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.
Which is what a lot of city life can feel like these days. You wait for a bus that the TTC claims is “on-time” 83 per cent of the time and it takes forever. St. Patrick subway station has been stripped to its bare-metal, circular studs for years and there’s no clear indication what is happening to it or if it will ever be completed. You go to a park where the city inspector has signed off that everything is great and find charred picnic tables or busted benches (as the city auditor reported last week).
Read more at Olivia Chow is willing to be a tax-and-spend mayor. But can she be the CEO that Toronto needs to fix what ails it? – Toronto Star, February 12, 2025
