For Toronto to rise, the Gardiner must fall
More than anything, the Great Gardiner Expressway Debate has revealed the immaturity of a city that has never had to work to be successful.
The city is routinely declared the best city in the world, the most livable, most equitable, most . . . Some might assume this is the result of a plan, but it’s not. Whatever the city does right; it does quite unconsciously. Indeed, the city’s attempts to run itself range from laughable to lamentable.
In 2010, Torontonians elected the worst mayor on the planet; even after that fiasco, our reputation remains more or less intact. Though we’re no longer “New York run by the Swiss,” Toronto is right up there by any measure, a shining civic exemplar.
But now a moment has arrived and a decision must be made, a tough one: What to do with a piece of infrastructure that has outlived its usefulness and been neglected so long it is falling down?
City leaders have resorted to the usual circular arguments that taking down even a small portion of the Gardiner would mean increased congestion for those using the Gardiner. The sources of congestion lie elsewhere, of course, but for senior politicians, the issue isn’t the greater good, but defending car culture at any cost.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the tortured logic of Deputy Mayor Denzil Minnan-Wong, who likes to talk about how he wasn’t elected to increase congestion. In fact, it’s unlikely he was elected for any other reason than the unfortunate fact that more voters recognize his name than those of his rivals.
Certainly, Minnan-Wong ranks among the council’s most befuddled members. His ability to confuse, conflate and confound is unmatched. One listens to MinnanWong and wonders which city he’s talking about, which alternate universe he comes from. His Toronto is largely a fiction invented by him, his boss, Mayor John Tory, and a few other council crustaceans.
These poor nostalgia-ridden souls long for a Toronto that never existed. And if it did, it was for a brief period sometime between 1958 and maybe 1962. Since then, it has long since given way to a new urban sensibility that clearly passed Minnan-Wong and Tory by without leaving a mark.
The specious arguments presented by Gardiner proponents have reached the how-many-cars-candrive-on-the-head-of-a-pin stage. Like many regressives, MinnanWong has latched onto the “hybrid” scheme, which would leave the Gardiner standing and reconfigure it to connect with the Unilever site east of the Don River.
What he and Tory fail to grasp is that the Gardiner has no place in 21st-century Toronto. Even in the ’50s when it was proposed, it was as part of a larger highway system that was never completed. That’s why even now only 3 per cent of traffic heading into downtown uses the east end of the Gardiner, which just last year city staff recommended be torn down.
The new city is a place of tall towers and people who walk, cycle or take transit to work.
Proximity is more important now than mobility; but the MinnanWongs and Torys are stuck in an outdated mindset incapable of understanding the city as anything more than series of arteries and highways that exist for the benefit of drivers.
As a reality, that never had currency; but as an ideal, it is dead. Already, Toronto’s failure to keep up with change has left it in a weakened state. It has lost ground to other more nimble cities.
Our leaders have grown tired, sclerotic and intellectually lazy. No surprise, then, that they are terrified of the future. But seeking solace in outdated notions of the city won’t help. As the novelist wrote, the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. chume@thestar.ca