Ontario’s road toll uprising.

EVEN IF TORONTO’S PLAN WAS KILLED FOR WRONG REASONS, IT IS THE RIGHT OUTCOME.

Democracy is coming, It’s coming down the Gardiner, It’s coming down the Parkway, As voters keep getting madder. There’s a carbon tax to pay, And solar power tariffs, So everybody’s got a whiff, That there’s no other spin, Democracy is coming ... for Kathleen Wynne.

Sorry about that, but it was hard to resist in the wake of the near-universal media condemnation of Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne’s decision to kill Toronto’s big plan for road tolls on two major expressways.

Here, in condensed form, is a summary of media comments on the toll-killing announcement: Political desperation wafting over the fumes of traffic jams. A pathetically unpopular premier battling a tax revolt over electricity rates, facing obliteration at the polls next year and under attack from opposition parties threatening to make tolls a big election issue. Wynne ran for the hills and left behind a bottomless pit of Liberal cowardice and expediency.

Democracy, it seems, is a great thing when voters confirm the objectives of the ruling policy establishment. But when a politician responds to the people, when democracy actually rises against a government drowning in its own sea of conventional interventionist prescriptions, well that’s a despicable act of political cowardice.

I say, let’s hear a round of quiet applause for Wynne’s Liberal government — and for the voters of Ontario who appear ready to revolt against a government that for too long has been coddled by a media and policy establishment through all manner of ill-founded policies — in electricity, health care, transit, climate, education.

Even if the toll decision came from a premier standing knee deep in a pile of cynicism, even if the city of Toronto’s toll plan was killed for all the wrong reasons, it is the right and best outcome. The benefits of highway tolls, properly applied, are theoretically solid. But the plan put forward by Toronto Mayor John Tory looked more like a trial balloon than a detailed proposal. No study had been completed, revenues appeared to have been estimated on the back of an envelope, costs were unknown, objectives were vague and in part contradictory.

The claim that the tolls would reduce congestion came without any supporting traffic-impact analysis. Would a $2 toll on the Gardiner Expressway or the Don Valley Parkway really reduce driver use of the two main arteries into Toronto? Would $5 work? How many road users would dodge the tolls and begin using secondary roads and residential streets, moving the congestion from one place to another?

Also unclear was where the toll money would go. Would it be used to fix the Gardiner and maintain the Parkway, or would it be funnelled over to fund Toronto’s generally grandiose but incoherent public transit plans?

There may be a case for tolling Toronto’s various expressways and roads, but Mayor Tory and the city didn’t make it. He also brought the idea forward at the wrong time and with the wrong arguments. One alleged selling point was that it was about time that commuters from outside Toronto pay the real cost of driving into the city. But one could also make the case that the free expressways help drive the success of downtown Toronto as a place to work and visit.

Voters in and around Toronto, especially in the suburbs, had an instant sense that they were witnessing the creation of a new source of government revenue rather than a coherent urban transit plan for the city. We have a road, let’s toll it.

It is clear that the Wynne government is wary of the toll plan because, like voters, it sees tolls as just another tax and not a fix for traffic congestion. Its kill-the-toll announcement called them “revenue-generating tools.”

But the main reason to applaud the no-tolls decision relates to the fact that the half-baked proposal clashed with other halfbaked transit proposals that are perpetually floating around the greater Toronto area and other parts of the province. As Wynne put it, “commuters need reliable transit options before revenuegenerating measures such as road tolls are implemented.”

Such “transit options” include $13.5 billion for a massive expansion of rail service around Toronto scheduled for completion in 2024. The province also talks about a $31.5-billion investment in transit and transportation around the province. “That is why the province is not supporting plans for municipal road tolls at this time,” said the government.

None of these spending and investment plans is taking place within a framework that even remotely resembles the market fundamentals associated with the economic principle of putting tolls on roads. The idea is to make users pay for the roads they use and, ideally, provide funds for market-based incentives to manage and expand road use over the long term. The instant road-toll plan proposed by the city failed to present a coherent rationale, analysis or structure.

More importantly, the toll plan was put forward within the existing and antiquated framework for building and operating public transit. There are no new ideas, new structures, or new privatization options that would free public transit from the extreme political controls that have held Toronto back for decades.

In this sense, the Wynne government is right. Until the province and the city can bring about a revolution in transit planning and development, there is no point in slapping a toll on expressways.

Toronto’s transit and transportation systems need an overhaul. Once democracy has arrived, the opportunities might open up that will take Toronto well past the short-term toll-road fix.