The High Life: Part 2

And now for Part II in my look at cannabis culture and retailing in Hamilton!

The first part of this story from last week isn’t required reading to understand the second part. Indeed, it was my attempt at a narrative non-fiction(ish) chronicling of the fascinating lives of two local celebrities, religious leaders, nudists, anti-prohibition activists, and politicians: Walter Tucker and Michael Baldasaro. I really enjoyed being able to tell their story and the story of the Church of the Universe so, if you haven’t already, definitely check out Part I by clicking the button below.

Deal me in

We’d love to sell you some weed

On October 17, 2018, the use, possession, and sale of cannabis was legalized in Canada, four months after Bill C-45 - the Cannabis Act - received Royal Assent. It was a signature piece of legislation from the Liberal government and one of Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould’s crowning achievements in cabinet.

It took a little longer for us to see cannabis retail stores actually open. Legal ones, that is. Plenty of unlicenced weed shops popped up in the lead up to and immediate aftermath of C-45 passing, but the province (which was the level of government tasked with overseeing the licencing of cannabis retail stores), spent a little bit of time getting things set up.

That was, in large part, because we elected Doug Ford’s PCs in 2018. The governing Liberals had already been working on a model similar to the LCBO which they were calling the Ontario Cannabis Store or “OCS”. This would follow the Quebec model of cannabis retailing, done exclusively through a subsidiary of the provincial liquour store (the Société des alcools du Québec or SAQ), which they call the “Société québécoise du cannabis” or SQDC.

When the Ford Tories took control of the province, they were handed a conservative’s dream: the chance to privatize a government service before it even opened. “Praise Friedman and let the market rejoice!” shouted every Young Tory, already drafting their business plans to use daddy’s money and open a weed store.

The Tories gleefully cancelled plans for OCS stores before realizing that the government poured millions into getting the system set up in the first place. So they presented what they thought was a compromise: cannabis stores would be run by the private market, but the OCS would be the only wholesaler in the province, supplying bulk product to private stores and would be the only legal place you could get cannabis delivery from.

This was originally supposed to be temporary as we worked out the kinks in the new licencing system and until the whole pandemic thing ended, making retail shopping a more appealing option again. But the system has stayed the same, in large part because it is working. It has received some pushback, though, notably from the Retail Cannabis Council of Ontario, which started a lobbying campaign last year to demand changes to provincial law, including options to circumvent the OCS for ordering, abandoning same-day delivery options through the OCS website, bypassing the OCS’s licencing program and selling products that were previously unlicenced, and having more consistency and support from the provincial wholesaler. Some of these are reasonable, while other suggestions seem like an attempt to get around labour disruptions from public employees.

Okay, so how does one open a cannabis retail store in Ontario?

First, you have to check and see if your municipality even allows cannabis retail stores.

When provincial legislation around cannabis retail stores was first introduced, the government allowed municipalities a one-time opt-out. If a local council did not want cannabis retail stores in their jurisdiction, they had from when the Cannabis Licence Act, 2018 came into effect (October, 2018) to January 22, 2019 to pass a council motion indicating they opted out. The first municipality to do so was Papineau-Cameron, a rural municipality of only around 1,000 people 70 kilometres to the east of North Bay, which opted out on November 27. The last to squeak in on January 22 was Caledon. In total, 62 municipalities opted-out. Three later opted back in, including Wasaga Beach, which was a “cannabis retail store-free zone” from January 1, 2019 to December 22, 2020.

But even if a municipality opted out of allowing cannabis retail stores in their jurisdiction, some retailers found clever ways to still serve an eager population. The municipality of Markstay-Warren, to the east of Sudbury, opted out on January 17, 2019. When Alain and Cheryl Gaudrault moved back into the area, they realized there was a gap in the market. Through conversations with locals, Alain figured out that the rural community’s older population was worried about weed stores popping up everywhere. At the same time, he heard that a segment of the population wanted easier access to marijuana. So the couple, along with Alain’s father, bought a property about as close to Markstay-Warren as possible while still being in the neighbouring municipality of West Nipissing and launched “EnRoute Cannabis” in early 2022. “It turns out, everyone’s pretty happy with where we are…They don’t want it in their backyard, but they want access,” Alain told BayToday. Honestly, that’s very clever.

Anyway, there are still 59 cannabis-retail-store-free zones in Ontario. Five are in the Niagara region while three are in the area around Woodstock. Oakville, Centre Wellington, and Mapleton all also ban cannabis retailing, as do many of the municipalities north of Toronto.

Hamilton debated two motions in January 2019 relating to cannabis retailing in the city. The first was brought by Sam Merulla and Tom Jackson to ban cannabis retailing in the city and shut down any illegal dispensaries within a week of the council meeting where the motion was discussed. It was defeated on a tie vote with Sam Merulla, Chad Collins, Tom Jackson, John-Paul Danko, Judi Partridge, Lloyd Ferguson, Brenda Johnson, and Maria Pearson in favour.

A second motion, brought by Mayor Eisenberger and Brad Clark to allow retailing got all split up, but the important part - “Therefore, be it resolved: a) That Cannabis Retail Stores be permitted to operate in the City of Hamilton, in accordance with the Cannabis Licence Act, 2018” was passed 10 - 6 with Danko and Pearson switching their votes. On January 14, 2019, Hamilton City Council affirmed the city would allow regulated cannabis sales within the municipality’s jurisdiction.

If you find yourself in a municipality that allows cannabis retailing, then you can move onto step two: applying for a licence. That’s done through the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario (AGCO). They need things like background checks, information on other applications, info on the proposed corporate structure, etc.

As soon as the licence application is received by the AGCO, the proposed operator has to post a sign, within 24 hours, indicating they’ve applied for a licence and directing members of the public to an online portal where they can submit comments in direct relation to the application. If a resident thinks your store is too close to where the youths are, if they are worried about crime, or have issues with how the store might impact public safety, their comments can be included in the application and the ultimate decision by the AGCO whether to grant the licence or not.

While that’s going on, a retailer has to schedule an “education session” with a government inspector. It sounds like a toned-down version of drivers ed for weed stores, but I’m sure it contains some mildly useful information.

If that’s all successful, you need to pay the $10,000 fee ($10,750 if you’re applying with a chain instead of on your own) and, broadly speaking, you’re good to go. But all of that requires you to have rented a space, come up with a business plan, and secured the initial financing to ensure the store can operate effectively. That’s why the AGCO’s “licencing journey map” for cannabis retailers actually has 17 steps but, since some of them include things like “consider the time it will take to meet requirements”, I decided to only provide a simple version. If you’re interested in applying for a licence because of this piece, first aww I’ve made an impact and second, please check out the AGCO’s website.

Even with all the hoops retailers have to jump through, the business has been notably lucrative for those who get in the game. And it makes sense; the year cannabis was legalized, only 37% of users got their supply from a legal store, while 39% still got it through a “social source”. Compare that to 2023, when 73% of users bought from a legal store compared to just 15% getting it from a “social acquaintance”.1 Weird thing to call your dealer, but alright.

Weed in Hamilton

Since the first day licences were issued to prospective cannabis retailers in Ontario, there have been 137 applications to sell weed in Hamilton.

Thirty six of those applications have now been cancelled. That means either a store opened and went under or an applicant failed to complete the 17 stages of applying for a licence and opening a store. Some of those cancelled applications are for stores that are now open, meaning the applicant withdrew the initial application and went back to apply again, maybe after they got their financing settled or slept off the killer high they had one weekend. Who knows?

One of those cancelled licences belonged to the “Cannabis Roll”, a store that opened just off Fiddler’s Green Road near the 403. Proposed for an abandoned convenience store at the edge of a neighbourhood backing onto the Hamilton Golf and Country Club, the Cannabis Roll application set off a moral panic in the community. When the application was first submitted in May, 2020, the neighbouring community flew into a rage, with neighbours demanding the application be denied because of the close proximity of schools (the nearest was 475 metres away in an adjacent neighbourhood, well beyond the provincial restriction of no weed stores within 150 metres of a school), a bus stop across the street, and the commercial development’s “problematic” parking lot. Ancaster’s then-councillor, Lloyd Ferguson (normally a staunch defender of the rights of businesspeople) led the municipal charge against the store, saying “It's a stupid location in a residential area.” He was backed up by Jason Farr and Chad Collins in that opposition. A change.org petition was launched by the community, gathering 774 signatures (though it was directed at all the people who had no say in the matter - Ferguson, MP Filomena Tassi, and the “Ancaster Town Council”…missed that boat by 19 years back there in 2020, but okay). The comments are…something else (“I want to keep our kids innocent” is one comment), but most focus on how it is a “residential area”.

Mixed-use? I don’t know her.

There was vigourous community opposition to the Cannabis Roll. The city, both English-language school boards, and community members sent letters to the AGCO opposing the licence. Even the city’s director of licensing said the store didn’t “fit this neighbourhood”. The store’s manager fired back with their own change.org petition, but this one only gathered 70 signatures. Despite all that, the licence for the Cannabis Roll was approved and the store opened on April 2, 2021.

…and then closed by the summer of 2022. The residents who opposed the evil, corrupting, inappropriate cannabis store spoke to Metroland’s Kevin Werner a few months after it closed, all lamenting it didn’t seem like the store had much traffic but that they were “happy that Cannabis Roll is no longer operating at the end of our street.”2

There are two licence applications in progress: one in Stoney Creek and one in Dundas. Nine applications entered the public notice period and then either never went anywhere or are about to move into the “in progress” category. These include the Tokyo Smoke location in Lime Ridge Mall (the notice period ended over a year ago).

The remaining 89 licences are split into two categories: open stores and closed stores. Seven of the active licences are for stores that have, at some point in the last two years, closed down. Despite this, the licence holder is hanging onto it for unknown reasons.

As such, Hamilton has 82 licenced, open, private cannabis retailers.

When we look at that number compared to other large municipalities that allowed private retailing, we find ourselves pretty much near the middle of the pack. Number of residents per retailer is just under 6,400. That’s higher than Windsor’s 5,000 people per store and much lower than Mississauga’s fairly conservative 15,000 per store.

Remember when I said they do it differently in Quebec? Yeah, there are 22 SQDC stores on the island of Montreal and 37 total in the MTL CMA. That works out to just under 116,000 residents per cannabis store.

So what does it all look like mapped over Hamilton?

I located each of the 82 licenced, operational cannabis retailers in the city and mapped them, adding a “heat map” to show clusters and where retailers are more prevalent.

Right away, one thing becomes obvious: there’s a clustering of cannabis retailers in the downtown core. There are 10 retailers in Ward 2 and 8 each in Ward 1 to the west and Ward 3 to the east. While there are 9 in Ward 5, they are far more distributed, while, in Ward 2, they’re more clustered. All but one of Ward 2’s cannabis retailers are in the same 2.5 square kilometre area, while Ward 5’s are spread out among over 11 square kilometres.

This makes sense; Hamilton is more dense in the downtown core and there are more commercial establishments available for aspiring weed entrepreneurs to rent out. What is interesting is how they’re clustered in the core and not throughout the city’s other major commercial corridors/areas. There’s only one cannabis retailer in the Upper Mount Albion and Meadowlands power centres. There are only four around the 5.5 kilometres of Upper James from the Escarpment to Glanbrook while there are 8 within striking distance of just 1.5 kilometres of Main Street West.

Here is the same map, this time broken down by neighbourhood. While there are some neighbourhoods (St. Clair, McQuesten, Inch Park, Rosedale) that have no stores, some (Crown Point, Ainslie Wood, Templemead) have multiple. Much of that has to do with the availability of space and how commercially-oriented a community is in relation to other communities. Remember the neighbours opposing the Cannabis Roll in Ancaster? A tiny fraction of a percent of that community’s land area is zoned for commercial. That stands in contrast to the east mountain’s Templemead, where three of the four major intersections that bound the community are zoned commercial.

Where things get really interesting is when we compare cannabis retailing to another form of intoxicant sales: wine and liquor.

While the Government of Ontario has slowly liberalized wine and beer sales, hard liquor and most wines can still only be purchased at the LCBO, a crown corporation. And, while there are 82 cannabis retailers in Hamilton, there are only 21 LCBO and LCBO Convenience Outlets (small stores in rural areas authorized to sell LCBO products) in Hamilton. And they are much more evenly distributed.

There are 42 licenced cannabis retailers in the lower city from Wards 1 to 5, but only 6 LCBO locations (the University Plaza one isn’t counted here, despite being on the border of Dundas and Ainslie Wood). That means that there are around 32,400 lower city residents per LCBO and only 4,700 per licenced cannabis retailer.

So what does all that mean?

Well, there are indications the cannabis market in Hamilton is still overheated. With only two applications in progress, it is clear that we’re going to start to see the market cool off and stabilize.

The same is true across Ontario. There are only 54 “in progress” applications for new licences while 431 have been cancelled. And, as of today, there are only five applications “undergoing public notice”.

And this isn’t even considering the numerous illegal and “sovereign” cannabis retailers opening up in the province. One notable case of the latter are the stores operated by the Mississaugas of the Credit Medicine Wheel, which you might know from their loud window displays that read:

These are stores run by Indigenous activists who operate under the belief that the Crown-Indigenous treaties are invalid and that they have the right to sell what they please on land that is rightfully theirs.3 A number of these stores are open in Hamilton, including one on James North and another on Upper Sherman.

There are still nearly 1,800 active legal cannabis retailers in Ontario. Without some business-oriented crystal ball, I can’t say for certain what will happen with cannabis retailing in Ontario.

Do I think it should have been run by the state to ensure quality control and an appropriate portion of the proceeds went into provincial coffers to fund our failing healthcare and education systems? Well, yeah. But we can’t go back to that. Much like with the provincial law on municipalities opting out of cannabis sales, we can never undo that decision. So now we have to make the best of it.

We’ll have to keep collecting data, understanding consumer demands, and monitoring the market.

I don’t believe these stores bring crime or other drugs or unsavoury elements to communities. The cannabis panic around retail locations is often grounded in a fear of the unknown and assumptions about cannabis use that have their roots in racist, classist, and discriminatory campaigns from 100 years ago.

But, any time a business opens in a community, it brings promise, jobs, and revenue. Communities come to count on those. But, if the cannabis bubble bursts and dozens of stores that employed people, paid their fees, and provided a service close down, the community will be worse off for it. At least with state-run cannabis retailing, there would be consistency, reliability, and the promise of security for those working in the stores.

Now we’re in the wild west of weed. At the end of the day, it’ll be communities left in the dust as cannabis cowboy entrepreneurs battle it out for control over the dankest of all the markets.

If you happen to be rich

We hit a milestone this past weekend.

As of April 20, 2024, Hamilton’s third-favourite right-wing populist dark money organization, “Concerned Hamiltonians”, placed their 28th ad in the Spec. This time, the rambling, Facebook-comment-level-quality advertisement screams at us about a “rain tax”, printed three times and presented to us as, and I quote, “RIDICULOUS!!!!!”. This imagined “tax on the rain”, along with another imagined tax increase of “28.1%” (I’m bad at math, but make that make sense) from “MAYOR/CITY COUNCIL” could, according to “Concerned Hamiltonians”, have dire consequences for regular folks. “Will they make YOU HOMELESS??” And you know it’s serious because they added two question marks.

The faux outrage at imaginary tax increases would likely have had a more meaningful impact there on on the bottom of page A4 had it not been placed beside an advertisement for a local food care clinic that featured a gnarly looking big toe that’s…also weirdly small?

It isn’t the content of the ad that matters, because, as usual, the rhetoric from “Concerned Hamiltonians” is utter toejam. What matters here is the cost.

By my calculations, since their ransom note campaign began last summer, they’ve spent a hair shy of $40,000 on print advertisements.

$40,000 is a lot of money. That’s almost my yearly wage as a postdoc and around 85% of my outstanding student debt, which is…fun. quiet sobs from Chris.

But, more importantly, they’ve now spent over half the median after-tax income for Ontarians as of the last census in 2021. And, when I say “they”, I’m using the word very liberally, as more and more details emerge indicating this whole campaign is being waged by one person with a very specific target in mind.

When you break it down by community in Hamilton, the picture gets even more infuriating. The amount of money spent on Spec ads by this one very angry person with 0 visual design skills is now over 50% the annual median after-tax income of 59 of the city’s communities (as a reminder: I’ve adapted the city’s official neighbourhoods list to better reflect reality by combining “north” and “south” portions of communities and isolating residential pockets in the industrial sector).

The amount they’ve spent on ads is 73% of the annual median after-tax income of my neighbourhood, Strathcona. It’s 87% of the same income for Beasley.

In what world is this a good use of resources? The fact that someone has $40,000 to burn - money that isn’t required to pay rent, buy groceries, support family members, pay down debts, buy cat food, etc. - and, instead of giving that to a local registered charity or to a faith group or, hell, even saving some of it for a run for city council in 2026, has poured it into publishing some of the worst advertisements to ever grace the pages of the Spec is mind-numbingly frustrating.

So, to keep up my campaign of opposition to “Concerned Hamiltonians”, I’ve been working on a slight refresh of my oppo site concernedhamiltonians.ca. That’s in part to direct people to progressive facts more quickly and in part because my old hard drive crashed with all my graphics templates.

mwamp mwamppp.

One final point about this: these advertisements may be filled with inaccuracies, attacks on specific political figures in the city, rampant hyperbole, messed up punctuation, and idiotic sayings, but there’s one thing that really bothers me about them.

They make this city look so trashy. When I talk about this city, I talk about a place that matters. Not just to me, but in the grand scheme of things. This is an important place with history (see above piece), with value, with something to offer. This isn’t just a place where people can plop down, clock in, and tune out.

“Concerned Hamiltonians” wants us to be the worst possible version of ourselves - uninteresting, unthinking, uncaring, unremarkable, unambitious. Every damn ad they run in the Spec - a paper that once had bureaus in London and that filled their pages with the profound actions of eager people working to make the world a better place - is a love letter to mediocrity.

That’s what gets me. They’re robbing us of meaning and joy. Robbing us blind. Robbing our future. Robbing us to the tune of $40,000.

St. Mark, Queen of the Bay

It’s giving…tree.

The city is wrapping up the years-long restoration of the building that housed St. Mark’s Anglican Church on the southwest corner of Bay Street South and Hunter Street West. The theory is that, sometime in the fall, the new community-focused building will finally open to the public after a decades-long contentious and sometimes problematic fight to create a unique space that blends heritage and modernity in the downtown core.

But now there’s a new fight brewing. And, despite the city’s intention to create a meaningful community space that will bring people together, this new battle is bringing out the worst and most divisive aspects in our community.

An Abundance of Episcopals

Though that is keeping with tradition; the congregation of the original St. Mark’s church came into being because of a fight. Well, “fight” might be too harsh a word to describe a mild disagreement over High and Low Church services in the Anglican faith…maybe more of a “friendly difference in views”.

Reverend R. G. Sutherland, a Cambridge-educated Briton with a fondness for ritual and pageantry, led 30-odd families who enjoyed his more elaborate services away from All Saints’ Church at the corner of King and Queen. There was a debate in that Anglican community about the kind of services preferred by the congregants - the elaborate and traditional services provided by Sutherland or a more toned-down, modern affair for their Sunday mornings. Sutherland’s group was in the minority, so they parted ways, turning one Christian community into two.

The ragtag group that became St. Mark’s met in a garage on Bay Street until their new church at the corner of Bay and Hunter was finished and opened in early January, 1878. The church was notable at the time for being the very first “free pew” church in town, where those with money and status could not simply buy their way closer to the front of the church through ample donations.

The slightly egalitarian congregation enjoyed their Gregorian chants and High Church services in the space, expanding it periodically through the early 1900s by adding the building’s now iconic bell tower, a Sunday School, and other on-site accoutrements. As time marched on, the Anglican community of St. Mark’s grew steadily until the mid-20th century when it started becoming smaller and smaller until there were only 20 regular congregants in the church by 1989. On October 1 of that year, the church was closed and was deconsecrated.

While the Anglican Diocese of Niagara - the church body that oversaw St. Mark’s and all Anglican churches in the community - initially proposed demolishing the church and building a combination office/housing tower on the site, neighbours pushed back, hopeful that the historic building could be saved. After a lengthy back-and-forth between the City of Hamilton and the Diocese, the church was purchased by the municipality for $425,000 in 1994.4 That’s roughly the equivalent of $800,000 today, which is practically a steal for a prime piece of downtown real estate.

For a few years, the building just kind of…sat there. Then, in June of 1998, the city put out a call for tenants or buyers would would maintain the church and the surrounding grounds.5 They got four bids: two from local Indigenous groups, one from St. George's Reformed Episcopal Church, and one from the Charismatic Episcopal Church of Canada.

Quick religious etymology sidenote: For those unfamiliar with the term, “Episcopal” is the American term for “Anglican”. After the Revolutionary War, the American Anglican Church didn’t want to associate with the monarchy they just broke away from, so structured their church around bishops (“episcopus” is the Latin word for “bishop”) in contrast to the Anglican church, which still has the British monarch as their head. Break-away factions within and outside the US similarly focus on local bishops rather than the King.

Okay, back to it.

There’s actually some weird history between St. George's and the Charismatic Episcopal Church of Canada.

St. George’s originally met at the corner of Tom Street and Strathcona Avenue North near Victoria Park. It, too, was a break-away from All Saints’, though it started as more of an “overflow” venue, rather than one born from an ideological disagreement. In 1994, the Anglican Diocese of Niagara disregarded the wishes of the congregation and decommissioned the church, leaving the now-rebellious community without a permanent meeting place (spoiler of a sidenote, but St. George’s is now Emerson Street and Royal Ave., having taken over the building from the former St. Margaret’s Anglican Church). The building that originally housed St. George’s was sold to the evangelical Hamilton Christian Fellowship, associated with the US-based International House of Prayer and Canadian-based Catch the Fire Charismatic Christian ministry. For a time, they rented space to the Charismatic Episcopal Church of Canada (CEC).

The CEC was a small and controversial church community. Founded by an anti-abortion extremist named Randolph Adler in 1989, the church community expanded rapidly in Africa and tended to poach existing faith leaders who maintained a more militant stance on reproductive rights. Dundas’s Mark Watters was the CEC’s first priest in Canada and led the country’s first CEC denomination, which blended traditions from other faiths with a focus on ministering to people with extreme trauma or addictions issues.6

When the city collected all the proposals, it became clear there were differing intentions amongst all the prospective tenants. The two Indigenous groups wanted to use the space for programming and displaying creative works from local artists. The St. George’s community needed a church. But the CEC wanted to open a faith-based centre for people recovering from sexual abuse. Even more dramatically, the CEC told the city it would buy the building outright, paying slightly less than the city paid for it, but carrying out over $300,000 in repairs after a generous contribution from an anonymous donor.7

Members of the Durand Neighbourhood Association (DNA) were not into that idea. In late 1999, the DNA hosted a meeting about the proposal where speculation ran wild. Some opposed the fact that the city seemed to be rushing to sell the land to offload responsibility for repairs. Some believed a centre for those who had been sexually abused was not appropriate for the community (“[Parents] don't want anything with a therapeutic slant…They're worried about walking their kids to school,” a member of the Central School Council told The Spec). Some believed the CEC was a front for a developer who would demolish the church for a new high-rise condo. By early 2000, the DNA was on record as formally opposing the sale.8 No other group had made the kind of offer the CEC was making, which made it seem like the city would move forward with the sale.

The city’s planning committee recommended against the sale, but Ward 1 Alderman Marvin Caplan told the Spec he’d bring it forward to council regardless, saying the sale was in the best interests of the community. Others working in sexual abuse counseling across the city were of mixed opinions; they urged people in Durand and around the city to not stigmatize those seeking help, but expressed concern that the CEC had never reached out to them or worked on issues of counseling in any formal way. To many, the CEC’s proposal seemed like a naïvely well-meaning attempt at proselytizing at best and an outright scam at worst.9 Despite this, the Spec’s editorial board endorsed the sale in early February, 2000.10

But it never happened. The city voted to not move forward with the sale, so the issue kind of just died.

Which was probably for the best.

A year later, a damning expose came out in the Spec. Turns out the CEC’s “first priest” in Canada, Mark Watters, (who was a bankrupt former salesman who was actually only a few months into his priest training) didn’t have the $350,000 he promised the city for the old St. Mark’s building. That money, supposedly from an “anonymous donor”, was actually going to come from his second-in-command with the church who was hoping for a big payout from a lawsuit he was involved with in New York state. That money never came through.

In fact, the church was over $60,000 in debt to congregants who lent Watters money to try and hold a big fundraising concert. They booked the Nova Scotia-based Rankin Family band to play at Copps Coliseum without actually having the cash on hand to pay for any of it. When the concert lost the group tens of thousands of dollars after selling under half the tickets needed to even break even, Watters asked congregants to pay up, leading some to take out out high interest credit cards while others mortgaged their homes.

Watters blamed the city for the mix-up, saying he never said the CEC had the cash. This contrasted with written statements and verbal confirmation from Watters to councillors that they were able to pay the full amount right away.11

The building sat vacant, but popped up in the news periodically after the turn-of-the-millennium controversy. In 2007, a push to ensure future proposals saved the former church structure was supported by every councillor except Ancaster’s Lloyd Ferguson. Then, in 2015, there were some rumblings the project would get money to help convert it into a community space in time for the Canada150 celebrations. Finally, funding came through, a plan formed, and the city got to work. Unfortunately, we missed the spring 2021 deadline to open the new community centre (little global pandemic got in the way and all), but the finishing touches are in progress and an opening is on the horizon.

So why, after years of fighting for this important community space, are some people so mad?

Call me by one very specific name

When the Anglican Diocese of Niagara closed St. Mark’s in 1989, they deconsecrated the building.

That’s an important word. Deconsecrated. When a church building is deconsecrated, it is secularized. It transitions from being a space that holds a religious congregation to a space without a specific religious intent. Indeed, the Anglican Church of Canada has a whole set of policies and procedures for deconsecrating a church building, with one document clearly stating:

The City of Hamilton recognized this reality. As the report to the Facilities Naming Sub-Committee noted, “Since the building has been desanctified as per Anglican protocol, a new name is required to reflect its new use.”13

To that effect, the city moved forward with public engagement around the name. Throughout the month of February, people were consulted via the Engage Hamilton portal on a few proposed names that would reflect the newly secular nature of the space. The proposed options focused on native flora (magnolias, wildflowers, coneflowers), fauna (Chimney Swifts and Sparrows), and aspects of the site’s unique construction (Brick and Arches Centre). Participants were also invited to provide their own options.

Based on these comments, the report to the city’s Facilities Naming Sub-Committee recommended the new space be called “Magnolia Hall”. This was passed by the committee and will be up for a council vote on May 1.

At some point during the consultation process, though, a few people in some local heritage circles mobilized to push back against the city’s desire to omit “St. Mark’s” and “Durand” from the name.

Now, at this point, I should provide some personal positionality. I love local history. I have shelves full of books and texts and reports and newspaper clippings from important things in Hamilton’s past. I write about it extensively and one of my great joys is putting the pieces together from the fragments left by those who came before us.

But I’ve never really been a part of formal local heritage circles. They tend to be, for lack of a better term, exclusionary. From my limited interactions with more structured groups, I encountered ample gatekeeping, a commitment to civic boosterist levels of uncritical reflection, and an interpersonal pettiness that seemed to supplant the work of telling the stories of our past.

The rather shallow debate around the naming of the new community centre in the building that once housed the St. Mark’s congregation is an excellent example of that.

The “suggest a new name” section of the Engaged Hamilton portal dedicated to the naming of the new space is filled with snide comments and a blatant disregard for the purpose of the centre. Setting aside the one comment that called for it to be named “Ryerson” to “correct the Woke misinformation version” of the story about him, the comments tied to some of the submissions demanding it be named “St. Mark’s” are telling.

“This recent habit of changing the names of places is silly, I think,” one wrote. “Why would you rename such a beautiful historical place?” another virtually scoffed. “This smacks of religious discrimination,” typed another, standing up for the oft-maligned members of the country’s largest and most widely recognized religious movement. The comments go on at length: “this is the opposite of heritage conservation”, “whonare [sic] you to tell people that St. Mark's shouldn't be up for consideration?”, “Shameful!”.

There’s no way of telling if all those comments didn’t just come from the same person. Indeed, plenty of the comments reflect the fact that the commenter has previously submitted a response to the survey. But even if we assume each suggestion is unique, we can still compare them to the votes earned by the proposed names.

Anything involving “magnolia” was the clear winner. Sparrow was next, followed by Brick and Arches. A full 74 people ignored the Engage Hamilton guidelines and wrote in “St. Mark’s” while 38 did the same for “Durand” and 7 a combination of the two. Even adding up all the rebellious submissions of “St. Mark’s”, “Durand”, and a combination of the two would still put that joint ticket in third place behind “magnolia” and “sparrow”.

Heritage advocates have submitted letters to the Facilities Naming Sub-Committee calling the Engage Hamilton process “flawed” and lacking “accuracy and integrity”. Members of the community have submitted almost identical letters to the city’s General Issues Committee demanding council reject the name and hold a public meeting because the magnolia has no connection to Hamilton (it is a native tree that grows in the area) and because we are dishonouring the memory of James Durand by not including his family’s name on the building (more on that in a minute).

I don’t think their contention is that half as many wrote-in “Churchy McChurchface” as did “Durand”. I’ve been forwarded other letters, comments, and social media posts from people in the community opposed to the name change, which echo the sentiments presented in the public letters almost identically (with one glaring exception that I’ll discuss in a second).

The overwhelming demand from these letters is simple: the new name must include “St. Mark’s” or “Durand” because omitting those names dishonours our heritage.

I firmly disagree. But it is first important to consider why “St. Mark’s” or “Durand” are entirely inappropriate names for this new centre.

The past

“St. Mark’s” is no longer an appropriate name for a few reasons.

First, that was the name of a very specific Anglican community that used the space from 1878 to 1989. That church community no longer exists, having been dissolved and redistributed to other Anglican faith communities around the city. The building is not “St. Mark’s”; the faith community was “St. Mark’s”. When the Catholic Church moved St. Catherine of Siena from Mohawk and Upper Wentworth to Rymal and Upper Sherman, they made the choice to demolish the parish’s former building. They did so knowing that they were simply tearing down a structure because St. Catherine of Siena, the community, had already moved into a new space. It is not the building that carries the name, but the people and community that uses it.

Second, this will be a secular space. People of all faiths and no faiths will be using it as a hall, be experiencing the grounds, and will be interacting with the centre without any specific religious intent in mind. People will carry their faiths with them into spaces. They may have outward displays of those faiths or engage in rituals that reflect their beliefs. But those do not need to be stamped on the building as some kind of endorsement of a way of being or belief system.

And, no, history will not be lost by not naming the building “St. Mark’s”. There will be a plaque in the new centre detailing the history of the St. Mark’s church community and we will still be able to speak about the space in that context when discussing its heritage. A place’s history doesn’t dissolve when we rename it. The memories made in those spaces, the people who attached meaning to them, the activities that happened in those halls don’t get undone. They’re already history. We can’t make them more real by saving a name.

That’s the exact same kind of nonsense argument we heard when reactionaries opposed the removal of Confederate monuments or statues of Sir John A. MacDonald a few years ago. History is not kept alive through names. Indeed, if that were the case, the people of Hamilton would know the history of the Kirkendalls and the Hughsons and the Terryberrys and the Bowmans and the Durands just because their names are everywhere.

Which brings us to why “Durand” is not a great name for the space.

The first is that the new centre won’t just be for people in Durand - it will be for all Hamiltonians. Adding the neighbourhood’s name (which already graces parks and businesses and apartments) might give the impression that the building is just for Durand.

The second reason is a little more important and controversial. The neighbourhood is named for early settler James Durand. A businessman, politician, and military figure, Durand sold a portion of his land to George Hamilton to help create the city we know today.

He also claimed ownership over at least one enslaved person.

Durand’s son, Charles, was involved on the wrong side of the Rebellion of 1837 and was eventually exiled to America after the events. In his later life, he wrote a long and detailed autobiography that included some information about his life and family, including references to the person enslaved by his father. Charles downplays this, saying that the woman was only an “apprenticed slave”, but that was a category that didn’t exist until August of 1834, nearly 30 years after the story in which he introduces (but does not name) her.

I understand we get into murky territory when we start judging people who lived 200 years ago by our standards. And we have to ask if the reprehensible morality of a man means his name must forever be sullied. After all, his son was a passionate reformer and charitable lawyer. And the neighbourhood which carries his name is filled with amazing people who work every day to make this city better.

But this goes to show we shouldn’t be naming things after people anyway. No more airports and bridges, community centres and schools, forecourts and streets. People are complicated. Families are complicated. Their motivations and actions may seem acceptable or right in the moment but can age poorly with time.

I have first-hand experience with this. When I was running for trustee in 2014, the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board (HWDSB) was in the process of renaming George R. Allan School in Westdale to reflect the merging of two school communities. They selected Cootes Paradise while I wanted them to pick the name Agnes Sharpe after the first woman elected to local office in Hamilton. Sharpe was the first woman to become a school trustee, a few years before Nora Frances Henderson was elected to council. She was a passionate advocate for poor students, opposed military training in schools, and was a voice for the working class in this city. It was only a few years later that I read a piece in the Spec about a speech she gave during a school board meeting in which she used an extreme racial slur in the context of a nonsense 1930s colloquialism. While that doesn’t erase the good work she did, it absolutely complicates her legacy. That complication means we shouldn’t necessarily be putting her name on a building, instead learning about her work on the board - good and bad.

We should not be putting the names of anyone - politicians, settlers, businessmen, philanthropists, athletes, whomever - on the names of public buildings or streets or anything. That’s why Magnolia Hall is a perfect name for the new centre at Bay and Hunter.

Unless, of course, you’re a right-wing extremist.

And what a culture war it shall be!

Last week, I was forwarded screenshots from an anonymous friend-of-the-newsletter (no one involved in the social media conversations that I’ll be referencing, FYI) that added one more interesting/unsettling component to this renaming battle.

Enter Bob Maton, an Ancaster-based perennial candidate and heritage advocate. Maton has run for office in the area four times since 2006 on platforms of varying intensity. He placed 5th with 0.65% of the vote as the candidate for the fringe Family Coalition Party (the outfit that opposed reproductive rights, gay rights, women’s rights, etc.) in Ancaster-Dundas-Flamborough-Westdale during the 2011 provincial election.

During his 2014 run for public school trustee in Dundas, he critiqued the HWDSB for showing a preference, as the Hamilton Community News noted at the time, “toward ‘certain groups of kids’ based on provincially mandated issues like race, disability, gender and sexual orientation.”14 In the same interview, he outlined portions of his platform, which included “a lot more corporate sponsorship of programs” and single-gender classrooms. In that race, he placed second with 38% of the vote.

His 2022 run for Ward 12 councillor was on a platform opposing tax increases, overdevelopment, and the city’s “soft on crime culture”.15 He placed 5th with 6% of the vote.

Maton took to the Durand Neighbourhood Association’s Facebook page to express why he opposes the selection of “Magnolia Hall” as the centre’s new name. I won’t be sharing the screenshots, but will be including some of the comments provided. Do not worry; I have my receipts.

Maton seems to have really taken issue with one word in the Facilities Naming Sub-Committee report, which reads: “Renaming the facility is in alignment with the City of Hamilton Municipal Property and Building Naming Policy naming criteria and guidelines and is part of the effort to make the space more inclusive.”16

Now, a rational person would read that and realize they’re trying to say “this is a new, secular name representative of an aspect of the natural heritage of the area”. Someone who has been sucked into a right-wing conspiracy wormhole on the internet, on the other hand, would assume that’s code for the extreme right’s new favourite enemy: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies (sometimes called Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion or EDI). They’ve gone from “politically correct” to “CRT” to “woke” to “DEI” with breakneck speed. Almost hard to keep up.

“Why is a flowering tree an issue for diversity, equity, and inclusion?” Maton writes in a comment. He then proceeds to note that the flowers of the magnolia tree have both elements required for their reproduction, while calling these “male and female reproductive organs”. That’s an anthropomorphizing stretch, but later on, he just comes out and says it: “…the real reason the name magnolia is diverse and equitable and inclusive….because it is transgender….” (the second and third ellipses are included in the comment).

Trees, of course, do not have genders. They’re trees. They don’t have the capacity to create social and cultural distinctions between people. Unless they’re Ents, but that’s a whole other matter…doomed forever to search for their lost Entwives.

This attempt to infuse culture war rhetoric into the debate over the naming of a new community centre is a lot of things: nonsense, infuriating, petty, ignorant, and botanically-inaccurate. Ultimately, it seems like an attempt by a well-known right-wing troll in town to further rile up anyone on the side of change.

That argument is silly and should be treated as a joke. It isn’t serious and the person presenting it is clearly not arguing in good faith. It’s all just a stupid, childish joke.

I’m looking forward to seeing Magnolia Hall in all its restored glory in the next while. And, unlike St. Mark’s and Durand and all the other elements of this city’s past - good and bad - around which we live, I look forward to this naming controversy being little more than a footnote in some newsletter of the future.

Cool facts for cool people

• I’ve written about the Spec’s Letters to the Editor in the past, but there’s a great one in today’s edition. This letter is from Ryan McGreal, the former publisher of the eternally-amazing Raise The Hammer, who responded to Scott Radley’s Wednesday column hypothesizing about an LRT referendum. Entitled “We did vote on LRT”, McGreal reminds us that the 2018 election was characterized by LRT opponents as a referendum on the project. Vito Sgro’s entire campaign was about how he would “kill Fred’s train” (he used the worst Conservative strategists for that campaign, I swear…). Even his campaign signs said little more than “NO LRT”. “Let’s focus our energies on current issues that demand our attention instead of endlessly nursing old grievances,” McGreal writes. I second the motion.

• A constant complaint from residents across the city is about loud cars. You hear it at election time, in community meetings, and on the r/Hamilton subreddit. Well now, thanks to a study from Western, we have a better profile of who actually likes loud cars: young, sadistic male psychopaths. Now, this was a study with a sample group of over 500 undergrad business students, but the findings showed that, among members of that group, it wasn’t the author’s original assumption (high narcissism scores) but, rather, a tendency toward sadism and psychopathy that better indicated preference for what they called “look-at-me exhaust systems”.

• Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre met with and expressed support for a group of far-right anti-government extremists on the Nova Scotia-New Brunswick border this week. The group includes anti-COVID conspiracists who tried to stop a truck from entering the province because they thought it was carrying vaccines, anti-trans activists who worked to attack drag story time events across Canada a while back, and Diagolon extremists representing a far-right jokey-political movement dedicated to creating a white supremacist state in North America. When your local Conservative candidate comes knocking on your door (or, more likely, the paid canvassers they’ll force to knock doors for them while they’re meeting with their millionaire and billionaire donors) ask them where that fits in with the Tory’s policy agenda.