WARMINGTON: Chow prioritizing wading pools in city filled with guns, robberies and drugs
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Olivia Chow says if she wins the mayoral race on June 26 she will get the wading pools open earlier.
She seems sincere and perhaps with much of the union vote behind her she may soon be in a position to throw taxpayer money at it to make it happen.
The syringes, the crack pipes, tents, broken windows, violence and growing scores of in-distress homeless people, however, may have to wait.
Toronto, meanwhile, is teetering on becoming what has become of San Francisco, Seattle and Vancouver and this was the first time I had heard of wading pools as a key issue.
“As your Mayor, I’ll say yes to fixing what’s broken and making our neighbourhoods more liveable for everyone,” she said in a tweet over the weekend, during which she went to parks and celebrations and community events.
Sounds good. Words often do.
As Toronto Police officer-turned-crime specialist Ross McLean said so well in his McLean Chronicles podcast, the key is not the promises to remedy a problem, but the “process” laid out to achieve it. Anything can be said. Achievements, though, don’t come from simply saying it.
In fairness, Chow has not been in elected office for almost a decade, so she can’t be blamed for the out-of-control drug use, violent crime, homelessness and cost of living that is making sections of Toronto unlivable. Most of the front-runners have been in positions of power during this increased decay of Toronto’s public safety.
But the question for Chow, the front-runner in the polls, is can she fix it with an underfunded police service, higher taxes and more and more rules, bike lanes and social programs with a court system that lets so many people out on bail?
No matter the ideology and no matter who wins, it’s a big challenge.
Most incidents don’t even make the news.
Over the weekend, the city finally filled in a sink hole in East York. It only took two months of complaining from people on the street before the city finally put some metal coverings over it.
The hole was so big “the kids were playing in it,” said Murray Clark of Glen Albert Dr., who was happy it was finally dealt with, but concerned it took so long.
People pay for their services with their always-increasing taxes, but don’t always enjoy the benefits of their enormous financial contributions. I wrote last month about how a syringe was under a picnic table for days and no one from the city ever came to pick it up.
There are many other serious incidents that fly under the radar. On Saturday, a TTC bus driver said he had a gun held to his head. He managed to escape, but it’s not hard to consider how badly that could have turned out. If holding a gun to a bus driver’s head isn’t news, then a broken window at the Kennedy TTC station wouldn’t be.
But it does offer insight into the lawlessness that exists now on public transit.
The broken window is a decent metaphor for what is happening to Toronto. New York employed the “broken windows” approach in the late 1990s to clean up a crime-riddled city and that should be tried here as well. In New York, instead of ignoring broken windows, police put 20 people on the case and stopped the small crimes before the big crimes took over.
This strategy would mean offending some people and throwing the book at some young offenders.
I wrote over the weekend about how a man was pushed off a bus last September, died in December and now a 15-year-old is charged with manslaughter. It was on the front page. But I didn’t get one call about it. People shrug their shoulders in acceptance now.
Just like an incident that Dr. Steven Starkman told us about, in which one teen girl at Avenue Rd. and Eglinton Ave. who allegedly beat up another girl, who was then swarmed by 20 girls. An elderly man on a bus was also accosted. The police are investigating it.
The cover of the Toronto Sun on Sunday, June 18, 2023.Same goes for a weird case in Leaside, where there is a man who has allegedly been terrorizing a neighbourhood and assaulting dogs.
“Seniors are terrified to go out now,” said a neighbour. “The anger from the man has been escalating.”
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Toronto has become one tough place to live in for law-abiding people.
But at least the wading pools may open early.
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