City of Hamilton Judicial Inquiry: True Accountability Likely To Be Replaced By Words?
Since the release of the final report into the City of Hamilton’s Red Hill Valley Parkway (RHVP) Judicial Inquiry the City has publicized that it is changing its ways. On its website it has posted a number of implementations including two that appear to be useful:
“The development and ongoing implementation of an Active Disclosure and Dissemination Policy, which makes clear how and when information such as consultant reports are to be made available to the public.
Development and implementation of a Council Staff Relationship policy.“
While, at face value, these changes appear to mean that the City will be more transparent, the actual meaning of the wording may be quite different. Implementation of an “Active Disclosure and Dissemination Policy” may only mean that, whereas previously information could informally be kept secret from the public, now there will be an official procedure whereby staff and politicians must keep matters secret from the public. And in a similar vein, the Council Staff Relationship policy may only set the official way in which staff can keep information secret from politicians and thereby keep it from the public’s knowledge. The comments that we make may appear to be unfair and distrustful but one must look back at the City’s history to see that distrust is reasonable.
A few months after the RHVP judicial inquiry was formed in the spring of 2019, and at a time when City representatives were claiming that they knew nothing about the burying of the Tradewinds report, another sandal erupted and we could see the representatives’ response.
In November, 2019, someone leaked some documents to the Hamilton Spectator newspaper about a sewage leak that had been kept from the public’s knowledge. Although City representatives claimed that they had reported a leak of sewage into Chedoke Creek, the truth was that they knew much more that they did not reveal. They knew that the sewage leak had been in existence for about four years and that an estimated 24 billion litres had been leaked. It was the timing of the knowledge and the magnitude of the leak that were never revealed. It was discovered that City politicians engaged in closed-door meeting where this leak was discussed and most of the politicians voted to keep that knowledge from the public. A few politicians such as Maureen Wilson, Nrinder Nann, John-Paul Danko and possibly Sam Merulla took the ethical road and disagreed with the secrecy but they were overruled. Councillors who voted for secrecy claimed that they took the “advice of outside legal counsel” which warned that the City would be expected to pay Provincial fines and deal with potential civil lawsuits.
An incredibly unethical decision by City representatives was taken when they voted to track down those persons who divulged the sewage leak documents to the Spectator newspaper and thereby to the public. That decision was eventually overturned but it laid the track and warning to future whistle-blowers as to the grave circumstances they faced when they felt they owed their allegiance to the public that elected them.
At a time when City representatives were claiming no knowledge about the burying of the Tradewinds report, we were subject to the comments of the Mayor of that time, Fred Eisenberger, who was of the view that keeping the sewage leak a secret was the proper thing to do. Eisenberger claimed that expert legal advice instructed him to proceed in this manner to protect taxpayers from future lawsuits. When Eisenberger wanted further discussions to be held in closed doors it was revealing that a white knight, John-Paul Danko, was quoted to make the following reply” “There’s a lot of crap around here, and not all of it in Chedoke Creek, and I do not agree to go in camera”.
Distrust must flow from these revelations. The RHVP inquiry placed blame on Gary Moore for the withholding of the Tradewinds report which contained damning test results about inferior surface friction conditions of the Red Hill Valley Parkway. But what unofficial communications occurred between elected officials, staff, and the City’s Risk Management Department that were never uncovered by the inquiry? As the Mayor and majority of councillors supported secrecy is it unreasonable that, in unofficial circumstances, they could have supported the burying of the Tradewind report? They were in favour of burying information about the Chedoke sewage leak, so what is the difference?
More recently there has been a new revelation about possible further misdeeds by City representatives. The Hamilton Spectator Newspaper has reported in a January 10, 2024 article ( “Court ruling puts dirt-dumping conspiracy lawsuit against Hamilton on hold”, by Matthew Van Dongen) that a $75 million dollar civil suit is under way which claims that City staff worked with a mob-linked person to allow the dumping of contaminated soil onto a property off Highway 5 in Flamborough. The described mob-boss, Pat Musitano, was subsequently assassinated. The Spectator article also described a meeting of Musitano with a City manager at a downtown restaurant – a scene cut into the minds of readers of some kind of segment from the Godfather movie. These descriptions are unproven in court but given the past history of the actions of City representatives what are taxpayers expected to believe? And this is a big problem. When City representatives have demonstrated that they are not protecting the public which they are supposed to represent and protect, seemingly unbelievable reports tend to become believable.
Despite what words the City of Hamilton posts on their website about how they are working to change, it will take a lot of work to bring back the public’s trust. And it will not occur from just words alone. There must be a demonstrated commitment to transparency and accountability to the public they ought to serve.
$27 Million Bill For Hamilton’s Red Hill Valley Parkway Inquiry – Who Won This Lottery?
It is bad enough that a technical report on road surface conditions of the Red Hill Valley Parkway in the City of Hamilton Ontario became buried. According to City of Hamilton politicians it became necessary to fund a judicial inquiry which lasted from April, 2019 until November, 2023. The costs for the inquiry were revealed at $27 million dollars. However no one expressed the opinion that a thorough break-down should be provided as to who was paid. At a minimum, those paying this large amount, which are the taxpayers of Hamilton, ought to be able to examine the invoices to be assured that the costs are reasonable. The City of Hamilton had originally budgeted $7 million for the inquiry. So how did this estimate grow so wildly out of control? When you have your roof replaced and you are given a cost estimate do you not examine your bill to have some sense of where the cost overrun came from? Seems the answer is no.
Here is a very basic assessment. Four participants were involved in the inquiry. Were they the only entities that submitted invoices for their participation? What about the judge and the inquiry’s legal team, what money did they receive for their participation? And there were a very large number of witnesses that were called to give testimony, were they also paid for their involvement? Do taxpayers not deserve a breakdown of these costs?
Once again the citizens of Hamilton are left to pay the bill with no explanation.
What Has Been Learned From Five Years of Reported Cyclist Collisions in London Ontario
A review of reported cyclist collisions in London, Ontario would make one believe that there are very few such collisions. In fact there is likely a very large segment of non-reported collisions, as suggested by further research. This article will provide a short review of cyclist collisions that occurred and were reported in London, Ontario in the last five years. Then we will examine some further research which indicates cyclist collisions are under-reported by a large margin. It should be recognized that nothing can be learned from these occurrences, not only because so many are never reported, but also because of the very minimal information that is made available in each reported collision.
The following is the list of 13 collisions reported by official news media in London between the years 2019 and 2023.
May 24, 2019
At approximately 2115 hours a female cyclist was struck by an unidentified vehicle Adelaide Street between Dundas Street and Queens Ave. The cyclist sustained serious injuries. No further information was made available.
June 15, 2019
At approximately 1530 hours a cyclist, of undisclosed gender, sustained a serious head injury after a collision on Wellington St north of Horton Street. The striking vehicle was a Pontiac G5. A site photo showed a distant view of a cycle lying in the left, northbound lane of Wellington just north of Horton. No further information was made available.
June 28, 2019
At approximately 2230 hours a male cyclist sustained fatal injuries in a collision on Hamilton Road at East Street. Two vehicles were reportedly involved: a dark coloured Chevrolet SUV and a red Honda sedan. No further information was made available.
July 22, 2019
At approximately 2300 hours a male cyclist was struck by a hit-&-run driver while travelling westbound on Exeter Road and approaching Wonderland Road. The cyclist sustained numerous injuries, the most serious was a head injury that left him in a coma and ultimately with permanent brain injuries that altered his life significantly. Eventually the hit-&-run driver was caught and was sentenced in court. While there was considerable media attention paid to the health progress of the victim, nothing was reported about the details of the collision. In fact, the specific location of the collision was never publicly identified.
August 22, 2019
Shortly before midnight a male cyclist was struck by an unidentified vehicle on Commissioners Road near Andover Drive. The cyclist sustained critical injuries however the eventual outcome of those injuries was never publicly reported. The type of vehicle involved in the collision was never identified. And no information about how the collision occurred was ever provided.
November 4, 2019
At approximately 0620 hours a cyclist was struck and injured on Adelaide Street just south of King Street. A photo taken by a reporter from the London Free Press showed the struck cycle and its wheels appeared to be undamaged. However the handlebars and front wheel were rotated around 180 degrees. Police were at the site for several hours but no additional information was made available.
September 5, 2020
At approximately 1230 hours a cyclist sustained fatal injuries after he was struck while riding his bicycle across Gainsborough Road just west of Hyde Park Road. The London Free Press posted an article focused on a cyclist who arrived at the collision site only a few minutes after it occurred. The witness cyclist claimed that there was a sight obstruction caused by vegetation in the southbound direction in which the deceased was travelling. Police were observed to operate a drone during their investigation at the site but no additional information was released about the collision.
Gorski Consulting conducted a traffic study at the site and it was found that the witness cyclist was correct in his reporting the sight obstruction. Furthermore it was found that typical motor vehicle traffic along Gainsborough Road was well above the posted speed limit and that unsafe features of the cycling path where the fatal collision occurred also may have been a factor in the collision. The London Police Service did not provide any information about their investigation.
March 2, 2022
The London Police Service reported that a cyclist was struck by an unidentified vehicle at an undisclosed location of Trafalgar Street near Elm Street. The extent of injuries to the cyclist was not reported. No further information was made available.
August 7, 2022
At approximately 0200 hours an unconscious cyclist was found lying on a sidewalk on Sunningdale Road near the YMCA east of Adelaide Street. No information was made available by police about their investigation. A family member posted on social media that the cyclist sustained major head injuries but that he was likely to recover. The family member also reported there were “cuts all over his arms, legs and neck”. No further information was made available.
September 18, 2022
At approximately 0430 hours a cyclist was struck by a hit-&-run vehicle on Hamilton Road near Inkerman Street. Extended media coverage of many months described how the search for the striking vehicle was continuing. Meanwhile nothing was noted about how the collision occurred. In February 2023 local residents gathered at a local community centre to discuss what actions could be taken to make Hamilton Road safer.
September 1, 2023
On this Friday afternoon a cyclist was struck by a vehicle on Adelaide Street between Dundas Street and Queens Ave. The extent of injuries to the cyclist was not made available. London City Police did not provide any information about their investigation.
December 1, 2023
At approximately 0500 hours a cyclist was struck by a Chevrolet SUV on Wharncliffe Road just north of Riverview Ave. News reporter photos showed the cycle lying in a driveway at the edge of the southbound curb lane. The cycle’s front wheel and handlebars were rotated 180 degrees. There appeared to be minimal or no damage to the rims of the cycle. The Chevrolet reportedly had damage to the right of its front bumper and along its right fender. No information was provided by London Police Service about the status of their investigation.
December 8, 2023
At approximately 1630 hours a cyclist as struck by a London Police Service cruiser on York Street near William Street. The cyclist suffered a serious injury but no specific injury information was made available. News media reported that York Street was closed for over 12 hours and that the Ontario Special Investigations Unit (SIU) became involved. At this time there has been no further information made available on the SIU website. No further information was made available from any other source about this collision.
Discussion
Thirteen collisions have been discussed in this five-year review of reported cyclist collisions in London, Ontario. Reviewing the descriptions it can be seen that absolutely nothing useful has been provided in these descriptions. If one were to provide safety guidance to cyclists and motor vehicle drivers these descriptions would be of no value.
The question remains whether these 13 collisions are the only ones that occurred in London in the past five years. No one can say for sure because no specific, official data exists that would confirm that cyclist collisions are being under-reported.
One might believe that an organization such as a local health unit might provide reliable information about cyclist collisions. After all a health unit must be responsible for monitoring any health risks to the public. The local health unit in the London area is the Middlesex-London Health Unit. Scanning their website it becomes clear that not much useful data about cyclist collisions is available. Some dated reports are available on the website with some data. For example a report in 2014 provided some cyclist collision data as follows:
“Collision data gathered between 2008 and 2013 in London indicate there were 779 Motor Vehicle Collisions (MVC) involving cyclists and of those incidents, cyclists were at fault 502 times and drivers were at fault 273 times (Human Environments Analysis Lab, 2014). Injury data indicate that the average yearly rate of Emergency Room visits between 2009 and 2013 for bicycle related traffic collisions was higher in Middlesex-London at 27.8 per 100,000 compared to 18.8 per 100,000 in Ontario. This amounted to 128 ER visits per year in Middlesex-London (Ontario Ministry of Health and Long Term Care, 20“
However even this limited data raises some questions. Someone conducted an analysis that determined there were 779 cyclist collisions in the 5-year period between 2008 and 2013. Or there were about 156 cyclist collisions every year. Compare this result to the one in our review where only 13 collisions were reported to the public between 2019 and 2023. Does that not suggest that there is a very large under-reporting of collisions to the general public? And there is more…
In a Canadian Press article published on August 2, 2022, statistics on cyclist hospitalizations were quoted from the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI). In part the article noted:
“The Canadian Institute for Health Information has released national data that covers hospitalizations and emergency department visits from April 1, 2020 to March 31, 2021. It shows hospitalizations for all injuries dropped by about 15,000 visits year-over-year to 256,000 — but hospitalizations for cycling injuries increased 25 per cent to 5,255. The jump was especially big in Ontario, which logged 1,579 bike-related hospitalizations and accounted for about 30 per cent of all cycling traumas. The province also saw nearly 29,000 trips to the emergency room for cycling injuries, up one third from the year before.“
Does this finding also show that recent collisions are vastly under-reported in London, Ontario? There were “nearly 29,000 trips to the emergency room from cycling injuries” in Ontario. In 2021 Ontario’s population was estimated to be about 14.9 million. And London’s population was approximately 400,000, or about 2.7 percent of the province’s population. If there were 29,000 trips to the emergency room in Ontario then one might believe there should have been about 783 visits in London. This belief would seem to match the data from the Middlesex- London health (779 visits) unit noted above.
Comparing the research to the number of cyclist collisions reported to the public would indicate that, of those collisions requiring a hospital intervention, which were about 780, only 13 were publicly reported. Or only about 1.7 percent were actually reported to the public. And even when those collisions were reported absolutely nothing of benefit was provided that would help the public in understanding how their safety might be jeopardized or what factors would be important in preventing their injury and death.
2023 Data on Cyclist Helmet Use in London Ontario
As in previous years Gorski Consulting has obtained observations of cyclist helmet use in London, Ontario for the year 2023. The latest data is shown in the following table.
Overall more than two-thirds of male cyclists in 2023 were observed not to be wearing a cycling helmet. Yet the usage rate for females appears to be more, at close to half. Similar data was also obtained and reported in 2022 and this is shown in the table below.
The difference in helmet use appeared to be less pronounced in 2022 as about 63 percent of males were not using helmets and 55 percent of females were non-users.
Observational data like this is important to understand what local trends exist versus what is reported for studies in Ontario, Canada or internationally.
Police Believe Evidence Too Costly To Obtain In Criminal Case
How much is your being found guilty or innocent dependent on your ability to pay? Little attention is given to this rising issue as technical data from motor vehicle manufacturers becomes more and more important in court cases. A recent example illustrates the growing problem.
A police investigator needed to obtain a download of event data recorder (EDR) data in a recent criminal proceeding from a vehicle manufacturer. The police investigator stated:
“The manufacturer’s legal representative, after confirming that the vehicle was equipped with an EDR, sent an authorization form that we had to complete and return, along with our search warrant. There is a $2500 fee for the EDR service. Because this was a law enforcement case, the manufacturer told me that they would waive the fee BUT informed me that their policy would be changing soon and LE will have to pay this fee in the near future. The people I dealt with at the manufacturer were friendly and very helpful. I could not have asked for a better experience with them. Unfortunately, it may be the last law-enforcement related case I might have the chance to use it in. My agency (like many others I suspect), would almost certainly not be willing to spend $2500 for this download except in the most exceptional cases. I hope at some point the manufacturer may offer a commercial tool for these downloads.“
Many in the collision reconstruction field hold the opinion that vehicle manufacturers have the right to claim their fees because it is an economic inconvenience to them. Manufacturers are not in the business of offering collision reconstruction assistance in court cases, they are in the business of manufacturing motor/electric vehicles. The manufacturer must support a legal department that receives requests, technicians that must perform the downloads, and a shipping agency that accepts and sends out the EDR hardware. And so a fee of $2500 is deemed a reasonable fee. However is this fee reasonable in most cases?
The police investigator noted that his agency would not use the service “except in the most exceptional cases”. What does that mean? Does it mean that, for those cases where the EDR data could be helpful in supporting criminal charges? But what if there is a chance that the EDR data could prove that police charges were not legitimate? Would the police agency still pay the $2500 fee? Highly unlikely. And when police do not conduct the download, it is left to the person charged with a crime to find the funds to obtain the download. How often will that be possible? If you are in a position of high finance and power a fee of $2500 may be of minimal consequence. But there are likely to be far more persons who simply cannot afford that expense.
We are entering the age where motor vehicles are computers on wheels. They contain numerous computer modules that speak to each other, gathering data from each other so that decisions can be made about preventing collisions or protecting occupants once a collision is unavoidable. The available data is not just in traditional EDRs, they are in snapshots that can be obtained from exterior-facing cameras. They are data taken from communication devices that operate on a vehicle’s network. As these data become resident in more and more vehicle systems the download of such data becomes too costly and is not affordable to the average citizen. The is our brave new world.
As in so many areas government policy lags behind, and sometimes on purpose.
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