The City of Hamilton is relaunching myhamilton.ca after a nearly twenty-year hiatus.
Manager of Business and Support Services Sheila Duverney announced the plan on Tuesday during a presentation to the Accessibility Committee for Persons with Disabilities meeting.
“The City introduced a customer relationship management tool early last year and for the past year has been working on internally leveraging the tool including training for staff, understanding of features and functions of the tool, where to use the tool, etcetera,” Duverney stated. “This year and for the remainder of the project, we will be focusing on the public and the public’s ability to interact with the tool directly through the portal MyHamilton.ca.”
“We will be launching by the end of the year a number of different digital applications, forms, service requests that the public can complete, self-serve and process through the City.”
“If the public sees a problem… they can now report that to the City rather than calling or coming in person,” Duverney stated.
Duverney’s presentation to ACPD did not include any visuals or concepts for the new site.
MyHamilton.ca Shuttered At The Time When Other Cities Expanded Online Services
During the first fifteen years of widespread Internet access, the City of Hamilton was at the forefront of connectivity and service.
During the 1990s, Hamilton built the then-largest municipally owned fibre optic network. Every publicly funded school in Hamilton was connected to FibreWired Hamilton. The network serviced nearly every City of Hamilton facility and most large businesses.
Hamilton was one of the first cities with an outdoor public wifi network in its downtown core.
MyHamilton was an integrated site that provided easy access to municipal services, health care information, provincial and federal services, online licensing application and purchases, local events, the Hamilton Public Library, and more.
In late 2007, the City sold the fibre optic network for an undisclosed sum. Less then three years later, it was flipped to Rogers as part of a $425-million deal. [A decade later, the City of Hamilton found itself building a new municipal fibre optic network.]
The downtown public wifi network was shutdown a few years later, and MyHamilton.ca reverted to the Hamilton Public Library.
The first Hamilton.ca was launched with less information and fewer online services.
Hamilton.ca’s most recent re-launch in 2022 further decreased online services and information provided by the City.
Hamilton’s First Online “311” Coming
At the same time the City of Hamilton was backtracking from using the Internet, the proliferation of smartphones saw municipalities across North America adopt online “311” services.
Over 15 years later, Hamilton is on the verge of adopting 311.
“We are not planning on releasing anything till the end of the year,” Duverney stated in response to a request from ACPD members to review the planned portal.
Look back at myhamilton.ca courtesy of the Internet Archive.
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v. 1.0.0
Published: July 11, 2025
Last updated: July 11, 2025
Author: Joey Coleman
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