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Originally Posted by Acajack
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I thought that was a bad article, indicative of the lazy "what I did for my summer vacation" journalism that the Globe pumps out from its op-ed writers; a reminder of why I don't subscribe to that paper.
It's not because the author dumps on Toronto and elevates Montreal. Quite the contrary.
It's because every Torontonian knows that Montreal has more affordable housing and childcare than Toronto, and those who bicycle in this city are keenly aware of how bad our cycling infrastructure is for a major city, let alone a city that once sang its progressive bona fides from the rooftops. None of this is news.
What would have been more revealing is a more in-depth look into why that's the case. I don't think it's because Torontonians are ignorant about other cities, nor because they are defeatist or masochists. I don't even think it's [primarily] because Ontarians elect Conservative slash-and-burn politicians at inopportune moments. Some of it is a legacy of things that are hard to change.
To take the easiest of those things to change - bicycle infrastructure - Toronto is a hard city to build a bike network in.
For starters, most North American cities that have been successful at building a comprehensive network of separated bike lanes and bike boulevards have a grid, where you can dump the bike lane in a lesser-used side street just off the arterial road. The wonderful bike lane that parallels St. Laurent along Clark would not be feasible paralleling, say, Queen St. Where there is the opportunity to do so - like along Richmond/Adelaide - Toronto city planners have jumped at the bait already.
Also, most of those arterials have streetcar lines cemented into them, so it's not a simple measure of repainting the road and shifting the lanes over a couple of feet. The streetcar system also precludes the ability to convert streets into one ways, so you can't have something like: Clark for bikes, St. Laurent for buses/cars going north, St. Urbain for buses/cars going south.
Finally, those arterials are a lot narrower than they are in Western Canadian cities, so between the streetcar lane and the parking/rush hour lane, there's not much space to squeeze anything in.
There are other political factors like the fact that these things have to be voted on by city councillors, 2/3 of whom are suburbanites, and the whining of local shopowners averse to losing parking spaces, and so on, but those are true of most other cities and probably not insurmountable. It's the built form of Toronto that's challenging.
If that's the challenge facing bike infrastructure - which is entirely local in scope - imagine how difficult it would be to fix housing affordability, which is a perfect storm of forces operating at so many levels: global property markets, interest rates, historical built form, rental laws, etc. Montreal is not that affordable anymore, either.
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Quebecers (in particular Montreal chauvinists) need to quit obsessing and hating on Toronto, we don't even think about you, we're making our own moves baby! 
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