OP-ED: Toronto taxpayers betrayed as Chow’s Marxist council runs city into the ground

"Welcome to Toronto circa 2025, under the feckless leadership of Chow and her pro-Hamas caucus, who are tone deaf to the concerns of taxpayers and treat them like they’re simply bottomless wallets."

Source: Facebook

Author: Sue-Ann Levy

Toronto resident Duey Esteireiro never thought he’d find himself in front of the media but as he told me earlier this week, he’s so upset with what’s happening to his neighbourhood, he had to speak out.

Esteireiro lives in a part of west Toronto where the city’s Marxist councillors intend to plunk another shelter in their mad efforts to find places to house the massive influx of refugees Mayor Olivia Chow has allowed into the city.

The proposed shelter in question in his case is planned for 1615 Dufferin St (just south of St. Clair Ave.)

He said the proposed harm reduction site is right across the street from a Toronto Public Library branch and within 750 metres of six schools.

”Hard to imagine how city staff came to this bizarre decision,” he said during a press conference by the Toronto Concerned Citizens Coalition at Nathan Phillips Square this past week.

“There will soon be drugs in our parks and laneways … we cannot accept this as the new normal.”

He accused city staff and local councillor Alexandra Bravo of “having no compassion” for the safety of children and seniors in their neighbourhood.

He said local residents were “blindsided” and they feel betrayed by Bravo.

Welcome to Toronto circa 2025, under the feckless leadership of Chow and her pro-Hamas caucus, who are tone deaf to the concerns of taxpayers and treat them like they’re simply bottomless wallets.

In fact, they are so dismissive of the concern of their “wallets” they are openly rude to them when they take the time and effort to speak at committees.

Housing and planning committee chairman Gord Perks — who has been on council for nearly 20 years and came from the environmental movement — has been known to treat speakers in a voice dripping with disdain.

I’ve written before that Chow’s shelter scheme makes no sense but because socialists like to build things using other peoples’ money, Dufferin St. is part of a new 20-shelter scheme which will produce 1,600 beds for $675 million.

It perhaps escaped Toronto’s fiscally illiterate council that the cost per bed will be $421,875.

But as I was told at the press conference, the scheme is only funded to the tune of $83-million.

Like many projects at City Hall, the budget always includes a sizable handout from the federal government, which in this case has not been forthcoming.

The TCCC made it abundantly clear that this council doesn’t really care about citizens when it comes to many, many other thing,s such as the crime wave, a decent TTC and the proliferation of bike lanes

Daniel Tate, who has formed and is building the civic advocacy group Integrity T.O., said there is a “crisis of leadership” in Toronto.

That doesn’t just include our (dancing) mayor but the “lifers” on council who bring “progressive policies” that don’t create community safety or well-being, he said.

He talked about the lack of credible transportation planning in which council have made it a “zero-sum game” and drivers have to sacrifice for cyclists.

As someone who has used the bike lanes this summer, I would add that motorized e-bikes and scooters have no place in the lanes, but there is absolutely no monitoring of them. The drivers, often Uber Eats or Door Dash employees, dash by at a high rate of speed without concern for the other cyclists in the lanes.

Motorized scooter drivers appear to have a death wish.

Tate said, quite rightly, that taxpayers foot the bill for the city’s shelters and should have a say as to where they are located and whether they should include harm reduction.

“Harm reduction and shelters are a bad mix and we really have to counter this harm reduction dogma,” he said.

”People are taking fentanyl with impunity on our streets and the city of Toronto’s public health department is enabling it.”

But our councillors have this Damn the Torpedoes full steam ahead mentality and when the fallout occurs, as it has repeatedly, they pretend it is not happening.

Like I’ve said, Tate reiterated, after I questioned him, that we need a “much stronger” police presence on our streets and in the TTC.

”Community safety is really getting out of hand and one way to deter that is to have a much stronger police presence,” he says. “Police should be walking the beat and they should be enforcing the law…if they see anyone participating in open defecation, there are laws for that.”

Tate is absolutely right.

But Chow and her council’s Hamas wing have let the city decline to the point where anything goes: Allowing people to defecate on our sidewalks and take over our parks, shooting up in the open, construction debris and overgrown weeds everywhere and doing nothing about the Jew hatred on our downtown streets.

These are but a few of the ways Toronto, the good of years gone by, has turned into Toronto the dump.