2024 and a little bit more
Woodlands and Werner and the Worst Op-Eds
New year, same newsletter (for now)
What a year, eh?
Wait, what’s that? It’s only the 11th? Oh. Cool. Cool. Cool cool cool.
Welcome back to the Sewer Socialists, a progressive newsletter on urban issues. I hope everyone had a lovely holiday season and that everyone is well-rested and ready for everything 2024 brings us.
I know I’m not.
Today’s edition will be a pretty standard newsletter. I take a look at the fire in Woodlands Park, the departure of Kevin Werner from local reporting, and critique two end-of-year opinions from Canada’s national newspapers.
The final post will be about Substack itself. Over the past while, the platform on which I publish has been dealing with a pretty troubling neo-Nazi problem. Many of my favourite newsletters on here have moved to other platforms or are in the process of leaving in response to Substack’s handling of the problem .
This is hard for me. Rather unfortunately, 2023 was a year of grief for me. And I’m not good with things like (insert exaggerated air quotes here) “grief” and “feelings” and “emotions” and “being consistently serious”.1 Over the past year, I faced significant personal challenges, big losses, and a lot of struggles. It is already looking like 2024 will bring much of the same.
Starting this newsletter gave me a way to keep doing what I love doing - engaging with my community - and do so in a way that let my weird little voice shine through. It reminded me of my carefree days as a student journalist, working on something that people enjoyed, having a place to express myself, and making a difference. I could write my little heart out as a way to process things I would have a tough time dealing with otherwise.
There might be some changes coming to the newsletter in the next while. I have some projects I should really dive into and that means maybe cutting some length from each edition. And, based on how Substack acts over the next while, I may change some more fundamental things about this newsletter.
But for right now, sit back, relax, and enjoy your regularly scheduled Sewer Socialists.
The Half Million Dollar Question
Just under 41 hours into 2024, a fire quickly engulfed the small washroom facility in Woodlands Park. Woodlands, situated at the corner of Baron and Wentworth streets, has been the focus of considerable attention over the past few years. The 0.021 square kilometre-sized park has been, since the beginning of the COVID-19 Pandemic, home to countless people experiencing homelessness.
Prior to the pandemic (and the Arkell’s 2022 “epic glow-up” of the space, which included a new basketball court), Woodlands was a much-neglected space in Hamilton. This is unfortunate, because Woodlands played an important role in the creation of the city we know today.
The park was a central hub for many in Hamilton at the turn of the 20th century. In addition to being close to where many working people lived and laboured, the park was also overlooked by the local headquarters of Westinghouse. A major employer in the city, Westinghouse also maintained a distinct antipathy toward organized labour, making the park in front of their headquarters an ideal spot to hold union-led events.
Working people’s organizations would regularly use Woodlands for open-air meetings in the summer. May Day celebrations were held in the park, as were rallies for Sam Lawrence’s municipal CCF and even the famous Tim Buck, the leader of the Communist Party of Canada and one of the top-ranking communists in the world.
After 1946 - Hamilton’s “Burning Year”, thanks to the sheer number of strikes (not to mention the Evelyn Dick affair) - the city moved forward with a plan to “revitalize” Woodlands. This resulted in the removal of the park’s trees, amenities, and stately fountain. Workers involved in the strikes described this “mutilation” of the park as both retaliation for ‘46 and a "Baron Haussmann-ian" effort to create a space where any public gathering could easily be quashed by state forces.2
During last summer’s discussions about the City of Hamilton’s encampment protocol, a fair amount of the city’s focus was on Woodlands. A resident whose home looks out over Woodlands lamented “that there are less children coming to play in the park,” while also acknowledging that those living in the park were “just people that need a little bit of help.”3 A family that had been renovicted and ended up living in Woodlands were profiled by The Spec because of their complicated situation; their pets - important members of their family - made finding shelter accommodation a challenge.4 In June, a car was driven into the encampment in Woodlands. A few weeks later, an encampment resident was stabbed. The Hamilton Police swooped in, raiding the encampment and seizing a bow and arrow, brass knuckles, and drugs. Then, a few weeks later, there was a shooting. Shortly after, a violent robbery. The encampment protocol passed and residents were pushed out of the park, though some remained as authorities sought alternative arrangements.
One of those people had erected a shelter alongside the park’s washroom facility. That individual had, at some point over the last while, left the encampment to stay with a friend. Despite this, others were still at the site, but it remains unclear how they were connected to the person with whom the authorities had been working to find housing.
It was those individuals who were rescued from the blaze on January 2. At the scene, Hamilton’s fire chief made a statement implying the fire caused $500,000 in damages.
It was this comment that sparked online outrage.
Half a million dollars to repair a washroom facility does seem pretty steep. I’m not a contractor, plumber, mason, roofer, or electrician, nor do I have any unique insight into how the city allocates resources to these kinds of repairs, so my personal shock is more related to how high of a number that seems. Which is likely true for many of the others commenting on this post.
While some poked fun at the idea that consultants would need to be hired to do a two-year study which would recommend the most expensive option, there was a fair amount of valid insight from those in the construction and restoration business, noting the high costs of goods, the likely need to demolish the structure, and the “hidden” aspects of the job (plumbing, wiring, etc.) that also require time and money.
The fact that this is a question is interesting, but not unexpected.
When (typically) right-wingers critique government expenses, they’ll say things like “the government should balance its budget like you balance your household budget”, to which (typically) progressives generally respond with “regular people usually don’t have a household budget of $1.07 billion, but go off I guess”.
Despite this, there’s an instinctive need to draw comparisons and understand what contributes to the cost of something. While not many people truly understand what it is like to renovate a public washroom and storage facility, they might be able to understand the costs if they were clearly broken down for them.
Kind of like how the city is now breaking down why water bills are getting more expensive. On December 14, Mayor Horwath tweeted that the city’s water bills will have a break down as to where the money goes, noting that 7.65% of the increase is because of the provincial government.
The city does something similar with the property tax calculator and by producing helpful graphics when the tax rates are set.
This way, residents get to see where the money they contribute to the city goes. The plurality goes to police, followed by general revenue, education, social services, etc.
When there are large investments or repairs that are needed, breaking things down in a clear way using as little jargon as possible could help keep residents informed and engaged with the process. Far too much of what happens at city hall is entirely baffling to nearly everyone. Hell, I have a PhD in local government and I get confused by 95% of the stuff that comes from city hall.
Democracies thrive when everyone feels like they can participate. When governments start to close themselves off and let a small group of insiders take control of the language and messaging of the state, people feel alienated. When policies and procedures and processes either are or appear to be complicated, people tune out and assume the worst.
I’m a big advocate for making government easier to access and understand. A big part of what government needs to do is educate people on how things work. The Woodlands fire is an unfortunate, but very real opportunity for our local government to explain the costs of a project to the people and open themselves up a little more.
The fire did not seriously harm anyone. Little harm could be done from being abundantly transparent about the reconstruction of that facility either.
Kevin’s Parting Words
On New Year’s Eve, long-time Hamilton-based reporter Kevin Werner posted 99 tweets on X/Twitter reflecting on his 24 years as a journalist in the city. That was the night on which Werner’s career in Hamilton came to an end that night thanks to the closure of the Metroland community newspapers by Torstar, the publishing giant that also owns the Spec and the Toronto Star, among other outlets. Werner’s tweets were not in a “thread”, (many tweets linked together as a single chain) as was common on the site, but were each posted individually, beginning with a post quoting The Doors song “The End”. This makes them harder to follow, but you can find them by looking at his account.
The posts spanned Werner’s long career, thanking former colleagues and reflecting on many of the people with whom he grew close as a reporter. Werner assigned interesting phrases to many of these individuals; Ted McMeekin is “a crafty person, with a soft heart for the community”, Tom Jackson is “a compassionate individual”, former councillor Sam Merulla is a “political animal, who never suffered fools”, and Conservative MP Dan Muys is “a good guy in a no-so good political environment”.
Werner should be commended for a long career in local reporting. That said, I think there is some merit in casting a more critical eye to both Werner’s tweets and larger role in the city’s journalism and politics.
On the topic of his final tweets, I can’t say I agreed with many of his assessments. Indeed, it seemed like a pronounced soft-c conservative affinity bled through in these posts, validating a personal feeling of mine that Hamilton’s suburban weeklies enthusiastically leaned right in both their editorial stances and general reporting. In some cases, it seemed like they went so far as to be more cozy to the populist right and maintain a focus on the issues of concern to the “anti-government taxpayer rights” crowd à la American-style talk radio.
One tweet in particular actually proved another old theory of mine. Back in July, I wrote about a deeply bizarre article that appeared in the Hamilton Mountain News. The article focused on a “Hamilton Mountain resident” named Rob Cooper who made some extremely outlandish claims about the city’s encampment protocol, the then-forthcoming rental housing licencing program in student neighbourhoods, and Ward 8 councillor J.P. Danko. I did some digging and found some other articles where the main interviewee was named Rob Cooper, listed as a “Hamilton Mountain resident”. These articles rarely mentioned that Cooper was a prominent Hamilton Mountain Tory (both federal and provincial) or made any reference as to why Cooper was being interviewed.5
One of Werner’s tweets helped clear that up:
Apparently the journalist and partisan activist would chat…intermittently. Cooper, whose party has averaged just over 24% of the vote on Hamilton Mountain in the last seven provincial elections, was able to present his partisan opinions, unfiltered and unchecked, through a local reporter almost entirely without hinderance.
While maintaining a relationship with someone involved in local politics is normal for reporters, their perspectives are usually presented as coming from a partisan source. Experts are listed as experts, politicians as politicians, partisans as partisans, etc.
That wasn’t the case with the July article. That article was published like this:
“Hamilton Mountain resident Rob Cooper says neighbourhood has seen more homeless people”
Residents blame the city's rental housing licensing pilot project, but Coun. John-Paul Danko disagrees.
Residents. This implies there’s been a mass movement or a petition or many delegations to council. This implies that many upper city residents associate one municipal initiative (which, let’s remember, hadn’t actually started when the article was published) to an increase in numbers of people experiencing homelessness. This implies Werner spoke to a reasonably large cross-section of Hamilton Mountain residents about the issue.
But that article quotes two people: Rob Cooper and J.P. Danko. Cooper provided anecdotes for three other people, in addition to himself, which were printed as told.
If I were a reporter, I would have sought to verify these stories by speaking with the neighbours Cooper referenced. Or I would have tried to talk to any of the people who Cooper said owned one of the “10 houses in [Cooper’s] neighbourhood for sale as property owners are rushing to leave [the] neighbourhood because of [the rental licencing] program.”6 Because that’s a bold claim. Ten rental properties being sold, with all their tenants being evicted, because of a program that hadn’t started? Ten properties in the neighbourhood adjacent to Mohawk College on the market because of an increase of $712.52 in fee costs for the first year and then $434.52 for each subsequent year? And the eviction of community college students from 10 properties has contributed to the ongoing crisis of homelessness…how, exactly?
That assertion would result in some deep digging from me before I submitted that story. Particularly since Cooper has been targeting Ward 8 councillor J.P. Danko for years, submitting letters to council that associate Danko’s support for the licencing program with housing unaffordability and creating circumstances where the city was “defunding my decaying street from being repaired.” Cooper was also a prominent donor and campaign worker for Sonia Brown, the last-minute right-wing Ward 8 candidate who appeared to challenge Danko in the 2022 election.
At the height of the debate over the city’s encampment protocol and the community’s larger response to the issue, it was an act of journalistic malpractice to publish an article that was little more than a campaign speech from a notable partisan, particularly when that speech was misrepresented as the genuine concerns of a larger group of residents. The article presented the politically-charged opinions of one man as a wider reality, further fueling baseless panic among Hamilton Mountain residents already whipped into a frenzy by a poorly-planned encampment protocol meeting. It cast doubt on a program intended to protect students and vulnerable renters from unsafe living conditions and presented a partisan rivalry as a legitimate exchange between resident and politician. It was like pouring fire on a city that was, as I noted at the time, burning.
There’s going to be more on the shady political nonsense coming from the city’s right-wing in the coming weeks (hint: it has to do with Concerned Hamiltonians again), but my critiques of Werner’s reporting go deeper than one article.
Many of Werner’s parting tweets further exemplified a disconnect from the community or, at the very least, a willing affiliation with some based on their proximity to power rather than their actions. Praise for politicians and developers like Paul Miller, Sergio Manchia, Lloyd Ferguson, Terry Whitehead, Roman Sarachman, and Bob Morrow, for example, included scant criticism beyond how the latter “didn't really take any interest in” Werner at the start of his career. Lack of context and substanceless praise for local leaders doesn’t help democracy; it merely signals to the wider public that the old boys club extends further, wider, and deeper than previously imagined. And while some of those mentioned contributed and continue to contribute to the city in their own way, many of them actively worked to forestall meaningful progress in Hamilton in ways that have created lasting harm. Manchia’s less-than-ethical campaign spending, Miller’s alleged Islamophobia, Morrow’s documented homophobia, Sarachman’s candidacy for the far-right populist Trillium Party in 2018, and Whitehead’s extremely abusive behaviour are just some of the troubling facts and actions glossed over or ignored.
Then there’s the issue of some of Werner’s last articles for local papers. Just before Werner’s parting tweets we posted, he published a profile of Hamilton West-Ancaster-Dundas MP Filomena Tassi. The article examines some of the work Tassi has done locally and as Minister of the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (and gives Dan Muys plenty of room to launch partisan attacks - no comment from local Greens, New Democrats, or other partisan officials, though).
In the article, Werner writes:
“Tassi, who so far is the registered candidate for the Liberals in Hamilton West-Ancaster-Dundas in the next federal election, said she doesn’t ‘focus’ on the polls.”7
That’s an interesting line for two reasons: the first is that the gears of the local rumour mill have churned out the millet that the three-term MP was not running again and that the way was being paved for a high-profile member of another local MP’s office to run in her place.
The second reason that comment is interesting is that the Liberal Party has no registered candidates for the next election, presently scheduled to happen sometime before October 20, 2025. Elections Canada has no listed nomination contests held after August 20, 2023. The federal Liberal Party only has six notices of nomination on their website, all for by-elections held or forthcoming.
It could be that Tassi told Werner she anticipated seeking re-election, which is fine. But her candidacy was presented as a fact despite not being one. Writing “Tassi, who said she will be seeking re-election in the next federal election, said…” is one thing, but the article implies she has already been signed up as the Liberal’s candidate in what will surely be a competitive riding. At best, it is an error. At worst, it is putting your fingers on the scale to influence an election.
Or there’s the glowing profile of a new business created by another person Werner gave a shout-out to on December 31. A day prior to the Tassi piece, Werner wrote about a company - which aims to provide services to people with disabled family members - created by Ancaster resident Robert Baboth. This same individual was noted by Werner as someone “whose enthusiasm can be infectious” during his New Year’s Eve tweet storm.
The special attention to Baboth was as odd as the attention given to Cooper; Baboth ran to be Ancaster councillor in the 2022 municipal election, during which time he received a glowing write-up in the Ancaster News - a write-up provided by Werner. Baboth placed 8th in that election with a hair over 3% of the vote and has recently become a loud critic of Hamilton Centre MPP Sarah Jama, submitting numerous letters-to-the-editor about how the now-Independent provincial politician should step down.
Aside from running a local charity, Baboth’s candidacy wasn’t really on anyone’s radar…except Werner’s. Local journalists tend to keep their fingers on the pulse of what’s happening in the community to provide people with factual reporting that reflects the wider trends, movements, and variations in our society. But when the same names keep appearing in our local papers, all because those being reported on have a connection to the person doing the reporting, we have to ask if this is contributing anything of meaning to our democracy.
Werner was a fixture in the city’s media for nearly a quarter century, which is something to be applauded by itself. He was a constant presence at city hall and local events…one of the few local reporters left doing that kind of work. But just because he was a fixture and filled the thankless role of local reporter does not mean we should forego an educated and principled critique of his work. Journalists bring their own perspective to their jobs. That perspective can influence the politics of a place in profound ways. What they report on, what they don’t report on, what they get wrong, and what they add has consequences. I suppose that taking all that into consideration means that Werner’s career in local journalism was deeply consequential.
Sprawl the Globe
If you’re a progressive urbanist, at one point in your life, you’ve probably looked at something in your community - an intersection, a transit line, a sidewalk, a group of single detached houses, etc. - and thought “there has to be a better way of doing this”.
Urbanists look at things like our urban transportation systems and acknowledge that too much space has been handed over to the automobile - a private consumer good that has been getting bigger and bigger each year. In February of last year, StatsCan released data that showed total sales of new motor vehicles declined 7.9%, with the only type of vehicle seeing a noticeable increase in sales being the heavy truck, which saw a 7.5% increase from 2021 to 2022. Our streets are clogged with massive, gas guzzling pieces of machinery that transport single occupants from home to the grocery store without using 3/4 of the space available in the vehicle. Municipal and provincial governments respond by making streets bigger, cutting highways through historic cores or sensitive farmland, and devoting more and more public resources to ensuring this private consumer item has as few impediments before it as possible. And, yet, there’s still congestion and traffic chaos and endless hours suck in cars going from place to place. Turning again to StatsCan data, in June of last year, the agency released commuting data for 2021. While there was a notable decline in commute times (pandemic and all), the average Canadian still spent 22.8 minutes commuting to work by car every day. Over the course of an average Canadian’s lifespan, working regular 9-to-5 hours for 45 years, they will have spent the equivalent of 186 days in their car, commuting. That doesn’t include all the entirely unnecessary trips taken by car to access basic services that should be accessible using active or public transportation.
Or how about the way we live? Urbanists tend to agree that there are too many single detached homes on large, ornamental lots that are isolated from essential services, the wider community, and the spaces where people can forge the necessary social bonds to sustain us as a community-based species. Yeah, I’m sounding all “anthropology textbook” here, but humans really are social animals. We need to connect with other humans because they have skills and passions and knowledge that we may not and the success of our species only came about because we pooled all those things and moved forward together. Despite this, there’s still an obsession amongst policy makers and developers with the single detached home and the unwalkable suburb. One family unit in one large house on one modest lot, surrounded by a fence, cut off from the wider world. Basically little more than a storage unit for living. We are actively constructing housing in a way that goes against basic human nature. We need other people, but build our communities in such a way that keeps them far from us.
Urbanists have been pointing to these problems for some time, observing that the move toward autocentricity and suburbanization that began after the Second World War and picked up steam in the 1970s has been continuing, unimpeded, for far too long. We know this method of building cities causes more problems than it solves, but we keep on travelling down this path. Far too many policymakers and wealthy interests and establishment commentators keep telling us that “this is the only way”, willfully ignoring the myriad of possible alternatives out there.
Establishment commentators like John Ibbitson, for example. Ibbitson’s terrible editorial in the Globe and Mail on December 28th, 2023 ran under the headline: “Politicians need to remember that this is a suburban, car-commuting nation” (Canada isn’t a nation…but what do I know? I’m just a political geographer).
In the piece, Ibbitson spends 700-odd words encouraging us to ignore the problems we face, doubling down on bad decisions, praising Pierre Poilievre for his principled defence of “middle-class, suburban voters”, and taking a critical eye toward immigrants for “jamming the market and pushing up [home] prices.”
The last line is more extremist rhetoric in full support of the growing war on immigrants. Establishment outlets like the Globe, the National Post, and the Toronto Sun are actively fomenting distrust toward (and even hatred of) immigrants. Immigrants are being unfairly singled out as the reason Canada’s housing market, economy, and education sectors are collapsing, which is a time-honoured tactic in the capitalist playbook. When the going gets tough (because the powers that be have allowed it to get bad), blame people who don’t sound or look or act like you do.
But let’s set that aside for a minute. The arguments presented by Ibbitson in favour of sprawl amount to little more than staunch defence of the failed status quo. In the piece, he writes:
Many an urban theorist has sought to imagine cities differently from what they are. Many preach the importance of densification, of infill, of improved transit, of restrictions on sprawl.
But that’s not what North American cities are. That’s not where – and, more important, that’s not how – most people live. And if you tell them they must live differently, they will reject you.8
Yes, that is not what North American cities are at the present moment. But Ibbitson presents no facts or data to back up his baseless assumption. The most sought-after housing is in the densest urban cores because people want options. They want the option to walk to the store, take transit to work, and cycle to meet friends at a pub. They don’t want to be forced to use a car, whether they like it or not.
The private automobile created opportunities for people beyond the wildest imaginations of people just four generations ago. But what could have been relegated to the realm of a luxury good for occasional use has become the central point around which many of our lives revolve.
It doesn’t need to be this way. Prior to car-centric development, we built urban spaces that were human-scaled. Urban residents could walk to the grocery store, walk to the pharmacy, walk to the library, walk to school, take a streetcar to work, take a train into another city, and so-on. There were ferries and quiet streets and bustling downtown cores where people met and shopped and worked and lived. Ibbitson tells us to ignore all that and focus on our glorious suburbs with their streetcar-free roads, unwalkable amenities, and private little enclaves where the rabble can’t get to us.
In a particularly irritating line, Ibbitson takes aim at the Trudeau government for talking “more about streaming services, news delivery and other cultural issues, while promoting the conversion to electric vehicles.” After repeating unresearched talking points from oil companies about electric cars not going very far, he writes this:
How is any of this supposed to make a couple with two children and a packed agenda – getting to work and back, getting the kids to school and to everything after-school, while shopping for food and checking in on elderly parents – feel better about what lies ahead?9
When Ibbitson says “if you tell them they must live differently, they will reject you” and “think about regular working people who struggle to get to work”, he is stumping for a very basic kind of politics: the politics of short-term fixes. Why invest in structural changes that will make life better in 10 years if we don’t see any results in 10 minutes?
This kind of politics has been pursued by self-interested governments and politicians for a long time. Local governments in particular are bad for this, opting to do things that provide a quick, cheap, and easy solution to a problem rather than spend the time, money, and energy to do something that will last longer. Streetcars last longer, carry more people, and are sturdier than busses, but there’s a bigger upfront cost. Building a multiplex or walk-up filled with affordable units provides better options for people, but there’s less of a quick and easy return on investment than just slapping together a mini-mansion. Doing a full reconstruction of a road takes longer and costs more, but will last much longer than a simple shave-and-pave job. The easy route always wins because it allows politicians to hold up the savings to the right-wing media and angry voters, who would cry bloody murder if things weren’t done cheap and fast.
It is the politics of customer service, and it is why our democracy is in shambles right now. When you are a consumer, you expect maximum return for minimal input. The customer is always right and the job of the provider is to offer service with a smile. But when you are a citizen, you have to educate yourself on issues, accept when you are wrong, and contribute to the process. Ibbitson is selling us an easy, unthinking, entitled way of looking at government.
But, even worse, he’s not offering us anything of substance. He’s lecturing us like a disappointed father figure, telling us to put away our video games and get a damn job already. He writes assuming his perspective and experiences are universal, unchanging, and above critique. In his mind, the past is dead and the future shall never come. This line really exemplifies that logic:
But get real: Meeting the demand for new housing, both for young people and for immigrants, means building cities out.
We’ve been doing it now for 80 years. Don’t think for a moment it will ever stop.10
In the span of human history, 80 years is nothing. Prior to building cities this way, we built them differently. Built them with humans in mind. Built them to last. Built them with an eye to legacy.
Here’s where Ibbitson is wrong: it will stop. If we don’t stop it by choice, the circumstances we’ve created will stop it for us. We can either change the way we build our cities on our own terms or be forced to change when we’re pummeled with relentless storms, temperature extremes, water scarcity, food insecurity, and human-initiated violence.
The sprawl is killing us. Our obsession with our expensive little climate change machines is killing us. Us, being atomized and kept away from our neighbours and our co-workers and our friends is killing us. We have no choice but to build differently. To live differently. To reach back into our past, take the best of today, and accept the change that will come tomorrow and build resilient, human-centred communities.
Ibbison’s piece was a year-end column without a basis in facts, reality, or compassion. It was a shallow perspective presented to the Canadian people in the same kind of condescending, “father knows best” kind of tone that is all too common in what’s left of our national media. The entitlement of the elite presented as facts, handed down from on high, barked at us with anger and contempt. Ibbitson tells us that we have to keep building like we did in 1950 while he acts like a mouthpiece for the Family Compact of 1820, stepping in to put the mouthy proletariat in their place.
We deserve better than this. And we deserve the space to envision our own ideal communities. And we’ll build them them, together, with or without the patronizing thought leaders at the Globe and Mail.
Left and Leaving
Speaking of bad end-of-year opinions, let’s turn away from the “Old Tory” pages of the Globe and Mail to the ideological ambiguity of the Toronto Star.
While the Globe decided to give 2023 a pro-sprawl send off, the Star opted for an appeal to unite the centre-left and centre/centre-right.
Martin Regg Cohn’s year-end piece, entitled “Want to see Doug Ford and Pierre Poilievre lose? Then the left needs to get its act together”, once again called for the Liberals and NDP to unite under one banner (MRC’s new name idea is the “Liberal Democrats”).
MRC pulls out all the old favourites: “look at the wonders it did for the Reform Party and PCs at the federal level, Justin Trudeau is super left wing, the conservative machine can’t be beat any other way!”
I’ve heard this argument time and time again, and each time I am enraged by the lack of careful analysis that goes into these strange suggestions.
Let’s just set aside the differences between contemporary liberalism and social democracy for a minute and focus on the voters themselves. A merger of the NDP and Liberals assumes all party members would be totally okay with the new arrangement. And, if you make that assumption, the proposal kinda sorta works.
If every NDP voter and every Liberal voter in Ontario cast ballots for a united Liberal Democratic Party, then we would have a LibDem majority government with 69 seats. There would be 53 Tories, 1 Green, and 1 Independent.
The 2022, the Ontario PCs won 26 seats with +50% of the vote. A LibDem party wouldn’t have beaten them there. But in the seats where the Tories earned less than 50% of the vote, 30 could have been flipped to a new party. Most of them would have been suburban GTA seats, but seats like Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, Thunder Bay—Atikokan, and York South—Weston would have been saved from going PC.
BUT that assumes every voter who previously cast ballots for those parties would vote for a new LibDem Party. I, for one, would absolutely not. While I have been drifting away from the NDP for some time, a formal merger with the Liberals would guarantee I’d never cast a ballot for them in the future. I believe there are deep, structural flaws in the way we organize our economy that need to be addressed. The fundamental ideological core of the Liberal Party is that the economy is fine and should be protected, if not tweaked a little. I can’t get with that.
During the 2022 provincial election, my research lab polled a random sample of Ontarians and asked them a series of questions, including “Which party did you vote for?” and “Where would you place yourself ideologically?” A solid 1/3 of NDP voters consider themselves to be “very left wing” and would likely not cozy up to a new LibDem Party. Same with the 10% of Liberal voters who consider themselves “very right wing”. While that new party might attract the 2% of confused PC voters who considered themselves “left wing”, it would lose a huge chunk of its base right off the bat.
So let’s assume that base fractures. The right-wing Liberals move to the PCs and the left-wing NDPers move to the Greens.
If we run that scenario, we get a PC majority of 76 seats with the new LibDems down at 46. The LibDems actually lose Oshawa and only pick up a handful of seats like Ajax, Nepean, and Scarborough Centre. With the number of Liberal voters who would be uneasy with a merger switching to the Tories, Doug Ford would have actually gained in the popular vote.
MRC makes this argument:
In theory, Canada and Ontario could adopt proportional representation, which might produce more progressive coalitions of Liberals and the NDP. But in practice, proportional representation has proved unpopular in one referendum after another and won’t come anytime soon.11
See, that’s just not accurate. Ontario held one very confusing referendum (while we’ve had four on prohibition) on a version of proportional representation that failed because people didn’t really understand what was being proposed. A paper presented at the 2008 Canadian Political Science Association (CPSA) Conference found that:
The [Citizen’s Assembly on Electoral Reform]’s recommendations were…not widely discussed nor well understood by the public at large. Unlike previous raucous referendum debates in this country, this one was quiet.12
Proportional representation wasn’t unpopular with the public; it was misunderstood. The provincial government failed to create the conditions wherein people actually engaged with the referendum and half-assed their support for the mixed member proportional system that would have fundamentally changed politics in this country.
If we take the first scenario I presented where every Liberal and NDP voter in 2022 voted for a LibDem option, that party would still win 56% of the seats in the legislature with 48% of the vote. In the second scenario where voters scatter among the new options, the PCs would win 42% of the popular vote and 61% of the seats.
The problem isn’t the Liberals and NDP fighting each other. The problem is that our electoral system presents results that do not represent the will of the people. So long as the largest group of people in a community can impose their will on the whole of the community when they lack the support of the majority, we have a problem.
If we took half the energy devoted to think-pieces about merging two ideologically distinct parties and instead devoted it to educating the public on more democratic electoral systems, we’d be a lot closer to defeating Doug Ford and Pierre Poilievre.
SubStack
I’m really tired of talking about the far-right. Sure, a lot of my academic work is focused on understanding far-right and extremist points of view, but like…I don’t want to have to talk about them all the time. They’re very mean and more than a few of them want people like me gone, so it wears on the ol’ emotions to constantly be bringing them up.
But, this time, I have to talk about the far-right because, apparently, I’m sharing a space with them. Substack, the platform on which I publish this weekly newsletter, has faced growing calls to deal with its “Nazi problem”. Back in November, The Atlantic ran a piece in which author Johnathan Katz found:
An informal search of the Substack website and of extremist Telegram channels that circulate Substack posts turns up scores of white-supremacist, neo-Confederate, and explicitly Nazi newsletters on Substack—many of them apparently started in the past year.13
On December 21, one of Substack’s co-founders, Hamish McKenzie, posted a “note” on the site explaining that basically said Substack will not be taking action against far-right figures who preach hate, because they are “committed to upholding and protecting freedom of expression, even when it hurts.” The note’s replies are filled with excessive praise from white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and people with Substacks dedicated to things like “unmasking the truth about COVID” and “exposing the WOKE lies from the DECADENT and INTOLERANT left”.
Others on the platform are divided on what to do. Ryan Broderick over on Garbage Day has said he will leave the platform. Taras Grescoe on Straphanger has said he’ll stay for the time being because: “Sometimes fighting for change from within is a waste of time…But I sense that’s not the case with Substack, and I’m going to stick around.” Bijan Stephen’s You’ve Run Out of Complimentary Articles has already moved to Ghost, a competing newsletter outlet that is seeing traffic jump in the wake of this controversy.
This past Tuesday, Substack announced it would be going after the worst of the worst neo-Nazis, specifically targeting those calling for violence openly. Casey Newton on Platformer (another Substack pub thinking about leaving) told CNN: “The next time the company has a content moderation controversy — and it will — expect these tensions to surface again.”14
I started this newsletter to get away from the increasingly dangerous far-right rhetoric over on X/Twitter. It sucks that I’ve now moved much of my online presence over to this platform, which also seems to be totally okay with catering to the extremist, violent fringe. My content here is insulated from most far-right nonsense because I’m in a different ecosystem, but it still sucks that Substack seems so disinterested in taking a stand against fascism. People obsessed over free speech sure do love giving a platform to people who want to take the freedom of speech away from everyone.
I’m still figuring out what to do. I want to be as far away from Nazis as possible (which I recognize is nearly impossible to do on the internet), so I need to think carefully about next steps.
For now, I can say that I won’t be giving Substack any money by creating subscriptions on here. How I move forward is still up in the air.
Cool Facts for Cool People
The Green Party of Ontario is quickly establishing itself as the province’s urbanist alternative. A few days ago, the party launched their Legalize It! campaign, trying to gather support for party leader Mike Schreiner’s private members bill, Bill 156, aka the “Homes You Can Afford in the Communities You Love Act, 2023”. The bill is actually very good! It authorizes missing-middle development in every municipality, essentially ending a municipality’s ability to hinder intensification through zoning. This is a great step toward getting the housing we all deserve in Ontario!
Speaking of housing, the City of Toronto announced that they had selected development partners for the city’s most ambitious housing project in a long time: a massive co-op development on Eglinton Avenue in Scarborough. The project will have three towers: one “market ownership” tower and two co-ops with 612 affordable units. The selected site is right by the Kennedy GO and TTC lines, meaning these buildings will be connected to the entire region. Way to go, TO!
Or spelling.
Teviah Moro (2023) “‘A little bit of help’ is what Hamilton encampment residents need, forum hears” Hamilton Spectator, June 28, 2023 - Link (Paywalled)
"" “‘They’re our babies’: For this family, encampment life includes pets” Hamilton Spectator, July 19, 2023 - Link (Paywalled)
Rob Kristofferson & Simon Orpana (2016) Showdown: Making Modern Unions. Toronto: Between the Lines Press. pgs. 22, 23 & 113.
An exception was this article where Cooper petitioned the city to ban election signs as local PC riding association president Rob Cooper.
Kevin Werner (2023) “Hamilton Mountain resident Rob Cooper says neighbourhood has seen more homeless people” Hamilton Mountain News, July 30, 2023 - Link
Kevin Werner (2023) “Hamilton Liberal MP Filomena Tassi focuses on affordability issues for 2024” Hamilton Spectator, December 28, 2023 - Link (Paywalled)
John Ibbitson (2023) “Politicians need to remember that this is a suburban, car-commuting nation” Globe and Mail, December 28, 2023 - Link (Paywalled)
Ibid.
Ibid.
Marin Regg Cohn (2023) “Want to see Doug Ford and Pierre Poilievre lose? Then the left needs to get its act together” Toronto Star/Hamilton Spectator, December 27, 2023 - Link (Paywalled)
Lawrence LeDuc, Heather Bastedo, and Catherine Baquero (2008) “The Quiet Referendum: Why Electoral Reform Failed in Ontario” Paper Presented to the 2008 Conference of the Canadian Political Science Association in Vancouver, British Columbia - Link
Johnathan M. Katz (2023) “Substack Has a Nazi Problem” The Atlantic, November 28, 2023 - Link (Paywalled)
Thank you for writing about Kevin Werner's weird, drawn-out goodbye tweets. I followed him on twitter because he was great at live-tweeting meetings, and I was a little pissed about his unceremonious ouster from Metroland. But he lost me not long into his tweet storm when he complimented Esther Pauls, Tom Jackson, Terry Whitehead and Jasper K! Holy moly. I knew he was right-wing, but come on!
I really enjoy your writing, Chris. I'm sorry to hear 2023 was rough. I hope you have a better 2024.