On The Radar, Part 1

In the lead-up to Hamilton’s 2026 municipal election, there will be a few things that will pop up that warrant analysis. Some policies, discussions, and comments deserve a closer look, particularly when they’re aimed at or advanced by candidates for office.

In today’s edition - the first in a series - we’ll look at the accusations that some candidates are on the “extreme left” and why such labels might be politically useful for certain groups around Hamilton.

The left-wing spectre

So a plumber from Manchester, Ontario’s premier, and a pair of former Hamilton city councillors walk into a bar…

***

On February 26, there was a by-election for an open seat in the UK House of Commons in the Manchester-area constituency called “Gorton and Denton” (most constituency names in the UK are whimsical and almost aggressively British…may as well have been “Crumbledown-Badgershire-Royal Doulton With The Hand Painted Periwinkles-Upon-Thames”).

The by-election was called after the previous MP from the Labour Party resigned due to “poor health”. That mystery illness just so happened to come on following a leak of upsetting messages he had posted in a WhatsApp group chat with other Manchester-area Labour politicians. The group was apparently a space where they could all “blow off steam”, but was used by the now-former MP to gripe about constituents and make racist and anti-Semitic jokes about public figures and leaders in his own party.

The MP's resignation came at a terrible time for the UK’s establishment parties. The governing Labour Party under Prime Minister Sir Kier Starmer is wildly unpopular, having squandered every opportunity to make meaningful change in that country after years of post-Brexit chaos. The opposition Conservative Party has been rocked by internal turmoil thanks to the ideological rigidity of their new leader, which has led to a handful of defections to other parties.

The response from the establishment parties to the changing political landscape has been to rush to the right, particularly as the right-wing populist Reform UK party has taken the lead in the polls. Reform has claimed this is a sign of their popularity (imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and all that) while the left-wing vote has coalesced around the Green Party. The leader of the Greens, the openly gay, Jewish, vegan London Assembly member (basically a London councillor) Zack Polanski, has taken the party in an eco-socialist direction, blending concerns about the cost-of-living with a deeply hopeful and inspiring policy on prosperity through environmentalism.

The Gorton and Denton became a reflection of the UK’s shifting political landscape. The Labour and Conservative vote utterly collapsed and the race became a battle between the Green Party on the left and Reform UK on the populist right. In the end, the Greens captured the seat with over 40 percent of the vote, drawing nearly all their new support from disaffected former Labour voters.

Part of the reasons the Greens won is because they ran an unapologetically optimistic campaign. Their candidate, 34 year old plumber Hannah Spencer, presented a bright and hopeful vision of the future, providing people with something to believe in after years of divisive, dirty, dark politics peddled by entrenched political staffers. In her victory speech, Spencer once again leaned on optimism:

The by-election result seems to have really hurt Starmer, who has been facing some increasingly loud calls to resign. Considering the magnitude of the loss, the threat to his job has only increased; while Gorton and Denton was a relatively “new" constituency (having been created from pieces of other seats in 2024), parts of the area had been represented by Labour MPs since the 1930’s, meaning the symbolic loss of this previously safe seat can't be ignored. After the loss, Starmer had two options: either reflect on his decision to move the Labour Party to the right, consider the calls from his base and some of his own MPs to recalibrate, and pursue a more hopeful and principled set of policies or throw a temper tantrum and blame the Greens.

Naturally, Starmer lashed out. He quickly labelled the Green Party an “extreme left” group that relies on “divisive, sectarian politics” and would legalize “all drugs, including heroin and crack cocaine to give to adults”.² Who is advising Starmer? The Mayor of Vancouver?

Nigel Farage, the Brexit champion who leads Reform UK, echoed Starmer’s critiques. Reform had hopes that their openly anti-immigrant campaign (their candidate in Gorton and Denton pledged to stop all immigration to the UK) would appeal to a disenfranchised white working class, which makes up a significant portion of the constituency’s electorate. Farage raged against the victors, saying the Greens were part of a “resurgent hard left” that was violent, anti-Semitic, and a threat to the UK.²

The same day the by-election was held in Gorton and Denton, Ontario Premier Doug Ford was speaking to the media.

Ford continues to face the fallout from his populist decision to ban automated speed enforcement cameras across the province. Research shows they slow traffic and save lives, though the province’s official line is that they were nothing more than a “cash grab” for municipalities. But, Canada’s constitution is lopsided and provinces have the power to do whatever they want with municipalities, so Ford’s decree has become the law of the land.

The City of Toronto has been trying to figure out how to pivot. They relied, in part, on speed cameras to help change the behaviour of motorists in areas where other road improvements have not yet been implemented. As John Lorinc pointed out in Spacing, the speed camera that set this whole thing in motion (after it was vandalized over half a dozen times in a few short years) was located on Parkside Drive - a “dog’s breakfast” of a strip that has inconsistent sidewalks, barriers to fast-moving traffic, and an uneven terrain that makes the area unsafe for everyone. The speed camera wasn’t just put up for funsies; it was installed after a speeding driver killed two seniors in 2021. While the hope is that the offending section of road can be redesigned, a speed enforcement camera was a stop-gap way to change the behaviour of motorists and generate the revenue necessary to actually make the changes people wanted.³

After Ford’s decree, the City of Toronto got to work figuring out other ways to change the behaviour of road users to make their city’s streets safe. The final report on their plan came out a short while ago. Toronto’s traffic folks were blunt in their assessment: it would take around 13 years and $52 million to implement effective traffic calming in just the 775 kilometres of school zones around the city. Instead of proven programs that slowed traffic and generated revenue, the city would need to spend money and install lots of new infrastructure. A speedbump costs around $4,000 to install and, given the number they would need, it would cost ten of millions to get the job done.

Upon hearing this, the Premier flew into a rage. The next time he had a bank of cameras in front of him, Ford railed against the plan, threatening (once again) to use his provincial powers to take over Toronto: “Hand that over to me,” he shouted, “I’ll show you how to do a roundabout in months! I’ll show you how to do a speedbump!”⁴

The Premier is, of course, not a traffic engineer. He’s not a civil engineer or a construction expert or an urban planner or a safety specialist or a person with any level of identifiable knowledge on the intricacies of how civic infrastructure actually works. His only qualifications are four years as a member of Toronto City Council, during which time his contributions to road safety were limited to calling for the firing of the city’s Chief Medical Officer of Health when he suggested reducing speed limits on residential streets.⁵ But, again, the constitution gives him supreme power over municipalities, so what he says goes. Thanks, Sir John A.

Ford saved some of his ire for a different foe. True to form, our illustrious Premier doesn’t see the complexities of city building as an issue of time, money, and expertise. He sees it, and everything, through the populist lens; there’s an entrenched elite out there doing everything they can to stall “common sense” projects. We can absolutely just slap a speedbump down on a street in an afternoon for $50 a a case of beer for your buds who show up to help, but the elites want us to conduct all these whimpy “studies” and have fruity “consultation” and wokely make sure we aren’t cutting through any DEI “power lines” that might “electrocute” us with their pronouns.

The problem, according to Ontario’s Premier, is the “radical left” on Toronto city council.⁴

***

One day before the Gorton and Denton by-election and Ford’s speedbump meltdown, we got news that the 2026 municipal election here in Hamilton is heating up.

On Wednesday, February 25, Keanin Loomis announced he would again be seeking the office of Mayor of Hamilton. I attended his announcement at The Westdale Theatre having been invited as a ✧˖°. commentator of note .°˖✧ in Hamilton and took some photos to post on social media (though my post about it on the r/Hamilton subreddit was unceremoniously taken down - BOOOOO to the mods for karma blocking me).

Loomis's announcement was covered widely in local media, with The Spec’s Scott Radley writing that his candidacy comes at the right time considering Mayor Horwath’s rough go during the budget process and that Loomis “may even open the campaign as the favourite."⁶

Former Ward 4 Councillor Sam “The Wally Infiltrator” Merulla had another perspective.

In a break from his usual Facebook posts about his workout routine and updates on his blood pressure, Merulla posted “Keenan [sic] Loomis, a native USA citizen, is demonstrating dubious decision-making skills by pursuing the mayoral position in Hamilton. #hamont”.

He followed this with an image (hard to tell if it’s Photoshopped or AI-generated) of Loomis standing in front of an American flag, wearing a Team USA jersey, with a gold medal around his neck.

I know Merulla was trying to paint Loomis as “not a real Hamiltonian” but like…he knows that gold medals go to the winners, right?

• Side note: I was genuinely curious about the origin of the mayors of Hamilton since the city’s founding in 1846. We have readily-available biographical information on 45 of the 57 people who have served as Hamilton’s mayor in that time. Only six were born in Hamilton while 39 were both anywhere from Grimsby to Tuscany. Some of the city’s most recognizable mayors were all “outsiders” - George Tuckett (who built the Scottish Rite) and Sam Lawrence were both born in England, Lloyd Jackson was born outside Sarnia, and Vic Copps was born in Northern Ontario. All of the six who were born in Hamilton were elected after the year 1900: four between 1900 and 2000 and two since amalgamation in 2001. Two Americans served as mayor of Hamilton - John Fisher in 1850 and William Kerr in 1853. Fisher would even go on to serve in the US House of Representatives as a Republican in the post-Civil War era after he was mayor of Hamilton.

While Merulla went with the jingoist anti-American approach, former Ward 2 Councillor Jason Farr chimed in with a slightly different line.

Commenting on Merulla’s post, Farr expressed concern "as a born and raised Steel City kid”, saying that Loomis had “been spending months running around with [former Hamilton-Wentworth Regional Chair] Terry Cooke and his other Hard Left supporters” instead of advocating for steel manufacturers. The lengthy comment is extremely difficult to follow, but it seems Farr is upset that Loomis, who serves as the CEO of the Canadian Institute of Steel Construction (the industry advocacy group for steel manufacturers), has decided to run for mayor instead of stay in this position. That line is a fairly standard critique. It doesn’t matter what someone’s political affiliation or aspirations are - anyone other than a retired politician or broadcaster in Hamilton can and will be accused of “abandoning” their job to seek public office by their cynical political opponents. That tired line isn’t what’s important here.

What’s important is the language Farr used at the beginning of his comment.

It’s the same language establishment figures in the UK have used to describe an environmentalist plumber who won a by-election. It’s the same language the Premier uses to attack Toronto city councillors and staff who have a better understanding of the complexities of city building than he does. It’s the same language bandied about by the thought leaders in the comments section of local blogs like the Bay Observer and the few who bother to post comments on thespec.com.

“Hard Left”.

That’s objectively weird, right?

Characterizing Cooke and Loomis as “hard left” indicates either a) a complete lack of understanding of the basics of politics, or b) a deliberate attempt to portray a political opponent in a strategically unflattering way.

But politics in Hamilton isn’t exactly known for its subtly, nor are Hamilton’s civic leaders (past, present, and future) all renowned for their cogent grasp of political theory. So I guess it’s time for little Poli Sci 101 here.

Farr’s confusing comment implies either or both Loomis and Cooke have “hard left” political sympathies.

When it comes to the latter, the label “hard left” would be baffling for anyone who has any local political historical knowledge. During his nearly two decades in municipal politics here in Hamilton, Cooke (who I should note is a friend of the newsletter) was described in local media as a “red Tory” (sometimes just a plain ol’ “Tory”), “radical bourgeois”, a “small-l liberal”, a “bright, moderate centrist”, and a “conservative, but not uncaring”.⁷ Just for context, the definition of “red Tory” is one who believes in centre-right, pro-business policies while acknowledging the state has a place in the provision of some services but should be a little less involved in people’s private lives.

And, as for the once-and-current mayoral contender, “hard left” is likely the last thing anyone thinks of when they think of the former CEO of the Hamilton Chamber of Commerce. It is possible that the former councillor was associating Loomis’s past support for the city’s SoBi bikeshare system, the Basic Income Pilot Project, and the LRT as evidence of “hard left” sympathies, but each of those have been supported by such eclectic allies as populist Liberal MP JP Danko (SoBi), the Canadian Chamber of Commerce (Basic Income), and Conservative donor Joe Mancinelli (LRT).⁸

So all of this begs the question: what does “hard left” even mean?

***

Okay, let’s do a rapid fire primer on political ideologies.

France, 1789. The country is slowly collapsing due to a widespread financial and social crisis gripping the reign of the ineffectual King Louis XVI. A National Assembly is called. Monarchists - “the party of order”, meaning supporters of the king, the established order, and the system as it was - sat to the right of the chair. Revolutionaries - “the party of movement”, meaning those who wanted change, equality, democracy, and freedom - sat to the left.

That’s where we get the root of “right-wing” and “left-wing”. This, and frankly most conceptualizations of political ideology, can be simplistic at times, but they help us with classification and self-identification.

Generally, we today use a “political spectrum” to place people and movements based on their ideology. Along the X-axis (horizontal), we have perspectives on economic matters. In the Western context, this usually means more supportive of individualism, capitalism, and non-interventionism by the state on the right and more supportive of communalism, variations of socialism, and state participation on the left. Along the Y-axis (vertical), we have perspectives on social matters. The top half is more “authoritarian”, meaning more state involvement in the basic affairs of people and the collective enforcement of morality, beliefs, etc. The bottom half is more “libertarian”, meaning a belief that people should be free to do as they please within the bounds of society and that the state should avoid over-managing personal freedoms.

We represent this with a fairly basic graph. Here’s a version I’ve mocked up with the “ranges” of some Canadian political parties for reference. The “ranges” indicate the general areas on the spectrum where supporters of each party will fall. There are often contests within parties to set policy and direct the ideology of the movement, meaning a party doesn’t occupy a simple “point”, but is spread across a general range.

There’s a lot of overlap between parties and many political parties have supporters that may fall on different sides of certain issues. In the Conservative Party, for example, you may have traditionalists who want the state to enforce their preferred morality working along side libertarians who want the state out of their business. Their caucus tends to reflect this; Niagara West MP Dean Allison was a strong opponent of marijuana legalization and voted against Bill C-45, which legalized weed across Canada, but his riding neighbour, Hamilton East-Stoney Creek MP Ned Kuruc, owned a chain of weed stores before being elected.

Not everything is as clean and neat as we’d expect. There are more left-leaning Liberals (few-and-far between among the elites in Hamilton-area Liberal circles) and there are some pro-business, centre-right Greens (Elizabeth May did work for Brian Mulroney, remember). Only groups like the Communists and the Christian Heritage Party are really firm in their respective corners, with one advocating for worker’s revolution and the other promoting the principles of ultraconservative Christian Nationalism.

Among parties on the left, you might see a level of social conservatism with some members. The NDP has long struggled with a loud, well-funded, but small group of labour traditionalists who support the party’s economic policy, but maintain socially conservative views when it comes to queer people, racialized minorities, and/or drug policy, for example. And the Bloc Québécois is a nominally social democratic party, favouring larger state involvement in the economy, but contains some nationalist elements that may be opposed to immigration or the presence of certain cultural and religious groups in the larger “Québécois” nation.

Parties drift based on their leaders, their members, and the context of the times, but that visual representation is roughly where Canada’s major parties are right now.

So if that’s a very basic political spectrum, then where do we find Ford’s “radical left” and Farr’s “hard left”?

Interestingly, in political science, these are two different terms with very different meanings.

“Radical left” has its roots in the radical tradition of the Enlightenment. At that time, “radical” in politics simply meant you believed in a variation of “liberalism” which, at the time, was considered radical and revolutionary. The contemporary “radical left” draws on that, but is quite different, with Gomez, et. al. (2016) defining current radical left movements as rejecting “the socio-economic structure of contemporary capitalism and its values and practices…[advocating] a transformative and systemic change, rejecting neo-liberal market-oriented policies.”⁹ Contemporary radical left parties in Europe especially have their origins in Communist parties of varying intensities.

“Hard left”, on the other hand, is a very British pejorative term referring to the most ideologically rigid and exclusionary members of left wing parties. Thompson (2016) defines the British hard left (albeit from a biased position; Thompson identifies with the British “soft left”) as “stubborn”, guided by “activists”, narrow in its views, inflexible, and hell-bent-and-determined to exclude more people than it brings in.¹⁰

So then, based on our earlier spectrum, we get this visual representation:

The radical left is a broader placement on the political spectrum, encompassing those who want a complete change in the economic system. That takes in some in the major parties on the left, as well as all of those affiliated with Canada’s various communist parties. The hard left is a subsection of people within the parties on the left, constituting a group that is more ideologically intense and militant than their colleagues.

Except…you can see the issue with the characterization of anyone as “hard left”, right?

People with principles can quickly be dismissed as being “rigid”. Those who want a party to maintain a coherent ideological grounding can be called “inflexible”. Anyone unwilling to acquiesce to a dominant group’s demands can be labelled “stubborn”.

That’s why “hard left” is considered a “pejorative” term. It’s used as an insult by political opponents to characterize a movement or candidate or politician as extreme, out-of-touch, and divisive.

So when Farr says that Loomis has been “running around with” local political figures and their “other Hard Left supporters”, he’s trying to position the mayoral candidate as an ideological extremist and in inflexible radical. This characterization makes a lot more sense when you pair it with how the city’s right-wing establishment has been promoting their prime mayoral candidate, Ward 8 councillor Rob Cooper. Local blog The Bay Observer defined Cooper - a Conservative Party-affiliated activist who has spent his short few months in office railing against taxes and talking about a non-existent crime wave - as a “centrist”.

In this light, we can see what the strategy for the city’s political right will be in this election. And, to best explain it, we have to use another fun political graph.

***

In the 1990’s, Joe Overton, a researcher with the fiscally conservative Mackinac Center for Public Policy in the US, developed a theory about the acceptability of public policy. One of George W. Bush’s speech writers, Joshua Treviño, refined the theory by adding “steps” to it and popularized the theory that became known as the “Overton Window”.

The Overton Window posits that ideas have six degrees of acceptance: the unthinkable, the radical, the acceptable, the sensible, the popular, and what eventually becomes policy. Through campaigns and other coordinated efforts to shift opinion, the “window” of what is considered viable can be shifted, turning something that was once radical into something that is popular enough to become policy, and vice versa.

So if we assume that the belief is that Loomis’s views are in the range of what many voters in Hamilton would accept (investment in local business, support for infrastructure projects, a desire to balance affordability with a growing infrastructure deficit, etc.) and Cooper’s views might be more outside the mainstream for some voters (pro-police budget and tough-on-crime, voting against budget increases for the Hamilton Public Library, calling for the cancelling of the vacant unit tax in the midst of a housing crisis, etc.), then the goal will be to shift the window of acceptability by framing Loomis as a “hard left” radical and Cooper as a reasonable “centrist”.

That would certainly help to explain why a former city councillor and candidate with the nominally centrist Ontario Liberal Party would characterize the “red Tory” former regional chair and the current mayoral candidate who worked as an advocate for local businesses and the steel industry as “hard left”. It would also explain why the local right-wing establishment has gone to such great lengths to describe a right-wing councillor who has been public about his affiliations with right-wing political parties as a “centrist”.

***

A larger question, then, is how do we actually categorize local candidates on a political spectrum? The conventional spectrum doesn’t really take into account specific local issues, focusing instead on larger economic and social matters that municipalities have very little control over.

That’s why a Vancouver-based podcaster and a political scientist developed a municipal variation of the political spectrum. It changes things slightly, creating an X-axis that averages a candidate’s (or, in the Vancouver case, a party’s) values on economic and social issues and a Y-axis that positions their ideas on a spectrum from most “urbanist” (meaning pro-density, multi-modal transportation, investment in large-scale urban projects) to most “conservationist” (meaning opposed to density, more focused on cars, more opposed to investments).

It’s extremely difficult to place mayoral candidates on this spectrum. The main focus of mayoral campaigns is usually to be as inoffensive to as many people as possible, resulting in a fascinating cluster around the middle. Most campaigns talk broadly about “communication”, “transparency”, and “accountability”, which are nice words, but really don’t mean anything beyond “I won’t be some ward-heeling, cigar-puffing, envelope-accepting despot”.

In the last election, there were only subtle differences between Horwath and Loomis’s platforms. Horwath tended to talk more about keeping taxes low while Loomis focused on attracting investment. Horwath campaigned on improving the Red Hill Valley Expressway and implementing traffic calming while Loomis proposed free transit for students and seniors and implementing Vision Zero recommendations. Horwath wanted development charges to support communities, Loomis wanted a firm urban boundary and no more sprawl. While Horwath avoided some of the more explicit calls from urbanists and progressives, Loomis embraced them while blending them with his focus on economic development, creating an interesting scenario where Horwath seemed like the more conservationist candidate while Loomis appeared to be more urbanist, even though Horwath won most urban polls and Loomis did well in the suburbs and rural parts of Hamilton.

As for Cooper…I don’t know what to say. As I’ve noted before, his by-election platform clocked in at 99 words. There was a call for more transit, though it was a desire to have more GO Transit options in the city, which would fall to the province. Other than that, he said he wanted to tackle violent crime, cap tax increases to the municipally-irrelevant ceiling of the “inflation rate”, eliminate other taxes, and vaguely “expand housing options”. Given his votes on council and his comments in local media, he’s absolutely and definitively on the fiscal and social right, and his focus is more conservationist than urbanist.

Based on all that, this is the very rough spectrum we’re working with going into this October’s municipal election. And this is based on past information, so take it with a whole heaping helping of salt.

The reality of what we face will not stop candidates, political actors, and others in the community from raising the spectre of an “extreme left” takeover. It’s politically convenient for some to label their opponents as “hard left” or “radical left” and then define what that means in their own words.

For some, it means anyone who would vote in favour of a tax increase beyond what they deem acceptable. For others, it means anyone who shows a modicum of compassion toward people experiencing homelessness. For many, it means considering the perspectives of people who have been, at one time or another, marginalized and kept from participating fully in the civic conversation.

But, more often than not, it is a phrase without meaning, used without context, assigned to those who think differently.

Now, to be fairrr, I’ve used the term “hard right” when referring to things in the past. I’ve called Toronto City Councillor Bradford Bradford “hard right”, and have used the term to refer to bots on X/Twitter and variations of populism. “Hard right” doesn’t have the same definitional background as “hard left”, but can be seen the same way - right-wingers who are ideologically rigid and fervent in their beliefs. But, being the nerd that I am, do my due diligence before assigning that label to anyone. Bradford himself has, on the conservative current affairs blog The Hub talked about his focus on violent crime, opposition to bike lanes, fight against tax increases while simultaneously supporting the police budget, and his desire to open more of Toronto City Hall up to the private market. By all accounts, Bradford is a right-winger; in that same article, he called himself a “right-leaning councillor”.

Farr’s comment, on the other hand, comes without evidence. He labels two people in the community as “hard left” because it’s politically convenient. Despite their records, their positions, and their own stated beliefs, he assigns them the moniker that best suits him and his political allies.

***

We will see more and more of this as the campaign heats up. Everyone even a hair left of where the city’s right-wing establishments wants to move the local Overton Window to will be labelled a “radical”, an “extremist”, a “leftist activist”, or worse.

Candidates who maintain compassionate positions on people experiencing homelessness, who call for more investment in public transit, who want other levels of government to come to the table with meaningful housing investments, who want to city to act on climate change, who won’t commit to the unrealistic and illogical pledge to cap property tax increases to the federal inflation rate, who call for the city to play a more active role in creating opportunities for people - these are the candidates who will be labelled as “hard left” and worse in the coming months. In contrast, candidates with shallow platforms promising low taxes and more services, committing to cutting staff at city hall while supporting the steady privatization of services, demanding an end to fees designed to support infrastructure while handing a blank cheque to the Hamilton Police Service will be framed as “fiscally responsible” and “centrists”.

So is there a “hard left” wave about to crash over Hamilton? Hardly. A handful of semi-retired politicians will try to convince their Facebook followers that everyone who doesn’t think like them is a woke Communist determined to destroy the city. Candidates who want to make this city better, work to improve the lives of their neighbours, and bring evidence and facts back to municipal government will be labelled “extremists”, “radicals”, and “dangerous”. The same machines that run on dirty tricks will do what they can to steamroll through the city, clearing a path for the candidates of their choosing. They’ll call people names, doctor images of them to post on social media, get down and dirty and nasty. We’ve seen it all before.

That kind of politics got us where we are now. But there’s a better way forward. It’s a way clearly and passionately articulated by a humble working class plumber from Manchester who took on well-funded opponents and won. As the new Green MP for Gorton and Denton, Hannah Spencer, said:

“I don’t think its extreme or radical to think working hard should get you a nice life…We have shown we don’t have to accept being turned against each other. We can demand better. Together. We have shown we don’t have to fight dirty to fight for change.”¹

Better really is possible. We just have to work for it.

1  _{“Hannah Spencer - who she is, and full text of her victory speech” The Guardian, February 27, 2026 (Link)}

2  _{“Starmer describes Greens as ‘the extreme of the left’ in response to byelection defeat” and “Farage claims Green party win in Gorton and Denton evidence of 'resurgent hard left'“, The Guardian, February 27, 2026 (Link and Link).}

3  _{John Lorinc. “It’s not about speed cameras on Parkside” Spacing, September 12, 2025 (Link).}

4  _{David Rider and Daniel Dale. “Plans to cut city’s speed limits curbed” Toronto Star, May 1, 2012 (Proquest Star archive)}

5  _{Liam Casey and Allison Jones. “Doug Ford takes issue with Toronto's 13-year timeline to build road safety measures” CBC News, February 26, 2026 (Link).}

6  _{Scott Radley. “Keanin Loomis announces run for mayor, setting up rematch with Andrea Horwath”, Hamilton Spectator, February 25, 2026 (Spec free gift link)}

7  _{Hamilton Spectator archive links (Paywalled): September 15, 1986; December 26, 1986; October 3, 1988; September 27, 1991; June 5, 1995.}

8  _{Hamilton Spectator archive links (Paywalled): May 29, 2020; November 3, 2020; June 2, 2021.}

9  _{Gomez, Raul, Laura Morales, and Luis Ramiro. “Varieties of Radicalism: Examining the Diversity of Radical Left Parties and Voters in Western Europe.” West European Politics (London) 39, no. 2 (March 2016): p 353. https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2015.1064245.}

10  _{Thompson, Paul. “Hard Left, Soft Left: Corbynism and Beyond.” Renewal (London, England) (London) 24, no. 2 (June 2016): 45–50.}