Just three days before nominations opened for the 2026 municipal election, Hamilton Mayor gave a 30-minute speech at the 2026 Mayor’s Breakfast hosted by the Hamilton Chamber of Commerce, where she said that the city’s tiny shelter project was “worth the risk.”
“When it comes to the Tiffany-Barton project, I’m asking you to look at it differently – to see the reality,” Horwath told the roughly 400 community leaders and officials who gathered at LIUNA Station.
“This is a successful innovation. Were there missteps? Yes. Some errors? Absolutely. But the results are real,” she continued.
“It’s a model responding to a very real and growing human crisis on our streets – a model that can be replicated and scaled. And many communities are coming to learn what we’ve done. It was worth the investment. It was worth the risk. Because without risk, without innovation, and without investment, there is no progress,” she concluded.
The tiny shelter project, which was marred by controversy, cost overruns, and delays, was also the subject of a scathing report by the City of Hamilton’s Auditor General.
Capital costs for the project ballooned well past the $2.8 million budget estimate to $7.9 million.
The Auditor General’s 68-page report, which can be read here, found issues with every single aspect of the tiny shelter project.
Auditor General Brown wrote, “There was insufficient research undertaken with respect to the Mayor’s Directive in that it was not adequate to deliver a range of feasible alternatives, including delivery options and associated costs.”
“Similarly, the research of potential vendors to supply/install the shelter units was not done in any organized way.”
The Auditor General said that staff had a “lack of understanding of the risks associated with the project”, there was a “failure to communicate to Council the options available,” and a “failure to keep Council informed in a timely manner of known cost overruns.”
“Overall, we found that the imperative of urgency overrode the importance of due diligence and good governance.”
When it comes to the topic of urgency, there were talks of tiny shelters all throughout Winter 2023, but Horwath waited until August 2024 to issue her Mayoral Directive to staff to begin implementing a tiny shelter plan.
That meant that the plan was not approved by Council until September 2024 – just three months before winter – and Council was asked to give Grace Mater, the city’s General Manager of the Healthy and Safe Communities Department, authority to execute all agreements necessary for the project in the name of urgency.
MicroShelters Inc., the company chosen to procure the shelters, was only incorporated a few days after Horwath’s Mayoral Directive, and the City of Hamilton is their only customer.
The shelters were procured through an American-based company called Global Axxis, LLC, which in turn sourced them from China.
It was later revealed that the city was on the hook to pay taxes, shipping, and duties on the tiny shelters, further escalating costs and the electrical wiring and lighting components of the shelter units did not meet Canadian standards.
Nevertheless, Horwath said that the tiny shelter plan is “working” since police and paramedics are “hardly ever called,” since “residents are accessing the care that they’ve gone years without,” and since “32 former long-term encampment residents are now permanently housed.”
She encouraged those in the room not to “slide back into the quiet constraint of negativity and defeatism.”
Horwath previously said that there is “a lot of misinformation out there” about the Barton-Tiffany tiny shelter project.
Based in Hamilton, he reaches hundreds of thousands of people monthly on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. He has been published in The Hamilton Spectator, Stoney Creek News, and Bay Observer. He has also been a segment host with Cable 14 Hamilton. In 2017, he received the Chancellor Full Tuition Scholarship from the University of Ottawa (BA, 2022). He has also received the Governor General’s Academic Medal. He formerly worked in a non-partisan role on Parliament Hill in Ottawa.
