You can laugh all you want but it wasn't that long ago that voting in municipal elections *WAS* restricted to land-owners, and of course only a few decades before that...

Out of Ford, Smitherman, Mammoliti, Rossi, and Pantalone, I believe only Rossi and Pantalone have a post-secondary education - Smitherman doesn't even have a high school diploma. As for ignorant voters I'd defend the right of any adult Canadian citizen to stand for election or cast a ballot for...

Maybe voting should be restricted to land-owning males too! Just because you didn't like the outcome of the election doesn't mean the system is in need of a ridiculous overhaul.

Of course Toronto could support another NHL team however MLSE would never allow it.

This is what would become of Ford's "vision" a decade down the road: Within 10 years the monorail will need extensive repair and having been built to unique specifications will cost a fortune to repair or an obscure part-maker will have gone belly-up leaving the track to do nothing but...

There will be no whales, seals -- or any mammals for that matter -- at Ripley's Aquarium.

Why not? The city exists at the leisure of the provincial government -- the Premier could say any funding is conditional upon Rob Ford running the 100 metre dash within 12 seconds if he was so inclined.

As long as developers aren't cutting as many corners as they do in China: China is constructing more than 21.5 billion sq. ft. (2 billion sq m) of new property every year, gobbling up some 40% of the world's total cement and steel production for buildings whose average lifespan is estimated at...

A few hours west down the 401 there's the Galleria Mall in Downtown London; a two-storey affair complete with marble flooring and vaulted skylights. Last time I was in London the only tenants in the mall were a call centre and a library branch.

I gather Rob's a big fan of NFL football, but if you're going to call him a sports nut because of it we might as well call him a patron of the arts because he saw all 3 Transformers movies or a man of letters because he might flip through the Sun once in a while. He was probably opposed to the...

Maybe one of the big American parks will have to make a commercial like this again: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RjU-0aZZ2I

Every major city has a Chinatown and ethnic neigbourhoods. Today the real Chinatown and Little Italy are arguably in Markham and Vaughan respectively.

What is not needed is more taxes to drive people and business out of the city. Taxes are always the answer if you're not the one who has to bear the burden. De-amalgamation will not happen, its been too long and it would be an incredibly expensive venture to start setting up separate...

I'm not sure why libraries are seen as sacrosanct. Surely there are a few branches that could be closed to address the budget deficit. Nominal user-fees (something like a $10 annual "membership" for adults, $2 for children) could also be imposed on a yearly basis on people who check out...

In 1987 a Supreme Court ruling found that separate schools were constitutionally-protected. http://scc.lexum.org/en/1987/1987scr1-1148/1987scr1-1148.html

Nope, but everyone seems to feel the need to suggest that Toronto is some ultra progressive place when electoral history shows otherwise. Now we're hearing that Toronto is "far more liberal than Chicago in spite of the antics of Ford nation" yup, uh huh. Why can't people acknowledge that there...

It's in the Constitution and therefore can't be anti-constitutional :) It predates the Charter and the Notwithstanding clause by 115 years. Some people posit that the Fathers of Confederation meant French schools as francophones were all Catholic and the overwhleming majority of anglos were...

Toronto and its environs are segregated too, there's not a whole lot of mixing going on in places like Rexdale, Lawrence-Heights, Weston or Malton (just to name a few)

I guess it's not surprising that it didn't take long for the old canard of "Toronto is more enlightened/progressive/less racist) than City X to be trotted-out. Toronto just elected a mayor who might as well have campaigned on a platform of paving over parks to make parking lots, and tearing up...

Do what you know you're supposed to do. You're not supposed to be doing things the examiner doesn't instruct you to do, however, they're not going to be telling you to do blantantly obvious things such as "depress the accelerator when the light turns green if it is safe to do so", or "come to a...