ABC Residents Association

The first few weeks of construction were challenging and came complete with snow storms. ABC and Councillor Saxe have been in continuous touch with the contractor’s field ambassador.

We have received a general update from the contractor and an email addressing specific concerns about the project.

Please read more to see the general and recent updates.

Councillor Dianne Saxe’s March 2025 Newsletter for University-Rosedale is now available!

Mayor Olivia Chow said Monday she is calling for a formal review of the “controversial” long-term contracts the city has signed with private companies for snow plowing and removal services.

The move comes after city hall has been under fire from residents over streets, sidewalks and transit stops that are still clogged with snow more than a week after back-to-back storms blanketed Toronto.

“I gave it a week. I was supportive of what the staff had been doing because I said, ‘Well, give them a chance for the first few days,’” Chow said at an unrelated press conference on Monday.

In 2022, the St. Lawrence Neighbourhood Association (SLNA) and the local business improvement area pitched Councillor Chris Moise on a proposal to close Market Street, just west of St. Lawrence Market, to cars for the summer.

Motivated by the isolation of the pandemic and the emphasis on outdoor activities, the group’s plan was to put out tables and chairs and take advantage of the fact that the City, in 2014, had rebuilt Market Street so it didn’t have curbs. The pedestrianization, with a full calendar of events, was resurrected for the summer of 2023 and again for this past summer.

This contained experiment revealed how an intentional effort to welcome city-dwellers into a lively public space can defuse the loneliness of life in the big city.

The other day, I got a notice from the city of Toronto letting me know a parking ticket I had disputed through its online system had been cancelled. Great news. Except that I’d put my dispute into the system in March 2024, and this was the very first acknowledgment I’d gotten that it had even received my petition.

Honestly, I’d mostly forgotten about it. The whole system that was implemented to allow quick-and-easy resolution of simple issues resulted in a 10-month wait to even be acknowledged. 

Councillor Saxe is advocating to have these projects completed as soon as possible and has provided this update on the Summerhill TTC station construction.

Elevators are expected to be completed by the end of 2025.

Constructing elevators in an active subway station has challenges including a constrained work site. At Summerhill Station, there is limited space to install the elevators and other accessibility features.

For decades in Toronto, property taxes barely went up. Under every previous mayor in post-amalgamation history, taxes were either frozen or increases were aimed “at or below the rate of inflation” or “in line with inflation.”

The result was decades of experts talking about how we had shockingly low property taxes by the standards of our region and the standards of other big cities. As a further result, we heard decades of city managers tell us how that was starving services and maintenance.

At a certain point, people really started to notice things falling apart.

As Toronto furiously debates bike lanes and their role in the city’s notorious gridlock, mostly missing from the discussion is a culprit that at its peak occupied almost one-fifth of the city’s road network.

Construction — for provincially managed transit projects, condo and office buildings, and utility work to support Toronto’s booming growth — closes more kilometres of roadway than bike lanes, special events or anything else. City officials say construction closures are the biggest cause of the kind of traffic backups that are angering residents and the Ford government.

Under cover of darkness, Infrastructure Ontario began the removal of 865 trees at Ontario Place on the evening of Wednesday, October 2, 2024. Within a single day, workers had cut down the vast majority of those trees.

The work—which includes the removal of every single tree on the western portion of the waterfront site adjacent downtown Toronto—is part of the approximately $200-million in site preparations that taxpayers are funding to prepare the land for Therme, an Austrian spa company, to develop a stadium-sized indoor waterpark on the site. See before and after photos.

The next day, October 3, the Province released the details of its 95-year lease with Therme, which journalists and grassroots organizations have…