First Up: Bonnie Crombie pitches a Square One subway extension - Toronto Star

In today's First Up: The Blue Jays are officially out of the playoff race and affordable Michelin restaurants.

Mississauga mayoral candidate Bonnie Crombie outside Mississauga Celebration Square on Sept. 23, 2026. Crombie is proposing a plan to extend Line 2 from Kipling to Mississauga city centre.

Good morning. This is the Thursday, Sept. 24 edition of First Up, the Star’s daily morning digest. Sign up to get it earlier each day, in your inbox.

The dream is over; there will be no World Series do-over. While the Blue Jays’ magical 2025 season ended in agony in Game 7, the cursed 2026 season staggered to a close in the first half of a doubleheader Wednesday. There’s always next year.

For decades, Toronto’s mayoral elections were dominated by rival subway plans — now a bunch of lines are under construction, and Toronto transit talk has turned to reliability and safety. But in Mississauga, where the Hurontario LRT line will be the first local rail transit, one candidate says the time for subways has arrived. Former mayor Bonnie Crombie, running to win her old job back, says the TTC’s Line 2 should extend west to Mississauga’s city centre. It wouldn’t be the first 905 stop. Vaughan now has two stops, and an extension to Richmond Hill is in the works. Alyshah Hasham has the story.

A condo construction project at the corner of Dufferin and Bloor.

A few numbers stood out in a new poll the Star conducted through Ipsos, to examine the state of the city in the midst of this year’s mayoral race. Here’s one: 69 per cent of people now agree that “home ownership is only for the rich.” Similarly, 71 per cent of current tenants expect they’ll never own a home in Toronto.

And yet, optimism about the city was highest among Gen Z (76 per cent), who you might expect to be least hopeful about the prospect of owning a home one day. Nearly half of those surveyed aged 18 to 34 say they might have to move out of the city in the next five years, most of them because Toronto is too expensive.

This is a large group of people who represent the city’s future and feel optimistic about it. But they aren’t sure they’ll be able to afford to stay. And they don’t expect to ever own a home here.

You could view that last bit as depressing, and for a long time our politicians have upheld the fading dream of home ownership as the rallying cry of housing affordability. They talk (and act) to get more condos built, more single-family homes approved, to manipulate interest rates for entry into the mortgage market. But maybe people who don’t own homes and still say Toronto is a fantastic place to live need a different kind of focus on affordability.

As I’ve written before, cities like Paris, New York City, Berlin, Los Angeles and Montreal have a prevalent culture of lifelong rental housing — and offer better options for tenants. A big part of the problem in Toronto is that it is very hard to find a place to rent — especially a purpose-built, rent-controlled unit — that is big enough to raise a family, and affordable enough to stay in. In the past decade, policies have started to evolve (the federal government has just launched a $1.5-billion program aimed at preserving affordable rental housing).

But it seems to me like maybe the political emphasis still has a ways to shift — that when a lot of people say housing affordability should be a primary election issue, many of them aren’t even considering buying anything. They just want manageable rent.

What do you think? Would you welcome politicians focusing on making Toronto a place where people can afford to rent a home that’s a good place to raise a family? Or is buying a single-family home still the gold standard for you? Do you think either is an attainable goal for Toronto in this election? Let us know in the comments here.

ADAM RADWANSKI: Mark Carney’s sweeping new bill has some faults, but it gets one big, necessary thing right.

MANDY PIPHER: Canada should enter any relationship with Europe clear-eyed about what we’re walking into.

MARK MCQUEEN: For a simple solution to the risk that AI will “kill all humans,” we should learn from the dot-com crisis.

Angine de Poitrine react to winning the Polaris Album Prize and the SOCAN Polaris Song Prize at Massey Hall in Toronto, on Tuesday.

We covered concerns that the Building Canada Strong Act could make strikes in federally regulated sectors all but impossible. Some of you wondered if that was even a bad thing:

“Strikes in transport cost us all (as do doctor strikes). Mediation makes sense. This is a relatively small part of unionized labour. Our sovereignty vs. 10 per cent of the labour force. Convince me that this legislation is bad.” — Maria

“Canada needs reliable ports, railways and airlines, especially while we’re opening new markets and building a stronger economy, but workers can’t become the shock absorbers for that national strategy.” — Lisa

Today’s phrase of the day is “sexy underdogs of the world.” That’s how a speaker at a technology conference described Canada, urging attendees to adopt a more patriotic investment strategy.

Thanks for starting your day with us. If you enjoy First Up, please share it with a friend. And let us know what you think of the changes we’ve made, and what you’d like to see. Email firstup@thestar.ca. I’ll see you back here tomorrow morning.