There’s no such thing as municipal democracy

Grade 10 Civics - Revisited

An interesting article appeared in Ricochet last week. An in-depth feature by Scott Martin, the article opens with a pretty stark warning:

Yikes. 

After Ford’s government up-ended Toronto’s city council election in 2018 by cutting the number of wards just days before the close of nominations, a number of legal challenges eventually worked their way up to the Supreme Court of Canada. In a 5-4 decision, the slim majority voted in favour of Ford’s interference on purely constitutional grounds.

The case brief (here for any legal nerds to look over) states rather succinctly:

Double yikes.

For a nice long time, pretty much since the King/Byng Affair (pretend you remember Grade 10 Civics), Canada has lurched along in much the same way as the UK, following the basic principle of “Pretend It’s A Democracy”. Federally, that means that yes, we have a monarch who was appointed by an almighty being to be our ruler but no, they can’t veto legislation or dismiss a government at their own whim. At the provincial level, that meant that premiers generally didn’t mess around with local government all that much.

The Amalgamation Crises of the 1990s and 2000s usually ended badly for the provincial governments that dared to mess around with local democracy. After creating the new Regional Municipality of Halifax in 1996, voters in Nova Scotia punished the incumbent Liberal government by flipping 5 of Halifax’s 10 seats in the provincial legislature to the NDP in the province’s 1998 election, which saw the Grits knocked down to a minority. In the following year’s election, PCs under John Hamm (no, not that one) formed a majority. The PQ got a similar treatment after amalgamating Montreal in 2001, with the Quebec Liberals promising to allow municipalities to de-amalgamate if they formed government in 2003, which they did. And the Ontario Tories were kicked to the curb in 2003 after their dramatic cuts to municipalities. Sure there were other reasons (Walkerton, the Blackout, Dalton McGuinty’s unrestrained and deeply magnetic charisma), but, aside from 1 seat in Ottawa, the Liberals and NDP won every seat in the newly amalgamated municipalities.

Then we found ourselves in a little lull. Even when Rob Ford admitted to smoking crack cocaine, used a homophobic slur to describe Justin Trudeau, and was admitted to a rehab facility for substance abuse, then-Premier Kathleen Wynne showed no interest in exerting her constitutionally-bestowed powers. She could have dissolved the municipal government of Toronto and created a hand-picked board of supervisors made up of Liberal Party bigwigs and centrist intellectuals to run Toronto, but she didn’t. The status quo had been restored. We were back to accepting the collective fantasy that municipalities were little corporate-flavoured democracies that the big bad provincial government would not touch.

Fordin’ around

But then we elected Doug Ford. The Fords, as a family, have never been too keen on the whole “democracy” thing. They’re multimillionaire businesspeople. Sorry…businessfolks. The process and the time and the blah blah blah of democracy tends to get in the way of their goals. In his quasi-autobiography/pseudo-manifesto, Doug notes that none of the Ford Family politicians thought of themselves as politicians, and he prefers to call himself “a family man…[and] an independent Canadian business leader”.3 And, beyond that, Doug has said that politics involves too much "ass-kissing".4 The whole "sitting down and talking about ideas" thing isn't Doug's style.

But, importantly, Doug knows the powers of his office and isn’t afraid to make use of them.

Like an unsupervised twelve-year old making an omelet using a pneumatic bolt gun and a blast oven, the current Premier knows what powers he has, doesn’t care that it is a messy way to get things done, and uses each tool with passion, regardless of the consequences. In part, that’s because he’s aware there aren’t really consequences. His past municipal meddling resulted in a big thumbs up from the Supreme Court and 16 more seats in the 2022 election. Sure, some “downtown lefty elites” will show up at Queen’s Park and protest, but this is Doug’s show and he can have them ejected from the viewing gallery if he feels like it.

See, Doug doesn’t subscribe to that prim and proper Upper Canadian ideal of a theoretical democracy. Those who drafted the founding documents of Canada expected a government by the elites with select participation from the plebs. As the world changed, regular people exerted more and more power, but, for the most part, those who were the most successful adopted the same style and deference to unseen authority as those who created the structures of government.

Doug is the unforeseen garish lout the Family Compact couldn’t have even hallucinated in their wildest opium-tinged dreams. A wrecking-ball in an expensive suit, Doug Ford is here to get things done, traditions be damned.

What’s the deal with the Constitution Act, 1867?

The Supreme Court ruling actually has some really important language in it:

The Supreme Court acknowledges something important here: municipalities aren’t in the constitution and their absence isn’t something the court is willing to pick up on their own. This isn’t the United States. Relying on the courts to settle matters that legislative bodies could fix isn’t really our style. No, apparently our style is not addressing those matters ever.

But we should. Municipalities are an important part of the modern world. In 1867, they weren’t as relevant to Canada’s founders. At that point, Canada was a resource-extraction and farming colony where urban centres were simply the places people went to trade goods or get their products to larger American and European markets.

Some, like Alan Broadbent in his book Urban Nation, call for large cities to be turned into provinces on their own.6 This is the case with places like Germany, where Berlin, Bremen, and Hamburg are all Stadtstaaten or “city-states” and whose mayors have the power of a minister-president (their version of a premier).

Others have called for cities to be formally added to the constitution. Plenty of folks get jumpy when you suggest changing the Canadian constitution because previous efforts have had a significant impact on “national unity”. Because initiating a conversation about urban rights means also having conversations about the rights of different linguistic communities, meaningfully including the rights of Indigenous communities, changing federal/provincial divisions of power, abolishing or reforming the Senate, etcetera.

So we find ourselves in a bit of a logjam. A premier is out there pulling down the façade we’ve built around local government but the only options we have are a) replacing that premier in three years (after considerable damage is done) and hoping a new premier gives cities some powers through provincial laws which, let’s remember, can easily be changed or b) we rip open the constitution and stick cities in there. But let’s think about the logistics of doing that second option. To change the Canadian constitution, we need to get Parliament, the Senate, and at least 7 provincial legislatures representing 50% of the country’s population to agree. That’s getting provincial legislatures to agree to removing one of their powers. I’m sure that’ll go over well.

The status quo isn’t acceptable. With Doug Ford’s changes to councils and planning laws and his obsessive tendency to micromanage municipal affairs (even if Toronto didn’t want him being their mayor, he’ll try to do it anyway), local governments are in a precarious position. They can vote down new developments only for those developments to go ahead. They can plan a municipal budget only for the province to shoulder them with more responsibilities. They can anticipate a working dynamic over four years only for the rules to change every few months.

Any provincial party worth their salt will commit to providing municipalities more autonomy with a long-term goal of advocating for codifying their rights in a more permanent way. And local leaders should commit to advocating for the same things.

Only 36.3% of eligible municipal voters bothered to turnout across Ontario last October. That’s the lowest in history. A third of local voters care to cast a ballot. And who can blame the 2/3rds who don’t? Like some perverse version of Whose Line is it Anyway?, municipal government in Ontario feels like a game where the rules are made up and the decisions don’t matter.

But municipal government does matter. Our local government can shape the structure of our communities, facilitate our movement, improve our environment, empower us as urban residents, and improve our quality of life in the day-to-day. Cities deserve the power to make that happen without provincial meddling. And until we take that pneumatic bolt gun away from our overgrown twelve year-old premier, we can’t be sure that’ll happen. So I guess we know what step one is, then.

Well, well, Welland

On Easter Weekend, a piece dropped in the Welland Tribune. I got notified about it thanks to my Google News’s weird algorithm. In between stories about sports cars and “The Top 10 Best Cats of the Week” from Highlands Daily (one of those makes sense, the other is about cars), I got this notification:

Reading like a laundry list of expenses, the article is entitled: “Welland city council cost taxpayers $528,763 last year”. Lest you think this is a case of an over-active headlines editor slapping an incendiary title on an innocuous article, that’s also the opening line of the 483 word piece.

The gist of the thing is this: in 2020, Welland City Council’s pay went up. $27,884 for councillors, $76,208 for the mayor. Welland has a council of 13 members (2 councillors per ward and a mayor) plus 2 regional councillors. Combining salaries, benefits, and council-related conference travel, the Tribune reporter got to the number of $528,763.25 for 2022.

For context, that means Welland’s City Council constituted 0.53% of the municipal budget.

That’s a tiny fraction of the city’s budget. And, yet, this article on council pay is framed in such a way as to rile up what I like to call “Terry Taxpayer”.

“Half a million bucks of my taxpayer dollars are going to you fat cat politicians!? I’m spending a cool half mill so that you suit-wearing hacks can sit around and have meetings!? MY FIVE HUNO THOUS are being shoveled into your gold-plated feeding trough!?!? 10 point 5 million of MY NICKELS are going to you clowns and your…”

But here’s the thing: a living wage in Welland is $35,148 a year. If we break a councillor’s salary in Welland down, they’re getting paid about $13 an hour, assuming they work 9 to 5 for a typical work year. So it is probably less than that.

And, beyond that, there’s a point that must be stressed. It comes up every time there’s a by-election ([insert name of outgoing incumbent] should pay the [insert cost of by-election] rather than the taxpayer!) or whenever there’s discussion about the compensation of elected officials and it is something we often overlook. The idea is simple:

Democracy costs money.

If you want a healthy democracy with regular, free elections, political leaders who have time to attend to constituent needs, read reports, draft legislation, debate their ideas, AND do all those weird little human things we all need to do like clean their cat’s litter box, do the dishes, and wash themselves (preferably between those other two actions), then we are going to have to compensate political leaders accordingly. Because you can’t do all those things AND have a regular job AND pay attention to your family and, more importantly, your cats.

This kind of reporting neglects all context or subtlety. It accepts the narrative peddled for decades by the hard right that politicians are greedy and overpaid and a waste of money.

It is stupidly easy for the hard right to advance that narrative because, if you’re wealthy (see above commentary on multimillionaire businessfolks) or advance the causes of the wealthy, then you can afford to take a hit on the political paycheque because there’s always going to be money coming in. The independently wealthy or business people or well-connected shills advocates for the wealthy will always have a source of income they can rely on while they play politics.

You know who can’t afford to take that hit? Working people. Those on social assistance. Cashiers and teachers and nurses and mechanics and Amazon employees. Recent graduates with mountains of student debt. New parents. Seniors. People who, because of their gender or identity or race, have been chronically underpaid.

If you want a diversity of voices on city councils and in provincial legislatures and in Parliament, we must recognize that politicians are human beings with needs. They need to pay rent. Make student loan payments. Eat. Buy cat food. Buy cat litter. Buy a million little cat springs so their cat can whack them under the couch.

Stares into the void for a few minutes, brightly-coloured little springs dancing before his eyes.

The point is, reporting a laundry list of council expenses, while good for accountability, is nearly negligent without context. Like, the article doesn’t even bother to do those back-of-the-napkin calculations about what it actually costs to live in Welland. It uses the phrasing: “Ward 2 Coun. Leo Van Vliet cost taxpayers $40,701.21…”7 It goes into detail about the pay raise they received and how they are the highest paid local councillors in Niagara. Sure, Welland's local council might be seen as a part-time job, but guaranteed it requires more than part-time attention. If any municipal politician in a city the size of Welland isn't spending at least 40 hours a week on their job, things are getting overlooked.

We need to move on from articles aimed at baiting Terry Taxpayer (see above images for reference) into being angry at “those clowns down at city hall”. We need to look critically at all municipal services and examine where efficiencies can be made. We need to ask what the cost is of the province downloading services without providing funding to municipalities to provide those services. We need to question whether municipalities deserve more freedom to levy taxes other than those on property. We must start framing municipal spending in the context of investing in our community, not simply “costing” taxpayers. And we really have to stop othering and dehumanizing people just because they get elected.

Diverse councils with a variety of lived experiences, opinions, and perspectives are good for democracy. But that costs money. If we want to have an honest conversation about municipal remuneration, fine. But articles like the one from the Tribune don’t provide enough context or insight and, instead, coldly report how much council members cost the public like they’re a fire hydrant or lamp post or some other piece of municipal property.

So I guess my point has two prongs: we need better reporting that provides detailed insights on municipal spending AND, when it comes to council pay, we need to recognize that decent pay means we get political leaders from more walks of life and with more diverse opinions than if we just elected the independently wealthy. And both of those things - critical journalism and diverse elected bodies - are good for democracy.

Scoot scoot

With much fanfare, Hamilton’s e-scooter rental program launched last Monday. First approved by council in 2021, the e-scooter program - operated by Bird Canada - will serve Dundas and most of the lower city. As the Spec’s Fallon Hewitt notes, the cost is $1.15 to start, $0.42 per minute, and the scooters can reach speeds up to 20 km/h.

Fun!

Well, fun for now.

Sure, it’s all scoot scoot now, but before you know it, it’ll be “Scooters have become my biggest enemy. I’m scared of them.” That was a quote given to The Guardian, covering the Parisian referendum on banning e-scooters.

The French capital has a very complicated relationship with their scooters. Reports indicate that 3 people died and 459 people were injured in scooter-related accidents last year. Granted, Paris is a very busy city, but still. Parisians seem to be entirely over scooters, as the referendum on their continued presence in Paris saw 90% of voters give the scooter program un gros pouce vers le bas (they voted to ban them).

I was in Montreal (I can almost hear the collective groans) when they introduced their e-scooter program. It was a lot of fun for literally one week before the problems arose. The Lime-operated program was subject to Montreal’s standard bike rules: anyone riding a scooter needed a valid driver’s licence, wear a helmet, and park in designated zones only. But people kept leaving them wherever they wanted. One particularly poor scooter operator left theirs at the bottom of the Lachine Canal, which was documented by this infamous Montreal Insta post:

The pilot project was scrapped after a year. But, only a few weeks ago, Montreal City Council began discussing a plan to bring them back to Parc Jean Drapeau.

E-scooters and other micromobility devices can help us shift some trips away from cars. If given the option to take a scooter or an Uber to an off-campus concert or to a bar downtown, I’m sure a fair number of folks would seriously consider the scooter. Bike share, transit, and micromobility provide people with transportation choice. And that’s important.

What is equally important is ensuring that these programs are well-supervised so that they aren’t abused. The case of Paris and Montreal are two examples of where a program was provided by the private market and loosely supervised by the municipality. These sorts of programs are probably better administered by a local non-profit in much the same way that Hamilton Bike Share is. That way, it is run by people who care and to provide a genuine service, rather than make money for investors.

All that said, I’m excited to see how the program shapes up. Having more transportation options is good for everyone.

They don’t live here anymore

I received a very welcome notice from the City last week. A brightly coloured, very informative flyer regarding the city’s new Vacant Unit Tax (VUT?).

The flyer clearly indicated some basics about the tax: homeowners will get a declaration in the mail which they must make by March 31st of next year. Then, in June and September, along with their property tax bills, there will be an extra tax for every property that has unnecessarily vacant units. It is a fairly straightforward plan that should incentivize negligent landlords to get units up to snuff and rented out. And it will penalize companies that hold onto homes, leave them vacant for years, and fail to redevelop them (and then become the subject of an essay on the problems with the housing market).

The Spec reports that a few councillors have received “zero positive feedback on [the VUT] whatsoever” after residents began getting the flyers this past week.8

I’m baffled.

Are there really that many local residents out there who have vacant rental units in their homes? So many that Tom Jackson said he got “nothing but angry, unhappy” resident feedback?

Sure, I bet some folks got that flyer, saw the word tax and…well…not to belabour this bit, but see above photos of Terry Taxpayer. But the tax can easily be explained. That’s the job of councillor’s staff and the nice people at the city’s inquiries department. But an onslaught of negative feedback? From whom? The buzzards that live around the vacant houses on Dundurn?

The city surveyed residents on their support for a VUT (I’m going to make that acronym happen). 91.3% of respondents said they support a VUT. 80.7% supported the mandatory declaration. Hell, over 70% of respondents wanted the tax to be higher than what it presently is (it is set at 1%).

The housing market in this city is messed up. Tom should know, given that he has been in office for 35 consecutive years and has voted on many of the things the city did to make the situation worse, like continually approving expansion into the suburbs instead of focusing on responsible infill and missing middle construction.

What we’re hearing from councillors who oppose this - and I need to stress this point - 1% tax on vacant units is that they don’t like the proposal and aren’t willing to provide any alternatives. So they’re complaining to local media because it is all they have left. Some constituents who hadn’t been following the four years of discussions on the tax got a strange flyer in the mail and called their councillors to complain. Councillors who were already opposed to the VUT for, you know, right-wing reasons, then used these calls as an example of why the tax was a mistake and slammed the rollout as “stumbling, fumbling, bumbling out of the gate.”9 They know what the VUT entails. Councillor Nann told the Spec so in that same article, clearly stating that staff has gone to great lengths to explain it over the years. So the indignation at this point is indicative of one of two things: either they still don’t understand the VUT or they do and are willfully muddying the waters to try and turn public sentiment against the…say it with me…1% tax on vacant units.

Hamiltonians deserve real solutions to the housing crisis. This VUT is a step in the right direction, but is only one step on what will inevitably be a marathon. For establishment councillors to push back this early in the process is just one more point in an almost never-ending list of reasons why we need more forward-thinking councillors around the council horseshoe. More people who are willing to push for bold solutions and not fight even the most modest changes like each one is their own personal Waterloo. More people who really, honestly, genuinely want to solve this housing crisis. And maybe a few less people who helped to get us into this mess in the first place.

Seven elections, nineteen lawsuits

Nathalie Xian Yi Yan is an instantly-recognizable figure in Hamilton now. And I mean before her issues of professional misconduct landed her in the Spec last week. More on that in a bit. Her recognizability comes from her campaigns for office over 17 years that have put her name on the ballots of thousands of and, occasionally, all Hamiltonians.

I first heard about Nathalie during the 2006 municipal election, in which she was Ward 6 councillor Tom Jackson’s only opponent.

In 2005, she was nominated for Hamilton’s Woman of the Year. And then in 2006, she was a finalist for the city’s Citizen of the Year Award. As her profile in the Spec read, she was “Nominated for her tireless volunteer contributions to the Hamilton Women's Detox Centre, YMCA, YWCA, Salvation Army, the United Way and many more.”10 While she lost to Mac prof Dr. Gary Warner, her profile had been raised.

Not long after, she was the feature of a profile by the Spec’s then city hall opinion columnist Andrew Dreschel. In the article, she was portrayed as a new Canadian with endless ambition, eager to contribute to her city and do good for new neighbours. As Dreschel wrote, “her heavily accented English is enlivened with a good vocabulary that doesn't seem to include the word fear.”11 By June of that same year, she had won a Women of Distinction Award.

She told the Spec that her council campaign would focus on a few key areas: “Solve poverty from the bottom, advocate for ecological and environment oriented projects to create sustainable jobs and encourage small businesses and investors. Create multi-billions in revenue from value-added agriculture and tourism.”12 And, though she lost that race by a staggering 60 points, she had become a figure on the city's electoral scene. Her generally progressive stances on social issues and willingness to take on an entrenched conservative made her seem like a person worth following.

In 2007, she sought the Ancaster-Dundas-Flamborough-Westdale Ontario NDP nomination, but lost to Juanita Maldonado.13 It was around this time that I remember attending a local NDP meeting where Nathalie was in attendance. She raved about meeting Olivia Chow and spoke about how she wanted to get more involved to inspire other women and newcomers to participate in the electoral process. She was energized, engaging, and inspiring.

A few months later, she announced she was stepping away from the NDP. It came as a surprise. She said she wanted to focus on a 2010 rematch against Jackson and not be weighed down by party labels. The local NDP establishment, once keen to help Nathalie in her campaigns, stepped back and refocused their energy elsewhere.

The 2010 campaign featured a different side of Nathalie. Her focus was “a tax freeze, balanced budgets and term limits for councillors and the mayor.”14 Her decidedly more right-wing campaign saw her shed almost 1,300 votes and fall to 5th out of 6 candidates.

A little time out of the spotlight ended in 2018 when Nathalie launched a slew of campaigns. She briefly rejoined the NDP to seek the Flamborough-Glanbrook ONDP nomination, placed 5th in that year’s mayoral race, and bounced down to Hamilton Centre to run federally in 2019. She repeated that in 2021, though did not indicate to the Spec if she was vaccinated or not.15 A last-place provincial campaign in Hamilton Centre in 2022 could have been followed up by a municipal run, had Nathalie not failed to submit required financial paperwork in 2018. So, instead, she ran in the 2023 Hamilton Centre by-election, earning 51 votes and placing slightly above John Turmel.

If we graph Nathalie’s results, we see a pretty consistent and dramatic decline.

Once a rising star in the city’s electoral arena, Nathalie has become a perennial fringe candidate.

The Spec’s article from Thursday, April 6th documenting her ongoing legal issues doesn’t help this reputation. Instead, it portrays a litigious local specialist in traditional Chinese medicine who has spent 5 years battling her own profession’s regulatory body. Nathalie is presently serving a 10 month suspension that is due to end in August. From the Google Reviews for her practice, it would seem that some folks would at least partially agree with the statements made against Nathalie.

The fringe political characters in Hamilton are always a mixed bag. So, so many are strange folks who, thanks to a combination of bravado, lax nomination rules, and misplaced ambition, become household names. With seven failed elections and a whole slew of new information, Nathalie Xian Yi Yan can certainly be counted among them.

Cool Facts for Cool People

• My friend Kojo Damptey has a great piece in this past weekend’s Spec, where he points out the frustrating position of council’s right-wing, which performatively decried a tax increase without really presenting any alternatives. Kojo rightly points out that the province keeps downloading responsibilities to the cities (while gutting their democratic capacity) without providing adequate funding to ensure those services function. The whole goal is to shift blame and create a culture of animosity at the local level to either put off making decisions or to push local governments to privatize services. Check it out if you subscribe!

• Environmental Defence has a great piece on the Ford government’s quest to make developers more money. This time, they’re going after the Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe. It isn’t great. And none of it is based in reality. The government’s plans follow the same “more supply means cheaper houses” line of thinking that neglects to acknowledge that the market doesn’t act rationally like that. Ford’s government is fixated on supply rather than recognizing we can go a long way by getting people out of the market and into other forms of housing.

• On April 5th, an interview with Dr. Cindy Blackstock was published on University Affairs. It is a brilliant read. Dr. Blackstock is an academic and an activist, and uses this interview to encourage all academics to get their hands dirty and shake things up. “Don’t just publish another paper; eighty-five per cent of journal articles don’t get read…Let’s do something and express ourselves in ways people can actually understand. And listen to the lived experience, get behind the community.” This is super important for young academics to hear. And, honestly, something I try to remind myself about every day. I spend most of my days working on my manuscript and on my papers, but things like this Substack exist to help me bridge that gap. Academia shouldn’t be about ivory towers and dusty old rooms. Sure, I love a dusty old room as much as the next nerd, but we have to use all our skills and all our knowledge and all our drive to make the world a better place. So thank you, Dr. Blackstock. It means a lot to be reminded of the responsibilities we have as academics.

Boy oh boy, what a week! And there’s still stuff I didn’t even cover! Thanks for sticking with it. The next few might be a little shorter, since I have some important work deadlines coming up. But this city just keeps throwing out juicy things to write about! Until next time.