Hamilton has been pegged as the go-to destination for hip, young creative types who get priced out of nearby Toronto ? people like Michael Pett, a shaggy-haired 24-year-old educator and indie film-producer.
?One of my friends has described it as, it?s kind of like before the West was won. This kind of open frontier where if you want a piece of it, it?s yours,? he said.
But this week, Mr. Pett was aghast when an Ottawa-based company, hired by the city to consult residents on spending priorities, made a series of mistakes that revealed how little it knew knew about Canada?s ninth-largest city.
During its Monday launch of the $376,000 Our Voice, Our Hamilton campaign, the consulting company, Dialogue Partners, tweeted ?what is ?HSR?? in response to a comment posted on Twitter. HSR is the Hamilton Street Railway, the city?s transit system.
Then news broke Tuesday that the company had posted pictures on their Pinterest page of a courthouse in Hamilton, Ohio, and of a t-shirt saying ?Hamilton pop. 354,? likely representing the small town of Hamilton, Washington.
Hamilton ? long southern Ontario?s underdog, it has basked in its evolution from Steeltown into something akin to Toronto?s Brooklyn ? is a place where identity is a constant topic. The apparent mistakes did not go unnoticed among the more than 500,000 souls who live there, or at least those who are on Twitter.
?The fact that this PR firm from Ottawa didn?t have the decency to learn anything about Hamilton is obviously insulting,? said Mr. Pett.
Mr. Pett grew up in Georgetown, a northwestern Toronto suburb, and would normally be the kind of guy who would head to downtown Toronto, and indeed many of his friends are there. But he moved to Hamilton seven years ago, and says it is affordable, supportive and full of potential ? the ideal place to live the Canadian dream.
Angered by Monday?s HSR tweet, he started the hashtag, #TellOHEverything, a play on last year?s #TellVicEverything hashtag protesting MP Vic Toews?s online surveillance bill, and began tweeting obvious Hamilton facts to the @OurHamilton campaign Twitter account. It was a humorous attempt to address a real problem and within 45 minutes, the hashtag was trending nationally, he said.
?It was just kind of a snowball effect,? he said.
Things got worse for Our Hamilton. People began to complain about ?atrocious language? on the campaign website ? including a survey question that presumed minorities in Hamilton had little access to services and were not engaged citizens, Mr. Pett said.
Finally, the City of Hamilton issued a statement announcing it had instructed the company to take down the website ?due to some offensive and inaccurate content.? On Monday, city council will discuss the campaign. City councillor Sam Merulla said he wants the company fired.
?It?s an issue at this point of it being impossible to reverse the damage,? he said. ?It?s an understatement to suggest that people felt slighted.??
The city?s former mayor said Dialogue Partners? problems could have easily have been avoided by hiring a local subcontractor with an on-the-ground perspective. ?I think it?s disastrous,? Larry Di Ianni said. ?I don?t know how they could have made such rookie mistakes from the get-go. It?s total, it seems to me, carelessness or incompetence.?
Stephani Roy McCallum, managing director with Dialogue Partners, said in an email to the National Post on Thursday that the company was not currently responding to media inquiries. She earlier told the Hamilton Spectator the company knows what the HSR is, but was seeking clarity with that first tweet. And she told the paper the errant Pinterest images may have come from another user. Dialogue posted an apology on its Facebook page Tuesday afternoon.
?We don?t like to make mistakes, and the first 24 hours of this project wasn?t what we hoped,? read the statement, as reproduced by the Spectator. ?The information we are collecting is important and will help to direct City services in the future and we can?t do that without you.?
Calls and emails to the city?s communications department were not returned Friday.
Harry Stinson, a former Toronto developer who moved to Hamilton a few years ago, said the debacle is representative of the tension between the old Hamilton, still spending money on unnecessary studies, and the new, looking to evolve.
?It?s [obvious] that there is a new type of Hamilton,? he said. ?Why do we need an expert from Ottawa to tell us that? And doing it in a laughable way just makes the city look even sillier.?
Independent Hamilton journalist Joey Coleman was involved in exposing the campaign?s errors online and sees this blunder as an opportunity to spark city-wide transformation, perhaps a more open, tech-savvy city hall. He said this is important as Hamilton transitions from an industrial-based past to a knowledge-based future.
?We actually did get $376,000 worth of an example of what not to do,? he said. ?It was just a face-palm moment.??
National Post
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