TORONTO – Canada appears to be in turmoil as she entered 2025, with soaring food prices, homelessness and political instability. The Liberal Party is at its lowest in the polls. It seems to me that the whole world has been shaken and has turned upside down from the government sector to the private one, it looks like a lot has changed. The status quo that we are so familiar with as a routine has totally turned 180 degrees in a manner of speaking. It’s so hard to be negative when you are so accustomed to positive reporting. When you see a lot of negative things you are compelled to say it as it is.

Let’s begin with the municipal government here when it started creating bike lanes in major arteries like Bloor and University. It was passed on as a perfect idea. City officials spent millions of taxpayers’ money as if it’s a necessity of life. Don’t get me wrong, I support cycling because it’s environmentally friendly. A cyclist myself and a motorist too, I am a believer in sharing the road. However, when problems like collisions between motorists and cyclists occur resulting in deaths most likely of the cyclists or traffic congestions because bike lanes diminished the paths where vehicles used to travel, I can’t help thinking that we’ve created our own ghosts. The provincial level of government thereafter steps in, exercising its power to remove certain bike lane on major roadways, seemingly ignoring the cost involved – first to install these lanes and now to remove them. To an ordinary citizen like me, this is incomprehensible. You spend millions of dollars to build bike lanes, now you have to remove these lanes which will cost again millions of dollars. I know no one is perfect, but why create something that will cause waste of life, money, time, effort, and division among its people. Now, some people say that housing should take priority than those bike lanes. Fair enough. There are many homeless people in the city.  I’ve always wondered where they came from.  I doubt from the metro area yet they’re here now, so their plight needs to be addressed.

Now let’s go to private sector of building in order to address the shortage of low cost housing. Builders, most of the time, are off on their estimate. It’s alright if the estimate is off by a negligible amount but oftentimes, it’s not. Let’s jump to the builders of crosstown Eglinton. It came out that it’s over budget to millions of dollars which explains why construction is still ongoing. At what pace? Who knows. Not only was the projection of completion out of line but some lame excuse was given using the pandemic. I can honestly say that before the pandemic, work was being done at the park near my building and it continued on during the pandemic in 2020. Millions of dollar has been lost to businesses that are on route with the construction of Eglinton crosstown and more millions are being lost everyday because of delay. These are the two big glaring problems which some attributed to pandemic.

At the start of the pandemic, I thought life would become tough because of supply issues in the ports where containers were delivered. I was wrong. The pandemic is not causing all these economic problems the world is experiencing. The two ongoing wars are. The Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 and the Gaza war which started on October 7, 2023 have destabilized the world and it looks like there’s no end in sight. My wish for the new year may sound cliché but still, I wish for peace. With peace comes stability. And I need not say what follows stability. It’s obvious.

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash