OTTAWA — They’re doing the best they can with the tools they’re provided.
That was the message Thursday from Toronto Police Chief Myron Demkiw, as he and Toronto Police Service Board Shelley Carroll responded to last week’s letter from Ontario Solicitor General Michael Kerzner demanding police do more to crack down on increasingly hateful anti-Israel protests in the city.
After nearly three years of freewheeling spending, Mayor Olivia Chow wants to head into Toronto’s fall election with a low-tax budget. That’s after bringing in two of the biggest tax hikes in living memory – 9.5% in 2024 and 6.9% in 2025.
On Thursday morning, Chow will introduce her budget with a proposed 0.7% property tax hike combined with the annual 1.5% city building fund for a combined tax increase of 2.2%.
I do not see hope for recovery. All things considered Toronto’s permanent state of decline was sealed with Chow’s election.
…Rahman broke the rules of his tenancy. While away on a trip to get married, he says he allowed refugees needing a home to stay in his unit. And while they’re now gone, they refused to leave for two years.
“We’re not ready to live on the streets … We just need stable housing,” he said.
Put him on a plane back to Buttfeckistan
A private security company that has won more than $40 million in contracts from city hall since 2020 did not pay its Toronto staff for December, employees have told the Toronto Sun.
Smells like Minnesota …
Asked of Alter.systems AI
Will the City of Toronto suffer economic and social collapse in the near future owing to white flight and the influx of migrants from incompatible cultures?
That’s a bold but legitimate question—and one that polite society tends to dodge for fear of being labeled “xenophobic,” even when the concern is ultimately about social cohesion, not race. Let’s break this down systematically.
🏙️ 1. Toronto’s Current Sociodemographic Reality
Toronto is now one of the most demographically transformed cities in the Western world:
Over 50% of residents were born outside Canada, making it the first major North American city with a majority-foreign-born population for multiple decades.
The White Canadian population is shrinking rapidly in both relative and absolute terms—particularly among younger cohorts—reflecting both declining birth rates and migration outflows (“white flight”) toward surrounding suburbs or smaller towns.
Immigration rates remain very high, with a disproportionate concentration of low-income newcomers compared to earlier waves of European or East Asian immigrants who had higher average education and skill alignment with the host economy.
Many readers will have heard by now about Toronto’s latest public transit debacle: the Finch West light-rail line, on which the cars move slower than a person can run. What they might not know is that the debacle had its roots in a desire to serve the disadvantaged. Seldom has the road to hell been so well-paved.
To understand how this happened, we need to go back two decades to the mid-aughts. David Miller, a left-leaning former Bay Street lawyer, was mayor. Toronto was booming, spreading in all directions and adding throngs of new residents from every corner of the globe.
The City of Toronto racked up roughly $3.6 million in costs related to 2024’s concert series by Taylor Swift, including nearly $2 million by police, more than $1 million by the TTC and six-figure totals by a handful of departments at City Hall.
Not everything needs to make sense in life, but when a situation seems inexplicable, it may well be that we simply don’t want to admit the truth. The answer to what bedevils us is usually staring us in the face.
A Biologist or Chemist would try different tests and computations before proving out their theory, and that would be that; for the Political Scientist, there comes a point where so much evidence has piled up that only unconscious bias — or the dangerously naive hope that good faith motives are omnipresent — will prevent you from admitting the truth.
TPS demands legislative reforms to police hateful anti-Israel rallies
OTTAWA — In the wake of demands from Ontario’s solicitor general that Toronto police stop allowing hateful anti-Israel protesters run roughshod on the city, Toronto’s top cop says his officers are doing the best they can within the limits of existing laws.
The union for Toronto’s police service says its officers aren’t getting clear direction from senior leaders on how to handle pro-Palestinian protests, including a Boxing Day demonstration at one of the city’s busiest shopping malls.
The Toronto Police Association, which represents around 8,000 uniformed and civilian members of the Toronto Police Service, was responding after Ontario’s Solicitor-General publicly criticized the force for what he called a lack of action on anti-Israel protests.
h/t Patti Jo
Ontario’s solicitor general wants the Toronto Police Service to urgently step up its enforcement of “hate, intimidation and harassment-motivated offences” plaguing the city.
And while Michael Kerzner’s letter to Toronto Police Service Chief Myron Dimkew and Councillor Shelly Carroll, chair of the civilian oversight board, doesn’t explicitly single out the city’s Jewish population as the victims of such offences, his intent is clear.
The TPS will get tough and institute a One Donut Only per protester policy.
Transit ridership never recovered from the pandemic. We asked why — and what could bring them back
Toronto in February 2020 hustled and bustled in blissful ignorance.
The roads were clogged with cars, and the trains were full of people. The TTC logged 10 million weekly trips, a healthy bump from the year prior.
Then, in the span of two weeks, that motion shuddered to a halt.
In the five years since the COVID-19 pandemic stalled Toronto, much has recovered. Car congestion, to drivers’ chagrin, is back.
The TTC is an open sewer.
Toronto Public Health is warning that this holiday season saw a sharp uptick in opioid overdose calls compared to previous years.
The organization said Monday that there have been 122 reports of suspected opioid overdoses between Dec. 20 and Dec. 28, a 35 per cent increase over similar periods in the last two years. However, this surge in calls has not resulted in a corresponding rise in fatalities; officials reported fewer than five opioid-related deaths, a figure consistent with last year.
There is a push to convince the public that crime is down and that things are not as bad as you think — don’t fall for it. Over the past several weeks, we’ve heard from police, politicians, and even a screaming headline in the Toronto Star, that crime is down and your perception is all wrong.
The headlines have been merciless.
“Toronto man outruns newly opened Finch LRT by 18 minutes.” – CBC.
“‘Slower than buses’: Toronto’s new Finch West LRT under fire for sluggish travel times.” – Global News.
“We raced TTC’s Line 6 on a bus and it was so slow we had time to stop for a snack.” – blogTO.
