By: Rob Hardy

This past autumn, huge buzz began to spread around Hamilton about the next big idea taking shape for the Hammer. Amazon, one of the largest players in a select circle of cool 21st century global tech brands, announced it was taking bids to open a second headquarters in North America, known as HQ2.

Such a chance would provide an immediate boost to any city lucky enough to land a deal as large and rare as this. Numerous municipalities across Canada and the United States began preparing how best to sell their cities.

As has been consistent with Hamilton’s ambitious stance this past decade, we decided to boldly take up the challenge and join more than 200 other bids vying for this golden opportunity.

We certainly should not count ourselves out of competition for larger ventures. Instead, we should be proud that such a diligent effort was made to lure this powerhouse into setting up shop here.

In order to keep Hamilton moving, we need to continue plugging away at increasing our business sector and working to gain a larger share of the investment capital that is attracted to the Golden Horseshoe, but usually goes to regions closer to Toronto’s nucleus than our own.

However, given the odds, we should be realistic enough to understand that winning this lottery is a huge long shot. Moreover, it is not just a numbers game. Some bids are inevitably much more attractive than others. It is likely that many other proposals ultimately have more convincing selling points.

Hamilton mayor Fred Eisenberger recently penned an open letter in the Hamilton Spectator where he referred to our city as “unstoppable”, and wrote passionately about his conviction that we are up to the challenge.

While I applaud his leadership and positivity, his sentiments seem a bit grandiose and too optimistic. It is not a question of our resolve, but of how much more unstoppable other competitors are. Is it helpful to believe that Hamilton is currently in the same league as some of the strongest players in this race?

One of the most fallacious claims in Eisenberger’s op-ed is that Hamilton happens to have everything Amazon is looking for. Actually, meeting their requirements is merely what is necessary to be considered — it is not something that somehow makes us standout from other serious contenders. It is also possible to find dubious ways of claiming that everything on a checklist has been satisfied. Yet in this case, we have not even done that.

For one thing, Hamilton is not a metropolitan area of over one million people. There are many cities that genuinely meet this criterion without attempting to pass off their additional surrounding regions as part of their actual metro population.

Even if we include Burlington in Halton Region, a city that is increasingly more of a satellite community for Toronto than Hamilton, we still do not even come close.

This is important, because Hamilton’s rather small downtown core, relative to Seattle or Toronto or San Francisco, lags far behind in terms of the number of businesses and services that are already established.

This brings us to another point relating to service. Hamilton also does not have any sort of rapid transit infrastructure set up — not even bus rapid transit.

What we do have are promises to have an LRT up and running by 2024, even though progress remains painstakingly slow, with an astounding number of setbacks and vague assurances. Any reasonable assessment would conclude that there is no way this project will be finished on time.

Meanwhile, are we are expecting a slew of forward-thinking millennials to be stuck with relying on the under-performing HSR to get to and from the Amazon campus every day?  The idea would actually be funny if it wasn’t for how truly miserable that would be for them.

Though I surely expect us to land in the rejection pile, this should not be a blow to our egos. After all, only one bid will be successful. More importantly, we should be proactive at asking ourselves how we can get closer to success in the future.

Are we really as good as we are blowing ourselves up to be, or should we realize that burgeoning art and restaurant scenes are merely typical of many other cities in a post-industrial economy and don’t really make us all that unique?

And though some hate to hear it, some level of gentrification needs to be further embraced to help Hamilton grow and evolve. Even as change causes us to lose a part of ourselves, it allows us to give birth to new identities. After all, having the guts to confidently bid for Amazon says that we are at least willing to overcome some of our trepidation as we explore the idea of new possibilities.

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On Sept. 27, city council approved spending as much as $500,000 on a bid to host Amazon’s second headquarters. The city will contribute $250,000 and private donors will contribute $250,000.

This was already a pipedream given competition such as Toronto, Vancouver and major US cities are able to spend $2 million on their bids and Hamilton fails to satisfy such Amazon preferences as “[m]etropolitan areas with more than one million people.” Since announcing their intentions, the city has also managed to demonstrate failure when it comes to other aspects of the bid.

Following the events of homecoming and the related street wide party on Dalewood Avenue, city council, with only ward 3 councillor Matthew Green and ward 15 councillor Judi Partridge opposing, passed a motion for additional bylaw officers be added to the Westdale and Ainsile Wood areas. These two neighbourhoods surround McMaster University.

This motion was forward by ward 1 councillor Aidan Johnson, who is the current representative of the boundries where the university and neighbouring areas are located. He argued that the program is necessary to improve the hygiene of the area and the enforcement of law in the area.

This knee-jerk reaction continues to pull at a few much larger issues. Instead of working with the student union for a non-punitive, educational and restorative approach to bylaw management, as proposed by vice president (Education) Ryan Deshpande and associate vice president of municipal affairs Stephanie Bertolo, the city simply decided that lip service to get students to pay more fines was better than actively working towards solutions.

With the issues about student retention in Hamilton coming up every so often, you would think the city would at least try to improve on this when this is a core part of the Amazon bid.

It explicitly states that Amazon has a preference for, “Urban or suburban locations with the potential to attract and retain strong technical talent,” and that, “A highly educated labor pool is critical and a strong university system is required.” Hamilton has demonstrated their intention to do neither.

Green stated that the bylaw management program unfairly targets students, sends a bad message for the city wanting to retain graduates and stigmatizes the population. He is right.

While I respect the fact that something had to be done, this particular effort and the way it was conducted disrespected the student body. Though our student representatives had strong enough points for city councillors to concede to, they were ultimately fruitless in changing the vote or even delaying it to find better solutions.

Hamilton had an opportunity to move forward in their efforts to retain students by at least pretending to care about the perspectives of the McMaster population, and could barely be bothered to try. The city has a significant way to go to even hope to compete for Amazon.

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