Cities need to be free to…

Cities need to be free to designate the space they have appropriately to meet their needs.
Adding bike lanes can reduce gridlock, when implemented such that cyclists have a safe path to go completely from A to B through the city. There also needs to be a safe storage options at both ends of the commute. Once the infrastructure is in place, people will use it more and more.
As a chain is only as strong as the weakest link, so is this infrastructure. If a cyclist has bike lanes for 90% of the way to work, but they still feel like they're risking their lives for the other 10%, the gridlock reduction goal will not be realized.
With that in mind, there will be some places where they make sense, and others where they don't.

Whether it makes sense to add or remove them should be completely a local decision. The province could provide models, statistics, data and guidance to aid in such decisions, but anything beyond that is just provincial overreach and unnecessary red tape, causing delays and added administration costs for every improvement a jurisdiction tries to make.