that will help put more money back in people’s pockets’.” Unfortunately, 1-800-Jagmeet is 1-800-524-6338, which is a toll-free number for a service called 1-800-FreeSex. Global’s Colin D’Mello found that out when, out of curiosity, he called the number. This is why it is important to do some research before blurting stuff out that’ll become part of the official record.

• Former Iqaluit city councillor Noah Papatsie is calling out Elections Nunavut for their seeming disinterest in helping people with disabilities run for local office. Papatsie is blind and uses a text-to-speech program to read. Unfortunately, Elections Nunavut has not offered the required election documents in a format that can be read by the program. What’s worse, the City of Iqaluit’s returning officer told Papatsie nomination forms were due on November 22 when, in reality, they were due on September 22. More work has to be done to ensure people living with disabilities can participate fully in our democracy - including as candidates. Elections Nunavut and the City of Iqaluit should do better by Papatsie.