Executive committee signs off on SmartTrack

Mayor shakes off controversy, stays the course

John Tory caused a bit of a kerfuffle on Twitter Monday evening. That’s not hard to do, but in this case it wasn’t contrived: in an op- ed in the Star, the mayor provocatively suggested that opponents of the increasingly expensive Scarborough subway (which he supports) aren’t much interested in helping immigrants.

“Many of the subway’s loudest critics do not live or work in Scarborough, where more than half the population is born outside of Canada,” he wrote. “When they say this is too much to spend on a subway, the inference seems to be that it’s too much to spend on this part of the city.”

Coun. Josh Matlow, a lead- i ng Scarborough subway skeptic, called it “sad, desperate and shameful.” Others, not on council, were far less polite. But on Tuesday, Tory insisted he simply hadn’t said what I and everyone else heard him say.

“I believe that those words, on any fair reading, were completely mischaracterized,” he told reporters.

If Tory had offered poor wording as a defence, I would have accepted it. It wasn’t like him at all. But as he didn’t offer it, whatever he meant to say, I can only suggest he guard against similar wording in future — especially on the explosive transit file.

The op- ed landed only hours before the executive committee was to consider, and only two weeks before city council will approve or reject — in essence — Tory’s legacy. If realized, it would be a very important legacy for the city: transit, and a willingness to pay for it.

On Tuesday exec signed off on SmartTrack — i.e., adding some stations to GO lines. It approved a western extension of the Eglinton Crosstown LRT to Renforth Drive. It approved an embryonic plan for a Downtown Relief Line, from city hall or thereabouts to Pape station.

And it approved Tory’s Scarborough Compromise — a one- stop subway extension from Kennedy to Scarborough Town Centre, and an LRT from Kennedy to the University of Toronto Scarborough campus — which seemed capable of grudgingly passing through council as an alternative to a previous, much costlier subway plan.

The much costlier subway plan was, in turn, an alternative to a previously approved, fully provincially funded LRT line, which council kiboshed in 2013. And when the Scarborough subway recently escalated in price to $3.2 billion, it reinvigorated LRT supporters. Matlow recently told me it might be revivable at council, and the vote to kill it in the first place was awfully close: 24-20.

The mayor deserves some of the stick he gets on transit. SmartTrack as presented in his election platform now hardly means anything more than enhanced GO service in the 416. No one should begrudge that, but it grates against Tory’s stated opposition to back- of- napkin transit planning, as does his one-stop subway plan, which arrived covered in hot sauce stains.

That said, this is far less Tory’s mess than it is the previous council’s. The province is more stuck- in than ever on the subway, as Tory says. Chief city planner Jennifer Keesmaat, whose praises many subway opponents are willing to sing when they agree with her, insists the extension is a worthy invest- ment in an important future urban centre. Ridership projections may well not support the cost, but they suggest the new terminus would be very well used by the standards of the system.

And it’s not clear how much more coherent Toronto transit politics can really get under the current municipal governance structure. Queen’s Park is all too happy to meddle in the decisions of Metrolinx, its “arm’s-length” GTA public transit agency. Now imagine if all 107 MPPs, beholden to no one except themselves and whatever horses they had recently traded, hashed out billiondollar decisions on the floor of the legislature, sometimes in the middle of the night, then hurled them at staff to sort out.

That’s essentially how Toronto plans transit. It’s certainly not how most cities like Toronto do it — notably, most have a mayor who is far more than first among equals on city council. The largest weak- mayor city council in the United States is Dallas’s, and it has 14 members. Toronto’s has 44. It’s a grotesque Rube Goldberg machine that the mayor of the day has to try to keep clanking and rattling towards better, never mind perfect.

When Tory says it’s time to forget the LRT and learn to love the subway, he’s not right. But he’s not wrong either. As imperfect and incoherent as his “stick- with-the- plan” plan is, not sticking with the plan is precisely what got us here.