Ward 13 (Dundas and West Flamborough) City Council candidate John Mykytyshyn tells Hamilton Community News that if elected, he’ll “work tirelessly to have Dundas have its own ward again”. In TPR’s first issues analysis piece, I’ll look at what Mykytyshyn’s promise means, and what he’ll need to do to implement the promise. First some brief background. The Town of Dundas was incorporated in 1847, and for a time surpassed the economic activity of Hamilton, enabling the Town to create its own unique institutions (such as its own Carnegie Library which today is the Carnegie Gallery) and identity separate from City of Hamilton. Dundas was an independent Town until 2001 when it was involuntarily amalgamated into the new single-tier City of Hamilton. As part of amalgamation, Dundas (and other suburban municipalities) were granted disproportional representation on City Council as part of what was to be a short-term political compromise to alleviate concerns about lost identity and independence. Dundas was granted its own seat on Council as part of this temporary arrangement. For 15 years, successive Councils deferred addressing ward boundaries, leaving the temporary boundaries in place. In 2012, over 1000 residents signed a petition calling on Council to review ward boundaries. Council voted to begin a review in 2015. In April 2015, Council voted 8-8 to only receive a staff report on ward boundaries to begin the review. A tie vote fails, meaning the status quo prevails. In this instance, because Council had previously directed the review to occur, the review happened. In October 2016, Watson and Associates filed its ward boundary review report. Council rejected the report, and sent the consultants back to create ward boundaries suggested by the Council which attempted to maintain the status quo, including maintaining Dundas as its own ward. In September 2017, just weeks before an Ontario Municipal Board hearing into the Council approved wards, Council amended them further in a last second attempt to save their own ward proposal. The Council amended boundaries shaved off slivers of Ward 1’s Ainslie Wood neighbourhood to increase the population of Dundas. It was this attempt to increase the population of Ward 13 that was the crux of the OMB’s overturning Council’s amended wards. OMB Executive Chair Dr. Bruce Krushelnicki wrote the slicing of Ainslie Wood to add population to Dundas was “as an unreasonable error which divides a community of interest without apparent justification” because it divided a functional neighbourhood, and diluted the ability of the student and renter populations of those Ainslie Wood to obtain effective representation. Those groups would represent around 10% of the new Dundas ward, and have interests which would significantly differ from the core of Dundas, and due to their small proportion of the ward, they could be ignored by the Dundas Councillor. A reasonable person can ask: don’t the interests of Dundas significantly differ from those of rural Flamborough? So why would those two interests be grouped in one ward when the OMB ruled Dundas could not be combined with slivers of Ainslie Wood? The key difference is in the new Ward 13, neither interest can dominate the other. There is effectively no path to winning the new Ward 13 that does not involve serving the interests of both urban Dundas and rural Flamborough. A candidate cannot run a campaign focused solely on the narrow interests of one half of the Ward as neither group possesses enough votes on its own to dominate the ballot box and elected their “own” Councillor. There’s an argument to be made that having a Councillor who must weight various interests in the ward they represent makes for better governance for the City of Hamilton as they cannot solely take a narrower urban or rural view. Dundas lacks sufficient population to be its own ward in a 15-member Hamilton City Council. Representation by population is an important concept in electoral democracies, especially in local politics. What are acceptable disparities in ward populations? The OMB Hamilton wards decision tackled this in paragraphs 152 to 171, stating the new wards “strikes the appropriate balance. It achieves a high degree of population parity without slavishly adhering to some mathematical ideal”. Based upon the questions asked by Executive Chair Dr. Krushelnicki during the hearing, the meaning of this statement is that representation by population is not an absolute, that there can be some variation in ward population sizes, but those variations must be for reasons of practically or minor voter protection – it cannot be for political convenience or deal-making. The 2016 population of Dundas is 24,285, the total 2016 population of Hamilton is 536,930.