But maybe it’s not corrupt. Perhaps it just smells that way. Maybe OMB is just comprised of honourable men and women who aren’t trying to boost developers’ profits and are trying to build a picturesque new sky-high wonderland of cramped apartments and shadowed landscapes. Picturesque. Picture that.
This is not to suggest that the members of the OMB which favours the desires of developers to line their pockets over those of the citizens who are trying to live in affordable and reasonably spacious dwellings are serving themselves. Certainly not.
After all, there isn’t unlimited residential space in our wonderful city for all the folks who want to live right here right now. So as a humanitarian gesture, the Liberals at Queens Park have agreed to keep in power the OMB panel who overrule the city’s planning department which looks after the best interests of the city in order to fulfill the best interests of OMB’s developer constituency. The city does have a well-paid professional planning department that doesn’t have enough authority to actually plan the city. Yet that’s their mandate. But Kathleen says OMB rules.
Your interests as a Torontonian are not the province’s concern.
They’ve got face-time with ministers to sell to developers and other supplicants. The Wynne crowd need funds to keep Ontario under Liberal rule, which is best for the party.
The Liberals rule for the Liberals, don’tcha know.
It’s entirely possible that they got that plan from the Tories under the Don of Municipal Evil, former Premier Mike Harris.
It was Mike who smushed together the former sovereign municipalities of Metropolitan Toronto into Megacity. He did so against the will of everyone. Almost. Certain moneyed interests had more influence with Mike than did the people he served so horribly.
Kathleen Wynne is of similar rags, it seems. Asked to free us from the evil entity of her Tory predecessor, Kathleen refuses. She likes the OMB.
It is the point of her sword. The lead in her pencil. The grimmace on her face. The wart on her brain. After all, she’s so despised by the public she serves up that Kathleen’s popular rating might be lower than Stalin’s. And he’s been out of office a long time.
We can hope to soon say the same about Kathleen. Any day now! Please!
And someone, please, free Toronto’s planners from the OMB! Enuf is enuf.
— Frank Touby