Let’s build better

Back in July, Ontario’s Premier came to Hamilton to tell us off. Well, technically he showed up at Heddle Shipyards to announce $3.7 million in new funding for shipyard modernization, but, when questioned by reporters about his plans to cut massive chunks from the Greenbelt, he decided to take the opportunity to tell Hamiltonians how we haven’t been stepping up.

“Hamilton has to do their fair share” to help get 1.5 million new homes built, he told reporters. “It is easy to say not in my backyard and go somewhere else…Where are [the people] going to live? We need to build affordable, attainable homes. Simple as that.”1

The “affordable” and “attainable” homes bit is key here. Ford positioned his decision to remove lands from the Greenbelt as a way to ensure more housing was built, which is in line with the current government’s housing strategy. The Tories believe that, as long as we offer developers more land to build on, the private market will do its thing and build houses, increasing supply and bringing prices down.

Doug also said something interesting while he was scolding Hamiltonians. “There is a tremendous amount of land here in Hamilton,” he mused.2 He’s not wrong. Hamilton is a city of over 1,118 square kilometres. You could fit 18 and a quarter San Marinos in Hamilton, if you were so inclined. Prior to its expansion, the city’s urban boundary was just under 240 square kilometres (if you don’t include the harbour). We’ve only built up around 21% of the city’s total area.

But do we really need to expand the urban boundary and sprawl out further to find space for housing? Groups like Stop Sprawl and environmental advocates say no. The Premier and organizations like the West End Home Builders' Association say yes.

I, of course, say hell no.

There’s plenty of land in Hamilton primed and ready for redevelopment. As much land as would have been cut out of the Greenbelt, in fact. So let’s go through the whole issue of land use, planning, car-centric development, urban sprawl, and how we can build a better community by flipping the dynamic - instead of developers and shady politicians telling us how we need to live, we, the people, should be making developers respect our communities and work within the confines we establish. That, and recognize that the private market alone cannot and will not solve the housing crisis.

So buckle up as we take a look at the Greenbelt, shady developers, gibbons, strip malls, sprawl repair, and how an NDP/Green coalition government in Ontario might be the only chance we get to build the kind of cities we want.

A belt of green and a boundary of urbanity

Ontario’s Greenbelt is actually quite young. While the government of Bill Davis created protections for the Niagara Escarpment and Mike Harris’s government prohibited development in the Oak Ridges Moraine, everything was tied together and expanded by Dalton McGuinty’s Liberal government in 2005. Kathleen Wynne expanded it slightly in 2017, adding 28 urban river valleys and coastal wetlands, creating a protected region of 810 square kilometres of undeveloped countryside, prime farm land, and ecologically sensitive areas.3

And then we got Doug Ford.

Doug has never been a fan of things like “rules” and “regulations” and “the environment”. These, to our premier, are merely obstacles in the way of hardworking capitalists making as much money as they possibly can.

In 2018, right before the provincial election, video surfaced of him telling a crowd of developers that he would “open up a big chunk of the Greenbelt”. You’d think the Fords would be more cautious about saying things while being videotaped by now, but here we are. He backtracked, got elected, and then shortly after Ontarians gifted him with a second, larger majority government, he decided to take those chunks out of the Greenbelt anyway.

Ford’s justification for doing so was that housing prices were skyrocketing and developers were being hampered by pesky environmental regulations. So long as we gave them more land, they would build houses, and the miracle of the market would materialize.

We know now that the whole scheme was a way for developers, many of whom have strong connections to the Ford Family and the current government, to make loads of cash after deliberately buying protected land and then pressuring the government to strip said lands from the Greenbelt. Ford has since walked back the Greenbelt plan, but we all know it is a matter of time before he does something else to make sure his developer friends get their piece of our collective pie.

The removal of parcels from the Greenbelt happened at the same time the provincial government overrode local democracy in Hamilton and imposed an expansion of the city’s urban boundary into 22 square kilometres of prime agricultural lands.

A couple of years ago, Hamilton’s planners recommended expanding the city’s urban boundary by 13 square kilometres, but an informal referendum of Hamiltonians saw 89.5% of respondents vote to maintain the city’s current boundary. The last council voted 13-3 to keep the boundaries as they were and focus on infill development but, a few weeks after the last municipal election, the provincial government informed Hamilton the boundary was changing whether we all liked it or not.

The fact that there were an extra 9 square kilometres in there was a surprise to everyone. This new expansion included a huge swath of land along White Church Road in Mount Hope that Hamilton’s planners never included in their original proposals.

The folks over at the CBC put together this illuminating map showing who bought up that land in the years around when Ford announced the urban boundary was expanding and land was being removed from the Greenbelt.

Good chunks of the land are owned by former Hamilton-Wentworth Catholic District School Board trustee and current developer Sergio Manchia, and two developer families: the Paletta family, and the Spallacci family. It is pertinent to note that Manchia has donated $15,848 to the Ontario PCs since 2019, Paul Paletta has donated $11,845 to them over the past two years, and the Spallacci family (Frank, Rudi, and Loren) have collectively donated $29,417 to the Tories since 2019. The only donation any of them made to any other party was when Rudi Spallacci threw $3,325 to former Ward 2 councillor Jason Farr’s failed run in Hamilton East-Stoney Creek for the Ontario Liberals in 2022.

All of that really makes it look like a bunch of wealthy developers with financial links to the current government have been rewarded for their loyalty with an opportunity to make loads of money. And, as of yesterday, we now know that the government knew the decision to expand urban boundaries without Indigenous consultation or allowing municipal planners to consider the expansions was wrong and that the decision might actually make it harder to build new housing. Since this story is evolving at break-neck speed, we also found out today that the government took advice from mysterious third party groups and not experts when they imposed a new urban boundary on the city.

The issue of the Ford government’s developer favouritism and their maybe kinda sorta possible itty bitty corruption scandal is all wrapped up in the larger conversation about housing.

Since Ford came to power in 2018, home prices in Hamilton have increased by 52.4%. The government has insisted that the only way to bring down prices and get more people into homes is to build, baby, build! And when they say “build”, they mean “build single detached, car-centric housing”. I don’t know what they mean when they say “baby”, though.

This is unsurprising. The single detached homes bit, not the “baby” joke that probably didn’t land. Doug Ford has an antipathy toward more dense development (his autobiography talks about how he and his wife lost money on a condo they owned in Brampton in the 90’s4) and his developer friends can make a lot more money by building single detached homes in the suburbs because they end up externalizing all the big costs.

New roads, new sewers, new police and fire stations, new schools, new parks, new streetlights, new garbage routes, new snow clearing routes. All of these amenities that help add value to the properties they will sell are covered by existing taxpayers. Sprawl literally costs us all. Infill development, on the other hand, brings more value to the community but is a lot harder to justify to a profit-driven corporation. Why would a developer want to buy an inefficient strip mall and convert it into a human-scaled, mixed-use development when their return will be a fraction of what they can get by building more little boxes made of ticky tacky on the hillside?

Monkey business

Of course, the whole idea that a more robust supply of market housing helping bring home prices down is built on a flawed foundation. That’s just “first year econ, supply-side, hard right wing, only-works-in-textbooks-written-by-Milton-Friedman” nonsense. Any housing built now will come onto the market at a “market” rate and, if they can’t sell it for the market rate, it’ll sit on/come off the market until prices go up enough for the seller to make a healthy profit.

Case in point: the new developments in Upper Stoney Creek off the Red Hill Valley Expressway extension and Rymal Road East. There are presently 20 properties, all either stacked townhomes or semi-detached houses, for sale in that development. The oldest property has sat on the market for three months and the average price is still $850,000.

The government insists that we need more market housing because they have absolutely no interest in reforming the system as it exists. If they were serious about fixing this problem, they’d take steps to limit the number of properties a person can own, invest in social housing, promote co-ops and other non-profit housing models, and actually build affordable housing. Instead, the message is still “buy, buy, buy!”

As David Moscrop writes in Jacobin, Canadians are some of the most indebted people in the world, with housing standing out as one of the largest factors contributing to that abysmal record. An obsession with home ownership is pushing us to complete collapse, but we’re still buying with passionate intensity. In no world should a stacked townhome on the side of a highway that’s closest amenity is a nail salon/gas station be worth a hair shy of $1,000,000.

Of course, this isn’t just about regular households; investors are scooping up homes at an alarming rate as well.

Reports from 2021 indicate that over 25% of people buying homes at the height of the first frenzy were investors. The next year, the Canadian Housing Statistics Program released a report showing that 20% of all homes across Canada are owned by investors, not occupants. A staggering 42% of all condos in Ontario are investor-owned. Toronto’s Vacant Unit Tax ended up raking in $54,000,000 because of how many homes there are owned by investors, rather than residents.

No wonder 63% of people in Canada who do not own their home told Ipsos they have “given up” on ever owning property. With 1/5 to 1/4 of the total housing supply scooped up by investors, it becomes necessary to build more homes to both satiate investor’s lust for property and provide homes to those in a position to buy (even if it means going deep into debt).

Think about it this way:

Imagine you’re a zookeeper. It is your job to feed the gibbons. They swing around all day, hooting and hollering, being the best kind of gibbons they can be. You come in every day and feed them their slurry of bananas and mangos and papayas. Only problem is, Frank, a local self-centred prick, keeps sneaking into the gibbon enclosure and eating 25% of the fruit slurry. The gibbons aren’t getting all the food they need because Frank is up in there eating a quarter of it.

You go to the zoo administration and say “hey, Frank keeps eating the gibbon slurry”. And they say “ahh, well then the answer is to make more fruity slurry!” You say “but wouldn’t it be easier to stop Frank from breaking into the enclosure and eating the slurry? Or at least make sure he can’t take a quarter of it?” It is only then that you realize that Frank is standing behind the zoo administrators. He leans forward, pats them on the shoulder, and says “no, more slurry is definitely the answer” as he licks his lips.

So you take more bananas and mangos and papayas from the capybaras and the llamas and the goats and add it to a growing bucket of slurry. When you go to feed the gibbons again, Frank’s right there, eager for his cut of the mash. Because he got all big and strong from eating 25% of the slurry before, now he can elbow the hungry gibbons out of the way and take an even bigger share. And this repeats over and over and over again until…well, hopefully the gibbons rise up and pull Frank’s head off.

Sure, we can blame that fact that plenty of MPPs and MPs are landlords already. But even if a level of government wanted to pursue alternatives, there are plenty of things standing in their way. In Hamilton, it is widely known that developers and their agents will literally bully city planning staff and councillors until they get their way. Yeah, that’s right; Hamilton city hall is like a cartoonish middle school where over-the-top thugs threaten planners and local politicians.

So what we get is more sprawl. Developers (and the province) push municipalities around until local plans fit their desire for profit, wealthy investors scoop up housing supply, and all the rest of us get is what’s left of the gibbon slurry.

The car store called, they’re running out of you

So how do we fix this? Well we have to start by examining the issue of land use. Opening up land for “greenfield” development is the easiest and most desirable for developers looking to turn a healthy profit, but it isn’t the only way we can build. Indeed, it should be the option of last resort.

In fact, it doesn’t take long to identify whole swaths of deeply inefficient lands that could easily be redeveloped. So much of Hamilton (and, let’s be honest, North America) is given over to one deeply silly use of space:

The temporary storage of private vehicles.

Our streets, our commercial centres, and our entire urban landscape has been changed, chopped up, and, in some cases, demolished, just so we all have places to store cars.

Think about how utterly nonsensical the whole scenario is for a minute. You need somewhere to store your car at home, so you carve out a chunk of land on your property or use valuable street space to store it while you’re at home. Then you need an easily-accessible space at every place you go, from the grocery store to the gym to the cat food store. At the end of every destination must be a parking space, ready to accommodate your own personal vehicle. As Henry Grabar notes in his new book Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World, “Our cities are full of moonscapes for the purpose of storing cars.”5

Hamilton’s entire urban planning strategy from the late 1940s to the present has been dedicated to the free flow and provision of abundant storage for one singular consumer good. Just look at Upper James north of Rymal. Everything within the red lines is considered “commercial”. The yellow shaded areas are where we store our cars when shopping and the green shaded areas are where retailers display new/used cars to be purchased. These two areas combined are far and away the largest use of space.

And that’s just the issue of car storage. I don’t even have time to get into how socially destructive the car is to us. Isolated in a metal box, you view everyone else in their metal boxes with suspicion, seeing them as competitors on the streets and untrustworthy motorists, honking and cursing at your neighbours as though they were NPCs in a video game. But that’s a topic for another time since I’m fairly certain lots of folks stopped reading after “gibbon slurry”.

Cities across North America are trying to contend with just how inefficient this method of building really is, particularly when we’re trying to provide housing, reduce carbon emissions, and build stronger communities.

Some municipalities are pushing back. As Laurence Lavigne, the Projet Montréal borough mayor for Villeray–Saint-Michel–Parc-Extension recently told people at a community forum, "La ville n'a pas comme devoir de trouver une place de stationnement pour chaque auto."

That translates to:

"The city does not have a responsibility to find a parking space for each car."

That’s a bold statement, and one that should be reiterated every time someone attends a public meeting to oppose a new development on the grounds that “parking will get worse”.

Hamilton has not adopted this strategy. But if we reimagined transportation, rejected the idea that car storage should be our primary planning goal, and looked at our urban landscape, we could find plenty of land that can be repurposed to provide housing, more resilient commercial space, and a stronger community.

8 square kilometres (with a bonus)

Doug Ford’s plan to remove land from the Greenbelt would have taken 8 square kilometres of prime farm land and handed it over to developers. For reference, that same area, if superimposed on the downtown core, would run from Bay Street to Gage Park.

I figured I could easily find at least 8 square kilometres of redevelopable “greyfield” land within the pre-expansion urban boundary.

Turns out, I was wrong.

I actually found 8.5 square kilometers. Way to exceed expectations, me. Pats self on back because he really needs that validation right now.

So here’s what I did:

Using the city’s Interactive Zoning Map, some available shapefiles on the OpenHamilton data site, and a combination of Google Maps images/my own knowledge of the city, I isolated seven different kinds of land use that are ideal candidates for redevelopment in the city:

• Mall: This one’s pretty easy. A property with one large, enclosed building featuring a variety of retailers accessed using internal paths. There may be additional “outbuildings”, such as chain restaurants, service centres, supermarkets, or LCBO/Beer Store locations.

• Strip Mall: A commercial establishment typically laid out in a row or a similar configuration, facing a prominent parking lot. There will generally be only one building featuring all retailers, each of which are accessed from an external path, usually facing a parking lot. In some rare cases, I will designate a lot as a “strip mall” if there are two distinct strip malls on it. The strip mall at the corner of Stone Church Road East and Redmond Drive is an example of this, since there is only a small pathway that divides the two buildings.

• Low-Density Auto-Oriented Commercial Centre (LoDAuC): You might know these places as power centres, satellite malls, or shopping centres. These are commercial centres with a mix of private and public roads that provide ample parking and are usually anchored by a few key big box stores and/or large supermarkets.6 

• Standalone Auto-Oriented Commercial (SAOC): A singular commercial establishment on a lot. This establishment will be “auto-oriented”, meaning the storage of cars is a prominent feature of these establishments. These include things like chain restaurants, gas stations, some grocery stores, etc.

• Mixed Auto-Oriented Commercial (MAOC): This one’s a little more broad. These kinds of commercial properties may feature a few different businesses on one lot or within the same parking space or have an “office” component on upper floors that’s still predominantly commercial and car-forward. The plaza on the northwest corner of Barton and Centennial is a good example of an MAOC, with two strip malls and a Wendy’s all on the same “lot”.

• Surface Parking Lot (SPL): A big ol’ silly slab of pavement that’s for nothing more than storing cars.

• Vacant Lands: The city’s designation for any lands that are not being used. I expanded this to include businesses/spaces I know are vacant and have no planned redevelopment use at this time.

Some of this work builds off the excellent effort by the folks over at the Downtown Sparrow who found just under 13.5 square kilometres of redevelopable land within the city’s existing urban boundary. My maps differ in that I only considered lands that fall into the above categories and did not include things like institutional parking lots and industrial parks. Still, check out their cool interactive map if you get a chance.

I went block by block through the city within the pre-Ford urban boundary and identified all the car-centric and/or inefficient lands that could be redeveloped. Before anyone complains, I fully acknowledge this might not be all the possible land that could be redeveloped, but this is what I was able to identify on my own.

The end result is this:

Super tiny, right? Well no need to worry, I have a link to a far clearer PDF down below.

Here’s a breakdown by ward and use in metres squared (with kilometres squared at the end):

Just a couple of things to note here: Ward 7 wins for “Mall” because of Lime Ridge, and Ward 12 wins for Low-Density Auto-Oriented Commercial Centre because of the Meadowlands. The surprise in everything is Ward 2, both for the massive amount of surface parking and for the fact that over 9% of the ward is dedicated to what I call “inefficient” land use. The Barton-Tiffany lands are part of that, but the dozens of little surface parking lots that dot the core could be put to much better use.

Granted, I included Jackson Square, the former Sir John A. MacDonald High School lands, and the North End redevelopment site in all this, as well as City Hall’s back parking lot. I did so just to show how much potential land there is that could be (and, in many cases, likely will be) redeveloped into something more efficient in the downtown core. Efforts to build more density elsewhere are often met with the rejoinder “downtown is where density should go”. But, if we aren’t seriously working toward increasing downtown’s density by getting rid of the huge parking lots around the General Hospital, the auto-oriented commercial on Barton and Main, and seriously looking at every strip mall between Queen and Wellington, then we aren’t serious about real solutions to the present crises we face.

Two other areas primed and ready for redevelopment are Ward 5 and the central mountain (Wards 7 and 8). Both of these areas are abundantly car-centric and desperately need a healthy dose of sprawl repair.

By the city’s own estimates, Hamilton will need an additional 80,000 units for Hamilton’s projected 2031 population of 660,000. That gives us just 8 years to build 80,000 more units of housing. We don’t need to sprawl out or destroy the Greenbelt to make those units a reality. There are 8 and a half square kilometres of land that can be reimagined, repurposed, and redeveloped to provide us with the housing we need based on the current government’s policies.

Fix! That! Spprrraaaawwwwwlllll!

There are proven tactics we can use to fix auto-centric development to make it more efficient and provide space for housing. Galina Tachieva, a planner and architect with DPZ CoDESIGN, the world’s leading New Urbanist design firm, has an incredible book called the Sprawl Repair Manual from 2010 that includes sample designs to provide inspiration.

For inefficient Low-Density Auto-Oriented Commercial Centres, Tachieva’s book imagines a dense urban community with housing, public plazas, and mixed-use developments.

Strip malls are another easy one to fix, adding new wings with extra density, providing public space, and even allowing for some modest surface parking.

And we don’t need to look that far to see cases of inefficient car-centric developments and parking lots being converted into more useful…umm…uses. The University Health Network and United Way of Greater Toronto are presently converting a parking lot at King Street West and Jameson Avenue into 51 rental units with social supports aimed at Toronto’s homeless population.

Or we can look at 312 Dundas Street East in Waterdown, where a vacant lot became a two-storey mixed use development that prioritizes pedestrian traffic over car traffic.

Looking at any of Hamilton’s existing car-centric development, one can begin to imagine how these spaces could be adapted to better suit the needs of a growing population and provide people with more sustainable and healthy alternatives to simply driving to every commercial location.

Keep dreaming

Now here’s where things get complicated.

Private developers would likely not pursue these alternatives en masse because short term costs would be high and the direct benefits to them would be minimal. There aren’t really firms clamouring to do this kind of work in Canada, either.

While I’d like to say there are easy things we can do at the municipal level (like change our municipal zoning by-law, which includes regulations for the built form of a development, and implement strict urban design guidelines), we live in Doug Ford’s Ontario, meaning anything a municipality does to get in the way of sprawl development is usually slapped down by the Minister of Municipal Affairs and/or the Premier. Using things like development fees to disincentivize this kind of development doesn’t work anymore either, as the province has also meddled with how municipalities can leverage those.

So, honestly, the way we can start building better cities is throwing the Ontario PCs out of office on June 4, 2026. One of the biggest impediments to stopping sprawl and building healthy communities is Doug Ford and the 78 other Tory MPPs who have proven time and time again that they are in the pocket of developers.

Will electing a different government fix things? That depends. The Ontario Liberals are holding a leadership race right now and their frontrunner, Mississauga mayor Bonnie Crombie, has already come under fire for accepting donations from wealthy developers and saying she’d be okay with taking land out of the Greenbelt. While the walked the latter statement back, that doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. Maybe some of the other leadership contenders might have a different approach, but Crombie’s pledge to turn the Ontario Liberals into a centre-right party seems to be resonating with that party’s insiders, who believe the reason Doug Ford was elected was because Ontarians want a conservative government and not because the other parties didn’t appeal to them. All that is to say: if the Ontario Liberals win in 2026, I seriously doubt we’ll see a different set of policies with regard to planning and housing.

The Ontario NDP and Green Party, on the other hand, can both position themselves as defenders of our farmland and advocates for more responsible urban development. The Greens already have a strong base in rural Ontario and can easily position themselves as the best chance Ontario’s farmers and rural residents have to protect their fragile lands. The NDP, on the other hand, can become a party of urban solutions (not the planning firm) by presenting ambitious proposals that give municipalities power to change zoning laws and set strict urban design guidelines, investing in high quality public transit, reforming the province’s inefficient Land Tribunal system, and pouring money into non-profit and co-op housing.

Short of an NDP/Green coalition government in 2026, there really isn’t much else that can be done.

Back in 2022, my winning submission (humble brag, sorry not sorry) for the Jack Layton Prize for a Better Canada called for the creation of Community Development Boards that would acquire land and property for the creation of non-market, affordable, and co-op housing. Short of local bodies backed by the state and overseen by community members becoming massively involved in sprawl repair and urban redevelopment, I don’t see us converting much of that 8.5 square kilometres into anything useful anytime soon. Sure, plenty of those downtown parking lots could become condos, but real estate groups are already forecasting the collapse of that market.

The way forward is with giving municipalities more control over their own lands, creating bodies that give communities the ability to become involved in the development process, and not perpetually worshiping at the altar of the Cult of the Market.

We in Hamilton live on territory covered by the Dish with One Spoon wampum belt treaty that was an agreement between Indigenous nations in the area. It was an agreement between three parties. One of those parties were the Indigenous nations themselves. One party was “future generations”. And one party was the land itself. The agreement holds that the land is something to be shared, to be protected, and to be kept healthy for the current generation and for all those who come after.

We perform our land acknowledgements before meetings as part of the functional housekeeping of bureaucracy, but don’t often listen to the words and understand how we can make them a reality. The City of Hamilton’s Land Acknowledgement reads, in part:

To share and care for the resources around the Great Lakes.

The way we plan our cities today, with our mindless dedication to cars and single detached homes and strip malls, shows how little we actually care for the land. The colonial mindset of buy, develop, exclude, profit, hoard is built into the landscape, shaping our lives and our future. In a very real sense, this is colonization in action, and we’re all participants in it.

It shouldn’t be this way. We owe it to ourselves and to future generations to be better. To live better. To build better.

So, my fellow gibbons, who is ready to rise up?

Craig with the facts

I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before, but doesn’t Twitter suck now?

I know, I know. I’ve been on this for a long time. I really despise what that social media platform has become and how racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and violence are common place in the replies to every tweet now. Right-wing conspiracies peddled by blue-check accounts with 14 followers are seemingly more prevalent than news, which is a shame. But I still keep checking on with the site, 50% for updates from the Hamilton Fire Department’s account and 50% out of habit.

On October 1st, Ancaster councillor Craig Cassar posted an amazing short thread addressing Hamilton’s looming tax increase. Clear, concise, and backed-up by facts, this is the information many people in the city have been missing.

The plurality of the budget increase is due to provincial downloading and new requirements. Exempting $31,000,000 in development charges (which they say will help get housing built but, let’s be honest, will just make their millionaire and billionaire developer friends richer) is going to be a harder smack in the pocket book than a piddly little $10,000 for a poet-in-residence. Coupled with the fact that the municipality must step up and fill the gaps left by the federal and provincial governments when it comes to housing and homelessness supports despite being constitutionally limited in how they can raise revenue, and we get a much clearer picture as to why municipal taxes might go up so much.

Craig Cassar is providing us the facts that have been painfully absent from the discussion in the mainstream media. And, at this point, not explaining why taxes might be going up and instead stoking populist outrage about minor municipal expenditures is borderline negligent. As I wrote last week, there is a violent fringe for whom this kind of drive-time talk-radio conservatives rhetoric is like chum in the water. Keep dumping that off the side of the boat and, soon enough, someone is going to be bitten. Bit? Bitted? Chomped? All of that seems grammatically incorrect, but you get my point.

It shouldn’t be up to politicians alone to provide these facts. Journalists need to be the ones asking these tough questions, not providing columns that are little more than the ramblings of the out-of-touch populist mind.

Exactement comme Montréal

On Thursday, September 28, another cyclist was killed as a result of Hamilton’s car-focused road design. A driver, operating a cement truck and turning right at York and James, struck and killed a cyclist, who became the city’s 11th traffic fatality of the year and the first cyclist killed on Hamilton’s streets since the death of Brian Woods on Upper Wentworth last year.

As a result, Ward 2 Councillor Cameron Kroetsch introduced a motion to both expedite a planned safety audit of that intersection and move up a report on banning right turns on red lights across the city, similar to the rules in place in Montreal.

This past Tuesday, the Spectator asked “Should Hamilton ban right turns at all red lights?” And there’s really only one answer to that:

Absolutely yes.

Seems to be the theme of this week’s edition of the newsletter, but there are too many damn cars on the road. Our obsession with the automobile is so entirely harmful to every aspect of our society. Far too many drivers let their brains shift into autopilot when driving, ignoring street signs, traffic calming measures, and the environment around them. Having a blanket law in place that requires motorists to stop at a red light and wait to turn could help bring some mindfulness back to those who drive.

Of course, the best way to reduce traffic fatalities is to reduce the number of cars on the road and introduce both more strenuous testing for drivers and stricter penalties for harming or killing someone with a vehicle. But no right turns on red lights is a great way to calm some of our traffic, even if just a little.

Cool facts for cool people

• Jeremy Appel over at The Orchard has a really interesting piece about the ongoing fallout from the Hunka Affair that saw Canada’s House of Commons give a standing ovation to a WWII veteran who volunteered for branch of the Nazi paramilitary Waffen-SS. As many people have pointed out, the one person in the Commons who should have known about Hunka’s affiliations was Chrystia Freeland, the Deputy PM whose Ukrainian grandfather edited a Nazi-affiliated newspaper that recruited for the unit Hunka volunteered for: the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division. Definitely check that piece out if you want some more background on the complicated history of Ukrainians supporting Nazi causes.

• The Hamilton Police Service is saying that “most” of the bomb threats directed at Hamilton-area schools over the past weeks originated “off shore”. These international threats have disrupted the learning environment for hundreds of local youth, as extremists obsessed over the sexualization of youth and the ongoing employment of a controversial shop teacher threaten to murder children to protect children. The good news is that none of the threats were connected to actual bombs. The bad news is that these violent extremists have been good at concealing their exact locations and identities, making it hard to catch them and hold them accountable for their actions.

• A Stoney Creek principal is under investigation for using a racial slur. The principal of St. James the Apostle Catholic Elementary School apparently overheard students using bad language and then, unprompted, dropped the N word as an example of words they shouldn’t use. I can think of literally dozens of other words that could have been used as an example. Or, maybe just don’t use an example at all. Because it should not be difficult to chose between “tell students to not use bad language” and “drop a vile racial epithet”. The principal has apologized but hot damn that is not okay.