Parts of Toronto are highly liberal , but it doesn ' t seem true to say that conservative thought is stifled . The current mayor ran as a provincial conservative and the former mayor was Rob Ford , for example . The problem in Toronto , and Ontario as a whole , is the specific conservative candidates . Privatising garbage pickup in Toronto has happened and seems poised to continue , but when Ford combined that with actually increasing my property taxes because he thinks that spending $ 2 billion of tax payers dollars for a 3 stop subway is better than spending $ 1 billion of tax payer dollars for a 5 stop LRT , largely because he didn ' t even know what an LRT is , then the uproar isn ' t about stifling conservative thought . it ' s actually because he wasn ' t being conservative he was being wasteful . Same thing when the provincial conservatives lost an election for proposing to give public funds to private religious schools . That ' s not being conservative at all , it was just a stupid waste of money that even the parents that were paying for their kids to go to those schools did not want . Unless you ' re referring to socially conservative thought . then yeah , there ' s a lot of stifling those kinds of opinions .