The past, present, and future of Hamilton’s West Harbour or: How to lose $120,000 selling coffee

The Cycling Tour

I don’t know if you noticed, but the weather last week was unseasonably warm. By Thursday and Friday, temperatures soared to nearly 30°. So it was the perfect day to pull the old bikes out of storage, dust them off, and take a ride down to the waterfront.

My partner and I took a familiar route, gliding down Longwood, past the controlled burns at Princess Point, along the Waterfront Trail, past Macassa Bay, and finally down to Piers 7 and 8.

The Williams by the waterfront was moderately busy when we got there. A rather long line overwhelmed the single cashier. A few of the booths were occupied and a large table played host to a gathering of folks in similar-looking windbreakers. Most people ordered a single drink or a pastry, despite the extensive menu at the café.

While sitting outside with our icy drinks, watching folks zip around on Bird scooters, walk along the pier edge, or fish from the side of the trail, I got to thinking about Hamilton’s harbour. Since colonization, the waterfront was slowly built out, morphed and changed to suit the needs of industry. As residents pushed back and the city decided to pursue recreational uses by the water, long battles ensued. Grand plans came and went, but, eventually, we created a West Harbour we could access and use and enjoy.

Now, as the Hamilton Waterfront Trust’s future looks to be on…umm…choppy waters? (I’ll avoid too many water-based metaphors), it might be a good idea to look at the past and present of the West Harbour and ask ourselves where we might go from here.

So let’s start at the beginning.

A bay for the people

Hamiltonians have always had a complicated relationship with Hamilton Harbour (or Burlington Bay if you’re from…you know…Burlington). While I have my own feelings, visions of the waterfront were beautifully articulated by Nancy Bouchier and Ken Cruikshank in their 2016 study of Hamilton’s harbour, The People and the Bay, so I’ll let them take over:

Since colonization, people have sought to use the waterfront for varied and often competing purposes. We collect food from the water, use it for transportation, disposing of waste, recreation, and commerce. We live by it, work by it, use it, and rely on it.

Let’s focus on the West Harbour, since that’s where the majority of the HWT’s focus has been since its creation 23 years ago. The West Harbour is roughly from Pier 10 onward.

As Bouchier and Cruikshank note in their quote above, by the mid 20th century, Hamilton’s waterfront had hardened and changed. There were some early plans to carve out a little space for recreation, though. One of the earliest and most promising was a 1917 plan for a “subway” and public beach below Dundurn Castle. Not an actual subway, of course. It was supposed to be a public walkway from Dundurn to the waterfront, traveling under what were then the rail lines of the Grand Trunk Railway (GTR). Unfortunately, the GTR wouldn’t budge, so the plan died in 1919.2

After the GTR debacle, Hamilton’s industry grew with intensity, reshaping the shoreline with infill to provide easier access to ships and to create more space for their industrial operations.

The scope of infill is almost difficult to imagine (I foresee a discussion of Hamilton’s missing inlets and streams in the future!). Here’s what Pier 8 looked like in 1959 (with a semi-modern shot from Google for comparison):

Of particular concern for decades was the growing peninsula that is today’s Bayfront Park. As construction crews gouged along the side of the Escarpment to create the Claremont Access in the 1970’s (which keen Sewer Socialist aficionados and Spec readers will remember helped to dislocate the Erl family and remains the source of constant frustration for both myself and the city to this day), the excavated soil made its way to a plot of land owned by two brothers, Samuel and Sheridan Lax. The Lax Brothers were inspired by the city’s fixation on urban renewal that had continued rolling on since beginning in the 1960’s.

Like the Eye of Sauron, the watchful gaze of Mayor Vic Copps and Hamilton City Council had turned to the North End neighbourhood. They were determined to demolish much of the community and replace it with perimeter roads, high rises, and waterfront-adjacent office towers. The Lax Brothers owned the land that is now Bayfront Park, having come to control it following the collapse of a business deal with a Philadelphia firm hoping to tap into the city’s growing industrial base.3 By 1959, it belong to the Lax Brothers. And they had big dreams for their lands.

The 1970 plan was called “Bay Shore Village”. It featured modular, Habitat 67-inspired apartments, shops, schools, hotels, and entertainment facilities dotted across a number of islands in the harbour.4 (Honestly, the plan might have been bad, but I love me a miniature urbanscape model.)

The introduction of 15,000 new residents on infill land was…not welcome news to North End residents, who were still battling for their community’s very existence. Residents fought back, creating the Save Our Bay (SOB) committee. The purpose of SOB was to challenge the ongoing destruction of the harbour by protesting local politicians, delegating to council, and inviting journalists to examine the infill and lack of democratic accountability that surrounded the decisions being made about their community.5

By 1972, the efforts of citizen activists had prevailed. SOB had two strong allies on their side: reformist Controller Herman Turkstra and Bill Powell, a former Ward 4 alderman who, despite losing his own big to serve on the Board of Control with Turkstra, found himself the chair of the Conservation Authority during the 1970-1972 term of council. Powell inserted the Conservation Authority into the approvals process, convincing the provincial government to allow them to study the situation. But it was Turkstra who blew the whole thing up.

Turkstra sought to kick the city’s citizen appointee, Ken Elliott, off the Hamilton Harbour Commission6 for alleged shady behaviour. Elliott was in the “ship-scrapping” business and was involved in some strange deals. Turkstra’s poking on the matter resulted in a federal probe that found Elliott had received $300,000 in kickbacks after manipulating the Harbour Commission’s bidding process with a few of his buddies and ordering over $4,000,000 in totally unnecessary work done along the waterfront. Elliott implicated a whole host of colourful local characters, like Liberal MP and cabinet minister Johnny Munro, Tory MPP George Kerr, and the Lax Brothers. At the end of the day, only Elliot and four others were charged.7 The Lax Brothers had a pickle on their hands: wait for the Habour Commission to get unstuck from its corruption issue (to which they were too close for comfort) or allow the city to take over (meaning they'd have to undergo months of public hearings where SOB and hostile councillors might make their lives difficult). And, to make matters worse, Powell's Conservation Authority report was released in 1974, recommending against the Lax Brothers proposals for towers and massive residential development.

On top of that, the Lax Brothers were waiting for the Harbour Commission to sell them additional land that had been promised as part of a land deal in 1968. By 1976, with the land still not sold, the brothers sued, eventually settling in 1981 for 21 extra acres of land.8

Armed with more land, the dynamic waterfront duo came back with a new proposal: the Harbour West Business Park. Light industry, high tech firms, glittering new offices and, because it was 1982, I just assume mountains of cocaine.

Council was much quicker on this proposal. After the 1982 election, the new council led by Bob Morrow came back with a definitive answer: “Nope. Just nope. And, while we’re here, we’ll also say ‘get the hell out of here’ too.”

By 1984, the city expropriated the Lax lands, giving the brothers close to a million for their now heavily-polluted peninsula in the bay.9 Planners went BIG with their plans for the space, delivering this absolutely wild proposal: Hamilton Island.

We’re talking marinas, a swimming and skating lagoon, amphitheaters, cafes, boardwalks, an IMAX theatre, and a replica of the Victoria Park Crystal Palace because if there’s anything this city loves, its replicas of the Victoria Park Crystal Palace.10 But 1985 wasn't a great time to propose a $32,000,000 park project. For starters, the cost to clean up an industrial wasteland of used batteries, contaminated infill, and a whole assortment of questionable waste kept climbing. That, and the 80's were a time of neoliberal austerity babyyyyyy. For Hamilton’s municipal government to spend 32 million in 1985 would have taken more political will than all of Canada’s urbanists, conservationists, parks lovers, waterfront defenders, and progressive political leaders could muster combined. So, instead, we got the Bayfront Park we know today.

Still, there were still ambitious plans for the whole area. When the park opened in 1993 (initially as “Harbourfront Park”), there were rumblings that the CN rail yard along the waterfront was headed to Aldershot. A highly optimistic plan was developed with that in mind. In 1995, it was unveiled to the public by the city’s Department of Public Works and Traffic:

A perimeter road from Bay to the rail line and then along until Burlington Street. Most of the Central Neighbourhood demolished to make way for the “Gardens of the World” and Peace Plaza at Bay and Cannon, complete with, you guessed it, a replica of the Victoria Park Crystal Palace. A massive amphitheater, tourist piers, and a “historical redevelopment zone” just below Burlington Heights from Dundurn Castle and connected by a footbridge. The zone was supposed to look like this, complete with replicas of the Hamilton and the Scourge:

This, as we all know, would not come to be. Nor would proposals for stadiums, concert venues, or the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. But some redevelopment did occur. All that development and all the change on the waterfront brought the same forces into conflict as had been battling since settlement began in the area. Recreation and commerce would need to figure out how to coexist along the city’s manufactured shoreline.

Trust in the waterfront

By the closing days of the 20th century, Hamilton’s municipal government and Harbour Commission were locked in a fierce battle. The redevelopment of the Lax lands and restoration of public waterfront access all the way up to Pier 4 was either complete or well underway. But there were still tensions. Tensions that were so intense, the Spec likened the feud to that between “the Hatfields and the McCoys.”11

While there were concerns over finances, one of the biggest sticking points was the future of Pier 8. The city wanted Pier 8 for recreation, tying the lands into the growing waterfront recreational space they had spend decades creating. The Harbour Commission wanted to keep the space open for shipping, having rented most of the dock space at Pier 8 to companies hoping to cash in on a suspected realignment in shipping priorities from Toronto to Hamilton.12

With just days left on the 20th century, the city and the Harbour Commission found themselves gearing up to fight a $100,000,000 lawsuit over the future of Hamilton Harbour. Negotiations were aided by the help of two of Hamilton’s Liberal heavyweights (you know, when Hamilton’s Liberal establishment had sway…high-fives self sadly as the realization that Canadian politics is incredibly damaged dawns and a wave of 90’s nostalgia hits, the opening theme to Royal Canadian Air Farce plays, and a belief that things can get better lingers like a calming aura close enough to accept but too far to reach just yet), Hamilton East’s Sheila Copps and Hamilton West’s Stan Keyes. But, again, Pier 8 was a point of contention. Copps wanted a marine heritage centre on the Pier while Keyes wanted it to stay open to shipping.13

By December 18th, 1999, a deal had been reached. By taking their lead from Solomon, Copps and Keyes split Pier 8 into sections, allowing some shipping while creating space for a centre of some sort.14 

And nothing acrimonious or bad ever happened to Sheila Copps again.

Ottawa stepped in with some cash to make sure things went smoothly and, in the end, the deal created, in essence, two Hamilton Harbours: a West Harbour for recreation and an East Harbour for transportation and industry. It ended the Hamilton Harbour Commission, created space for a Parks Canada-administered marine discovery centre, and reconfigured the governance of Hamilton's waterfront.15

When the Hamilton Port Authority (now the Hamilton-Oshawa Port Authority or “HOPA”) was born, it became necessary for the city and new agency to have an intermediary agency that could coordinate on recreation projects where both parties would have some interest. Thus was born the Hamilton Waterfront Trust (HWT).16

With the goal of “Connecting You to the Water’s Edge”, the HWT has a fairly clear mandate:

Despite some early successes, the HWT has been the source of near-constant controversy and frustration.

Completed in 2004, the Parks Canada Discovery Centre flatlined from the beginning. Low attendance, little fanfare, and a lack of direction saw Parks Canada hand the keys to the centre over to HWT in 2010.18

By 2012, the HWT was bleeding money and turned to the private sector for a boost. The HWT attracted Sarcoa Restaurant and Bar to the former Discovery Centre. Former council member and Conservative candidate for Parliament on Hamilton Mountain, Bob Charters, who was the then-chair of the HWT, hinted to the Spec that another restaurant was also planning on opening in the space by fall, 2012. Noting Sarcoa’s waterfront patio, Charters said “people coming here are going to be wowed.”19 (Narrator's Voice: "Nobody was wowed.")

Sarcoa got mediocre reviews in The Spec.20 It mainly made the news for hosting political gatherings and nomination meetings. That is, until 2014, when people in Burlington started complaining about the noise the bar's patio music made. Echoing across the bay, Burlington councillor Rick Craven said that the bass was enough to "quite literally vibrate the house".21 I mean, fair, but that's what bass is supposed to do. Those fish know how to party. And, in an interesting turn, it was Herman Turkstra who ended up complaining vigourously about the music at Sarcoa.22

The music battle lingered over Sarcoa, with the HWT stepping in to play parent and tell the kids to keep the damn music down. So, in 2015, Sarcoa sued the HWT for $15,000,000 and stopped paying rent. And, the next summer, turned the music back on. But they never resumed rent payments so, in 2017, the HWT slapped a sign on the front doors of Sarcoa telling them that not paying $226,072.68 in rent was grounds for termination of their lease.23 The 15 million dollar lawsuit was settled out of court in 2019 and Sarcoa is no more.

Side note: I went to Sarcoa exactly once to catch up with some friends from undergrad. We had one glass of wine on the patio, during which a passerby exposed themselves to us before casually walking away. 2/10 stars for both the restaurant and the entertainment.

2017 wasn’t a great year for the HWT overall. Turns out, they hadn’t been paying their taxes to the city. HWT executive director Werner Plessl told then Ward 2 councillor Jason Farr, who sat on the HWT board, to keep the media up to date on the issue. He blamed the Sarcoa issue, telling The Spec: “This wouldn't even be an issue if certain people paid their rent.”24

Three months later, the HWT board found itself in lukewarm water when local media took them to task for not releasing their meeting minutes.25 They got in trouble five years later for similar circumstances, this time keeping members of the public out of meetings. It took a report by Ontario's Ombudsman to tell the HWT that, yes, they were indeed a local board and had to let members of the public in to watch their meetings.

In 2017, there was some question as to whether Chair Bob Charters was indeed leading the organization. After coming 9th in the 2016 Ward 7 by-election, after which he failed to file financial disclosures and was disqualified from the subsequent general election, Charters had been slightly hands off with the HWT. He was hard to find and by January, 2018, it was announced that he had stepped down weeks prior without much fanfare.26

And now, in 2023, over the past few weeks, council has directed staff to examine the HWT’s future, with the primary two options going forward dissolving the HWT or pursuing a blended body.27 The reason? Well, all those mentioned above. And the HWT’s troubling finances.

A damn fine cup of coffee?

The HWT’s 2023 Operational Budget lists 7 main line items: William’s Fresh Café, the Waterfront Scoops ice cream parlour, the Grill by the skating rink, the Skate Rental shack, the “Hamiltonian” (a 12-person boat offering guided tours of the Harbour), the Waterfront Trolley, and admin.

Fun fact! Former Board Chair Bob Charters, who, I should remind folks, was a Tory candidate for Parliament, told the Spec in 2012: “You'll never run a boat or a trolley that's profitable,”28 referring to the HWT’s Waterfront Trolley which runs from Princess Point to Pier 8. The 2023 operating budget anticipates a profit of $26,460 from the trolley. In the years since the pandemic, the trolley has become one of the HWT's top performers. Now what's all that about Conservatives being better at managing the economy?

Anyway, back to a leftist talking about corporate budgets.

The two biggest earners for the HWT are the skate rental and the ice cream parlour. The trolley and the Hamiltonian do pretty well. The grill isn’t as hot, but it about breaks even.

The Williams Fresh Café, on the other hand, is expected to lose almost $120,000.

The Williams at the waterfront has always been a modest player. It opened in 2004 when the chain was still “Williams Coffee Pub”.29 That was just 11 years after the first Williams opened in Stratford. Oh yeah: Williams is named after William Shakespeare. Weird, eh? They (as a chain) rebranded in 2009 to "Williams Fresh Café" and, in 2016, were bought by Druxy's Delis from Toronto.30

Williams made $40,000 in 2010, but then lost $33,000 the next year. Despite that, Williams CEO Corey Dalton told The Spec that the Pier 8 location “is usually one or two in our chain, in terms of sales.”31 Which, honestly, doesn't bode well for the business.

Using available financial data, it appears that, since 2016, Williams has reported income that, until 2021, was steadily declining. Sure, there was a massive drop off in 2020 for obvious reasons, but prior to that, there was a year-to-year decline in revenue.

In terms of Net Income, Williams did alright in the pre-pandemic years, though there was a noticeable decline from 2017 to 2019, dropping by nearly $43,000 over that time. The pandemic fired them into the red and they haven’t been able to stop the bleeding since then.

Other HWT ventures like the ice cream parlour and the trolley are both now making money. The ice cream parlour has been a consistent winner (though much of it based on the heat of the summer) and, after some modest reductions in expenses, the trolley has become profitable.

The Williams just isn’t performing the same way. The space is huge and, frankly, cold. With earth-tone tiles and institutional seating, sitting inside there feels like having lunch at a low-budget retirement home. The menu offers too much and the costs are too high for what you get. I know that supply chain issues and inflation have made the cost of running a restaurant hard, but maybe then don’t offer a whole menu of fast comfort foods for sit-down restaurant prices?

But, even if we consider the Williams to be a major liability for the HWT, their loss only constitutes about 25% of the HWT’s overall deficit. Without the businesses they presently oversee massively expanding their revenue or without attracting an entity that will bring in at least $400,000 extra a year, the HWT is in major trouble.

The next few waves

Pier 8 is expected to change dramatically over the coming years. Work will start on a new park sometime this year. Former industrial buildings will become artisan markets and open-air pavilions. And, the centrepiece of it all will be 1,500 new housing units, all townhomes and condos, including the controversial 45-storey cylindrical condo tower right smack dab in the middle of it all (pending council approval, of course).

As the waterfront changes further, becoming a place of residence and recreation, we still have to contend with the lingering presence of industry on the water. Even if all industrial uses were removed tomorrow, we’d still have the legacy of that industry with us for decades, if not centuries. Hell, we had to build a 6.2 hectare “Chernobyl sarcophagus”-like containment facility over Randle Reef, just 2 kilometres east of where those 1,500 new housing units will be.

And, beyond dealing with lingering industrial fallout, we have to accept that the agencies and boards created to oversee the “rebirth” of the waterfront in the late 90’s just aren’t working anymore.

The HWT can’t stay afloat. Their overly ambitious coffee shop is bleeding money. Aside from letting the Tercot Communities “Waterfront Shores” condo showroom open in the Discovery Centre, a massive structure by the water’s edge has been criminally underused since its creation.

There are ways we can fix this. And, honestly, much of that work is already being done by the current council’s crop of HWT appointees. They’re working to restructure the organization, bring in qualified new leaders to right the ship, and rework the whole thing to provide better results for Hamiltonians.

Beyond that, the simplest solution is this: we need a Parks Board. Vancouver’s Parks Board is a directly-elected body of residents who oversee the management of the city’s parks and recreation spaces. As their website notes:

Their whole thing is dealing with parks and recreation. At the same time as Vancouverites (Vancouvergonians?) vote in their municipal elections for mayor, councillors, and school trustees, they select seven commissioners who run the city’s parks for the benefit of all.

A Hamilton Parks Board could be expanded to look after the waterfront. A group of dedicated Hamiltonians who ensure that the city’s waterfront development doesn’t limit resident access to the water’s edge. To ensure the businesses that do operate in their facilities are local, pay fair wages, and don’t bleed too much on the finance side. To run things like the skating rink and Waterfront Trail and the adorable (and profitable) trolley. To connect the city’s waterfront recreation to the wider system of parks and recreational facilities in the city.

Sure, council can do that too. But to have a dedicated parks board allows for specialization and dedicated focus. That’s what local agencies, boards, and commissions (ABCs) are supposed to do. An ABC provides specialized attention to large public resources.

I don’t know if this will happen any time soon. I mean, even if council created it, there’s a good chance the premier will step in and squash it. But it is an idea for the future of, not only the HWT, but the city’s entire waterfront and parks system.

Until then, let’s wait and see what happens to the HWT. But if the history of the West Harbour tells us anything, its that big plans have a habit of changing. Let’s hope, at least, that they change for the better.

The conspiracy creeps closer

A couple of weeks back, I wrote about the 15-minute cities conspiracy that hit the UK and began bleeding into Canada. Quick recap: anti-vaxxers and the usual conspiracy folks mistakenly equated two traffic calming/planning measures in the UK and, without any justification, speculated that they were the prototype for “open air climate prisons”. The whole thing is unhinged and unsettling and, at the end of the day, unsurprising given how fast misinformation spreads online.

At the end of that post, I said “I don’t know how long this far-right obsession over 15-minute cities will last.” Turns out, it is still going on.

Essex County is reviewing the region’s Official Plan. That’s basically the guiding document for future planning in the County. Somehow, a group of conspiracy-minded folks down there got it in their heads that the Official Plan review meeting was a meeting to discuss how Essex County would be limiting the movement of residents and locking people into designated zones.

An April 5th meeting of the Essex County Council had to be cut short because there were so many irate members of the public, the Warden (yeah, Essex County Council’s leader is a “warden”…very Game of Thrones, non?) couldn’t manage the meeting.

Unfortunately, the Warden didn’t take the time to tell the conspiracists that they were wrong, instead stating: "It [the Official Plan review] has nothing to do with 15-minute cities. You can trust me on that. It is not." Yeah, okay, but like…even if it was, it isn’t the conspiracy theory the opponents of 15-minute cities think it is.

The CBC interviewed a local opponent of 15-minute cities who believes the state will monitor people to ensure they stay in their zones to ensure their carbon footprint doesn’t get too high. Healthy and fun. Very good for the debate. Great. Like, I realize that including these perspectives gives the story context, but…when this stuff gets into mainstream outlets, it helps legitimize it. “I read on the CBC that Essex is creating open-air climate prisons” is now something that a conspiracy theorist with poor reading skills can say.

They then follow that interview by speaking with Essex County’s manager of planning, who, despite trying to explain what the Official Plan review was, seemed unable to get through to opponents.

Here’s part of the problem. Over the past few decades, malicious forces have tried to undermine our confidence in everything from media and doctors to planning experts and our democratic institutions. During the pandemic, that campaign reached a fever pitch. Distrust is now the norm, not the exception. Certain segments of the population are more willing to trust randoms on Facebook over a planning professional saying “no, you’ve misinterpreted this process and the very thing you oppose.”

Again, this goes back to alienation. People are terrified. They lack control over their jobs and their homes and their surroundings. The world is moving fast and they are being left behind. So they seek comfort in the words of people who tell them “no, you do have control, there are just shadowy elites who are preventing you from exercising it.” The poor, sad, ill-informed people who oppose 15-minute cities are being manipulated by people who have too much confidence and not enough sense to know fact from fiction.

Speaking of malicious forces…

Pierre Poilievre perceives Pravda

Before Pierre Poilievre can become Prime Minister, he’ll need to ensure the Tory base is satiated. And they are a hungry, hungry bunch. Scheer didn’t do it for them. O’Toole wasn’t what they wanted. No, the Tory base demanded a true blue right-winger. A Preston Manning with charisma, a Boris Johnson with better hair, a Stephen Harper who would go further than they had ever gone before.

Problem is, the Tory base is generally much farther to the right than the pool of voters who would consider the Conservatives. Data from the 2021 Canadian Election Survey shows that Conservative voters were just slightly less right wing than the People’s Party, a vanity-project turned conspiracy-peddling operation.

Poilievre is still in campaign mode. Every third word out of his mouth is “woke”. He can’t stop throwing mediocre shade at the Prime Minister. And now, his big crusade is to “defund the CBC”.

Like one of Elon’s cringeworthy fanboys, PP33 fired off what I’m sure he thought was a banger of a tweet, asking if the King of Twitter would pretty please help him undermine independent journalism and democracy by throwing a “government-funded media” tag on the CBC’s account.

And Elon did. PP celebrated by calling Canada’s independent broadcaster “Trudeau propaganda”.

Sure, this is bad for democracy and bad for journalism and bad for everyone, but, as Martin Lukacs notes in The Breach, this is all part of a long-standing strategy to warp the CBC into an entity that is, if not overtly favourable to the Tories, then at least deferential and unwilling to do critical journalism.

This also indicates something important: The next federal election campaign will be exhausting. Pierre Poilievre is a permanent politician who just gives off the most “straight white dude wearing a button up and tie, sporting a near-permanent smirk, even while sitting alone at the back of your poli sci seminar, scoffing loudly when the professor brings up capitalism” vibes. And he has one goal: win. It doesn’t matter what he destroys or what institutions he damages or who gets fed through the woodchipper. PP is a clever politician. He knows that the Tories win when the electorate is divided, exhausted, and unmotivated. He’ll keep throwing garbage like this out until he convinces enough Liberals and New Democrats in key ridings to stay home on election day and the media ecosystem in Canada gets warped like a Presto Card that gets thrown in the dryer (long story).

And, if the Liberals keep blundering, it is entirely possible he will be our next Prime Minister. With PP at the helm, he’ll keep smashing things until Canadian democracy is as fragile as it is in states where populist politicians have been using the same playbook for years. And, by then, it’ll be too late.

Cool Facts for Cool People

• The Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board (HWDSB) will consider a change to their school naming policy to avoid naming any school buildings after people. In the wake of the decision to rename Ryerson Elementary, the board considered how they could improve the policy in the future. The process to rename Ryerson shifted the board away from their usual process of creating a shortlist and got people to use coloured stickers to indicate which of them were their favourites. Instead, they pursued what the Ancaster News called an “Indigenous-informed process”, which meant striking a naming circle to consider how to best approach the renaming policy through the lens of reconciliation. The end result - Kanétskare or “By The Bay” - came from that process. After polling residents, they found close to 65% surveyed opposed naming new schools after people. Doing some quick math, about 35% of HWDSB schools are named after people and a fair number of them are either royalty or former school board trustees. Despite the stance I took during my 2014 HWDSB trustee campaign, I think this move is a good one. In the future, the HWDSB could consult with local Indigenous communities, consider the natural geography or a unique local landmark, or work with student groups to find school names that don’t honour just one person. Because people are complicated. What someone advocated for in the past may not be in line with our society’s values in the present. So this seems to be a good move by the HWDSB.

• Rebecca Banky is the new LGBTQ-Hamilton Police facilitator. Evidently, there will be a series of talks and town-halls over the next 10 months to help us talk about our feelings relating to the HPS’s failures at Pride 2019. Considering the city’s queer community hasn’t received an apology for anti-cruising sting operations like Project Rosebud or for the chief’s casually homophobic equating of sex in public washrooms to the violence at Pride 2019, I’m not optimistic.

A waterfront-heavy week! As usual, this one was fun to write. But it also took up a lot of time and I have a book manuscript due soon. But I’m really enjoying the research, data crunching, and writing in a more casual style I get to do here. So I hope you enjoyed this one!