Oh good. A chance to make women feel incredibly anxious and guilty about every decision that they have to make during pregnancy. Something new for society.

Note that our projected underspend is $200 million higher than the report delivered to the executive committee *at the last meeting*. Will anyone ask about it? No. Happens every year like clockwork.

Every time that a car drives into a pole or building, people make the joke about the building should have been wearing high-vis. But Mallick is the first person that I've seen seriously ask, what if we actually blamed the building tho?

Very glad that @jocelynsquires.bsky.social live-skeeted this so that I could enjoy it while being only a little bit jealous.

"The only true bulwark we have against the misuse of the notwithstanding clause is voter indignation—and politicians’ fear. This means, alas, that minority rights are only protected when enough people rally to defend them."

This week, CMHC showed "Canada's" housing problem is really "Ontario's" housing problem. @fordnation has made us runt of the litter—the only province with falling housing starts. Ford has every excuse to say why housing is⬇️ but the real reason is he hasn't shown ⬆️. #onpoli

What we've done instead is made it so a homeowner can have 3 permits if they want, but an apartment dweller can't get one. How is that an equitable system? Who is actually overwhelming the system? And wouldn't the real solution just be to raise the price of the permit to properly address demand?

Staff not recommending a pedestrian scramble at Yonge and Eglinton. Infinite sadness. Cc @chanface.bsky.social secure.toronto.ca/council/agen...

It turns out that "fixing" the immigration system in response to political concerns rather than in response to actual problems in the immigration system has some unintended consequences. www.thestar.com/news/canada/...

A thread on the challenges of affordable housing: -how funding is cobbled together and has restrictions on what it can pay for -how the housing is required to do so much more than being affordable housing How can that math work?

A friend is coming from Europe to Toronto in a few weeks (not peak anything) & trying to book a hotel. Found a middle-market hotel downtown for $395. That is bonkers. More expensive than London or Paris in the summer. Toronto needs a whole bunch of new hotels. Maybe dead condo mkt can pivot.

one of my silly takes is that truth is actually a core liberal value--truth, not relativism--and what demsas argues here is absolute capitulation to pure relativism sure bad ideas are as important to teach as good ones lies as important as truth surely this will allay all attacks on universities,

Many people are saying. Housing starts down in Ontario but no other province. What could the difference be?

Toronto is a great city. It has its issues at the moment but these are not insurmountable. Many of us have a vision for the future and @ericlombardi.bsky.social has been critical in helping me and many others to get our ideas out through More Neighbours. I know that he'll do great work here as well.

With fall drawing near, civic life in the city reinvigorates with more public consultations- there's never been a better time to advocate for more housing! Want to get involved, but not sure how? We made a video to help you get started! Funded through #MNTOgigs www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvUc...

in general I think more people should accept that not everything in a city has to be *for you* in order to be beneficial, the whole magic of cities is that they cater to lots of different people in lots of different situations

The @ontarioliberal.bsky.social party has announced that @bonniecrombie.bsky.social will resign the leadership upon the selection of a successor. She got 57% support in a review & evidently decided that wasn't enough to continue. Yesterday was a happy day for Crombie. Today, very different #onpoli

Ana Bailão has been fighting for housing forever. She got basement suites & laneway homes through Council before @moreneighboursto.bsky.social even existed. She worked with Tory and Perks to legalize rooming houses citywide. Build Canada Homes has a huge amount of work ahead. She is a great choice.

Think this would be great in Toronto as well (though it would mostly apply to parks and not bike lanes because.. you know). But it would run right smack into the Official Plan which tries to minimize development near parks lest they cast a shadow on the park.

NEIGHBORHOOD GREENWAYS ARE 100% COMPATIBLE WITH DENSE HOUSING.

"Although the homes are configured as compact micro-units, the lack of double-loaded interior corridors allows every suite to be a dual aspect unit — a rarity, unfortunately, for North American apartments — with natural light coming in from two sides."

Recent changes around transit stations are a big opportunity for housing. We've got the zoning (almost). Now the province needs to change the building code to allow for more spacious and accessible apartments.

Liberals to Canola industry (total export value: $7.7 billion): take $370 million, please! Liberals to Post-Secondary Education (total export value $11B from tuition, more if you count foreign student spending in Canada): drop dead. What kind of economy are we building, again?

Young Ontarians are disillusioned by sky high cost-of-living, housing insecurity and rampant unemployment. Doug Ford’s message to them? You’re not looking “hard enough”. For someone with so much contempt for education, he sure lectures a lot. #onpoli globalnews.ca/news/1140573...

Sometimes I remember that this started when residents objected to a garden suite at Committee of Adjustment that was refused. That is, the existing rules already prevent the thing that they got upset about, but they want the rules to be more restrictive anyway. storeys.com/toronto-gard...

Yeah, I'll be sure to pass that on.

I guess that it's good that the Globe and Mail is using the term "luxury condo" for what I presume is an actual luxury condo rather than just a normal condo that's cheaper than a detached home. But it's kind of funny to do it in a way that admits a "proper house" will cost you around $8 million!

In Russia's air raid on Ukraine tonight, about 15 of its attack drones have entered Polish airspace, per Ukrainian channels. There's been a few instances of these drones crashing in Poland to date, but this appears to be the most significant Russian intrusion into NATO airspace yet.

I find his statement pretty hard to square with the fact that when the city tried to make roads safer for cyclists without taxing anyone, he tried to pass a law to undo the changes and prevent all similar changes in the future.

It's incredibly weird that folks have convinced themselves that the Covid vaccines - which had an ~82^% take up rate - were unpopular.

"this returns us to what is perhaps the most fundamental problem before us: not policy or program but culture and mindset. We want to program out the possibility of power used badly. But this cannot be done." www.liberalcurrents.com/good-governa...

"A partial copy of the ticket issued to Lincoln. In it, the make of his car is listed as 'Power Wheels,' the model as 'Barbie Jeep,' and the colour as 'pink.'" This is some A+ reporting.

"Boomers bought houses at a time when saving a couple of pounds per day taking a packed lunch to work would give you a house deposit in eight years. For a millennial this would take two centuries." #housing

This made me go look up the details of the Grace Hopper "first computer bug" story and that's how I learned that they taped the moth to the day's log sheet. I'm going to start doing this with the log sheets at work. Mine probably won't end up in the Smithsonian though.

i've been thinking lately about the loss of the future--not in the historical sense, because the future just keeps on coming--but the loss of the future in the ideological sense, the loss of the future as an organizing principle of politics this is as true of liberals as it is of the left

Literally one parked car, likely with no one in it, holding up a 60' articulated bus, with maybe as many as 60 times the amount of people on it. Which should our city prioritize? strongtownsottawa.ca/bank/ Tell the city to at least try some proper dedicated bus lanes in the Glebe.

I very much appreciate this question, even though it is light on details. The Official Plan is to be read "as a whole," but we continally ask for public comment on isolated, narrow bylaws. This Q gets to the tradeoffs: does preserving trees matter enough to you to vary setbacks and building height?

#kendryden Most media are missing one of your biggest accomplishments: childcarecanada.org/documents/ch...

I made my own taxonomy a while back. Coalition for building: urbanists, "property rights" lovers, gray environmentalists, housing first advocates, Georgists Potential partners (depends on pitch): businesses, unions, tenant groups/CLTs, ... Useless: anti-immigrant, nihilists, doomers

whatever dumb idea you have about how to make migrants lives a bit grimmer to reassure nativists, the UK has likely *implemented* it "hostile environment" is a term the government came up with to describe its own approach

The process of continually postponing the opening of the Eglinton Crosstown LRT has been ongoing for years. Again, I call on Premier Ford to initiate a public inquiry into the delays. We cannot allow future infrastructure projects to repeat these mistakes.

Two baseball bats? In this economy?

Announcing another Eglinton LRT opening delay right after the province forced municipalities to charge development charges to fund Metrolinx and all of its cost overruns feels designed to upset me, personally.

Sorry but abundance is now the collective noun for a group of bros who ruin everything. An abundance of bros. Former abundancers, please redistribute yourselves into Keynesians and sewer socialists for the time being.

Eagerly awaiting the discussion of the detached home bubble, the glut of detached homes and the discussion of how detached homes are obviously the wrong type of housing and we shouldn't be building them anymore. Robertson? Pasalis? Mortgage guy? Where y'all at? www.thestar.com/real-estate/...

This would never have happened under Freeland. (Of course, the Liberals wouldn't have formed government under Freeland, but that's a whole other thing for all of us to sit and stew on.)

There’s this weird psychological thing where some people, like this council candidate, look at a lane that isn’t actively choked with vehicles and declare it must be underused. But buses (and bikes) are *much* more space-efficient than cars. www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

Convenient reminder that Toronto's survey on Neighbourhood Retail is open until September 30. They are currently not proposing this, but you could ask them to? www.toronto.ca/city-governm...

I hope that this is a sign that the government realizes that "affordable housing" can be built OR bought. They can just buy from the "overbuilt" type at lower prices and rent it out affordably. But I worry that the Minister just saw his chance to do the usual demonizing of "condos" (high rises).

It’s not just that the President of the United States posted a video of eleven people being murdered in international waters it’s that the President of the United States ordered the murder of eleven people in international waters so he could post a video of it.