Keesmaat’s Gardiner plan soothes progressives

Candidate says she will cancel rebuild

You could almost hear the collective sigh of relief coming from some of Jennifer Keesmaat’s core supporters on Sunday when she announced she would cancel the planned rebuild of the Gardiner Expressway east of Jarvis Street — if she wins the Oct. 22 mayoral election, that is, and polls suggest she will not.

“We already have the plans, we already have the designs to do this,” she told reporters assembled near the hulking unloved thoroughfare, referring to several options presented to city council by her own planning department in recent years. “It’s just a matter of having the leadership and the political will to say ‘hey, let’s move into the 21st century, let’s build a green city, let’s build a sustainable city … and let’s save $500 million doing it.’ “

In the eyes of many urban progressives, continuing to refurbish and rebuild the Gardiner is one of Toronto’s most iconic “bad decisions” — a clear sign that the city fathers are lost in the past up their own backsides. Where proper modern cities tear down elevated expressways and prioritize pedestrians and cyclists and transit, Toronto rebuilds elevated expressways and remains slavishly devoted to the automobile at the expense — far too often fatal — of those travelling on two wheels or two feet.

On this, many implausibly argue, Mayor John Tory is just as bad as former mayor Rob Ford.

Keesmaat calls the alternative a “grand boulevard,” à la University Avenue, that would easily accommodate the traffic — just three per cent of regular downtown commuters — while allowing for new, lucrative and attractive developments along the Keating Channel and in the rest of the Port Lands.

This is the option Keesmaat supported when she was the city’s chief planner. It makes sense she would support it now.

But the relief isn’t about the expressway itself: not since the fixed link to the island airport has so much ado been made about so little. The rebuild option approved overwhelmingly by city council in 2016 opens up a good chunk of real estate for development, and allows for much of what Keesmaat and her fellow boulevardiers want to see there.

The real relief is because this is the first sausage Keesmaat has really offered urbanists who have projected all their hopes and dreams and dreams onto her.

They think Toronto’s property tax rate is far too low; they support exploring new and many “revenue tools” for the city. And as chief planner, during a public consultation on potential new revenue tools for infrastructure, Keesmaat was clear: “(I support) anything that’s quick to implement, such as sales and property taxes,” she told Toronto Life. “Really, I don’t care how we do it, as long as we do it.”

Ask Keesmaat about it nowadays and she’ll tell you Torontonians can’t afford to pay more. It’s in keeping with her central message about the city’s unaffordability, but it doesn’t help fund her proposed solutions — not least her otherwise sensible 30-year $50-billion transit plan.

And then, speaking of which, there’s the Scarborough subway — perhaps the most iconic “bad decision” in progressive Torontonians’ eyes, the one most indicative of this city’s myopic, parochial and benighted decisionmaking. (The progressives are not wrong.) Even as she vows to fight Premier Doug Ford tooth and nail on various other fronts, Keesmaat has conceded he’s going to build the stupid thing. So she proposes letting the province pay for it, and repurposing city money to build out planned light rail in Scarborough.

In short, she is asking an awful lot of those progressives who adopted her as their champion when she suddenly entered the race on July 27, after Ford lobbed his democracy bomb into the proceedings. Tory’s virulently anti-tax rhetoric upon Keesmaat entering the ring invited questions about his city-building brand; it’s only fair she should face the same ones.

Of course, Keesmaat didn’t ask to be adopted by the city’s tax-hiking expressway-demolishers. Most people who have worked with her at city hall describe her as a centrist, by municipal standards anyway. It may well be that the natural Keesmaat voter isn’t that much different than a natural Tory voter. They really don’t disagree on all that much. And there’s nothing wrong with a battle between a centre-left candidate and a centre-right one. But so far, this campaign hasn’t been the pointed, substantial test of Tory’s record that many expected, and that the mayor deserves.