Editor’s Note: Toronto has fallen into disrepair. How is Olivia Chow going to fix it?

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Some days, it’s hard to imagine a city more hostile to moving its citizens from Point A to Point B than Toronto.

Before I go any further, let me first say that I love this city. I’ve lived here for nearly 30 years. I’m raising my two kids here. I never want to live anywhere else. And yet sometimes it is utterly exhausting, even enraging, to try to do something as simple as get to work. The distance between my house in the west end and The Globe and Mail’s office in the east is roughly eight kilometres. It should be a 25-minute drive. And yet, during rush-hour — which seems to last pretty much all day — the journey can take well over twice that, thanks to volume, road closures and construction-related slowdowns. Anyone who’s been stuck on the Gardiner Expressway for upwards of an hour trying to travel less than a click (me!) won’t be surprised that the TomTom Traffic Index, which measures congestion in 357 cities, ranks Toronto third for slowest-moving traffic. Only London and Dublin score worse. All that congestion costs drivers nearly 100 precious hours each year. It’s such a drain that the Toronto Region Board of Trade has gathered 19 leaders (including the head of public policy for Uber, which has 60,000 drivers clogging the city’s streets) to tackle the problem.

The state of public transit (my preferred mode of travel, even though it takes just shy of an hour) is similarly dismal. The Toronto Transit Commission has been chronically underfunded for years, depending on fares to cover up to 80% of costs, compared to 56% in Montreal, 51% in Vancouver and just 40% in New York City. Its decrepit state was only compounded by the pandemic, which gutted ridership, leading to fare hikes and service cuts, which led to lower ridership, which ..... you get the picture.

What we desperately need is more, better-funded transit. But hope is thin on the ground. Consider the Eglinton Crosstown LRT, whose 25 stations will eventually run east-west across midtown. It’s been under construction since 2011 and is at least $1-billion over budget. When asked when the trains might start running, Metrolinx CEO Phil Verster — who was paid $850,000 last year — refused to even guess at a date. Which is particularly troubling, because Verster and the Crown agency over which he presides are responsible for several other massive transit projects that will impact this city for decades to come.

Transit isn’t even the most daunting challenge facing Toronto and its newish mayor, Olivia Chow, who was elected in June 2023 and inherited a nearly $2-billion deficit courtesy of her two less-than-illustrious predecessors. Rather than raising property taxes, both Rob Ford and John Tory kept cutting, allowing the city to fall into disrepair. But as Chow said when she released her first budget in February, “We cannot cut our way out of this mess. If we cut deeper, we could be cutting at bone and hitting the marrow.”

Trevor Cole sat down with Chow for this month’s Exchange to talk about the sizable property-tax hike she instituted to stem the bleeding, fixing the city’s housing crisis, her plan to get traffic moving and more. If you’re stuck on a streetcar right now, read it. Maybe it’ll give you hope amid the rage.