Every time a news story breaks where Doug Ford and the Ontario provincial government are once again meddling in Toronto politics, I wonder if it will be the one that leads the city and its citizens past their collective breaking point. I now feel like we’re getting there, not because of any story in particular, but rather because of just how many examples of this behaviour are now out there.

We’ve seen Doug Ford’s rather blatant corruption at the provincial level for years: the proposed opening of Greenbelt land and the construction of Highway 413 that stood to benefit his developer friends, the sheer size of his cabinet to shore up support within his own party, and the immediate promotion of newly elected conservative MPPs in order to increase their salaries. We’ve now also seen much of the same behaviour at the local level here in Toronto. I spoke about this phenomenon in the venerable pages of this very newspaper last year, when I wrote about Toronto’s mayoral by-election following the resignation of John Tory. Doug Ford inserted himself right into the thick of it, saying “if a left-wing mayor gets in there, we’re toast. I’ll tell you, it’d be a disaster.” 

Partisan election interference is one thing, but now the provincial government’s actions have begun to take a toll on specific local issues. The Ontario Science Centre was closed under dubious circumstances, after Doug Ford has said for years that he wants to move it to Ontario Place. While Ontario Place is owned by the provincial government, their continuance with a project that will bring a luxury spa to the area is certainly not benefiting the plurality of Toronto residents, and has already resulted in the removal of 865 trees. This was all preceded by the 2018 size reduction of Toronto’s city council forced by the provincial government, in stark contrast to Ford’s almost doubling of the size of his own cabinet since then.

The most recent issue that has really brought the provincial government’s incessant meddling in Toronto’s municipal issues back to the fore is the spat over bike lanes on major Toronto streets. It all began heating up earlier this fall when local residents and representatives clashed over the new bike lanes on Bloor Street West, which served as a flashpoint that elevated the issue beyond a neighbourhood dispute. The provincial government now wants to force the city to remove all bike lanes from University Avenue, Bloor Street, and Yonge Street. All new bike lane projects that remove car lanes would also need provincial approval. All of this bickering over bike and car lanes on streets that have some of the continent’s best used subway lines directly underneath them is itself utterly ridiculous, but such is politics in Toronto.

The province’s simplistic framing of the issue also really bothers me. “Bike lanes increase traffic congestion” is a highly contested statement, and a Toronto Star analysis only showed modest improvements in travel times on Bloor Street without bike lanes in place. The infrastructure improvements the city is making are also not just about bike lanes; we can see this very clearly just down the street at St. George and Bloor. Bike lanes have been better separated from traffic, new protected intersections have been installed, and signal timings have been adjusted. This is about pedestrian access and safety just as much as it’s about bike lanes. The bike lane debate on University Avenue in particular is completely absurd; there remain two or three car travel lanes in each direction and there is somehow still on-street parking on this major thoroughfare. Heading north past Queens Park, you run into another major cause of congestion that isn’t bike lanes: the construction to make Museum Station on Line 1 accessible has traffic down to just one travel lane in each direction, while the bike lanes are closed.

The question you might be asking yourself is: how is this behaviour from the province even legal? Many of us who have completed the civics curriculum in Ontario schools are no doubt harkening back to the lessons on which level of government is responsible for a given service or piece of infrastructure. Indeed, building and maintaining roads, including the installation and removal of bike lanes, falls squarely in the municipal category. Unfortunately, this is only by convention, not by statute. The Canadian constitution’s only reference to cities and their governments is that cities are “of the provinces.” What this means in practice is that cities cannot adopt charters of their own, and provinces can pretty much do whatever they want with respect to the municipalities in their territory. This is in contrast to the United States: municipal governments similarly have all of their powers granted to them by states, but many cities can adopt their own charters, leading to stronger and more independent local governance.

Unfortunately, this means that meddling in Toronto’s affairs is likely to continue to be a mainstay of provincial policy. And just to be clear, this isn’t about the particular person or party that is currently engaged in the practice; I’m politically agnostic. There’s no doubt in my mind that the Liberals or the NDP would engage in similar behaviour, but perhaps not to the same extent and with respect to different issues (for example: the Liberal government blocked the city from instituting tolls on the Gardiner Expressway in 2016, despite the highway being a municipal responsibility at the time). I’ve always wondered aloud why so many state capitals in the US are in small cities that don’t really register with people when they think of that state (Springfield, IL and Jefferson City, MO are two examples that come to mind). I now see some of the potential benefits: by keeping state lawmakers out of your large city, hopefully they leave you alone policy-wise (although Gov. Kathy Hochul’s continued interference in Manhattan’s congestion pricing scheme is a pointed example of this effect not working).

What are the solutions then? It doesn’t sound particularly glamorous, but our best path forward is continued civic engagement and voting (when the time comes). With respect to bike lanes, I should note that not all Toronto residents disagree with Doug Ford on this issue, and many do support the removal of bike lanes. It’s therefore important that all of us who do support bike lanes make our voices heard. The fact that the conservative provincial government is meddling with Toronto’s bike lanes while their same party, under Mike Harris, was the one that offloaded the Gardiner Expressway to the city as an explicit cost-saving measure in 1997 (when highways are clearly a provincial responsibility) is a complete farce. The same party that shirked its responsibility on highways is now preaching on local transportation thinking that they alone know what’s best for the city. Meanwhile the Eglinton Crosstown, constructed by the province for the city of Toronto, is now entering its fourteenth year of construction with no opening date in sight. Perhaps the province doesn’t actually know what they’re doing with respect to local issues in Toronto. Citizens of this city must continue to make their voices heard so that we foster the urban environment that we want, not the one prescribed for us by the provincial government.