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Chow, a cycling advocate elected in June 2023 after beating a third-place rival who vowed to rip out bike lanes, says º£½ÇÉçÇø¹ÙÍømust fight this provincial “overreach.”

Pressed Tuesday on how she will do that, Chow instead answered why she feels the city should try to thwart the unusual intervention by a one-term city councillor who tried and failed to become mayor before becoming the much more powerful premier in 2018.

“Local democracy matters and we need to make sure everyone is safe,” Chow told reporters after an unrelated event. She noted motorists have killed six cyclists on º£½ÇÉçÇø¹ÙÍøroads so far this year and suggested Ford fight congestion by finally opening the Eglinton LRT.

“I am not one that would back down when it comes to safety,” the mayor said. “Literally, some bike lanes save lives.”

Pressed on ways to fight the Progressive Conservative majority government, Chow said she’s waiting for a city staff report that will be tabled sometime before council debates her ”, likely on Thursday.

Ford, for his part, says Toronto’s notorious gridlock demands the removal of sections of bike lane on Bloor Street, Yonge Street and University Avenue. Neither Ford nor his transportation minister, Prabmeet Sarkaria, have offered any data to prove that those separated lanes are causing traffic any more than road construction or condo projects that occupy vehicle lanes, sometimes for years.

But they don’t have to. The Ford government’s Supreme Court of Canada win in 2021 established that the province had the right to unilaterally slash the size of º£½ÇÉçÇø¹ÙÍøcouncil midelection and, by extension, do pretty much whatever it wants with its legislative offshoot which happens to be Canada’s biggest city.

The court’s 5-4 decision included a sharply worded dissent calling Ford’s intervention unlawful. However, barring some kind of novel legal challenge, perhaps based on personal safety concerns, little doubt exists that the Ford government has the legal power to rip out bike lanes approved by elected º£½ÇÉçÇø¹ÙÍøofficials and funded by city taxpayers. 

That leaves Chow the court of public opinion, something to which the premier pays a lot of attention.

Most observers believe that Ford’s out-of-the-blue move on cycling infrastructure is driven by internal polling that suggests, with talk of an early 2025 provincial election brewing, the move will help him more with fed-up drivers than it will hurt him with furious bike lane lovers.

A wedge issue could swing some º£½ÇÉçÇø¹ÙÍømotorists their way.

“I think the government has a pretty good idea that the politics work for them on this, especially in Etobicoke,” where the PCs currently hold three seats, said Jim Burnett, a former city hall political staffer who works on PC political campaigns. 

“They’re convinced that the politics work quite strong for them, they’ve done polling on it, they hear about bike lanes.”

Ford has lost to city hall before. In 2019, before any hint of a looming pandemic, his government announced deep cuts to funding for provincial health, with º£½ÇÉçÇø¹ÙÍøinexplicably hit the hardest. John Tory and Joe Cressy, then the mayor and public health chair, respectively, went door to door in PC ridings, urging residents to give their MPPs an earful for Ford.

Their public relations war, augmented by firepower from mayors across the province, won the day. Ford retreated and saved himself a massive political problem when COVID-19 hit the following year.

There are two reasons, however, to not expect Chow cycling door to door to lobby homeowners to fight Ford and save bike lanes.

First, the Ford government last year agreed to a new deal for º£½ÇÉçÇø¹ÙÍøto rescue the city’s pandemic-ravaged finances. Negotiations on everything from uploading the Gardiner Expressway and Don Valley Parkway to helping fund new subway cars for Line 2 are, city staff say, expected to produce a deal in the new year with “ongoing collaboration and partnership.”

Chow, a former NDP MP with a list of socially conscious goals for her first term, can’t afford to do much of anything without that deal.

Second, even many cyclists will acknowledge that there are enough bike lane haters to convince Ford he is on the right track.

“I don’t think there is enough sentiment on bike lanes to change (Ford’s) direction,” said Coun. Josh Matlow, a progressive who lost the mayor’s race to Chow but has fought more public battles with the premier. “Public opinion within the city is mixed on bike lanes. For people who care about them, they care passionately, and the people who don’t passionately despise them.”

Matlow believes the mayor and council should instead try to galvanize Torontonians against Ford’s micromanagement of city issues, asking voters if he should be usurping the power of the local politicians they elected, and whom they can hold accountable in the next civic election.

Matlow is a proponent of º£½ÇÉçÇø¹ÙÍøseeking to become a charter city — a long-standing global concept that involves providing specific legal jurisdiction to cities under the constitution, allowing them to manage their own affairs. It’s needed more than ever, he says.