Put the housing choice in the basket!

Housing, housing, housing. PLUS: the revenge of the boards.

The Silence of the Homeowners

“You still wake up sometimes, don’t you? Wake up in the dark and hear the screaming of the homeowners?”

Tonight, a play in three acts. In the first, we look at the story of storeys, and how a fear of heights might, more accurately, be called a fear of change. In the second, the story of a parking lot and how the powers gifted by a foe might be used for good, all while an expected ally loses sight of the current times. In the third, the story of greed and the powerful people who yearn for profit. These are all stories of houses, none of which are homes, either because of time, fortune, or circumstance. They still might one day be. But that’s all up to you.

Narrator exits. Enter: the shadowy figure of the Duke of Etobicoke.

Act 1: Such deafening cries

Doug Ford had a weird few days last week. In response to a motion from the Liberals, he had such an intense, knee-jerk, partisan reaction that he publicly undermined his own housing goals while, simultaneously, signaling what his government’s priorities have been all along. In doing so, he’s confirmed that we’re barreling into an unsustainable, unaffordable, unworkable future.

The premier’s policy pronouncement was hugely upsetting and indicates the crisis we face will only keep getting worse. He wants communities defined by sharp contrasts and high prices. He wants a few condo towers amidst a sea of single detached homes. He wants what he thinks has always been. Because it makes him comfortable.

Let’s start at the beginning, though.

The Ontario Liberals introduced a private member’s bill in the legislature last Tuesday that would automatically allow four unit and four storey buildings to be built across Ontario without the builder needing to get municipal approval. This would, in theory, reduce a little bit of the bureaucracy and political wrangling that some have said is contributing to our housing crisis. This isn’t just some “radical pinko lefty” proposal, either; this proposal came from the Ford government’s own Housing Affordability Taskforce report in 2022.

Actually, the Liberals aren’t the first ones to advocate for more density. Double actually, the Liberals aren’t even the first ones to put forward this motion. The whole discussion we’re having now is around a Liberal motion that was pretty much copied from the Greens, whose leader, Mike Schreiner, introduced an early version of this motion in November.¹

This current bill, introduced by Don Valley East MPP Adil Shamji, is called the “Building Universal and Inclusive Land Development in Ontario Act, 2024” and it goes even further than the chatter would indicate, outlining that, through the Planning Act, municipalities would not even be able to require parking spaces be provided for any homes with four units or fewer.

On Thursday, Ford indicated that he had absolutely no interest in any such policy, instead doubling down on his commitment to runaway sprawl. “We’re going to build homes, single-dwelling homes, townhomes, that’s what we’re going to focus on,” he said.²

The backlash was swift and severe. Schreiner nicknamed Ford “Premier NIMBY”. Marit Stiles of the ONDP said the premier’s comments were “frankly outrageous and actually deeply insulting.”³ The Ontario Liberals issued a press release saying that Ford’s was “a NIMBY government that only cares about looking out for their rich friends & well-connected insiders.”⁴

Even the federal government got in on the action. On Friday, federal Minister of Housing, Infrastructure, and Communities, Sean Fraser, sassed Ford on Twitter/X with a post about fourplexes that “might frighten some politicians”.

Given that Twitter/X is, indisputably, a far-right platform now, almost every top response to his tweet was from a Blue Check™ account with usernames like “WokeMindVirus✝️🍁🙏🏻TrudeauMustGo” and “BitcoinAlphaChad_PoilievreForEternalGodKing” saying that fourplexes are a communist/globalist/immigrant/WEF plot to turn suburbs into crime-riddled slums and that we don’t need to build more density anyway because Canada has one of the “largest landmasses in the world” on which we can build endless suburbs which are better for raising “large patriotic God-fearing families”.

It is honestly like pulling back the curtain and peeking in on an AI-generated Gilead every damn time I look at the comments on Twitter/X these days.

At a stop in Hamilton on Friday, Ford was forced to clarify his remarks. While he noted that he wasn’t necessarily opposed to four units on a single lot, he did say this:

“If I went up to Ancaster right in the beautiful community and threw a four-storey tower right beside homes, they'd lose their minds…Stoney Creek as well, Waterdown, I could keep naming everywhere in Hamilton, I will tell you one thing … [the neighbours] wouldn't stop screaming.”⁵

A few things to note here.

First, the Premier just so happened to mention three places that do not fall within the boundaries of “old” Hamilton. Second, why should we care if people “wouldn’t stop screaming” about new housing beside them? They’ll scream no matter what kind of development pops up in their community. It doesn’t need to be what Premier Ford calls a “four-storey tower” (whatever that is). Any proposed change will be subject to pushback. So let them scream. They already have been.

Ancaster residents opposed the redevelopment of a lot for one single detached, two-storey home with an in-ground pool in 2022. Stoney Creek residents opposed turning three single detached homes into 35 single detached homes along the waterfront near the Newport Yacht Club. Residents in Dundas opposed a four-storey retirement home/townhome complex on Pirie Drive. Seven two-storey townhomes earned a rebuke from central mountain residents and a twelve-storey condo was tut-tutted by west mountaineers living in the neighbourhood in which I grew up. Former Ancaster councillor Lloyd Ferguson even used community opposition to just the idea of fourplex conversions as a justification for voting against a draft of the new official plan two years ago.

If a change is proposed, there will always be someone who will come out and oppose it. Change is scary. Change means something different. It might mean different neighbours, different sounds, different shadows, different traffic flows, and a different look to your surroundings. But we cannot let it be the case that one’s purchase of a home gives them a kind of intangible ownership over the properties that surround them as well and a veto on any kind of change within the boundaries of the community - real or imagined - in which they live.

Part of the problem is that we have too many communities made up predominantly of just one single type of housing. The 2021 Census tells us what the structural makeup of Hamilton is across the board: 71.5% of Hamilton’s housing stock is of the single detached, semi-detached, or row house variety. Only 3% are multiplexes. 8.6% of are apartment buildings that are four storeys or fewer.

What does that look like mapped out over the neighbourhoods of Hamilton? Now, I should note before presenting this map: I’ve adapted the city’s official neighbourhoods to better reflect reality. I’ve added neighbourhoods where there weren’t any, made the industrial sectors more clear, and merged the directional neighbourhoods into their singularly-recognized entities.

There are 77 neighbourhoods in Hamilton - 51% of all neighbourhoods - where over 90% of the housing stock is single-detached, semi-detached, and row homes. There are only 13 neighbourhoods where over 20% of the housing stock is small apartments. Ward 9, Ward 11, and Ward 15 have no neighbourhoods where more than 10% of the housing stock is another other than single-detached, semi-detached, and row homes. If we lower that number from 90% to 60%, we can also include Wards 12 and 14.

Small apartments are highly desirable and excellent additions to our communities. They fit into the existing built form of a neighbourhood in a much better way than today’s ugly new glass condos do, providing a more efficient use of space at a human-scale. While single detached homes and condos work primarily for developers and wealthy investors, small apartments and multiplexes work for residents.

All across Hamilton, small apartments of two, three, and four storeys provide excellent housing for a wide array of people. From Ainslie Wood to Stinson to Raleigh to Kirkendall to Glenview, small apartments have provided real housing choice to a city in desperate need.

The best way to stop people from “screaming” about these buildings going up in their neighbourhoods is by exposing them to these buildings. There are too many communities in Hamilton that are monolithic, dominated by a singular kind of housing and lacking any real housing choice. Yes, neighbours might be frightened about these buildings, but they’re frightened about what they do not understand.

A few weeks back, former Ward 1 councillor (alderman in the day) and regional chair Terry Cooke tweeted a link to a great op-ed he penned for the Spec back in 2009. The article was Cooke’s way of both recounting an important part of the city’s history and supporting then-Ward 1 councillor Brian McHattie’s approval of the stalled 17 Ewen development, intended at the time to be a 10-storey student residence (it remains an unwieldy pile of gravel and weeds sandwiched between the Rail Trail and the awesome folks over at Grain and Grit Brewing). Cooke tells the story of his own support for 101 Broadway, which became two three-storey buildings, containing 45 CityHousing run apartments on the site of, what was then, an abandoned factory, also abutting today’s Rail Trail. At the time, residents in the area did exactly what Ford said they would; they screamed and screamed and screamed. Backed by Cooke’s fellow Ward 1 alderman, the decidedly more reactionary Mary Kiss, they hung Cooke in effigy, disrupted a council meeting on the matter, and threatened to boot Cooke from office (he was returned in 1988 with an even larger majority, with Kiss placing second to him, as would happen in every election in which the two faced off).

Ainslie Wood residents were scared, but Cooke weathered the political storm and did what was right by the community, helping to create 45 much-needed affordable units for people. As he wrote in that 2009 op-ed:

Unfortunately, the too frequent response by ward councillors is to pander to not-in-my-back-yard sentiments in order to appease voters…

This cynical game just breeds distrust by voters who feel manipulated by the process, while discouraging developers from risking capital in a community that doesn't seem to appreciate the financial risks involved in trying to advance good infill projects in the absence of consistent political support.⁶

We need neighbourhoods where the residents have a variety of incomes, backgrounds, ways of living, interests, and perspectives. We need neighbourhoods with single detached homes and townhouses and small apartments and multiplexes and larger buildings. We need diversity of people and housing stock.

Doug Ford may only want “single-dwelling homes, [and] townhomes”, but we deserve real housing choice. The message should be simple: ignore the angry few, build what needs to be built, and show neighbours how their worst fears are overblown.

Or, you could dig in and try to make things worse.

Enter Matt Francis, pursued by a bear, representing his own inaction.

Act 2: The Merry Wives of Lake Avenue

The saga of the Lake Road Parking Lots is about to come to a close.

There was some drama when, before the meeting, Councillors Craig Cassar and Cameron Kroetsch put forward a package of compromise amendments intended to win over some of the right-wing holdouts. The compromises would have given more site-specific and site-adjacent visibility to veterans, find space for new parking elsewhere, and work to address the parking-related concerns of members of the Stoney Creek Business Improvement Area.

Just an aside, but wow #HamOnt Twitter/X sucks these days. Like, I’ve been on this a lot lately, but…has every reasonable voice just shuffled off? The replies to Craig’s tweet are just the most unhinged nonsense, divorced from reality and decency, from accounts that almost exclusively repost stuff from the Toronto Sun, the CPC’s official accounts, and press releases from council’s right wing fringe. It used to just be the usual self-indulgent weirdos who would, upon a progressive post, would bubble from their Harkonnen ooze to blame everything under the sun on iElect, the Westdale elites, and NDPers. But now, every reply to everything posted by anyone slightly to the left of Barry Goldwater is some comment about pronouns and Cameron’s ego and wokeism and Laura Babcock and communism and blah blah blah. It’s like you asked ChatGPT to write a Pierre Poilievre speech, but asked it to crank the “hyperlocal” and “hyperannoying” dials up to 11. They’re like mosquitos with an overinflated sense of their own importance: everyone finds them little more than mild irritants, but they’re buzzing like it’s their job. Touch grass, weirdos!

Where was I? Oh, yeah, councillors doing their jobs.

Craig and Cameron actually did work. They sat down, looked at the logjam, and realized it was up to them to burl down whitewater and unstick those logs. They submitted motions that sought to address the concerns raised by residents, business owners, and their colleagues AND still get housing built, but the same Obstinate Eight swatted them down without even batting an eye.

Matt Francis, committed to making council as dysfunctional as possible, thought he had won. But then the mayor slipped on her Super Mayor signet ring, thrust it into the sky, and bellowed “I INVOKE MY POWERRRRSSSSSS!”, morphing into Strong Mayor Horwath, which is like regular Mayor Horwath, only…you know…stronger.

Doug Ford’s bestowing of “strong mayor” powers on large cities was intended to do just this: allow a mayor to enact a “veto”, use the support of a small group of councillors, and push stuck legislation through difficult councils. She’ll only need the support of four councillors, but she’ll likely get the backing of seven, meaning the small sections of the bedeviling Stoney Creek parking lots will be cleaved off and turned into housing.

Francis told the Spectator the mayor’s actions amounted to an “abuse of power”. Jeff Beattie, a councillor who never fails to disappoint the progressives who had such high hopes when he was elected, said the decision should “come from the community, not be imposed on the community.”⁷

As I noted in the first act, opponents will be angry (and a chorus of sockpuppets on Twitter/X will bemoan how our Stalin-esque mayor and her pink-haired, pronouned supporters have wokely disrespected veterans by taking 29% of the forgotten alley named broadly for the idea of veterancy and giving it to the poors) but, when the buildings are up and the neighbours have moved in, it’ll hopefully be a different story. Creating much-needed affordable housing in an increasingly-unaffordable community will be good for everyone, which opponents will surely see in due time.

The hard part is waiting until that happens. That’s the hard work that Francis and Beattie and the others among the Obstinate Eight do not want to do. They want to feed into the fears of a small group of reactionary residents because they believe, foolishly, they can harness that anger come election time to be swept back into that $106,285-a-year office where everyone pays attention to them.

One more weird thing on this. Into the fray, entirely unprompted, jumped former Ward 7 councillor Scott Duvall, always keen to show off his new conservative cred.

Duvall targeted Ward 1 councillor Maureen Wilson’s support for the upcoming mayoral veto (one might ask why Duvall took issue with Maureen’s support, but I’m not here to focus on the man of it all). When questioned by residents about his position, he responded with this banger:

This is not to say it was not hard for young families to find housing when Scott was first starting out at Stelco in the 1970’s. Life has never been easy for working people. But life has been getting progressively harder. Working people today are being squeezed more than they were when Scott was just getting started. We’re not lazier, we’re not more unmotivated, we’re not just ignoring opportunities. The bosses are getting greedier and less empathetic.

Let’s run a little comparison. Assume you were a millwright in Hamilton in 1965. You would have made around $2.71 an hour. Assuming a good year’s work, you would have brought home around $5,655 a year. At the time, homes in Hamilton were going for around $14,000 (if you wanted a nice one) so, if you were setting aside 15% of your income every year for a down-payment on a house, you’d have enough in around two years.

Fast forward to today. The median wage of a millwright is now $33 an hour. Pulling in around $69,000 a year and setting aside that same 15% for down-payment, you’d have just enough for an average-priced home in 10 years. Better hope your three young ones don’t mind living with grandma and grandpa until they’re in Grade 5!

People today aren’t just “finding new homes” like Scott claims he was able to do, in large part because the price of homes today has not kept up with wages. That $5,655 an average millwright would make in 1965 went a hell of a lot further than the $69,000 today’s average millwright brings home.

The bosses are just getting greedier. I would have hoped that a former labour leader would have recognized that. But, instead, he’s thrown his lot in with some new pals. Among them, a landlord of some disrepute.

Enter Peter Dyakowski, pursued by a fire inspector:

Act 3: Brains, brawn, bedeviled

Those of us in the west end all have stories about the “student” houses on Dundurn. “Student” is in quotes there because we know that particular identifier is used in relation to those houses quite liberally. The homes have a wide array of folks moving in and out of them all throughout the year, and I’ve personally spoken to a handful of people who lived in the bland buildings across the street from the Dundurn Fortinos who were well beyond their studies. They are, no matter what anyone says, rooming houses. Such a form of housing isn’t necessarily bad and can, indeed, provide affordable, community-focused accommodation. Reimagining landlord-driven rooming houses as tenant-focused co-living spaces is honestly one of the ways we can help address the housing crisis.

But these particular houses aren’t inspired or appealing. There is usually garbage strewn about on the tiny decorative beds out front of the buildings, between bikes locked to ornamental chain fences that are weathered and collapsing. While the homes are an eyesore on the best of days, they’re better now than they were in the past; a constant source of controversy, the buildings reached their worst in 2010 when three teens were shot in one of the homes during a raucous house party. A gathering of 50 people got out of control and, at 1:30 AM on Saturday, March 13, 2010, a man opened fire after a disagreement about music. Two of those shot were injured, while another, an 18 year old, later died in hospital.⁸

Some (it is unclear if it is all or just some) of the homes are owned by landlord Peter Dyakowski, as managing director and primary shareholder of Hillcrest Properties. This week, Dyakowski’s properties have once again made news for all the wrong reasons.

Dyakowski has a habit of making the news in town. He is, for lack of a better descriptor, the All-Canadian football superstar that a certain brand of newsman loves to love. The newspaper stories about him (even the ones not about his athletic prowess) all have weirdly specific, fawning recitations of his build and triumphs, as though he were a character in a Norse epic: 6-foot-5, 315-to-325-pounds, a Mensa-level IQ, an “astonishing confidence”. An all-star Ti-Cat guard-turned-business-whiz-and-family-man. A healthy investment portfolio, deep right-wing populist credentials, the common-sense tell-it-like-it-is style that’s like kryptonite for every suburban dad who’s listened to too much CFRB 1010. The man’s charming, handsome, skillful; the kind of guy you want to grill a steak with. What’s better than this: guys bein’ dudes?

His triumph on a 2012 CBC reality show - Canada's Smartest Person - is referenced with regularity.⁹ His third-place finish on a 2014 episode of Jeopardy, not so much.¹⁰ Same goes for his third-place finish as Conservative candidate on Hamilton Mountain in the 2019 federal election - a campaign during which he told a debate that his was a policy “that places the family at the centre of everything we do as a nation.”¹¹ But, while he failed as a candidate, he has solidified his position as a Tory power broker and remains the source of excited mayoral speculation among some on the city’s uninspired right.

At present, though, he’s not in the news for another reality television show or showering right-wing council candidates with donations or making another 2026 campaign pledge to massacre birds. Now he’s in the news for pushing back against doing the bare minimum.

Dyakowski’s been fighting the city for years on what he calls “principle”. That principle is semantic in nature, with a city inspector arguing that his properties are rooming houses, which he rejects, instead claiming his properties are “single co-operative households.” If a home is a rooming house, it is subject to more stringent fire code regulations to ensure that, if a fire does break out, all tenants and/or occupants can get out safely. If a home is a “single cooperative household”, it is assumed there’s some level of coordination between residents who can help each other escape a fire.

Each property is rented to 10 people who share kitchens, bathrooms, laundry, and some common spaces. But Dyakowski’s contention is that these are groups of students who are expected to be living “together” regardless. He wants the same rules applied to the absentee landlords who own homes across Ainslie Wood and Westdale.

And so he’s refusing to, as the Spectator notes, put in a second exit in the basements of each building (where, in each building, four people live), install more fire protections and fire-proof doors, and generally beefing up the internal structure to slow down the spread of flames.

While Dyakowski’s company did make other changes, which the Spec noted as doing things like “sealing penetrations from pipes and vents in drywall, cleaning dryer lint traps, testing kitchen fire extinguishers, and [ensuring] proper on-site documentation of smoke detectors and fire extinguishers,”¹² he’s holding firm on any other changes.

He’s already been ordered by a court to make the necessary changes, with the judge ruling that he had “failed to prove on a balance of probabilities that the buildings are not boarding, lodging, and rooming houses.”¹³ But he’s appealed, saying he rejects the notion that the rooming houses he’s operating are rooming houses.

Dyakowski has decided that he can ignore rules he doesn’t agree with, all in the service of making a quick buck. Even if he does eventually have to make these changes, the unethical way he’s been acting up until this point, should be cause for concern.

But, at this point, all this should simply bolster his mayoral credentials: an aging star with a silver tongue, resting on a few overhyped successes achieved long ago, enthusiastically profits from the community while providing the absolute minimum in return.

And from that great Hamilton Club in the sky do many of Hamilton’s mayors of yore smile kindly on their new protégé.

All exit. Our narrator enters, robed, looking cautiously (curiously?) about for bears.

Conclusions: House and Home

Yesterday, our Prime Minister tweeted that paying rent should count toward one’s credit score. This comment earned scorn from the right and the left, demonstrating how sadly out-of-touch the federal government is on the housing front. The opposition remains similarly out-of-touch, even if they reap the benefits from the growing mobs of Anybody But Trudeau (But Really Just Poilievre) jesters that have entirely overwhelmed pollsters as-of-late.

Doug Ford’s rejection of more dense living shows the provincial government is all in on the out-of-touch train. Only at the local level have we seen a glimmer of courage, like so much spice in the sand. But it took national-level-attention, weeks of embarrassment, and the invocation of the mayoral “nuclear option” to even get us a small fraction of the number of units we need to make things better. And, while all that has been playing out, we have former labour leaders picking fights about the cost of housing on dying social media sites and landlords resisting changes to their firetraps at every turn.

Our future Prime Minister, Pierre Poilievre, has bounded around the country doing his best folksy cosplay, asking people “Don’t you just feel like everything’s broken?” Of course, there are some of us who have spotted the “Big Breaking Hammer” in his hand while he says this, but there’s a kernel of truth to his comment. Things do feel like they’re broken. The system was intended to provide us an outlet for our anger and a chance to participate meaningfully in the process of fixing what’s broken. But when a premier with a legislative supermajority tells us he’s going to pave everything green and build a sea of single detached, ticky tacky mansions…when it takes a battle of Helm’s Deep-ian proportions to get just a couple of units built on a parking lot…when a political power player and landlord can just stall investments in life-saving fire safety equipment on principle…it sure feels like things aren’t broken. It sure feels like they were designed with some serious flaws.

We need more small apartments. We need more multiplexes. We need more infill and missing middle development and housing co-ops and co-living spaces. We need to accept that some homeowners will scream because things might look different for a minute. We need to sit with them, in their anger, and help them realize that we don’t have any other choices. We need to move on from them when they won’t listen. We need fewer parking lots, less space for community-destroying cars, and more affordable housing. We need former MPs to take a look at the data and stand with us, even if we’re young and different and confusing. We need to expropriate the buildings that shady landlords won’t make safe, no matter who lives in them and no matter who those landlords are or want to be.

We need places to live, places to thrive, places to be who we have always wanted to be.

We need houses. We need homes. And we need to work together to make them.

Narrator exits, thinking about bears, Jodie Foster, and the missing middle.

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Ten Principles for the Establishment of a Monolithic Board System

One board changes, one stays the same.

On April 1st, Pat Mandy’s term on the Hamilton Police Services Board (PSB) will come to an end. Mandy informed the Spec that, despite applying for an extension of her six-year term, she was rejected, and there will be a vacancy on the PSB.

Vice chair Fred Bennink will lead the PSB’s April 25 meeting, where the PSB will vote on a new chair. In all likelihood, Bennink will be elected chair and either Councillor Esther Pauls or provincial appointee Geordie Elms will be elected vice-chair. A new provincial appointee will not be in place by then and, unless there’s a massive change-of-heart on the part of Mayor Horwath, the Progressive Conservative Block will maintain their control over the PSB.

Still, a vacancy creates the possibility that there might be some substantive change on the board. Under Mandy’s leadership, the PSB had become a more authoritarian and dysfunctional entity, most notably weaponizing procedure to silence members Cameron Kroetsch and Anjali Menezes. But, soon, there will be a new provincial appointee to the board. One can only hope that the province will appoint a dedicated community activist, hopefully from the city’s queer or BBIPOC or Indigenous community, to serve as a voice of reason and critical inquiry. But it’ll probably just be 2023 PC by-election candidate in Hamilton Centre, Pete Wiesner.

Mandy’s departure also marks a time of change on the PSB more broadly. On April 1, the new Community Safety and Police Act (CSPA) will come into effect. The CSPA has some interesting new language in it, including a directive that a PSB put into place a “Municipal Diversity Plan” that ensures PSB members are representative of the wider community. This, of course, only applies to municipal appointees, but it’s still a chance for some change.

While things are changing over at the Hamilton PSB, they’re decidedly not changing at the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board (HWDSB). Ward 2 trustee, Sabreina Dahab, has been very vocal on the issue of the ongoing conflict in Palestine. Her social media activism on the issue earned her a Code of Conduct violation review back in November. So Trustee Dahab tweeted that the review had been initiated and that she was upset over the decision to move forward in that way.

Then, at the board’s Tuesday meeting, she was given an ultimatum: delete the tweet or be barred from participating in private HWDSB meetings. Trustees deemed that Dahab’s tweet constituted a breach of the code of conduct's rules on confidentiality. While the code of conduct review by itself is one thing, the ultimatum is heavy-handed and misguided. Trustee Dahab informed the public of the review, which, itself, should not be a violation of any code of conduct. If a trustee is the subject of an internal review process over their actions, constituents and the wider public deserve to know.

A strange decision from the trustees of the HWDSB. Hopefully they’ll realize how this seems and back off. Let’s hope the authoritarianism of the PSB hasn’t rubbed off on them…

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Cool facts for cool people

• Burlington is going to have a ward boundary review for the first time since 2005. Mayor Marianne Meed Ward announced that Hamilton’s friendly northwestern neighbour will undergo a ward boundary review to account for the fact that their population has increased by some 26,000 since their last ward changes and 20 years is a long time to go with the same electoral boundaries. Most municipalities are hesitant to add any new wards, so it is highly likely they’ll stick with a council of 7 (6 councillors and the mayor), but anything’s possible!

• About 70 kilometres to the east of Timmins is the small town of Black River-Matheson. It’s actually one of the few towns in Ontario I’ve never been to, usually opting for the main TransCanada route during my adventures through the province. Unfortunately, they don’t really have a functioning municipal government right now. And three of their councillors are trying to have the entire council thrown from office and trigger a city-wide by-election. The municipality has a council of seven: six ward councillors and a mayor. Last August, one of their councillors stepped down and was replaced by appointment. Then, the city locked out municipal workers which became a strike in January. Since then, council hasn’t been able to meet, pass a budget, or accept a second resignation from one of their own. At this point, the municipality is unable to repave roads, keep garbage off the streets, or provide any municipal services. So three councillors have pledged to not attend meetings for 60 days in an effort to get the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing to vacate the entire council’s seats and hold by-elections for all seven elected officials. And, with one of the council’s members already trying to resign, it looks like they’ll be able to do it. It’ll be interesting to see how this all plays out!

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1. Beattie, Samantha. “Ford says Hamiltonians will 'lose their minds' over 4-storey fourplexes, while city looks to build more” CBC Hamilton, March 22, 2024 - Link

2. D’Mello, Colin & Issac Callan. “Ontario Liberals push for policy allowing fourplexes as-of-right across province” Global News, March 19, 2024 - Link

3. D’Mello, Colin & Issac Callan. “‘Massive mistake’: Premier Ford rules out Ontario-wide fourplex policy” Global News, March 21, 2024 - Link

4. Yazdani, Tina. “Premier shuts down fourplexes as of right across Ontario” CityNews Toronto, March 21, 2024 - Link

5. “NIMBY Tories Won’t Build the Housing Ontario Needs: Bonnie Crombie” Ontario Liberal Party, March 21, 2024 - Link

6. Cooke, Terry. “No room for NIMBY if Hamilton is to benefit from good planning” Hamilton Spectator, May 23, 2009 - Link (Paywalled)

7. Moro, Teviah. “Horwath aims to use 'strong mayor' powers to push through Stoney Creek affordable housing plan” Hamilton Spectator, March 27, 2024 - Link (Paywalled)

8. Reilly, Emma. “Teen dead in triple shooting; Two partygoers complained about music at student house, then pulled handguns; two others wounded” Hamilton Spectator, March 15, 2010 - Nexis Uni Archive, no link

9. Milton, Steve. “Cat packs a wallop on the field, at IQ testing table Tiger-Cat a finalist on Canada's Smartest Person” Hamilton Spectator, March 12, 2012 - Nexis Uni Archive, no link

10. Radley, Scott. “I'll take third place for $400, Alex” Hamilton Spectator, June 3, 2014 - Nexis Uni Archive, no link

11. “Quotes from candidates' debate; Candidates” Hamilton Spectator, October 10, 2019 - Nexis Uni Archive, no link

12. McCullough, Kate. “Peter Dyakowski in years-long battle against city interference on his student rental properties” Hamilton Spectator, March 26, 2024 - Link (Paywalled)

13. Ibid.