Over the last few days while out and about on my summer cavort, I’ve been asked by some folks who still think of me as someone avidly if not rigorously interested in municipal politics what I think of the election of Olivia Chow as mayor of Toronto. 
Am I happy with the turn of events? Is she as socialist scary as some of her opponents said? How she’s going to fare, do you think? Continue reading
With Olivia Chow elected to be the next mayor of Toronto, surely we can write the final chapter of the interminable, meandering, wholly unsatisfactory, What was it even about? book of the John Tory era. Can’t we? He’s done, isn’t he? 
The rock has definitively crushed him in his one last attempt to roll it up the hill of relevancy. Hasn’t it? Continue reading
Once upon a time there was Transit City.
It was a plan to build public transit (‘Moving Toronto Into the Future’), modest in the sense of seeming achievable in a reasonable time frame and at a feasible cost. 
Both levels of government, municipal and provincial, were on board and, despite a scaling back of projects by the province in the face of the 2008 recession (brewing bad blood between Queen’s Park and City Hall that would open the door to bad faith actors intent on killing the proceedings), work was begun in 2009. Continue reading