'Crime has just blown out of control here': The businessman challenging Hamilton's NDP mayor
This fall’s Ontario municipal elections are shaping up as the most compelling in years, thanks to stark left-right battles.
Much of the conversation has centred around Toronto, where Councillor Brad Bradford is challenging NDP stalwart Olivia Chow over what he says is a city in quick decline. But TVO’s Steve Paikin has declared that Hamilton, Ontario’s fifth biggest city, may have the province’s best race.
Like in Toronto, the incumbent is a prominent New Democrat – former provincial leader Andrea Horwath – who is facing accusations of allowing rampant crime, homelessness, waste and mismanagement. Among her challengers is Rob Cooper, a longtime business executive who was just elected to city council last fall in a byelection.
Cooper, a former progressive conservative party stalwart, was born and raised in Hamilton. He has held senior roles across some of the country’s biggest institutions, including Ernst & Young, Stelco, TD Bank, Manulife, McMaster University and Ontario’s Workplace Safety and Insurance Board — experience he argues is directly relevant to a city hall wrestling with its own budget pressures and infrastructure backlog.
He stresses that every line item in the municipal budget should be tied to an outcome residents can see and feel in their daily lives. Dave Gordon interviews him for the National Post:
What convinced you to run as mayor?
I was elected in a by-election in September, and the platform I ran on was tackling violent crime, repairing infrastructure, addressing tax increases, capping the rate of inflation, and confronting the housing crisis.
Got to city hall, and the moment that it all became real to me I realized that because of strong mayor powers, I couldn’t achieve these goals as a councillor.
The city has no audited statements since 2022. The tax increase process we went through this year, there’s no benchmarks, there’s no peer data. And I’ve never seen an organization run like this before. So it became obvious to me that in order for us to make the change, I would have to run for mayor.
Where has Mayor Horvath fallen short?
We have homelessness at a level we’ve never seen.
One of the commercial property owners told me he lost three floors of tenants because their people don’t want to be in downtown Hamilton anymore.
The city spent $170 million in the last year on housing and homelessness. There are now 2,100 homeless, but in 2022 was 545 [in a single night snapshot]. What we have to do is recognize the fact that this isn’t about housing; it’s all mental health and drug addiction, and we need to get these people help, and off the streets.
For the amount of money that we spent on that whole file, Indwell [a non-profit organization that creates supportive housing communities] said they could solve homelessness in all of Ontario. They do it better than we’re doing it.
So we’re throwing money against problems, solving nothing.
Crime has just blown out of control here, where we set records for shootings. It’s a very dangerous place right now.
We just saw a 16-year-old shot by a 14-year-old in a mall store the other day. And in my neighbourhood, which is one of the sleepier wards in Hamilton, my neighbour was shot dead five years ago. A lady was getting off a bus and got killed by a gun shooting, driving down the street.
Mayor’s got wrong the fact that just because you’re spending, doesn’t mean you’re getting outcomes. And we’ve clearly seen that on the books for the next three years, another 27% tax increase.
Our taxes are 30% higher than Burlington, but Burlington’s property values are 30% more. If you start looking at the amount that we’re paying in taxes and match that against the incomes of Hamilton, which is a lot lower than Burlington, for example, we can’t keep coming back to the taxpayers of Hamilton, having to fill out a blank cheque for these things.
One of your platforms was to expand public transportation, and with about a quarter-million new residents expected by 2051, how would you deal with traffic swell?
Roads infrastructure is a real issue in Hamilton.
If it takes you longer to get to where you’re going, we’re not going to attract businesses. People are finding it challenging to just get around Hamilton, in general.
There are pockets of suburbs that are not reached by public transit.
We’ve got two of the worst roads in Hamilton, Aberdeen Avenue and Barton Street East, ranked the worst roads in the province by CAA. Potholes, poor maintenance, heavy traffic.
There is a lot of congestion, because the road system hasn’t been adequately adjusted for the number of people in Hamilton.
So the Lincoln Alexander Expressway, two lanes – bottlenecks in the morning, bottlenecks in the evening. What we should be talking about is the other lane that we need, on the Red Hill Valley Parkway and the Lincoln Alexander Expressway.
Another opportunity is to get people connected on the GO bus or transit lines, to and from the mountain, and suburbs, or Toronto. We have Mohawk College as a Metrolinx station with virtually no service.
Since 2008 the Light Rail Transit is stuck in endless delays, with timelines announced but no movement on anything. Doug Ford has said he’s going to pay for every penny of it. I want Doug to deliver the best LRT he can deliver for Hamilton. Let’s get it done, and heal the community.
You announced your mayoral campaign after just five months on council, a seat you won by just 87 votes. Why should voters look to you to manage a $2 billion municipal budget, and a city of 600,000, when you’ve barely had any time as a legislator?
So my background is such that I rescue organizations.
I’ve gone in and helped multi-billion-dollar organizations with strategies that have been challenged with execution.
And, so whether raising half a billion dollars in 30 days, helping them through their bankruptcy situation, the pensions funding, the organization, helping them get out of a bunch of products that really had no markets, or even McMaster University, where I came in and helped them with their business park.
I have experience running multi-billion-dollar corporations. Now, if you look at the mayor, Andrew Horvath has never run a multi-billion-dollar corporation. She’s run a relatively small political party, never governed before she took office.
When you look at the race, I am the most experienced person. I’m five months in; it’s going to be over a year by time the election comes around. It’s really giving me a sense of what’s going on in the city, and what we need to change.
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