Ward 14: Spadafora wins in nail-biter race against Damptey
Mike Spadafora, a well-known hockey club manager and one time Progressive Conservative candidate, is the new councillor for Ward 14 in an election that came down to the wire.
With all polls reporting around 12:20 a.m., Spadafora had defeated Kojo Damptey by a mere 79 votes.
The narrow margin of victory is not close enough to trigger an automatic recount, and it was not immediately clear Monday night if either candidate would attempt to trigger one.
The race between Spadafora and Damptey was razor close from the moment the first polls reported in Monday night. When the final votes were counted, Damptey had 2,531 votes to Spadafora's 2,610.
The candidates both campaigned on the issue of police funding and are worlds apart on the issue.
Damptey had promised to examine every one of the city's budget items, with an eye toward reallocating money from the police budget to groups and projects that would be more beneficial to the community, including combating a rise in hate crime incidents and homelessness in Hamilton.
But Spadafora said he would not take a dime from the police budget, preferring an educational approach to combating hate and bigotry in the city.
In defeating Damptey, Spadafora replaces longtime city councillor Terry Whitehead, who did not run for reelection. The president of the Hamilton Kilty B's Junior Hockey Club also beat out experienced political players like former Ward 8 city councillor Don Ross, who placed third Monday night, and Collen Wicken, Whitehead's chief of staff for a decade, who finished a distant sixth.
Whitehead, the ward's longtime councillor, left politics under a cloud. His pay was docked for 30 days in November by the city's integrity commissioner for having bullied and harassed municipal staff.
Last year, Whitehead spent months on sick leave for an illness he has described as affecting his cognitive skills. He has also spoken of an incurable problem" that led to mental-health issues, including depression and anxiety, but has not shared his diagnosis.
While the candidates debated issues of police funding and street safety, the campaign was also marked by racist vandalism that targeted Damptey, the only person of colour running in the ward.
A white nationalist network labelling itself White Lives Matters" began pasting stickers on public lampposts and benches in Hamilton. One of those stickers was put over Damptey's face in a bus shelter election advertisement.
With the exception of Damptey, five of the seven candidates running in the ward - which also included transportation operations manager Brian Lewis and communications consultant Christine Seketa - said the police needed more officers to combat the recurrence of hate crimes and hate incidents in Hamilton, although no candidate had a specific plan to deal with the issue.
The seventh candidate in the ward, Christopher Poole, did not attend debates and did not reply to interview requests from The Spectator during the campaign. He finished last with only 147 votes.
During the provincial campaign when he ran for the Progressive Conservative Party on the Hamilton Mountain, Spadafora was a largely silent candidate. Like many Tory hopefuls across the province, he did not attend debates and eschewed questions from the press.
But in the local campaign, he locked horns with six of his rivals during the Cable 14-Spectator debate. It was during that debate that Spadafora made it clear reallocating police funding was not something he would support.
Grant LaFleche is an investigative reporter with The Spectator. Reach him via email: glafleche@torstar.ca