…but first, a word from The Incline.

I have some exciting news for all you Inclineites (Inclinegonians?) out there! I’m presently working on the newsletter’s first ever Live Event! That’s right, fans of local affairs newsletters punctuated through with historical facts and left-leaning commentary! Get ready for a fun local story, told live by yours truly, followed by a chance for questions, conversation, and socializing.

I’m still working out the details, but the plan is to host it the week of May 26. I’ll send out a separate invite to subscribers when the specifics are confirmed. This will be a ticketed event with limited spots available, so keep an eye out for that email!

Alright, now that the teaser trailer is done, on with the show!

Sage Council

First Number: 7,900,000

On Wednesday, April 30, the General Issues Committee (GIC) of council received details about the Barton/Tiffany Temporary Outdoor Shelter (let’s just call it “the Barton/Tiffany site” for now). The good news - namely that the site has housed 80 people, is providing 24/7 wrap-around services, and is putting residents on the path to permanent housing - was eclipsed by the admission that the project is $5.1 million over budget, bringing the total to somewhere around $7.9 million.

The cost increase isn’t because of one single significant event. Rather, the overrun is due to dozens of medium-sized events, many of which could have, theoretically, been avoided had the project been given more time to come to fruition, been cited elsewhere in the city, and had been developed in conjunction with experts on the ground and people experiencing homelessness themselves.

But that was never really in the cards. And that’s because the Barton/Tiffany site was created as the result of a mayoral directive that was issued on August 6, 2024. Since the COVID-19 Pandemic, summer always seems to be the time when people get most angry over the issue of housing and homelessness. Maybe it’s because folks are out, going to events, and generally hanging around in social spaces (you know, seeing people IRL that are outside of their immediate social circle), but the warm weather is a reliable indicator that the heat around that particular issue is going to be cranked way up.

Last summer was no exception, as community tensions over encampments, the now-abolished protocol, and a perception of an imagined encampment-induced crime wave were running high. There was palpable anger in the community over the issue. Council’s opposition caucus began introducing motions that amounted to park-by-park encampment bans to earn favour with the angriest of their constituents, each attempting to peel their communities away from the city’s collective effort and to appear “tough on crime” while saving their own neck of the woods like old fashioned ward bosses. Local political figures eager to use the situation to advance their own agenda were out and about, trying to “main character” their way through the crisis by doing everything from posting obsessively about the issue on social media to doing things like “show of force” patrols through parks where encampments had been sighted. The whole dismal display is made all the more frustrating when we consider that only around 300 people are actively sleeping outside in Hamilton. Imagine what could be done if all the blame was redirected to finding a real solution to help those with the most acute needs?

***

In the midst of last summer’s anger, Mayor Andrea Horwath decided to act. Using the powers afforded her by Doug Ford’s expansion of the Strong Mayor regime, Horwath directed staff to come up with a plan in 43 days. This set off a flood of what the Spec called “unsolicited proposals” to build a tiny home village somewhere in Hamilton. One group proposed a small cottage court-style development with a central service building, the Hamilton Alliance for Tiny Shelters folks proposed a modest array of homes on a local parking lot, and tiny home vendors were making their pitches to a desperate city. General estimates were that a “village” of between 25 and 50 cabins would cost between $1.5 million and $2.5 million to set up and another couple million to operate. The goal was always short-term, transitional housing to get people ready for more stable housing when it was made available.¹

On September 18, 2024, council’s GIC received the initial report entitled “Reducing Homelessness and Managing Encampments” which outlined a proposed massive expansion of shelter space and the creation of a temporary outdoor shelter on the vacant former industrial lands around Barton Street West and Hess Street North in the “West Harbour” or “Barton/Tiffany” area of the city.

The report was then broken into pieces, allowing councillors to vote on each portion of the report separately. The first portion - the massive expansion of shelter beds - was passed unanimously.

The second potion - to create the outdoor shelter - was passed 12 to 4 with Councillors Matt Francis (Ward 5), Tom Jackson (Ward 6), Esther Pauls (Ward 7), and Mike Spadafora (Ward 14) voting against.

The third portion - to hire staff to manage these shelter beds and ensure those in shelters have support getting accessible housing - passed 10 to 6, with Ward 9’s Brad Clark and Ward 11’s Mark Tadeson joining the other four in opposing that part of the motion. It’s worth pausing here for a quick sec to think about this vote. The six councillors opposed to this motion voted to expand shelter space. When given a chance to hire people who can help move residents from shelter space to permanent housing, they gave the idea a big thumbs down. That makes the first vote entirely performative, signaling that they want people experiencing homelessness out of view, but don’t see any value in working diligently to find permanent, stable, safe housing for them.

The fourth portion - granting the “General Manager of the Healthy and Safe Communities Department or their designate” full authority to do what was necessary, including “negotiate, enter into, execute and administer any and all contracts, agreements and other documents necessary to implement recommendations” - was passed unanimously.

A controversial fifth portion was tacked onto the end, requesting staff report back in Q1 of 2025 on abolishing the encampment protocol. That one passed 12 to 4 on the same lines as the second portion.

By Halloween 2024, council had received an update on the Barton/Tiffany site which informed them that a tiny shelter provider had been identified and that feedback from both the community and council was incorporated into the planning.

***

The problems cascaded from there. The environmental assessment of the Barton/Tiffany lands, which dates back to 2018, found that the general West Harbour area had wildly contaminated soil and water thanks to former uses, which included things like autobody painting facilities, petroleum storage tanks, plastics and metal recyclers, and a coal tar and chemicals manufacturer. This meant that the Barton/Tiffany site might have had leftover contaminants like asbestos, mercury, benzene, lead, and hydride-forming metals like arsenic. Yum! An updated report noted that the site really only had dangerous levels of lead that needed to be addressed (thanks to paint, of all things), but that environmental management would be needed thanks to existing storage tanks, building foundations, and residue from former coal storage facilities. All that necessitated grading, capping, and soil management to protect the residents and people who would be working there. That couldn’t proceed until the City addressed an “Order to Comply” that was slapped on the site in November thanks to their failure to register the project with the Ministry of Labour, failure to appoint a supervisor on site, and failure to list the dangerous substances present.

Then, of course, was the controversy around the tiny shelter provider that had been announced to great fanfare in October. At the time, MicroShelters Inc. - a company that evidently formed around the time of Mayor Horwath’s directive - claimed the units would be “100 times better than a tent.” The company was evidently formed by a former RCMP superintendent and a Burlington resident who worked in the social housing sphere.²  Then it was revealed that the company might have been using images of shelters from another provider in California (which MicroShelters Inc. denies). Then City staff revealed the tiny homes were being shipped in from China, not the United States. Then staff learned the tiny shelters weren’t even up to code and needed close to half a million dollars to ensure they were actually livable.

At present, the whole affair has everyone pissed. Advocates working in the housing, health care, and addictions fields are mad at the bungled opportunity and the insistence that everything is temporary, despite the lack of real housing or actual supports for when this temporary solution is wound down. Some of the more…conservative voices in our community are angry at the expenses, the bureaucratic bungling, and a vastly inflated perception of lawlessness that, again, just hasn’t played out in the data.

And, ultimately, this is becoming another issue which those ambitious soon-to-be council candidates will use to bludgeon their incumbent opponents with when the real festivities kick off in a year’s time.

Second Number: 535

The GIC report about the Barton/Tiffany overruns happened on April 30. The very next day - May 1 - marked one year before the official opening of municipal nominations for Hamilton’s 2026 municipal election. Today, we’re just 535 days out from the next municipal vote, and the campaign machinery is starting to grind once more.

Now, the fact that the Barton/Tiffany site exists is because of a mayoral directive to find a solution to the entire concept of homelessness in just 43 days isn’t going to concern any of the dozens of people already hungrily eyeing council seats with the express goal of turning council even further to the right. That little technicality certainly won’t stop the legions of the permanently aggrieved and our city’s reliably well-funded, albeit laughably amateurish, right-wing populists from pinning this on our woke council of The Ladies and the Gays (plus Craig)™. The facts of the matter - including the fact that staff were given ample authority to do what needed to be done to meet an impossibly short deadline - aren’t going to stop the exact people you’re imagining from repeating the issues with the site over and over and over again on the long, slow, painful march to the ballot box next October.

Barton/Tiffany will just be one more thing they’ll all crow about to earn the support of the angry minority that perceives itself to be a righteous majority. Because, at the end of the day, this isn’t really about homelessness. The Barton/Tiffany site could have been built for a song, housed double the number of people, and become a shining beacon on which other cities based their response to this crisis and still people in the community would find a way to politicize it. It’s not about the result; it’s about riding a wave of anger into office to then have the power to remake the city in your image. Remember: it’s big developers and people with a massive financial stake in the city promoting the angriest actors because the culture war stuff is a convenient distraction, aimed at making people mad enough to vote for candidates who will reorganize the machinery of our local government to ensure the wealthiest make as much profit as humanly possible.

Say it with me, everyone! ✧˖°. Right-wing populism is a scam designed to make regular people angry enough to vote against their own interestsss! .°˖✧

***

Shifting gears ever-so-slightly, let’s move on to everyone’s favourite hobby: wild and rampant speculation about the 2026 municipal election!

After his loss in Hamilton East-Stoney Creek, the name on everyone’s lips (eww) is that of Chad Collins. Long seen as a mayoral contender, his newfound unemployment makes the prospect of a Collins 2026 campaign all-the-more likely. While he didn’t deny or confirm his intentions to Scott Radley after the federal election, the Spec’s columnist did piece together the clues Collins has been leaving around town for about a decade. He was seen as a possible contender in 2014, complained about the commute to Ottawa, and told Radley last December that he missed City Hall.

Similarly, former Hamilton Mountain MPP Monique Taylor was the topic of mayoral speculation by Radley in his May 2 column. Taylor got her start working for stalwart labour traditionalist Scott Duvall and held the Mountain as a provincial legislator for fourteen years without any trouble. Even if she lost her federal bid, as Radley noted in his piece, “it wouldn’t take a particularly skillful debater to argue the case that she didn’t lose — rather, [the NDP] did.”³

Another name that came up was 2022’s runner up, Keanin Loomis. Radley alluded to Loomis’ registration in the last election and Joey Coleman reported on Loomis attending the opening of Magnolia Hall “as a parent”. That notepad entry from Coleman was fun; it reminded me of Spec tidbits from back-in-the-day reporting on Hamiltonians of high regard in society circles being spotted having tea with former social rivals or gracing an up-and-comer’s party with their presence. It’s like our own version of The Gilded Age! Fun. Regardless, Coleman has pledged to ask Loomis about his intentions re: 2026 the next time he sees him.

A few other names have been thrown about over the past few months. Apparently since former mayor Fred Eisenberger has soured on Horwath’s leadership, his name has been added to the mix, as has former Hamilton Centre MPP Sarah Jama’s. Eisenberger practically made a career out of running for mayor through the 2000’s and 2010’s and Jama was actively preparing a 2022 mayoral bid before Horwath announced she would enter the fray. So anything is possible at this point. Let’s see if anyone else gets their “contender profile” in the Spec over the next few months.

One person who will likely not be in the mayoral mix for 2026 is recently defeated Hamilton Centre MP Matthew Green. While I raised the possibility of him making a mayoral pivot on Radley’s podcast on election night, Green quickly quashed any quixotic questions regarding his local ambitions. Instead, Green told the Spec’s Matthew Van Dongen (full disclosure: in an article I’m quoted in) that he will contest Hamilton Centre for the NDP again whenever the next federal election is called.⁴ Add to that the fact that Green has been raised as a possible contender for leader of the NDP - seeking to really focus on on the idea of the NDP as a “working-class party” - and it is highly unlikely Green will be on your 2026 mayoral ballot.

On the council side, people are preparing their campaigns with glee. The attacks on councillors from the legions of right-wing populists in town have increased, as has the posturing by some councillors keen to position themselves as mavericks and win over the loud, well-funded minority currently trying to bring the culture war to Hamilton.

Across the province, there’s a worry that a surge in populism and an emphasis on the culture of rage, entitlement, and punitive justice will drive “normal” candidates and many beleaguered incumbents away from seeking office in 2026. Quebec’s municipal elections are this year and, since their last round of elections in 2021, they’ve seen upwards of 10% of all local elected officials just up and quit before the end of their term because they’re burnt out dealing with the onslaught from the online right.

With tensions once again running high - over encampments, tax increases, and every misstep from a municipal government that isn’t being given any leeway by a frustrated electorate - one has to wonder who would really want to seek local office anymore. Given that so much of the vitriol is aimed at The Ladies and the Gays (plus Craig)™ and that it comes dangerously close to veering into homophobic, misogynistic, and racist territory, we have to ask if other queer folks, Hamiltonians of colour, and women and gender diverse members of our community would want to stick their necks out and subject themselves to the kind of abuse that has replaced real conversation in our community.

Contenders are keen to replace much of council, anger is running high, and the mayoral field is starting to come into focus. With that, it’s about time we looked back at elections of yore to see if there’s anything we might be able to glean from our past.

Second Number: 1,443

Let’s take a look at all our municipal general elections since 1960. That was the year of a major ward boundary realignment that created roughly the same kind of wards we have today. Ward 1, for example, has stayed exactly the same since then (Ancaster Creek in the west, Queen Street in the east, Cootes and the Harbour to the north, the Escarpment to the south), making it now old enough to be eligible for a pension.

Since 1960, there have been 1,443 candidates for mayor and council combined. Many of those candidates were repeats, but that’s how many candidates have offered themselves up for election in the past 65 years.

In that time, we’re really looking at three distinct periods:

• 1960 - 1980: Elections with the Board of Control (21 seats)

• 1980 - 2000: Pre-amalgamation elections (17 seats)

• 2000 - Present: Post-amalgamation elections (16 seats)

The Board of Control, for the uninitiated, was a four-member body elected at-large across the whole city. The four people top candidates would become Controllers who would sit on council but act as a kind-of “expert” body of fiscal managers. They had more local authority than regular councillors (at the time called “aldermen”) and the person who received the most votes of all controller candidates was the de facto Deputy Mayor. Serving on the Board of Control was considered a natural stepping-stone to becoming mayor; four of the city’s six pre-amalgamation mayors all served on the Board and another lost a close race for a Controller’s position in 1970. By 1980, it was seen as a clunky, outdated body, and was abolished in favour of a streamlined council of two aldermen per ward and one mayor.

During that first period, Hamilton had an average of three mayoral candidates per election (the numbers are slightly off as there were three acclamations in that time). There were an average of nine Controller candidates and 40 council candidates spread across the city’s eight wards.

After the Board of Control was abolished, ambitious candidates redirected their efforts, returning to sit on council as aldermen or challenging the mayor for his (it was always his at the time) seat. During those tumultuous twenty years, there were an average of five mayoral candidates and 49 council candidates per election.

When the City of Hamilton was amalgamated with its neighbouring suburban municipalities, the candidate lists began to grow. Since 2000, there have been an average of 11 mayoral candidates and 68 council candidates running across the new 15 wards of the city.

All this means there’s been a steady uptick in the number of candidates seeking local office in Hamilton. The 2018 election was the high-water mark for candidates, with 89 people seeking council seats, a near-record 15 people running for mayor, and 54 people running for trustee seats (I’ve excluded trustees from the overall calculation because of how rapidly trustee positions changed and the general unreliability of data before 2006).

***

But that’s just raw numbers. The folks out there in the community prepping their own bids for council are eager to defeat incumbents en masse. That, as history would tell us, is extremely difficult to do. We can’t really do averages for this number since there are a lot of zeros in the dataset, but we can look at the median number of incumbent councillors who are defeated in municipal elections in Hamilton. And that number is one.

The single largest turn-over election was in 1960 when seven incumbents lost bids for re-election. Mayor Lloyd Jackson was acclaimed to office as six candidates stepped up to contest the Board of Control and 50 candidates registered to run in the newly reconstituted wards.

It’s kind of hard to state just how dramatic the change in ward boundaries was between the elections of 1958 and 1960. I’ve thrown together a very rough ward map using Google Maps showing the changes between those two elections here that should give you some idea of the scale of the change. The mountain gained a ward, traditional wards that split the city along King Street were instead drawn north-to-south, and the city’s expansion added massive amounts of territory to the map.

The result saw council members shift their wards and need to campaign to, in some cases, entirely new electorates. Coupled with the entry onto the municipal scene of the wildly popular radio broadcaster Vic Copps, people expected some shake-ups. But the scale of change was unexpected, even by the veteran reporters at the Spec. Reporting on the results the day after the election, the paper noted that:

The paper was careful to note that people from all parties lost seats, but that “among those who replace them were three Liberals and two Socialists,” reflecting the country’s souring mood toward Prime Minister John Diefenbaker and the excitement around the changes in the labour movement that would lead to the creation of the modern NDP.

In that election, 54.3% of eligible Hamiltonians cast ballots. That number was surpassed in the next election when 55.1% of voters went to the polls. Those two figures have been the highest turnout Hamilton has seen municipally since 1960. In that election - the one held on December 4, 1962, only one incumbent lost their seat. Mayor Lloyd Jackson was defeated in his re-election bid by the dynamic Copps.

During the next 14 years of Copps’ reign, only six incumbents would be defeated, as voters became comfortable with the council members they had guiding them through the last of the city’s post-war golden years.

The only election that came close to the wholesale clear-out of 1960 was the election of 1985. Held in the fall after a spring provincial election that, for the first time in 42 years, brought the end of Progressive Conservative domination over Ontario, the 1985 election was a chance for voters to express their anger after the first normal three-year term in the city’s history (there was a three-year term between 1973 and 1976 after the province held snap municipal elections following the creation of the Region of Hamilton-Wentworth). Voters in Wards 1, 4, 5, 7, and 8 threw out their incumbents and replace them with a new class of dynamic and eager municipal politicians.

The council of 1982-1985 was marked by rampant and public dysfunction. The atmosphere at City Hall was so heated that, in the summer of ‘85, the Spec ran a series of profiles on each council member that included unflattering remarks from their colleagues and city leaders. I’m planning a whole edition just on those profiles, so you’ll have to wait for the backstory, but the point is that the previous council was a complete mess. The results from November 12, 1985 make complete sense when understood in the context of the council dysfunction from the preceding three years.

(Fun fact: the election of 1985 marked the first appearance of current Ward 6 councillor Tom Jackson and saw the re-election of Shirley Collins, mother of likely mayoral candidate Chad Collins!).

Since amalgamation, we’ve averaged about two incumbents going down to defeat each election. Much of that is driven by our regular mayoral turnover, though last election’s replacement of entrenched incumbents in Wards 2, 10, and 13 was the largest change in councillors since 2000.

***

So what does all this data tell us? Hard to say, really. The number of candidates running increased steadily until 2018 before dropping in 2022. Whether that marks the beginning of a new trend or an inconsequential blip will take time to figure out. And, when it comes to incumbent candidates being defeated, history shows us that it’s only around times of great upheaval where challengers can truly find an opening. Ward boundary changes, transparent disfunction, or complete municipal restructuring have been the most obvious indicators of a wave of change in the community.

This past term of council has been interesting, though it doesn’t really check any of those boxes. In the absence of reliable leadership from the mayor, other councillors have stepped in to the void. There’s been some typical partisan bickering, but also plenty of unanimous votes and collaboration between factions. Posturing from council’s “opposition caucus” doesn’t seem to serve any purpose other than solidifying their own bases and, again, they tend to work with other councillors on some important issues.

The best indicator we will have of the electorate’s mood pre-2026 will be the inevitable Ward 8 by-election to be held sometime over the next few months. Few names have been mentioned as contenders, aside from Ward 7 public school trustee Dawn Danko and 2015 Ward 7 by-election candidate Uzma Qureshi, who presently works for Mayor Horwath as Chief of Staff. If an “establishment” candidate is rejected in favour of a brash populist, that tells us one thing. If the right-wing populists can’t mount a serious bid, that tells us something else. If voters turn out in droves, that signals something. If housing and homelessness is the main issue, that points to an election based on anger and should be good news to the populists aiming at challenging lower city incumbents.

In the absence of reliable polling, the by-election will give us the best indication of what to expect come October 26, 2026.

Then again, given the state of the world and the unpredictability of electorates across democratic states, we might be in entirely uncharted territory. This election might upend everything we thought we knew about local democracy in Hamilton.

With just 535 days to go until the 2026 municipal election, we’ll have our answer sooner than you think.

1  _{Teviah Moro. “Small cabin pitches roll in as Hamilton considers ‘sanctioned’ sites for homeless” Hamilton Spectator, September 16, 2024 (Spec link).}

2  _{"" “‘Micro shelters’ on their way to Barton West site” Hamilton Spectator, October 31, 2024 (Spec link).}

3  _{Scott Radley. “How the federal election might have affected Hamilton’s next mayoral race” Hamilton Spectator, May 2, 2025 (Spec link).}

4  _{Matthew Van Dongen. “‘I’m not going anywhere:’ Defeated MP Matthew Green is gearing up for a NDP rebuild — and another election race” Hamilton Spectator, May 3, 2025 (Spec link).}