Councillor’s wilful ignorance on subway extension not surprising
While the one-stop boosters and critics on council will likely never change their mind, the voters and citizens of Toronto will have to pick up the tab
“Whatever the price may be, the subway will be built.”
That was Councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker, speaking with CBC reporter John Rieti on Thursday, about the proposed Scarborough subway extension.
“I don’t think it matters what the costs are,” he went on.
This seems an unbelievable thing for a politician to say out loud. Yet those who have followed De Baeremaeker’s career recently will have no trouble believing it came out of his mouth. De Baeremaeker has made it clear enough over the past few years that he’s ride-or-die with the one-stop subway extension.
This staggering display of wilful ignorance about the cost of things is, I suppose, fine for De Baeremaeker. As he says, those councillors who oppose the subway’s construction probably won’t change their minds based on a lower-than-expected budget quote, and those like him who support it will not have their enthusiasm dampened by even a doubling or tripling of the bill. But the rest of us, the voters and citizens of Toronto who will have to both pay the expense tab the city is running up, and decide this fall whether to continue employing De Baeremaeker and John Tory and the rest of council’s subway gang — well, we might care.
This same crew is nickel-anddiming homeless shelters and bus service and community centre operations. If the big hole they’re digging in Scarborough is going to wind up burying even more of our budget, we ought to know it as soon as possible.
Certainly we ought to know it before the election, if the information is available. (And to be clear, it should be made to be available.)
That was the immediate question being put to the councillor on Thursday: whether the detailed price estimate, if it is available in September, should be released then or kept secret until after the election. It’s a question that has been put to Mayor John Tory and others since the Star reported on internal city documents that seemed to show the cost estimates would be “available” in September.
Now, council as a whole has suffered recently from a curious level of incuriosity about how money is spent on certain things.
For example: the city owns Toronto Hydro, which spent some money earlier this term on lobbyists and consultants to try to privatize the agency. How much did they spend on this aborted effort, some of which seems to have wound up in the pockets of people who ran Tory’s campaign for mayor? A majority of city council decided not to compel the agency to reveal it. This is your money, and mine, that was spent. Hydro has repeatedly refused to reveal how much, and how. Councillor Gord Perks, reasonably, put forward a motion suggesting we should force them to reveal it. The mayor, and a council majority, disagreed.
“I take no position on whether the information should be released,” councillor and Toronto Hydro Board member Stephen Holyday said, in leading the majority. “I’m more interested in governance.”
Ah, governance. Trend spotters will notice a sudden passion for the governance process emerging as councillors’ preferred excuse for keeping people in the dark.
See also the mayor’s statements on the release of the Scarborough subway costs. It’s a “staff-controlled process that was approved by council” that will keep the information secret until after the election is over, he has tweeted. Wouldn’t want to interfere!
This respect for the integrity of the process is selective, of course. For example, the process of approving the Scarborough subway extension is still underway. You may not know that, because of all the debates and votes we have had over the years. But what has been approved is detailed design work that will allow everyone to know how much it will cost, and how long it will take, and how and where exactly it is to be built. When that process is finished, council will need to approve the project again before construction can begin.
Which is how it should be, of course. Agreeing to do something when you don’t know how much it will cost is a recipe for bankruptcy. A basic principle of good governance would be to make a decision after you’ve gathered relevant information. And as it happens, that is the process the city is pursuing. Though you’d never know it listening to this crew.
All these evangelical governanceand-process devotees suddenly abandon the faith when it comes to that particular process. “We’re getting on with building the Scarborough subway extension,” the mayor tweeted. The decision is behind us, he always says. Nothing left to discuss.
“The subway will be built,” De Baeremaeker said in that CBC interview, adding it’s already been “debated 10 times and it’s won 10 times.”
They would, of course, prefer it not be an election issue. But it is, and it should be. Not only because, contrary to what they say, the final decisions on whether to build it or not will in fact inevitably take place after the election. But even if the decision was already behind us, it would still be an obvious and important job-perfor- mance metric for voters to use. This mayor and his crew have repeatedly said this is a good use of our money. They drew up and adapted this plan, and approved it (10 times De Baeremaeker reminds us) and are insisting now it is irreversible. The wisdom of that decision is a key criteria we might weigh when deciding on re-electing these people, all the more so if the decision is final.
If, by design or by incompetence, our politicians prevent us from learning before the election the price tag they have allegedly irrevocably committed us to paying, per- haps it’s fair for us to assume they do not care about how much of our money they spend, and do not consider the cost of things an important factor in their decisions. I mean, De Baeremaeker practically said that already.
Voters can make decisions accordingly in response. Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca. Follow: @thekeenanwire