Programming note: This is the last Sewer Socialists for a few weeks. I know, I know, I’m sorry, but there’s no need to cry. I’m only one lizard person in a human suit guy and I have a few other things I need to get done. Namely, I’m under contract with a publisher to adapt my doctoral thesis into a book. That first draft is coming due soon and I really need to get that done. Add to that a conference in about two weeks and lots of other academic stuff I need to do (you know, job things). I need a few weeks to clear up the ol’ to do list. Plus, I’ve been working on this week’s “top story” for a while and it really took it out of me.

My plan is to be back with a regular weekly newsletter on Thursday, June 8th. If I can’t make that (as my ancestors would say: “The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men, gang aft agley!”), then it’ll definitely be on Thursday, June 15th.

Thank you for all the love, reads, and comments over these past 14 editions. I’ve had so much fun so far. So see you all in June!

All the money in Hamilton

How not to run a municipal campaign

I ran for Wards 1 and 2 HWDSB trustee back in 2014. The whole process, from start to finish, was grueling. I signed up as early as I could (January 8th, 2014, which meant I was campaigning for 292 days or just under 10 months) and tried to make a splash. I wrote blog posts on policy positions (which ended up making people mad and losing me more votes than I won), I shoveled snow and planted trees on school grounds (got caught in mud, not fun), and designed all of my own materials (graphic design is my passion meme goes here).

I had help from some wonderful friends when they could make the time, but, for most of it, I was on my own. Me, all by myself, knocking on doors when I could, in between taking the GO bus back and forth from Toronto for grad school and trying to do basic things like feed myself and shower.

I was at a disadvantage from the outset: I was 24 (wistful sigh), I wasn’t a parent (I tried to focus on how schools are community resources and we should keep them open since they’re some of the last public, secular spaces in our neighbourhoods), I spent 5 years in the Catholic system, wasn’t a student trustee, and, while I was a modestly connected partisan, I faced a divided local NDP establishment, as there was another party-affiliated candidate in the race. Plus, I was campaigning to an electorate disinterested in a school board race for three reasons:

1. The electorate is generally disinterested in school board issues (I have a book chapter in a great academic piece on this going to print soon), unless there’s a school closure in the area. In 2014, that was in Ainslie Wood, and they had a local candidate campaigning on that issue.

2. People don’t know what the school board does. For every three doors I knocked, two would smile politely and not have any questions while the third would ask me what my opinion on LRT was.

3. There had not been a race for HWDSB trustee in Wards 1 and 2 since 2000. From 2003 onward, incumbent trustee Judith Bishop was acclaimed. Bishop served since 1988, meaning I was trying to replace a trustee who had served longer than I had lived and who had been acclaimed for over a decade.

I tried, but I didn’t have the experience, the connections, or the skills to make it work.

And I was running on a tight budget. In total, my campaign raised $2510.85. The $0.85 was interest from my Teacher’s Credit Union bank account. $880 came from me (meaning it came from OSAP). I received $155 in small donations and $1475 from seven sources, specifically 6 people and 1 union (back when unions could donate to candidates - solidarity ✊).

Most of my donors were folks I knew from my activism work in the city or from my time as the youth officer for the Hamilton Mountain NDP. Many wonderful people whom I am honoured believed in me enough to cut me a cheque for my run. And then there was one other donor who ended up moving out of town and becoming a big Kellie Leitch supporter 😬

I didn’t have any idea how to fundraise. Or run a campaign by myself. And the end result showed that. I beefed that campaign hard. 12.3% of the vote. Best I managed to do in some polls was third.

More bafflingly, the spending-to-vote ratio was all out of whack. Former trustee Brian Gage spent almost three times as much as I did, but came in second to the eventual winner, Christine Bingham, who spent $974.20 - 2.5 times less than I did and 7 times less than Gage.

Per vote, she spent $0.29 to my $1.88.

Since then, I’ve thrown myself into academia and have spent the better part of the last decade studying, among other things, campaign finance. Municipal campaign finance documents can shed light into the unspoken parts of campaigning - who a candidate is getting backing from, what that candidate’s unspoken politics is, and what priorities a candidate might have once in office.

So, today, I’d like to look at the campaign financial documents from the 2022 Hamilton municipal election. Most of the financials are in from that race and the story they tell is fascinating. Let’s go on a little journey through the campaign financials and see what we find, shall we?

Describe those stats!

The 2022 municipal election in Hamilton was expensive. Let’s look at some basic descriptive stats first.

For all the financial records we presently have, candidates raised a total of $1,275,301.10 and spent  $1,236,624.49. In terms of money raised, that’s 3.29% more than 2018 and 8.67% more spending than last time around.

Winning council candidates spent, on average, $21,950.10. Their average per-vote spending was $5.37. Ward 11’s Mark Tadeson spent the least at $2.29 per vote, while Ward 4’s Tammy Hwang spent the most, at a whopping $11.75 per vote.

Among all council candidates, 5 of those running listed expenses of $0. They earned an average of 2.6% of the vote. 67 candidates listed expenses of at least more than $0.01. Those candidates spent an average of $11,163.77. Per vote, it was an average of $7.27.

Things get a little weirder with school trustees, as it always does. Winning HWDSB trustee candidates spent an average of $0.96 per vote and an average of $4093.82. On the Catholic side, it drops to $0.45 per vote and $825.65 in expenses. Only three winning Catholic trustees spent over $1,000 and incumbent Wards 9 and 11 trustee Louis Agro listed $0 in expenses.

As for mayor, that one is a little easier. While Keanin Loomis raised and spent a little more than Andrea Horwath, her spending-per-vote was more efficient. She spent $3.26 per vote, while Loomis spent $3.54 per vote. Had Loomis spent as much as Andrea, but earned the same number of voters he got, his per vote spending would have been $3.36.

The mayoral financials are a little messy, since the majority of candidates either spent $0 or haven’t submitted their financials. We only have figures for the Convoy street preacher Solomon Ikhuiwu and the neo-Nazi Paul Fromm.

The biggest gap is Bob Bratina. His campaign faltered early on, and it is unclear how much of his own money he sunk into that effort. As I told the CBC a few weeks back, if Bratina doesn’t file and pay his penalty, that’s his signal to Hamilton that he is retiring from politics (until he’s appointed to fill a council seat that becomes vacant a year before an election and then gets some plaza or parkette named after him).1

Even without old Bob in the mix, we still have plenty of data to consider. So let’s jump into the really good stuff.

Where you get your cash

Of all the 150 candidates who ran for all available offices in Hamilton in 2022, 16 are presently “in default”. This means they didn’t submit the legally-required campaign finance documents and, if they don’t get them in by the end of the month and pay a fee, they will be barred from running for any office in 2026.

Of the remaining candidates (not counting the handful who have extended their campaigns), 28 candidates entirely self-funded their campaigns. This includes every Catholic trustee candidate with the exception of incumbent Wards 12 and 13 trustee Phil Homerski.

Only 80 candidates had listed donors. From here on out, when I refer to “candidates”, I’m talking about people with listed donors unless otherwise specified.

Some people might have done small “pass the hat” fundraisers where you don’t need to list donors or might have only accepted donations under $100, which, again, means you don’t need to report. A requirement (that too many candidates ignore) is that each donor’s full address be listed with their name and the amount given. But 80 candidates gave us some great data with donor names and addresses. This gives us the chance to map donations and see where candidates get their money from.

Using QGIS and the available donor postal codes, I was able to determine if a donor came from within a candidate’s ward, if they were from a neighbouring ward, from further away in Hamilton, or not from the city at all. Two candidates - Ward 5’s Gordon Noble and Wards 11 and 12 HWDSB trustee Amanda Fehrman - did not provide addresses of donors, so the location of their donors is unknown.

Of the winning councillors, Jeff Beattie, Alex Wilson, Maureen Wilson, Craig Cassar, Cameron Kroetsch, and Nrinder Nann were the most “local” in their donations, with over 50% of donors coming from in their wards.

Now, don’t jump to conclusions on this. The data here only means they had strong networks in their own wards. Other candidates might have known people who were spread across the city while some people might have connections to larger political networks across Ontario. Just because a candidate did not source most of their donations from their own ward does not necessarily mean they were not connected to that place. People like Kojo Damptey, Ted McMeeken, Lynda Lukasik, Chris Sly, and, yes, even Catherine Kronas, were known city-wide for their political and activism-based work and that shows in the pattern of their donations.

As for the mayoral candidates, Loomis drew 69.5% of donations from inside Hamilton and 30.5% from the rest of Ontario. Horwath drew 61.75% from within Hamilton and 38.25% from outside. Breaking their donations down by ward, Loomis did best in Ward 1, collecting 16.5% of donations from his home ward, and pulled in the least - 0.75% - from Ward 11. Horwath surprisingly raised the most from Ancaster’s Ward 12 while getting the least - 1.5% - from the more working-class Ward 4. This could be due to the comparative income levels of each place, but pulling in 12% of her campaign’s cash from the wealthy suburbs is interesting.

But that’s only where money came from. What about who was donating?

Fieldin’ loonies

Many of the donor names that popped up were pretty familiar. Having an understanding of the political and social dynamics in the city meant that it was fairly easy to place some of the names on each candidate’s donor list. But, to be a good scholar, I tried to systematize the process a little.

Any donor who gave more than once (281 of 1336 - or 21%) was subject to a quick Google search to best determine their “field of work”. The remaining names were scanned to pick out any obvious ones and match them with their field.

This left me with 10 categories:

• Academics and healthcare - people who are affiliated with universities or research groups or are well-known medical professionals in town

• Arts and culture - you know, creative types

• Business, banking, and investments - folks who either own their own business, are hot-shot CEOs, are well-known investment people, etc.

• Hospitality, recreation, and entertainment - people who own sports teams, banquet centres, hotels, etc.

• Labour - people in positions of leadership in local unions

• Planning, engineering, and architecture - urban planners or the like

• Politics and Law - other politicians, political staff, or lawyers

• Real Estate, Development, Construction - anyone in the real estate business, from individual agents all the way up to the big developer families…also includes consultants for the industry and people who, while they may be planners, are more on the corporate development side of the biz

• Social services and advocacy - people who work in the city’s established advocacy agencies or run social services

• “Other” - this is everyone else who wasn’t classified.

These categories are important, as many candidates explicitly said they would not take money from people in the real estate and development industry because of how much of a conflict of interest that would be in their deliberations on real estate and planning issues.

Crunching the numbers, its clear the real estate industry was very involved in the 2022 campaign. That is the only industry to crack double digits in the average percent from each field given to candidates.

This one might be a little harder to visualize with 10 categories and 80 candidates, but the full table will be down in the footnotes (like an academic paper!).2 So, instead, I'll isolate a couple of categories. First, real estate. A total of 29 mayoral, council, and trustee candidates accepted money from people in the Real Estate, Development, and Construction industry. Of them, four - Dawn Danko, Peter Lanza, Laura Farr, and Maria Pearson - had folks in this industry account for more than 50% of listed donations. A word about Dawn Danko's numbers, though - she listed two donors who gave over $100. Both were in the industry. So, while it says Real Estate, Development, and Construction-linked donors account for 100% of her donors, it is important to remember that we’re looking at two donors here. That is a little different than somebody like Peter Lanza, the Ward 9 council seat heir apparent, who had 25 donors over $100, of which 59.5% were in real estate.

If a candidate isn’t on the list, there were no identified Real Estate, Development, and Construction-linked donors in their lists.

Notably, winning councillors Matt Francis (47%), Tom Jackson (43%), JP Danko (40%), Michael Spadafora (37.6%), Esther Pauls (34.5%), Ted McMeekin (16.9%), and Brad Clark (8.3%) accepted money from Real Estate, Development, and Construction-linked folks. Mayor Horwath received 13.7% of her funds from people in the industry while Loomis got 7.4% from them. More on this in a sec.

Let’s take a look at the political donations. 34 candidates got money from folks in politics and law. Two mountain candidates - Ward 6’s Chris Slye and Ward 7’s Scott Duvall - got more than 50% from folks in this field. This isn’t surprising; Slye is a local NDP riding association president and Duvall was an MP for 6 years. What is surprising is that many of Duvall’s donations came from Tory bigwigs. This could be because of his long-standing reputation in the community, his connections from his time in Ottawa, or maybe local Tory skittishness over Councillor Pauls’s stance on COVID-19 public health measures. All of that is just speculation, of course, but the numbers are pretty interesting.

But what’s really interesting is how all of the candidates can be connected by some key donors. As you might remember from earlier, I noted that 21% of listed donors gave to at least 2 candidates. That allows us to start drawing connections. And the connections that did come up are pretty fascinating.

We’re all in this together

Right off the bat, I’ll note this: I will not name the donors outright in my analysis. Yes, their names and addresses are public record, but, if you really want that info, you’ll have to gather that yourself. Naming donors feels a little too much like doxxing to me, so I’ll just provide some publicly available details and give some info about dollar amounts.

The most prolific donor in the 2022 election is connected to, you guessed it, the Real Estate, Development, and Construction industry. They were also a Catholic School Trustee for many years. They gave $5,550 to 14 candidates. The biggest spender was a well-known figure in both the development industry who have $9,600 to 8 candidates.

Of the top 15 donors in terms of number of donations, 7 were in the Real Estate, Development, and Construction industry. These include developer advocates, real estate trade group officials, and high-profile figures in Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) in the city. Of all the people who donated at least twice, the names of politicians from all three major parties pop up, former councillors are in the mix, labour union officials come up, and the names of the city’s prominent developer families appear.

When you connect all of these names based on who they donated to, a really interesting picture emerges. Specifically, this picture:

This is a donor connection “map” I made using kumu.io, an online application that creates these kind of connection visuals. The map is interactive, so you can check it out at this link here (because it doesn’t embed) and search the connections. All donor names have been converted to completely random numbers.

Some things to point out: there are four interesting elements to this map.

The Lonely Reef:

These are the candidates who do not have any donor connections to any other candidates. The highest profile of them are Jeff Beatie, Catherine Kronas, and Becky Buck. Their donors all gave only to them, which is interesting, especially in the case of the latter two. Kronas was a high-profile New Blue Party-affiliated anti-woke candidate for school board trustee, though most of the other hard right candidates for trustee either failed to submit their financials, self-funded, or are also on the Lonely Reef. That could explain the lack of connections. But Buck is a well-connected Tory and prominent in some faith communities, so it is interesting that her donors were just in it for her.

The Progressive Constellation:

The left side of the map is the progressive side, where connections between centre to left-of-centre candidates are stronger. It might be a little tough to see on this photo (so check out the actual interactive map for more detail), but this side includes councillors Craig Cassar, Alex Wilson, Nrinder Nann, Cameron Kroetsch, and Maureen Wilson, trustees Sabreina Dahab, Maria Felix Miller, Graeme Noble, and Elizabeth Wong, and candidates like Lynda Lukasik, Ahona Mehdi, Nancy Silva Khan, Kojo Damptey, and Jay Edington. Fun aside on that, among the progressive council candidates, they raised an average of $24,146.81 and spent an average of $21,420.78. Progressive trustee candidates raised an average of $6,751.37 and spent an average of $6,586.00

The Conservative Constellation:

Flipping over to the other side, things get very clustered, showing more intense connections between centre to right-of-centre candidates. This is folks like Councillors JP Danko, Brad Clark, Matt Francis, Esther Pauls, Tom Jackson, and Michael Spadafora, and candidates like Walter Furlan, Maria Pearson, Laura Farr, Jason Farr (no relation), Colleen Wicken, Amy Cowling, Bob Maton, Nick Lauwers (who was, fun fact, the only council candidate to be endorsed by “Vote Pro Life Municipal”), and Arlene VanderBeek. Same aside here as above: right-leaning council candidates raised an average of $22,446.41 and spent an average of $20,468.06. While their donor pools were tighter, their spending varied more, from Jackson and Pauls raising over $30,000 and Brad Clark running a comparatively lean campaign after raising and sending less than $10,000. For the right-wing trustees, it was an average of $4,070.92 raised and $4,010.43 spent. Again, some big money and some small campaigns.

The Mayoral Candidates:

Now here’s the really interesting part. The two prominent mayoral candidates are smack dab in the middle with ample connections to both sides. You can find donors who connect Keanin Loomis, Bob Maton (who ran for the Christian nationalist Family Coalition Party in the past), and Esther Pauls. And you can find donors who connect Andrea Horwath, Walter Furlan, and Alex Johnstone. It is a pretty mixed up web. So let’s look at that a little more closely.

Heavy is the neck that wears the chain of office

Okay, I’ll be up front about this: I barely said a word about who I would cast a ballot for in the mayoral race. I was upfront and enthusiastic about supporting Maureen Wilson and Elizabeth Wong in my ward (with a huge shout-out to Cameron Prosic for being ultra knowledgeable about school board issues and an incredibly eloquent performance at the Ward 1 debate I helped organized).

But for mayor? Pffttt.

That mayoral contest was one of the most viscous, petty, awful things I had ever seen in politics, and I’ve been to NDP leadership conventions AND been in student union politics. Friends, allies, and neighbours began to spit internet bile at one another over their support for one of the two major candidates. Loomis supporters said Horwath supporters were the worst people on the internet. Horwath supporters said the same thing right back. People who otherwise agreed on 95% of things in this city acted like Montagues and Capulets.

I’d share thoughts with a select group who asked, but this isn’t like when I voted in Montreal and was 100% vocal about being on Team Valérie Plante. Even still, I was accused of being a shill for both candidates on Twitter because I tried to share facts. It was messy. So, when I present these facts, remember that this is cold, hard data. Don’t get mad at the messenger here.

Let’s look at the data.

22 donors gave to both Andrea Horwath and Keanin Loomis. 12 of those donors - 54.5% - were from the Real Estate, Development, and Construction industry. 3 were connected to LIUNA, 4 to the The Hamilton Urban Precinct Entertainment Group. 16 of those 22 donors gave the exact same amount to both.

Among three of the most “connected” donors, meaning those who gave to the most number of people, two gave to both mayoral candidates. Again, click over to the kumu.io map to get a closer look. Just click on a donor bubble and see how many candidates they gave money to.

Each of these donors focused their donations on conservative-leaning candidates. Two were connected to the Real Estate business, one was in planning (though on the development side of planning). The unifying factor was that all three gave to Esther Pauls as well. Six Degrees of Esther over here.

What does this tell us?

First, both candidates knowingly took money from these folks. Yes, it was a tight and very competitive race where every dollar counted, but other candidates took a principled stand and said they wouldn’t accept money from folks who might have a financial stake in who gets elected. Some folks might not see it as a big issue, while others may have an ethical concern with this. That’s for each individual to decide.

Second, it could be that these donors were hedging their bets, unsure which of the two candidates would prevail on election day. But, even if this were the case, they’d be betting that either candidate would be friendly to their business interests. If I’m a rich developer, say…umm…Paul McMillions, and I, Paul McMillions of the McMillions Massive Homes Development Corporation, am looking to support a mayoral candidate who will speak positively about my new housing development, named “Forest Acres At What Used To Be A Turtle Breeding Ground”, I’m probably not going to donate to someone with a track record of being anti-sprawl and pro-turtle.

Ultimately, it was Andrea Horwath who seemed like the better bet for people in the development biz. Remember, 13.7% of her funds from people in the industry. But Loomis still pulled in 7.4% of his donations from them.

But here’s the real question: which came first, the chicken or the egg?

No, seriously. One of the big questions that people who study campaign donations have is essentially that: are people donating to candidates because they hope it will grant them access and sway a candidate’s allegiances or are they donating to candidates because they believe those candidates are already inclined to support their position? Municipal elections are low information events. It can be hard to tell where candidates stand. Andrea’s campaign was light on specifics. Loomis’s campaign was a little more policy-forward, but much of that was pro-business policy with urbanist positions thrown in. It can be tough to tell if these folks were donating the way they did because both candidates would support their business interests naturally or they hoped that, by donating, they could move them to their cause.

Big money! BIG MONEY!

Okay, wrapping this up, what does this all tell us?

I think there are a few obvious and some interesting takeaways. The first obvious one is that you need a lot of cash to run an effective campaign. At least $175,000 for mayor, $20,000 for council, and between $1,000 and $4,000 for trustee.

The second is that there are identifiable clusters of candidates in each election that are drawing on a similar pool of donors. Because of our obsession with the Victorian-era idea of municipal non-partisanship, this isn’t apparent to the general public. Instead, connections are concealed, limiting transparency and accountability. Sure, not having official party labels means candidates can draw on a general pool of broadly “progressive” and “conservative” donors which otherwise might get chopped up if we start slapping labels on things. And parties might see that nastiness of the mayoral campaign filter down to the entire campaign. But it also means that you get candidates playing both sides, as people like Ted McMeekin and Alex Johnstone did in 2022. Ultimately, when we take a look at the data, we see these clusters emerge.

Third, just because corporations can’t donate to candidates directly anymore doesn’t mean that there isn’t still corporate influence in our elections. The Real Estate, Development, and Construction industry threw a lot of cash around in 2022, hoping to create a more favourable playing field on which they could do business. People who have and will have business before council were the financial backers of a fair number of councillors.

This is just my personal opinion, but I distrust the objective decision-making capacity of any councillor, mayor, or trustee who took money from the Real Estate, Development, and Construction industry. This isn’t about politics; it is about being beholden to people with an outsized financial stake in your decisions. And if I were ever to run for office, I wouldn’t accept a nickel from anyone in that industry. But like…why would they even try to donate to me? Have they not read this newsletter? The title alone…

The interesting things are some of the connections between candidates. Who out there is giving to Maria Felix Miller and JP Danko in the same election? Wild stuff. But the sheer number of donors who gave to both mayoral candidates and the industries to which they were connected is fascinating. I don’t want to say it blows holes in the theory of each candidate’s supporters that the other was so completely ideologically different (since tensions are somehow still high), but it does highlight how there were some key similarities between the two camps.

My main takeaway is this: campaign finance tells a story. In Hamilton’s 2022 campaign, it told a story that is still unfolding today. We have right-leaning councillors, left-leaning councillors, and pools of donors behind each. The old axiom “there is no Liberal or Conservative way to pave a street” is nonsense. Of course there is. A left-leaning councillor will consider the environmental impact of street paving, the labour conditions on the work crew, whether that crew is unionized and/or work for the city, and the kinds of improvements on the street once it is paved. A right-leaning councillor will ask about value for money, if it can be privatized, how the road can be best used to advance our competitive advantage, etc. The money that changed hands in the 2022 election shows all that very, very clearly.

And that the Real Estate, Development, and Construction industry has an outsized impact on our local democracy. They pump money into the campaigns of candidates who are either friendly to them or are ideologically-ambiguous enough to possibly become friendly to them. I personally think that isn’t okay.

What about my 2014 campaign was so bad? Was it the circumstances of the campaign? The fact that I was a kid without a team? Was it my campaign finances?

I think it was a combination of factors. And, while studying campaigns and campaign finance has helped me see broader patterns, I know that a lot of politics is up to chance and the whims of the electorate. Money can certainly help campaigns. A lack of it can hinder them. But it should be ideas that shine through.

Democracy must be about ideas. Money can help us get those ideas out to a larger audience. But it shouldn’t ever drive those ideas. So here’s hoping 2026 is a contest of ideas, rather than a display of wealth and connections.

A Good Tweet

Wherein the populists face reality

A truly fascinating editorial appeared in Hamilton Community News publications this week. Entitled “Searching for a better councillor outreach program to engage Hamilton's residents”, the piece managed the incredible feat of being both smarmy and supportive simultaneously.

Summarizing the struggle to adequately fund council offices, the editorial seems, at times, like it is ready to jump on the same old populist conservative suburban dad train pickup truck of moaning on and on about “those clowns at city hall spending all my money”. Yeah, Bruce, you’re the only one who pays taxes.

Almost every paragraph comes closer and closer to that populist edge, giving the reader the indication that the next paragraph will be lifted verbatim from AM talk radio or some Preston Manning Centre for Making Democracy Work Better for Businesses working paper.3

But it never quite gets there. It jumps back from the edge, actually acknowledging that we need to be able to get in touch with our elected representatives and that their having staff is crucial to that. But it still manages to throw in a couple of jabs at “them there clowns at city hall”.

The concluding line of the editorial sums this up perfectly:

They actually got it right! They accept that it isn’t okay to pay staff pennies for what is basically a 24/7 job. The expectation that every resident of the city is a customer whose demands must be met no matter the time of day or triviality of the request AND that the people responding to those trivial requests live in abject poverty is…well…I want to say dystopian, but that was the reality of human civilization up until like…the 1950’s, so yeah.

Yet, still, they feel the need to throw in a jab at councillors for asking for the very thing the paper’s editors have acknowledged we need.

Is that how this has to go, now? Do we all just need to accept the fact that the hard right has so utterly demonized elected officials that we all have to say “yeah, I hate politicians, but what these politicians are doing makes sense” in order for the message to get through? Is saying “I hate politicians” the magic key that unlocks the “listening” part of some voters’ brains? Is the reality of our political landscape such that we have to lean in to hatred to get our message across?

I think that’s nonsense. So, here, let me re-write that last paragraph to see if we can’t still get the message across:

Look at that! And I turned down my journalism school offers, so how’s that!?

The discourse

Fellas, is it gay to live in an apartment?

Cool facts for cool people

• The Great Peel Region break-up looks like it is going forward. Ford is working on dismantling the regional government that contains Ontario’s 3rd and 4th largest cities. While both Mississauga and Brampton seem keen on it, Caledon, which has not been consulted on this, is unsure of what the future now holds for them. Classic Doug: back-of-the-napkin policies that are sprung on people without their input or approval. Isn’t democracy working great in Ontario?

• Kevin Clarke, a perennial candidate for office in Toronto and current candidate for mayor, crashed a mayoral debate he was not invited to. There was a lot of chatter about this on social media, including accusations that he was mentally ill or on some kind of substance, and there were Tweets praising and attacking the invited candidates for their actions/lack of action during Clarke’s protest. There’s an interesting piece by Desmond Cole about the event that includes Clarke’s perspective. I’m on the fence about protests at debates. On the one hand, debates are theatre that are becoming increasingly irrelevant, so why not add a little drama to them. On the other hand, sometimes debates are structured so at to deny candidates with objectionable views (see Paul Fromm in Hamilton) a platform. The façade of decorum is one way to prevent those candidates from taking a platform they do not deserve. Clarke isn’t nearly as bad as some of the other candidates in the race, but, at present, only a handful of candidates have a shot at winning. Clarke isn’t one of them. Ugghhh, the flip-flopping! Not too sure how to handle this one. So just check our Cole’s piece instead!

• The city’s new encampment protocol is in purgatory. The GIC meeting on the issue was a mess (see JP’s bad tweets from above). The messiest was Councillor Matt Francis’s weird request to create a registry of “encampment sympathizers”, taking the hackneyed old bad faith argument of “well if you like the homeless so much then you should let them sleep in your yard” and turning it into actual public policy. This from a man who opposes new housing in his ward. But, hey, who needs to come up with solutions when they can play their culture war trap card and end their turn?

Thanks for reading. All spelling and grammar errors are on purpose, I swear. See everyone in June!