Every so often, you just get hit with the news. Some weeks, it seems like a million little things are happening and all you want to do is talk about all of them. Despite being in Montreal this past weekend for a conference, I’ve still managed to collect an obscene number of stories that deserve to be mentioned. I won’t be going into too much depth on all of them, but each matters in their own way.

Enjoy!

Les rues de Montréal

Marchez à Montréal, mais ne pensez même pas à le faire ici!

On my way to Montreal for a conference last week, I got a news notification about the city’s plan to create pedestrian-only zones across 10 streets all summer long. As Councillor Sophie Mauzerolle told CTV Montreal:

Huge segments of the city will be car-free, which only serves to improve the local streetscape and create a more enjoyable environment for everyone. And they even have data to back it up!

And, by the time I was already back in Hamilton, Montreal had gone a step further, saying that whole sections of the historic Old Montreal will be car-free by next year.

They just keep knocking it out of the park! Montreal knows how to do pedestrianization. Under the leadership of Valérie Plante and the Projet Montreal (yeah, a left-wing, environmentalist, urbanist municipal political party that I was proudly a member of when I lived there) municipal government, the city has made huge strides toward achieving greenhouse gas emissions reductions targets and improving the urban experience for everyone.

Take the example of Ste-Catherine, one of the busiest commercial strips in downtown Montreal. Much of the street is either off-limits to cars or only accessible at specific times through the use of controlled bollards (the bollard thing again!).

All throughout the city, there are little interventions that have improved the urban experience. It isn’t just pedestrian streets; things like unique bike parking or the city’s iconic bike share program offer different ways of getting around and, last year, the city announced the creation of a network of bike lanes, including 200 KM of new bike lane infrastructure. Hamilton would have to install the Cannon Street bike lanes 67 more times just to meet the amount of new infrastructure Montreal has announced.

Beyond that, because Montreal is a city of primarily small walk-up apartments without backyards, there are plenty of urban parks to enjoy. Some are elaborate and winding, some are filled with amenities (I watched an engaging game of giant chess down the street from where my conference was held), and others are just little pocket parks, created in place of a few parking spots.

When I suggest things like this, people often say “well it works there but it can’t work here”. But my response is always “why not?” Yes, Montreal is a much bigger city with a longer history and a very different pattern of building and politics. But it doesn’t mean we can’t learn from them, adapt some of the great things they’ve done, and have them work in our urban environment.

A couple months after I moved back to Hamilton from Montreal, I wrote a piece for The Spec where I pretty much said all these same things. Hamilton can “learn from the neighbours” on big, important things. Missing middle development, cycling infrastructure, pedestrian streets. That was three years ago.

Hey, maybe I’ll still be talking about those things in three years. My hope is that we will have made headway on some of those. But, if not, I have a feeling there will be a few important opportunities to bring these ideas up three years from now.

Safe to the core

Back on May 2nd, the CBC ran a story about downtown business owners and their employees feeling unsafe while at work. It is definitely worth a read, since the perspectives of all the folks quotes are valid and deserve to be addressed.

Basically, thanks to a rise in the city’s unhoused and under/unsupported population, particularly in the core, there have been more instances of interaction between people with serious mental health challenges and/or addictions issues and people working in customer service who do not have the training or the capacity to provide the kind of help and care needed.

The issue arises when people are looking for stop-gap solutions. The CBC interviewed Denninger's CEO Mary Aduckiewicz, who said:

I get the call here. Our employees feel unsafe, we want them to feel safe, let’s get more cops on the street.

But will that fix anything? In the short term, it might ensure that more people facing mental health crises, addictions issues, and homelessness might interact with the police more regularly, but it doesn’t fix the structural issues that have caused this situation.

The prevailing government approach to dealing with social issues is best described as “gleeful cruelty”. It doesn’t have to be this way, though. Yeah, it costs money to fund a mental healthcare system that actually works for people. Yeah, it costs money to find housing for people. Yeah, it costs money to legalize substance use and channel resources that were once put into maintaining prohibition into treatment instead. But we either do that or admit we’re all okay with the state committing some light eugenics. Half measures aren’t going to cut it anymore.

Putting money into more policing may seem like a way to increase safety, but, given the fact that the HPS isn’t even remotely qualified to be one giant social work agency, all it would do is increase perceptions of safety. And, as research shows, that would actually depend on other factors as well. Merenda, et. al. surveyed residents of a mid-sized US city and found that the people with the highest perception of the police and safety were those who believed the police act justly in all their interactions.3 So if you've maybe had a bad interaction with the police or had them dismiss one of your concerns, you'll probably not feel any more safe, just because there's a police cruiser down the street.

When 80% of Denninger’s staff feel unsafe and 73% don’t feel comfortable leaving work after dark, there’s a problem. But the way we solve that problem is going to take political will, a reallocation of our resources, and a whole heap of compassion.

The passion, the desire, the Election Compliance Audit Committee

Over on The Public Record, Joey Coleman is reporting that Hamilton’s Election Compliance Audit Committee (shudders) is having their first meeting today (Thursday, May 11th).

Their task: deal with Cindy Kennedy, who ran in Ward 4 during last year’s municipal election. Kennedy placed 9th out of 11, earning 251 votes, or 2.8% of the vote. This isn’t her first attempt for office; she ran for school trustee in 2014 (like me!) and in 2010, both times in Ward 4. During those races, she placed second, well behind permanent trustee Ray Mulholland, and listed no campaign spending.

Kennedy’s campaign financial statement for her 2022 council race is blank. Like, she filled in her name and all, but there isn’t anything else listed on the sheet.

This is a problem, as there are photos of her campaign material out there. Some were included in the complaint, which was filed by fellow Ward 4 candidate (and current Ward 4 council office staffer) Pascale Marchand, and some were sent to Joey after the complaint came to light.

In a follow-up piece, Joey notes that Kennedy believed she did not need to submit a full financial report because she self-funded her campaign. The province issued a fairly detailed candidate’s guide, but, sure, use “ignorance of the law” as a defence. That one always works.

The big problem is that this process seems to be inconveniencing Kennedy. Her statement accuses Marchand of having “some grudge against me”, saying that a financial statement shouldn’t be necessary because she didn’t have “the amount of signs as some of the other candidates”, and telling the Election Compliance Audit Committee:

It is really, really, really important to follow the rules when campaigning. That’s the best way we have to ensure the election is at least slightly fair from a structural perspective. Yes, it can be hard as an individual candidate to go out and learn the rules, but if you can’t even do that, should you really be on city council?

Anyway, I’m working on a campaign finance thing for next week, so I won’t say too much more on this, except to note that, from my perspective, this is an open-and-shut case: Kennedy is in the wrong here.

Paving paradise as a policy

On May 4th, The Narwhal published a great interview with Windsor Mayor Drew Dilkens in which he 100% committed to sprawl. Not sure if he totally understood the audience there.

Dilkens has served as Windsor’s mayor since 2014 and was that city’s Ward 1 councillor for two terms before that. He’s been a staunch right-winger (low-tax, pro-policies that further marginalize the already marginalized, and a big Conservative Party donor). To reward his dedication to the status quo, the Ford Government appointed him chair of their Housing Supply Action Plan Implementation Team (HSAPIT?).

The article (which you can check out here) is a study in tone deafness. Fatima Syed sat down with Dilkens for an hour and asked some pretty important questions about how Windsor in particular will grow over the next few years.

Some of the best quotes are:

The whole interview, start to finish, is a journalist asking a politician how they’re planning for the long-term future and that politician coming back with “sorry, I’m only thinking short-term here”.

We have to balance the need for housing affordability with the need to, you know, have a planet to live on and food to eat. Far too many people in positions of political leadership right now have

• a) not demonstrated an ability to think critically and creatively about problems,

• b) not shown the courage to act when they are given a creative new option to a problem,

• c) not shown any willingness to challenge conventions and educate the public on different options,

• d) truly questioned whether “growth” is the only metric of a community’s success, and

• e) enthusiastically supported tried-and-tested methods of getting things (like building housing) done by having the state just have some courage and do what it is supposed to do.

This Dilkens interview is all of those things, plus an admission to future generations that nothing is going to change for the better down there.

Gotta go fast!

The Spec reports that, last week, council heard about the city’s photo radar program. Spoiler: people like driving really fast near schools.

More surprisingly, Mike Field, the city’s transportation director, actually told council:

That’s a huge admission. We’ve designed our roads so poorly, we’ve basically facilitated dangerous driving.

Tom Jackson, whose Ward 6 includes one of the most dangerous streets - Upper Ottawa - threw a couple of folksy jabs at people driving fast (yeah, calling them “knuckleheads” definitely stops all those children from being run over, Tom) and then asked his council colleagues to buy more photo radar devices because: “we cannot put a police officer 24-7 at all these problem areas.”6

REDESIGN THE ROAD, TOM. THE ROAD IS A HUGE PART OF THE PROBLEM. FIX THE ROAD. THE ROAD, TOM, THE ROAD. LOOK AT THE ROAD. FIX IT!

Just, like, look at Upper Ottawa. Of course people are driving 20, 30, 40 km/h over the speed limit:

But, as usual, traffic calming, road dieting, or any of the other placemaking interventions that could genuinely, meaningfully, actually fix the hellscape that is the road network in this city are shrugged off.

Council has been told the design of our roads is the problem. Which means we now know what needs to be fixed. All we need is the political will to fix it.

Market days

Back to Joey for this one - as reported in The Public Record, the fourth consultant hired to consult on the overly consulted Hamilton Farmer’s Market has recommended a massive reno of the market, or moving it in the future.

In August 2022, the Project for Public Spaces (honestly, a very cool urbanist group) was hired to “lead a community engagement process to inform the creation of a new vision for the Hamilton Farmers’ Market.”7 The result was a report that acknowledges a few key things about the current market, namely that it is a dank, unappealing basement with none of the charm and life that it once had.

Okay, that was me paraphrasing a little. The key recommendations are to:

1. Fix the building or relocate the market

2. Expand flexible public spaces

3. Strengthen connections to outside space and neighbours

4. Provide space for more local farmers, local producers, and pop-up vendors

5. Offer more programs and events

6. Open a market cafe that serves alcohol

7. Increase management capacity

8. Expand hours

9. Strengthen the market’s messaging, ads, and promo

10. Maintain adequate parking

These are excellent suggestions. And I have an idea as to how we can make them happen.

First, we invent time travel. Then we go back in time to a city council meeting in the 1940s and shake each and every member of council. Just grab them by their stupidly padded shoulders and shake them while yelling “DON’T DESTROY THE MARKET AND BUILD A MALL HERE, YOU SILLY PEOPLE” until they understand it. Then maybe give them some fashion advice (“you can wear your pants a little lower, Controller Frame”).

As Joey notes, most of the land around the Market is under the control of the Hamilton Urban Precinct Entertainment Group, a vehicle for the Mercanti family of Carmen’s Banquet Centre fame (also, like, not too many spoilers for my campaign finance piece next week, but like…prolific donors to council candidates). Councils past have surrounded the Market, offering few options for growth or change from here-on-out.

There aren’t a lot of great options. But there are options. It’ll be interesting to see how council and the groups overseeing the Market move forward. It is both heartening to see changes might be coming and concerning to see how few options there are to make those changes happen.

Goodbye, old acquaintance

The old CHCH broadcast centre at Jackson and Caroline is no more. Now owned by Brad Lamb, the plan is for the space to become some of Hamilton’s swankiest condos in the next four or so years.

The whole thing has been a mess to begin with. Lamb pissed off William Shatner in 2017 when he used his name and likeness to market the project without Shatner’s permission. The project then faced backlash for not promoting any activation with the streetscape. Only a couple of months ago, he cancelled all original sales and “relaunched” the project, charging far more than originally anticipated for units in the as-yet-to-be-even-started project.

Lamb has a mixed track record in his past developments. During the height of the pandemic, tenants living in an illegally-constructed development on top of an old garage that Lamb had built were evicted without notice. This was after a failed development of his around a heritage property caught fire twice and after he cancelled a handful of other projects after starting sales.

Now, I know I’m going to get push back from the “YIMBY at all costs” crowd, but just because we need housing doesn’t mean we should trust every snake oil salesman in a flashy suit who offers to buy land and build something there. The corporate market swoops in, promises to fix a problem it created, and we’re all on our knees, begging for more.

Will “Television City” fix our housing crisis? Hell no. These units will be scooped up by speculative investors and either sit empty, or get rented out to desperate people for $3,000 a month. That doesn’t fix the housing crisis. It just prolongs the suffering of some so that a couple of investors can get rich.

A vacant stare

We’re still talking about the Vacant Unit Tax, I guess. An article in the Flamborough Review profiles a senior in Waterdown who does not have a vacant unit, but is still concerned by the tax. It then talks to Nic von Bredow, the president of the Realtors Association of Hamilton-Burlington, who says the tax won’t work, but we should instead throw rules and regulations out the window and let developers do what they want. Because of course he thinks that.

The messaging around the Vacant Unit Tax could have been better, I’ll agree. But why are these the voices being profiled? Anyone concerned about this extra tax who does not have a vacant unit does not need to worry about the tax so long as they send the form in saying “no, I do not have a vacant rental unit”. But then turning to a real estate advocacy group for comment? If he said anything other than “I want more units to come online so my members can sell them”, I’d assume there was something wrong.

Do we need more housing? Yes. Do we need to do away with every rule and regulation and attempt by neighbours to squeeze a little bit of community from these nonsense developments just to get housing? No. We can just build it. But, in the mean time, a vacant unit tax will help to put the pressure on those speculative investors who scoop up units and let them sit, treating them like parts of their stock portfolio. If these units aren’t being used, there’s a problem. The VUT is intended to get housing on the market while we pursue other policies to solve this crisis. So let’s get it done already.

Check, double check, check again

Brantford had a very close mayoral election in 2022. Incumbent mayor Kevin Davis earned just 208 more votes than challenger Dave Wrobel. Both candidates were pretty right wing (Davis served as an Ontario PC riding association member in Brantford while Wrobel was an old Reform/Alliance dude whose platform was “low taxes for all!”) with similar political experience (Davis was a two-term councillor from ‘85 to ‘91 and has been mayor since 2018 while Wrobel was a 1 term councillor from 2010 to 2014 and ran for mayor in 2014 and 2018), so the electorate can be forgiven for having a tough time distinguishing between the two.

After all the ballots were counted, Davis was just ahead by just a hair over 1%. Wrobel acknowledged that there isn’t anything in the Municipal Elections Act that allows for a recount, so he had to file an application for a hand recount with the Ontario Superior Court of Justice. The result was a resolution for the City of Brantford to do just that.

On Saturday, the city recounted, by hand, all the ballots cast for mayor about 7 months ago. The result? Davis picked up three more votes while Wrobel picked up 1. All-in-all, a couple of votes were found, one was invalidated, meaning Davis’s victory was confirmed. His final vote total changed from 45.95% of the vote to 45.96% of the vote.

Democracy!

Recounts should totally be a thing in the Municipal Elections Act. A close margin means that elections officials should go through the results and check them by hand. Here in Hamilton, we use a scantron system for voting, meaning that a close margin might require some careful human eyes to ensure the will of the people is actually being followed. Our elections are safe and secure, but double checking doesn’t hurt.

That mischievous little Jonker

Ottawa Police have arrested former West Lincoln councillor Harold Jonker for his role in the Convoy. Jonker was a key figure in the occupation of Ottawa, blocking roads and organizing a Niagara contingent while still an elected member of West Lincoln’s council.

First elected in 2018, Jonker was one of West Lincoln’s contingent of far-right members. From 2008 to 2016, Jonker (like his fellow West Lincoln council member, the township’s mayor, Dave Bylsma) was a big time donor to the Christian Heritage Party, giving the Christian nationalist group close to $3,500, and running as their candidate in the Niagara-area multiple times over the years. In addition to (as his CHP profile notes) having 13 children (holy what), he’s a partner in his family’s trucking business and is active in his church.

The Niagara-area has long been a hotbed of Christian nationalism in Canada (with the Windsor-Essex region also playing host to people of similar affiliations). The success of CHP members and other far-right figures in local elections is troubling, though it seems like their success is muted. Indeed, while they might be able to pull off one victory, running as a “conservative” candidate, once they start saying the quiet parts out loud, voters get squeamish. Bylsma lost by 42 percentage points, shedding 20% from his 2018 results. Jonker didn’t even get 25% of the vote, going from 1st in 2018 to 3rd in 2022 and losing to someone he defeated in 2018.

Not only has the electorate turned on this kind of politics, but now the authorities are getting involved, reminding these Christian nationalists that their actions have consequences (wait, isn’t that their whole thing?).

It’ll be interesting to see how this trial plays out and what the electoral fortunes of Christian nationalists are in local races in years to come.

The Broken Social Scene election

The old joke goes that, if you’re wandering the streets of any city in Italy, chances are you’ll bump into a former or future Prime Minister (their political system is notoriously unstable and they cycle through non-fascist PMs quite quickly). Do the same in any place in Finland, you’ll run into a member of a heavy metal band (the eastern Nordic nation has 53.2 heavy metal bands per 100,000 residents). Try that in Canada, and you’ll probably find someone who has been in the indie collective Broken Social Scene. Their music is fun, but they can get a little unwieldy, because…well…there are a lot of them. From the band’s Wikipedia page:

But I guess the saying will have to be adapted a little, since Toronto’s mayoral by-election has already surpassed Canada’s supergroup in terms of…volume?

The Toronto Star reported that, as of 4:45 PM on May 1st, with the registration of 18 year old Joshua Singh, the 2023 mayoral by-election tied with their 2014 mayoral race for the electoral contest with the most candidates the city has seen for a single office at 65 candidates. That record was promptly smashed the following day and candidate numbers have just continued to climb.

As of 5:00 PM, Wednesday, May 10th (with two days to go for nominations), there are 78 nominees for mayor (over/under on them breaking 100 by Friday?), making it the largest candidate pool of any mayoral election in Toronto and, likely, in Ontario. Possibly even in Canada.

Some of the more noteworthy of the 78 are:

• A handful of fringe federal/provincial political figures like

  • Ontario Libertarian Party chair Serge Korovitsyn,

  • Michael Nicula, who founded the now-defunct Party for Accountability, Competency and Transparency,

  • Erwin Sniedzins, a New Blue candidate in the 2022 provincial vote, and

  • Brian Graff, who took the NDP to court when they wouldn’t let him run in the party’s 2017 leadership race

• Four former politicians

  • Former councillor, MP, and mayoral candidate Olivia Chow,

  • Celina Caesar-Chavannes, who was the MP for Whitby who resigned from the Liberals over conflicts with the PMO around the same time that the Jody Wilson-Raybould affair occurred,

  • Giorgio Mammoliti, certified meany who, after being booted from Toronto City Council in 2018 by fellow councillor Anthony Perruzza (in the great Ford Ward Debacle), moved up to Wasaga Beach, where he ran for mayor in 2022, coming in 3rd out of 4 with 20% of the vote, and

  • Former Toronto councillor/PC candidate Rob Davis

• Six sitting politicians

  • City councillors Josh Matlow, Brad Bradford, Ana Bailão, and Anthony Perruzza,

  • Liberal MPP for Scarborough—Guildwood Mitzie Hunter, and

  • Toronto Catholic school trustee Frank D'Amico

• At least two people (Weizhen Tang and Xiao Hua Gong) who have (allegedly) run pyramid schemes and/or other fraudulent schemes

• Two parents (Claudette Beals and Willie Reodica) of people killed at the hands of the Toronto Police Service

• Two former members (Blake Acton and Mark Saunders) of the Toronto Police Service

• At least two explicit joke candidates

  • Meir Straus, proports to be the youngest candidate in the race and is running a classic satirical, Rhino Party-style campaign that’s worth a chuckle, and

  • Ben Bankas, who is running on a “I’m an anti-woke comedian” platform that could be the least funny thing ever. It isn’t even inappropriately funny. It’s just boring.

• An actor (Simryn Fenby) whose big roles include staring in a Jell-o ad as a kid

• 11 perennial candidates (people who have run in multiple elections, often as part of a fringe party/with fringe ideas, and who have been unsuccessful). That’s 15% of the candidate pool right there.

And that’s about it. Don’t think I’m missing anyone there…unless…wait…it can’t be…oh, well damn, it is…

• Nathalie Xian Yi Yan!? Yeah, Hamilton’s own “Dr.” Nathalie has registered to run in Toronto. She was ineligible to run in Hamilton’s 2022 election because she failed to file her campaign financials in 2018, so I guess she’s jumped up the QEW and is going to try her luck there! If she doesn’t submit campaign financials from this race, I guess we won’t see an Andrea Horwath/Brad Clark/Nathalie Xian Yi Yan race in 2026.

Not just any bus…a megabus.

This one is interesting: When Margaret Thatcher ruined England in the 1980s, one of the main things she did was deregulate the hell out of everything. One company to emerge from that was Stagecoach, a company that would quickly come to operate public transit routes across the UK. In 2003, they launched a no-frills bus company across Europe that they called “Megabus”. Just six years later, they had expanded into Canada. After Greyhound shut down in Canada, Megabus swooped (drove?) in and assumed control of some of their biggest lines.

Just last week, Megabus announced they’d be expanding their service to offer 16 daily trips between Toronto and Montreal. That’s 6 more than there are VIA trains.

The concern here is that the corporate market (and, in this case, a giant £1.9 billion multinational) is providing more and more services that should be offered by the public sector. Why? What’s to stop a company like this from providing service to a small town just because it isn’t as profitable as they’d like? Or from gobbling up every competitor until their have a defacto monopoly and can charge whatever they like? Or from convincing a government to provide them with extra funding or attention or legislation because they “provide jobs”?

A national public transportation strategy with air, rail, water, and road connections that are provided by and for the people is something we desperately need. That’s a bus I’d hop on.

Q & A

Question:

Answer:

Cool facts for cool people:

The whole newsletter was cool facts! And, when you think about it, isn’t the friends we made along the way the real cool facts? Wait, no, that’s not right…