Contrary to her claims in her victory speech, newly re-elected Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow will never ever be the mayor of all people in the city she loves for its festivals.
Or so she said during the campaign.
She left my community to hang out to dry for the past three years — allowing anti-semitic and increasingly violent acts to fester and grow on the streets of Toronto, even at Jewish synagogues and schools.
Thanks to her negligent and cavalier attitude and that of our weak police chief, Myron Demkiw, many synagogues — including my own, which was shot at 20 times in March — have erected heavy iron fences to keep out intruders.
We can no longer attend any event in the Jewish community without going through security and seeing police in attendance. The location is sent at the last minute to keep away protesters.
This is the atmosphere Chow has created with her kid-glove treatment of violent protesters and offenders and her instructions to police to keep the peace only at protests.
She barely beat out her closest opponent three years ago. In Monday’s election race, she walked away with more than 530,000 votes, trouncing former Beaches East York councillor Brad Bradford by more than 125,000 votes.
Mind you, Bradford did well considering she had the activists at Progress Toronto feeding Torontonians a steady diet of lies about Bradford, the unions putting up signs (on company time), and most of the legacy media shilling for her. Never mind all the freebies she offered and her talk about free grocery stores in her attempt to imitate NYC mayor Zoran Mandami.
Do you think with this decisive win she will suddenly have a Come-to-Jesus moment about protecting Jews?
Absolutely not.
After the disheartening results became clear Monday night, I posted my epitaph for Toronto, and not just because of the rising Jew hatred:
Toronto’s “grifter class” of entitled union bullies, the homeless, drug and poverty industries, activists for any cause, helmetheads, the unemployed and, of course, the Islamists and other immigrants who she wooed ad nauseam (even dressing in their costumes) put her in office.
They knew she would continue the gravy train unchecked, while no doubt spending another term dancing her way sometimes in skimpy costumes (unprofessional for a mayor, especially at 69) around the city.
Predictably, they were most aggrieved with my analysis, as they always are when someone exposes the truth.
But as a City Hall columnist for 25 years for the Toronto Sun, I lived and breathed my job, enjoying walking, running and cycling Toronto’s streets and soaking up the downtown vibe while working from my office at City Hall.
No more.
Then things started to deteriorate around 2018, and I wrote about how if we don’t catch it then, we could become like blue cities in the States like Seattle, Portland and L.A.
I hate to say I was right.
Make no mistake. Chow’s predecessor, John Tory, despite his constant chest-thumping and the easy ride given him by the media, started that decline. He allowed encampments in parks, supported safe injection sites and essentially pandered to every left-wing cause.
During COVID, when the attention was not on him, he not only dallied with an underling, but he snuck in several bike lane projects, including the ones on Hospital Row and University Ave.
And he certainly did not mind the spending as one would expect a Conservative to do.
He also gleefully reminded the world that Toronto is a Sanctuary City in 2017 after Trump got into office the first time.
When Chow walked in the door in 2023, she merely picked up where he left off, using the city’s already debt-ridden coffers to satisfy all the stakeholders in the “grifter class”.
The homeless industry, which her late husband, Jack Layton, created back in 1999, was ecstatic when she and her left-wing council opted to plunk new “emergency” shelters in unsuspecting and lawful neighbourhoods to accommodate all the refugees she was allowing into our Sanctuary City.
She got Toronto deep into the not-so-affordable housing game and will most certainly continue that because socialists like to be in control of bricks and mortar, no matter how expensive.
And she supported all kinds of loony left-wing causes like renaming the well-known Yonge-Dundas Square to Sankofa Square — and the expensive signage that goes with that.
Our decrepit roads — not just for cars and cyclists — and the terrible gridlock will continue unabated because I predict she will divert even more money from the basics to social programs.
Her new council of mostly left-wing nutbars will turn a blind eye to the addicts and homeless on the streets because that’s the way they think they’ll guilt the senior levels of government into giving the city more money.
Despite their claims, socialists are not the least bit human and caring because they choose to leave these poor souls on the streets and in our parks.
The streets will become even dirtier and urine-soaked, and tourism will decline.
More Torontonians will sell their homes.
I predict there will be even more storefronts with ‘For Lease’ signs in their windows than there are now.
Now they can inflict their socialist mindset unchecked.
So forgive me if I don’t believe for a minute what Chow said Monday night.
We’re in for a very bumpy ride.
I truly hate having to write this epitaph for my once caring and clean city, but I see the decline with eyes wide open.
Toronto the Good is no longer.