'We're going to celebrate:' Conservative MP Melissa Lantsman speaks after re-election in Thornhill
Pierre Poilievre's co-deputy leader, Conservative MP Melissa Lantsman, has been re-elected in Thornhill. CBC's Susan Ormiston spoke to her about what this result means.
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Toronto Star
2 hours ago
- Toronto Star
Why Toronto's streets keep ending up as a battleground — and what the fight should really be about
The big number 25 % the percentage of customers that business owners believed drove to access their stores along Bloor Street, according to a 2017 study. The actual number was less than 10 per cent. Hey, did you hear the story about the group fighting a proposed change to a Toronto street? They're really worked up about it, claiming that the proposal from Toronto city hall will devastate small businesses, bring traffic to a standstill, and maybe even usher in a 'Mad Max'-style apocalypse. 'Wait, which street?' you might be wondering. And the answer is, well, a whole lot of them. I've seen so darn many of these street fights in my decade-plus covering Toronto city hall, with the civic equivalent of knock-down drag-out brawls occurring again and again. And the street fighters just keep coming. Last week, an advocacy group dubbed the Downtown Concerned Citizens Association held a press conference to state its opposition to a bike lane extension planned for the Esplanade, between Yonge and Market Streets. 'Bike lanes restrict road space,' the group declared, according to a report by the CBC. 'Bike lanes have turned streets into parking lots, with residents unable to shop, get their kids to events, and seriously impact emergency services and Wheel-Trans.' Their opposition follows a similar — and at least partly AI-aided — uproar over city hall's plans to install transit-priority lanes on Bathurst Street and Dufferin Street. And a local tiff over a bit of bike infrastructure on North York's Marlee Avenue. And the ongoing fight over keeping bike lanes on Bloor Street, Yonge Street and University Avenue, where even Premier Doug Ford got involved. Go back further and there are more examples. Remember the street fighters who claimed prioritizing the King streetcar would mark the end of King West? Or the 'citizen's revolt' over bike lanes on Woodbine Avenue? Or the ' Save Our St. Clair' group that sued to try to stop the construction of the streetcar right-of-way on St. Clair? Heck, you can even go back to the '90s, when opposition groups along Spadina Avenue warned that removing the angled on-street parking to make way for dedicated streetcar lanes would somehow destroy the vibrancy of the street. They really loved those angled parking spaces. The frustrating thing isn't just the sheer repetition of the street fight stories, but also that the pile of accumulated data from these same fights never seems to change anything. Because when you do look at the record, the record is clear: where these kinds of projects have been allowed to go forward, and where traffic has been given enough time to adjust to the new street layouts, the result has been basically fine. The uproar and opposition inevitably fade away. People get used to the new bike lanes or the new transit lanes. The apocalyptic warnings are forgotten about. The apocalypse never arrives. At this point, with so many fights waged — not just in Toronto, but in other cities, too — you'd think there'd be at least a handful of examples where the dire warnings proved prophetic. Where bike lanes, bus lanes and the removal of some on-street parking led directly to boarded-up storefronts and permanently gridlocked traffic. But I've struggled to find real case studies that document that kind of catastrophic failure in any city anywhere in the world. ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW The repeated claim that transit lanes and bus lanes will destroy businesses deserves a special call-out because it seems to be based on a perception problem. The Centre for Active Transportation, for example, found via a 2017 study that Bloor Street retailers believed that about 25 per cent of their customers arrived via car. The actual percentage? Less than 10 per cent. Part of the issue might be that merchants were about five times more likely to drive to work than their customers. They drive, so they assume their customers do too. Meanwhile, data suggests the transit priority project on King Street and the bike lanes on Bloor Street actually led to increased retail spending. Go figure. None of this should be read as a suggestion that Toronto city hall and its plans are always perfectly on point. The transportation department tends to make change harder than it has to be. On Bloor West, for example, opposition to the bike lanes was likely made more intense by the baffling decision to install the lanes without making adjustments to signal timing at intersections. And the department is generally still not fast enough at addressing clear bottlenecks that could be eased with minor tweaks. Toronto's street fighters would be better served by focusing their energy on getting city hall to address those kinds of specific issues more quickly and efficiently, rather than always trying to land a knockout blow against any kind of change. When your punches are this weak, it's probably time to stop throwing hands.
CTV News
9 hours ago
- CTV News
Support numbers for Poilievre plummet after federal election loss: Nanos
Watch Pollster Nik Nanos says its 'quite significant' how Pierre Poilievre's support numbers plummeted in the past month.
National Post
12 hours ago
- National Post
Kelly McParland: Poilievre needs to earn an extension as leader
Canada's federal Conservatives are stuck with a dilemma as they consider whether to do anything different in the next two years than they did in the last two. Article content At the centre of the dilemma are a host of riddles. As in, did they actually lose the last election? Sure, they didn't win, but did they lose lose? Like, did Canadians actually reject them, or did something else happen that got in the way of the victory they anticipated? Article content Article content Article content If they did lose, what do they do about it? And if they didn't lose lose, what do they do about that? Article content Article content Depending on the answers to those questions is another of equal weight: do they head into the future with the same team of decision-makers who didn't quite win if they maybe didn't lose? And how do you answer that question when you don't know what the future holds, given that one complaint against the current leader is that he didn't respond effectively enough when the playing field changed? Article content As far as Pierre Poilievre is concerned, there's nothing to decide. 'We had the biggest vote count in our party's history, the biggest increase in our party's history, the biggest vote share since 1988 and we're going to continue to work to get over the finish line,' he replied when asked. That same argument is on offer from other Conservatives keen on moving past the vote that left them once again in second place. Article content The 'nothing to see here' case goes like this: In any previous election dating back 40 years the Tory results would have put them in power, likely with a majority. The fact this one didn't was the result of unprecedented exterior factors, specifically, the timing of Justin Trudeau's departure and the coinciding emergence of a U.S. president even his most fervent detractors didn't foresee as being quite this nuts. Alarmed and unnerved, voters opted for continuity and incumbency over the very real practical policies they'd been firmly embracing until then. Article content It's not a bad argument, but also not entirely convincing. In the Liberal bastion of greater Toronto, it sounds a lot like the local NHL team's annual excuses for once again failing to deliver the goods. 'Hey, at least we did better than our last collapse,' doesn't quite cut it. Article content Article content To its credit, the conservative universe isn't ready to simply roll over and accept the excuses. In this the party shows itself once again to be more independent-minded than the rival Liberals, who — after refusing to give themselves the power to oust Justin Trudeau, and living to regret the fact — made the same decision over his replacement. A majority of the caucus voted not to accept the rules of the Reform Act, meaning Prime Minister Mark Carney knows he can rule as he sees fit, safe in the knowledge the minions can't get rid of him. Would any other party in the democratic world vote to remain minions? Article content Conservatives not only adopted the Reform rules, but are discussing whether Poilievre should face a leadership review. A decision could be made as early as this month, with a review to take place next spring. It's possible they'll reject the option, but it would be a mistake. The world a year from now may look a lot different than it does today. Given the level of international uncertainty and the daily madhouse in Washington, it would be a shock if it didn't. Locking themselves into a recently-defeated leader when circumstances could easily demand an entirely different set of calculations would not be a show of confidence but an act of denial.
