Raise the Hammer

August 1, 2010 Mayor Eisenberger, City of Hamilton Members of Council

Dear Mayor and Members of Council, Further to my self-serving and condescending letter dated July 31, 2010, I wish to clarify a few issues and insult your intelligence even further. First of all, it appears that some members of Council think I wrote because Bob Young and his lackey Scott Mitchell have been blowing smoke about leaving the city and never playing at a west harbour stadium and had got themselves painted into a corner with nowhere to go but Ivor Wynne. Well, nothing could be further from the truth. They’re not packing blanks. I want you to know that there are literally hundreds of municipal councils of cities with half a million residents and millions more within an hour’s drive (that don’t already have CFL franchises) just lining up to spend millions of dollars of public money to provide a home for Mr. Young and his team. And I could name them. But I won’t. It’s a simple fact that downtown stadiums don’t work. If they did, Pittsburgh would have three of them and the Alouettes would be sold out every game. Well, actually, it does and they are BUT IT”S NOT ABOUT BUILDING STRONGER COMMUNITIES OR BECAUSE THE ALOUETTES ARE DOWNTOWN! Pittsburgh is a former steel town with an escarpment, unlike Hamilton, and the Alouettes are a good team. It’s easy for you to accuse the Tiger-Cats of participating in the site selection process for the Pan-American games without recorded objection and even saying they would work with whatever site was chosen only to pull out at the last minute and cause Hamilton to lose the track and field portion of the games. That’s called business. GET USED TO IT! YOU WERE PLAYED LIKE A VIOLIN. IF YOU THINK YOUR BACKS ARE AGAINST THE WALL, IT WORKED, AND BOB YOUNG’S IN THE DRIVER’S SEAT, NOT YOU! Furthermore, I understand that a few wiseacres are saying that the City’s future fund money can’t be used for an east mountain stadium because it won’t “grow Hamilton's economic base in order to create jobs and generate subsequent investment revenues or enhance Hamilton's social fabric or its community life”. Poppycock! If that’s what it was meant to do, those things would be contained in the mandate of the board that you appointed to oversee the fund. And even if they are, SO WHAT; Mr. Young wants the stadium on the east mountain. And to those who say that the future fund money came from hard-working Hamiltonians and shouldn’t be essentially handed over for the exclusive use of Mr. Young and the Tiger Cats; well, they obviously didn’t work hard enough or they’d be multi-millionaires like Mr. Young. He’s the one who deserves to reap the benefits of that money not some layabout who expects the City of Hamilton to fund his hobby and provide him with a subsidized place to live for years. If that’s what they want, buy a football team! Make no mistake, if you follow the advice of subversive groups such as the Hamilton Real Estate Board or the Ontario Construction Association, the downtown BIA, the Future Fund board or that bunch of young accountants, architects and lawyers or the thousands of tax-paying citizens who’ve actually taken the time to write their comments, not simply vote on a website, then, I’m warning you, there will be NO GREY CUP EVERY 10 YEARS. Tell that to all the unemployed hot-dog vendors in your wards! And don’t think for a moment that Hamilton will get another franchise if Mr. Young decides to leave for one of those other cities that neither he nor I are prepared to name. The CFL board is made up of smart, free enterprising, capitalist businessmen who know that it’s in the league’s best interest to leave all of southern Ontario west of Toronto without CFL football. There’s simply no better way to sell our game. In closing, I realize that some people think it’s inappropriate for me to expect you to look past the vacant downtown storefronts or to forget about the true purpose of the future fund and the places to grow strategy or a promised LRT now with nowhere to go. But let’s be realistic; you’re just members of Council. Whoever said it was your job to shape a city? Leave that to the future and someone better-suited to the task than you. Get with the program, any fool would know that the key to Hamilton’s future isn’t beside the harbour, it’s beside Home Depot. Yours truly,

The Commissioner