Pull up a chair

Summer: a time to sit back and relax. So I’ve heard.

I’ve been rather preoccupied as of late. Between work, personal commitments, and the Pride 2019 report I’ve been working on, there hasn’t been much time for anything else. Let me tell you, it is a good day if the dishes get done before midnight. Or the newsletter comes out before Friday. Sorrrrrrryyyyyy.

But it would seem that I’m not alone. The general consensus seems to be that everyone is super busy at the moment. Indeed, I’ve heard from plenty of people who have a lot of unread editions of the newsletter just sitting in their inboxes, awaiting that perfect moment when they’re sitting in a doctor’s waiting room, on a GO bus stuck in traffic, or made the mistake of preparing food without having some Netflix documentary queued up.

So this will be a short little newsletter. There’s some new stuff, but I’m also throwing in some links back to previous things from the past that people might want to take a look at if they haven’t already (or revisit if they’re interested). Take a seat, flip through some previous pieces, and relax. You’ve earned it!

It is very unlikely I’ll publish new editions over the next two weeks. But, to make up for it, I’m working on some fun new stuff for July and will have a preliminary copy of my Pride 2019 report available for folks in the coming weeks.

Enjoy!

An Indigenous seat at the table

On Monday, Indigenous leaders in Hamilton held a press conference at City Hall to formally request Hamilton’s municipal government begin the process of creating an Indigenous seat on council. This process would likely start with a council motion to have staff provide a report, which would inform council about the specifics and challenges, before moving onto another motion, more-or-less symbolically asking the province’s permission to create a first-in-Ontario seat for Indigenous people at the municipal level. Hamilton City Council does not have the authority to create a new council seat for a distinct population by itself and the province would likely have to study the issue through the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing before providing any clarity on the matter. And this current provincial government isn’t at all interested in expanding municipal councils at all. All this is to say: there will not be an Indigenous seat on council for the 2026 municipal election (or, likely, the 2030 municipal election). Any motion that comes forward on this would be purely symbolic and serve as an attempt to get the province on record as opposing such a measure.

Hamilton’s Indigenous population as of the 2021 Census is 12,520. That’s about 56% smaller than Hamilton’s least populated ward - Ward 11 (Glanbrook) - which has a population of 28,225 and around 75% smaller than Hamilton’s most populated ward - Ward 7 (Central Mountain) - which has 48,565 people living there.

That kind of population disparity would give a hypothetical Indigenous councillor a lot of power compared to their colleagues. The voting weight of such a councillor would be extremely disproportionate to their colleagues unless council also combined the creation of an Indigenous seat with a massive expansion of council or other meaningful electoral reform measure which would, again, require provincial approval.

The population disparity has the potential to be even worse when you consider that not every Indigenous person in Hamilton would likely sign up to be on the Indigenous voters list. There’s evidence this would occur.

New Zealand’s Maori population has distinct seats in their parliament. These seats are layered on top of the “general” electoral districts and members of the Maori community are given the choice of registering to be on the General or Maori “rolls” (voters list). There are presently 7 Maori electoral districts elected by the 291,825 members of the Maori voters list. But the Maori population in New Zealand is around 904,000. So only around 1/3 of Maori people in New Zealand have self-selected to be on these lists. And that’s for the national parliament where voter turnout is nearly 80% (Kiwis love voting, apparently…likely because they have a fair and proportional voting system in the form of Mixed Member Proportional).

We have no reason to assume every Indigenous person in Hamilton would want to be on the Indigenous voters list. It is not inconceivable to assume some Indigenous members of the community would have concerns about providing any kind of endorsement to this current system, which many see as rooted in colonialism, and that other members would not want to feel restricted by being placed on a special electoral roll.

If we use the New Zealand case and calculate that the Indigenous seat would be elected by 1/3 of the city’s Indigenous population, that would provide a voter’s list of 4,132. That’s equal to just 8.5% of Ward 7’s population. With voter turnout at the local level hovering around 35% in Hamilton, it’s possible that only around 1,500 people would vote for the new Indigenous councillor, which is far fewer than the 12,000+ people who voted in 2022 for local councillors in Wards 12 and 13, for example.

If council were to move forward with a distinct Indigenous seat, then it isn’t outside the realm of possibility to see Hamilton’s post-secondary students call for their own seat as well, given there are nearly 69,000 enrolled students across the city’s two public post-secondary institutions and one private Christian college.

That being said, the circumstances are different here. The purpose of an Indigenous seat on council is to address the historical inequity faced by members of the Indigenous community. As the city’s own Urban Indigenous Strategy notes: “Acknowledging that Indigenous people face many unique barriers in health, poverty, justice, employment and intergenerational trauma, and acknowledging that Indigenous people have close relationships to the land and their traditional knowledge.” Having the unique and rich perspectives provided by people with lived experience can ensure voices often excluded from the conversation are guaranteed a space.

But that was also the intent behind the city’s oft-maligned advisory committees. The city paused all recruitment for those committees last September pending a review of their scope, membership, and purpose, meaning there is no formal City of Hamilton-sanctioned advisory group on Indigenous issues. The last Hamilton Indigenous Advisory Committee meeting was in February of 2023.

So the big question is: would a dedicated Indigenous seat on council help the city move toward meaningful reconciliation and improve our local democracy?

On the first point, absolutely. Indigenous voices were purposefully excluded from the civic conversation for years and having a dedicated seat would go a long way to fixing that. Ensuring there is space for an Indigenous voice means that perspective can’t be ignored as easily.

On the second point, that remains to be seen. The logistics would be difficult to iron out and not every member of the Indigenous community would want to be on a separate voter’s list, so it has the potential to be a controversial position. And, of course, every racist harbouring nasty prejudices will worm their way out of the woodwork to oppose this seat. Yesterday’s Spec letters to the editor already features a perspective that falls back on outdated tropes about Indigenous people not paying taxes and being a special interest group.

But at least we’re having an honest conversation about the make-up of council. If this gets people thinking about ways we can strengthen our city’s civic culture, then even just the idea of an Indigenous seat on council has already improved local democracy.

By-elections for the big chairs/Élections partielles pour les grands postes

Speaking of local democracy, there were two big mayoral by-elections this week that are worth talking about.

The residents of Gatineau and Mississauga both voted in mayoral by-elections to replace mayors who stepped down. In both cases, the mayors who stepped down were women and the winning candidates were women.

The case of Gatineau is the more interesting one. The city’s incumbent mayor, France Bélisle, resigned in February after spending the first few years of her term dealing with a campaign of intimidation and harassment that included a number of death threats. In essence, Bélisle was bullied out of the job by Canada’s rapidly devolving political climate.

The winning candidate was Maude Marquis-Bissonnette, leader of the progressive urbanist Action Gatineau political party (Quebec has parties at the local level because that just makes sense). Marquis-Bissonnette ran against Bélisle in the city’s 2021 municipal election and improved on her result to beat out six other candidates for Gatineau’s top job. Action Gatineau has all the right ideas: stopping sprawl and focusing on targeted intensification, building more affordable housing, addressing the climate crisis, an arts promotion strategy…basically all the good stuff. So Marquis-Bissonnette’s election has the potential to set the capital’s cross-river sister city on the right path.

Mississauga, on the other hand, has voted for continuity. The voters of Ontario’s third largest city were selecting a replacement for Bonnie Crombie, who narrowly won the Ontario Liberal Party leadership and resigned to focus on leading the third-party from outside the legislature. On Monday, voters there decided to maintain their course and elected Carolyn Parrish, a career politician who pulled out of all mayoral debates after attending one and making unprompted, bizarre transphobic remarks.

A last minute surge by the most progressive candidate of the bunch - former OLP leadership candidate and sitting Mississauga councillor Alvin Tedjo - wasn’t enough to stop the Parrish train, which was running on the fumes of 35 years of active involvement in politics. Parrish’s platform was little more than vague generalizations like “pursue corporate donations for youth programs”, “push for bail reform”, and “have lots of consultations”, but it seems to have worked.

Kinda. Parrish only ended up with 31% of the vote. And only 25.7% of Mississaugans (Mississaugites?) voted. That’s a dismal turnout and not exactly a commanding mandate from the people.

All this speaks to the need for real electoral reform at the municipal level. A ranked ballot would have likely changed the outcome in Mississauga and might have even encouraged more people to go out and cast a vote. When London moved to a ranked ballot in 2018, voter turnout was around 40% but after the province forced them to move backward to first-past-the-post for 2022, voter turnout plummeted to around 25%.

Electoral reform helps. But we can’t understate the importance of having inspiring candidates that give people a reason to show up and put their faith in local democracy. Tedjo was able to finally do that after he broke through the media firewall, but his surge happened too late in the game to make a difference.

All this is to say: we need more inspiring candidates with actual platforms running for public office. Better candidates are a huge part of the equation. So let’s work on that, yeah? (More on that in the last piece this week)

Sitting in the Sewer Socialists archive

Call it a Sewer Socialists clip show. I’ve poured my heart into a few of the more recent pieces I’ve published, particularly those that take a look at a unique local issue or a part of our history.

So please enjoy six “clips” from each of the pieces I’ve been most pleased with in the past four months. You can read them by clicking on the link in each of the headlines.

***

From “Driven to Death” - March 1, 2024

“On the evening of October 20, 1949, alderman Ellen Fairclough was rushing back home from Toronto. The Ward 3 representative (at that time, the ward included Ainslie Wood, Kirkendall, Strathcona South, and Durand West) had been at a meeting all day, but needed to hurry home to attend a memorial for her friend, Nora Frances Henderson, the trailblazing and controversial former municipal politician who had passed away a few months prior.

Fairclough drove back and forth from Toronto to make her trip easier. Most of the drive home was uneventful. She sailed along the quiet, new roads and crossed over Hamilton city limits on schedule. Once in the city, she turned from York, up Locke Street North, intending to make a quick stop at her home at 214 George Street before heading to City Hall for the memorial. She did not anticipate the delay that she was about to encounter and the impact it would have on the rest of her life.”

***

From “The Assembly of ‘69” - April 19, 2024

“While other aldermanic candidates were likely knocking on doors or attending community meetings, it was safe to assume that Morgan put most of his energy into performing his church-related duties, supplying the sacrament to a mellowed flock.

Around a quarter to two in the afternoon, Morgan’s 19-year-old son Henry and step-son Duane went looking for their father. Things seemed unusually quiet at the church compound on Wentworth North.

When they climbed the stairs to Morgan’s apartment, they found out why. Entering his unit, they saw Morgan, bound with his hands behind his back, dead. Though they didn’t know it at the time, he had beaten to death. When the killers were done, they placed a towel over his body. The Ward 3 aldermanic candidate was dead at age 42.”

***

From “So Long, Mrs. Anderson” - May 3, 2024

“…I thought it would be pertinent to quickly look back into Hamilton’s past and remember the third woman to ever be elected to local office in this city. She’s a person who has been so thoroughly exorcised from our collective memory that few, if any, know anything about her at all.

Her greatest sin wasn’t that she was a fraud or a criminal or deeply unethical while in office. Her fault lay in her ideology, which she came to through a life of difficult work and challenging relationships. The reason we know so little of her today is that she maintained these beliefs at both the best and worst possible time.

The problem, you see, was that Helen Anderson was a Communist.”

***

From “We’re all in this together” - April 4, 2024

“Two weeks later, Skarica was demoted, losing his Parliamentary Secretary role. Dominic Agostino openly told the Star that Skarica would be welcomed into the Ontario Liberal caucus with open arms. Skarica remained a Tory and ran as the party’s candidate in the newly restructured riding of Wentworth-Burlington in 1999. Along with fellow PC MPP Brad Clark in Stoney Creek, Skarica ran on an explicitly anti-amalgamation platform, with both indicating they would do what they could to stop any proposed regional merger.

Then, on August 23, 1999, the province handed the municipalities of Hamilton-Wentworth a demand: get your act together and give us a regional restructuring proposal in 60 days or else. Within three months, there would be some kind of change, with or without the input of municipal politicians in the region’s six communities.”

***

From “St. Mark, Queen of the Bay” - April 25, 2024

“The city voted to not move forward with the sale, so the issue kind of just died.

Which was probably for the best.

A year later, a damning expose came out in the Spec. Turns out the CEC’s “first priest” in Canada, Mark Watters, (who was a bankrupt former salesman who was actually only a few months into his priest training) didn’t have the $350,000 he promised the city for the old St. Mark’s building. That money, supposedly from an “anonymous donor”, was actually going to come from his second-in-command with the church who was hoping for a big payout from a lawsuit he was involved with in New York state. That money never came through.”

***

From “Extra! Extra! Vox populi!” - February 15, 2024

“Which brings me to the overwhelming obsession among letter writers during the two months I looked at: homelessness. The word appears in letters 61 times over those 46 days. For some letter writers, every proposed penny of spending could be countered with some variation of “how dare they spend this money when there’s homelessness”.

Vacant Unit Tax? Not when people are homeless. Two-way streets? Not when people are homeless. LRT? Not when people are homeless. Bike lanes? Not when people are homeless. Snow plowing and shade trees and washroom repairs and a bus barn and paying council staff? Not when people are homeless. One letter went so far as to say we should force councillors and the mayor to live in a tent with no more than a few dollars to spend on food in some kind of macabre cosplay performance.

But when it comes to actual policy, there’s little to be found in these letters. Indeed, the issue of homelessness is presented as a reason to not do anything.”

Last seat on the right

One last thing before we go.

John Best of The Bay Observer has published a summer editorial providing his reflections on council, the state of the city, and a little gossip on preparations for the 2026 municipal election. I have been critical of Best’s commentary in the past, but you should give this one a read, if for no other reason than to get a glimpse into the conservative perspective on civic affairs in the present moment.

One line in particular stands out. Recapping the 2022 municipal election, Best says that the vote signaled a left turn on council: “In terms of political complexion of the new council, it looked like a massive shift to the left, to progressive politics, to ‘wokeness’ –whatever one wants to call it.”1

I’ve heard variations on this in correspondence from readers, in the Spec’s Letters to the Editor section, on r/Hamilton, and from among the scant remaining few who actively use X/Twitter.

There is a belief among a segment of the population that this current council is firmly on the far-left of the political spectrum.

This is, unequivocally, nonsense. It smacks of attempts by extreme right-wingers to move the Overton Window in their favour and label even moderate right-wing policy as being rooted in Marxism. This is contextless, gut-driven, and exhausting. What Hamilton’s critic class has done is based their perspectives on the vibes and then cherry-picked cases that vaguely fit their narrative that we’re barreling toward becoming the People’s Woke Republic of So-Called Hamilton.

There is nothing “far-left” about this council. Nothing’s been renationalized or redistributed or reeducated. This council is just different than what members of the Old Boys Club expected. The meanest, most reactionary voices have shuffled off and seat-filling careerists were booted out by well-organized opponents. The only difference is, the people who once held sway now don’t have their buddies in council chambers who will sit on the phone with them for an hour a day listening to their gripes or demands. And now there are so many ladies and gays!

Now we have a council that’s faced with cleaning up 22 years worth of civic mismanagement. They’re studying the bill for years and years and years of putting off necessary infrastructure upgrades, inefficient and costly sprawl-forward development, and ward-heeling vanity projects aimed at placating the privileged few who supported incumbent councillors.

Of course property taxes have gone up. They always go up. The Constitution limits municipal powers and everything costs more. Inflation hasn’t just hit bananas, you know.

We’re still dealing with the lingering fallout from the global supply chain collapse during the pandemic, a new reckoning with just how diminished our domestic construction and development capacity is, and two higher levels of government that use the municipality like a dumping ground for all their problems. Are the current tax increases because council has suddenly poured millions into new social programs? Of course not. Yet, the right-wing has fabricated this idea that council spending is “out of control”. Every expense is memorized and raised with passionate intensity as though it is the cause behind increased taxes. $4,505.40 for a trip to Italy, $750,000 for e-bikes for the SoBi fleet, $52,500 for air conditioners, blah blah blah. Every penny spent is a dollar taken from the pocket of a hungry taxpayer.

Inflation? I don’t know her.

Near the end of the piece, the Bay Observer’s editor makes this claim: “The Bay Observer is aware of political organization activity in several wards and even some fundraising…If the 2022 election featured the activist group, I ELECT as a factor, is it possible 2026 might see the emergence of an ‘I CORRECT’ movement?”

Just one aside here…fundraising? Are you serious? Gurl don’t broadcast that there are prospective municipal candidates out there actively breaking the law.

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah, conservatives getting ready for 2026.

A natural extension of the belief that council is some iELECT-backed Woke Politburo is that someone needs to Take Hamilton Back. From the pronouned, mask-wearing, queer cabal of out-of-town overeducated elites who tricked people into voting for them. From our tax-and-spend ultrasocialist mayor Horvath and all the other Marxists on council. From the nefarious community organizations that delegate to council. As Best writes: “The same faces pop up again and again in the pool of delegations who appear before council to ask for immediate action on topics like the air conditioners, leading this observer to wonder how spontaneous some of these appearances really are.”2 It isn’t just council they’re coming after; it’s the Hamilton and District Labour Council, Environment Hamilton, ACORN, the Hamilton Centre for Civic Inclusion, and all the other “community organizers” who are in on this conspiracy.

The hope, it would seem, is that this campaign of manufactured outrage will persist into the 2026 municipal election. And they have reason to assume it will.

The poli sci consensus is that we’re on the precipice of a new conservative decade - the most extreme right-wing decade we’ve seen in a century. An early spring election has the potential to return a PC supermajority to Queen’s Park and a fall federal election will likely give us a Conservative government federally. Hamilton’s civic politicos are salivating at the prospect of that right-wing wave washing over council chambers come October 2026. With that wind in their sails, Hamilton’s civic conservatives can run a coherent slate of law-and-order right-wing candidates who will pledge to slash taxes, clean up the streets, kill every woke social program, feed buckets of cash to the police horses, pave the Greenbelt, and Make Hamilton Great Again.

It is entirely possible this will happen. But there are flaws in this plan, the most obvious being that Hamilton’s civic right-wing is just…really bad at politics. Like, really really bad.

The egos in the movement tend to take centre-stage and few of them have enough on-the-ground political experience to run an effective campaign at the municipal level. Outrage is fine for getting likes on X/Twitter, but it does not a get-out-the-vote campaign make.

There are two things that might work to their advantage. One, progressives are exhausted. I don’t know a single person working in the progressive sphere that hasn’t said to me, at least once, that they want to flee to the wilderness, live in a cabin, and dedicate themselves to knitting, farming, and reading. The daily fight to justify our own existence is contrasted by the right’s “Get Away With Everything” pass and the macabre fixation of the few remaining journalists in the world on the “surging far-right”. Everyday, we wake up and read a new story about some fringe neo-fascist movement of pro-Russian anti-democrats and are like “oh, fun, this again, cool, I’m glad the five journalists left at this outlet have found a new weird group to scare me with. Yay.”

Second, the right is awash in resources and time. It’s hard to run a two-year campaign for council when you’re struggling to pay rent, afford groceries, pay off student loans, take care of family members, and carve out thirteen milliseconds a day to feed and wash yourself before collapsing in front of the TV before five-hours of panic-riddled sleep.

But we forget our own strength sometimes. There’s power in community. There’s unlimited potential in people of conviction working together to achieve their common goals. There’s an energy and enthusiasm we can tap into to give us strength.

Progressive politics in Hamilton isn’t dead. It’s still worth fighting for. For a Hamilton where you can be yourself. For a city rooted in the principles of democratic and economic fairness. For a community of dense, walkable, vibrant neighbourhoods. For a place where inequality is addressed, not simply policed. For a city where the air and soil and water are clean and safe for everyone. For a Hamilton where people, not just cars and developers and corporate profits, are prioritized. For a Hamilton that matters.

As we slip into the dog days of summer, remember: the right is organizing to capitalize on people’s fears and anxieties to serve their own aims. It’s about time progressives step up to present a credible alternative based in justice, fairness, and hope for everyone.

Cool facts for cool people

• I’ve written a bit about the controversies surrounding the Hamilton Police Services Board. But we aren’t the only ones dealing with a shady police oversight body. The Toronto Police Service Board has been rocked by allegations that board member Nadine Spencer’s company - BrandEQ - might have misrepresented its staff. The CBC has done a great investigation into Spencer’s company and discovered that people listed as employees with the company don’t appear to exist. The photos used for these people are stock images or pulled from other places on the internet and have been on the BrandEQ website for at least 10 years. The focus on Spencer comes as members of the Black Business and Professional Association (BBPA) raised concerns that Spencer’s company earned contracts for over $1.1 million in work while Spencer was on the BBPA’s board. Those two pieces are definitely worth a read.

• There’s been a lot of chatter about the recent EU elections in Europe. What’s interesting is that the AFD, the far-right party in Germany, has won over young voters by speaking to them directly on platforms like TikTok. The party’s lead candidate (Maximilian Krah, who has ties to Russia and China and, more recently, made headlines for being an SS-apologist) was focused on winning over young men by appealing to their sense of loneliness. In one video, he tells young German men: “Don't watch porn, don't vote green, go outside into the fresh air. Be confident. And above all don't believe you need to be nice and soft. Real men stand on the far right. Real men are patriots. That's the way to find a girlfriend!” Good lord, the douchebros are running for office. Combatting social isolation will be key to a progressive political strategy because, if we don’t start working on that, we cede ground to neo-fascists who claim being a bigot will help you get chicks.