A selection of news that informs issues in Hamilton, municipal news from elsewhere, and other readings of interest.
Calgary Council Begins Debate For City-Wide Downzoning: Calgarians went to the polls in 2025 and voted for a new council with one of the key promises being to revoke a 2024 city-wide permissive zoning change. A marathon multi-day council meeting to downzone most of Calgary’s residential zones to only permit single-family detached began Monday.
Grimsby Councillor Docked 15 Days for Missing Meetings: Councillor missed more than a dozen meetings. The story of the council debate on this matter reflects how dysfunctional this council has become.
Snowbird City Councillors: A Thorold councillor hasn’t been in Thorold for months, because he’s “working” remotely from the Dominican Republic. Jim Handley is not the first municipal councillor to take advantage of post-COVID video-conference meetings to skip the inconvenience of living in Canada during the winter. Sudbury’s Bill Leduc spends winter in Florida.
It may seem straightforward to change the rules to require municipal councillors actually be in the municipality, but doing so could have the consequence of removing remote meeting privileges from others.
Councillors Need to Avoid ‘Naming and Shaming’ Staff: One of the constraints of being a municipal council is they cannot publicly call an incompetent staff incompetent. Serious, that’s a violation of codes of conduct and Integrity Commissioners are issuing substantial penalities for this kind of conduct. In East Gwillimbury a councillor well beyond a passing comment and took to social media to name and shame.
Municipal councillors need to keep those comments to closed session, and it is not the public they need to convince to fire staffers – it is the rest of Council, or depending, the Strong Mayor.
People are Showing Up to Public Meetings, and That’s The People’s Problem?: In Kamloops, the municipality is struggling with too many members of the public wishing to observe Council meetings.
Of note, the response from municipal staff is they are “not aware of a requirement that forces a City to move their facilities due to an increase in attendance.”
Production Details
v. 1.0.0
Published: March 24, 2026
Last updated: March 24, 2026
Author: Joey Coleman
Update Record
v. 1.0.0 original version