Toronto deputy mayor Jennifer McKelvie let everyone know on X that she intended to move a motion this week to declare the route from the Rogers Centre to Nathan Phillips Square Taylor Swift Way for the entire month of November.
The motion, seconded by deputy mayor Ausma Malik, is to honour Swift’s tour coming to Toronto.
City officials told True North the cost will be $14,000 for 22 ceremonial signs at every intersection along that route.
It’s a mere drop in the bucket in the grand scheme of City Hall spending under the socialist regime of tax-and-spend Mayor Olivia Chow. Nevertheless, it’s the optics.
It doesn’t just symbolize everything that is wrong with City Hall — which is run by a bunch of childish and sophomoric incompetents who engage in silliness like this Toronto sinks into a decrepit state. It shows a cavalier attitude towards the real issues and towards money.
On that same agenda of Wednesday’s council meeting, Chow moved a long-winded motion asking for an update by year’s end on the city’s current stormwater mitigation and adaptation programs for private homeowners.
This is of course an attempt by Chow and Co. (the motion was seconded by McKelvie) to look like they’re doing something after last week’s deluge of rain, which turned the Don Valley Parkway into a raging river and left many basements (including ours) flooded.
This is despite the fact that Toronto homeowners have been handed a 9% water rate hike each year since 2006. That’s 9% compounded each year.
The piece de resistance is Chow’s request that city officials look at another tax — dressed in the guise of a commercial parking levy — to address the climate crisis that led to severe flooding throughout Toronto.
Or so she claimed.
The motion refers to the city’s Basement Flooding Subsidy program, which offers grants of up to $3,400 to homeowners to install backwater valves and sump pumps.
But the program has so much red tape that, according to a report to this year’s budget committee, just over 10,000 homes have received grants in 17 years!
Naturally the costs to address basement flooding have gone up.
Let’s not forget that the city is dealing with more than 100-year-old sewer infrastructure which has not been replaced.
It has been typical of successive councils to take the money and direct it to pet projects.
Their priorities are all messed up.
Chow has been a master at doing these kinds of things since she took office a year ago.
There are the bike lanes on Avenue Road from Bloor Street West to Davenport, one of 25 projects that will cost taxpayers $7.5-million to put in place and at least $200,000 yearly to sweep and shovel (during the winter when no one uses them.)
The bike lanes on Avenue Road are absolutely absurd considering there are lanes a few blocks to the east on Yonge Street.
Whenever I use those lanes, there is no one on them but Uber Eats and other food delivery people.
Last week, Chow announced that she’d be handing the organizers of diversity events an extra $2-million bailout to help defray their rising costs. She did so while partying at one such event dressed in one of her newly acquired gowns.
It is interesting to note that she always has time in her terribly busy schedule to dance and party with various multicultural communities. But not so for the Walk with Israel on June 9 — attended by a record 50,000 members of my community — when she claimed she was too busy to attend.
That said, she really has no business giving already heavily subsidized festivals more money. I suspect if it were Chow’s own money, she wouldn’t be handing it over like water.
But the biggest slap in the face was the insistence by Chow and her cabal of leftists — led by Chris Moise — to rename Yonge-Dundas Square to Sankofa Square.
The initiative, which had considerable opposition, will cost up to $13 million.
I knew when Chow ran for office she, like most socialists, would address every single problem by taking the easy way out and asking taxpayers for more money.
I knew she and her incompetent sycophants would never be satiated and would find more ridiculous ways to spend that money, instead of dealing with the real priorities.
In fact, last week’s torrential rainfall in Toronto was eerily symbolic of her approach to managing the city.
She spends money like water expecting the rich will keep her city afloat.
Borrowing from Taylor Swift’s song I Knew You Were Trouble — “trouble, trouble, trouble” — I knew Chow was trouble the day she was elected to run Canada’s largest city.
But hey, I’m sure the world-renowned singer will love the street signs.
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