My 5-Pillar Platform:
Pillar 1: Fiscal Accountability & The “Truth in Budgeting” Platform
As residents, we’re cut off from understanding how our tax dollars are actually spent. With property taxes climbing more than 20% in the last four years, Ward 3 families simply can’t afford another cycle of runway tax hikes. Budgeting at City Hall has become an exercise in complexity rather than clarity, leading to a profound loss of fiscal control. If elected, I would launch the Truth in Budgeting initiative to restore rigorous, analytical oversight to the council table and bring private-sector data standards to Hamilton’s finances.
We’ll implement a public-facing, interactive financial dashboard that tracks municipal spending, vendor contracts, project milestones, macro financial trends, and localized bylaw enforcement data in real time. This ensures you can see exactly where your property tax dollars are going, mapped out directly by postal code, project code and department.
True fiscal responsibility also means ending systemic procurement and management failures. The Barton-Tiffany outdoor shelter project is a glaring example, ballooning more than 300 percent over budget and costing taxpayers an extra 5.1 million dollars due to a total lack of non-competitive oversight, unverified vendors, and unvetted code compliance that required the entire site to be rewired. I’ll mandate strict, public adherence to Auditor General reports, ensuring past purchasing failures are corrected and never repeated. We’ll also freeze consultant waste by launching an In-Source First framework, reallocating outsourcing dollars to upskill and train our existing municipal staff.
We must also repair the damage done to our international financial standing. Because City Hall failed to submit routine, provincially mandated financial reports following the cyberattack, S&P Global Ratings stripped Hamilton of its top-tier AAA credit rating, downgrading us to AA+. This preventable failure in risk management and disclosure drives up borrowing costs, wasting millions in extra interest that you pay for. By opening the books, enforcing hard financial reporting deadlines, and eliminating structural deficits, we’ll restore our financial management standing and regain our AAA credit rating.
Pillar 2: Neighbourhood Revitalization and Renewal
A vibrant Ward 3 requires safe public spaces, well-maintained properties, and a shared sense of community dignity. For too long, a few bad apples have left derelict buildings to decay. This neglect is especially clear along our long-decaying King, Main, and Barton street commercial corridors, where hundreds of derelict buildings sit vacant. This blight drags down surrounding property values, creates severe safety hazards, and strips away the character of our streets. We aren’t just cleaning up properties; we’re reclaiming them.
I’ll establish a strict 90-Day Dangerous Building Action Plan to fast-track enforcement and force the remediation of non-compliant structures. By breaking the gridlock on abandoned lots and chronic zombie properties along our major commercial veins, we create the perfect opportunity to build “missing middle” housing, such as duplexes, triplexes, and laneway homes, right in our existing neighbourhoods. This strategy turns financial liabilities into community assets, creating new homes for young families, restoring neighbourhood dignity, and growing our local commercial tax base so the burden stops shifting onto everyday taxpayers.
Finally, we’ll transition Hamilton into the 21st century by connecting smart spending with forward-thinking economic growth. For far too long, our city has lagged behind neighbouring municipalities in proactive planning. While other regions modernized how they do business by streamlining approvals and fostering growth, our outdated processes have held Ward 3 back. We’ll deploy modern, proactive development and licensing frameworks to unlock local commercial investment, cutting the bureaucratic delays that stifle small businesses. Together, we’ll restore the commercial energy and vibrancy of our historic hubs along Ottawa, Main, King, and Barton Streets, making your tax dollars work directly for you.
Pillar 3: Safe Streets & Reliable Mobility
As a lifelong rider of the Hamilton Street Railway (HSR), I know that public transit isn’t a luxury; it’s an economic lifeline. Empowering our community means investing in transit reliability, optimizing cross-city routes, and ensuring scheduling matches the reality of shift workers and families. We need to expand HSR service in our underserved north-end of Ward 3.
We must also change how we fix our roads. We waste tax dollars repeatedly filling the same potholes with temporary cold-mix asphalt that washes out after the first heavy rain. I’ll mandate strict adherence to Service Level Agreements for road repairs, backed by a public tracking system.
Instead of waiting for an accident to occur before acting on residential streets, we’ll proactively deploy rapid-intervention safety tools, such as speed cushions and localized lane-narrowing, prioritizing streets near schools and daycares based on actual speed data.
Pillar 4: Economic Resiliency & Small Business LRT Support
The Light Rail Transit (LRT) project represents a large transformation for Hamilton, but construction cannot come at the expense of the independent retail, service, and hospitality businesses that give Ward 3 its character. Construction should not mean closure.
By developing a comprehensive economic resiliency policy that shifts the city’s approach from passive mitigation to active investment. We’ll pioneer policies to leverage municipal revitalization grants specifically for permanent structural upgrades, such as storefront facade improvements, energy-efficiency retrofits, and accessibility upgrades, for businesses directly impacted by the construction corridor.
By deploying these capital resources during construction windows, we ensure our local businesses don’t just survive the disruption; they emerge as permanent, modernized anchors of a revitalized transit corridor. These municipal grants can be funded through existing economic development funds, protecting our long-term commercial property tax base without placing an undue burden on residential taxpayers.
Pillar 5: Community Recreation Equity & Intergenerational Hubs
Every neighbourhood in Ward 3 deserves equitable access to high-quality municipal recreation, but right now, City Hall is neglecting our downtown cores. Families in high-density areas like Stinson and Corktown are expected to take multiple HSR buses just to access basic services, while local legacy facilities like Central Memorial remain underutilised and underfunded. We have to stop pouring all our operational focus into new suburban recreation centres while letting our downtown hubs starve.
I would introduce an Equitable Recreation Strategy driven by data. We’ll transform waitlists from dead ends into active data triggers. If a program like youth swimming is consistently waitlisted, that metric must automatically trigger increased staff hours and resource allocation to expand capacity at that specific facility. Second, we must expand specialized programming, including adult recreational, social, and adult-support programs, ensuring residents stay active and connected at every stage of life.
Finally, we’ll eliminate the bureaucratic red tape that blocks residents from stepping up. We’ll introduce a low-barrier community-use framework that waives or heavily subsidises facility and insurance fees for local citizen-led groups. We’ll also pursue aggressive joint-use agreements with school boards to unlock closed taxpayer-funded spaces after hours, while directing Ward-specific area rating funds to fast-track long-delayed upgrades.
Let’s build a better Ward 3, together!
From our ports and steel mills to our thriving local light manufacturing and the small businesses that anchor our neighbourhoods, Ward 3 has it all. But more than our shared industrial grit or geography, it’s the resilient people of this neighbourhood who truly unite us all. We have the power to turn this incredible potential into reality. We can build a Ward 3 that’s affordable, accountable, and vibrant, but I can’t do it without you.
I’m asking for your vote so we can finally deliver the transparent, forward-thinking leadership our community deserves.