Chiyi Tam knows Kensington. The planner and anti-displacement organizer is the former executive director of the Kensington Market Community Land Trust and has spent the past two years spearheading the Toronto Chinatown Land Trust, which aims to bring affordable housing to a dense inner-city neighbourhood. The job requires her to meet frequently with grumpy merchants, Kensington Market hipsters, newcomers working for cash in Chinatown restaurants, and disdainful property owners who live in Markham.

In those conversations, Tam has heard many hot takes on the overdose prevention site on Augusta Avenue, run by The Neighbourhood Group Community Services. The topic, Tam observes, “immediately lights this fire for everyone, from every perspective.”

Last summer, the Ontario government passed legislation to shutter the city’s consumption sites and replace them, at least aspirationally, with addiction treatment services—a move that has brought mixed reactions in Kensington. While formal community organizations supported the facility, Tam hears plenty of indifference on her rounds. “The vast majority that I actually spend time talking to could not care less.”

Those contrasting opinions are just one example of the widening rift Tam’s noticed between the folks working in local non-profits and Chinatown/Kensington property owners, who are now mostly based in the 905 and don’t understand what draws people to these neighbourhoods.

“Those people really feel very drawn [to] and [are] still very loyal to Ford’s conception of the city,” Tam says. That view, as she describes it, is: “`Downtown is a problem. The downtown is costing everyone too much money, it’s full of spoiled people that are in full-time rehab that the rest of us are paying for.'” Some of these views aren’t new, she notes. “But I guess the specific vein of it, in 2025, is that the city core, the city people, compared to [people in the suburbs] live a nonsensical life.”

In the midst of a controversial early election playing out against the chaotic backdrop of national and international politics, Doug Ford, Ontario’s 60-year-old Progressive Conservative leader, has sought to present himself as a nationalist linebacker, defending the province against the Trumpist threat. The opposition parties are touting their own ability to stand up for Ontario while confronting severe problems that have piled up under the Tories’ watch, such as extreme family doctor shortages. But in Toronto and its vote-rich suburban periphery, Ford should also be judged by his government’s complex record on cities, and this city in particular.

Not since the late-Progressive Conservative leader Bill Davis has an Ontario premier been so determined to build: over the next decade, Queen’s Park will spend $190 billion on highways, transit, housing, high-speed internet, and critical infrastructure. Ford’s position as the head of a large legislative majority has also allowed him free rein to meddle in Toronto’s political, economic, and social affairs. “They’ve certainly been more interventionist than other provincial governments in Ontario,” says Andrew Sancton, a retired municipal governance expert at Western University. Yet, as Chiyi Tam knows first-hand, Ford’s incursions into local matters aren’t necessarily unpopular, even in the places one might expect them to be. As Sancton adds, “Some people will say, `Oh, that’s great, we’re getting rid of the bike lanes. It’s good that Ford’s intervening.'”

The question is, what motivates Ford to muck around in the world of local politics when his day job is to lead the country’s largest and wealthiest province? Here’s one theory: after seven years in office, Ford has come to see himself as a city builder. Unlike many of his caucus colleagues, he doesn’t come from the parochial world of small-town Ontario mayors or reeves. While few progressives would use the label “urbanist” to describe him, there’s no question that Ford pays close attention to the way the GTA works, or doesn’t (in his estimation). And counter to his brand as a conservative, he is also clearly prepared to spend heavily—and break things—in order to leave his mark on a city that didn’t want him as mayor.

If you did a quick synopsis of the Ford government’s record on all things Greater Toronto, you might come up with a list that looks something like this: cutting the size of council, wrecking Ontario Place and the Science Centre, the insider-Greenbelt shenanigans, the never-ending Eglinton Crosstown fiasco. Then there are the familiar car-oriented moves, such as the plans to build Highway 413, Ford’s crazy-making notion of tunnelling under the 401 and, most recently, the bike lane wedge.

The record, however, also includes ambiguities and some surprises. Exhibit A: Ford and Mayor Olivia Chow’s new deal for Toronto, consummated in 2023, which saw the uploading of the Gardiner and the Don Valley Parkway (more cars) in exchange for $1.2 billion for the operating costs of the Eglinton LRT and shelters for asylum seekers, as well as cash for subway cars and the mayor holding her fire on Therme’s mega-spa scheme for Ontario Place.

The question is, does all of this—plus the tens of billions going into transit mega-projects and the raft of developer-friendly planning reforms that have poured out of Queen’s Park in recent years—add up to some kind of Ford-inflected urbanism? Or has his time in office merely reinforced what we’ve suspected all along, that he’s basically a car-loving suburbanite with a knack for infuriating progressives?

University of Toronto geographer Matti Siemiatycki observes that Ford, like many GTA commuters, experiences the city-region from the outside in, rather than inside-out. “He sees it from the perspective [of]] someone whose journey in the morning starts from Etobicoke or Scarborough or North York, rather than someone whose journey and day starts in downtown Toronto or in the very inner ring surrounding downtown,” he says. “And I think because of that, his perspective on how you build a city is very different. It’s the way you understand space and distance. When you look at it from that perspective, you see how you’re frustrated when you come into the city, especially by car, and you’re stuck behind a streetcar. That sticks with you.”

Ford’s political career starts, of course, at Toronto City Hall alongside his brother Rob. There, both made ridiculous and destructive attacks on streetcars and LRTs (they won’t work in winter, etc.). As premier, however, Ford wields the power of the purse, and has approved an historic expansion of the GTA’s rapid transit network, including new subways, expanded GO corridors, and new LRT lines. The federal Liberals have kicked in billions as well.

Counter to his brand as a conservative, Ford is clearly prepared to spend heavily—and break things—in order to leave his mark on a city that didn’t want him as mayor.

Ford, Siemiatycki observes, doesn’t feel constrained by such costs. “This government has removed the constraint of scarcity somehow.” He recalls transit debates from the 2000s and 2010s. “You look at those periods, everything was about debating, `What could we afford? Could we put [transit] on the surface because we didn’t have enough money?’ This government has taken all of those questions off the table.”

Leslie Woo, chief executive officer of CivicAction and the former top planner at Metrolinx, says she’s been surprised by Ford’s commitment to building large-scale rapid transit—a program that carried over into his second term. “He stuck with it, for better or for worse, and [at a time] when we actually need people to be paying attention to transit.”

The Ontario Line is certainly the most audacious of Ford’s transit moves, and it has proceeded quickly after being mired in process for years. This corridor, which has been on the city’s planning books for decades, was never going to be cheap or simple. Still, scarcely five years after funding was announced, this mega-project is further ahead than more modest GTA rapid transit lines. It is, to Siemiatcyki’s point, also way more expensive.

University of Waterloo geographer and transit expert Brian Doucet says the Ontario Line will go a long way toward creating an integrated regional transit network because of its links to an expanded GO network, the Eglinton LRT, and the subway. “I think it has the potential to be the best transit line in Ontario, if not all of Canada,” he says. “It is incorporating some of the newer design ideas and concepts such as shorter trains, automated trains, smaller stations. They’re using existing rights of way… It can’t happen quickly enough, but it is happening.” Notably, he points out that Queen’s Park is much less generous about supporting the operating costs of such mega-projects.

The execution has also left much to be desired. In contrast to the never-ending Eglinton Crosstown, which is still under construction after 11 years, Metrolinx has moved extremely rapidly on Ontario Line sites, with construction underway on the entire length of the route as of last fall. But it’s obviously a pull-the-Band-Aid-off-quickly strategy, and one that has created a string of clogged construction zones, required the clear-cutting of Crothers Wood in the Don Valley, and involved the expropriation of hundreds of homes situated near station sites. “They did it in an overly heavy-handed way and not a very strategic way,” Woo observes. But, she adds, “as much as there’s criticism about stepping on community autonomy, it’s that same community autonomy that was actually getting in the way of the things that people really wanted, which is faster, quicker, more accessible transit.”

As the second eldest son of Doug Sr., a former Mike Harris MPP, Doug Jr. didn’t begin his political career as a big spender; quite the opposite, in fact. In his single term as a city councillor representing a north Etobicoke ward, he and brother Rob rarely missed an opportunity to rail about City Hall’s spendthrift “gravy-train” ways. Early on, he boasted frequently of spending nothing on his office budget. (Reporting at the time for The Globe and Mail, I filed a Freedom of Information request and found he actually was spending money—not a lot, and out of his own pocket—to buy office supplies and printed stationary sourced, unsurprisingly, from the Ford family business, Deco Labels).

Like Rob, he also made political hay about the alleged inefficiency of municipal government and city council’s ponderous ways. Indeed, the same outlook underwrites his current approach to city-building: that we should be able to get things done more simply than has been the case in the recent past. This belief typically manifests in conservatives who rail against red-tape, and that’s certainly true of Ford. But his government’s record also reveals his desire to not just eliminate rules he considers counter-productive, but also his willingness to drive ahead with large and contentious projects.

His impatience shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. There’s plenty of evidence that it’s become bewilderingly difficult to carry out routine city-building tasks, such as erecting a modest-sized apartment building. Most of the pre-war city and much of the post-war inner suburbs were built without elaborate rules governing public consultations or site plan controls. Tens of thousands of Torontonians routinely ride along streetcar routes that could not be approved, much less built, today. Nor is it difficult to find other cities that have been able to develop necessary infrastructure in less time and at less cost—the conclusion of a recent University of Toronto study comparing Toronto transit construction to other urban regions around the world.

Ontario Place, of course, is a vivid example of Ford’s self-conception as an ice-breaker clearing the path forward. There had been several previous attempts to solve the problem of the park’s future, including one commissioned by the McGuinty government over a decade ago; none of them went anywhere. Ford arrived in office determined to break that logjam.

He’d already showcased his taste for waterfront development as a city councillor back in 2011, pitching an alternative vision for the Portlands that included, famously, a Ferris wheel, a monorail, hundreds of acres of high-end malls, and an exclusive marina facing the inner harbour. That scheme (shot down by council after a fierce citizen-led backlash) both showcased Ford’s particular conception of city-building and precisely foreshadowed his preoccupation with the Therme spa scheme for Ontario Place as a flashy tourist destination fronting a largely privatized waterfront.

But the current Ontario Place debacle also foregrounded Ford’s indifference to protocol. As the Auditor General of Ontario reported in December, the government pushed the approvals ahead with scant regard for procedural niceties like procurement rules, fairness monitors, or even adequate due diligence on the massively inflated price (now estimated to be $2.6 billion). The public’s concerns about the site’s heritage and ecology were dismissed as Toronto NIMBYism. It could hardly be a coincidence that the clear-cutting of the West Island, the site of the future Therme spa, began the very day the auditor general released his scalding conclusion that the “call for development process” was “not fair, transparent or accountable.”

His impatience shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. There’s plenty of evidence that it’s become bewilderingly difficult to carry out routine city-building tasks, such as erecting a modest-sized apartment building.

In his single term as a city councillor in north Etobicoke, Ford loved complaining about the sluggish pace of decision-making at Toronto City Hall. Shortly after winning his first majority at Queen’s Park, Ford made good on his critique, driving through legislation halving the size of council, in the middle of a municipal election campaign, no less. Less well remembered, now, is Ford’s other significant detour into municipal governance—his decision to confer so-called strong mayor powers, a plan leaked out during the 2022 municipal election. While the debate about strong mayor powers had burbled away for years, Ford’s interest in this reform was of a piece with his general outlook on matters municipal: less talk, more action.

Yet neither change sated his compulsion to get in Toronto council’s face. The bike lane fight, launched late last year in the name of fighting congestion, is the most glaring example of Ford’s inability to keep his paws off a municipal government now streamlined to his liking.

There’s no question traffic in Toronto is terrible, and not just for Progressive Conservative voters. The chronic tie-ups are the result of a cascading sequence of disparate factors—construction sites blocking traffic lanes and intersections, the endless Gardiner rehabilitation, poor TTC service, and more.

But many of the fixes are beyond even the premier’s control, or simply the by-products of long-term efforts to add transit capacity and maintain highway or road infrastructure. And Ford’s most conspicuous moves are not solutions so much as sugar hits for vote-rich constituencies. His fantasy of tunneling under the 401 will never come to fruition because to embark on such a wildly unworkable scheme will produce a generation of crippling construction delays and bankrupt the province.

Ford’s bid to rip out the Bloor, Yonge, and University bike lanes, and then impose a veto on future bike lane proposals, is also about electoral signalling—there’s no evidence that these lanes have created the kind of congestion he’s attributed to them. But the symbolism sells. And the legislation also opens the door to further partisan incursions by the province into municipal decision-making and administration.

Stunts like this overshadow the Tories’ more urban-minded record on land use planning reform, at least within the built-up regions of the GTA. Planning consultant Blair Scorgie gives the Tories points for tweaking planning laws that have allowed the City of Toronto to authorize laneway suites, garden suites, multiplexes, and small apartment buildings—moves that will add much needed gentle density to places that have been the exclusive preserve of single-family dwellings for generations.

Similarly, Queen’s Park has ordered the city to change the zoning around dozens of new and existing LRT, subway and GO stations in order to drive apartment, commercial, and office development to those transit nodes. It’s a long overdue reform that seeks to take advantage of all that costly transit infrastructure.

However, the Ford government has also undermined those very reforms, often for explicitly partisan reasons. Even as they’ve eliminated minimum parking requirements in high rises—a change long advocated by urbanist planners—they’ve moved to remove the bike lanes that might help new residents of those high rises move around the city without a car. “Now that we’re building things that are reliant on that infrastructure, they’re ripping out the infrastructure,” says Scorgie “It’s inherently problematic.”

As for all the up-zoning around rapid transit stations, Queen’s Park has delayed approving those changes for well over a year, with no explanation.

What’s more, Ford’s development-friendly government, which has pledged to build 1.5 million new homes in the next decade, hasn’t figured out how to crack the affordability crisis. While real estate prices and rents have come down slightly, the Tories have failed to address the glaring mismatch between demand and the highly limited type of new supply that’s come onto the market in recent years—very small but nonetheless expensive condos. Nor has the Tories’ deregulation of rent controls on new condos—a long-standing ask by the building industry, ostensibly to drive investment—done much to ease the supply crunch.

Scorgie points out that the Ontario Housing Affordability Taskforce, which included representatives of both for- and non-profit developers as well as academic experts, scoped out a detailed road-map in 2022 showing how the province could actually make some progress on the housing front. “It included like 50 major recommendations and they barely touched any of them,” he says. “They have been somewhat timid, actually, on a lot of the housing stuff.”