LILLEY: Toronto is a city in decline, desperately needs new leadership
We need sweeping changes at the Mayor's office, around the council table and at Toronto Police HQ
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Toronto is a city in decline in every possible metric. There is no worse example than the murder of 71-year-old Shahnaz Pestonji last week.
Just before 10 a.m. last Thursday, Pestonji was performing the most mundane of acts, picking p groceries. As she was loading her groceries into the car, a 14 year-old boy says he demanded her car keys and when she said no he stabbed her.
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At least that’s what the 14 year-old boy — now arrested and charged with second-degree murder — told his friends what happened during a live chat on social media. Presumed innocent unless proven otherwise, none of the allegations have been tested in court.
“I didn’t mean to f***in’ kill the old lady,” the young man, who can no longer be identified, said.
In his slang-filled rant from under a hood, the young man described how he wanted the car to whip around town and do all kinds of things; he needed a “free car.”
“But fam, it went left. She wouldn’t give me the keys, so I yoked her.”
For the sin of not handing over her keys to her own family vehicle, Pestonji was stabbed and left for dead.
“She loved being a grandma,” her daughter, Yasmin, told The Toronto Sun’s Jack Boland last week.
Yasmin is pregnant with her second child, meaning Pestonji would have been a grandma yet again. Now, the child won’t know their grandmother at all, a family is grieving, a neighbourhood is shaking, wondering what has become of our once safe city.
The young man was on the loose until police nabbed him Sunday — his name and face plastered all over traditional and social media in an attempt to find him. With him now behind bars, it is illegal for his name or face to be published – though good luck to authorities wanting it scrubbed from the internet.
What we can say is that the little thug was out on bail already for auto-theft when he allegedly decided to steal a car and stab “the old lady.”
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Thankfully, Toronto Police haven’t reissued their old advice to just always hand over your keys. We should all be able to drive to our local grocery store to pick up a few things without fear of being knifed by a hood with a record.
There were 9,570 auto thefts last year, down from an all-time high in 2023 of 12,501, but that is still far above the 3,628 auto-thefts Toronto Police recorded in 2014. Assaults over that time have increased from 17,847 to 25,783 while at the same time, auto thefts have become more violent with carjacking being an increasing trend.
How many more grandmas have to die like Shahnaz Pestonji?
How many more stories do we need like Karolina Huebner-Makurat?
On a sunny July afternoon two years ago, Huebner-Makurat, a 44 year-old wife and mother of two was shot and killed by stray bullets. The bullets came from low-life drug dealers fighting over the ability to sell to addicts at the South Riverdale Community Health Centre’s now closed “safe-injection site.”
Unfortunately, our city’s leadership isn’t focused on making us a safer, cleaner and more livable city. Instead, they have their personal, radical political agenda to push through as witnessed by a new shelter proposed in the Wilson and Keele area.
A daycare centre is steps away in one direction, while Pierre LaPorte Middle School is steps away in the other direction. Surrounding the area are suburban, middle-class homes and this is where city staff wants to put a homeless shelter that will hand out drug needles, crack pipes and other drug paraphernalia that the city calls “health services.”
This new shelter is just two kilometres from an existing shelter where a man was stabbed and killed just last month. The chaos that I get to see living in the downtown core is being expanded and exported to Toronto’s suburbs.
Solving these problems — rather than ignoring them or moving them to different parts of town — takes the kind of leadership we haven’t seen at City Hall or Toronto Police HQ for a long time. That’s why we need to be looking for sweeping change in the mayor’s office, around the council table and in the executive offices at TPS.
Our city was once safe, clean and livable, and it can be again with new leadership.
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