ArchiveDecember 2013

Published on Tue Dec 31 2013 The city council scorecard ain’t what she used to be. When I started collecting this data — way back in 2011 — it was because I was curious to see where Mayor Rob Ford was drawing the council support he needed to pass major items. At the time, I was working the hypothesis that Ford wouldn’t be able to maintain enough support from councillors to push his agenda through...

By: Metro Published on Thu Dec 26 2013 These days, whenever I tell anyone that I make my living writing about Toronto City Hall and our famous mayor, I tend to get the same response. “Oh,” they say, with a knowing smile, “you must be having fun.” And, yeah, I get it. With Mayor Rob Ford, crazy stuff happens. The city hall beat used to be dominated by stories about whether property taxes should go...

By: Metro Published on Mon Dec 23 2013 Last year, in my final column before the holidays, I put together a Christmas wish list for Toronto City Hall — three things that I wanted to see happen in 2013. Christmas, I reasoned, is a time to be hopeful. I’ll stand by that again this year. Because it paid off. Sort of. Looking back at the list, two of the three things I wished for came to pass. I asked...

In my column this week, I looked at the transit funding strategy unveiled last week by a provincial advisory panel led by Anne Golden and Paul Bedford. In summary, it’s a good plan created by smart people. The report's biggest issue is that it comes on top of other good plans that were also created by smart people, none of which have led to squat in terms of actual transit construction. We...

Published on Fri Dec 13 2013 I don’t think anyone really wants to sit through yet another debate about the Scarborough subway. We’ve sat through too many of them already, and they’re all the same — packed with pandering, persecution complexes, bad math and the word “subway” repeated three times in quick succession. I’ve had enough. But despite the fact that it could drag us all back into...