Who is the authority on Don River flood risks?
Provincial auditor general Bonnie Lysyk’s critical value-for-money assessment of Waterfront Toronto, released Dec. 5, led to the immediate firing by the Ford government of three board members appointed in 2016 by the previous Liberal government. Meanwhile, opposition MPP’s at Queen’s Park have been attempting to question Lysyk’s earlier decision to stop counting the government’s part of provincial employees’ pension plans as provincial assets.
This accounting decision, flatly rejected by the province’s chief controller, who resigned as a result, boosted Doug Ford’s election campaign. The relabelling of pension assets currently supports Finance Minister Vic Fedeli’s claims that the cupboard is bare and Ontarians should get ready for further cuts.
That financial numbers don’t speak for themselves, and that accounting and politics aren’t always as separate as they’re supposed to be, is not news.
But there’s one bit of news that has thus far gone undiscussed: the policy suggestions contained in Section 5 of the provincial auditor’s inquiry into Waterfront Toronto, entitled “Detailed audit observations: Port Lands Flood Protection.”
The background to this is that toward the end of the Liberal Wynne government, municipal, provincial and federal officials announced a major project that, among other things, would save Waterfront Toronto, or at least extend it into 2028 or beyond — namely, $1.25 billion for a huge Port Lands Flood protection plan.
The auditor general questions the need for this spending, by claiming, among other things, that the “risk contingency” of $174 million is too high. But with all due respect, what does an accountant, however reputable, know about costing an unprecedentedly large and futureoriented environmental project?
For one thing, Lysyk omits to the public that the project is on land (the Port Lands) that has few if any parallels from which reliable cost figures could be derived. The Port Lands soil is thoroughly contaminated by the toxic sludge that, for decades, came down the Don River — the very sludge used to physically build the Port Lands in an era (the 1910s) when there were no environmental regulations.
Going even further than challenging the cost estimates, in Section 5.1.2 of her report, Lysyk goes as far as to question the wisdom of governments spending serious money to protect the country’s economic engine, downtown Toronto, from the kind of flooding that climate change is already causing in other parts of the world.
The special toxicity of the Port Lands, which poses unprecedented financial risks to the project, goes unmentioned. She spends several paragraphs delving into current policies limiting development on the Port Lands and, in essence, dismisses the risk of serious flooding. Hurricane Sandy’s damage to the New York downtown goes unmentioned.
So far, the Ford government has not presented an emissions-control plan to replace the cap-and-trade contracts misleadingly described as a carbon tax, and talk about “cutting red tape” is being used to greatly weaken environmental protection measures in the Greenbelt and beyond.
In this context, Lysyk’s negative comments about the Port Lands flood protection plan may well lead the province to pull out of its share of the $1.25-billion flood protection financial commitment. If this happens, people all over Ontario, not just Toronto, will rue the day when an accountant wandered into the technically complex field of environmental policy.
Accountability has been sorely lacking at Waterfront Toronto, as Lysyk rightly pointed out. But what citizens need is clearly presented facts about the Port Lands flood protection plan — not a penny-pinching response that empowers the anti-environmental agenda of the Ford government.
Few Torontonians can judge for themselves whether the Port Lands plan is solid. But all Torontonians know by now that governments at all levels have spent way too little, not too much, making our infrastructure more resilient and trying to prevent and mitigate climate change.