As a citizen of Toronto, I…

As a citizen of Toronto, I completely oppose Bill 212. This is an absurd direction to try to take the city of Toronto in 2025. We are facing a dire climate crisis, and gridlock will not be solved by allowing more cars into our city. Invest in public transportation and we will see improvement in traffic. More public transportation and more bike lanes will increase safety and commuter flow, not more cars. Athens and Florence are both examples of cities that have placed restrictions on driving within the city and are both top destinations for tourists and are good pedestrian cities. Athens has an incredible public transportation system that allows tourists to easily move around the city and get to all the monuments and they built this system even with the insane amount of archaeological material they had to sift through (1993-200). Yet somehow, because our municipal government continues to devalue and defund and privatize our public transportation, we can't even get the Eglinton CrossTown Light Rail built within a twenty year period.
Prohibiting the building of and removing bike lanes will lead to more deaths from bike accidents. The reason Toronto started building bike lanes was to reduce the number of accidents and deaths caused by cars hitting bikers. This is public health and safety issue as well as an environmental one.
I am also deeply concerned about the act about Highway 413. Removing the Environmental Assessment requirements is ridiculous in the climate crisis. The environmental impact of a highway is also a health and safety issue, since highways increase air pollution for residents as well as damaging the ecosystem they are built in, which has knock-on effects for people. If you can't bring yourselves to care for the environment and the ecosystems in the area, at least try to find some empathy for the voters living in this area. Deregulation always leads to disastrous results. The environmental assessment is not the only regulation that the Ford government has sought to bypass during his time in office and it won't be the last. Last year in Greece there was a horrifying train crash that killed at least 30 people. This train crash was a direct result of the deregulation of safety checks enacted by the prime minister, Mitsotakis. Deregulating environmental impact leads to unhealthy living environments and irreparable damage to the ecosystem, which both lead to a decrease in quality of life.
Ford has made it his mission it seems to mess with the few things Canada really has going for it: our beautiful natural landscape and our free healthcare. Now he proposes to "reduce the gridlock", by enacting laws that will only increase the number of cars contributing to Toronto traffic and bike accidents, as well as going against the worldwide movement towards environmental protections, while simultaneously decreasing funding for public healthcare and public transportation all in a desperate bid to decrease the quality of life of everyone living in Canada.