LAS VEGAS – Mitch Marner says he hasn’t given much thought to the reunion.

The Vegas Golden Knights winger was focused on putting one foot in front of the other as he navigated a new team, city and country.

The calendar has also finally flipped to a day many others circled back in June.

Vegas hosts the Toronto Maple Leafs tonight in Marner’s first game against the team he cheered for as a kid, starred with for almost a decade, and then bolted for Sin City.

“I don’t think I’ve got to look at it any different,” the 28-year-old told reporters last night following a 3-2 road victory in overtime against the Los Angeles Kings when asked about facing his former club. “Just look at it as another hockey game and just try and go out there and do my thing.”

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Selected with the No. 4 overall pick at the 2015 NHL draft, Marner registered 102 points in 2024-25 with Toronto and hit 90 on three other occasions.

He finished with 741 points (221 goals, 520 assists) in 657 regular-season games, but was a lightning rod of criticism for playoff failures on a roster with offensive talent that also included Auston Matthews, William Nylander and John Tavares.

“He was there a long time,” Vegas head coach Bruce Cassidy told reporters in L.A. “There’s always turnover every year, but I’m sure he has real close friendships with a lot of those guys. That can be hard.”

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Marner’s slow march out the door — he had a full no-movement clause in his previous contract — as unrestricted free agency loomed finally ended when the Maple Leafs shipped him to the Golden Knights in a sign-and-trade deal that netted him an eight-year, US$96-million extension.

Depth forward Nicolas Roy came the other way in a swap that allowed Marner to get an eighth campaign on his new pact instead of the seven-season max as a UFA.

Poised to also suit up for his first game in Toronto against the Maple Leafs on Jan. 23, Marner had 11 goals and 36 assists for 47 points in 45 games entering Thursday.

“We’ll use him like we usually do and hopefully get him a few extra shifts here and there,” Cassidy added of a player set to represent Canada at the 2026 Winter Olympics next month. “I’m sure he’s going to be highly motivated. But sometimes it goes the other way … you want to do too much. Hopefully he just goes out and plays his game.”

Vegas (22-11-12) enters on a five-game winning streak following five straight losses. Toronto (23-16-7) saw its 8-0-2 run snapped Tuesday in a 6-1 road loss to the Utah Mammoth.

“Mitchy’s obviously very crafty,” Maple Leafs defenceman Jake McCabe told reporters in Salt Lake City after that defeat. “I’ve switched teams and you play buddies. It’s always a little bit different the first night, but looking forward to it.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 15, 2026.

&copy 2026 The Canadian Press

A powerful winter storm continued to paralyze roads across Toronto and the Greater Toronto Area Thursday morning, grounding flights, closing highways and triggering dozens of crashes as heavy snow conditions made roads treacherous.

What started as a yellow warning snowstorm has worked its way up to an orange warning snowstorm with more than 20 to 30 centimetres of snow, and up to 5o cm in some regions.

The storm also forced widespread school and university closures across much of Ontario, as boards and post-secondary institutions cancelled in-person classes due to dangerous travel conditions.

Global News chief meteorologist Anthony Farnell said the system is the most significant winter storm to hit the region since January 2022.

Across the GTA, OPP Sgt. Kerry Schmidt said officers were responding to about a dozen active crashes Thursday morning, most involving single vehicles sliding off the roadway.

“Most are single-vehicle crashes, cars in the ditch, into guardrails, facing the wrong way after losing control,” Schmidt said in a social media post. “We’ve also had a couple of multi-vehicle crashes.”

In Toronto, the Don Valley Parkway has been closed in both directions following several crashes linked to black ice.

Police say major routes across the city are seeing snow-covered and slippery conditions.

Schmidt urged drivers to slow down and give snowplows room to work, warning that travel would remain slow and hazardous.

“Make sure you’re giving yourself all the time in the world. Let the plows do their work,” he said. “Have a full headlighting system on.”

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According to Toronto city officials, some TTC routes are also facing delays or experiencing suspended service till conditions and roads improve.

TTC has announced that they are taking measures to ensure service continuity including running anti-icing trains to keep the power rail and tracks clear of snow and ice.

The storm has also caused significant disruption at Toronto Pearson International Airport.

According to FlightAware, as of Thursday, 165 flights were delayed and 101 were cancelled at Pearson.  49 delays involved flights travelling within, into or out of the United States from Toronto Pearson.

Several major GTA highways and ramps are also feeling the impacts of this powerful weather storm, with many partially or fully closed due to crashes and stranded vehicles.

According to OPP, a jack-knifed tractor-trailer shut down the westbound Highway 401 collector ramp at Kennedy Road in Scarborough early Thursday morning.

Other transport trucks have also been reported to be involved in collisions on Highway 402 and along stretches of Highway 401.

In London, fire crews responded to a crash on Highway 401 eastbound just before 4 a.m., using ropes to reach a transport truck driver who had gone down a steep, snow-covered ditch.

No injuries were reported, though heavy towing equipment will be required to remove the vehicle.

OPP’s West Region also reported multiple highway closures due to vehicle collisions Thursday morning.

In central Ontario, police warned that snow, ice and poor visibility were affecting roads in Barrie, Orillia, Midland, Bracebridge, Collingwood, Peterborough and Northumberland County.

OPP are urging drivers in those regions to avoid non-essential travel and to prepare emergency supplies if travel is unavoidable.

“Wait for the storm to pass if you can,” Schmidt said. “Plows are out clearing the roads, but it’s going to be a slow, slippery and messy drive.”

Police are also warning motorists to practise safe driving rules after a transport truck was spotted stopped in a live lane to clear windshield wipers.

OPP called this move “extremely dangerous” and are urging drivers to exit the highway or pull into a safe location if they need to stop.

Ottawa also reported early-morning disruptions after being moved from a yellow to an orange warning. City traffic officials confirmed that at least nine collisions had occurred by mid-morning Thursday as conditions deteriorated.

Conditions are expected to improve slightly by noon, when snowfall will stop.

&copy 2026 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.

The Ford government is delaying its own affordable housing measures in several major Ontario cities, calling the rules it wrote “unnecessary red tape and requirements” that make it more expensive to build.

The pause will affect inclusionary zoning rules in Toronto, Kitchener and Mississauga, a policy that requires developers to provide a minimum number of affordable housing units in certain situations.

Legislation introduced by the government in May 2025 said municipalities could mandate new projects near transit stations to include five per cent affordable units for a maximum of 25 years after their construction.

It was a provincial compromise that Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow said came nowhere near what she had hoped she could ask for from developers, but which she grudgingly accepted in a meeting with Premier Doug Ford.

“I went in and said, ‘Give us 20 per cent.’ In fact, I appealed for 30 per cent. I said to the premier, ‘We need to build housing — not all of it, but 20, 30 per cent people can afford. It’s a perfect opportunity,’” Chow said at a news conference on Tuesday.

“He said no and now it’s five per cent. I had no choice, I said, ‘OK, five per cent, all right. At least it’s five per cent.’”

Now, the government is pausing its own plan, saying requiring developers to build even five per cent of their units at affordable rates will hurt the construction of new homes.

“We need to get more shovels in the ground to build homes for families across the province — now is not the time to be adding unnecessary red tape and requirements that only increase the cost of building a home,” a spokesperson for Housing Minister Rob Flack, who introduced the legislation less than a year ago, said.

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“These temporary measures will help to ensure project viability so more people can call the city of Toronto home.”

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The regulation posted by the provincial government proposes pausing the five per cent inclusionary zoning until July 1, 2027. It said Kitchener had already opted to pause its program.

“MMAH has heard from stakeholders expressing concerns that implementing IZ at this juncture, particularly in Toronto, could have a negative impact on overall housing supply and could result in the cancellation or pause of projects,” the regulation said.

Chow, however, said she didn’t believe the requirement was slowing development in her city. She said most builders had stopped working in current conditions, and the few that were still in construction were doing so because of financial incentives from city hall.

“People need homes they can afford,” she said. “Right here, in Toronto, seven out of 10 homes that are being built, if you see a crane, most likely it’s made possible, the building is made possible, because the city has put in financial incentives.”

The Building Industry and Land Development Association said in a statement that the delay was a “prudent” move.

“This will safeguard the already very fragile pipeline of new housing in the province as the market grapples with the lowest sales seen in decades, declining starts and mounting layoffs in the GTA,” the statement said.

“Present cost-to-build challenges, new home sales, and market conditions are extremely dire in the province and adding even more costs through IZ requirements would simply further erode project viabilities and result in even fewer housing units coming to the market.”

The Ford government ran its 2022 election campaign partly under the promise that it would build 1.5 million new homes by 2031 to lower the cost of housing in the province. It’s a strategy that has stalled to the point that the finance minister recently called the 1.5 million goal a “soft target,” after years of failing to hit key milestones, even after watering down the criteria.

Flack told Global News last year that recent provincial housing measures were designed to revive the spring market for 2026, after consecutive years where the number of housing starts in Ontario fell — often at sharper rates than the rest of the country.

The fall-off in development has perhaps been most acute in Toronto.

Between 2020 and 2025, 25 projects have stopped sales on more than 3,200 new units in and around Toronto, numbers compiled by BILD show.

A total of six projects stopped selling in 2020, with five more giving up the following year. In 2022, 10 projects abandoned sales attempts, while four more folded in 2023.

BILD said no projects had stopped selling in 2024 or 2025 because fewer than 10 highrises have even tried to launch over the last two years, as builders struggle to make the costs work and buyers stay away.

The low sales matter to builders because most condominium projects require the majority of their units to be sold in order to finalize financing to get construction off the ground.

Richard Lyall, president of RESCON, said recent data shows “we are staring into the abyss” when it comes to residential construction.

— with a file from The Canadian Press

&copy 2026 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.