Victoria, BC is reducing minimum front setbacks in order to support future perimeter blocks, as parcels on a block are redeveloped. morehousing.ca/victoria-ocp

Protecting our water is about more than now, or the next 10 years. It’s about protecting it for generations to come. Some of our youngest Torontonians have shared their drawings with me. My commitment to them: I’ll keep our water in public hands.

French girl says free college, free healthcare, “still not enough” ahead of Saturday protest

So, who did I vote for in Toronto’s mayoral election? And why? A few observations first. Despite all the attention paid to the mayor, it is a relatively weak position. Even with “strong mayor” powers, council is independently elected, City Hall is a vast bureaucracy, and many of our problems are downstream of provincial failures. The job is more constrained than the rhetoric suggests. Both @oliviachow and @BradMBradford are decent people who care about Toronto. Chow also deserves credit for difficult decisions, including raising property taxes after years of avoidance. But with those considerations in mind, I cast my vote for BRADFORD² Firstly, I’ve known him for years. His understanding of planning, municipal finance, bureaucracy and economics stands above most councillors. He’s a planner by trade, and even where he’s moderated on housing, I think he gets its details better than nearly anyone who’s run for mayor in decades. There’s also plenty in his platform I agree with. The land transfer tax is a dumb tax, and I ran on abolishing it provincially. Brad wants to substantially reduce it. His proposed municipally owned water corporation also makes sense. We should finance infrastructure over its useful life, and I proposed a provincial framework for similar municipal models. Frankly, much of the hysterical response has been financially illiterate. There are fair questions about debt and governance, but treating public ownership as privatization is absurd. I appreciate his commitments on what makes a city work. Dynamic traffic signals, transit priority, and a TTC focused on speed and reliability rather than simply keeping fares down. And as I recently wrote for the Toronto Star, public order is fundamental to quality of life. I think Brad understands that in a way Chow and many of her allies don’t seem to. But here is where I’ve felt most disappointed with Chow’s leadership. If we’re going to elect a progressive mayor, I want them to actually fight for progressive things. On sixplexes and neighbourhood retail, we’ve normalized the idea that individual councillors get to decide whether basic city-building reforms apply in their wards. This is one of the worst governing precedents we’ve set in years. I’d have preferred much greater compromises, provided the rules applied citywide. Instead, I worry we’ve set Toronto back decades, and invited the same ward-by-ward veto on future reforms. Yes, Brad voted for the sixplex compromise, which I disagree with. But a mayor needs to organize the politics behind a citywide vision, the buck on this one stopped there. Likewise on Ontario Place, Exhibition Place, bike lanes, and the airport. Even if the province has the stronger hand, why not offer an alternative vision worth rallying around rather than get steamrolled? Then there’s the vacant home tax. It was created before Chow, but the rollout was under her leadership. We now require every homeowner to prove, every year, that their home isn’t vacant. Why not declare once and update it when you move or sell? The tolerance for this sort of mindless bureaucracy drives me nuts. I disagree with Brad on other issues, including bike lanes, or the focus on involuntary care over increased capacity in our drug treatment systems. But I admire how he responded to his last loss, and the energy and tenacity he put in after. And yes, being under 45 matters to me. I value someone who understands the affordability pressures of building a life here personally, not just conceptually. I would happily vote for a mayor considerably more progressive than Brad. That isn’t my objection to Chow. I just don’t see the vision. Often it seems like the goal is simply to have the “right people” in charge. To do what? I couldn’t tell you. Brad my friend, good luck on Monday. Should you win, do justice to why you wanted to be in politics, all those years ago. Good luck!

The most beautiful building in all of Williamsburg. God, I wish I’d built it.

you need to be mentally ill to be some sort of popular streamer or internet eceleb and it doesn’t bode well how much influence this class of people has on the future of politics

If we want to increase transit ridership, we need to make it safe, reliable and clean. Mayor Chow hasn't. I will. Vote for it on October 26th.

.@VP: I find it a ittle ironic that European countries — who have nothing like the technology @elonmusk has developed in Starlink and have universally waged regulatory war against SpaceX — are all now running to SpaceX saying, 'Please do what we need you to do.'

A message from David Suzuki.

Wake up. Every profession deemed white-collar, the middle class dream, is about to be decimated by AI, at a much faster pace than anticipated, with monstrous social consequences.

Every one of the best neighbourhoods I’ve lived in had shops and cafes and restaurants within a 10 minute walk. Oak Bay, BC The Plateau, Montreal Greenwich Village, NY Primrose Hill, London NW Portland, OR Dupont Circle, Washington DC Garrison Woods, Calgary

In Victoria HCTZ1 (inner catchment), 6 storeys is allowed only on large sites (≥1000 sqm with ≥20 m frontage, or combined lots). Max height is a mandatory 21.5 m from natural ground level to the roof or parapet. Both limits apply. Basements do not count as storeys. +1 m is allowed for slopes steeper than 2.5 degrees.

Palmer Luckey warns America cannot compete with China’s population advantage forever through innovation alone: “We need 1 BILLION Americans minimum. Probably more like 2 or 3 billion.” 🇺🇸🇨🇳 “Yes, we need to get our act together. We need to do better at manufacturing, at defense, all these things. But everything is just biting around the margins if we’re 350 million people and they’re 2 billion people who are roughly the same. How exceptional do we have to be to achieve a 10-to-1 ratio forever, in perpetuity? It’s not practical. It’s not logical. I would say it’s even possibly a racist thing to believe that we can be so much better than China and the Chinese people that we’ll just beat them with a tiny fraction of the population. We need to do better with what we’ve got. But we also just need a lot more people. We need 1 billion Americans minimum, probably more like 2 or 3 billion, with better demographics and better natural resources. The Dutch once had the most powerful navy in the world. They didn’t lose that position because they fell behind on factories or shipbuilding. They became economically irrelevant.” Both countries are competing with respect to declining birth rates. Both nations must be more willing to have children and expand the population growth exponentially over the next decade. The current economic path is unsustainable if our labor force begins to shrink even with artificial intelligence on the rise.

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