One year in the sewer

🥳🎉🎂 The Sewer Socialists has turned 1 year old! 🎂🎉🥳

What a ride! The first real edition of The Sewer Socialists came out on February 23, 2023, which feels both like it was 300 years ago and like it was yesterday. To show you how much can change in a year, that first edition focused on the 15-Minute City conspiracy (now barely a blip on the far-right radar), took a look at the water situation at 1083 Main Street East (landlord Dylan Suitor now owes $144 million and his 11 shady corporations are bankrupt), and examined the proposed merger of Peel Region (the decision to dissolve the regional government was abandoned by Premier Ford after Mississauga mayor Bonnie Crombie became the new Ontario Liberal leader). I also apologized at the end of that newsletter for it being “pretty long”. Ha!

I have enjoyed contributing to the conversation here in Hamilton in my own unique way over the past year. At this point, I feel like I am starting to get a good flow going with the newsletter (rampant spelling mistakes and grammatical errors aside). Some wonderful folks have shown their appreciation by sending me tips through my ko-fi.com page, I’m nearing 300 subscribers, and there have been nearly 6,000 “views” of the last couple editions of the newsletter!

Thank you for all your support and your kindness over the past year. Here’s to many wonderful things over the next year!

Love in the time of austerity

Such a Dorothy

It took me a while to warm up to the 80’s. It was actually my partner, Colin, who showed me the amazing music, hilarious television, and cinematic masterpieces that came from the decade before I was born. Before he sat me down a couple of years ago and tuned me into the wonders of New Wave and the Golden Girls, I had a general antipathy toward the 1980’s.

I had always associated the 80’s with stagnation. Growing up in Hamilton in the 1990’s, I was surrounded by the ghosts of the decade prior. For the first few years of my life, Canada was in the grips of a paralyzing recession. Hamilton in particular was hit hard by the recession, with unemployment rates jumping from 6.4% in 1987 to 11.4% by 1993, though early estimates from that year posited that Hamilton’s real unemployment rate was closer to 13%.1 Stelco cut nearly 850 jobs in October of 1991, Oakville’s Ford plant started rolling stoppages and layoffs in early 1992, and Camco workers were only able to save their jobs by agreeing to reduced hours and wages in order to prevent the plant from closing.2 Shortly before my 3rd birthday, Statistics Canada reported that approximately 41,000 Hamiltonians were unemployed.3

Ontario’s NDP government responded by implementing a brutal program of austerity. By early 1992, the government of Bob Rae indicated that municipalities and schools would have to do more with less, cutting transfers without consulting local leaders. The Region of Hamilton-Wentworth saw funding cut to the point where they needed to raise their local tax levy by $7 per household (scandalous) and the Hamilton Board of Education (precursor to the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board) cut $12,000,000 from their budget, with board chair Margaret Cunningham cautioning that further cuts “means we are looking at a staffing reduction”.4 In order to ensure the municipality met goals, the editorial board of the Spectator encouraged Hamilton’s municipal leaders to freeze the salaries of all politicians and upper-level managers, consolidate municipal and regional services, petition the province and feds to not download services, and “hold the line” on a 0% budget increase.5

The effect of the recession and the program of austerity at all levels of government meant cutting back on those things deemed “unnecessary”. Now, what one person deems “unnecessary” might be what another person considers “essential”, so the phrasing really is up to interpretation.

My memories from the time are of stores and malls that opted to stop updating their décor, even as the styles in the 1990’s differed wildly from the styles of the 1980’s. I remember seeing municipal signs and banners, up year after year, yellowing and chipping and fraying. I remember schools that had gone years without paint, the flashy pastels of years gone by becoming increasingly sun-bleached and pale. I remember old busses - the ones you needed to walk up onto - rattling down pothole-strewn streets. I remember feeling like people had stopped taking care of their city. Of their schools. Of their surroundings. Like we were living in a place that stagnated. All set to the songs of the 1980’s, playing on a loop from crackly speakers in dingy malls, piped in from 102.9 -Lite FM.

That was the last major recession in Canada. The early 2000’s recession really only hit the airline sector and the Great Recession didn’t really have as deep an impact in Canada as it did in the United States. The only notable impact of the Great Recession was the Bank of Canada slashing interest rates, enabling wider access to mortgages, which has, in small part, created the housing crisis we have today, but that’s for another time.

Don’t be like Blanche

We are not in a recession now. The economy continues to grow (whatever the hell that really means) and the provincial government only has a modest deficit. In the 2022-2023 fiscal year, the provincial government’s deficit was only $5.9 billion, which is just a little more than half the average deficits the government carried from 1990 to 1995. And, in the 2021-2022 fiscal year, the provincial government had a surplus of $2.1 billion, which was the single largest surplus a provincial government had since 1986.

Despite this, we, as the residents of Hamilton, are being told to brace for austerity. Rumbling down the tracks like a locomotive without the space or time or desire to slow its roll, austerity is coming one way or the other.

Last week, city council approved Hamilton’s 2023-2024 fiscal year budget, which included a 5.79% tax increase. That increase is notably smaller than the 10-ish % increase that was floated by moderate and conservative councillors last July and less than half the nerve-rattling, eye-popping, resident-repelling 14.2% that was conjured from the doomsayer’s cauldron last September.

Even in the lead-up to the city’s final budget meeting, figures like the Spec’s Scott Radley noted that, no matter how much civic leaders whittle down the tax increase, they can’t get away from the fact that they would be “tapping reserves to offset an operating budget that's grown by $100 million.”6

Radley’s late-January article takes the city to task for their increased spending, highlighting a few areas where the budget was increased:

• +9.4% for the planning and economic development department (including +8.7% to tourism and culture)

• +10.4% for public works

• +7.3% for the city manager’s office

• +8.8% for the mayor’s office

• +21.6% for the city clerk's office

• +3.6% for ward budgets

• +7.2% for the Hamilton Police Service (HPS)

• +31.8% for “boards and agencies”

• +46% for consulting

Of course, those numbers are slightly deceiving, according to the available budget presentation on the city’s website.

That 31.8% increase to the “boards and agencies” budget? That actually includes the HPS budget increase. Of the extra $16,011,484 budgeted for those “boards and agencies” - which includes the police, the library, conservation authorities, the farmer’s market, the beach rescue unit, and the RBG - a full 86.5% of that increase goes to the police. Another 9% goes to those greedy bookworms at the library, while the money hungry plants daddies at the RBG take another…0.08%. The beach rescue unit gets an extra $2,600 a year. For context, if you present the ratio of police-budget-increase-to-beach-rescue-unit-increase, it’s 56,000:1. Baywatch on a budget.

I actually added up all the non-public works spending increases and got just over $8 million. That’s only 2/3 of the increase directed toward the HPS, which got an extra $13.8 million. The public works increase was much larger (over $30 million), with the bulk of it going into increased costs for transit, transportation, and waste management.

There are some other things in Radley’s article that have dried up a little since publishing. The litter collection program he takes issue with, which would have been allocated $2.5 million and created 28 jobs, was (as far as I can tell) dramatically scaled back to focus only on the lower city, preemptively cut $1.6 million from its budget, and only create 7 new jobs.

One of the deepest cuts came from Public Health. A full $11.6 million dollars was slashed from the city’s Public Health budget, with the overwhelming majority of that coming from cutting “employee related costs”. Now, for context, public health did receive over $21 million from the province to deal with “COVID-related issues”, which it cut and, in the case of $9 million, clawed back last year. The province provides most of public health’s budget, but cut their contributions by over $13.7 million from what they were providing in 2022.

That means 134 people will be fired. There will be less-frequent inspections of before-and-after-school programs. And Hamilton will be down to just two public sexual health clinics: the downtown location at the David Braley Health Sciences Centre across from City Hall and the Stoney Creek clinic on Centennial Parkway. And the downtown location is only open Wednesdays, from 4:30 to 7:00 PM, by appointment only. Before it closed four years ago, the Centennial clinic was open on Mondays and Thursdays for 3 hours each day. Even if they maintain those hours when they re-open, Hamilton will be providing public sexual health clinics for 9 of the 168 hours that are in each week. All amidst the worst syphilis outbreak since the 1950’s.

Guess it’s time to bring back the “I’m Worth The Wait” abstinence-only, shame-centric sex ed campaign taught in Hamilton’s schools in the early 2000’s that was developed by the anti-choice group Birthrite and the far-right, anti-gay Hamilton-Wentworth Family Action Council, among others.7 Sure, that campaign messed me up as a kid, but since we’ve slashed the budget for sexual health, we should probably tell everyone in the city to be ashamed of their sinful, disgusting little bodies. That’ll stop transmission of STIs! Oh, wait, no it won’t.

We should probably hold off on that, though, since changes to the public health funding regime might be coming. As was reported in the Spec, the provincial government, always keen to meddle in local affairs, has delayed the implementation of reforms to how public health is funded for years. The current estimate is that they might get around to it sometime next year to ensure the changes are in place around the time of the next provincial election in 2026.8

Explain it to Rose

It was Radley’s post-budget column that got me the most worried. The whittling down of the budget through targeted cuts is not enough. “It’s unsustainable”, said Tom Jackson. Jeff Beattie says someone needs to prune “the top of the tree”. Radley tells us this:

That, my tax-and-spend-friends, is the definition of “austerity”.

Cut. Cut deeper. Cut to the bone. And then go deeper. Saw the whole damn thing off.

Because keeping taxes low should be the only goal, right? Low taxes means a better community, right? People are happier when taxes are low, right?

Well, not quite.

In his paper “State government public goods spending and citizens' quality of life”, published in the journal Social Science Research in 2019, Patrick Flavin of Baylor University examines 30 years of government spending in the United States. Spending on public goods means allocating public money to things the private sector doesn’t want to do because it is unprofitable or too risky. This means spending on things like parks, roads, and first responders. To adequately provide these services, a government has to levy taxes. They’re public goods, so the public has to contribute to their provision to the best of their abilities.

Across the board, without exceptions for income level, education, gender, or race, there is a large, statistically significant relationship between state spending on public goods and resident happiness.10

Put simply: the more governments spend on public goods, the happier residents are.

One note, though. Flavin was unable to determine if the spending was the cause of happiness or if happier people just to happened to be located in jurisdictions that spent more on public goods.

Both make sense: a state spends money on parks and quality infrastructure and makes sure the fire department has proper funding, which can make people feel like they’re part of a community, not simply living in their own personal storage unit amid a sea of other people’s storage units, thinking only of themselves and how they can get ahead.

Conversely, people who are okay with the state providing services will have a more cheerful disposition than those who sit atop their piles of horded gold, Smaug-like, fearful of any threats to their fortune.

I first heard about this study from one of the best non-fiction books I’ve read in a while: A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear by journalist Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling. Profiling a town in New Hampshire that ultra right-libertarians tried to turn into a stateless, free-market utopia, Hongoltz-Hetling interviews town officials, long-time residents, and people in surrounding communities to understand what went so horribly wrong with the experiment (spoiler: part of it had to do with bears…lots of bears). But the thing that was the most striking was the general meanness of the libertarians he spoke with. Embittered, distrustful, and deeply suspicious, these folks wanted to be left alone to do whatever they wanted, however they wanted, everyone else around them be damned. They thought of themselves as eminently capable, never needing the help of others.

There’s a feel to that in all the breathless outrage over Hamilton’s municipal budget. Get off my lawn but make it policy.

Let’s be abundantly clear: the corporate market won’t save us. They won’t provide barrier-free access to public services, they won’t offer savings if you contract things out to them, and they won’t stick around to keep providing those services if things get hard (or their CEO decides they want a little more megayacht money instead of paying employees this year). Just look at Hamilton’s SoBi network, which was scooped up by Uber and then promptly dropped by Uber, leaving users in the dark until the community rallied together to save the service.

Spending on the public is good for the public. Parks are good. Bike lanes are good. Beach rescue units are good. Books and plants and e-bikes and new coats of paint and litter collection and caring about your community is good.

We should not be idolizing and supporting the efforts by greedy people who worship at the altar of selfishness to turn their self-obsession into public policy.

The conversation about municipal spending in Hamilton is being warped by low-tax extremists who don’t give a damn about their community. Anti-tax crusaders demand austerity, badgering right-leaning councillors who raise the prospect of +30% tax increases to put pressure on anyone a hair over the centreline to get their head out of the clouds and focus on the task of cutting, cutting, cutting.

Some exceptions apply, though. Council can request the Hamilton Police Board find efficiencies and the Board can turn around and tell council to shove it. But, everywhere else, we’re being prepped for lean times. And, as the threat implies, if this council doesn’t do the cutting, we’ll find ourselves a council that will.

The “Concerned Hamiltonians” beacon alights in the distance…

Sophia’s choice

And so what can we expect if this march toward austerity is successful? Where do we cut? Should we pursue the policy outlined by Radley? “Nice to haves shouldn’t do it. Must haves only. No pet projects. No bells and whistles. Only the absolute necessities.”11

Alright, let’s scrub in and start the cutting. Slash the tourism and culture budget. Who needs art and tourist money anyway, right? Bring that down to $5 million. Save a million by cutting the Indigenous Relations department. And what about Children’s and Community Services? Bunch of freeloaders. Drop that budget to $3 million. Slash the legislative budget, too. Council staff can get part time jobs and the mayor can go on Cameo to make ends meet. That saves us $5 million. What else? Let’s keep going. Cut deeper, right? No more beach rescue, no more farmer’s market, no more housing secretariat. That gets us another half million.

Now we’re getting close to the increase the HPS got this year.

But why stop there? Economic development? Why spend $6 million when the market should develop itself? Slash it like Freddy Krueger. Let’s get rid of the remaining public health budget, too. Who cares if people contract life-altering diseases? That’s their own damn fault. And with those two cuts, we come close to making up the budget shortfall caused by Bill 23.

Alright, so now we’ve saved a couple million. The police still get cable TV and Doug Ford’s gift to his developer donors is accounted for, and all it cost us was a chance at meaningful reconciliation, funding for children, a farmer’s market, beach safety, funding for the arts, public health, and a functioning legislative and economic development branch of government.

“Only the absolute necessities.”

And here’s our problem. Development applications sit on the desks of overworked planners so long, they just get shipped off to the Ontario Land Tribunal where people outside our community decide what’s best for developers, not what is best for our city. People miss shifts and tests and appointments because their busses don’t come on time. Business licences take forever to process, letter writers to the Spec bemoan the litter situation downtown, the wheels of local bureaucracy grind with excruciating lethargy.

A budget is presented that tries to address those problems. More money to move people around the city. More money to hire more planners. More money to clean up garbage that blows down our streets, gets lodged in our sewers, pollutes our streams.

The anti-tax crusaders, swept into office and elevated to the position of “esteemed pundit” by those whose self interest outweighs their interest in community, orchestrate a campaign of outrage against the audacious, socialistic, tax-and-spend intellectuals who dare ask taxpayers for an extra $300 a year to operate a municipality.

We got little cuts this time. But the focus for the right is on bigger cuts moving forward. Deep cuts. Meaningful cuts. It doesn’t matter if spending on public goods is linked to the happiness of people in a community. It doesn’t matter if investing in people is a good and just thing for a municipality to do. It doesn’t matter if the city is doing what it can while faced with an actively hostile provincial government.

There’s only one thing they’re focused on: tax cuts. Keeping more of their money for themselves. And if that campaign wins out, we’ll all suffer for it. Things will get grubbier, amenities will slip away, and we’ll be forced to fend for ourselves. Things will stagnate for the many, remain gilded in gold for the few.

Love in the time of austerity. Just be careful with that loving; we’ve cut the public health budget, don’t you know.

Into the fire

In 2020, far-right activist Christopher Rufo engineered a moral panic around “Critical Race Theory”. For a failed politician, Rufo sure knew how to do politics. He saw the boiling, churning, visceral anger and tension in the United States after the high-profile police killings of unarmed Black people and the principled, albeit decentralized, response from activists with Black Lives Matter and knew that it presented an opportunity. But, being a skilled politico, he knew he couldn’t demonize a movement that was focused on fair and equitable treatment for a community all-too-often targeted and profiled by law enforcement.

After seeing some City of Seattle equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) slides that leaned a little too heavily into the whole “white guilt” thing, he knew he had a winner. To effectively brand and market his new focus of outrage, he selected the term “Critical Race Theory” (CRT). The easily acronymized phrase was, as he called it, the “perfect villain”; it was obscure enough to not be totally understood (it is a graduate-level theory in American law schools), opaque enough to be recreated in the image he selected for it, and straight-forward enough to roll off the tongues of every far-right pundit and politician. After a couple of strategic appearances on Fox News, Rufo was able to inject his newly redefined CRT into the public consciousness. He had succeeded in crafting a new paper dragon for the culture warriors of the right to slay.

At first, it seemed like the backlash to the thing Rufo made up would work. In the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election, finance bro Glenn Youngkin slid opposition to CRT into his broader culture war campaign and eked out a slim victory with 50.6% of the vote.

It seemed like the strategy might work for the right. But it quickly became obvious that the CRT dragon was too vague and too…racey…to work effectively. Reporters kept trying to figure out what all the anti-CRT people were actually against to no avail. When the comedian Ziwe had a group of anti-CRT parents on her show, none of them could actually explain what it was about CRT they didn’t like (and just ended up just ranting about other pet concerns for right-wing parents). By the time the US elections rolled around in late 2022, the CRT frenzy had subsided.

The move away from CRT was, interestingly, shepherded by figures like Rufo, who likely realized the limited success the campaign was having. Being a typical far-right millennial, Rufo tweeted about his intent to shift the focus toward something the right had a long and storied history in opposing: people with differing gender identities and sexualities. There’s a certain kind of arrogance in broadcasting your intent to engineer a culture war, but, to his credit, the media lapped it up with enthusiasm.

While he’s not to blame for hatred of queer and trans people, he certainly helped make it an area of focus for the right again. Suddenly there were campaigns against queer-themed books, gay teachers, and queer rights organizations. It was Rufo who helped launch the Summer of Hate in 2022, when Pride events and drag brunches were attacked by far-right activists, whipped into a frenzy with lies about rampant child sexual abuse. But he wasn’t alone.

One of the loudest voices in the anti-gay movement became Chaya Raichik, a real estate agent who posts to social media using the handle “Libs of TikTok”. Raichik’s followers are ruthless, targeting schools and children’s hospitals where they believe acts of abuse or “sexual grooming” occur. All of this has made Raichik a star in the far-right movement, which has helped her into positions of power.

Oklahoma’s current ultraconservative “Superintendent of Public Instruction”, Ryan Walters (who, while holding another education-related position in the state, was also being paid by an extreme right-wing front group founded by the Koch family that has the express goal of dismantling public education) appointed Raichik (who does not live in Oklahoma) to the state’s Library Media Advisory Committee because of her efforts to combat “Woke indoctrination on our kids” (read more about that over on Erin in the Morning’s newsletter here).

That’s the kind of educational culture Walters sought for Oklahoma. Stopping the “wokes” from “gaying up” our kids. Fighting the culture war battles. Stopping socialism. Walters is a political figure who said he didn’t want trans kids in bathrooms and teamed up with Raichik, who had targeted queer and gender diverse teachers in the state in which he was elected to oversee schools.

A few days ago, a gender-fluid trans child was murdered in an Oklahoma school bathroom. We know few details, but early indications are that this was a hate crime.

This is the end result of engineering culture war battles. Cynical right-wing operatives create monsters they know they will never be able to fully control. Rufo and Youngkin are just dull conservatives who know their Perpetual 1-Day Blinding Stew of right-wing fiscal policy is a hard sell to people already burnt out on the system. So they pivot and find a new enemy. They win elections based on defeating that enemy, all so they can implement their brutal fiscal policies with ease. Who is complaining about tax cuts for millionaires when you’re defeating whatever woke is?

But what they forget is that they win elections by appealing to people. By lying to people. By making people scared. Or by telling people their fears will go away once the enemy is dealt with.

They spawn real culture warriors like Walters and Raichik, who turn the dials up because they realize this formula works to their own personal advantage. It makes them money, it buys them power, people pay attention to them.

And then someone dies. And then a lot of people die. Because that’s the price of the far-right culture wars. People always get hurt.

So when, on Wednesday morning, future Prime Minister Pierre Poilievre decided to offer his two cents on the matter, I felt like I needed to say something. I had planned on talking about federal issues in a future edition (and still will), but this is a pressing matter. Rage makes me write, which helps focus my thoughts, rather than allow me to sink into sadness.

Bringing his campaign of malaise and anger to Kitchener, Poilievre told a group of assembled reporters: “Female spaces should be exclusively for females, not for biological males.”12

Since becoming the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, Poilievre’s image has been laundered to make the Tory boss seem like a reasonable alternative for skittish voters in suburban ridings in the GTHA and BC’s lower mainland. Canada’s right-wing media has done wonders, turning the wonkish and deeply unlikable member of Harper’s Brat Pack into the principled, strong leader who will Make Canada Great Again.

Poilievre is in the unenviable position of holding together a Conservative tent that is always in danger of collapsing in spectacular fashion. He knows his is a party that, in any reasonable democracy (read: one with proportional representation) wouldn’t try to appeal to as many people as it does. Parties like his don’t exist in Denmark or Norway or the Netherlands or Iceland. There’s a centre-right party and a whole bunch of farmer, right-populist, regionalist, and far-right parties, allowing reasonable people a chance to skip the noise and go straight to the mainstream.

Poilievre’s own path to power seemingly includes winning over those on the far-right who abandoned the dull CPC of Scheer and O'Toole for the hot mess that is Bernier’s PPC and convincing those on the hard right who just stayed home in the past couple of elections to drive on over to a polling station and make their F*CK TRUDEAU bumper sticker proud. This is on top of his natural base: the hard-right activists who took over CPC riding associations and executive positions and made life a living hell for Scheer and O'Toole with their opinions and Facebook posts and coded language. He combined all those groups into an unstoppable coalition. That’s why, in the CPC leadership election, he beat Jean Charest, whose core demographic were the spectral entities whose earthly vessels once delegated for John Bracken and Robert Stanfield.

And now Poilievre is faced with some weird political math. He knows he will win the next election. The Liberals, if they were to have any hope of defeating the Tories in the next election, should have pulled up from their nosedive about five months ago. They needed 24 months - 2 years - of runway to turn things around, and now all they have is 19. With each passing day, the chances of victory in 2025 grow slimmer and slimmer and slimmer.

So Poilievre is looking at those juicy suburban ridings in Mississauga and Markham and London and Carleton and Surrey and Burnaby and sees nothing but Tory blue. But he also sees those people who, very recently, switched from purple shirts back to blue. He sees those angry F*CK TRUDEAUers who might very well stay home on election day. He sees the party activists who put him there and, at any second, could back a Leslyn Lewis take-over of the party.

He has to hammer the unpopular Prime Minister while feeding red meat to the base. He had to pepper his speeches with things that blame Trudeau for high inflation AND wokeness. He has to be everything to everybody because he doesn’t have the luxury of being the human Rorschach test that Trudeau was in 2015.

And so he dons his crusading armour and fights a little culture war battle every once and a while to keep the extreme, but powerful, fringe minority happy. Too many battles and he starts to lose the mushy middle voters in those suburban ridings he covets, slipping into minority territory with the Bloc Québécois in opposition. Too few, and he might lose his throne altogether.

But that doesn’t mean he isn’t still playing with fire. It is the same fire Rufo and Youngkin and every other cynical right wing politician has played with for years. Premiers across Canada have played with it. Local politicians have played with it. A bunch of miserable school trustee candidates played with it. It gets people fired up, it gets the base going, it creates a wedge between you and your opponent. A little pyrotechnics makes the dull theatre of democracy and exciting spectacle.

But it gets people killed. Vulnerable people. Scared people who just want to be themselves and live as they want to live. People who deserve better than to be some cartoon villain in the overdramatized production of modern politics. Human beings.

There’s a reason that CSIS, Canada’s spy agency, has said the demon these culture warriors created - the “anti-gender” movement that has emerged as an angry response to the saber-rattling of right-wing politicians - poses a very real threat to queer and gender-diverse people to the point where we have been warned these people may try to “carry out their own extreme violence against the 2SLGBTQI+ community or against other targets they view as representing the gender ideology 'agenda'.”13

Here’s the thing about Pierre Poilievre: he’s as savvy a politician as Rufo. More so, honestly. You’d have to be to rise up through the ranks of the Conservative Party over 30 years despite only being 44. Poilievre knows what he’s doing. Which means he must understand the consequences of his actions. Yet he still does them anyway.

Poilievre knows he’s playing with fire. He knows it makes for a good show. And he doesn’t care who gets burnt.

Books!

A little shameless self-promotion here: the edited volume in which my very first peer-reviewed book chapter appears is available now through McGill-Queen’s University Press!

The book - Political Engagement in Canadian City Elections - uses data from the 2017 and 2018 Canadian Municipal Election Study to consider important questions about who votes in local elections and what motivates those voters. I was really happy to be a part of this project! And was even happier to finally have a proofreader for some of my work.

My chapter, which focuses on trustee elections, makes the case that there isn’t a singular “school board” political culture in Canada or even in each province, but that each board’s elections are defined by the unique circumstances parents and voters face in their own municipalities. That’s why the chapter is entitled “The School Board Archipelago: Participation in School Board Elections in Canada”.

One of the contributions I am most proud of is creating a typology of school board trustees. I categorize trustees based on their ambitions, focus, and motivation, creating three trustee architypes: the useful apparatchik, the aspiring star, and the concerned-citizen trustee. One is an ideological or party stalwart, one is biding their time, and one is engaged in specific issues. But, to find out more, you’ll have to get your hands on a copy of the book!

I can be convinced to sign copies, but you’ll have to talk to my agent for meet-and-greet photos. ⭐😎📸

Cool facts for cool people

• Analogies are hard. Just ask New York Governor Kathy Hochul. Speaking about the ongoing conflict in Israel/Gaza, Hochul tried her hand at a folksy analogy. Saying that, if Canada “someday ever attacked Buffalo”, that the United States would…murder all of us? Not too sure what else she could have meant when she said “there would be no Canada the next day.” She indicated that the mass murder of people because of an action undertaken by a small number of them “is a natural reaction”. Uncritical nationalism really just warps one’s sense of reality, doesn’t it? The idea that every single member of a cultural, religious, or ethnic group must assume collective responsibility for the actions of some who share their identity is really, really, really messed up. Like, by that logic, if some far-right convoyists attacked a Walmart in Buffalo, there would be grounds to kill all of us who, by the accident of birth or circumstance, live here now, regardless of whether or not we agree with them because…I guess we shouldn’t have been born with similar characteristics? Anyway, nationalism is a poison for the body politic and a justice-centred peace is the only sustainable option to end conflicts kthnxbyeeee

• The Ontario NDP is trying its hand at TikTok in an attempt to make the party’s focus on stopping the privatization of healthcare cool and hip and fun for the youths. While it is cute, it wouldn’t be the approach I would take. In large part because the real potential in the NDP is in presenting a broad, compelling, enthusiastic vision to the people of Ontario, rather than reminding people about the icky parts of life. What sounds better? The ONDP calling for a “crackdown on for-profit medical clinics after 1,600 patients lost their family doctor to an 'executive health' medical practice that charges patients a fee of $4,995 a year” or “everyone deserves barrier-free healthcare, including access to prescription drugs and quality mental health supports, because that’s how we build a just society and today’s NDP is the party of justice!” or something. I’ve always taken issue with how bland and uninspiring so much of the NDP’s messaging is, especially since a compelling, inspirational progressive movement is what people are desperate for.

• The Antigonish Heritage Museum in Antigonish, Nova Scotia (because obviously) recently made over 100 years of local news available, for free, for anyone who wants to access it. The community’s newspaper - The Casket - began publishing in 1852. Through a Department of Canadian Heritage grant, the local heritage museum was able to get a Halifax-based company to digitize the newspaper for community use, all for free! Having access to so much important local history is incredible and can be an amazing way to encourage research, writing, and education on what makes communities what they are. Here in Hamilton, we have select issues of the Times available online, but, for back issues of the Herald and the Spec, you have to head on down to the HPL’s Local History and Archives section and pull out the ol’ microfilm. These kinds of things should be digitally available for all to see!