Coming up on The Sewer Socialists

Summer is wrapping up! Which sucks, because I, like any self-respecting lizard person, derive my warmth and enjoyment from sprawling out on a rock and soaking up the sun’s loving rays.

As we move into fall, I wanted to lay out what the next while looks like for this newsletter to give you an idea where I’m going with this thing and to keep myself to some kind of schedule. Trust me, if I didn’t publicly announce I was doing something, I would absolutely fall behind and not get it done. Shame is a wonderful motivator.

So here’s your syllabus what you can expect over the next month:

• September 7 - In honour of Labour Day, I’ll be taking the week off to work on some of my upcoming editions. I recommend getting out, enjoying the last of the summer sun, and spending time with cool comrades. Go on a picnic, take a hike, unionize your workplace. You know, fun stuff!

• September 14 - The newsletter is back with a look at public spectacle and the cost of stadiums. With a lot of ruckus about creating a Downtown Entertainment Precinct and the increasingly public role of developers and company union figures (LiUNA in particular, but more on that in a moment) in opposing progress in the core to advance their bottom line, I thought it would be a good opportunity to look at whether stadiums are a boon for or a blight on cities.

• September 21 - Then we turn to the humble grocery store. The places we buy food from have changed dramatically over the past 100 years, and now contribute to the increased cost of living, subjugate workers, promote urban sprawl, perpetuate food insecurity, and represent growing corporate consolidation in Canada. What did grocery stores look like in the past and how can we get back to a more human grocery experience?

• September 28 - Finally, we take a look at car-centric development and Hamilton’s poor use of urban space. When Doug Ford made the argument for opening the Greenbelt, he said that we needed to build 80,000 additional units to meet the city’s projected population in 2031. But I make the case that we could easily build those units well within the urban boundary by using existing resources and already-available land. And redeveloping inefficient land could go a long way to reducing the city’s greenhouse gas emissions, create a stronger sense of community, and get some of those pesky cars off our clogged streets. There will be plenty of maps and some actual data in this edition, so you don’t want to miss this!

• October 5 - October 5th will mark the 30th edition of The Sewer Socialists, which is fun to think about. Such a milestone gives me a chance to check in with you lovely folks about how I’ve been doing and where this thing should go long-term. I’ve received plenty of emails from folks with advice, kind words, and, on occasion, anger over how I’ve characterized events or people. I read it all, but, because I’m a huge nerd, would love some data. So on October 5th, I’ll be soliciting your opinions on how to move forward with The Sewer Socialists.

• October 12 - Some people think of Thanksgiving as a silly colonial dress rehearsal for Christmas. That’s fair and mostly accurate. But I also like to think of it as a cozy little harvest festival! I’ll be off that week as well, giving folks two weeks to provide feedback on the newsletter, maybe hiking around this wonderful place, taking in the fall colours. I might just send out another prompt about the survey, I don’t know.

So that’s the next few weeks for The Sewer Socialists. Stay tuned for all that and more!

And, while you’re at it, send a link to your friends! Why not spread the newsletter?!

Are we merely a distraction?

Three little stories for you. The first is from New Brunswick.

Back in April, there were three provincial by-elections in New Brunswick. Three Liberal MLAs resigned, two to run municipally and one just because. The three ridings were in the heavily Francophone north of the province, where the governing New Brunswick PC Party has had a hard time breaking through. NB’s current premier, Blaine Higgs, has been especially polarizing, considering he ran for the leadership of the staunchly anti-bilingual New Brunswick Confederation of Regions Party back in 1989. His whole deal back then was that he thought the province was “catering” to Francophones who refused to speak English. Quel connard.

The PC vote in those ridings collapsed. In one, they didn’t run a candidate (to let the newly elected Liberal leader into the legislature), but, in the other two, they fell to third behind the winning Liberals and the popular Green Party. In the riding of Dieppe, they couldn’t even muster 300 votes. Local news reported that “Higgs could be flirting with disaster in key ridings if the party's Francophone vote completely evaporates.”1 

A few weeks later, the Higgs government announced changes to Policy 713, which used to protect queer and trans kids from discrimination. The new changes remove the requirement for teachers to get student consent if they want to share new pronouns or identities with the student’s parents and no longer requires teachers to use a student’s preferred pronouns or name. The province’s child and youth advocate called the change incoherent, saying “it's going to introduce a lot of uncertainty for children at a time they need the grownups to act with certainty.”2

The second story is from Saskatchewan.

On August 10, three by-elections occurred in Saskatchewan. In each of them, an MLA from the governing right-wing populist Saskatchewan Party had resigned. Which makes sense…the party has been botching the province’s economy and things just seem to be getting harder for regular folks out there. The by-elections were, in short, disastrous for them. The NDP picked up two of the seats in Regina, while the third, in rural Lumsden-Morse, saw the Sask Party shed almost 20% of their support, which mainly fled to the even more right-wing populist Saskatchewan United Party or “SUP”. Yeah, SUP. I dunno, man, sup with you?3

Less than two weeks later, Saskatchewan’s Minister of Education announced that a new policy would be implemented in the province that outs queer and trans students under the age of 16 to their parents if they’ve requested a name or pronoun change at school. While a big issue in the Lumsden-Morse by-election was sex ed and the role of groups like Planned Parenthood in schooling (which is also now banned from entering schools under the new policy), not a single person in the province was clamouring for this policy. As the Sask NDP leader Carla Beck told the CBC, “I think this is a reaction to a political problem that this minister and this government has.”4

The third is from Ontario.

On July 27, there was a by-election in Kanata-Carleton, a riding in Ottawa. Held by the Tories since it was created (portions of the riding had been held by the Conservatives since the 1920s), the PC candidate was defeated by former MP Karen McCrimmon, who ran for MPP with the Ontario Liberals. The PC vote dropped by almost 12% and the NDP came within striking distance of knocking the Tories to third. On the same day, there was another by-election held in Scarborough-Guildwood. Though this was a Liberal seat, the Tories ran local city councillor Gary Crawford in the hopes that they could flip it. They did not, and lost 2% of their previous vote. While the NDP did well, the surprise of the night was when the fourth place candidate came not from the Greens or one of the more well-established right-wing populist outfits in the province, but from the fringe Stop the New Sex-Ed Agenda Party, which earned 3.28% of the vote (likely much of it from angry Tories).

Then, in early August, Ontario’s Auditor General released a report laying out the sheer level of unscrupulousness with the government’s decision to carve land out of the Greenbelt to give to developers who magically just so happened to own these parcels and who coincidently lobbied the Minister and one of his staffers on the issue.

A couple of weeks later (this past Monday, to be exact), Education Minister Stephen Lecce announced that Ontario would be considering the implementation of a policy that…you guessed it…takes aim at queer and trans kids and requires parental consent for pronoun and name changes in schools.

So let’s just spell this out nice and clear:

• A provincial government starts faltering, either because they’ve alienated a linguistic minority, ruined the economy, or let developers get rich through government policy.

• There are some by-elections where voters express frustration and punish the government. Maybe a hard right-wing populist party takes a negligible amount of the popular vote or maybe the Liberals and NDP do better than expected.

• A few weeks later, an unwanted policy targeting queer and trans people is announced out of the blue.

• Suddenly, no one is talking about how bad the by-elections and corruption scandals were for the government. Instead, they’re focusing on the queer youth fighting for their lives and the Convoy morons hooting and hollering at every school board meeting.

If Canada were a real country, this wouldn’t be happening. But we’re not. We’re just a time-delayed Wish.com version of America where every policy that comes from our provincial governments is a Kidz Bop edition of some policy Ron DeSantis thought up a couple of years ago. Yes, I’m mixing my metaphors, but that sentence was still more coherent than any of these transphobic and, let’s be honest, anti-child policies.

These are political tactics to tire out progressive opponents, rile up a small segment of their base that loves to donate, and create a diversion so pesky journalists stop asking inconvenient questions.

While much of this has been cribbed from the worst minds in America, these premiers are playing with fire they know little about. Because down stateside, as the polling firm Navigator recently found out, these kinds of culture war issues are either deeply unpopular or are, at best, polarizing to the point of ripping communities apart. This obsession with culture war issues may have riled the base, but it has been cited as one of the reasons the Republicans failed to meet expectations for the 2020 mid-term elections. Same thing could happen here; this nonsense might suck up so much oxygen that suddenly Poilievre’s Tories might seem a little icky to suburban voters.

I shouldn’t have to say this, but queer people don’t exist to be your distraction when the going gets tough. Children should not be used as pawns in some game you’re playing when they deserve to grow up, figure out who they are, and live in peace. Voters in a democracy don’t deserve to sit on edge all the time, petrified that you’ll screw up and suddenly come for them as a great diversionary tactic. That’s what cartoonishly outrageous dictators in make-up authoritarian countries do.

I know the vilification and demonization of queer people and trans folks and teachers and doctors and immigrants (think housing) has been a trend for a long time, but we’re starting to see hard-fought rights being scaled back as a distraction so a premier can avoid questions about their political future. So I need to be abundantly clear about this:

If we allow this to continue, our democracy simply will not survive.

Killing us with consultation

There was a public meeting about city staff’s decision to allow the Hamilton Alliance for Tiny Shelters (HATS) to create a 25 cabin/tiny home village on Strachan Street on Saturday, August 26.

By all accounts, it was a pile on. Which should have been expected.

Former councillor Jason Farr has been whipping up anger in the community with his weird Facebook rants. Area residents are comparing people experiencing homelessness to literal garbage. LiUNA is lobbying hard against HATS, with their Director of Public Relations, Communications, Marketing and Strategic Partnerships (who is also the daughter of LiUNA’s president?) becoming one of the most recognizable public faces of opposition to compassionate solutions to homelessness. Also one of the most recognizable faces of being bad at communications:

Director of Public Relations, Communications, Marketing and Strategic Partnerships, eh? Kinda failing on all of those fronts. I thought the job here was to launder the reputation of LiUNA, an organization that is, in the words of Naomi Klein, “a fossil fuel astroturf group disguised as a trade union, or at best a company union,”5 not take cheap shots at the NDP. But that’s okay; I’m sure LiUNA’s Director of Public Relations, Communications, Marketing and Strategic Partnerships will be rewarded by the Ford government when the time comes. Maybe after a failed bid for council or mayor in 2026?

But LiUNA is only one voice in a sea of rage. There are many people speaking out against this proposal, in large part because they feel like they haven’t been heard. The anguished cries from the homeowneriest or homeowners, rising up from the Bay to LiUNA Station, continues to be “we deserve to be consulted!”

Scott Radley, writing in The Spectator, became the media voice for the opponents, calling a question by North End resident Lorraine Philip (“Why were the homeless consulted and not the neighbourhood?”) quote: “the one question council should be embarrassed to answer.”6

Okay but here’s the thing: most folks agreed that we needed an alternative to encampments and the alternative that was the easiest to rally around was a tiny home village. HATS wanted to locate on the Sir John A. MacDonald Secondary School site, but the school board said naw. There was a private site on Barton Street in Ward 3 that was considered, but certain segments of that community about which I have written in the past became vocal opponents of it and, regardless, the site proved to be incompatible with the project. There was talk of the cabins being placed on some of the West Harbour lands, but they are still extremely toxic and would need to be remediated before anyone could live on them.

Frankly, the last council dragged their heals on the issue, even when a tiny home village seemed like a very realistic and admirable attempt to transition us away from a city where encampments are just a part of the landscape and toward a city where we fully embrace the idea that housing is a fundamental right. They were so negligent in dealing with the issue that The Spectator printed a scathing editorial, slamming the last council for their inaction, asking why we hadn’t moved on this opportunity, and finishing with this incredible line:

What has changed since July of 2022 to shift the Spec position from “we need tiny homes” to running Radley pieces that gleefully point out how much Cameron Kroetsch, Maureen Wilson, and Andrea Horwath were booed at the North End meeting for promoting compassionate solutions to the homelessness crisis?

Honestly, very little. The endless cries for public consultation have been part of the HATS conversation since the beginning.

One of the very first things the new term of council’s Emergency and Community Services Committee did was finally get the ball rolling on HATS. But that wasn’t until they heard community members oppose the project by saying they “felt blindsided” and demanded more consultation.

They instructed staff to report back in January 2023. At the meeting where they happened, they heard again from community members who opposed the project, demanding more consultation.

In February of 2023, council approved the staff report on HATS that acknowledged political dithering and endless waffling on the issue was unacceptable, that HATS and city housing staff were the experts who needed to direct the project, and that the project was worthwhile. By the time the Encampment Protocol came around, the job was done and Strachan had been picked as the best possible spot.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that the calls for more public engagement are little more than a tactic to stall a project so long that it no longer seems viable.

HATS has a model that explicitly aims to prevent the kinds of problems that have been raised in public meetings. Regular visits from support workers. Constant security, regular clean-ups, wrap around services. A limit on the number of residents and a limit on encampments anywhere near the site. And, yet, North End residents still held up signs with phrases like “Mommmmy [sic] I stepped on a needle.”

HATS has provided ample information about the project. It has been in the Spec for years. There have been HATS open houses at just about every community event in the city for just as long. You can visit sample shelters at churches across the city. We have all the facts and data we need from Kingston, from Victoria, from goddamn Portland in goddamn Oregon. Every little piece of this project has been explained and explained and explained again.

We have the case of Kitchener, which has had a tiny home village (called A Better Tent City) at Ardelt Road for almost 3 years. Most of what we hear about Kitchener’s village is how the project has literally saved lives. Even if we wanted to look for negative stories, all we would find is one story from this year about how two guests to the tiny home village got into a fight They brought weapons into the site (which is against the site’s rules) and someone was injured, but that was only the second time the tiny shelter village had interacted with the police for anything major since they located there in 2021. Two times in over two years.

And yet, still, there is confusion. There is fear. There is irrational, knee-jerk opposition. Worries about property values and theft and violence and debauchery and perversion. Worries that have little grounding in reality.

Why?

Because a tiny home village with wrap around services has not been tried here. We’ve had encampments. We’ve had traditional homeless shelters. We even had a shanty town along the waterfront for decades in the early 20th century. But we haven’t had this. This entirely different approach to the issue may have some negative attributes that folks associate with encampments or shelters, but there is no way to tell until we try it.

While we do have some facts from Kitchener, we don’t have stats on crime increasing in the surrounding neighbourhood or instances of toddlers stepping on needles or a decline in property values because of a tiny home village. Because that would be almost impossible to measure. Sure, there might be a correlation, but only a very silly person would mistake correlation for causation. And, even if we could find a direct link between these things, what would make such a place different than an encampment, which is already along Strachan Street?

All these cries for more consultation are just another tactic used by cynical politicians, greedy developers, and frightened residents to filibuster a project based on imaginary concerns. We won’t know what kind of impact a project like this will have - good or bad - without trying it. We should put our faith in the faith communities and anti-poverty groups behind HATS and let them start their work, rather than battling the paper dragons we’ve allowed our fears and the least neighbourly parts of our imagination create.

Let HATS start their work. Let’s monitor their progress, but trust that their alternative will be different. And let’s not hide behind the seemingly neutral call for “more consultation” when all is really meant by that is “not in my backyard.”

Mic drop

I have been floundering a little since Twitter’s decline. I used to spend hours on that hellsite to get my news, hear what people were thinking, and get into dumb little arguments about dumb little things with dumb little people. Not having that in my life has been a bummer.

Sometimes, Tweets were so fire they made you laugh out loud. Literally. We got a little taste of that last week when Ward 1 councillor Maureen Wilson took Flamborough-Glanbrook PC MPP Donna Skelly to the cleaners for her hypocrisy and ill-timed defence of the overtly corrupt government of which she is a part.

🔥🔥🔥

Just perfect.

If Donna Skelly can’t answer for her years of inaction, the least we can do is keep reminding the voting public about her abysmal record.

Cool facts for cool people

• Davide Mastracci over at The Maple is reporting that Gurkiran Kaur Sidhu, the wife of NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, has just purchased a rental income property. I have no idea who thought that was a good idea, but the optics behind that are just…terrible. But, I mean, the party isn’t really serious about housing anyway, considering the federal NDP’s housing policy is basically “keep everything the same, just subsidize homeowners more.”

• Hamilton’s neighbour to the south - Haldimand County - just voted to initiate a ward boundary review for the 2026 municipal election. The H.C. (maybe that’ll catch on?) has been struggling with low voter turnout and a wide discrepancy between ward populations. The issue of ward boundary changes is a weird one. In Ontario, municipalities pretty much decide what they want their boundaries to be after paying a consultant a hefty sum. That’s different than how it is done Federally, where an impartial board of experts redraws boundaries based on population change. Part of the reason why only three municipalities increased the size of their council from 2018 to 2022 while two actually shrank their councils (with a third considering it). Five municipalities switched from ward-based elections to at-large, weirdly. Hopefully the H.C. gets the representation it deserves!