About HamiltonIQ

Most of what changes a neighbourhood is decided in public, in documents almost nobody reads. A rezoning that adds four towers beside a GO station, a school boundary review that moves a street from one school to another, a by-law that freezes a category of development for a year: all of it is published, and all of it is written to satisfy a statute rather than to inform a resident.

HamiltonIQ reads those documents and reports what they say. The test we hold ourselves to is simple. A resident should be able to finish one of our stories knowing what was decided, what it means for their part of town, what happens next, and where to check us.

Development and planning, schools, neighbourhoods, City Hall, transit and infrastructure, housing policy, and useful Hamilton data. In practice that means planning applications and the growth areas absorbing them, school boundary reviews and new school construction, Council decisions and the municipal budget, Hamilton Street Railway service changes, and the public datasets that describe the city.

We do not cover crime, sport, restaurant openings or event listings. Other people do those well. We would rather be the only place that reliably explains a 6,420-home planning application than a thin version of everything.

Primary sources first. Every story is reported from the document itself: a City notice, a staff report, a board report, a statutory instrument, a provincial dataset. Those documents are listed and linked at the foot of every story, with the date we retrieved them.

Another outlet can be a tip, never a source. If we learn something from somewhere else, we verify it in the primary record before publishing, and we cite the primary record. We do not rewrite other publications’ journalism and we do not republish it.

We do not invent. No composite quotes, no unnamed sources standing in for reporting we have not done, no rumours dressed as news, no unsourced claim generated by a language model. Where a number is a proposal rather than an approval, we say so. Where the honest answer is that nothing is happening, we publish that.

We do not draw boundaries we cannot source. School attendance areas are set by the school boards, and neighbourhood has no legal boundary in Hamilton. Our area pages say which public body uses each area name, and never present a distance calculation as a catchment.

Independence. HamiltonIQ has no owner, sponsor, advertiser or partner with an interest in what it reports. It is not affiliated with the City of Hamilton, either school board, any political campaign, or any real estate business. If that ever changes, this page will say so before the change takes effect.

Stories are published under the HamiltonIQ Newsroom byline. That is a deliberate choice rather than a way to hide. We would rather carry one accountable masthead than invent reporter names to look larger than we are. Correspondence reaches a person, and corrections are answered by one.

We will get things wrong. When we do, the correction is part of the record rather than a quiet edit. Our policy has four parts.

• The URL does not change. A corrected story keeps its address, so existing links and citations still resolve to the corrected version.
• The timestamp is updated. A corrected story shows an updated date alongside its publication date.
• Material corrections are recorded on the page. A correction that changes the meaning of a story is appended in a dated note on the story itself. We do not silently rewrite a significant mistake.
• Typographical fixes are not. Fixing a spelling or a broken link does not get a note, because nothing about the substance changed.

To request a correction, email corrections@hamiltoniq.ca with the story and, if you have it, the document that shows what we got wrong. We would much rather hear from you than be wrong for longer.

HamiltonIQ uses automated monitoring to watch public sources: City notices, board reports, transit service updates and provincial registries. Automation is allowed to find a change, gather the evidence and draft. It is not allowed to publish. Nothing reaches this site without a person reading the primary document and approving it.

Tips, questions and story suggestions: editor@hamiltoniq.ca. Corrections: corrections@hamiltoniq.ca. More on what makes a useful tip is on the contact page.