Hamilton city council recently declared a climate emergency and pledged to substantially reduce the city’s greenhouse gas emissions. While the declaration carries symbolic weight, the ambitious emission reduction targets can only be met if city council commits significant resources towards climate change measures. Climate activists and city councilors weigh in on what this will mean for the city.
On March 27, Hamilton city council finalized the decision to declare a climate emergency in the city of Hamilton.
The decision comes as a result of a report from the United Nations intergovernmental panel on climate change released in October 2018. The report found that, unless humanity limits global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, there will be a risk of long lasting and irreversible changes that will result in major loss of life.
The report found that limiting global warming to 1.5°C would mean reducing carbon dioxide emissions to 45 per cent of 2010 levels by 2030, and reaching net zero emissions by 2050.
“Limiting global warming to 1.5°C would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society,” stated the report.
Hamilton city council has joined a number other Canadian cities, including Kingston, Vancouver and Halifax, who have pledged to reduce emissions to meet these targets.
The declaration instructs the city manager to put together a multi departmental task force and present an emission reduction plan within 120 days.
According to the 2018 vital signs report released by the Hamilton community foundation, Hamilton has double the per capita GHG emissions compared to other greater Toronto and Hamilton area cities.
The 2015 community action plan set the goals of reducing GHG emissions by 20 per cent of 2006 levels by 2020, 50 per cent by 2030 and 80 per cent by 2050. The new goals, however, are more ambitious.
By declaring a climate emergency, the city aims to communicate the degree of risk to the public and demonstrate that the city is taking the issues seriously. During the board of health meeting, environment Hamilton climate campaign coordinator Ian Borsuk noted that it is important to show the public that the city understands the severity of the issue.
Additionally, a major goal of the declaration is to coordinate municipal action to develop a centralized strategy for dealing with climate change. This will take the form of a multi departmental task force across city departments.
“This isn’t something that can be left as a side project, this isn’t something that can be left as another file, this is something that needs to be part of what the city does every single day,” stated Borsuk during the presentation.
At the March 18 board of health meeting, presenters from environment Hamilton made suggestions to the city about ways to reduce emission levels by the target dates, noting that the city has already taken significant measures to reduce GHG emissions, but can do more.
One suggestion was to expand and improve public transit. Currently, Hamilton street rail ridership falls short of projections by about 10 per cent. The city is currently working towards a 10 year plan to improve HSR service, which includes improving service and adding capacity.
After industry, transportation is the largest emitter of greenhouse gas in Hamilton. According to Hamilton 350 coordinator Don McLean, transportation is one of the areas that the city can make the biggest difference. By extending bus service and making transit more affordable, McLean sees potential for large increases in ridership.
McLean also notes that Hamilton charges some of the lowest parking fees in Canada. The city owns some parking facilities, and has the ability to tax parking lots separately in order to drive pricing. In order to incentivize people to take public transit, McLean says, the parking rate has to be considerably higher than bus fare.
“Why switch to a bus if I can park downtown all day for $4?" he asked.
Another suggestion that environment Hamilton made to the board of health was to develop a “green standard” for new public and private buildings. By mandating energy use limits, the city can make a substantial difference in emissions.
Environment Hamilton executive director Lynda Lukasik also noted during the presentation that enhancing green infrastructure would help the city meet its emission targets. This includes measures such as bio soils, better managed storm water, and planting an urban forest.
Urban canopy currently sits at about 18 per cent, which is 12 per cent below the official target. Expanding the urban forest would help draw down emissions, reduce stormwater flows, and mediate heat effects.
In order to meet these goals, multiple environmental organizations across Hamilton have suggested that the city commits to applying a climate lens to all of its decisions. Similarly to the equity, diversity and inclusion lens equity, diversity and inclusion lens announced in March, the climate lens would evaluate all city actions in terms of their climate impact.
One of the main challenges for meeting the emission reduction targets is resource availability. During the board of health meeting, ward 3 councilor Nrinder Nann pointed out that achieving the commitments would likely involve retrofitting almost every building across Hamilton and switching to electric or hydrogen fuel cells for vehicles. Implementing these measures would require substantial investments of time and money.
Currently, the community climate change action plan receives provincial funding from the proceeds of the cap and trade program. However, the province scrapped the cap and trade program in October 2018 and has pulled funding from other environmental initiatives. Therefore funding for the emissions reduction plan would likely have to come from other sources.
Ward 4 councilor Sam Merulla noted that the challenge will become clear once staff reports the budget to city council within 120 days. If people hear that their taxes will increase, they may be resistant to implementing the plan.
However, Nann pointed out that even though dealing with climate change requires immediate spending, it will generate revenue in the long term. Additionally, inaction will incur high remedial costs.
Another challenge for meeting the emission reduction targets is industry. Industry accounts for 83 per cent of Hamilton's emissions, a large percentage of which comes from steel mills. However, steel mills are under provincial and federal jurisdiction, meaning that the city does not have direct control over their emissions.
Despite this, notes McLean, the city can work towards offsetting emissions through agricultural practices and reforestation.
Even if the city manages to reach the emission reduction targets in time, McLean worries that it will be too little, too late.
Climate change is a cumulative problem, meaning that all GHGs currently in the atmosphere will continue to contribute to warming, even if emissions stop.
“The kinds of things that are being talked about now are the kinds of things that should have been very actively implemented 30 years ago,” he stated. “ If you've got a cumulative problem then setting any date in the future as to when we should stop is too late.”
In order to make the climate change emergency more than a symbolic gesture, the city will have to dedicate significant resources and implement regular checkpoints to reduce emissions. The true weight of this declaration will become clear once the task force presents the emission reduction plan to city council. To achieve net zero emissions by 2050, the city has to implement unprecedented changes across all aspects of decision-making.
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In the lobby of L.R. Wilson Hall, human figures constructed of wood carving and found objects are fastened to a series of nine panels. At the bottom of the panels are phrases chronicling the thoughts that the artist, Persimmon Blackbridge, had while making the work. The figures come together to question the way in which society frames disability as a fracturing of life rather than an expected part of it.
Blackbridge’s Constructed Identities exhibit will be set up in L.R. Wilson Hall from Jan. 16 to Mar. 15. The exhibit is part of McMaster University’s Socrates Project and put on in partnership with Toronto disability arts gallery Tangled Art + Disability, for which Constructed Identities was the opening exhibit in 2015.
On Jan. 16, Blackbridge came to McMaster via video chat to have a conversation with Eliza Chandler. Chandler is an assistant professor at Ryerson University, founding Artistic Director of Tangled Art + Disability and a practicing disability artist and curator.
Blackbridge chronicled her disability art practice, which began in 1977. The Canadian sculptor, writer, curator, performer and editor told the story of her life and its entanglement with her art practice. She cites art as something that has helped her in dark spaces and in her daily life.
“I've been an artist for 48 years. I've had a psych diagnosis for 31 years. I've had a learning disability for 68 years. Had kidney disease for 15 years. Some of these things work better together than others,” said Blackbridge in the opening of her talk.
Blackbridge recalled starting art school not long after experiencing her first breakdown. She counts herself as fortunate to have found a community of artists and activists in art school who understood her experiences.
Blackbridge’s history of making disability and mad art has put her on the forefront of these movements, which are only now being publicly funded and programmed. She likes the idea of having this exhibit shown in a university because she sees universities as spaces where disability is beginning to be discussed in new ways.
The pieces in Constructed Identities bear similarity to figures she created for a preceding series that explored her diagnosis. It was in that series that she began cutting off the tops of the figures’ heads and she has continued doing that in this work.
“[I]t really represented how some of us have [multiple] diagnoses and every shrink you see gives you a new diagnosis and expects you to act in a different way depending on that… [I]t's [also]… a way of representing invisible disability… [S]ometimes we don't get to speak with all of our identities together, sometimes we get fragmented into different, different pieces,” explained Blackbridge.
The first phrase in Constructed Identities is “what she taught me.” “She” refers to Tempest Grace Gale, a singer, artist and Blackbridge’s friend who was murdered in 2009. Gale combined doll parts and collected junk in her art practice, items which Blackbridge inherited after her death. The series begins with a reference to her because she influenced all the pieces in the exhibit.
There are others in Blackbridge’s life who influenced the work. SD Holman insisted Blackbridge carve more in this series than she did in her previous one. The wings in panel 4 are a tribute to the death of Blackbridge’s friend, Catherine Holman, who passed away in a plane crash. The words, “soft stroke” refer to the small strokes that Blackbridge’s partner, Della McCready, has as a result of her mysterious brain disease. McCready also helped to install the exhibit.
Some of the figures in the exhibition were made since it first showed in 2015, all entitled “his bones.” These pieces are made with bones that once belonged to Geoffrey McMurchy, a disability artist and activist who died suddenly in 2015. McMurchy was a founder of Vancouver non-profit Kickstart Disability Arts and Culture, which supports and promotes artists with disabilities.
“He and I shared a junk aesthetic and often traded… in bits of trash to inspire each other's art work. I was sent beautiful bones he’d collected over the years and that formed the basis of these new pieces. His work, his style, his energy and his hot sly humour helped so many of us along the way,” Blackbridge said.
Blackbridge is not done with Constructed Identities. She still has McMurchy’s bones that she is working with. His death was also the catalyst she needed to create more seated figures, as she realizes that the floating figures could be perceived as standing.
Constructed Identities has been on tour across Ontario since it opened up at the Tangled Arts + Disability gallery in Toronto. Next year it will be going to Vancouver where Kickstart Disability Arts and Culture Society will showcase the exhibit as it continues to inspire audiences to think deeper about disability.
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In Dec. 2018, posters featuring the same font and design as McMaster University’s Brighter World campaign posters but instead reading “Whiter World” began popping up in various locations around campus.
According to the De Caire Off Campus Facebook page, the group behind the campaign is the Revolutionary Student Movement, an anti-capitalist student activist movement that claims to “support the peoples’ struggles against capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism in Canada and internationally.”
One poster reads “Farewell Patrick!” and accuses McMaster president Patrick Deane of promoting white supremacy and far-right groups, alleging that he was a “settler in apartheid South Africa.”
Another poster displays two photos of University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson, calling him ‘anti-trans’ and ‘fascist’ and mentioning the treatment of protesters during his appearance in March 2017 and the ensuing free speech debate. It also highlights the vandalism of McMaster’s pride crosswalks.
The third poster details McMaster director of parking and security service Glenn De Caire’s history of support for carding, alleging that police presence around campus has increased dramatically.
The campaign initially began in Dec. 2015 in response to McMaster’s hiring of De Caire. In spite of the student backlash that the hire ignited and the McMaster Students’ Union Student Representative Assembly’s vote to endorse De Caire’s removal, the university stood by him, and De Caire has remained in his role since.
“The Whiter World posters outline white supremacist activity that the McMaster administration has actively facilitated on campus, as well what we see on the rise in the city,” the De Caire Off Campus group said in a statement to The Silhouette. “The campaign emerged out of the increasingly urgent need to push back against far-right and white supremacist organizing.”
When asked for an interview, Gord Arbeau, the university’s director of communications, responded by condemning the Whiter World posters.
“Our approach when there is graffiti or there are acts of vandalism is to remove the material when it is found. That’s what has happened in the handful of times these leaflets have been discovered,” said Arbeau.
The group behind the Whiter World campaign is particularly concerned about the alleged ineffectiveness of student consultation efforts by the university and the MSU and the university’s free speech guidelines, which they say have not seriously considered the concerns of marginalized communities.
In November, the SRA passed a motion opposing the Ontario government’s free speech policy mandate. MSU president Ikram Farah has been vocal in her opposition of McMaster’s free speech guidelines.
On Nov. 14, Farah, Deane, and McMaster University associate vice president (Equity and Inclusion) Arig al Shaibah hosted an open town hall to consult students and discuss the free speech mandate.
“[Consultation efforts have been] nothing more than manipulation and exploitation, and we refuse to cooperate,” the De Caire Off Campus group said.
The De Caire Off Campus campaign has also condemned the allegedly bolstered police presence in and around McMaster.
They are also in opposition to the increase in bylaw officers in Westdale and Ainslie Wood, which city council voted in favour of in 2016 and in 2017.
Every school in the Hamilton area employs at least one ‘school resource officer,’ a special police officer stationed at that location to ensure security.
“Police presence brings with it, for so many marginalized people, a constant threat of violence,” said the De Caire Off Campus group.
They also accuse Hamilton’s ACTION police teams of targeting racialized and working class residents and creating a hostile environment for marginalized students.
It is unclear whether the De Caire Off Campus group has any further plans to protest the university or consult with the student union or university administration.
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By: Zachary Strong
Given the discussion surrounding McMaster’s protest guidelines, I’d like to offer some perspectives for today’s student activists to consider.
First, some biographical details for context. In 2011, I was the first person to publicly denounce offensive and crude cheers used by the engineering “Redsuits” group during Welcome Week. In 2012, I ran for the position of McMaster Engineering Society President on a diversity-focused platform. In 2013, following a meeting with concerned students from Feminist Alliance McMaster, I was the first person to voice a concern directly to the Engineering Society that LGBTQ+ engineering students lacked adequate peer support. I share these things not to boast of my activist credentials, but to assure readers that I am not a member of the “alt-right” or an enemy of human dignity.
That said, I would like to address the misguided claim that McMaster’s new guidelines infringe on activists’ ability to dissent. I ask students to consider what the university might become without policies banning de-platforming tactics as a form of protest.
Here’s the core issue — McMaster’s guidelines affirm that the right to free expression includes the right to not be de-platformed. To remove that right from others today is to sacrifice your own claim to that right in the future. For if you are free to disrupt events you find reprehensible, what’s stopping your own events from being similarly disrupted?
Without these guidelines, what would prevent secular humanists from disrupting gatherings of the Muslim Students Association, or anti-LGBTQ+ activists from crashing Mac Pride events? What would stop BDS activists from targeting pro-Israel gatherings, or Zionist activists from shutting down pro-Palestine events?
Without a universal policy of mutual non-disruption, free speech only becomes available to those capable of defending their platforms, physically or otherwise. Given that many activists on campus claim to be acting to prevent violence, any opposition to these guidelines seems counterintuitive.
It’s also worth mentioning that de-platforming, or otherwise preventing people from speaking their minds, has long been the hallmark of totalitarian regimes, and is only a recent addition to the modern activist’s toolkit.
Indeed, humanity’s most celebrated activists have employed creative, provocative, and non-confrontational methods that exposed the hypocrisy and tyranny of their oppressors. Consider the heroic Iranian women currently demonstrating against the compulsory hijab; they face prostitution charges for merely removing their hijab in public. Other paragons of creative and non-confrontational resistance include Rosa Parks, the suffragettes, Sir Thomas More, Oskar Schindler and Banksy.
Activists must realize that Jordan Peterson, who they de-platformed on this campus one year ago, is a master of non-confrontational subversion. The footage from last year’s event, where Peterson faced down a crowd of screaming undergraduates armed with glitter and air horns, showcased his calm and measured disposition. It made him look like a reasonable intellectual, and cast McMaster’s student activists as a mob of raving lunatics.
The publicity generated from last year’s protests has fuelled Peterson’s rise to stardom, making him one of the world’s most sought-after thinkers. Ironically, Peterson is beating social justice activists at their own game.
Students of McMaster University: silencing those with whom you disagree instead of exposing their shortcomings in a public debate is an unsustainable approach used exclusively by fools and tyrants. It has never worked, it is not currently working, and it will never work.
Furthermore, protest tactics that de-platform others have no place or purpose in an institution dedicated to the discovery, communication, and preservation of knowledge. Many activists that insist otherwise are well meaning, but misguided. However, some are merely clever thugs who use the prevention of violence as an excuse to perpetuate it.
The Silhouette welcomes letters to the editor in person at MUSC B110, or by email at thesil@thesil.ca.We reserve the right to edit, condense or reject letters.
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The pictures, names, and detailed resumes of students involved in the contentious Boycott, Divestments and Sanctions campaign in North America are now easily compiled for your convenience in a website called Canary Mission.
The purpose of Canary Mission is to identity individuals who engage in activities that are “anti-Freedom, anti-American, and anti-Semitic,” so that these “radicals” don’t become the “employees of tomorrow.” In a response to the backlash it has received, Canary Mission says that its real end goal is to act as a deterrent for students who spend their undergrads campaigning in favour of boycotting the state of Israel.
It’s not the public nature of the website that’s predominantly worrying. All of the people featured on the website have likely already made their opinion public through Facebook posts, tweets, videos, and rallies. Any employer can easily do a background check and uncover the same information. Public shaming is a tactic that takes place everywhere along the entire political spectrum. The social justice left has ended careers of those who have recklessly tweeted out offensive statements, and similar things have happened on our campus as well.
So while the public shaming aspect of it is concerning, it’s not what I find most frightening about the website. If the information they have compiled about each activist is false, they will most likely face legal action, and if it is not false, then all they have done is compile already available information.
However, the website is part of a disturbing pattern of deterring public speech in the West, that lies beyond the BDS movement and its critics.
It warns anyone who criticizes Israeli policies and occupations to think twice or find themselves featured on a website that will forever associate them with anti-semitism. In doing so, it silences those who question these ideas, by threatening to destroy their public image.
"The website is part of a disturbing pattern of deterring public speech in the West, that lies beyond the BDS movement and its critics."
Another instance of this sort of public speech being deterred through scare tactics happened recently in Canada. When the email exchange between a CBC reporter and a public relations staff for the Minister of Public Safety that suggested campaigning for BDS could be seen as a hate crime under Canadian law became public, the MSU quickly released a statement dismissing the claims as “egregious.”
Radical acts are vilified as being anti-Canadian and anti-American. A valued cultural identity is used to make the radical act appear as a foreign act that someone who is Western, in support of freedom, in support of these two countries, would never do. Whether this fits into the American or Canadian identity is decided by a select few people with a lot of power and a large audience to legitimize their words.
McMaster is no stranger to the complexity of the Israel-Palestine and BDS debate. People from both sides have complained about the animosity they have felt on campus throughout the discussion. These feelings are even more impactful in a university the size of McMaster, where you’ve probably met someone who strongly stands with either side. However, while we should be cautious that only non-violent, peaceful, and non-hateful activism takes place on our campus, knee-jerk reactions to activism as being hateful only further reinforces its initial goal to change the way we talk about an issue in the first place.
Deterring activism through a negative platform such as Canary Mission is a way of maintaining a specific political stance as the only correct stance, and erasing the other sides of the discourse from the public sphere. It cuts activism at its root by threatening the livelihood of potential activists.
The activism that BDS campaigners partake in is not criminal. This logic of deterring an act by threatening someone’s livelihood applies to crimes, not non-violent activism. That’s why it is left in the hands of the judicial system, not to the whims of the public and individuals that can possibly benefit from silencing certain viewpoints.
Given the lack of consensus among experts and world leaders on the Israel-Palestine conflict—I’m not suggesting that they are the epitome of moral and ethical guidance but rather a good sample of the complex nature of the conflict—it is illogical to deter activism and debate as if the right answer has already been found, and it is illogical to claim that anyone who disagrees needs to be punished publicly.
The website, along with the recent Canadian story, is an incredibly concerning method of control and silencing. As long as an activist group isn’t encouraging hatred and violence towards a group of people, why is their activism harmful, and who’s to say it is?
The ability of groups to silence with subtle threats of losing one’s place in the world, of having fewer career options and a bleak future ahead, is detrimental to the open nature of our academic environment. If we can’t have these discussions in the Western world, where we pride ourselves of being champions of freedom and human rights, then when can they happen?
The discussion isn’t about choosing one side over the other. I hope that even after the vote in favour of BDS at this year’s General Assembly, respectful discussion can continue at McMaster about international issues that, in one way or another, affect us all.
