Budgeting in the cold

I’ve been having a rough time this winter. I am deeply unmotivated, struggling to retain any semblance of a social life, and have been caught in a horrible cycle of “wake up late-try to get work done-fall into a seemingly bottomless pit of despair-watch comforting TV instead of going to bed-repeat” since December. I keep trying to crunch data and make edits to papers, but I end up playing video games for hours and watching a lot of people make aesthetically-pleasing (but ultimately inimitable) meals on Instagram.

I know other people in similar boats. Lots of folks are doing their best to hibernate. This winter has been particularly miserable weather-wise and the sheer weight of everything in the world (war, poverty, climate change, democratic collapse, inflation, etc.) has been a lot to handle.

Which, honestly, has made watching all the chatter about the City of Hamilton’s municipal budget all the more exhausting.

Such is the nature of our political discourse that the discourse - in print and online - is all about the crumbs. The Spectator’s Scott Radley used his Tuesday column to take on this ‘tax and spend’ council for “[boosting] their own office budgets” and authorizing the purchase of e-bikes for the SoBi system instead of maintaining “a near-religious commitment to restraint”.1 There’s been a renewed criticism of the city’s “Poet in Place” program and, like conservative clockwork, we got another round of online debate about the council catering budget.

The cries of “outrageous!” “these clowns must go!” “suckling at the public teat!” “shame!” “you can’t make this up!” “WOn’t sOmEOne ThiNK oF tHE tAxPAyErs!?!” echo down our wind-swept and frigid streets, rattling along the pavement with carelessly discarded coffee cups and the escaped contents of someone’s blue bin.

I get the populist impulse to shame civic leaders for every minor expense. It makes people feel good to have someone else to complain about. Sure my life is hard, but things are worse because of those CLOWNS at the CIRCUS that is city hall. And, honestly, complaining is easier than governing. Just ask the Republican Party in the States.

Problem is, there’s way too much focus on the little things while the big things go unchallenged. Boosting the budget for councillor’s offices cost $600,000. There’s $900,000 for e-bikes, $10,000 for a municipal “Poet in Place”, and, as Cameron Kroetsch noted after the internet people complained, council catering was just under $40,000 in 2023.

That’s a total of $1,550,000. To a regular person, that’s a lot of catered cheddar. But, when you look at it in the context of a municipal budget, that’s a fraction of a percent.

The combined cost of all those things - ensuring council staff can pay rent, giving Hamiltonians a new way to get around the city, enriching the city’s cultural scene, and feeding 16 people who have to sit through obscenely long meetings for a year2 - is $6.95 per household, per year. That’s about $0.58 a month.

All that for a full year and for less than the cost of an Egg BLT McMuffin Extra Value Meal at McDonald’s. In fact, that particular menu item costs $9.05. So, if we bumped everyone’s contribution up to McMuffin-levels, we could hire 10 more Poets in Place, double the council food budget, and give their staff budgets another $300,000. And, of course, that’s assuming that everyone pays the same tax rate, which they don’t. Property taxes are based on assessed values, so those with big, shiny houses do end up paying slightly more than people whose homes are deemed to be more modest.

There is an impulse on the part of some to assume they, alone, are footing the bill for municipal services. “My tax dollars”, they rage, “pay for your salaries and snow clearing and senior’s swimming classes at the public pool!”. Sure, you contribute to the municipal budget. But you’re not the only one. You’re one of roughly 570,000 humans, living in roughly 222,810 households, in the 10th largest municipality in the country. Our municipality’s budget is in the billions. So maybe step back and get some perspective before you fire off an angry email to your councillor about them eating food and paying for poetry at your expense.

Especially when the biggest drivers of any upcoming property tax increases are at Queen’s Park and on Parliament Hill. Our federal and provincial governments have used municipalities as the dumping grounds for all the services they no longer want to deal with because of the cost. When Jean Chretien’s government decided to stop funding social housing, the responsibility shifted from the federal government to municipalities. And when the provincial government of Mike Harris was looking for ways to cut costs, they handed the bill for social services to cities. Doug Ford carried on the tradition with Bill 23, which makes it the municipality’s responsibility to subsidize urban sprawl and the mistakes developers etch onto our landscape.

And, of course, we can’t talk about the municipal budget without acknowledging the 15,000-pound off-road-capable tactical assault elephant in the room. If you take the combined office-budget-e-bike-poet-catering budget and multiply it by 8, you come close to the increase Hamilton’s police force is asking for in 2024. The Hamilton Police Service wants an additional $13,000,000 added to their budget, which brings their total budget up to $213,422,645. Granted, some of that money will go toward things like hiring a civilian support worker for their new Missing Persons Unit, but that’s only a portion of their proposed $9.24 million increase for staffing.

The expectation is that everyone tightens their belt - that we not spend money on frivolous things like poetry, expect council staff to be berated by angry residents at all hours of the day while being paid minimum wage, and make councillors wander over to the Jackson Square Pita Pit for lunch - so that we can ensure the HPS gets to loosen their belt a little.

All this comes on the heels of a Canada-wide, longitudinal study published in the December edition of Canadian Public Policy, a peer-reviewed journal produced through U of T Press. This study received notable attention when it was reported on by the Toronto Star this past Tuesday. The study - Police Funding and Crime Rates in 20 of Canada's Largest Municipalities: A Longitudinal Study - was produced by a large research team, drawing on scholars from sociology, public health, and criminology, and considered police spending and crime rates from 2010 to 2021 in the 20 largest municipalities in Canada, Hamilton included.

Hamilton’s data actually gets a shout out in the paper for being bad, with several years of important data actually missing from the public record. Yay. But the data clearly shows that there is absolutely no widespread, observable correlation between increasing police funding and reducing crime. When you isolate Hamilton’s results in the study (I got access through the TMU library, so you’ll just have to trust me on this), our municipal figures show the same thing: there have been modest, per-capita increases in police funding which have had no observable impact on the city’s crime severity.

The authors are very clear that people should not read into things, but should be asking further questions:

When increases to police budgets are pitched to local residents, the argument is always that more money = more safety. It may not be in those terms, but it is heavily implied. When the suggestion is made that police budgets are cut, those implications become even more pronounced.

Over in Toronto, that argument has been made in stark terms. Myron Demkiw, the Chief of the Toronto Police Service, has been responding to the proposal that the TPS gets less of an increase than he asked for by painting a picture of a crime-ridden, inhospitable, post-apocalyptic hellscape. “Costs cannot be reduced without taking unacceptable risks,” he was quoted as saying. But, as Taylor Noakes writes for TVO, a 1% decrease to the proposed TPS budget won’t destroy society. Indeed, it is a reasonable request from a municipality facing incredible pressures. Noakes writes:

If we truly believe that the police work for the public good (and I acknowledge that there’s plenty of debate on that) and are a part of the public service, not above it, then we have to be open to discussing their budget with the same veracity as some target minor investments in governance, transportation, and culture.

But, in Toronto, just as in Hamilton, taxpayer advocates are taking aim at little things like a proposed $7,600 salary increase for Mayor Olivia Chow. For context, that number is so small in comparison to the total amount of money Toronto spent in 2023 (over $16 billion) that the fraction is represented by the number 4.70006184e-7. But that hasn’t stopped groups like the Canadian Taxpayers Federation from pushing one of their seemingly interchangeable white men/future Conservative MPs from a rural riding they’ve never been to before in front of a camera to chastise Chow for maybe getting a raise she didn’t even ask for.

While the Taxpayer’s Federation’s ploy is clearly very, very dumb, it also gave us this gem:

As municipalities deal with the complicated reality of drafting budgets that balance existing services and the downloaded responsibilities from other levels while not having the constitutional power to do more than levy a property tax, far too many commentators (and the most punchable guy from your first year poli sci seminar) are encouraging us to focus on small potatoes. While we obsess over those itty bitty spuds, the big tubers are drawing more and more resources from a shrinking public plot. If we don’t move past tiny expenses and start looking at federal, provincial, and police spending with the same passionate intensity as we’re looking at investments in the public good, then we’re all mashed.

Darko Vranich’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad January

I’m not entirely sure when it happened, but sometime over the past few weeks, a hole opened up in front of the Vrancor offices on King Street West. I don’t like walking that stretch of King too often; the flow of traffic and the narrowness of the sidewalk make the journey uncomfortable when compared with the relative peace of parallel George or Market Streets. But, while walking along that stretch of King a few days back, I nearly fell into the hole.

A pesky sidewalk hole isn’t the only problem Vrancor is facing this January. The growing property developer and hotel company, run by Darivoj Vranich (who goes by the name’s common short form “Darko”), is a semi-regular source of controversy in the city and the region.5 He’s not a popular figure in my neighbourhood of Strathcona where his hotel/condo complex on the northwest corner of King and Queen was pushed through despite community complaints over the company ignoring the neighbourhood’s official plan. Residents in Burlington are unhappy about his plans for their waterfront and Vrancor earned some bad press in 2021 when they cut off a tenant’s hot water and gas despite a handshake agreement to let him stay in a building at 756 King Street East that was, at the time, slated for demolition.

The property at 756 King is actually one of the reasons Vranich isn’t having a great month. The developer had proposed two new buildings at the site (which has since been cleared of their original structures), linked by a single podium, but divided in a pretty big way. Vrancor would construct a 12-storey and a 15-storey building, then gift the 12-storey one to CityHousing Hamilton to be used for affordable rentals. The company would keep the second, larger building to rent at the usual (high) rates.

Problem is, Vranich’s proposal requires some substantial changes to fit city policies. There’s barely any public amenity space, there isn’t any setback from the surrounding neighbourhood, and the whole thing seems to have been designed in a way to make Vrancor the most money possible.

In response to the city’s requests to change the plan, Vranich is threatening to pack up his toys and go home. While the developer has pitched the new buildings as a legacy that he will “gift” to the community, the expectation was that the city would let all the problems slide in order to get the 12-storey addition to CityHousing Hamilton.

Margaret Shkimba tackled the Vrancor development in her Tuesday Spec column, where she made some very astute points:

A developer looking to give back to the community is a good thing. But that does not mean that we have to accept a bad design, just because it is free. Nor should that gift be contingent on allowing the developer to maximize their profit on another development at the expense of the community or break the rules to get ahead.

Speaking of “breaking the rules”…that leads to another reason Vranich might not be having the best time this month. In 2023, Vranich and developer/former school trustee Sergio Manchia both faced charges for over-donating to candidates in the 2022 municipal election. In Vranich’s case, there’s been some resolution.

For background: in 2022, Vranich donated to mayoral candidates Keanin Loomis and Andrea Horwath (third-place candidate Bob Bratina did not submit financial paperwork), and council candidates Laura Farr (Ward 3), Walter Furlan (Ward 3), Matt Francis (Ward 5), Tom Jackson (Ward 6), Peter Lanza (Ward 9), Maria Pearson (Ward 10), and Nick Lauwers (Ward 11). The donations he made during and after the campaign were $5,800 in excess of what is legally allowed, resulting in the city’s election compliance committee recommending charges be laid.

Vranich isn’t new to funding municipal campaigns. In 2018, he gave to Fred Eisenberger and Vito Sgro (Mayor), Jason Farr (Ward 2), Sam Merulla (Ward 4), Brad Clark (Ward 9), and Lloyd Ferguson (Ward 12). And yet, a Vranich spokesperson told the Spec that the campaign finance violation was an “unintentional act”.7

Seeing the writing on the wall, Vranich pled guilty to the charges in provincial court and was fined $12,500 (1 and 1/4 Poets in Place) for his crime. Full disclosure: I’m quoted in the Spec article about Vranich’s plea (which you can read here if you’re a Spec subscriber), but I’ll reiterate my feelings: this is still a democracy and, in a democracy, we have to do what we can to make sure the playing field is as level as possible. Just because someone is rich and powerful doesn’t mean they should be able to have more of an influence over who gets elected and what those people do once elected.

Vranich stands to benefit from council decisions. A council filled with people who have, at least in part, Vranich to thank for those few extra pieces of literature or lawn signs or days of paid rent on a campaign office, which all might have helped them gain an advantage over a less-well-funded opponent, might be more inclined to ensure their benefactor is happy. Campaign spending limits at least create some kind of barrier, allowing everyone a chance to contribute in a way that is reflective of their means. This decision means that there will be actual consequences (aside from the consequences of Vranich’s donations going to only 3 of 9 winning candidates) and that Vranich might think twice about carelessly throwing money about during the 2026 campaign.

January has seen Vranich lose a possible legacy building, $12,500 in fines for campaign finance violations, and half a metre of sidewalk space in front of his King West offices. Not a super start to 2024.

‘berta

For the last piece this week, I wanted to link to a great investigation by Jeremy Appel of The Orchard. Appel has some leaked audio from meetings held by Take Back Alberta, a far-right organization seeking to run candidates in next year’s municipal and school board elections in that province. The group might benefit from Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s semi-formed proposal to allow partisan involvement in municipal affairs.

This is fascinating for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is a delicious Hamilton connection. One of the key figures in this hard right plot is Craig Chandler, a Calgary-based political operative who has long been involved in the fringiest of right-wing politics in Canada. He got his start while a student at McMaster, where he was recruited by the Reform Party to be their candidate on Hamilton Mountain in 1993. The party’s surge in support (thanks, in part, to the collapse of the PCs) resulted in him placing a respectable second to incumbent Liberal MP Beth Phinney. Now Chandler is organizing a province-wide municipal party for Alberta’s 2025 local elections tentatively called “Alberta United”. Read more about it over on The Orchard!

Cool facts for cool people

• Pierre Poilievre is starting to slip. Not in the polls, but the façade he’s built up over the past year of a competent, focused, internet-savvy politician is cracking. His biggest mistake happened today when Poilievre’s social media team took to X/Twitter (a site now basically designed for him and his followers) to attack mayors in Quebec. The Poilievre social media team called progressive Montreal mayor Valerie Plante and centrist Quebec City mayor Bruno Marchand “incompetent” over reports that housing starts fell in the province in 2023. One problem: housing money in la belle province is administered by le gouvernement provincial and not by the feds. In stepping over carefully delineated provincial and federal responsibilities to try and make a point, Poilievre’s team might have dealt a minor blow to the Tory campaign to woo nationalists in Quebec. We all knew that it would be hard for the Conservatives to maintain momentum for another year before the election, but it is satisfying to see them sabotage themselves for once, rather than sitting back and letting the Liberals do all the hard work of electing the Conservatives for them.

• The Canadian Anti-Hate Network is reporting that the bigots are fighting each other. Out in BC, some failed far-right municipal candidates resurrected a far-right provincial party to serve as their vehicle for…you know…far-right stuff. The Freedom Party of British Columbia (which is decidedly anti-freedom) had previously maintained a handshake agreement for support from “Gays Against Grooming” (GAG), the unlicenced Canadian version of a similarly named American group. GAG, which proports to be a right-wing gay-led group that is opposed to a queer presence in schools and trans rights overall, helped the BC Freedom Party and other far-right groups plan those anti-gay school board protests back in September 2023. But, last week, the Freedom Party’s leader (failed Surrey mayoral candidate Amrit Birring - a conspiracy theorist and mildly white supremacist person of colour) told GAG that the group was no longer welcome at their protests because the GAG folks were waving rainbow flags. Birring conflated queerness with child abuse, to which GAG Facebook page admin Scott Geiler took offence in a wonderful example of one being “hoisted with their own petard”.