Summer break extra credit
A surprise newsletter with HPL archives, Fordmandering, and the goobers.
I know, I know, I said I would be off until August 15. But I have so many thoughts. And things keep happening, despite it being summer. I find that unfair. Wait until September to be interesting, news. Anyway, enjoy an “extra credit” newsletter.
Our history is just a click away
Memories
I’ve blended two core memories in my head and have to constantly remind myself they’re not just one event.
One of those memories is the first time I experienced the rooftop terraces of the Hamilton Public Library’s Central Branch. I think I was in high school or early undergrad. It was warm and bright and I was at the library for some unremembered reason.
I was poking around the stacks on the third floor when I realized there were sliding glass doors along the building’s northwestern wall. I peered out and realized they lead out to patios with little tables and chairs and a cute bit of greenery. I remember looking around, unsure if I was allowed to even test the doors. It seemed like something that was forbidden for us plebs to even consider. Maybe the library folk could use the patios, but patrons? Unlikely.
When the coast was clear, I gingerly pushed on the handle and, to my surprise, the door opened. Stepping out onto the patio, I had a clear sight down the end of York and onto Wilson Street with Beasley and the General and the faraway stacks of Stelco all laid out in the distance. I must have stood out on that balcony for an absurd amount of time, just staring out over that little sliver of the city and marveling at how it all looked from up above. I gained such an appreciation for the city in that moment and have carried that feeling with me for years.
The second memory is the first time I sat down to explore the Hamilton Spectator’s microfilm collection.
I was in the first days of my M.A. program at McMaster in the School of Labour Studies. This time, I was in a different library - the Mills Memorial Library at Mac - for, once again, an unremembered reason. Though, if I’m being honest, do I really need a reason to be in a library? They’re amazing public spaces filled with knowledge.
Anyway, I remember stumbling upon the microfilm collection and realizing that there was over one hundred years of Hamilton’s history, all wrapped up on brittle little spools, free for anyone to take down off the shelf and explore.
I grabbed a spool from the 1930’s, walked over to one of the microfilm readers lined up, at that time, against one of the group study rooms, and spent about 20 minutes trying to figure out how to use the thing. They had a body like a Macintosh 512k and a control panel that looked like a Pioneer DJ controller that Dr. Frankenstein had started working on, only to get bored and wander away after ripping off most of the nobs.
Once I got it working, I dove in with intensity. I quickly discovered references to CCF candidates for municipal office. Candidates, nominated by a political party, running for local office. I had been told, for years, that parties never participated in Hamilton’s municipal politics but there, right in front of me, was evidence to the contrary. That little revelation lodged in my head like some Kennedy-esque brain worm, and led to not only my M.A.’s major research project, but also my doctoral dissertation. Thanks, microfilm!
The two memories have been blended in my mind because, as of late, I’ve spent most of my time exploring microfilm on the third floor of the HPL’s Central Branch. There, just outside of Local History and Archives, on the third floor where those magical patios are, stand banks of microfilm. Not just from the Spec, but from long-lost papers like the Herald and the Times, as well as suburban papers and minor publications, all of which served our communities for a while.
The Spec is Hamilton’s paper-of-record because of its longevity. No other media institution has served the city as long as as dutifully as it has, for better or for worse. That makes it an important component of our city’s history and, in some cases, the last remaining available documentation about certain events and instances from Hamilton’s past. There are entire elections where the Spec published poll-by-poll results for mayoral votes that the city itself didn’t deem worthy enough to maintain.
But going through microfilm was always a process. You needed to have general dates in mind before starting your quest because the microfilm rolls only held a few weeks or, at most, a few months of information on them. And good luck if the date you were looking for was at the end of the roll because you’d spend 15 minutes sometimes manually unwinding the film to find your desired edition. There was obviously no search function, either, so if you wanted to find a specific name or date or fact, you might have to read every word of every paragraph of every column of every page in the hopes that you stumble across what you’re looking for. And you better hope the edition you’re looking at wasn’t hastily photographed by some bored young man who grabbed the most snow-damaged edition of the paper from January 6, 1887 and said “yeah, that’ll do” because this is what you’ll get:
And, honestly, that one is pretty okay looking because you can still read most some of it.
That was how historical research in Hamilton had to happen. Until the middle of last week, that is.
On July 30, the HPL announced that their entire Spectator archive had been digitized and uploaded to ProQuest, an online repository of newspapers and other documents. Now, with your library card, you can not only look through almost 200 years of Spec issues, but you can search them, download the pages, and share them with whomever you like.
“Gamechanger” doesn’t even begin to describe how monumental this is for people interested in local history. Or for people with a long family tenure here who might be interested in what their ancestors did. Or for anyone who is curious about their home or school or workplace. This archive throws open the doors to decades of our history, and it’s all just one click away.
You can access that archive here by signing in with your library card’s barcode, selecting “Publications” and clicking on “H”. There are seven different “Hamilton Spectators” there, mostly divided by time, though there are the “Weekly” and “Daily” Spec which served different purposes pre-1890. And there’s an awkward gap between 1968 and 1984 that will hopefully be filled in soon enough. Because the 70s were a fun time in Hamilton and that gap is so frustratingly small.
But one of the wild things this archive allows is for us to actually consider the health of the Spec itself. And to understand why that’s an issue, we need to look at the paper’s history.
A Bull and a Smile(y)
The history of the Hamilton Spectator is, in many ways, the history of Hamilton. The city was incorporated on June 9, 1846 and, just over one month later, the Hamilton Spectator and Journal of Commerce released its first edition.
But to understand the Spec, we have to understand how it came to be. See, the Spec wasn’t the first paper in the city. In fact, the Spec was commissioned by high-status Conservatives in the area after their first project - the dull and religiously-oriented “high Tory” paper named the Hamilton Gazette and General Advertiser - had failed to live up to expectations and its publisher’s reputation often got in the way of his work.
The Gazette was a project of George Bull, an Orange Order Irishman who had bounced around the British Empire, desperate to escape his own misfortunes. In the old country, Bull linked up with the fascinatingly named Ogle Gowan to start an aggressively pro-Protestant newspaper in Dublin. He quickly ran into trouble, spent time in a Dublin prison for libeling a priest, and had a bitter falling out with Gowan. His former friend moved to Eastern Ontario and Bull to Montreal, where they continued their pointless feud. Bull organized Protestant Irish immigrants in Montreal in defence of the Empire and against Gowan (who was doing the same outside of Kingston). Bull meddled in politics but was eventually driven out of Montreal, relocating to Toronto and starting a new paper, the Toronto Recorder and General Advertiser. He used his new outlet to whip up popular anger toward Gowan, who was a candidate for office in the elections of 1834. His successful campaign against Gowan (whose election victory was later nullified thanks to Bull’s agitation) caught the eye of one of Gowan’s opponents in the region, an up-and-coming politician and railway baron named Allan Napier MacNab.
MacNab had moved to Hamilton in 1826, eager to be a big fish in a pond he could control. Stifled by his mentors in Toronto and unable to break through in his second-choice location (he moved to Thornhill and even attempted to build a version of Dundurn Castle there prior to his move to Hamilton), MacNab had settled in the growing outpost at the head of Lake Ontario and wanted to establish a conservative, pro-Empire movement in the city to help his business and professional interests. MacNab liked the cut of Bull’s masthead, and invited him to Hamilton to be the city’s Conservative Party-backed media voice.
Bull’s Gazette served its purpose for a few years, but was soon eclipsed in popularity by a new paper, the reform-oriented Hamilton Journal and Express from an aggressive and popular young leader named Solomon Brega.
MacNab and the city’s Tory establishment began to see this as a problem. As Hamiltonians grew bored with Bull’s paper and sought out Brega’s more ambitious publication, they could see their grasp on power slipping. To counter this, they sent a local businessman, Edwin Dalley, to Montreal to speak with a young writer with extensive publishing experience named Robert Smiley. At just 28 years old, Smiley had already worked as the foreman for two Kingston-area papers and had become a leading voice on political issues in Montreal.
Dalley convinced Smiley to relocate to Hamilton and, with the backing of the city’s Tory elite, founded the Hamilton Spectator and Journal of Commerce. As a consolation to Bull, the city’s political establishment pulled strings to have him appointed as the area’s chief coroner and let him keep publishing his competing paper. But, just over a year after the Spec started, Bull died, leaving the Gazette to his son.
The Spec expanded rapidly. Beginning as a twice-weekly paper (Wednesday and Saturday), it became a daily paper in 1852 and, soon after, absorbed what remained of the Gazette. When the Liberal-affiliated Toronto Globe called Hamilton an “Ambitious Little City”, Smiley turned the phrasing around, saying that being an “Ambitious City” was nothing to scoff at. All the while, Smiley followed the Tory line, ensuring there was a passionate editorial defence of everything the city’s elites did.
The paper continued to grow and, to reward himself, Smiley built a striking mansion at the corner of East Avenue and King William Streets (now awkwardly incorporated into Kiwanis Homes’ Hampton Court building). But, soon after his mansion was completed, he died from Tuberculosis at age 38. He left the paper to his brothers who kept the paper going on their own until 1877.1
Citizen Southam
That year, an ambitious 34 year old named William Southam was visiting the city. Based in London, Southam was the very embodiment of a classic rags-to-riches tale. At age 12, Southam was forced to find work to help support his six siblings and widowed mother. The job he found was carrying the London Free Press, then run by Josiah Blackburn. The young Southam’s eagerness and curiosity was noticed by Blackburn, who became a sort-of father-figure and promoted him quickly through the ranks of the paper. At just 23, Southam had become an editorial writer with the paper and Blackburn reoriented the previously reform-oriented Free Press to match Southam’s conservative leanings. Just one year later, Southam would become a co-owner of the Free Press.
He continued to assert control over the paper until his fateful visit to Hamilton a decade later. In 1877, the Smiley brothers had grown tired of running the Spec and had made it known they were looking to sell it off. Southam saw his opportunity and, together with a business partner, some family loans, and a hefty contribution from Hamilton’s Conservative establishment, he bought the paper and began assembling a media empire.
Southam’s policy differed little from that of the Smiley brothers. A passionate supporter of Sir John A. MacDonald’s Conservatives, Southam ensured the Spec maintained its editorial affiliation toward the party. During the election of 1887, the paper went all in for Conservative candidates Adam Brown and Alex McKay (Hamilton was just one single riding that elected two members at the time) and included this helpful advice on election day:
With the Spectator as the cornerstone, the Southam empire grew with speed and viciousness, gobbling up papers and affiliated industries across the country. By the mid-1920’s, Southam owned papers in Ottawa, Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton, and Vancouver, had secured exclusive rights to print railway tickets, and had expanded his general printing business throughout Montreal and Toronto. He invested in the companies which would eventually become Canada Steamship Lines, Stelco, and the Hamilton Street Railway. He poured money into local hospitals, churches, and sports clubs, and became a leading champion of personal responsibility. Southam was all about people working out, working hard, and working for the betterment of King and Country.2
When Southam died at age 88 in 1932, the Spec’s front-page obituary was…I don’t know if “glowing” is the right adjective because that doesn’t exactly convey the passion of their sentiments.
“His rugged frame finally succumbing to the burden of advancing years”, “a pioneer in modern Canadian journalism”, “Life An Epic of Achievement”. Pretty intense stuff.
Members of the Southam family remained involved in the media empire for years, with many of William’s sons and grandsons playing key roles in managing the chain. And, for decades, the paper prospered and grew, serving the needs of Hamiltonians and people in surrounding communities.
The Baron Crossharbour Cometh
A few important things happened in 1985.
The first was that St. Clair Balfour III, Southam’s grandson, stepped down as chairman of Southam Inc. The family’s grip on their own empire began to loosen and, soon, the vultures began circling.
The largest and most grotesque of all the vultures was a complicated little man named Conrad Black. Black’s family was preposterously wealthy and, in the great Canadian oligarchical tradition, had their fingers in nearly everything we know and tolerate. His father, George, assumed control of his father’s brewing business and used that to create holding companies within holding companies within holding companies that, by the mid-70s, controlled everything from the Dominion grocery store chain to the Orange Crush pop company.
Key among the various companies’ holdings was a small gold mine in Timmins named the “Hollinger Mines”. After George Black died and left Conrad his stake in the holding companies, he bounced from business to business until finally settling on Hollinger, which he restructured into another holding company in 1985.
That’s the second important thing to happen that year. Because Hollinger would become Black’s vehicle for expanding his wealth. And one of the central ways he would do that would be through buying newspapers.
He had a lot of experience in that field. One of his business ventures, at age 22, was to buy the small Eastern Townships Advertiser in Quebec. A year later, he bought the Sherbrooke Record. So, when he created Hollinger in 1985, he immediately set about buying up papers. By 1987, he had already purchased nearly 50 individual papers and even more newspaper chains before scooping up the Saturday Night magazine and a bunch of shares in the UK’s Telegraph.
Black’s first bites out of the Southam chain happened in 1992 when he took 23% of the company from Torstar, the publisher of the…Toronto Star. Not a creative name, I know.
Over the next few years, Black kept buying up more and more of Southam until 1996 when Hollinger finally had just enough shares to be the majority owner of the chain. He kept going and going until all of Southam was in his control.
But he didn’t want old papers. Black wanted to create a new paper. What was the fun in controlling a million small markets when you could make a bid to control the whole country instead?
Black’s plan involved a little prisoner exchange with another upstart media company, Sun Media. The history of the Sun is a little more straightforward; it came about when laid off employees of the defunct, sensationalist, ultraconservative broadsheet, the Toronto Telegram, decided to open a sensationalist, ultraconservative tabloid named the Toronto Sun. The Sun, in 1987, had bought up a long-standing and stodgy newspaper called the Financial Post, which Black desperately wanted to sink his little claws into.
So, in 1998, Sun Media and Hollinger agreed to trade papers: the Financial Post would go to Black and the flagship of the dying Southam chain, the Spec, would go to Sun Media. Reportedly, the Spec’s editor was only told of the sale at 8:45 AM on the day it happened.3 Black got his Financial Post and used it to tack on the new conservative daily broadsheet, the National Post. His mission was complete.
And that is the difference between Black and Southam. Yes, Southam was a hardcore Conservative who used his paper to advance his party’s cause. But the man cared about his product. He walked himself to the office everyday, remained involved in the operations of the Spec until he died, and took pride in the paper he produced. Black used the Southam chain as a means-to-an-end. As John Ralston Saul told the Ottawa Citizen in 2008, Black shouldn’t even call himself a “capitalist” because he never really created wealth:
“He has only created one thing -- one newspaper (National Post) -- and even that he couldn't hold on to for more than three years. Apart from that, his career has been largely about stripping corporations. Destroying them. As the most visible voice for Canadian capitalism, he has had a negative effect on how most Canadians imagine the marketplace. In fact, I can't think of anyone who has had a more negative effect on how Canadians think of the market.”4
Of course, Sun Media didn’t know what to do with the Spec either, so they turned around and sold it to Torstar a year later. Then, in 2020, Torstar itself was bought out by a private equity firm Nordstar Capital LP, which has been slowly slimming down news operations in an effort to milk as much profit from the industry as possible.
And that brings us to today.
Well, kinda. First, we have to close off Conrad Black’s story, which I’ll do breathlessly in one sentence: Hollinger started running into problems pretty quick, sold off most of its papers, offloaded a bunch more to CanWest Global (because there are only like…three companies in Canada and they just trade assets for fun) and finally sells everything to CanWest Global while Black renounces his Canadian citizenship and is made a member of the UK’s House of Lords (becoming Baron Black of Crossharbour with the UK Conservative Party), stepped down from running Hollinger, is sued a bunch of times, is charged with fraud, is then additionally charged with racketeering, money laundering and obstruction of justice, is found guilty, goes to jail, is deported back to Canada (despite not being a citizen), is pardoned by Donald Trump, gets Canadian citizenship back and, as of July of this year, had been kicked out of the House of Lords for not showing up.
In the middle of all this, Hollinger was selling all of its stuff to CanWest Global. One of those things was Southam, which CanWest Global just absorbed completely into its existing business. By 2010, the shell of what once was Southam and what was once Black’s National Post were spun off into a new company called Postmedia.
The Spec before, the Spec today
Before the release of historic Spec archives to the public last week, the biggest news from the paper was the closure of the paper’s physical office space on Pritchard Road in the Mount Albion area last October. And, before that, it was the move from their massive facility on Frid Street in Kirkendall in 2020.
Nordstar has been chopping away at its assets to ensure profitability for a while, which has impacted the quality of their product and job security for journalists.
We can actually see the impact of the changing news landscape in the size of the paper itself. Last week, during my brief wilderness sabbatical, I picked up a copy of the Spec for fireside reading. I was surprised by how small the paper was and how little actually came from the local reporters I’ve come to know both professionally, personally, and as a reader.
But now with the Spec’s online archive thrown open to all of us, we can actually document the changing size of the operation over time.
I decided to chart the size of an average mid-August edition of the Spec from 1884 (the beginning of the biggest block of Spec archives through the HPL) to today. I decided to only look at weekday papers, not weekend editions (since they tended to be larger), all between the dates of August 6 and 10.
The paper grew steadily through the early years, incorporating more and more information that people might want and all the news occurring both around the world and in our growing city.
This front-page column from Tuesday, August 8, 1905, for example, provided important information on what locals were doing, kind of like an Edwardian-era version of Facebook.
The paper continued to grow after Southam’s death. By the early 1960’s, the paper had unique stories and features, regular columns, labour news, crosswords, and the ever-present “women’s pages”, like in this edition from Thursday, August 8, 1963.
By the early 1990’s, the size of the paper began to shrink. It looks like there was a technical error on Thursday, August 8, 1991 that made that day’s paper a little smaller at 50 pages. But, but the next year, the paper had shrunk down to only 32 pages. Hard to blame that on computer error too.
The trend speaks to consistent growth into the 1980’s (we’ll just have to extrapolate through the gap in the 1970’s), followed by a levelling during the paper’s Hollinger-Sun-Star period, and a rather consistent decline since 2010. The year Nordstar took over, the paper dipped below 30 pages for the first time since 1949 and has not broken that ceiling since.
The number of pages alone isn’t an indication of a paper’s health or strength. But it is a good figure to keep in mind when examining everything else about the media industry in Canada. If you stop hiring journalists and can’t sell ad space, then you don’t need a lot of pages, do you?
Love it or hate it, the Spec is an important voice in our community. And now, you, my fellow Hamiltonian, have access to decades worth of the Spec’s archive. You can dive into our city’s history, search for family members or addresses or institutions. You can engage with our past, all from the comfort of your own home.
And that is definitely newsworthy.
Fordmandering
Four years into the Great Depression, Ontario’s political leaders faced a crisis. Unemployment was ticking up, the province was losing money, and it seemed like the financial downturn had no end in sight.
One year into the Depression, Premier Howard Ferguson (of Prohibition-ending fame) stepped down, naming George Henry as his replacement. Henry was the Minister of Highways and decided the entirety of his government’s response to the Depression would be…more highways. Needless to say, he was quite unpopular and this strategy did almost nothing to help the issue of mass unemployment and general discontent.
So, in the lead-up to the 1934 election, Henry decided he needed to find more savings somewhere. He decided the best course of action would be to slash the number of provincial representatives from 112 to 90, thinking this would cut down on costs and streamline the government. His bill to do so, An Act respecting representation of the People in the Legislative Assembly, received royal assent on April 18, 1933.
One year and two months later, Ontarians replaced Henry with a Liberal government led by Mitchell Hepburn. Most of the ridings he merged were won by Liberal candidates, defeating the Conservatives who battled among themselves for re-nomination. A good example of this was in the new riding of “Wentworth”, created from Hamilton West and Wentworth South, the two Conservative candidates were replaced with George Henry Bethune, the popular reeve of Glanbrook, who ran with the Liberals.
Ontario’s riding boundaries shifted periodically after that. Eight more members were added for the 1955 election, 10 more in 1963, another nine for the next election in 1967, eight more for 1975, and finally 5 more for 1985. That brought the number of seats in the Ontario legislature up to 130.
Then, in 1995, Ontarians elected Mike Harris and the Ontario Progressive Conservatives, who did everything they could to reduce the capacity of the government to do its job effectively, creating a strong case for selling pieces of it off to make rich people richer.
A core component of that was the Fewer Politicians Act, 1996, which forcibly redrew Ontario’s riding boundaries to align with the number of federal seats in the province. The leg was slimmed down from 130 to 103. Since then, we’ve mostly had the same number of provincial seats in Ontario as we have federal seats (except for one small change in 2017 that created the majority-Indigenous seat of Kiiwetinoong and the majority-Francophone seat of Mushkegowuk—James Bay in Ontario’s high north).
This has created a noticeable imbalance in our provincial government. In every other province and territory, their provincial representatives represent a much, much smaller number of constituents. The issues they deal with are more local and, therefore, they require more of a connection to their communities (if we believe the stated intent of first-past-the-post).
In Quebec, each of their MNA’s represents an average of 68,015 people. In Manitoba, their MLA’s represent around 23,547. Out on PEI, it’s around 5,700 people per rep. Up in Nunavut, the populations vary wildly because of their geography, but the average is 1,675 (for reference, Hamilton’s downtown Ward 2 has 37,075 residents and the central mountain’s Ward 7 has 48,565. The average MLA in Alberta represents the same number of people as Esther Pauls does locally).
But the number of residents per riding in Ontario is almost 115,000. That’s more than double the number of people that an MLA represents in BC.
But we just updated our federal ridings. The federal redistribution added just one seat to Ontario, but also took a seat from the north and one from Toronto to give them to the growing suburbs around the provincial capital. It isn’t enough to provide more effective representation to Ontarians, but it is a start.
Well, it could have been a start. A short while ago, Doug Ford announced that Ontario won’t be updating our electoral boundaries for the next election, which is increasingly looking like it will be in the spring of next year. Ford simultaneously said that the new federal boundaries were unfair and that he believes in us having as few politicians as possible, ignoring the fact that the new map would add just one more seat to the legislature.
The changing boundaries reworks some of the suburban Toronto ridings and northern seats that the Tories presently hold. The seat of Sault Ste. Marie (presently held by Ford’s PCs), for example, is folded into a larger riding called Sault Ste. Marie-Algoma, which would be much friendlier to the NDP. And the new map adds seats around Brampton and Milton that the Liberals will be campaigning hard to earn.
All of this makes it seem less like Ford is trying to keep government small and efficient and more like he’s trying to keep the government to himself. That would make this a case of Fordmandering, I guess.
The best way to address this would be to elect a government that wouldn’t just update our riding boundaries, but commit fully to meaningful electoral reform. Not endless studies and lopsided referendums, but a real pursuit of a truly fair electoral system.
But, at the very least, Ontarians deserve more effective representation. When one MPP is representing the same number of people that 6.5 Nova Scotia MLA’s or 53 reps in the NWT represent, it is hard for residents to see how government really is working for them.
For the people. For a lot of people.
Some Good Tweets
X/Twitter is a platform run by a transphobic, petty, far-right troll without any semblance of skill, ingenuity, or creativity beyond what he is able to steal from others and the platform is actively making humanity worse by platforming overt fascists and manipulating conversations with a trillion little AI bots launched from a million little dingy backrooms in squalid corners of countries presently oppressed by the very insecure authoritarians idolized by the site’s aforementioned pointlessly wealthy human disaster of an owner. Or at least it would be making humanity worse if the site didn’t feel like a dead mall every time you log in with the same 3 tweets from 45 minutes ago floating up to the top of your feed between advertisements for Christian workout gear or Trump assassination attempt merch.
And yet, there are still some who use it like they did back in the Good Ol’ Days™. Every so often, you find a tweet that just…slaps. Like finding a fifty dollar bill in a pile of manure.
Update: Canada’s third-cruelest far-right pundit had a complete meltdown over Mayor Chow being happy at Caribana, which led to wild accusations of anti-Semitism and an all-out assault on Global News. Deeply weird, terminally-online, unhinged behaviour.
Speaking of weird people and X/Twitter…
The Weird and the Goobers
Pierre Poilievre held a rally in Kirkland Lake on July 31 as part of a “whistle stop” tour through Ontario’s north. The ridings in that region are generally split between the NDP and the Conservatives, though with many high-profile NDP MPs like Carol Hughes and the always wonderful Charlie Angus announcing their retirement and some important riding boundary changes, there’s a belief in the Tory camp that they could sweep Ontario’s northern ridings as part of the anticipated “Blue Wave” in the next election.
It makes sense, then, that Poilievre primarily attacked NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, whom he has uncreatively branded “Sellout Singh”. Targeting the “NDP-Trudeau” coalition, Poilievre whipped up the working class crowd by proudly proclaiming he’ll make life easier for the wealthy by…something something carbon tax? I don’t even know anymore.
The whole thing was very boring and decidedly uncreative. Or, at least, it was supposed to be.
Luke LeBrun, the editor of the Broadbent Institute-affiliated outlet PressProgress, tweeted on Sunday that hundreds of accounts (mostly brand new and claiming to be from around the world) were, as of a few days ago, “still buzzing” about Poilievre’s rally in Kirkland Lake. Another X/Twitter account (@The280Times) posted screenshots of literally hundreds of accounts using almost the same language in reference to the rally.
This was obviously a really hackneyed attempt at using a botfarm to get Poilievre trending on X/Twitter. And it’s backfired so spectacularly, that the NDP is now calling on the Elections Commissioner to investigate.
That should be good news for Liberal and NDP campaign staff, because that means the Tories employ people who still think X/Twitter is relevant, meaning they’re permanently stuck in 2011. If you can’t beat that, what are you even doing?
Although, what the Liberals are doing seems to be just copying the new strategy of the Harris campaign in the US.
Kamala Harris’ campaign has adopted a new approach to dealing with the Trumpian Republican Party: just call them weird. Which makes sense because they are, unequivocally, weird.
This new strategy got a bump on Tuesday when the person who really kicked it off, Minnesota’s Governor Tim Walz, was named as Harris’ VP pick.
The Republican Party - from the leadership all the way down to the grassroots - is obsessed with an imagined reality so far beyond anything that’s even remotely rational, it is genuinely concerning. Secret blood drinking rituals in pizza parlours, billions dead from vaccines, alien technology that the military and liberals are keeping from the people. Weird, weird stuff.
Trump himself keeps rambling about Hannibal Lecter, doing “would you rathers” with himself about sharks and electrocution, and displaying…confusion…about mixed-race people. His running mate, JD Vance, is just one big Diet Mountain Dew-filled container of weirdness.
By coming out and calling today’s Republicans weird, the Democratic Party is signaling a change in tactics that basically boils down to the triumphant final moments in every Very Special Episode where a kid who has been bullied turns around and tells their bully that they don’t matter to them anymore. All the bully has ever wanted is a response, but, by simply ignoring them, you’ve taken away their power.
Jonesing for a response a time-honoured conservative tactic; set the agenda by being outrageous and/or extreme and make the left respond, giving you an automatic advantage. For decades, they did. Now, anyone left of centre is just rolling their eyes, looking into the camera, and smirking.
Vance has been trying to goad Democrats into fights on issues for a few days now. After he tried to generate a response by throwing out some nonsense transphobic stuff on a douchebro podcast, AOC just responded like this:
The strategy acknowledges that the Republicans under Trump are just bullies and, instead of using high-minded rhetoric about “threats to democracy” and “preserving our institutions”, the Democrats are responding by pointing out that the bullies are weird. It’s incredibly disarming.
As a researcher from Stanford told NBC, the whole tactic of the right has been “triggering the libs” which needs the “triggering” part for it to succeed. But “when you call someone weird, it’s a very different move. You’re not acting bothered. And so they don’t get the type of oxygen from that as they get from other responses.”5
Canada’s Liberals are, apparently, trying to snatch this tactic for use against the Tories.
When Poilievre tweeted a very, very boring meme about communism the same day as his “buzzing” Kirkland Lake rally, Trudeau responded with a screenshot of the tweet with the caption: “I think this guy needs to touch grass.”
Oh, so the Liberals have let their under-35 staffers have access to the social media accounts again. Cool.
They should have let those same staffers into Kingston and the Islands MP Mark Gerretsen’s account too, since he tried the “weird” line on Poilievre using a screenshot of a video in which the Tory leader talks about log houses. This attempt was…very uncool. He’s said so many odd things and you pick a still from a video about cabins? Missed the target by a mile there, Mark.
There’s just one problem with the “weird” line: the Conservative Party is not the Republican Party.
True, both parties are big tents, but they differ in dramatic ways. Notably, Poilievre is no Trump. He’s not interesting or compelling or humourous enough to be Trump. He’s very boring and very, very unlikable. He’s leading in the polls for the simple reason that everyone else is tanking. People aren’t enthralled by Poilievre who, as I’ve noted countless times, gives big “only kid wearing Dockers, sitting at the back of your poli sci seminar, who starts every sentence with umm actually” vibes. He’s a career politician from an Ottawa suburb, not some gold plated television superstar.
Poilievre has already transitioned the operation toward the Conservative Party’s natural bit: dull economic classical liberalism festooned with folksy faux-working-class baubles. It’s surface-level stuff that takes advantage of the current government’s unpopularity so they can ride a wave of discontentment to the hollowed-out shell of 24 Sussex, cut services to the very working class folks who sent them there, and ensure the state doesn’t get in the way of making rich people richer. All by-the-book basic stuff.
And that’s the thing. The populism they peddle is vellum thin. The pandering to anti-vaxxers and far-right folks living permanently in camper vans on the side of a highway in New Brunswick was just pandering. The slogans are boring, the policies are standard, the whole schtick isn’t new.
The Conservatives aren’t weird. They’re just…goobers.
Let me explain what I mean: a political goober is just a basic dork with few meaningful social skills beyond what they can muster while canvassing, an uninteresting fetish for Westminsterian Parliamentary procedure, and a belief that politics is some dumb game that can be won or lost with no consequences because they’re privileged enough to be insulated from the outcomes. You know, middle class kids raised on a steady diet of Air Farce and Lloyd Robertson and Heritage Minutes who broke off into different camps based on which politicians visited their high schools.
Every party has them. There are Tory goobers, Liberal goobers, NDP goobers. But the entire Conservative leadership is now just firmly in the goober camp, while the other parties have done their best to push them to the back of the campaign office.
Rather than being weird and dangerous, Canada’s Tories are just dorky and uninteresting. Sure, maybe some of their ranks are dangerous, like the religious extremists they keep letting run for them. The Republicans have that too. The Democrats have realized that they can point out that they’re also weird and get a better response than just talking about the threat they pose. You can’t spend decades undervaluing civic education and then expect people to respond to lofty appeals like they’re some Newsroom character.
But that might not work here. The Liberals won’t win the next election by being the Dollarama Democrats. You can’t just take an American political tactic and apply it to Canada like everything is the same here. You have to try something different.
Yes, the antidote to Trumpism is pointing out how weird it is. I’d argue that the antidote to Poilievre, King of the Goobers, isn’t to pretend he’s Trump. It’s to be interesting. Advance interesting policies. Go big. Swing for the fences. National housing program, electoral reform, high speed rail, something, anything that you can point to and say “look, we’re not just goobers, we’re doing things that matter.” Dress it up in a cool way, speak to people like they’re humans, ditch the Laurentian Elite technobabble, and focus on your strengths.
If the Liberals keep on with this cribbed “weird” bit, it won’t win them the election. It’ll just prove how goobery they are themselves.
Cool facts for cool people
Canadian media is having an absolute field day with the current US Presidential election. Living up to our reputation as a “LOOK AT ME” country, news outlets in Canada have been breathlessly inserting the collective “us” into the conversation by talking about how Harris once lived in Westmount, how Doug Ford knows Tim Walz, and how Walz is the governor of a state that is in close proximity to Canada. Really groundbreaking stuff. Unfortunately for Pierre Poilievre, former President Trump doesn’t seem to know about his existence, telling a far-right online streamer that Canada would be better “If they had a good conservative person — maybe they do, maybe they don't. I don't know.” Aww, that’s gotta hurt. Poor Pierre.
The results of a massive study of both residents and police officers in London, Ontario has yielded exactly the results we have come to expect. The report, done by both community members and researchers with the London Police Service found the experiences of non-white community members’ interactions with officers to be dramatically worse than those of their white neighbours. And white officers have claimed to be the victims of “reverse racism” with “diversity hiring” being more a priority than “effectiveness and quality of service”. This reminds us that racist attitudes can permeate an institution with such intensity that they poison all new members and make meaningful reform almost impossible. That’s a challenge to deal with in any instance.
A small town in Italy is hosting weekly “walks with the mayor”, not just as an effort at public outreach, but to help their chief magistrate get back in shape. Luciano Fregonese, the centrist mayor of Valdobbiadene in northern Italy’s prosecco-producing region, has blamed the “convivial obligations” of his job for his weight gain of over 100 lbs. He was spurred to action when an enterprising graffito wrote a slang word for “tubby” on a wall in the town. His weekly walks have become a town-wide affair, with over 200 people participating in a mid-July jaunt. The reason he is walking with his constituents? “I wouldn’t do it alone – it would be too boring and I am too lazy,” he told The Guardian. Community is good, not only for building connections between people, but helping folks stay in shape too!
References for this section include: Mark McNeil. “A look at Robert Reid Smiley who started The Spectator 178 years ago this week” Hamilton Spectator, July 15, 2024 - Link (Paywalled); Donald Robert Beer and Katharine Greenfield “SMILEY, ROBERT REID” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 8, 1985 - Link; Hereward Senior. “BULL, GEORGE PERKINS” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 7, 1988 - Link.
References for this section include: William Newbigging. “SOUTHAM, WILLIAM” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 16 - Link.
Thanks for the great history of the Spec and the kalidescope of characters that made it possible, capitalism created it, capitalism raped and plunderd it-- then threw itself on the mercy of the government to bail it out.
You Sewer issue on the ladies of the left was tremendous.
Keep up the good work,
Solidarity forever!
I haven't even finished reading this article (I will! I will!), because I got waylaid looking up the digitized Hamilton Spectator at HPL, and just generally introducing myself to their databases available online. It's too late in the evening to finish that process, and I still havent finished reading the article, but I did subscribe in the meantime.
Thanks to my friend Ilpo who tipped me off to your article in the first place.
- Robert Brosius