June 22, 2025
Toronto politicians don’t realize that when someone like Taylor Swift sells 240,000 tickets to six shows, the best thing for governments to do is get out of the way.

I’d assumed Toronto had reached maximum cringe. I was wrong

A city that cannot accept its own successes will never truly succeed

After 15-or-so years observing and covering Toronto municipal politics — only a few of those years, thankfully, being full-time — I thought I had come to terms with the untethered heights and depths of maddening, petty irrelevancy to which city council can rise and plummet. I thought I had cringed as hard as I could cringe, raged as hard as I could rage, about and against the legions of parochial zeroes, elected and otherwise, who want to hold this hard-striving city hostage to their various whims and preferences.
And then Taylor Swift booked six shows at Rogers Centre, and official Toronto melted into a puddle, and now I don’t even know anymore. It seems to be worse than ever.

In years past I watched councillors explore nether-regions of the periphery I didn’t even know existed — hey, let’s ban shark fin soup! — even as every major facet of the city’s infrastructure crumbled and smouldered beneath their feet. I saw a councillor fly an inflatable shark around the council chamber, in support of the shark-fin ban. I saw a councillor plunk a low-flow toilet down on a desk and declare it a “miracle.” Those last two items involved the same councillor, and I’m not going to name him or her here because that’s just what he or she would want.

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