Wicked Little Letters
It is the season of love...letters. Lots and lots of letters. Hold the love.
Extra! Extra! Vox populi!
What could you say in under 250 words? Readers will know I have a difficult time staying below 2,500 words (the average newsletter is actually over 5,000…), so it would be a challenge for me, but there’s a lot one can convey with 250 simple words.
Shelley’s Ozymandias uses only 111 words to tell us a tale of looking upon Ramesses II’s works, ye Mighty, and despairing. Henley uses 8 fewer words for Invictus, reminding us that we are the masters of our fate, we are the captains of our souls.
It isn’t just poetry that packs a punch with brevity. A work by pioneering science fiction author H.G. Wells gets a strong message across using only a few words. I’m not referring to one of his novels, of course, but a 48-word letter sent to the Mayor of Cambridge after the author discovered he had accidentally nabbed the magistrate’s hat in 1938. Wells’s letter to the mayor read simply:
“I stole your hat. I like your hat. I shall keep your hat. Whenever I look inside it I shall think of you and your excellent sherry, excellent, dry, and of the town of Cambridge, which is older than the university. I take off your hat to you.”1
And, sometimes, a short message can both tell a story and add more mystery to a subject. In a classic case of “respond and bamboozle”, the famously shy author E.B. White used only 29 words to turn down a public appointment with the iconic letter:
Dear Mr. Adams,
Thanks for your letter inviting me to join the committee of the Arts and Sciences for Eisenhower.
I must decline, for secret reasons.
Sincerely,
E.B. White
A few short words can convey appreciation and anger, concern and congratulations, fear and frustration.
When those words are crafted into a “letter to the editor”, they become a once-vaunted contribution to the great democratic experiment. The humble letter to the editor is a way for the public to engage with news stories, respond to claims that appear in print, and dialogue with the movers and shakers in a democratic system.
An American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) briefing on writing successful letters to the editor makes the case that such submissions “are important advocacy goals” since they have the ability to:
“reach a large audience
are often monitored by elected officials
can bring up information not addressed in a news article
create an impression of widespread support for or opposition to an issue.”2
It is pertinent to note that the ACLU’s points about letters to the editor came from 2004. You know…pre-social media.
*pause for blissful reminiscence*
In the time since the explosion of online discourse and the decline of more traditional print media, some of the focus on letters to the editor has shifted toward things like comment sections for local newspapers and outlets or the responses news stories receive when they’re posted on Facebook or X/Twitter.
But the letters to the editor section is still there. Groups like the David Suzuki Foundation still advocate for their use and even have a helpful form on their website to help people to write letters that advocate for climate action.
Here in Hamilton, our last remaining paper, The Hamilton Spectator, prints 5 to 6 letters every weekday and more on the weekends, generally capping submissions at 250 words. Those letters can enflame passions, drive engagement, and concern members of the community. I know they’ve certainly bothered me on more than one occasion.
But what’s the deal with letters to the editor? Who is writing them? What are they saying? And are they actually contributing anything to our democracy anymore?
These are important questions to ask. Ours is a society built on the notion that journalism acts as a kind of “fourth estate”, constituting a load-bearing pillar of our democracy. But this is also a moment in which journalism is changing in a profound and intense way. Market forces, hungry for profit and uncaring about repercussions, have shuddered newspapers across Canada, including here in our own community.
So what can letters to the editor tell us about the state of journalism and civic engagement in our community? Let’s take a look at letters to the editor and jump into a case study from our own local paper, The Spec, to see if we can’t better understand media and democracy in the present moment.
“Enlighten and serve the Publick”
Modern letters to the editor can trace their lineage back to the letter-style political pamphleteering of theorists during the Age of Enlightenment. Men (always and exhaustingly men) of letters and means would use printing press technology to widely disperse their thoughts and ideas to a larger audience than could otherwise be reached by handwriting a bunch of notes or standing on a street corner and hollering.
It was in the Americas that newspapers really took off, given more leeway to print complicated and controversial pieces than would have been allowed in Europe at the time. The Americans quickly took to newspapers, as they offered a chance for budding revolutionaries to spread word of their rebellious intent to the larger population of colonists. Letters began appearing in newspapers around the 1720’s and soon became an important part of the overall editorial content of the press. Early papers encouraged letter writing to both signal that they had engaged readers and to help contextualize, with personal observations, the stories that appeared in print. A rather famous call for letter to the editor came from the Boston Weekly Rehearsal in the 1730’s, which asked:
“‘all Gentlemen of Leisure and Capacity … to write anything of a political nature, that tends to enlighten and serve the Publick, to communicate their productions, provided they are not overlong.”3
Not overlong? Oh boy, that counts me out.
Newspapers quickly became an important part of the democratic process, with each major political movement backing their own press to ensure their position was covered in the way they pleased. Letters helped reinforce the political stances of the papers and created the appearance of a larger group of core supporters for their preferred party. As McCluskey and Hmielowski note in a 2012 paper: “Reader letters were common throughout the partisan press era of the 18th and 19th centuries, typically reflecting the political stance of the newspaper.”4 While much of the research on this is American in focus, Canada’s partisan press was an integral part of our politics well into the 1940’s.
In the case of Hamilton, the city at one point had three major papers: the Spectator, the Herald, and the Times. The Spec was the first, originally published in 1846 as The Hamilton Spectator and Journal of Commerce, which should give you an indication as to the paper’s inclinations. By 1877, it had been sold off to William Southam, who cemented the paper’s status as the unofficial organ of the local Conservative Party.
The Times was a less-polished competitor, which started in 1859. Officially tied to the Liberal Party, the Times sought to chart a less adversarial course than fellow-Liberal paper, the Herald, which appeared in 1889. Indeed, by the early 1900’s, each paper was sniping at each other in the most Edwardian of ways, with the Times writing during the municipal election of 1907: “The Hamilton Herald, the organ of [Liberal] Ald. Stewart, works up a fine brand of simulated indignation…The Times does not sympathize with that course.”5 Unfortunately, the Times couldn’t keep up with…umm…them…and folded in 1920. The Herald stuck it out for another 16 years before closing during the Great Depression. While the weekly Labor News (the organ of the Independent Labour Party) joined the mix in 1912 and persisted until the 1950’s, the Spec became the undisputed paper-of-record for the city, cheering on Conservative Party (and, later, Progressive Conservative Party) candidates and encouraging their readers to do the same.
During the city’s 1943 municipal election, in which the popular former provincial politician, Sam Lawrence, was making his first bid for mayor against the Spec and Tory-backed Donald Clarke, the paper came out swinging against Lawrence and his Co-operative Commonwealth Front (CCF) slate of municipal candidates. They ran front page editorials comparing the CCF to the Nazis, to the Soviets, to a small group of special interest radicals, and to all manner of godless heathens. So intense was their hatred of the CCF that they endorsed a group of candidates which, awkwardly, included actual Communist Party members Harry Hunter and Helen Anderson.6
To bolster their campaign against the CCF, the paper ran letters speculating wildly about the kind of socialist hellscape Hamilton would become if Lawrence was elected mayor. One letter was written in the style of a poem, published under the title “A Question of Diet”. Here are a few lines:
The Liberal cooks have grown careless of late,
And Conservative chefs are uncertain.
What the dinner is marred by some dirt on the plate,
It is time that such cooks got the curtain.
So he turned to the Socialists amateur chef
For a menu of manna and nectar
An alphabet salad of C, C, and F -
Not passed by the pure foods inspector…
A word to the wise is accounted enough:
Beware the CCF salad!
Don’t cram your poor stomach with the venomous stuff
When the bread and the meat are still valid!7
Cool.
Like most letters of the day, this one was printed without the author’s actual name.
In fact, many early letters to the editor were printed under pen-names. The idea that a writer’s full name appear in print whether they liked or not seemed like an attack on freedom of speech. The Spec, even into the 1950’s, published this blurb in the letters to the editor section:
The Spectator prints letters over pen-names only when the writers give their names and addresses. These are held in strict confidence. Anonymous letters are not printed. Writers are asked to be as brief as possible. All letters may be condensed by us.8
That meant that letters like one from 1946 that included the lines: “It is beyond me how any woman can prefer to work…the maternal instinct in some is nil, but all women were meant to be mothers,” could be published under the pen-name “A Contented Homemaker and Mother”.9
But, by the 1970’s, pen-name letters had fallen out of fashion. While the Spec still printed the occasional letter under “Name Withheld”, they had mostly switched to publishing letters with the writer’s full name.
Journalism had changed by that point. A new crop of journalists had entered the business and re-imagined newspapers - not as the stale partisan organs of their parent’s generation, but as active contributors to the scientific, objective, and modern politics of the era. This was reflected in surveys of the time; a 1979 study of weekly papers in the United States found that editors were expanding local coverage (including adding more letters), but over 40% refused to leverage the paper’s editorial weight to endorse candidates.10 It was a paper’s job to inform, not to politic.
Letters to the editor kept up with the times and became an important aspect of understanding local politics, social issues, and concerns. In fact, it seemed like the concerns of letter writers were actually encouraging the editors of papers to consider issues with more intensity. A multi-year study of letters to the editor in the United States with an emphasis on those writers who shared concerns about crime found that a paper’s focus could actually be predicted by the content of letters. The authors noted that “in the absence of a more valid indicator, newspaper journalists may tend to take cues about reader concerns from letters to the editor.”11 People had concerns about crime, local journalists focused more intensely on crime, leading more people to read about crime. It was a feedback loop of fear.
Letters to the editor had sway. They could change how editors and journalists saw issues. They could influence political campaigns. They could shift how people thought of politicians.
A provincial politician in British Columbia certainly believed that was the case. In 1996, Paul Reitsma, the popular former mayor of Port Alberni on Vancouver Island was elected to the BC legislature as a member of their Liberal Party (actually a centre-right party, now called BC United). Only two years into his stint as an MLA, in 1998, Reitsma was staring down the barrel of a recall petition - one of the first in Canadian history - because he had submitted a controversial letter to the local Parksville-Qualicum Beach Morning Sun. This letter to the editor attacked NDP member of the legislature, Jan Pullinger, accusing her of lying, slandering Reitsma, and cursing at a constituent. One problem: the letter was signed “Warren Betanko”. After the paper’s editor questioned Reitsma in interviews and had the letter (which was handwritten) examined by a forensic graphologist, Reitsma said that he had written “the letter for a friend and did not realize the friend intended to submit it to the newspaper,” before finally admitting “Warren Betanko” was made-up entirely.12 The incident ruined his political career and Reitsma resigned in disgrace.
By the mid-2000’s, significant energy had shifted to providing space for online comments on the new websites being thrown up by legacy news organizations. This had the effect of reverting to a pre-1970’s style of interacting with the news, as users no longer needed to provide their full name and address to share their opinions.
But the letter to the editor has 300 years of history behind it. It can change the focus of a newspaper, present a compelling argument to support an idea, or ruin a political career. The tangibility of a letter - being able to hold something physical in your hands, which may be one of the few pieces of writing a person will have professionally published in their life - still carries an appeal and a mystique.
The questions we turn to now try to understand for whom letters to the editor have that appeal in our local context. Who is writing in to the Spec, what are they writing about, and are their contributions positively helping our local democracy?
A case study: Letters to the Spec
To answer these questions, I decided to take a look at two month’s worth of letters to the editor that appeared in the print versions of the Hamilton Spectator from December 1, 2023 to January 31, 2024.
Turns out December is a weird time to be looking at letters to the editor, as the paper did not publish any letters in print on December 11 or from December 26 to 28. So two months of Spec print editions yielded 46 days worth of letters. In that time, the paper published 310 letters for an average of a little more than 6 a day. The most letters published in a single day during that time was January 24, when a full page - A11 - of 14 letters was published, half of which were anti-bike lane and anti-council. More on that in a minute.
A keen scientific mind will note that what I’m actually doing is looking at a snapshot in time. If I wanted to make larger claims about the paper’s editorial direction or about the letter writers themselves, I’d need to take a broader or more random sample. Instead, I’m looking at something close to the present moment to understand what letters to the editor of today tell us about the state of our local democracy right now.
For each letter, I took down a few key pieces of information: the author’s name, their location (if any), an estimate of their sex based on their name, the topic of the letter, the letter’s “genre”, the specific issue, and the number of words excluding the author’s name and any headline information.
A quick note on my classification system: I know judging a person’s sex or gender identity based on their name is inherently problematic. There are a whole host of reasons why researchers should be very careful when collecting that kind of data, not the least of which is the threat of diminishing the contributions and identities of trans and non-binary people. Indeed, the only reliable data on sex and gender identity is collected when a person is asked and provides a response. But when we’re looking at larger data sets, we’re estimating trends for a specific population - in this case, Spec letter writers. This isn’t an attempt to ignore or dismiss anyone; rather, I present this speculative data to show a general trend using what limited tools I have right now.
On the other categories: contributors to The Spec are often identified by their location. Generally speaking, this is either “Hamilton” or one of the formerly independent suburban communities now part of the larger city, though some letters come from further flung locales like Simcoe or Brant County. Writers are also identified by the name they provide when submitting the letter. In only two instances during the two months I analyzed, the name of an organization was used instead of a single author’s name (not counting when a letter was submitted by the “Office of Matthew Green”, which I just attributed to MP Green).
A letter’s “genre” is adapted from a classification system defined by Rasmus Nielsen in a 2010 paper in the journal Journalism entitled “Participation through letters to the editor: Circulation, considerations, and genres in the letters institution”. In the paper, Nielsen sorts one month’s worth of letters from the Danish newspaper Politiken into three categories: criticism, appeal, and storytelling. Nielsen’s presentation of the genres is interesting; storytelling adds context, criticism pushes back against something that was published, and appeal seeks to “take part in an issue.”13 I amended these definitions to better suit the kinds of letters I read in the Spec. Rather than Nielsen’s original definitions, I define the genres as such:
Storytelling: these are letters that reflect on a topic, provide a personal anecdote, thank a columnist or fellow letter writer for their thoughts, or add context to a printed story
Appeal: these are “calls to action” that implore readers or policymakers to act on a specific issue with tangible, realistic, and coherent actions in mind
Criticism: these are letters that critique a policy, politician, or movement that has been covered in an article, letter, comment piece or advertisement, as well as criticisms of the paper itself for action or inaction on a specific topic.
I ran into some cases where letters contained aspects of two and, sometimes, all three genres. An example is a letter that reflects on a documentary the writer watched about the late architect Raymond Moriyama. The author provides context, but also sneaks in some critiques:
Once a student at Westdale, [Moriyama]…designed Ontario Science Centre and, after watching the documentary, you understand how he put his heart and soul into his structures, taking into account the human aspect and the natural elements related to his projects…
Another of his buildings, the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre, is to be destroyed in Toronto to make room for a condo with lovely views over Don Valley. Think of the money to be made out of the sales there for Ford's developer friends.14
Many “criticism” letters had a slight nod to “appeal”, but were heavier on the former. Spending 12 lines complaining about “those clowns at city hall” and 1 line saying “they should do something about homelessness” means that the letter is primarily focused on critique.
So I had to use my best judgement to determine the genre of the letter based on the context. I did that for each letter, based on the focus and the presentation of the opinions.
Classifying the topics was harder, but I whittled it down to 20 broad topics that cover everything from American politics to utilities. While classifying general topics was hard, looking at the specific focus of a letter was even harder. My notes are a jumble for these, ranging from the very specific (1 instance of “pro-indoor cat”) to the very vague (2 instances of “sarcastic”). But the top 5 specific issues (excluding letters thanking/ critiquing a columnist directly or simply providing a memory about a subject) were:
Anti-public spending (17)
Anti-Doug Ford (16)
General calls to do something about homelessness (12)
Tie between Anti-bike lane and Anti-city bureaucracy (9)
Three way tie between Anti-encampment eviction, Anti-Pierre Poilievre, and Pro-climate action (6)
The length of letters was interesting. Letters ranged from just 16 words to a limit-busting 450 words. Only 6 letters exceeded the Spec’s 250-word limit, with the 450 word submission being the largest by a significant margin. Both the average and median number of words in a published letter was 121. For context, everything from “So I had to use…” to “providing a memory about a subject) were:” in the above two paragraphs is 121 words. Clever, non?
But I wanted to measure something else. Something that I had thought about for a long, long time. I wanted to measure why some of the letters made me mad. I wanted to understand the tone of the letters. And doing so required venturing into the lab and experimenting with the dreaded…
Artificial Intelligence
*thunder clap, sounds of bats, panicked horse whinnying, spooky, scary*
“Sentiment analysis” is a tool I’ve seen used by colleagues in academia who want to understand the tone and forcefulness of a piece of media without subjecting it to their personal biases.
To effectively analyze the tone of each letter in the Spec, I used a well-regarded Sentiment Analysis tool - Google’s Natural Language API, which considers two components of a piece it analyzes: overall sentiment and forcefulness.
A letter’s overall sentiment is how positive or negative it is on a scale from -1 (the most negative) to +1 (the most positive). Google’s Natural Language API scans each sentence looking for both the kinds of words used and how those words are used, gives each sentence a score, and then provides a total overall score for the whole letter’s perceived sentiment.
Here’s an example. This January 3 letter on the retirement of Steve Milton, one of the Spec’s sports reporters, was sent in by a Dundas resident with a penchant for sending in rather positive thoughts about what the paper is doing. The letter reads:
Steve, we will miss you greatly. Your great insight into the CFL and Tiger-Cat background will be remembered the most. Happy retirement. To Torstar management, please appoint someone to cover the Hamilton sports scene.15
Four short sentences. Only 34 words. Two positive sentences, one neutral, one slightly critical of the paper’s chain. Google’s Natural Language API gives that letter a score of 0.4, meaning it is in the middle of the positive range. A pretty fair assessment, if I do say so myself.
A few letters were placed at the exact middle of the scale at 0. For our purposes, they need to be to one side or the other, even if just slightly. So I took a look at how the API ranked each sentence and, if it seemed like more sentences were positive, it was given a score of 0.01. If more sentences were negative, it got a -0.01. Sometimes, letters were ranked as neutral because they really were neutral. Other times, the negative and positive were very present, but balanced each other to such a degree that the API ranked them as 0. But there was never a case where a letter received a score of 0 for every sentence. Basically = there are no True Neutrals in letter writing.
A letter’s forcefulness is how intense the feeling behind the letter appears to be, based on the words and phrases used. A slightly negative phrase would be something like: “I disagree with this policy.” The sentence signals opposition, but does so in a very neutral way. A very negative phrase would be something like “It is disgusting and shocking that those utterly inept morons in government have failed miserably again.” There’s no mistaking the rage behind those words. The adjectives, the verbosity, the flamboyance of it all hunny!
Google’s Natural Language API takes into consideration the length of the piece, the structure of the sentences, and what it understands as the emotion behind the words. It isn’t perfect, but it does compare what it is fed with a massive database of past and current examples. That said, the documentation actually says users should employ their own judgement when analyzing results. There was a wide range in the forcefulness scores for the Spec letters I analyzed, so I created segments based on percentiles to get the following scale: 0 = softly, 1 = slightly, 2 = strongly, 3 = intensely.
These numbers are added together to provide us with a letter’s overall score.
Here’s an example: a January 3 letter recounting a visit to the hospital prior to the Christmas holidays.
On Dec. 16…I was rushed to Juravinski with a broken hip. It took three days before I had surgery and another four days before I was discharged. I was seen to by numerous doctors, nurses, PSWs, PTs, porters, those who bring meals and other staff, all of whom I can say unequivocally performed their jobs with professionalism and, more importantly, kindness and patience, despite the pressures of short staffing. From the bottom of my heart I thank all of you for being there and doing the job you do under such difficult conditions.16
The first little bit of the letter is harrowing and has the potential to be critical, but the second half leans into praise for the healthcare workers who helped the writer, while also acknowledging the short staffing in the hospital. It has ups, it has downs, but it is overall a pleasant letter.
Google’s API ranked this letter 2.1. The “2” means the forcefulness is “strong” while the “.1” means the overall sentiment is leaning positive. Therefore, a 2.1 means the letter is “strongly neutral-to-positive”. A reader would see that letter, appreciate the strength of the writer’s appeal, and come away feeling mostly happy, if not slightly upset about the challenges our healthcare system faces.
So here are the average daily sentiment results for the two months analyzed:
It is a lot of negative.
For the total time analyzed, the overall average sentiment was -1.06. The daily average was only positive on 6 of the 46 days. On 12 of the days analyzed, there were 0 letters that scored positively.
Published letters to the editor skew negative, which makes sense considering the imbalance in the “genre” of letters printed. Of the 310 letters, 76.5% were of the “criticism” genre, followed by 13.5% in the “storytelling” category, with the remaining 10% in the “appeal” column.
It appears that people I’ve classified as “likely male-identified” contributed 60% of letters and had an average score of -1.07, which is slightly less positive than “likely female-identified” who made up just over 37% of printed submissions with an average score of -1.04.
Around 55% of letters were attributed to people from Hamilton, followed by over 8% from Burlington, just over 7% from Ancaster, 6.5% from Dundas, and 5.5% from Stoney Creek. There were smaller numbers from Binbrook, Hannon, Waterdown, and elsewhere. Letters from Burlington were the most positive, with an average score of -0.4, while Ancaster letters were some of the lowest at -1.27.
Now here’s the kicker: there were 310 letters published, but only 231 distinct authors. A full 21% of letters in the two month period I looked at were written by repeat authors. There was only one day in my analysis - January 11 - where a repeat author’s letter did not appear in print.
There were 9 authors published at least four times each in that two month period. I call these people “superscribes”.
I was curious about these “superscribes”, so I took a look at all their published letters in the Spec from January 1, 2023 to January 31, 2024. In 13 months, these 9 writers contributed a combined 160 letters to the local paper, with one particularly active user being published 29 times. That’s over twice a month and a staggering seven times in October, 2023. And these numbers don’t even include letters the “superscribes” sent to the now-defunct Metroland suburban papers and Caledonia’s Sachem.
The “superscribes” have a lower overall letter sentiment for the time analyzed as well; while the average for all letters is -1.06, the “superscribes” have an overall rank of -1.33. Only one of the writers has a positive score while one has a strikingly low average sentiment rank of -2.64, putting them in the “strongly negative” camp.
Discussion
Okay, that was all the quantitative stuff. Let’s chat about the qualitative aspect here.
I have a better understanding as to why Spec letters have me feeling icky most of the time. They’re generally negative in nature and lean heavily into criticism, rather than provide unique context or advocate for a coherent policy.
Even when letter writers make reference to social issues, it seems like it is done as a diversionary tactic, rather than as a genuine concern.
Which brings me to the overwhelming obsession among letter writers during the two months I looked at: homelessness. The word appears in letters 61 times over those 46 days. For some letter writers, every proposed penny of spending could be countered with some variation of “how dare they spend this money when there’s homelessness”.
Vacant Unit Tax? Not when people are homeless. Two-way streets? Not when people are homeless. LRT? Not when people are homeless. Bike lanes? Not when people are homeless. Snow plowing and shade trees and washroom repairs and a bus barn and paying council staff? Not when people are homeless. One letter went so far as to say we should force councillors and the mayor to live in a tent with no more than a few dollars to spend on food in some kind of macabre cosplay performance.
But when it comes to actual policy, there’s little to be found in these letters. Indeed, the issue of homelessness is presented as a reason to not do anything. Letter writers seem to be telling anyone who will listen “no, Billy, you can’t watch TV until you solve the homelessness problem”, when, in reality, they’re watching the game and don’t want Billy to get to the TV at all.
A pre-Christmas letter ends with this rebuke:
How many articles in The Spec does it take to make the city hall people really realize that there is a homeless crisis in Hamilton and to take positive action in alleviating the situation? Is there no compassion within those walls?!17
Which raises the second obsession among letter writers: blaming those clowns at city hall for every possible thing under the sun. Every action taken by staff - from parking enforcement officers to city planners, from contractors fixing pipes to building inspectors, from the city manager to transportation engineers - is personally the fault of every city councillor and the mayor.
When the Spec covered the eviction of those living in RVs on city property at the Barton/Tiffany site who were told to move by city bylaw officers, a letter writer had this to say:
Shame on you for forcing people to constantly shuffle around because they can’t stay where they find themselves. Where are they supposed to go? And within days of Christmas. For shame city council.18
For shame city council.
And here’s one of our biggest problems. There’s a vocal segment of the population who see councillors and the mayor as some otherworldly hybrid between an all-powerful feudal lord who have the power to solve every problem we face on a day-to-day basis AND an entirely subservient customer service representative who has failed so spectacularly in their job that a manager must be sought post haste! The mayor is a monarch and a store clerk, wearing a crown and apron simultaneously, ready and willing to respond to every demand from the public by snapping their fingers and ordering the legions of minions at their command to do their biding.
To them, the Spectator’s letters to the editor section is a daily Yelp review that is delivered to the door of subscribers and available beside the Taylor Swift magazines at the cash register at Shopper’s. It is a forum to express discontent at things they imagine council has done, will do, or has failed to do. It is a customer complaint card, a user experience survey, a chamber into which they can rage at the staggering incompetency around them.
Ask not what you can do for your community, ask why your community hasn’t given you all to which you are entitled with speed and a smile at a fraction of the anticipated cost.
Thus, we find ourselves with a letters to the editor section where 1 in 5 submissions are from repeat writers and superscribes who habitually comment on every issue with noticeably more negativity than others. Where over 3/4 of letters are critical, predominantly of any public investment at any time for any reason, using a visible but incredibly complicated social issue as a cover for their calls for inaction. Where a predominantly male-identified cohort of writers chastise municipal leaders for a host of real or imagined failings, expecting their cashier king to decree that the people’s will be done.
In service of democracy
The question remains: is this helping our democracy?
There are some excellent and well-reasoned letters in the Spec. Very passionate and caring people use the venue to present coherent and meaningful ideas. Some letters remind readers that provincial downloading is the reason for increased local taxes. Some letters vigourously defend public broadcasting. Some letters counter the anti-bike lane hysteria that gripped the paper (anti-bike lane letters had an average sentiment score of -1.94) with intelligent, reasoned, and fact-based appeals for us to invest in active transportation (resulting in an average sentiment score for pro-bike lane letters of +0.8).
A notably inspiring letter on January 15 makes the case for us to be more understanding of immigrants: “When hunger, conflicts and climate change combine, the numbers of migrants will grow and thousands more will then be seen in cities where they’ve never been. Today, our aim must be to pave a way for empathy, to build more highways of hope, to be ready to help the displaced cope with equity, equality and dignity.”19
There is good in those pages. Not just letters I agree with, but letters that lean into positivity, constructive engaged citizenship, and fact-based proposals for improving our city and our society.
But to find those diamonds of truth, we have to mine through the rocks of entitlement and outrage.
When criticism outweighs positive appeal 8:1, it becomes a slog to remain involved. Are the entitled a vocal majority or has the aforementioned “letters to the editor feedback loop” been activated in this city? Do some letter writers complain, leading what little coverage remains to focus on those complaints, resulting in more letters of complaint?
After spending weeks collecting and analyzing this data, I have come to the conclusion that the letters to the editor section is both reflective of and contributing to the overall challenges our democracy faces in the present moment.
We have given people the tools to make their voices heard, but without the tools needed to research a topic beforehand. We have created intricate systems of government intended to provide accountability that have become inaccessible and confusing to even the most knowledgeable of laypeople. We have a citizenry that has been coddled by right-wing politicians who have created an expectation that government should be in the customer service business, rather than the legislating business.
Which honestly works well for them. I mean, that’s how our province has operated for the past 6 years. The Ford Family did not invent this style of politics, but they have perfected how it works in the present moment. It was Rob Ford who kept his cellphone on all night so he could take out people’s trash at 2:00 AM, which totally made up for the homophobia, racism, and enthusiasm for privatizing municipal services (which were conveniently sold to his campaign donors). Doug Ford can tell us he’s “For the People” by cutting licence fees and beer taxes and pointing at Bonnie Crombie while repeating “more taxes, folks!” without needing to campaign on any of the uncomfortable things he really intends to do, like repeatedly manipulating local democracy, carving up the Greenbelt, making deals with unstable multinationals to provide essential services, and making developers obscenely wealthy at the expense of everyone else.
My little anti-Ford rant (which would rank -1.01 on the sentiment scale) aside, the issue is this: the Spec’s letters to the editor section provides some insight into what a small segment of the population thinks, but that segment is not necessarily representative of the wider population. The opinions presented are angrier and more critical than what would be conducive to creating a healthy and robust space for wider democratic engagement. There is an overwhelming focus on fiscal restraint, using the ongoing crisis of housing and poor funding for those experiencing homelessness as a convenient cover to justify support for a brutal campaign of austerity. Reflected in these letters is an expectation that government provide convenient customer service and that councillors are to blame for the misfortunes we see or anticipate.
Rather than helping our democracy by providing a forum in which people can contribute in a meaningful way, the letters to the editor section both reflects the division in our society and reinforces it by habitually printing the opinions of a small number of superscribes and enthusiastically presenting consistently negative sentiments, driving away those eager and engaged readers keen to participate in constructive citizenship.
My last opinion piece in the Spec was on the topic of anger. I wrote:
Anger is everywhere right now. It lingers around major issues like a vengeful spirit, disrupting our lives, ruining debates, and making our world uglier and more hostile…
We must pursue a politics of radical happiness that recognizes anger prevents us from pursuing long-term solutions to our fears. We must be happy warriors, rejecting messages of hate and anger and, instead, pursuing positive change at every turn…
Anger does not build great societies. Only love, compassion, and happiness can do that. So let us reject anger and be the happy warriors our community needs.20
Anger is valid. Anger is normal. Anger is okay. But when one is exposed to anger every day, shouting at them from the pages of the last in-print newspaper in the city, egging on other letter writers, creating a spiral of negativity and animosity, it goes from being ‘a normal and understandable human reaction to frustrating circumstances’ to ‘a hinderance to widespread participation and finding constructive solutions’.
Anger doesn’t build great societies. And it doesn’t make for healthy democracies. And if letters to the editor are an essential part of our great democratic experiment, then the ones in print recently indicate that we have work to do to get well again.
A concerning omission
I’ve been following the dark money right-wing populist group “Concerned Hamiltonians” for some time now. Every week since they started back up with their Saturday advertisements in the Spec, I’ve been keeping a running total - both via graphics in the newsletter and on the concernedhamiltonians.ca website I created - of the number of ads they’ve run and the amount they’ve spent on them as a way to keep the group mildly accountable.
But while going through back issues of the Spec for my piece on letters to the editor, I realized I miscounted. Turns out, on December 23, they had two ads in the paper, not just one. The first, on A5, was a rant about the HWDSB and their changes to the trustee communication policy, while the second (hidden away on A17) was a complaint about council overtaxing people despite sitting on cash reserves. Kinda shreds their “fiscal conservative” cred when they’re asking us to drain our savings, but whatever.
Adding that extra ad to the total means the group is one more ad away from breaking $30,000 in spending. I cannot stress how unacceptable it is for a partisan, ideologically-motivated group to run ads attacking council decisions without being accountable to the public. The Right to Life people advertise in the paper, but at least we know who is behind that. “Concerned Hamiltonians” keeps lurking in the shadows, throwing money around like it doesn’t matter. That’s still not okay.
Democratic theory
Ah, the Hamilton Police Services Board.
It can sometimes be hard to remember that democracy in Canada is functionally incomplete. Sure, we get to vote, we have the ability to interact with our elected officials, and we can write letters to the editor (there’s a theme!). But Canada is still a fragmented democracy where rights and freedoms can be denied or suspended if they are deemed to be too inconvenient.
Canada’s head of state is the hereditary British monarch. One of the country’s two federal legislative bodies - the Senate - is appointed entirely by the Prime Minister and is generally unaccountable to the people they proport to represent. The Notwithstanding Clause of the Charter allows provinces to ignore fundamental human rights whenever they please. Municipalities can be dissolved, merged, changed, and created, mayoral powers can be changed, and local voting systems can be altered, all through simple acts of provincial legislatures without the consent of the municipality’s residents or elected officials.
And, when it comes to the police, there’s no accountability at all. The Police Services Board, while claiming to be a board that oversees the civilian management of a branch of the public service, acts as a carefully managed outlet for frustration that is organized in such a way that allows rabble rousers to blow off steam, but never in a way that actually impacts the unrestrained actions of the force.
Revise and resubmit
On January 30, city council sent the proposed 2024 Hamilton Police Service (HPS) budget back to the Hamilton Police Services Board (PSB) to see if they could find reasonable cuts to the $213 million ask from the police. The day before the PSB meeting, board members Cameron Kroetsch and Anjali Menezes announced a number of motions that would try to bring the budget down, including deferring the hiring of non-officer staff, phasing out some management positions, disbanding the $37,300 ceremonial unit and the nearly $915,000 mounted unit, cancelling a proposed $100,000 website redesign, $118,100 that was to be spent on advertising, and their nearly $20,000 bill for cable television.21 The motions targeted a number of non-officer-related costs that could actually have saved a significant amount of money when added together. Kroetsch and Menezes were in the unenviable position of receiving no help from their fellow board members and facing the prospect of being smeared by the right-wing as anti-police agitators if they dared propose any cuts too deep. But they came up with meaningful savings and put them forward to the board.
Then came Tuesday - the day of the meeting. Rather than hold the meeting in council chambers, the PSB met in a smaller space, Room 216, which is hidden away near council’s offices. Initial reports were that the meeting would be closed to the public. That decision was reversed and then un-reversed after a delay with the board’s livestream pushed the meeting’s start time back 30 minutes.
After the chair, Pat Mandy, called the meeting to order, she asked for members to declare a conflict of interest. Councillor Esther Pauls used the opportunity to make a speech about a recent ruling from the city’s new integrity commissioner that cleared her of any conflicts that may arise from the fact that her son is a police officer with the HPS. The commissioner said that, despite the close familial relation, there’s no conflict and Pauls can vote on the police budget.
But then Mandy took the floor to indicate that Councillor Kroetsch would be in violation of the board’s conflict of interest policy if he voted on any of the motions before the PSB because he was the mover of the council motion to send the budget back for review. Aside from not being a conflict of interest at all, Mandy neglected to point out that Mayor Horwath voted in favour of that motion.
Let’s cut the technical stuff for a minute and do the very un-Canadian thing of saying the quiet part out loud: any reasonable person watching these meetings can infer that Mandy dislikes Kroetsch. Far from stopping at personal disagreements, Mandy uses the privileges of the chair to single Kroetsch out for critique and imagined rule violations. Worse still, Mandy’s insinuations at the February 13 meeting indicate there’s a very real possibility that efforts will be made to either neutralize Kroetsch or remove him from the PSB.
The PSB is the closest thing Hamilton has to a partisan municipal body. There’s an identifiable majority block on the PSB that uses the privileges afforded it to silence, intimidate, and sideline the identifiable minority block.
More letters
The agenda included correspondence from residents about the proposed budget, submitted in the form of letters to the PSB.
I counted the letters that were part of the initial agenda packet posted online. Of 136 letters, 104 (76.5%) either opposed an increase or urged the board to re-examine the budget. Of the remaining letters, 31 (22.8%) were supportive of the budget increase - with some actually asking for more of an increase - and 1 was a lengthy discussion of speed traps without taking any position on the budget.
The letters included quite a few suggestions for how to address the budget issue, though few were within the realm of possibility for a host of factors…namely that many of the suggestions were either illegal or not possible without the coordination of every level of government. Once again, these letters serve to show that two things are simultaneously true: that there are so many incredibly engaged and thoughtful Hamiltonians willing to participate in the democratic process in what ways our system allows and that far too many people do not have even a basic grasp of civics, government, or politics, and make wild assumptions based on the angriest, simplest, ugliest things they hear on the news or social media.
Some letters went into graphic detail about crime stories residents have heard through the grapevine. Some letters called for money from policing to be “instead put into nursing” or supports for people living with mental illness, showing that there’s a belief among some in the community that all taxes are just thrown into one big pot and pulled out when needed. Some letters expressed right-wing talking points about “evil” public sector unions or how Hamilton is as crime-ridden as Detroit (despite roughly similar populations, in 2022, Hamilton had 5 homicides while Detroit had 309). Some - like the letter from the International Village BIA - used the public forum to ask for more policing, which isn’t something the PSB can provide.
I did want to single out one letter in particular that caught my eye. The delegate submitted their full name without redaction, indicating a willingness to have these thoughts be a matter of public record. As such, I will use their name when referring to this letter. Submitted by Dr. Jo-Ann Savoie, the letter presents a strong defence of the police budget (with the exception of recommending the defunding of the HPS’s Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion office), but also personally attacks one of the board members. Parts of the letter read:
“I have been following closely the circus of having a clown sitting on the board who only motions or second [sic] items if it is against the service…I wonder why the Mayor would allow this appointment in the first place, knowing his defunding leftist views on policing only serve as a disruption to an otherwise functioning board…
If a cost savings must be found to appease Mr. Kroetsch, he should bring forth where he thinks it should come from. I see no heavy lifting on his behalf, just smug, condescending remarks…Why bring up this motion other than to score points with the fringe majority?”22
This letter is a one-two punch: a jab in defence of the budget (EDI excluded) and a hard right hook for Cameron Kroetsch’s politics and person. There’s something notably harsh in calling Ward 2’s democratically elected councillor a “defunding leftist” and a “clown”.
And, frankly, that kind of attack is unbecoming of Dr. Savoie, who failed to note in her letter that she retired from a 27-year career with the HPS only weeks ago. Other retired officers disclosed this in their letters, but not Savoie. Though, I should not have been surprised to read a letter like that, as Dr. Savoie, who spent 13 years on the Sunshine List, spends quite a bit of time posting and re-posting fringe right-wing content on social media.
Goliath 1, David 0
Armed with the support of 76.5% of those delegating through letters, Kroetsch and Menezes moved their motions and were resoundingly defeated on all of them. In every instance it was only Kroetsch and Menezes for the motions, and the PC Block + Mandy & Horwath against.
A little past the half-way point in the meeting, a hastily drafted motion was brought to the floor by Vice Chair Bennink which, in procedural terms, told council to “pound sand” and pass the budget the PSB asked for in the first place. While it is a minor point, Bennink’s late-in-the-game motion was accepted no problem, but when Menezes tried to do the same thing at a previous meeting, her attempt was shot down.
At the end of the meeting, Bennink was allowed over 10 minutes (well beyond the allotted time for board members) to read into the public record select quotes from the most pro-police budget increase letters the PSB received. Following this, the PC Block + Mandy & Horwath voted to send the exact same budget right back to council, complete with money for cable TV, advertising, and a website rebrand.
Pauls called Kroetsch and Menezes’s motions “micro-managing”. Mayor Horwath said that too much scrutiny on the HPS sends the message that “we don't trust the people of the Hamilton Police Service.”23 There was no effort on the part of the PSB to engage meaningfully with the 104 letters from residents urging fiscal restraint or respect the request of council to reexamine the budget in a meaningful way.
Let’s be clear here: the HPS’s requested budget was always going to be implemented, whether we wanted it or not. Even if council rejected the budget (which they didn’t), it would have gone to the Ontario Civilian Police Commission, which never contradicts a PSB. The decision is baked-in. That’s not something that was ever going be stopped once it got to that point.
There was a chance that Tuesday’s special meeting of the board could have changed things before it got to that point. Board members could have recognized the discomfort in the community with the proposed increase to the HPS budget, respected the wishes of council, and taken a hard look at what could be cut or put off for later. The mayor could have shown leadership by bringing forward motions to that effect. Councillor Pauls, with her newly-bestowed “Get Out Of Conflict of Interest Free” card, could have shown the same enthusiasm toward reduced police spending as she proports to have toward reducing spending in every other department.
But that chance could have only come about if Hamilton’s elected officials who serve on the PSB took this process seriously. Of the three elected members of the PSB, two looked at the political map and realized one path would be challenging and one path would be easy. One path would require them to push back against the management of the HPS and work collaboratively to find savings. One path required them to do nothing, to sit back, and adhere to the party line. Councillor Pauls and Mayor Horwath chose the easy path.
And so we’re back to square one. The fiscal hawks get to caw about the need for lower taxes despite handing the HPS a blank cheque while the progressives, who made a meaningful attempt at finding savings using the democratic process and in line with a majority of those corresponding with the PSB, go back to being both “tax and spend clowns” and “radical fringe minority anti-cop defund socialists”.
Worse still, only two years into the job, Hamilton’s “NDP” mayor has proven with clarity and certainty, that she’s all-too-happy to side with the fiscal hawks and council’s right wing. Instead of asking tough questions and being the hopeful social democratic leader many hoped, she’s casting votes in a way that makes it seem like she wants to do little more than, in the words of one letter writer, “score points with the fringe majority.”
Cool facts for cool people
As we continue to grapple with the ongoing housing crisis, more and more voices are speaking up in favour of social housing. Professor Shauna MacKinnon from the University of Winnipeg’s recent piece in The Conversation is an excellent and compelling case for more federal investment in housing. Read that here!
Next week is going to be a big one for Independent Hamilton Centre MPP Sarah Jama. With a newly formed Independent Constituency Association up-and-running, Jama has presented four main priorities going forward. One of her first actions will be to table motions calling on the province to boost Ontario Works and Ontario Disability Support Program rates, followed by a motion on air-quality monitoring. Then, on February 22, the first judicial review into Jama’s censure will happen, which could pave the way for the restoration of Hamilton Centre’s voice in the provincial legislature.
McCluskey, M., & Hmielowski, J. “Opinion expression during social conflict: Comparing online reader comments and letters to the editor.” Journalism, 13 (3), 2012, pgs. 303-319.
Ibid.
“Monday Is the Day” Hamilton Spectator, December 4, 1943, pg. 7.
“A Question of Diet” Hamilton Spectator, November 29, 1943, pg. 6.
Hamilton Spectator, November 30, 1954, pg. 6.
A Contented Homemaker and Mother, “Letters to the editor: Claims They Want To Keep Up With The Jones” Hamilton Spectator, December 10, 1946, pg. 6.
Hynds, Ernest C., and Charles H. Martin. “How Non-Daily Editors Describe Status and Function of Editorial Pages.” Journalism Quarterly 56 (2), 1979, pgs. 318–23.
Pritchard, David, and Dan Berkowitz. “How Readers' Letters May Influence Editors and News Emphasis: A Content Analysis of 10 Newspapers, 1948-1978.” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 68 (3), 1991, pgs. 388 - 395.
“Liberal MLA admits writing phoney letter” Canadian Press, April 1, 1998.
Nielsen, Rasmus K. “Participation through Letters to the Editor: Circulation, Considerations, and Genres in the Letters Institution.” Journalism, 11 (1), 2010, pgs. 21–35.
Hough, Irene. “Letters to the editor: A study in contrasts” Hamilton Spectator, January 11, 2024 - Link (Paywalled)
Kruzins, Al. “Letters to the editor: Farewell, Steve Milton” Hamilton Spectator, January 3, 2024 - Link (Paywalled)
Cicero, Maria “Letters to the editor: Hospital staff kind, patient” Hamilton Spectator, January 3, 2024 - Link (Paywalled)
Guay, Carole Ann. “Letters to the editor: Where's the compassion?” Hamilton Spectator, December 23, 2023 - Link (Paywalled)
Johnson, Lisa “Letters to the editor: City's move shameful” Hamilton Spectator, December 22, 2023 - Link (Paywalled)
Hicks, Robert. “Letters to the editor: Standing ready to help” Hamilton Spectator, January 15, 2024 - Link (Paywalled)
Erl, Chris. “Anger cannot build society, it can only tear down” Hamilton Spectator, September 21, 2023 - Link (Paywalled)
Peesker, Saira. “2 Hamilton police board members say the policing budget could be cut by $5M — here's how” CBC Hamilton, February 12, 2024 - Link
The letters math is fantastic. I cancelled my spec subscription recently in no small part bc I felt like I was reading a group chat with Scott Radley and a handful of angry ppl who really despised cyclists.
Dude, you are so cool..