Here we have candidate David Soknacki joining the political pack yet again by re-defining words in the hope of getting elected. He insists that the thing everyone else recognizes as mere traffic is in reality a black beast named gridlock. The dictionary says gridlock happens when motion is locked, everything stops moving indefinitely because cars — or maybe bicycles — are arranged in such a way that none of them can move. The truth about gridlock? There is none in Toronto. There is gridlock in Beijing where they don’t know how to drive. In Toronto we have traffic. It may be heavy or light, annoying or unimportant but it’s traffic, not gridlock. In Toronto, everyone gets home at night without gridlock locking them out of seeing their families. In fact, where gridlock even threatens, well-trained Toronto drivers figure out how to make it go away. So David Soknacki is doing what municipal politicians typically do. He is seizing on an annoyance and trying to make it into an election issue. He says ban all parking on downtown streets. Get rid of the cars except for the ones speeding through. Oh sure, the parked cars will have drivers and passengers who are buying dinner or shopping in stores. If there is no traffic there are no people, no businesses, no payroll and no taxes from businesses that thrive from the people who arrive in cars. This is not hard to understand.
