Toronto's lost its top-of-the-world status

[CityPainter]

"the last I heard, there is still open gang warfare on many of our streets"

total bollocks.

it should be possible to take people like Brian French to court and sue their pants off for basically LYING with a straight face.

Especially when he's essentially comparing Toronto with US cities like Chicago and Boston. With quite similar populations, Chicago had 458 murders in 2009 versus Toronto's whopping 40. Boston's 49 murders in 2009 looks respectable until you realize that the city proper has a population about a quarter the size of Toronto, under 600,000. The crime rate in Toronto has been dropping steadily for a decade; the Toronto Police Service reported a 30% drop in just the past 5 years. But perhaps French is too busy dodging bullets from all those gangs to worry about annoying things like "facts" that might interfere with his wildly innaccurate statements.

On the whole this editorial is a lazy pile of nonsense, just a series of unrelated complaints and invalid comparisons piled together in an incoherent manner. Yes, editorial is opinion, but it's supposed to be informed opinion. Toronto faces many valid problems and challenges, but this article ignores a large number of positive developments that have transformed the core of Toronto over the past decade. Nonsensical over-exaggerations like "seven years of Miller leadership has not built a single thing for the city" belong in an anonymous blog comment, not in an editorial published in a newspaper.

 

[Redroom Studios]

^^^lol, +1