A tale of two Torys
Ayear after his election, John Tory’s mayoralty is both a great success and a terrible mess.
On the good side, Tory is quite brilliant at the crucial business of recognition. He addresses every group, cheers every parade, tirelessly exhorts, includes, represents and just plain shows up — seemingly everywhere. As an antidote to the civic sickness of the Ford years, the new mayor’s combination of energy and earnestness couldn’t be more effective.
Policy wonks and pundits who deride such work as mere “ribbon cutting” don’t understand politics. Our mayor’s first duty is to tell us a story — to elaborate and continually reinforce the narrative that unites us and gives civic life its purpose. Tory gets it, and he’s doing it. Good for him!
But wonks could well have the last word in deciding Tory’s legacy, because the business of making change is something he doesn’t get at all. Even Ford accomplished more in his first year than Tory has managed to do. With every new snafu, Tory reminds us of the political ineptitude for which he was once so notorious.
The debate over the Gardiner Expressway really deserves its own chapter in the great book of civic folly. No ordinary incompetence could have spent so much, in political and fiscal capital, to accomplish so little. Mulishly ignoring staff advice and best practices worldwide, Tory demolished his own credibility while struggling to win a close vote with the aid of low bribes to council weaklings.
A savvier mayor would have accepted the sensible staff recommendation with a five-minute speech and kept her powder dry for a necessary battle. But Tory decided to mount the molehill of a two-minute delay and make his brave stand.
And the carnage continues: Recognizing that the result he bled so much to attain is indefensible, Tory has elected to torture us further by ordering up a whole new suite of “hybrid solutions” to a problem that never needed to exist.
The same genius animates Tory’s scandalous non-management of SmartTrack, his key election promise. Despite the glaring impossibilities its many critics identified, the plan worked well to get Tory elected.
But a year later, it has all but disappeared under a growing mass of impossibility and confusion.
How do you build a “surface subway” through built-up neighbourhoods? Why duplicate the proposed Scarborough subway with the same service on a parallel line? How does SmartTrack differ from GO Transit’s ongoing program to electrify the same rail lines and run the same frequent service?
The city’s recent data dump of unreadable technical reports on SmartTrack provided no definitive answers to the obvious questions. The reports are best interpreted as a cry for help from bureaucrats struggling to steer straight while the helmsman naps belowdecks.
The result is that a year after Tory promised a wholly new transit system built in record time, nobody at city hall even knows what it is. Reports multiply and bills mount as Tory dodges inconvenient facts — especially the existence of the houses and workplaces that line Eglinton Avenue west of Mount Dennis, where SmartTrack proposes a new, heavy-rail “surface subway.”
It took an extraordinary intervention by Bruce McCuaig, head of Metrolinx, the provincial transit agency, to inform city manager Peter Wallace (in a private email obtained by the Star’s Tess Kalinowski) that Tory’s foggy SmartTrack vision is “unaffordable and unworkable.” Noting the mayor’s flimsy plan to finance the initiative with magic beans — and pointedly citing the authority of the provincial government — McCuaig instructed the city to scale SmartTrack down to “an incremental increase” in GO’s ongoing RER (regional express rail) program.
Thank goodness there are still adults at the province capable of managing difficult files. But how sad to see Toronto council still mired in its Ford-era playpen. Tory’s executive committee is excruciating, the bureaucracy is rudderless, and the mayor’s signature political successes — like shuffling around the orange cones at construction sites — are borderline ridiculous.
A deeper analysis would likely find some underlying connection between the mayor’s intractable political incompetence and his tremendous success as a representative of all that is good and generous about Toronto. But one year in, those two Torys remain firmly at odds.
Even (former mayor Rob) Ford accomplished more in his first year than Tory has managed to do