Politics
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Questions for City Charter supporters: What and whom is it for?
Note: At the end of November, I was part of a panel hosted by the Institute for Municipal Finance and Governance on “Does Toronto Need a City Charter?â€...
By Tricia Wood -
MUKHERJEE: Why Toronto police are worse off under Chief Mark Saunders
In Act I, Scene IV of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Marcellus, a guard, renders this famous verdict on his country’s politics: “Something is rotten in the kingdom...
By Alok Mukherjee -
LORINC: Just who is the face of the TTC these days?
With apologies to the famously elusive picture book figure, where’s Rick? Increasingly, as the TTC finds itself in a public relations nightmare, I have...
By John Lorinc -
LORINC: Council ponders $600 million affordable housing incentive
It is Toronto’s ur-question, the riddle of riddles, the fodder for a thousand earnest studies. What combination of public policy, political will and pixie...
By John Lorinc -
When Poverty Mattered: The 1970 uprising at the Social Planning Council
Editor’s note: Excerpted from the book When Poverty Mattered, Then and Now, by Paul Weinberg (Fernwood Publishing, 2019). There is something both...
By Paul Weinberg -
The delicate dance of governing Sidewalk Lab’s Quayside project
Three-and-a-half months after The Great Re-Set trimmed the sails of everyone’s favorite smart city villain, Sidewalk Labs CEO Dan Doctoroff and Waterfront...
By John Lorinc -
In defense of Toronto becoming a charter city
This column is in response to Professor Zack Taylor’s analysis of Toronto becoming a Charter City on Spacing In an opinion column here on Spacing...
By Doug Earl -
LORINC: John Tory’s tax hike and the myth of the electoral mandate
In his column on the weekend, the Globe and Mail’s Marcus Gee took Mayor John Tory to task for committing an electoral bait-and-switch, promising during...
By John Lorinc -
LORINC: What exactly does ‘affordable housing’ mean in Toronto?
With the unveiling yesterday of the City’s ten-year “Housing Opportunities Toronto” (HOT) action plan, Mayor John Tory and city council’s housing czar Ana...
By John Lorinc -
Dear Toronto: We need to talk about city charters
Is the answer to Toronto’s problems a city charter? According to the aptly named Charter City Toronto, it is. From my perspective, the group’s proposal...
By Zack Taylor -
Transportation tech bros need to listen to the Vision Zero folks
When we talk about Smart Cities, which seems to be all the time now, we hear about tensions between public governance and corporate interests. It is...
By Tricia Wood -
LORINC: Toronto’s charter city conundrum
For some time, I’ve harboured a growing impatience with the occasional campaigns urging greater institutionalized independence for the City of Toronto...
By John Lorinc