December 2018 toronto life 53hardly anything went down in Toronto this
year that didn’t bear the new premier’s imprima-
tur. Recreational pot became legal, but not before
Ford steamrolled the pre-existing plans and
implemented a framework for private sales. In
September, students and teachers returned to the
classroom unsure of whether they were allowed
to call it a penis or a pee-pee or anything at all. A
little over a month before voters went to the polls,
Ford chucked the municipal electoral process into
a blender. He roadblocked Trudeau’s carbon tax
scheme, cancelled the basic income pilot and went
on and on about the all-curing virtues of one-
dollar beer. So steady was the firehose feed of news
flowing from Queen’s Park that you’d be forgiven
for not paying attention to the other influential
Torontonians who were busy changing the world
in 2018. Chrystia Freeland emerged semi- victorious
from her NAFTA arm-wrestle with Trump; Drake
conquered the music world, and then Shawn
Mendes did, too; a quirky Jungian psychology
professor became the guiding light of a new global
men’s movement; our adopted frightmeister,
Guillermo del Toro, snagged four golden statuettes
on Hollywood’s biggest stage; Jessica Mulroney
became Pippa 2.0; and one brave, level-headed
police officer at Yonge and Finch decided to holster
his gun, rather than fire it—demonstrating to a
world grappling anew with racism, bigotry and
violence what Toronto is truly about.
2018
The fifT y
MOST
influenT ial
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