Programming note: Oh no! I’ve heard from a few friends of the newsletter that they did not receive last week’s edition. I boil that down to it just be chalk full of maps and big ol’ graphics. I’ll try and keep this one less intense on the photo front. If you want to take a look at it, or at any past edition, they’re all archived at sewersocialists.ca. And last week’s can be found at this link. On to this week:

School’s out for summer

The school year officially ends here in Ontario next week. And for too many queer youth, teachers, and allies across not just Ontario, but Canada, it has been a very difficult year. A small, but vocal and increasingly violent minority have set their sights on youth and schooling. While this is all part of the culture wars in Canada, the US, and the rest of the “Anglosphere”, there is a deeply unsettling nature to these new battles, which have only intensified since the COVID-19 pandemic.

So I thought this is as good a time as any to check in with schools and school boards. Not just to look at the culture wars, but also some of the other overlooked stories from the most overlooked of overlooked levels of government in Canada.

Fair warning, these stories will contain a fair amount of upsetting content and links to stories that some readers might find uncomfortable. Zip on down to the riveting piece on strong mayors if you need some time off from all this. Indeed, as an Oakville parent told the Toronto Star, the recent fights to maintain queer rights in schools has drained so many people, with that parent simply stating: “I’m tired”.1 And, honestly, same.

So if reading about the rising tide of far-right hate toward everything isn’t your jam, I feel you. Take a good book to the beach, ride on over to your favourite local brewery, head to the park and have a picnic with friends, make some art, coordinate with your local orca pod to sink a yacht, or just spend time with the people you love. The ol’ newsletter will always be here and ready when you are.

And with that, let’s begin.

An HWDSB Checkup

Just like so many wonderful things, we begin in Hamilton.

Compared to previous years, things have been slightly more subdued over at 20 Education Court. So many folks in town are used to battling the school board on everything from accessible playground space and school closures to board transparency and every little thing that Carole Paikin Miller said, so it has been a breath of fresh air to see things running a little more smoothly these days.

Back in May, there was pushback when local Tim Horton’s franchises offered HWDSB high school students volunteer hours in exchange for decorating the brand’s “smile cookies”, which are sold to benefit local charities. The president of the Hamilton and District Labour Council, Anthony Marco, said that the offer of volunteer hours was “basically teaching them [students] the basic premise of scab labour, which is to replace paid workers.”2 While Board staff indicated that they support the program and commit to reviewing it in the future to make sure it isn’t replacing regular staff, it is clear that this is a troubling campaign for the HWDSB to be associated with. Sure, 100% of the proceeds from the smile cookies are donated to local charities, but folks aren’t just walking in and getting 1 cookie. They’re also going to get a coffee or a doughnut or a bagel, which all goes to make Tim Horton’s money. By sticking high school students in these joints to decorate cookies, the corporation is saving money on staffing costs to produce a product that will be sold along side other products that will directly make them money. This ain’t no bake sale, folks. So good on the HDLC for opposing that.

The Board has also passed a new policy that prevents schools from being named after people. This was a smart move, considering how complicated the historical legacy of some folks can end up being when we find out more about their lives and perspectives. After the board renamed Ryerson Middle School to Kanétskare (By The Bay in Mohawk), they took steps to rework the school naming policy to be more neutral. While this was opposed by trustees Todd White and Paul Tut, the rest of the board agreed with the change. I mentioned this before, but this is a good policy. Naming a school after some natural feature in the community or, more appropriately, working with local Indigenous communities to develop a name that has significance for the area and encourages students to learn about Indigenous languages, practices, and histories is a great thing for everyone.

I know no one is asking my opinion on this (and I have absolutely no intention of ever running for school trustee again),3 but some names the board could consider changing are:

• Earl Kitchener (colonial aristocrat, conquered Sudan, oversaw the world’s first concentration camps during the Boer War, all around lover of war)

• Prince of Wales (British royal)

• Queen Mary (British royal)

• Queen Victoria (Queen of all the British royals)

• Sir Allan MacNab (Tory landlord who supported the aristocratic and anti-democratic Family Compact and actively fought republicans seeking to liberate Canada from the British crown…I may be biased on the second point there #republic)

• Sir William Osler (said at the time of the Komagata Maru incident, where a group of predominantly Sikh individuals tried to immigrate to Canada but were barred from entry, that Canada should be “a white man’s country” and advocated euthanizing anyone over age 60)

• Sir Winston Churchill (do I even have to at this point?)

• Viscount Montgomery (honestly the least offensive of the bunch, unless you’re Irish and take exception to his saying that he didn’t care how many homes of Irish civilians he burned down during their civil war)

I’m not trying to “cancel” these folks, so just…make your jokes now so we can move on. What I’m saying is that these people are part of the reason why this policy is now in place. When we name something after a historical figure after learning only about the positives of their lives, we run the risk of idolizing flawed people. And everyone is flawed, so why name something after someone in the first place? These folks deserve to be remembered for the good they did and for the bad they did. That’s what history books are for. As for schools, let’s just stick with names that reflect the space they occupy.

The HWDSB hasn’t been immune to the machinations of the far right. Just this past Monday, a group of around 70 far right protesters descended upon the board meeting to attack trans and allied students, teachers, and administrators. The situation got so bad that the Hamilton Police needed to barricade the doors to stop the protesters from further disrupting the proceedings. The panic over issues of gender and sexuality was manufactured in the United States in 2022 by far right activist and failed politician Christopher Rufo to help bolster Republican candidates in that year’s midterms. They sought to replicate the success of investment banker Glenn Youngkin, who won the gubernatorial race in Virginia the year prior. While the hard right believes that it was Youngkin’s toxic blend of anti-vaxx, anti-Critical Race Theory, and anti-queer rights rhetoric that secured his victory, it was more likely that Virginians were uninspired by the campaign of right-leaning Democrat Terry McAuliffe and frustrated with COVID-19 measures. But Rufo and the American far right created a fake panic about gender and sexuality which has rippled into today. Scared and alienated people, lacking a real community around them, turn to the internet where malicious actors feed them lies and exaggerations to advance their own weird agendas. While the hope is that all this will die down eventually, it will likely only do so when the far right reorients its endless hate on another minority community.

By far, the most impressive thing that’s happened at the HWDSB this year is the work by Ward 2 trustee Sabreina Dahab who has been pushing for more transparency over the Board’s reporting on suspensions and expulsions. Initial reports on this data did not include any demographic information, which is a disservice to communities that have been advocating for different communities within Hamilton’s public schools for years.

When the demographic data finally came out, it painted a picture that too many folks in our communities worried might be true. CBC Hamilton did a wonderful job visualizing the data, which you can check out here, but the fact that Indigenous, Black, disabled, and Arabic-speaking students are suspended at a much higher rate than white students is just so upsetting. The intersections of identities here matter as well. Suspensions and expulsions need to be a last resort when all other avenues of getting through to a student have failed, which means we need more supports for those with different learning styles, those with differing abilities, those with limited English or French language skills at home, and those students that are part of New Canadian households.

Again, this is an area where the province is going to have to step up with meaningful investments. Downloading responsibilities to the school boards won’t help here, since the HWDSB is really limited in how they can fund their programs. Time to hound Steven Lecce until schools are properly funded!

And, just an aside, but the HWDSB data indicates 207 students were suspended after an alleged hate crime. That’s profoundly upsetting, but even more so when you consider that there are parents, standing outside the Board of Ed building, asking the board to take rights away from trans students. Just sit with that for a minute.

So that’s the HWDSB. Overall, some interesting stuff, good work by some trustees, and a promising start to the term.

Elsewhere, on the other hand…

The far right is trying to win school boards

This should not come as a surprise to anyone, but the far right wants control of your local school board.

Extreme right groups have been keen to win school trustee seats for decades, starting with conservative Christian groups across the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. Today’s far right is quite different, though, which is something a lot of folks have a difficult time understanding. Up until a short while ago, conservative Christians formed a cohesive and dominant block in hard right politics, particularly when we consider issues of schooling. Debates over evolution, sex ed, school prayer, and accommodations for the children of devout conservative Christians dominated the discussion in the United States (and, subsequently in Canada) for much of the 1990s and into the 2000s.4

But, beginning around the time of Barack Obama’s election to the Presidency of the United States, conservative Christians began moving their children out of public schools and into either homeschooling or private Christian academies. Initiatives like “The Exodus Mandate” and appeals by figures such as Jerry Falwell, Robert Simonds, and Glenn Beck to “flee” the public school system resonated with a polarized Christian community. There is some evidence that this happened across the US and, to a lesser extent, in Canada.5

This isn’t the only reason why today’s right is fragmented. Blame COVID-19 for that. The secularization of the right was already well underway by the time the pandemic hit. Conservatives realized that they could court non-religious working class people with appeals to nationalism, “common sense”, and engrained social roles, drawing off the success of European far right parties who were able to successfully appeal to similar groups.

COVID-19 lit a match under these groups, who realized that adding a little bit of pandemic populism to the mix worked wonders. The government is telling you what to do? Tell them to fuck themselves! Nerds in lab coats want you to take some shot? Don’t trust them! Some underpaid service sector worker asked you to put on a mask? They’re infected with a woke mind virus and it is your patriotic duty to yell at them!

Across Canada, hard right parties picked up support (except in New Brunswick where PC leader Blaine Higgs made overtures to supporters of the hard right People’s Alliance party, whose 2 members of their legislature would, by 2022, join the PC caucus).6

By the time of the 2022 municipal elections in Ontario and BC, these secular right-wing populists had already been lathered into a frenzy by folks like Rufo and the American conservative establishment to think that Critical Race Theory and “gender ideology” were coming for Canadian school children.

Two notes here: first, this isn’t anti-Americanism. This is reflective of the reality that Canadian conservatives have precious little in the way of unique media that confirms their biases. The National Post and Toronto Sun will usually just repurpose outrage from Fox News with a slight Canadian angle. The kind of nonsense we hear from Conrad Black and Barbara Kay and Sue Ann Levy is indistinguishable from things you’d hear from Jeanine Pirro, Laura Ingraham, Greg Gutfeld, and Sean Hannity. Canadian conservatives will even tune into American programing to get their fix thanks to the scant Canadian hard right coverage there is. Second, “gender ideology” is a term used by the far right, but it is not a thing. They’re trying to equate queerness, gender expression, and gender-affirming policies with an “ideology” to make people think it is something you chose, that can be foisted upon you, and that can be changed.

A number of far right groups organized to try and win school board seats in 2022. Action4Canada, Blueprint for Canada, and the Liberty Coalition Canada all formed around the time of the pandemic with the explicit goal of opposing Critical Race Theory, gender affirming policies, and pandemic public health measures, with a specific focus on schools. These groups were joined by “independent” People’s Party and New Blue Party-affiliated candidates (Hamiltonians will remember Michael Kelly, Michael Peters, Larry Masters, and Catherine Kronas). Candidates affiliated with a wide array of far-right groups were all promoted by websites like “Vote Against Woke”, which also included candidates who did not share their beliefs and mysteriously went dark a few days before the election.

These groups and candidates blended messaging and policies from a wide array of sources and drew from both the secular “neo alt-right” that was energized by the pandemic and Convoy and the increasingly extreme and violent Christian nationalist movement.

Most of these candidates performed poorly. Candidates declared “supportable” by the Christian nationalist Campaign Life Coalition (CLC) averaged 30.39% while Vote Against Woke endorsed candidates averaged 29% of the vote. Only 27% of CLC candidates won, of which over 3/4 were Catholic trustees, and under a quarter of Vote Against Woke candidates won with 2/3 of them also being Catholic trustees.

Even the presence of these candidates made elections more complicated. The Samara Centre for Democracy released a report this week on the online hate candidates in municipal elections received in 2022. In Ottawa, Ottawa-Carleton District School Board (OCDSB) candidate Nili Kaplan-Myrth, who is both Jewish and a family doctor, got the second most hate of any candidate for office in Ottawa on Twitter, just below the progressive, non-binary candidate for mayor, Catherine McKenney. Nearly 30% of all tweets directed at Kaplan-Myrth, who was a passionate supporter of COVID-19 public health measures, were abusive and 1 in 10 were actual threats. At the same time, violently anti-trans candidates Shannon Boschy and Chanel Pfahl also received push back on Twitter. I take some issue with the Samara Centre’s methodology here, though, as they noted “Tweets that described these candidates as transphobic, racist, or similar terms were evaluated as identity attacks by SAMbot [their monitoring bot]”.7 There’s a slight difference between telling a candidate you wish them harm because they’re pro-mask and calling an openly transphobic candidate a transphobe, but maybe I’m just splitting transphobic hairs.

But, just because the general elections for trustees are over, doesn’t mean the far right is slowing down. Groups in Kitchener-Waterloo are monitoring the appointment process for two vacant trustee spots (for Waterloo/Wilmot and Woolwich/Wellesley) on the Waterloo Region District School Board (WRDSB). Far right activists with ties to the People’s Party, New Blue Party, anti-vaxx movement, and the Convoy are organizing around these appointments after failing to gain much ground in the general election. The above link is a wonderful deep dive by the KW Hate Activity Monitoring Group, who have combed through the far right activity on social media and the web in the KCW area, so definitely check it out.

Antihate.ca has followed up, focusing specifically on Waterloo Region for Medical Freedom (WRMF), a far right, anti-vaxx group that is specifically aiming to get friendly candidates appointed to the WRDSB. The WRMF group encouraged members of their mailing lists to spam the application process, even writing:

As messed up as that might be, by doing things so openly, the far right might have given themselves away. And the WRDSB selects the best candidates out of all the applicants, meaning there is a chance none of the WRMF folks will be interviewed.

As with everything to do with the far right, it remains to be seen if they can actually keep the momentum going. They lost their favourite punching back in the form of COVID-19 measures, they pivoted to 15 minute cities and “mass immigration” and Critical Race Theory before fixating on trans folks. But these movements are ego driven (see Chris Sky) and usually can’t sustain the pressure of needing to go mainstream. Plus, it is hard to keep up that level of hate toward one specific group or issue for that long. They all tend to peter out after a while, particularly when their most outrageous conspiracy theories end up not coming true.

Will we see more far right candidates for trustee spots in 2026? Maybe. They seem to like the idea of controlling school boards, but today’s school boards aren’t giving them a lot to work with. It could be possible that, once the PPC and New Blue Parties finally collapse under the weight of their leaders’s egos, we’ll see them all venture back off into the wilderness. But we all know that, when life gets harder, extremist movements thrive. Only time will tell.

What a trustee can get away with

As alluded to earlier, things have quieted down here in Hamilton on the trustee front. We don’t have trustees like the Toronto Catholic board’s Mike Del Grande who made national headlines for his “queerness is like necrophilia” crusade or former Whitchurch-Stouffville trustee Elizabeth Terrell-Tracey of “cancel French immersion because we done speak Canadian here” fame (I can’t stress how slight these exaggerations are…both trustees actually did advocate for these things).

While Del Grande is still kicking around and Terrell-Tracey lost her re-election bid by a big margin, some other trustees are making the news for bad behaviour.

Take Durham District School Board (DDSB) trustee Linda Stone, one of three trustees elected to represent Oshawa. Throughout 2021 and 2022, Stone made a series of transphobic and racist comments over Twitter and in person. The wild thing is: Stone lost re-election in 2018 and was only appointed in 2020 after openly queer trustee Ashley Noble resigned because of how disappointed she was in the lack of progress she saw in the DDSB.

Six different instances were raised between her appointment and mid-2022 in which Stone was just terrible on social media and during board meetings. In response, Stone resigned just before the 2022 election. The DDSB launched an investigation into her behaviour in spite of her decision to step down.

Turns out that was a good move, because Stone registered as a candidate for DDSB trustee in 2022 and then won with the most votes out of all the candidates becoming the top trustee of three representing Oshawa (they elect three public trustees at large).

The report on her behaviour came out in February 2023, finding that, yes, she was actively harmful on social media. In a unanimous decision, her fellow trustees decided to censure Stone, barring her from their next meeting and banning her from sitting on any committees until the end of the year.

But Stone wasn’t done. She then turned around and asked for a judicial review of the board’s decision, with her lawyer saying this was all an issue of “free speech”:

Good grief.

So a couple of weeks ago, the DDSB and Stone struck an agreement to keep their working arrangement civil and avoid a costly legal thing. In exchange for Stone withdrawing her request for a judicial review, the board will allow her back onto committees in September. Yay?

So that’s Durham.

But it doesn’t beat a trustee out in BC who has also had some fun with social media.

New Westminster trustee Dee Beattie was asked to resign from the board when it was revealed she has operated a secret Twitter account for years that she used to target her opponents. She blamed mental health struggles, her elector organization dropped her, and her colleagues want her gone. All this after another member of her elector organization (reminder: that’s the BC name for local parties) stepped down as board chair after a special prosecutor found she had violated elections laws by hanging around a polling station during last October’s elections.

Secret trolling Twitter accounts and violations of election law? Where do they think they are? Hamilton?

Parents behaving badly

Protests at school board meetings and around schools have increased in intensity and volume in recent weeks.

Back in Durham, a May meeting was shut down after “parents” began shouting down speakers and rambling at the mic, attacking the board’s decision to fly the Pride flag. When the meeting was shut down, ol’ Deb Stone popped up again to say that stopping the meeting and proposed rules that would limit public questions was “the start of a slippery slope”.10 Sure Jan Deb.

In York, police had to be called to disperse dueling protests. And, in Ottawa, protests saw the children of anti-gay activists forced to stomp on Pride flags. That protest, organized by another shadowy far right group called “Save Canada”, saw Ottawa Centre MPP Joel Harden attacked by an anti-trans protester who shoved Harden’s megaphone back into his face with such force that he was cut on the cheek.

So now the focus has turned from “hearing community concerns” to “protecting public safety”. Some school boards are pausing public participation while other boards are investigating alternative means of soliciting feedback. One solution being proposed in Ottawa is a “safe zone” around schools (advanced by trustee Nili Kaplan-Myrth).

Kaplan-Myrth notes that a notorious anti-trans activist who goes by the name “Billboard Chris” stood out front some Ottawa schools in 2021 to harass students but was driven away by groups of students, parents, and community activists who weren’t having any of his nonsense. But he’s started up again, and, after organizing online, is bringing droves of transphobes with him.

The idea behind a “safe zone” around schools is that students deserve to learn in a safe, secure, and stable environment. When protesters are standing outside your classroom window ranting about mutilation and gender and other nonsense, it is kind of hard to focus on Hamlet and algebra and the mitochondria. School boards don’t have this kind of power on their own, so it would be up to other levels to investigate this solution.

I, for one, think it is a good idea to ensure students feel safe at school, which, depending on their circumstances, might be the only place they feel safe sometimes. Just because some far right creep has become fixated on the gender and sex of minors doesn’t mean that every student in a school needs to feel unsafe and unwelcome.

But the flag was still there

Many of the most recent protests have been centred on the Pride flag being raised at Ontario’s schools. The flag has become a target of intense debate as the far right rage machine becomes more and more obsessed with queer people.

There was Niagara Catholic District School Board trustee Natalia Benoit, who told PPC candidate Peter Taras that the Pride flag was similar to the Nazi flag. Or the debates at the York Catholic District School Board (YCDSB - where police needed to be called to deal with abusive parents) that eventually saw the board vote 6 - 4 against raising the flag.

Then there were the supposed “classroom walkouts” organized by anti-queer parents and the far right Christian nationalist Campaign Life Coalition in Waterloo, Halton, and Ottawa. These were matched by YCDSB students who walked out of class to protest the flag not being raised. These walkouts were met with violence from other students, fed homophobic nonsense at home and through the debates over the issue, who hurled abuse at their fellow students and, in some cases, engaged in physical violence.

Flying any Pride flag is an important symbol for queer students. As one student in Alberta told the CBC:

That means something. Flying the flag is a good way to show queer students that the systems around them don’t hate them just for being who they are. While far right protesters obsess over the issue of “wokeness” and the morality of queerness and every other issue they have with people who are different as a way to feel a modicum of control over their lives, queer students are just looking for safety and support. The fact that some school boards are bending to the whims of a vocal fringe minority of people advancing an agenda of hate is troubling.

But the students organizing walkouts to protest decisions to not fly the flag, students organizing to lobby trustees, students joining and supporting Gay-Straight Alliances, students showing compassion to their peers, and students stepping up to speak with the media about their concerns show that there is nothing but hope on the horizon.

Read for filth

One good news story: the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) is no longer asking “parental permission” for students to attend drag queen storytime events. This is a great step to countering the false and harmful narrative that alternative gender expression is inherently sexual. Yeah, there are raunchy drag queens and they are fun! But the queens who do things like storytimes at libraries and schools or who host family-friendly drag brunches always focus on a message of inclusivity, acceptance, and understanding.

As “drag bans” sweep the United States and far right activists threaten gender affirming care, it is more important than ever to show kids that there is nothing scary or wrong with expressing yourself in the way that makes the most sense for you. So good on the TDSB for this change.

The Orb of Duurin is lying to you

Finally, a very important video explaining how kids are being indoctrinated in schools today. Parents should have a right to know if their children are being exposed to truths unseen.

Mayor strong! Mayor smash!

On June 16, the provincial government announced that they would be expanding “strong mayor” powers to 26 “fast growing” municipalities to “help those municipalities build 1.5 million homes by 2031”. Oh boy, I better slow down on the sarcastic quotes, because my feelings toward this whole thing involve a lot of sarcasm.

Let’s face it: there’s no way giving a mayor the power to appoint a Chief Administrative Officer, create fake committees, and “help advance provincial policy” will get 1.5 million homes built. Damn, more sarcastic quotes.

This is an expected extension of a silly policy that Doug Ford wanted because, while hanging out in Chicago with his dad’s label company, he heard about how their mayor has “strong” powers and wanted it for himself if he ever became Mayor of Toronto. Far too much of Ontario’s provincial policy these days just seems to be Doug Ford’s way of vicariously acting out his mayoral fantasies through the office of the Premier.

Most mayors agree that these powers are silly. Burlington’s mayor Marianne Meed Ward has already said she didn’t want these new powers and would keep their city council working as it has been, despite being quoted as supportive initially. Most of Durham’s mayors have said they’ll only use them in “an emergency” (sarcastic quote count = 6).

That brings us to our mayor. Andrea Horwath has always remained a little ambivalent about her stance on these powers. In the same CBC article, Horwath says that “she hasn’t thought about using them”, that they’ll “change the culture at city hall”, and that she’s “committed to operating as usual” (do they count as sarcastic if they’re also actual quotes?).

Ultimately, I could see Horwath employing these powers some time in the future, if only for things like striking committees, more closely guiding the budgeting process, and having a more direct say in the hiring of certain city staff. But I seriously doubt that her having these powers will significantly change how Hamilton is governed.

More importantly, these powers will do absolutely nothing to get more homes built or fix the housing crisis. Mostly because, say it with me now:

THE HOUSING CRISIS WILL NOT BE SOLVED WITH SUPPLY-SIDE SOLUTIONS.

The issue is not, has never been, and never will be about “the number of units”. That’s just developers and real estate professionals spinning a crisis to their advantage so we pour all our resources into making life easier for them instead of actually building non-market, social, and co-op housing.

I feel like every second newsletter has some reference to that, but its because we still keep hearing that nonsense from people who stand to profit from the crisis and it pisses me off.

Anyway, just over a week until Hamilton’s mayor gets “strong” powers. Look forward to that changing next time Doug Ford decides he wants something else!

#HesRunning

Breaking news! Jellymania is already sweeping the #HamOnt tweetosphere!

jkjk not actually. But Matt Jelly does bring up an excellent point about advertising on busses. Transit agencies sell space on their busses to serve as roving billboards, but don’t often intervene, even if the advertisement is, in the case of this Burlington Transit bus on Cannon, damn near inscrutable. If we’re going to wrap busses in ads to help offset the cost of running a transit system, let’s at least 1) not obscure windows so people can see what’s going on outside and 2) have the ads be subject to some kind of design review?

Lucky number 551,000

Another one of those glowing realtor advertorials appeared in the Globe last week. While I usually just scoff when these things show up in my Google News feed, this one caught my eye because of the headline.

“Markham home with lucky number sells $551,000 over asking”

Half a million over asking. A home, listed for $1,799,000 sold for $2,350,000. A 276% increase over its previous selling price back in 2011.

this 👏 is 👏 not 👏 okay 👏

The realtor in charge of the selling told the Globe that, because the house is at #18 Bruce Thomson Drive, it had significance to members of the Chinese community, who see that number as lucky. So, after two days on the market, this tiny suburban home with half a postage stamp for a backyard sold for $2.35 million.

So what are the new buyers getting for that ridiculous chunk of change? A 12 year-old home with four bedrooms, four bathrooms, a two-car garage, and an unfinished basement.

The nearest amenity is a Tim Hortons that is a 3 minute drive or 15 minute walk away. The closest grocery store is a Costco on the other side of the 404 which would take 5 minutes to drive to, though you could always opt for the 30 minute walk (careful of the two uncontrolled highway onramps you’ll have to cross). There is no public transit from 18 Bruce Thomson to either location.

If you worked in downtown Toronto, you could drive in about a half hour (assuming the DVP is moving smoothly) or spend 2 hours in transit, walking to the aforementioned Tim Hortons, catching a bus, riding it for 45 minutes to Fairview Mall’s Don Mills subway station, then taking the Sheppard subway to the Yonge/University line. Woof.

Make no mistake, this is the ‘burbs. But what’s fascinating about this spot (and something that is strangely left out of the article) is that this home is in an extension of a quirky development called Cathedraltown.

Cathedraltown is part new urbanist build, part typical Canadian suburban development, and part fever dream.

Built on land once owned by Slovak-Canadian Stephen Boleslav Roman, who owned a Holstein cow breeding farm in addition to his work as a mining executive. Roman was loaded and also happened to be a devout member of the Slovak Greek Catholic Church, also known as the Byzantine Catholic Church in Slovakia. Yeah, the Byzantines.

After his death, his daughter worked with a UK-based architect to create a concept for a new town that would be built on the site of her father’s farm. Intended to feel like a European cathedral city, Cathedraltown was built around its namesake centrepiece: the Cathedral of the Transfiguration.

Extending from the rear of the church, a “high street” features mixed use buildings along a wide road that provides ample space for pedestrians. The intended feel is like Rome or Paris, with cafes and shops and an activated streetscape, all within walking distance of homes, radiating out from a place of worship.

While in planning school, I visited the space with some of my colleagues and was struck by how eerie the whole place felt. There was absolutely no one around, the high street had a ghost town vibe to it, and the Cathedral was locked, with large “no trespassing” signs posted all around it.

Turns out that, from 2006 to 2016, there were debates between the Roman family and the Catholic Church over the ownership of the building.

This wouldn’t be the only conflict in the community. Over the years, the Romans have really leaned into the whole “medieval” theme, attempting to impose their will on the community like feudal lords. They even erected a bizarre statue of a chrome cow on stilts in a park facing the cathedral. The statue is of “Brookview Tony Charity”, a prized show cow owned by Roman, who was once called “the best cow ever to walk the face of the earth”.

The community thought otherwise (it being a cathedral town, it attracted quite a few devout Christians, who had a tiny issue with the symbolism of an idolized cow facing a church) and pushed Markham City Council to remove the offending sculpture. The Roman family sued after Markham’s council did decide to move the statue, but a judge ruled against the developers, saying that the gift was “unwanted” and no one had to take it if they didn’t want it. So the cow was removed in 2018.

Every little part of this story is weird. The overly expensive, car-dependent house beside the failed New Urbanist development centred around a church built by a cow-obsessed family.

The funniest bit, though? Brookview Tony Charity was valued at $2.8 million, based on the half share that Roman had in…umm…her? So for a little extra dough, the folks who bought 18 Bruce Thomson Drive could have bought a prize show cow instead. Ahh, to have money and want weird things. What a lark.

Cool Facts for Cool People

• If you’ve been to Toronto at any time over the past few weeks, you will have noticed signs for Gong Xiao Hua, one of the 102 mayoral candidates running in their by-election. Gong’s signs are all over public property (illegal in Toronto, but whatever), as well as on the side of TTC busses and even on billboards over Yonge and Dundas Square. That’s some expensive advertising real estate! If you haven’t heard of him before hand, that’s okay. Not everyone follows news on fraud and pyramid schemes. Yeah, Gong is a convicted “white collar” criminal who had engaged in fraudulent behaviour in Canada and New Zealand. In 2022, the Capital Markets Tribunal actually said he’s still at risk of offending because he’s that slimy. It’ll be interesting to see if he actually boosts his vote total with all these signs. I’d say he’s likely breaking campaign spending laws (candidates can only give themselves a certain amount and like…one billboard at Yonge and Dundas would eat through that), but there’s a good chance he won’t be submitting financial paperwork (he doesn’t seem to be a fan of doing things by the book), so it’ll be hard to confirm that.

• As much as I’d like to write more, I’ll leave it at that and simply say: Happy Pride, dear readers!