Ontario court strikes down Ford government's plan to remove Toronto bike lanes
The judge ruled Wednesday that Cycle Toronto and others "have established that removal of the target bike lanes will put people at increased risk of harm and death, which engages the right to life and security of the person."
In December, lawyers for the Toronto cycling advocacy group and other cyclists asked the Ontario Superior Court of Justice to strike down parts of a law empowering the province to remove the 19 kilometres of protected bike lanes on Yonge Street, Bloor Street and University Avenue, and replace them with vehicle lanes.
The province has been pushing for the removals as a solution to Toronto's traffic congestion, but cyclists and advocates say bike lanes are crucial for public safety and that removing them won't solve traffic concerns.
Justice Paul Schabas concluded Wednesday that the bike lane removals will not reduce congestion.
In his written decision, Schabas highlighted expert evidence "which establishes that bicycle lanes, and in particular separated or protected bicycle lanes, reduce motor vehicle traffic congestion by providing an alternative method of transportation that is safer for all users of the roads."
WATCH | Cyclists protested bike lane removals earlier this year:
"The evidence shows that restoring lanes for cars will not result in less congestion, as it will induce more people to use cars and therefore any reduction in driving time will be short-lived, if at all, and will lead to more congestion," said Schabas in his decision.
In a statement, a spokesperson for Transportation Minister Prabmeet Sarkaria said the government will appeal the decision.
"We were elected by the people of Ontario with a clear mandate to restore lanes of traffic and get drivers moving by moving bike lanes off of major roads to secondary roads," Dakota Brasier told CBC News.
Premier Doug Ford commented on the decision as he left an event in Brampton Wednesday afternoon.
"I believe, and the people of Ontario believe, that they elect parties to make decisions — they don't elect judges," he told CBC News.
6 cyclists killed in Toronto last year
Schabas also wrote in his decision that removing the target bike lanes and replacing them with lanes for cars will make these roads less safe for cyclists and for other road users, resulting in an increased likelihood of collisions, injuries, and death.
Six cyclists were killed in Toronto last year, all on roads without protected bike lanes.
There have been no fatalities involving cyclists this year, according to Toronto police data.
Data from the 2021 Statistics Canada census suggests the number of people commuting on bicycles in areas of Toronto where bike lanes are located is far above one per cent, with the exception of the federal riding of Etobicoke-Lakeshore, where the debate over the Bloor bike lane has been arguably most intense.
The executive director of Cycle Toronto told CBC Toronto that they are "over the moon" with the judge's decision.
"It's great news for Toronto. It's great news for anyone who supports local democracy and local decision-making, and for anyone who rides a bike in the city. This victory is yours," said Michael Longfield.
He said Premier Ford should be focusing on more important issues other than bike lanes.
"What Torontonians, what Ontarians need from their premier is for him to be focusing on really important matters like trade, education, health care, and not obsessing over trying to be the mayor of Toronto and meddling in 19 kilometres of bike lanes," said Longfield.
Ford made removing the bike lanes a campaign issue during the snap election he called and won in February.
He and Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow had been negotiating a compromise for months, with the mayor conveying that she believed there was a solution that would keep the bike lanes and add an extra lane of traffic in each direction on the three roads.
Etobicoke business group welcomes appeal
A coalition of business owners and locals in Etobicoke was disappointed with the decision Wednesday.
Cody MacRae, founder of Balance on Bloor — a non-profit group of residents and business people that wants bike lanes removed from the Etobicoke section of the street in favour of a lane for motorized traffic — said he's happy the province is appealing.
"I think it just doesn't make any sense whatsoever," he said in an interview. "For the judge to say it doesn't cause congestion, I would welcome him to come to Bloor Street in Etobicoke and take a look at it."
MacRae said, says the stretch of bike lanes is barely used, while motorists are left idling with one less lane available to them. Balance on Bloor argues that's impacting business in the area, he said.
Toronto mayor says bike lanes keep people safe
Toronto city council voted in November to oppose the province's plans to override the city's authority and remove the lanes.
In a statement Wednesday, a spokesperson for Chow said the city and its elected council should be the ones making decisions about municipal infrastructure.
"The City is reviewing the court decision and the impact on our ongoing discussions with the province," said Zeus Eden.
The city is tackling the root causes of congestion by hiring traffic agents, speeding up construction, and improving subways, streetcars, and buses so more people take public transit, Eden said.
A city report in November estimated the cost of removing the targeted bike lanes in Toronto at $48 million.
You can read the full decision in the document below:
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When crime was broadly falling from the 1990s to the 2010s, mass incarceration seemed like a huge problem, so it was easy to forget about the problem that had driven it: the enormous spike in crime, especially violent crime, in the late 20th century. So people decided that policing and incarceration were bad. Then crime started to rise again, and incarceration fell, so we again got a shift toward thinking about the problem of crime and not the problems created by fighting crime. Rafael Exactly! In a lot of ways, American cities became victims of their previous successes on the public safety front. Story continues below advertisement James It's obviously good that the pendulum is swinging back in the other direction. Is there any risk it will go too far? Rafael Criminologist Eric Monkkonen wrote that crime tends to follow a predictable cycle: As it goes up, societies erect the structures to address it, which drives crime down, which then feeds a sense of discomfort driven by the disconnect between crime levels and punitiveness. This, in turn, sets the stage for reforms that create the conditions for the next spike. Our job should be making it so that each time the pendulum swings past the point of equilibrium, it doesn't go as far as it did the last time around, because we've learned from our history. Megan My worry is that the debate often gets polarized between two unhelpful positions: defund the police, or 'criminals are human garbage, lock them up and throw away the key.' Those are not the only policy options — and in fact, they're the worst policy options. Rafael Trying to stay away from the unproductive extremes is harder to do when you have a lot of Serious People™️ saying we should empty jails and abolish the NYPD. Megan The better option is to make both policing and punishment more humane and more effective — as in, better training for police, incarceration alternatives such as probation and home monitoring, and making punishment swifter and more consistent rather than harsher. The challenge is that those strategies take a long time to pay off, which is not the most appealing for any politician who needs to win the next election and can't clone Bill Bratton to run his police department. Rafael Swifter is important, but we can't discount the harshness element, either. Story continues below advertisement Advertisement Megan Obviously, punishment has to be unpleasant to be a deterrent. But if you take juvenile crime, which is a huge problem in the District — well, when I was 14, I could barely imagine next summer, much less five years from now. A year is effectively forever at that age, and you can't double 'forever.' James But you also want especially dangerous people off the streets for more than a year. Something is clearly rotten in society when 14-year-olds from out of state are routinely carjacking people, such as what happened to a former DOGE staffer on Aug. 3 at 3 a.m. Rafael If a teen is committing 20 felonies a year, doubling the punishment can mean real relief for society. This isn't an appeal to retributivism per se, but rather an acknowledgment of the fact that so much serious crime is driven by offenders we could and should have kept off the street for longer than we chose to. To me, incapacitation is a far more important element of criminal punishment. James To what extent do you think the left understands any of this? Megan Depends on who we're including in 'the left.' I still see people on Bluesky with 'ACAB' in their handles. A lot of people on the center-left understand that crime is a problem — especially for poor people in struggling neighborhoods who can't move when the crime gets too bad — and that good policing is going to be a big part of fixing that. James Great point. Two years ago, D.C. Councilman Trayon White Sr. called on President Joe Biden to mobilize the National Guard to fight crime on White's side of the Anacostia. But there's a reflexive desire among many to simply be against anything Trump is doing. Half as many D.C. residents say crime is a serious problem as did a year ago, because the issue gets polarized. Rafael Trump seems to have a knack for getting his opponents to take up extremely unpopular positions on 80/20 issues. Story continues below advertisement Advertisement James The surge of resources to D.C. is temporary. It will probably end after 30 days. What needs to happen to prevent this from becoming a blip of security theater? Megan What we have in D.C. is not an emergency; it's a bad situation of persistently high crime. We need a permanent solution, not a Band-Aid. James Despite the polls, I think there's a silent majority that is quite happy to have this packet of Band-Aids. 🩹🩹🩹 Rafael What the president is doing isn't sustainable in the long term; he is taking federal agents away from their other assignments. I also think there will be real short-term public safety gains from what the president is doing. It could give people a taste of what more aggressive policing can do, and make some of the political fights about the long-term solutions less hairy. Story continues below advertisement Advertisement Megan What we really need is to build capacity in our police departments and courts, get the federal government to put juveniles on home monitoring 24/7 rather than 8:30 to 5:30 on weekdays, and invest in stuff such as better street lighting. Rafael 💯 James Agree completely. My hope, though, is that the surge in law enforcement gives D.C. cops the help they need to get the 50 most dangerous people in the city off the streets. This is a chance to come down hard on the gangs and hopefully make the whole community safer, with help from Uncle Sam. Then we just have to figure out how to scale it up beyond D.C.
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Opinion: Canada's broken equalization system needs a major overhaul
The Alberta Next Panel is tasked with assessing Alberta's role in Confederation. As it reconvened last week, Canada's equalization program remained near the top of its agenda. At the same time, the Alberta government is backing a legal challenge led by Newfoundland and Labrador arguing that the program does not achieve its intended purpose. People can hold differing opinions on the program's core principle — to ensure reasonably comparable public services delivered at reasonably comparable tax rates across the country — but it's clear that any fair assessment would judge the current equalization system broken. Under the system, which has been in place since the late 1950s, Ottawa collects taxes from Canadians across the country then redistributes money to 'have-not' provinces. How much a province gets is determined by its 'fiscal capacity' — that is, its ability to raise revenue on its own. Basically, the formula applies a tax rate to different possible revenue sources (personal income, business income, resource revenues, and so on) to determine how much revenue a province could generate if it applied that tax rate. In theory, if a province wouldn't be able to raise what the average province could, it receives enough equalization to make up the difference. This year, such payments are projected to total $26.2 billion. Seven provinces — Ontario, Quebec, Manitoba and all four Atlantic provinces — will receive equalization. Alberta, British Columbia and Saskatchewan will not. In theory at least, these three provinces have a greater ability to generate government revenue. But here's the problem. Due to the 'fixed-growth rule' introduced by the Harper government in 2009, how much Ottawa spends on equalization increases whether the gap between 'have' and 'have-not' provinces widens or narrows. For example, from 2007-08 to 2020-21, equalization payments rose nearly 60 per cent even though the gap in fiscal capacities between richer and poorer provinces actually shrank over that period. If equalization is meant to close the fiscal gap between provinces, then the amount spent should reflect the gap. Having equalization grow as provinces become more alike fiscally is one sign the formula and program are broken. The equalization principle — ensuring that all provinces can deliver reasonably comparable services at reasonably comparable tax rates — suggests that provinces with higher incomes (and therefore greater ability to generate tax revenue) will not receive equalization, while provinces with lower incomes will. But, to cite one example, in 2020 Newfoundland and Labrador, which received equalization, had higher per capita GDP (an indicator of incomes and living standards) than B.C., which did not. Same thing in 2018: Ontario had higher per capita GDP than B.C., but Ontario received equalization payments while B.C. did not. Clearly, there's a problem with how the formula determines which provinces are 'haves' and which are 'have-nots.' Another obvious difficulty is that some important sources of provincial government revenue aren't included in the measure of fiscal capacity. Subsidized electricity is an example. Both Quebec and Manitoba provide electricity to their citizens at below-market prices. If instead they charged the market rate, that would provide more profits to Hydro-Québec and Manitoba Hydro, which manage the generation, transmission and distribution of electricity in these two provinces, and therefore more revenue to their owners, the respective provincial governments. But the equalization formula doesn't account for this lower-than-market electricity rate in determining the two provinces' ability to raise revenues. In fact, an increase in Hydro-Quebec's profits of $100 million would result in a decrease in Quebec's equalization payments of an estimated $70 million. Simply put, the equalization formula underestimates Quebec and Manitoba's ability to raise revenue from electricity provision, effectively penalizing provinces that don't provide such subsidies. Ironically, the formula does not follow that same approach for Alberta, which has no provincial sales tax. But when determining Alberta's fiscal capacity, the equalization formula accounts for how much revenue the Alberta government would generate if, hypothetically, it charged the national average sales tax rate. So, the formula does not count Quebec's foregone hydro revenues but does count Alberta's foregone sales tax revenues. Quebec also bans fracking (as did Nova Scotia until lifting its ban earlier this year), but the equalization formula does not apply any forgone hypothetical fracking-related resource revenue to Quebec. This inconsistency in the treatment of different types of revenue in different provinces is yet another sign of a fundamentally broken system. Terence Corcoran: CUPE and the 'crime' behind the Air Canada strike Matthew Lau: Two good Ontario government decisions … in 20 years Reasonable people can debate the core principle of Canada's equalization program, but as the Alberta Next Panel continues discussions, policy-makers should recognize that the current system is badly broken and requires a major overhaul. Tegan Hill is director of Alberta policy and Nathaniel Li is a senior economist at the Fraser Institute. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
