It’s Jama Time!
Hamilton Centre MPP Sarah Jama will run as an Independent in the next Ontario election
The Hamilton-Centre Independent Riding Association held their nomination meeting on Thursday night - September 12 – at the Workers Arts and Heritage Centre in downtown Hamilton. The same location where, a year ago, the NDP Riding Association acclaimed Sarah Jama as their candidate for Hamilton-Centre. How times change.
As Sarah Jama has received a significant amount of negative attention from a wide range of sources, I went to to see firsthand what kind of support she does enjoy and why her supporters have stuck to her side like Velcro.
I recognized a number of faces when I arrived, the first of which was Fred Hahn, President of CUPE Ontario. Hahn has been in the news lately for the attempts (failed) to oust him by the CUPE National Executive Board over an anti-Israeli social media post. He was there bringing CUPE support. City councillors Cameron Kroetsch (Ward 2) and Nrinder Nann (Ward 3) were there, as was Hamilton Centre NDP MP Matthew Green and Dr. Anjali Menezes, a member of the Police Services Board.
I don’t know everyone in town, of course, but I learned afterward that there were no Hamilton media there. So I took notes.
The Hamilton-Centre Independent Riding Association is what happened to the H-C NDP Riding Association after NDP party leadership turfed rookie MPP Sarah Jama for the sin of “insubordination” for refusing to apologize for the statement she made concerning the – at the time – impending genocide in Gaza.
Still the MPP for Hamilton Centre, a new riding association was formed to support Jama in her work. The old NDP riding association had supported Jama: they knocked on doors, they staffed the phones, they raised the funds and did the hard work of getting their candidate, who was acclaimed, elected. Overwhelmingly. It’s hard enough to get people involved in politics. So much work is volunteer, any party should be grateful to the riding associations that do the work of nominating and campaigning for candidates. So it’s understandable that support went with Jama as the new Independent riding association rose from the ashes of the old NDP one. Who knows what’s going on with the NDP in Hamilton Centre now?
The space was filling slowly. People were milling about the exhibits while waiting for the arrival of others, delayed due to the street preparations for the weekend’s Supercrawl event. There were about thirty chairs set up, all of them taken. There were old people, young people, families; racial and ethnic diversity marked the crowd. There was lots of room at the back but it was a packed standing room only crowd by the time proceedings began.
While waiting, I chatted to several people about why they came, what was it about Sarah Jama that touched them? They were clearly willing to ditch party loyalties to follow her into the Independent candidate wilderness. One women told me of a time she was at an event hosted by Jama that brought together a number of different people from NGOs and government. She said Sarah created an environment for people to collaborate and work together without dominating the discussion. This woman impressed upon me how much she was impressed by Sarah. In all her years, she said, and there had been many, she hadn’t seen that before.
I thought this point was particularly salient as it’s been said that Jama was not a team player in the accusations levelled against her by naysayers, an accusation she adamantly refutes. In my interview with her, she responded with emotion to this point, it cuts her deeply because it’s against her way of doing things to be autocratic. It could be, coming from the world of activism that her “tackle the problem”, “speak your mind” blue sky-ing way of problem-solving was seen by others as dominating the discussion. But surely such accusations are grade school and get in the way of finding real solutions.
But back to the meeting.
First up was Don McLean, long time leading voice in the Hamilton community on the environment and ways to save it, who spoke of the “honour of being a public supporter of Sarah Jama”. McLean touched on every issue facing us from the environment to food banks and the growing procession of hungry people lined up for free food at St. Pat’s every day and Gore Park on Saturdays. Bleak.
Jama has established a modus operandi of working with advocacy organizations to advance change. On the environment front, Jama is working with local groups such as Environment Hamilton taking on the issue of air quality. A study released in 2023 found that breathing Hamilton’s air is like smoking a cigarette a day. Jama has made air quality a priority of her environment policies.
Following a break, area politicians Cameron Kroetsch and Nrinder Nann from city council and NDP MP Matthew Green for Hamilton Centre shared the floor and thanked Jama for her commitment to represent the community. Kroetsch called her a “light in dark and troubling times” and noted she was “not afraid to stand up for the people who need it”. MP Green said that when he first met Sarah Jama ten years ago, he knew he was meeting an historic figure and if there were one person to fight Doug Ford it would be Sarah Jama. He said it wasn’t a cult of personality, but of a commitment to principles and ideals and the qualities reflected in leadership.
Rani Hemaid was up next. Rani came to Canada eight years ago from Palestine. Since October 7, he has been trying to get family out of the war zone and safely into Canada. He had lost hope in politicians but knows that Sarah Jama cares about the rights of Palestinians. He pointed to the fact that Jama was the first Canadian politician to call for a ceasefire and called her “bravely unapologetic” in standing up for what is right. “She acts, she doesn’t just talk” he said.
Local 1005 Steelworkers were represented by president Ron Wells and vp Jim McColl, who stated they had “no problem supporting Sarah” who was always visible on the protest line, from migrant workers to health care workers. Ron Wells called her the “voice of marginalized people who don’t have a voice” and reiterated the need for a “leader who wasn’t afraid to do the right thing”. Jim McColl called her the “transformative leader that we need”.
Dr. Yipeng Ge is a family physician and a personal friend of Sarah Jama. Dr. Ge made headlines in the wake of Oct 7 for being released from his residency program in public health at the University of Ottawa and leadership roles within the Canadian Medical Association for his social media posts in support of a ceasefire and an end to the occupation of Gaza. Consistently showing up, “Sarah puts people first” he said, and put her censure within the context of manufactured distractions by the Ford government to hide their “chronic devaluing of the health care system”.
It was time for the nomination.
As a group, everyone repeated “I propose Sarah Jama as the Independent candidate for Hamilton Centre”
Sarah Jama made her way to the front to great applause. The following is her acceptance speech:
I obviously cannot proceed without giving a shout out to my mother, who is up here at the front. (Clapping) Without whom I would not have any strength to proceed with the hardships that come with being a very public figure in politics especially at this time, so thank you Hooyo, for being here.
You know, when I first got involved in politics or organizing, or first came up with the idea that maybe if we have issues in our community we should stand up and try to say or do something about it, it came from a place of frustration. I was in my early 20s, I was looking at systems across the board, policing, like meeting people in Barton jail who had just been let down over and over again, or people with disabilities who were not making enough to live off of who were being left behind over and over again in our communities.
And I thought that continuing to collectively gather and yell at systems of power and express our frustrations over and over again, something would shift. And of course there are always some wins but I think now being 30, an older lady, more wise (laughter) there is a lot more to say about organizing from a place of hope, right? So when I decided to put my name forward and run for office, it wasn’t just because I wanted access to a position of power and I think for a lot of people in this room and in our community at a wider scale, putting my name forward to run for office as someone who is on ODSP, as someone who has a very visible disability, as someone who is a young person, racialized, who has experienced a lot of what people go through on a day-to-day, in terms of just every day struggles, who struggles to build and find consistent community over and over again and to find a safe place to go to express frustration, I knew how much it would mean to put my name forward and I get that with support of so many people in this room.
About a year and half ago, from now … I want to say thank you to so much of the people who showed up then and continue to show up to say that it is important that we have representation in political spaces that aren’t just about accessing power. It’s about showing up in leadership roles from a place of hope and imagining what’s possible if we all continue to gather in rooms like this and put forward ideas that are maybe not conventional all of the time but are built from a place of trying to represent the ideas and thoughts that are missing from places of power. I really believe that if we have more people from community representing politics right now we wouldn’t have polices that’s about privatizing our health care systems. (clapping)
We wouldn’t be, over and over, [having] conversations that are pitting everyday working class people against each other and talking about immigration when meanwhile the truth is the issues that we’re having are operating under a $9.3 billion deficit in a province that spent three weeks arguing at Queen’s Park about alcohol when people are out here dying in the streets. I have met too many people living in encampments who died in the winter who have to survive by lighting hand sanitizer on fire because there are no other solutions available right now. And we have been fed this lie that there are places to go, that there are shelter spots, that there are safe spaces in community to go, but more and more, these safe spaces for community have been eroded. That is what happens when you lose people in these positions of power to corruption. You lose the safe places that exist locally for the people that are struggling
It shouldn’t be the case that many people this room have two or three jobs just to try to survive. We have the right to exist peacefully and equally among each other in community and while I may not have all the solutions and I don’t propose that I ever do, I know that I will continue to be that voice at Queen’s Park to say: hey you know what? I don’t think that’s the right way to do this.
I refuse to sell out our values and what Hamilton Centre needs, a riding that is the poorest riding in all of Ontario, in order to just make a dollar. I do not by any means want to be a career politician and I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a difficult decision to try to decide to run independently again but I’m doing this because I know that it’s important to everyone in this room not just me that we put forward a different way of doing politics (prolong loud cheering).
A large part of who I am and what I believe in comes from spirituality and faith. I have faith that the world that we live in right now doesn’t have to be this difficult. That human beings have the capacity to be loving and caring and kind. That we do not have to be so divisive, so destructive, and fuel and perpetuate hate amongst each other. And I know from every day communities that I participate in that on the day-to-day things are not like this so why do our politicians reflect the opposition?
Greed, corruption and prioritizing corporations over our lives. I do not think more poor people need to struggle here or internationally. And we don’t need to be investing in the hardships of other people’s lives (clapping)
For as long as I can I want to govern from a place of love, from a place of compassion, from a place of kindness. The media will continue to say that I’m this big scary bad wolf and I know that Hamilton Centre knows the truth of my values because I’m reflecting back your values. I know that everything that I speak about in that place or here in our office locally are values that people sent me to Queen’s Park to represent and the last I’ll say is Doug Ford may have silenced me now, but when I am re-elected that censure will be lifted (prolong loud cheering) and with all the tools at our disposal by the grace of God, I’m going to fight like hell to make sure that happens so that people coming after me in this position [know] that Hamiltonians are not messing around, we will not be censured, we will not be silenced for standing up for basic human rights. (Loud cheering)
I want to give a heartfelt thank you to all of the speakers today, to everybody who stood up to spend time and time again talking about why they support this race for independency. I also want to spend time thanking so many members in this room who are active members of the Hamilton Independent Constituency Association.
We’ve been going out three times a week knocking doors to talk to people on the ground to get real ideas about what our platform as an independent riding association should look like when that election comes around and it will be soon. We are anticipating a 2025 election and our platform is being built by all of you and our support is going to be grassroots.
I do not not have the mechanism of a party supporting this campaign. So I’m going to rely on all of you here who came out to listen and to support this race of independency to sign up to volunteer, to put your money where your mouth is and put work in to make sure that we are all sending a voice to Queen’s Park that is going to represent our values because the alternative is we send another dud to Queen’s Park who’s only going to say what they’ve been told and you don’t want that here. Absolutely not. (clapping)
With that being said, the call to action is don’t leave this room without signing up to volunteer. I want to see you out at the doors, knocking doors with me talking to every day people. If I can do it in a wheelchair I know all of you can show up when it’s time to talk to your neighbours. (laughter) And if you can’t do that, come out to our riding association meetings, we have monthly meetings, talking about engaging community, building up the platform, hosting events like this. There are so many ways to plug in and to show your support. We take anyone and everyone. Right now the Riding Association has about 60 members but we know that so many more people would love to tap in so do that today. Commit to this fight alongside me
Because I will do it alone because of my values. But I know that we don’t have to do it that way. I know that every single person here cares and is committed to making sure we’re sending a politician to Queen’s Park who will reflect the values here in opposition to what Ford brings to the table.
I’m committed to this fight with you for the long haul and I look forward to 2025. (Loud cheering)
Two last speakers came forward to end the evening. The first was Anthony Marco president of the Hamilton and District Labour Council who praised Jama’s level of courage during the lonely days of scandal and reiterated that Sarah shows up for people; people show up for Sarah. And last up was Fred Hahn, president, CUPE Ontario, who pledged not only $1000 in support of Jama’s campaign, but that he would bring buses of CUPE canvassers to help knock on doors and personally go with anyone who had canvassed before. What a guy.
The people who support Sarah Jama do it from a place of love and compassion for the example she sets and feel she has been maliciously maligned for political advantage. They feel she was abandoned by the NDP, a party they supported for years. Her supporters are not just the hundreds of new NDP people she signed up in the by-election campaign, they’re also longtime NDP voters who simply cannot support it any longer. On the provincial stage at least.
Lots of speculation about what’s going to happen with the NDP in Hamilton Centre. But one thing is for sure, Sarah Jama isn’t backing down and will be knocking on doors from now until the next election, checking on her constituents, asking if they need anything.
What’s your MPP doing?
