As a language instructor who has worked at Mohawk and Columbia International colleges as well as McMaster University, I am deeply concerned with Mark Nimigan’s suggestion in last Wednesday’s Hamilton Spectator that Hamilton Police Services begin focussing on “clean[ing] up” the downtown core by arresting individuals who swear in public. If police are to be used as agents of the cultural hygiene policies of a few motivated bureaucrats, then an extremely dangerous precedent will have been set.
I wish to argue with Mr. Nimigan that Hamilton Police Services does not have the authority to arbitrate what use of language constitutes “vile” and “filthy”. Police forces are not semioticians, anthropologists, or linguists, and the public should not expect them to be trained in these fields. Not a single word can in and of itself be deemed either vile, filthy, or harmful to the public. The discursive contexts in which words can be deemed as harmful to the public interest are already covered by Canada’s Hate Speech laws. Any other curtailing of public speech treads on the rights of individuals to free speech as protected under the Charter of Rights.
When viewed in terms of his support for a project of cultural hygiene, Mr. Nimigan’s suggestion that entrepreneurs don’t want to “come downtown and open a restaurant or specialty shop given the atmosphere down there” is laughable at best. Mr. Nimigan’s suggestion that “taxpayers” and “little old ladies” are the victims of individuals whom the author views as undesirable for the core stinks of the elitist and fascist rhetoric which characterised the eugenics policies undertaken by authoritarian regimes throughout the 20th century. Mr. Nimigan, I wish to emphatically state to you that Hamilton’s poor national reputation will not find a solution in the forced removal of certain individuals from the city’s public sphere.
Two issues serve to keep many entrepreneurs from the core: blight and taxation. I wish to suggest that Hamilton Police Services be used to enforce property standards in the downtown core so that buildings are properly maintained as they are legally mandated by existing property by-laws. The collapse of the Balfour Building, which has seriously effected the operation and financial status of entrepreneurs on King William street such as Thai Memory, is the principal witness to the need for police enforcement of property standards. Furthermore, a redeployment of public health resources to aid in the core’s instances of drug abuse and mental health issues would be of benefit to the area’s atmosphere.
Entrepreneurs in the downtown core pay a higher proportion of municipal taxes as compared to suburban areas. It is largely for this reason that entrepreneurs chose to locate themselves along Hamilton’s expanding periphery rather than be contained within what should be a high-density downtown business area. As the periphery expands, Hamilton taxpayers in the core must bear the financial burden for the expansion of infrastructure – sewers, water, roads – that fuels suburban growth. The departure of stores from Jackson Square and the Eaton’s Centre have a great deal to do with this fact. Large department stores prefer suburban locations because they get free additions to their development plans.
Policies of cultural hygiene are misguided at best and more often signal a grossly-unjust disregard of the rights of individuals. Mr. Nimigan, if you wish to see the city face court challenges under sections 2b, 2c, and 24 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, then by all means please move forward with your plans to act as arbiter of cultural hygiene for the city of Hamilton.
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