It always seems silly to suggest it, but the frustration has gotten to me. Feel free to excuse my generalized rant - but can we get a Province of Toronto already?
Governments will change sure, but the manner in which we’ve seen the current Ontario govt. smash the local electoral ridings prior to a municipal election, (completely out of spite) and the whole MZO debacle, tells me that Toronto needs to be protected from the province.
Looking at election results, Toronto didn’t vote for these people, they definitely didn’t vote for their mandate, nor do they agree with their actions that weren’t in any mandate whatsoever.
A city is a living and breathing human project where people live, it’s not simply a collection of tourist attractions, sports stadiums and investment opportunities. But the city part of Toronto has long been governed by the suburbs and the rest of the province, who seem to see it that way.
I don’t see a lot of innovation springing forth from having the city governed by tourists, folks who are keen on visiting, trashing the joint and stashing their problems here before taking a highly subsidized highway out of town (Woodbridge looks like it has plenty of room for affordable housing, and would be great for addiction and rehabilitation centres, let’s get on that no?)
this pandemic has shown glaring weakness in all levels of government, ironically because people’s general mistrust of all levels and parties in government. Even in their most earnest of hours, governments here can’t take a necessary hardline with the public, because the public has seen them overreach, act in corrupt fashion and remove any and all confidence. So here we are rounding the corner on a full year of “lockdowns”. Folks suffering and dying because nobody can get it together.
I’m not saying that it would have made things over the last year any better, but man, I think of the candidates who were running for municipal seats before council was culled, and I think of the wide array of new voices that we would have had at city hall helping fight this.
Instead, Corktown, Canary, the Distillery, we get less representation, a back hoe through heritage buildings, months of all night construction and billions poured into a little-used expressway extension, all the while we’ve been paying increased property taxes for a white elephant subway extension in Scarborough.
Toronto needs to stop being governed by Vaughn and Oshawa, Thunder Bay and Etobicoke, all according to what THEY want to get out of a city. We live here dammit, and this city belongs to us.
