Concerning Hamiltonians, Part 1

A trunk and a thunk

I’ve been helping my grandfather out with things around his house. My last surviving grandparent, he’s 93 and has been in rough shape since a weeks-long stay in the hospital this past spring. The whole family has been chipping in, making him meals, watering his plants, sitting and watching Blue Jays games with him.

Last Thursday, I was over at his little bungalow on the east Mountain, helping clean out a steamer trunk he wanted to give to my sister. The thing was full of firewood and earwigs, having sat in his basement for the better part of 50 years. From what he tells me, he was doing some plastering work at the Notre Dame Convent in Waterdown and the sisters asked if he wanted to buy a trunk from them. The sisters had taken a vow of poverty, so sold the belongings of candidates and aspirants to help fund their school work. He picked out a trunk, gave them a couple of bucks, threw it in the back of my grandparents’s old truck, and had my grandmother drive it down Snake Road (my grandfather is mostly blind, so never had a driver’s licence).

As I finished cleaning out the trunk, there was a thunk on the driveway. I look out from my grandfather’s front porch and see the unmistakable blue of the weekly flyer packet, fluttering in the pre-storm breeze. I jaunt down the driveway, grab it, and bring it inside. I disobeyed my grandfather’s direction (“Just throw the stupid thing in the recycle” - a fair number of objects are labeled as a “stupid thing” in my family’s vernacular…practically a term of endearment) and pulled out a copy of the Hamilton Mountain News.

Now I’ve had my issues with the Mountain News. Sure, they were one of the first papers to publish my writing, but I’ve taken issue with the apparent favouritism the paper has shown the Conservative Party as an institution on the mountain. I dedicated a whole piece two weeks ago to their contextless recitation of Hamilton Mountain Tory exec Rob Cooper’s views on homelessness.

Still, they’re a local news source, so I thumbed through the July 20th edition of the paper just to see what was going on. Not too much was in there. A cool story about the history of the Boy Scout movement on the Mountain (I made it to Cub Scouts before calling it quits!) and an update on the Fennell/Upper Ottawa strip mall redevelopment (where the old Sherwood Lanes was).

The thing that really caught my eye, though, was on Page 6. An advertisement, awash in many different fonts (or, at least, styles of the same font) and colours, screams out: Tax INCREASE. WHY????

The full text, for those who are wondering, goes like this:

The ad is signed “Concerned Hamiltonians” and includes two ways of contacting the group: [email protected] and 647-522-1971.

I stared at the ad for a good long while. Who might “Concerned Hamiltonians” be? Why all the colours and fonts and different capitalizations? Why tie the city’s property tax increase to the city staff wage increases when they aren’t even remotely connected? Why take issue with the mayor’s trip to Italy and connect that to rising grocery prices?

The ad nibbled away at my brain all day. While I was in line at the LCBO. While I was shoveling gratuitous amounts of trail mix into a bag at Bulk Barn. While I was brushing fugitive earwigs out of my car.

So, obviously, I decided to get to the bottom of this ad.

The publisher

One of the first things I did was get in touch with the advertising department at Metroland Media Group, the organization that publishes the Hamilton Mountain News.

Just some quick background on Metroland: Metroland Media Group is a subsidiary of the “Torstar Corporation”, the group that publishes the Toronto Star. Torstar has been owned by a private investment firm called “NordStar Capital” since 2020. So the chain goes NordStar → TorStar → Metroland → Hamilton Mountain News. Metroland takes care of publishing the Hamilton Spectator and also publishes daily papers in Waterloo, Welland, St. Catharine’s, Peterborough, and Niagara Falls, as well as around 70 weeklies, the Mountain News among them.

Metroland takes care of all the advertising for the Mountain News, so they were the ones I had to reach out to first.

I had three questions for Metroland that would help provide some context. The first two are simple enough, while the third gets into tricky territory regarding things like privacy.

So here’s the email I sent them on July 20th:

Made a little mistake in that email, actually. It was a 1/2 page colour ad. My bad.

I’m swinging for the fences here, but the questions I had for Metroland were:

1. What’s the chain’s policy on political ads?

2. How much would an ad like the Concerned Hamiltonians one cost?

3. How do I get in touch with an actual human behind this ad?

It is important to know where Metroland stands on political ads. This is, rather obviously, a political ad that is appearing outside of a regular election period, so it would be great to understand what the chain’s policies are on this.

Second, knowing the cost of an ad like that helps give us an idea as to how much bread this Concerned Hamiltonians group has to play with.

Finally, if there’s another way to contact the people behind the ad, then I can send them questions to all relevant accounts.

It is important to note that Metroland does have “Advertising Terms and Conditions”. These include:

• The Publisher reserves the right to revise, reject, discontinue or omit any advertisement, or to cancel any advertising contract, for reasons satisfactory to the Publisher without notice and without penalty to either party.

• The advertiser agrees to indemnify the Publisher for any losses or costs incurred by the Publisher as a result of publishing any advertisement which is libelous or misleading or otherwise subjects the Publisher to liability. This indemnity shall apply to all advertisements published, even if produced by the Publisher on behalf of the advertiser.

• The Publisher will not knowingly publish any advertisement which is illegal, infringing, misleading or offensive to its readers.

• All advertising subject to approval. Rates are subject to change without notice.

• The Publisher reserves the right or option to insert the word “advertisement” above or below any copy.

The publisher reserves the right to reject a misleading ad, to cancel any contract, and to more clearly identify the advertisement as such. None of those things have been done in this instance, so it is clear that the Concerned Hamiltonians ad cleared at least a few of Metroland’s bars.

The advertiser

Now we come to the obvious question: who is/are “Concerned Hamiltonians?” The group’s name is designed to sound like one of those American Astroturf groups like “Working Families for Walmart” or “Americans for Prosperity” or “Americans for an American America”. The name implies this is a group of regular working folks who have concerns with the way council is acting. There are lots of them and they’ve pooled their resources to have this ad printed in the local weekly.

But is that really the case?

A quick Google search for the name “Concerned Hamiltonians” pulls up other groups in town that have used the phrase “concerned Hamiltonians” in their messaging before. Hamilton 350, HAMSMaRT, Environmental Defence, and the folks who helped Cameron Kroetsch with his legal expenses after the whole Integrity Commissioner issue in 2020.

Also math. Yeah, a “Hamiltonian” is something in quantum mechanics that means an “operator corresponding to the total energy of a system”. So there are some academic papers where the authors have written about the operator using the wording: “regarding the concerned Hamiltonians”.

That’s the most I could follow. Don’t blame me, I’m a social scientist.

Anyway, the specific group “Concerned Hamiltonians” doesn’t seem to have an online presence. The only thing I could find was something from the r/Hamilton subreddit.

Here’s where it gets fun.

See, the post in r/Hamilton came under a link to the same Rob Cooper interview I complained about. Because, apparently, the a strange ad from Concerned Hamiltonians ran in that week’s edition of the Mountain News that repeated all of Cooper’s talking points.

It even made the same inaccurate claim about the future rental housing registry being a cause of present homelessness. So either there’s some tie between Cooper and Concerned Hamiltonians, or this completely unrelated group just so happened to also blame an unimplemented policy (that seems to be a headache for some local landlords) for a crisis that’s been decades in the making in the exact same edition of the suburban weekly where those points were made by a local Conservative Party executive.

This all raises more questions.

I took advantage of the email address on the ad to send along a list of questions to see if I could understand this group better.

I started off by saying that I write a pretty cool newsletter and would like to talk about Concerned Hamiltonians in my next edition. I then put seven background questions to the group:

The first two questions get at the naming issue. I want to know if this is one Hamiltonian pretending to be multiple people or if this is a genuine group of Hamiltonians.

The second question relates to who is doing the speaking for the group. Is it Rob Cooper? Are there others? Who should the media and obnoxious newsletter writers get in touch with if they have questions?

The fourth question is important because this is an advertisement with a political objective (like using an organized group to lobby for changes to policy or supporting a candidate in a future election), so the money matters. If someone has a vested interest in a policy being changed, then we should know about it and they should be on the city’s lobbyist registry for accountability. If the aim is to support a candidate or one’s own candidacy for local office, then this should be considered a donation, and therefore be subject to campaign finance laws. As I’ve said before, where money comes from and where it goes can often say more than a campaign’s actual messaging does.

The three final questions are all tied to that. Is this a Mountain Tory front group? Should there be some accountability for this advertising? What’s the end-game here?

I then threw in three questions about the specifics in the ad. I’ll let them speak for themselves:

These questions are more overtly political, but that doesn’t invalidate them.

The ad takes aim at city staff getting a pay increase, which we know comes from the tax stabilization reserve. That means that this year’s tax increase can’t be blamed on spending another $289,400 for staffing. Plus, as an aside, when you pay staff well they can afford to pay rent, go grocery shopping, put some money aside for big purchases, and invest in their community through supporting small local businesses. From a conservative angle, people having more spending power should be a good thing. From a more…humane angle…people not starving to death should also be a goal.

The ad then blames the mayor for a $4,505.40 trip to Italy and ties it to families struggling to buy groceries. But, let’s face it, that 2 cents per household isn’t going to “break the bank” and the real reason families are struggling to afford groceries is because of profiteering in the grocery sector. The Weston’s have an estimated family fortune of $11.5 billion, Michael Medline (CEO of Empire, the chain that runs Sobeys and Farm Boy) gets paid $13 million a year, and Eric La Flèche (CEO of the Metro chain) gets paid $5 million a year. But, sure, blame the mayor for taking the cheapest working vacation ever to Italy. Hell, I’m pretty sure my partner and I spent more while in Saskatchewan and all we got to see were some sand dunes.

Okay, they were pretty cool sand dunes.

Back to the point here. The ad made some pretty bold claims and I wanted to understand their motivation. If they wanted to spark an honest discussion in the city about council spending, which one could assume they would want to do by placing an ad in a local paper, then they would be able to answer these questions and engage in a genuine dialogue about the priorities of our elected officials.

So I fired off those emails to Metroland and Concerned Hamiltonians and waited.

Answers

That section header is misleading because I did not get any answers.

As of publishing, neither group has gotten back to me.

Which is a shame. On the part of Metroland, I thought they’d at least send something back politely declining to discuss specifics about the ad and include a bit of information on their pricing. I found some old rate cards from Metroland’s Toronto-based weeklies that indicates a 1/2 page ad runs from about $1,600 in Scarborough to just under $500 in the Beaches, but that’s outdated and in a different market, so having up-to-date info would have been great.

The lack of a response from Concerned Hamiltonians, while not entirely unsurprising, is still a bummer. I genuinely want to know more about the groups active in this community so that we can describe them, make people aware of who is participating in our local politics, and save researchers the headache of trying to figure it out in three decades like I’ve had to do with some of my work. Hamilton’s a city with a lack of (and I’m going to use a buzzword I picked up from my time in student politics here) “institutional memory”. City hall got rid of old election information, news sites pop up and disappear, and we end up doing the same things over and over again because we haven’t kept a good enough record of our activities to warn future generations (or even people coming a couple years after us) not to do the same stupid stuff.

So we don’t know who is behind “Concerned Hamiltonians” or what their motivations are. I’m honestly starting to think that I may never really know who is behind the group. But they’ve put out two ads in local papers riddled with misinformation and populist bluster. Something’s got to be done about that.

Speaking up

Pushing back against reactionary right wing populism should be one of our top priorities right now.

That’s because things are bad in the present moment. Years of ignoring problems by centre-left, centrist, and centre-right governments has meant we’re now in the “find out” stage of “fuck around and find out”. Massive infrastructure deficits, a collapsing social service sector, rampant inequality, a dangerously changing climate…just loads of scary stuff. Some people will react to that scary stuff by rejecting it entirely. Just hunkering down in the “denial” state of grief over there. But the even scarier thing is that there are cynical politicians and political groups who will pander to those folks. And, if those cynical politicians get elected with the help of those groups, they can make things worse for almost everyone but themselves.

“Concerned Hamiltonians” appears to be one of those groups. Two ads, filled with right-wing populist talking points that aim to whip up anger in an attempt to harness it to either a) shift public policy in their favour by spooking skittish suburban councillors and/or b) challenge those councillors in 2026.

Sorry for all the horse references. I was just champing at the bit to use all those.

Right now, these ads are going unchallenged. They’re published in local weekly papers without context or accountability, and are trying to impact the conversation here in Hamilton.

Right now.

The best way to challenge these groups might be to meet them on their home turf. A colourful ad with simple messaging, meant to inform readers about a current topic might just be the best way to push back against this reactionary right wing populism. And maybe, just maybe, we can start to shift the conversation to ensure that the work of progressive councillors is highlighted and that progressive candidates have a real shot in 2026.

Maybe someone needs to draft up that ad. Maybe see how much it would cost to get it in Hamilton’s suburban papers. Maybe somebody who publishes a weekly newsletter could do that.

Wonder who would be silly enough to do something like that?

Stay tuned for Part II at a later date…

I’m at the gay bar. I’m at the Wendy’s. I’m at the combination gay bar Wendy’s.

Well, Well, Well.

Looks like Waterloo is getting a new gay bar! The Well, a chain of gay bars that just to happens to operate Hamilton’s only such bar (and also sponsors the softball league I play in, so, just noting that “conflict”) is opening a new location in Waterloo, which will be the chain’s third after opening bars in Toronto, #HamOnt, and London.

Fun thing is: it’ll be in a Wendy’s.

The Well’s owner, John Ribson, also franchises the Wendy’s in question at 221 Weber Street in Waterloo. Apparently, the Wendy’s is in an old restaurant and doesn’t need as much space as it has. So Ribson is going to convert half the place into a new queer space.

Waterloo hasn’t had a dedicated gay bar since 2017, so this will be a refreshing new location for them.

I’m fascinated by the presence and disappearance of queer spaces, especially in smaller cities. Hamiltonians understand the struggle, as most of our queer-friendly spaces close up shop after only a few years. Yeah, there are still bars in Toronto, but bumping down the QEW on the 16 GO bus just to head to a bar isn’t convenient or easy for many folks. Plus, the loss of these physical spaces means the loss of a certain sense of community. It is a signal that an already marginalized community loses one more part of itself, leaving it feeling a little more empty.

As the author Jeremy Atherton Lin writes in Gay Bar: Why We Went Out:

That’s a question many queer Hamiltonians grapple with. To be queer in Hamilton almost certainly means being spread out over space. We don’t have a gay village where people can congregate, we have limited queer space, and the spaces we do have rove around the city. StatsCan indicates that, in 2016, only 1.9% of queer couples in Canada live in Hamilton, putting us on par with Halifax (which only has 3/4 the population of Hamilton) and Victoria (which has 16% of the population we do).

When we’re scattered, we’re vulnerable. Every Hamiltonian knows this, but this city has a higher than usual proportion of hate crimes. In 2022, there were 21 hate crimes or incidents impacting someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity. That was an 850% increase in attacks on queer people from 2021. 850%. That isn’t a typo. And these were crimes that were fairly spread out over the city.

There are queer folks in Stoney Creek, Hill Park, Waterdown, Winona, Homeside, Greensville, Rolston, Harmony Hall, and Rockton. We exist in Hamilton, but we have so few spaces in Hamilton. And, because of that or maybe as a reflection of that, we sometimes feel less safe, less willing to be our authentic selves, less at home in Hamilton. And that’s not okay.

Woof, took a dark turn there. Sorry about that. Ultimately, good for Waterloo for getting a new combination fast food joint/gay bar. Let’s hope it lasts and inspires a whole bunch more fun and interesting queer spaces to open up in KCW and across Southern Ontario!

A blue jeans update

Last week, I discussed a story coming from the Upper Canada District School Board (UCDSB), which has suspended Stormont and Glengarry trustee Curtis Jordan from meetings until the end of the year.

At the time, the UCDSB had not said what Jordan did to warrant the suspension, so all we had to go off were Jordan’s own words on the matter. He claimed it was because he wore jeans and didn’t follow parliamentary procedure in board meetings.

Well those comments have earned him another review and possible censure.

The good news is, it was those statements that forced the UCDSB to be a little more transparent about the background regarding Jordan’s first censure and suspension. The board claims Jordan has been submitting incomplete expense reports and made comments during a meeting about said reports that prompted the first censure motion. He then did not participate in the investigation into his conduct, nor did he provide his side of the story.

Okay, that makes sense. It still seems like an overreaction to censure someone for something so minor, but at least it makes more sense than banning a trustee from meetings because of less-than-business-casual attire.

Unfortunately for Jordan, there will now be a second round of investigations, which isn’t great. Still, having a less formalized conversation with a colleague about their behaviour might have prevented this from blowing up, becoming another story about school board disfunction in Ontario, and giving opponents of the board fodder for their trustee campaigns in 2026.

Pierre Poilievre thinks your house sucks

Last Wednesday, Conservative Party leader and (if you only believe polls that are conducted before an election) future Prime Minister Pierre Poilievre breezed into Niagara Falls last week to talk housing and show off his new no glasses supervillain look.

At a press conference, he talked about how Americans could buy “a big beautiful multi-level with a garage and a big lot for $217,000 Canadian”, in an apparent attempt to mimic the rhetorical style of Donald Trump and appeal to all those Canadians who…actually like sprawl. Hot.

He then pointed to a house in Niagara Falls that costs $550,000 and has been on the market for a while and called it a “shack”.

The person who rents said “shack”, waitress Asha Letourneau, told CHCH: “He called it a shack. A shack. That was a little embarrassing also because it’s not.”

Listen, I’m no Senior Associate Principal Consultant at Navigator or anything, but my general recommendation is to not make fun of people whose votes you want. And maybe don’t be a classist prick, either. I’m thinking the second comment is why I don’t work at Navigator.

But, of course, the best response came from satirical news site The Beaverton.

In a fake interview with Poilievre, the Beav folks wrote:

Canadians need affordable housing. Poilievre and Ford and all the other hard right wingers in Canada are pumping the supply narrative because it’ll make wealthy developers wealthier. We all know that by now.

But making fun of people’s houses shows just how amateurish the Tories still are. If this is any indication as to how the next campaign will go, I could see that Conservative lead evaporate in a few short weeks of campaigning.

P.S. - That was the second Beaverton article I linked to this week. See if you can find the other one!

Someone’s in the money!

And it isn’t me!

Last Thursday, Substack (the platform on which this newsletter is hosted) announced that writers have raised $1.2 million from “pledges”. This is a new tool the service has created which allows publishers of newsletters to solicit a pledge of money while testing the waters on paywalling sections or whole newsletters. Substack says that 20,000 writers have earned pledges and the overall push of the service is to get publishers to paywall stories.

I genuinely don’t know if that’s something that’ll ever happen with The Sewer Socialists. I’ve had offers from folks to contribute to a Patreon, which I really appreciate, but I don’t know if I’d ever paywall any portion of this newsletter.

I started this thing because I had a lot of fun keeping people updated about Hamilton’s 2022 municipal election, specifically the school board candidates and their policy positions. I loved using Twitter to share my ideas, my research, and my writing, but as the site became less and less usable, I pivoted to Substack as a way to keep that going. I’ve used this site as a way to keep my writing skills fresh, do deeper dives into topics I’m interested in, and generally keep my friends and subscribers up-to-date on important issues.

But I’m not going to lie: this is hard. I spend hours of my own time researching, writing, creating graphics and maps, and selecting the freshest of all the memes to include with each week’s edition. I’m an underpaid postdoc right now, with a contract coming due in the next year, so my future is looking pretty shaky (I’m getting some serious pressure to move and I don’t want to do that). And there are some things - like pulling property records or travelling around to take actual pictures of things - that have cost me money…money that I, frankly, don’t have. So that’s been a challenge.

It would be great to make some sort of living off my writing, but paywalling this newsletter or any segment of it feels wrong. I don’t want to make any stupid declarations that might come back to bite me in the ass, but just know that The Sewer Socialists will remain a free publication for the foreseeable future.

If you have any ideas re: 💰💸💶📈💲🍞, feel free to send me a message or email and we can chat about that. That is not an invitation to send me links to your dumb crypto pyramid scheme! But, if you have ideas on what can be done to provide fun, informative, and topical information to readers while also being able to pay rent, let me know!

Cool facts for cool people

• The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives “Can’t Afford the Rent” report is out. These folks do some great work breaking data down in ways that highlight the issues in specific places. They’ve calculated a “rental wage”, which is the wage you’d need to be paid an hour to spend no more than 30% of your income on the average apartment if you’re working a 40 hour week. That 30% cutoff is what the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation deems as “affordable”, meaning, if you pay more than 30% of your wage for housing, it is not affordable. In Hamilton, you’d need $23.02 an hour to afford a 1 bedroom and $28.77 for a 2 bedroom. There are no neighbourhoods in Hamilton where rental accommodation is considered affordable for a full time minimum wage worker. The only major cities in Canada where minimum wage workers can afford to rent are Trois-Rivières and Saguenay. In Toronto, you’d need to be paid $40.03 to afford a 2 bedroom. Woof. Check out the report if you’re interested.

• Kojo Damptey, a friend and all-around awesome Hamiltonian, tweeted screenshots of a two-page letter sent to local politicians, police, and the media (as well as “Premier Ford” denouncing Kojo, Sarah Jama, Sabreina Dehab, and the entire HCCI. The letter rejects the notion that there’s any racial bias in policing, brings up discrimination against the police, tells the HCCI to focus on the issue of Khalistan, and rehashes the Spec article about Samson Dekamo that was published days before the election. It strongly suggests that people who commit crimes have behavioural flaws and rejects the notion of socialization or how any circumstances in one’s life may push them to commit crimes. The letter is weird. And, frankly, is another example of right wing reactionaries doing their thing in town. But, the very fact that they’re taking aim at people shows those folks pushing for change are doing something right.

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