The city that does not work*

Meanwhile, this story on Toronto's half-hearted venture into legalizing street food sums up everything that's wrong with this city. (Accurate headline: "So you want to cook bhajias or fajitas? Do we have a slate of rules for you".) Well, maybe not everything, but enough: red tape, indifference to the point of the policies under consideration, and, basically, stupid stupid people (both elected and administrative) in charge of city policy. That for decades we had a system designed to legally prevent the sale of anything other than semi-toxic hot dogs is a total embarrassment; that now, instead of just adopting whatever New York or Singapore or Bangkok does -- you know, doing what works -- we are slowly custom-designing a regime so snarled up in red tape that no one you would want in the street-food business would be willing to go into it -- that's beyond embarrassing and into infuriating. And it's really hard not to see it as a sign of general indifference and dysfunction -- remind me again why everyone was so excited about David Miller?

* I wonder how many of you even remember when Toronto used to be called 'the city that works'. A phrase that has gone the way of 'Harvard of the North', and for much the same reasons.