Toronto neighbourhoods are increasingly becoming polarized by income. The middle class that once reigned supreme is quickly eroding—part of a trend that has become more and more apparent over the past four decades. Housing prices in the city are skyrocketing as the recent recession continues to cause job loss. Considering all of this, it is [...]

Live streams from hundreds of Occupied cities listed here. 9:08 PM: It was after dark when I left and people were setting up for the night. I didn’t see an exodus from the park as night fell, it looks like most people are staying. Several meetings were well-attended and ongoing. I saw a group of [...]

Activists planning on occupying a Toronto location have decided to halt communication with the police and the media one week before their planned protest. About 250 people met on Friday evening at Berczy Park near the Financial District in Toronto for a “general assembly,” to plan Occupy Toronto Market Exchange. The protest, set to begin [...]

In the run-up to the provincial election on October 6, we’ll be comparing the major parties’ platforms on issues that matter to urban voters. The economy is a meta-issue, or a super-plank, the issue under which all other issues are subsumed. If the economy doesn’t work, then there’s no money to pay for any of [...]

A new column for Maclean’s by Search Engine host Jesse Brown, slagging tax incentives for the Canadian video game industry, has sparked a heated discussion online—one greater than Brown may have expected. In a piece titled “Grand Theft Tax Break,” Brown argues that tax breaks for video game companies aren’t worthwhile for three reasons: the foreign [...]

If musician and visual artist Kat Burns ruled the world, artists would earn a decent living wage, school teachers would receive the respect they deserve, and an artist’s wellspring of inspiration would never run dry. Sadly, Kat Burns doesn’t rule the world, teachers aren’t respected nearly enough, and after a month of creating an original [...]

Photo by Todd Michael M. from the Torontoist Flickr Pool. Quelle surprise. For those whose daily commute traverses the GTA, be it via car, transit, or otherwise, the headline splashed across the Star‘s website this afternoon—”Toronto’s 80-minute commute ranked last in global study“—was itself a study in the I-told-you-so kind of obvious. According to 2010′s [...]

Illustration by Brian McLachlan/Torontoist. Bright and early this past Monday morning, Mayor David Miller launched the third Toronto Forum for Global Cities conference, dedicated to harnessing the economic power of large urban centres. Put on by the International Economic Forum of the Americas, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (or OECD, whose scope [...]

Illustration by Brian McLachlan/Torontoist. People tend to do a lot of shouting around budget time. They feel, by turns overtaxed, under-serviced, that the City is spending too much, and that the City isn’t delivering everything it should. Usually lost in the shuffle are some basic facts about how the budget process actually works and what [...]

Photo of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa by Kasia/flickr. There’s more than enough trash-talking to go with the tulips this spring on Parliament Hill, with some distinctly unflowery themes (Fiscal mismanagement! Attack ads! Election threats! Secret tapes!) echoing through the air. Wait, secret tapes? It sounds sexy, but almost definitely isn’t. Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s [...]