The idea behind 15-minute cities is pretty simple: we should build communities where people can fulfill most of their needs within a 15-minute walk. Some terminally online people seem to believe that this would be a radical feat of social engineering that would end our free-market way of living.
Toronto is facing a $1.8 billion budget shortfall. We need to close that gap through higher revenue, lower spending, or some combination of the two. Unlike the federal and provincial governments, cities can’t just run deficits.
Given America’s vast influence, it’s easy to forget that Canada is its own country with distinct challenges, opportunities, and history. There isn’t always an off-the-shelf American policy solution that we can just slap a maple leaf on.
Subsidiarity is a good principle in the abstract, but a hard one to implement in practice. As a decentralized federation, Canada is grappling with the challenges of dispersed responsibilities. Happily, we seem to be correcting some of our missteps.
Given our growing and ageing population, clinging to the status quo isn’t an option. We should embrace more economic dynamism and less supply management. Governments should default to erring on the side of more rather than less.
Ford can get back in the driver’s seat and be the man who fixed Ontario’s housing crisis. Or he can be remembered as the last gasp of Toronto NIMBYism.
If we want people to pollute less in their day-to-day lives, we should build more traditional, walkable neighbourhoods—the kind of neighbourhoods this country was built on.
There are always loud minorities on the other side of any issue, even whether gravity exists or not. We shouldn’t let them become a distraction. Fixating on them sure doesn’t help our allies in Israel or Ukraine, or our Jewish friends at home.
Conservatives need to realize that the landscape has changed. For a long time they’ve had the upper hand on the housing file, which is arguably responsible for their meteoric rise in the polls. But now, it seems, the Liberals have woken up.
Building more housing units isn’t enough to address everyone’s housing needs. We need governments to do more to help the truly vulnerable, and less that interferes with homebuilders trying to house the middle class.
