Paul Viret

The Mayor and City Council

The most pressing issue I, and most of my neighbours, are concerned with is the price of groceries. Affordable housing, creating a greener city, faster TTC; these are all important but when people are skipping meals and feeling hunger pains everyday these things are less important. My competitors have suggested things like community garden, useless in the winter, or co-ops, even more expensive then other grocery stores. i think it's time someone with real life experience get a say and not wealthy people who can only imagine what we live through

Housing

First and foremost, we need houses, apartments and rental units and we need them yesterday. We don't have time to wait for another condo to take a decade to build, we need small to mid-sized, Mass Timber apartments. These are 20 to 50 units but not tall enough to ruin the city scape around the neighbourhoods they're built in and can go from ground breaking to finished in just a few years. We must also expand the city's existing programs like the Multi-Unit Residential Acquisition (MURA) Program to secure properties before private developers do

Cost of Living

Combat high cost grocery chains with government owned grocery stores. This buy food in bulk and split it between the stores, schools, elder care and other non-profit and public facilities. The school meal program and CampTO are great programs that provide food and will get additional funding but a government owned grocery store will help every one, even those who don't have children.

Safety in Public Spaces

The stats say that crime and assaults are down since lockdowns were lifted, but people don't read stats. They want to see the safety measure in place that are supposedly, keeping them safe. I can tell you that in my 15 years of taking the TTC I have never had my fair inspected, even seeing an Inspector is rare so how can I believe that stats. We need to see people doing their job, we need to see then checking fares, we need to see police walking on the street and interacting with the neighbourhood. People need a reason to believe the stats.

Getting Around the City

Speed up the TTC, particularly streetcars and punish people who ride on the side walk. Our street cars are some of the slowest on earth, there's no reason they should be and if we can speed them up more people will take them, that means less cars on the road. Less cars means people will feel safer riding a bike and actually punishing e-bike drivers hopping onto the side walk, and not just an $80 fine, will help prevent pedestrians from getting run over.

Confronting Hateful and Hostile Behaviour

The best way to combat hate is through education and while we have anti-racism strategies inside the government and education programs there's a whole world out there the government has no say in. Community leaders, with support from the city, need to have outward facing, public events. Open houses, Barbecues, games nights, anything that lets the public actually see and get to know them. It's a lot harder to hate someone if you actually know them.