This fall’s city elections give Hamiltonians a chance to select their representatives for the next four-year term. While there are no shortage of controversies affecting the present and future of Hamilton, a new book argues that issues have little to do with who gets elected.
The Rise of Cities examines municipal politics of Canadian cities especially in the three largest. Two of those – Montreal and Vancouver – have long featured local municipal parties who run slates of candidates. Toronto doesn’t and Bill Freeman contends this has resulted in easily re-elected incumbents and a council without vision dominated by older white conservative males.
“The lack of political parties helps incumbents because it makes it very difficult for voters to understand what candidates stand for,” Freeman argues. “Ward contests are almost entirely devoid of city-wide issues. Incumbent councillors take credit for routine improvements, like fixing sidewalks or installing new streetlights, even though these improvements are part of the city’s normal upgrading of infrastructure. Because voters don’t know what the politicians stand for, many will cast their vote for a name they recognize on the ballot.”
Freeman has authored multiple books including several on Hamilton’s social, political and labour history. The latter include: A People’s History; Their Town; Local 1005; Glory Days; and most recently The New Urban Agenda. He was called as a witness last fall in the OMB hearings on the city’s ward boundaries.
Freeman’s argument on local political parties seems to be supported by the experiences in Montreal and Vancouver where the fortunes of incumbent ward councillors are frequently determined by the fate of their municipal political party. For example Montreal’s elections last November saw the winning party claim 15 additional council seats including the mayoralty.
Similarly several incumbents were defeated in the most recent Vancouver elections as a result of shifting support for local parties. In contrast, only one incumbent councillor was defeated among Toronto’s 44 council seats. In that city, like in Hamilton, pressure for change usually ends up focused on just the mayor’s single seat.
In The Rise of Cities, Freeman writes the chapter on Toronto municipal politics but says the situation across Ontario is much the same. “The lack of parties has meant that individual candidates rarely talk about city-wide issues during elections,” he argues. “It is ward politics that gets a politician elected to local government, not inspired ideas for progressive change.”
He’s also critical of the large size of municipal wards and the Ontario amalgamation process in the 1990s that drastically cut the number of local politicians.
“The reduction in the number of councillors meant that citizens had less access to the politicians who represented them,” Freeman writes. With the result that it became much “more difficult for citizens to control or influence their councillors, and it [left] the city open to control by corporate interests who had money and power.”
In Hamilton, amalgamation in 2000 replaced 59 representatives with just 16. All the suburban municipalities lost their local councils of five to seven members each and in most cases ended up with just one representative at the new city council table, while councillors for the old city were cut in half.
In the Fewer Municipal Politicians Act pushed through by the Conservative provincial government of the day the number of Hamilton residents per representative nearly quadrupled – from less than 8500 to just over 30,000. That has shifted further in the same less democratic direction with last month’s re-drawing of the city’s ward boundaries that ignored population growth. As a result each local politician chosen in this fall’s election will represent an average of 35,000 people.