News

Toronto often feels shabby. There are many examples but the renovation of College Park comes to mind. The general idea was good — skating trail, landscaping, sculptural giant frogs — but the execution seems cheap and the details look rough and unthoughtful. There’s a clunky Zamboni-storing field house, expanses of lawn turned to mud and natural pedestrian routes blocked by obstacles. It should be great, like New York’s Bryant Park, but it’s shabby.

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.

Please read more to see the general and recent updates.

Monday, March 24, 6 p.m. at Belmont House, 55 Belmont St.

Come join the kickoff Community Consultation meeting for the Ramsden Community Recreation Centre

While it might be sufficient in other cities, it’s a well-known fact that looking both ways before crossing the street in Toronto simply isn’t enough to guarantee one’s safety.

Pedestrians encounter traffic-packed roadways, narrow sidewalks and unpredictable motorists — and for kids, navigating the streets on foot can be especially intense.

For parents, the statistics for pedestrian collisions involving youth in the city can be alarming.

Join Green 11’s virtual update on the City of Toronto Waste Strategy< br/>
Monday, March 24, 2025, 7 to 8 p.m. on Zoom

Guest speakers include Marie-Helen Brillinger, project lead on reviewing and updating the City of Toronto’s long-term waste strategy and Connie Choy, project manager on the update.

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.

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.