He cannot win his Greenbelt argument and he doesn’t know when to shut up. Every time the Ontario premier opens his mouth in public, he sticks a foot in his mouth. Mind you, what we are hearing from him is grade school sophistry. He can hardly tell us that the only available land for building on in southern Ontario is in the Greenbelt. And he is embarrassing himself when he sticks to his lie.
The basic problem is that Doug Ford has never had any mentoring in politics. His late brother Rob tried to instil some political savvy in Doug when they were both in city hall in Toronto. The problem was that Rob was self medicating on crack cocaine at the time, and leaving his brother to the sycophants among the lawyers and other builders’ representatives.
Ontario is not going to have a housing problem because we don’t want to build in the Greenbelt. We have a housing problem now. Toronto has been trying to build more infill for the past 40 years and has been battled to a stand-still by the NIMBY’s and their over-paid councillors.
What people don’t seem to understand in Toronto is that if you want a world-class city, you damn well have to pay for it. And they had John Tory holding the line for them for the past nine years. John Tory was a pretty damn good mayor, for a conservative. He was living in the past. He did not build any future. Ask me of his legacy and I will try not to laugh too much.
And let me remind you: A world-class city does not have people living in their parks and on their streets. And remember that a panhandler is just a lost boy who is looking for his Peter Pan and Wendy.
I will try to remember that Toronto’s major problem these days is that asshole at Queen’s Park. Doug Ford should have grown up in my part of York Township instead of down in Etobicoke—both integral parts of the Toronto of today. I thought my family was coming up in the world when we moved in 1946 from Sherbourne and Wellesley to north of the stockyards. It was a world that Doug Ford never knew existed. All the homes on streets around ours had their basements finished first so that people could have a place to live while the rest of the house was finished.
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Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry
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