Soknacki gets my vote for mayor, as I told him when he dropped by a local coffee shop to answer questions. The 2 hour session showed Soknacki to be sincere, sensible, sober and smart. He’s an abstract generalist and a detail guy at the same time. Can he survive in the middle space where most of us live? I hope so.
Here are some points I took away from answers he gave to questions. Soknacki would:
- Fix land transfer tax to protect entry level buyers
- Cut red tape for new businesses to create jobs
- Fix the eastern end of the Gardiner and pay for it with recovered real estate
- Make landlords pay taxes on empty storefronts
- Move downtown core traffic. Reduce main thoroughfare parking, add more parkades
- Ease TTC morning rush with free rides before 7:00 a.m.
- Break the monolithic Toronto Housing Corporation into manageable parts
- Get back the $40 million for social services that McGuinty cut
- Build the Scarborough LRT that we could have had by now
- Save $60 million on policing without any cuts to actual policing
- Open city databases for everyone to use inventively
- Restore focus on environmentalism. Air, parks, quality of life issues
- Review water services to maximize results, especially flood control
- Enforce no parking in bicycle lanes.
- Support ranked ballots for civic elections
We can get rid of Rob Ford and still have a financially conservative, imaginative but practical mayor who speaks to us as adults. Lots of time yet to consider David Soknacki.