LILLEY: Choices, Chow and city hall’s woke priorities
· Toronto Sun
See more Toronto Sun on Google — save as a Preferred Source
Visit mchezo.co.za for more information.
One thing voters in Toronto need to decide by Oct. 26 is whether they want a mayor focused on the key, basic services we all rely on. The alternative, as personified by Olivia Chow, is a mayor who focuses on renaming, DEI, decolonization and changing the language city staff use to communicate.
The latest example was a nine-page training guide issued by Toronto’s Transportation Services warning, among other things, that the word stakeholder was problematic because it was colonial.
“Indigenous Peoples should not be referred to as stakeholders because they are rights holders, not stakeholders,” the guide states. “The other is a broader view that the term itself may be problematic due to its colonial origins and connotations, and that organizations should move away from using it altogether in favour of more specific and respectful language.”
This is utter rubbish.
The word stakeholder has nothing to do with colonialism. It’s a longstanding word that has evolved to mean someone with an interest in a matter. What Chow’s administration is doing is seizing on a single incident of people claiming land in Oklahoma by driving a stake into the ground and pretending that is the origin of the word. That’s not the origin of this word, and the fact that bureaucrats at city hall would think so, and then try to change the language, shows the problems we are facing.
How much staff time is put into this?
Word games over results
At city hall, meetings are now required to start with a land acknowledgement followed by an African ancestral acknowledgement. That means we’ve got staff time being taken up by employees reading these acknowledgements to each other rather than getting down to the work at hand.
Given all this, is anyone shocked at what the Toronto Sun reported earlier this week? Big contracts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to a DEI consulting firm with close ties to Mayor Chow’s top staffer and her deputy mayor, Ausma Malik.
More than $500,000 in taxpayer money has been paid to Monumental Projects Inc. over the last four years for projects such as renaming public places. Monumental Projects is a firm owned by two of the founders of Project Toronto, the third-party political group that acts as a de facto political party for Chow and NDP-aligned candidates.
RECOMMENDED VIDEO
Taxpayers pick up the tab
While you are focused on navigating traffic, avoiding the person smoking crack on the subway or streetcar, worrying about whether the garbage is picked up and whether the snow is cleared, Olivia Chow’s city hall is focused on renaming places like Yonge-Dundas Square to Sankofa and telling staff to change their language based on inaccurate information.
While the latest data from the coroner’s office shows that overdose deaths in Toronto fell by 44% after the Ford government moved from safe injection sites to addiction treatment, Chow is still on the wrong side of this issue. She opposed the Ford government’s move, which saw annual overdose deaths in the city drop from 468 in 2024 to 259 in 2025.
Chow has never walked away from her support of full decriminalization of all drugs and signed onto a letter in 2023 asking the federal government to allow this to happen by exempting Toronto from federal drug laws. When this was tried in British Columbia starting in 2023, it resulted in an explosion of public drug use and anti-social behaviour.
The wrong side of common sense
Things got so bad that the NDP government of David Eby had to ask the Trudeau government to end the deadly experiment, which saw B.C. record a record-high 2,591 opioid overdose deaths that year. That’s the policy that Chow asked for and still supports, as do her backers at Progress Toronto.
Progress Toronto backs decriminalizing drugs, defunding the police, increasing taxes and ending fare enforcement on the TTC. They also expect politicians they endorse, like Chow, to support these policies.
So Toronto, the choice is yours. You can vote for a city hall focused on ideology, symbolism and political activism, or one focused on getting the basics right.
Choose wisely.