Gardiner vote revives old rivalry between the downtown, suburbs
Near the end of a long, punchy debate over the east Gardiner Expressway, Councillor John Filion exposed, in stark terms, the unspoken divide.
The Willowdale councillor was “horrified” by the results of geographically charting his colleagues’ voting preference for keeping up the aging expressway — to keep commute times as low as possible — or tear it down to replace it with a boulevard, to create the best new waterfront neighbourhood possible.
“In the (old) city of Toronto and in Councillor (Sarah) Doucette’s ward (Parkdale-High Park) that abuts it . . . It is 13-0 for the boulevard option,” Filion told council. “That is more than 40 per cent of our population. We have a different culture in the suburbs and I know, I live there, I live in Willowdale,” he said, noting all the votes to keep up the expressway came from the suburbs.
“When I drive downtown . . . I’m coming into a part of town that values bicycle lanes and walkability and streetcars . . . I would never dream of imposing Willowdale culture or Agincourt culture or Downsview culture on the people who live downtown, and that’s what we’re about to do today. “And that’s just wrong.” He didn’t change any minds. The map of the votes that followed minutes later shows a solid block of boulevard supporters downtown, surrounded by a sea of hybrid fans in the more car-centric suburbs, with little islands of suburban boulevard support from councillors including Filion.
A Forum Research poll conducted days before the vote revealed a similar split, with Torontonians overall about evenly divided between the two options. Geographically, however, a majority of residents in the densely populated downtown favoured boulevard.
Mayor John Tory, who campaigned last fall on the theme of “One Toronto” and energetically supported keeping the current expressway link to the Don Valley Parkway, emerged with a narrow 24-21 victory and, clearly, more than one Toronto.
Alan Redway, the former East York mayor currently campaigning to get Toronto de-amalgamated, said the Gardiner vote was the latest example of how the old city of Toronto and five surrounding former municipalities have never fit together well.
Redway wants to go back to the way it was before 1998, with multiple independent municipalities united under a metro level of government to decide regional issues. However, he acknowledges that under that scenario, the Gardiner would have been a regional issue and the outcome would have been the same.
Councillor Paula Fletcher (Ward 30, Toronto-Danforth), who also at times has floated de-amalgamation, noted that the first megacity council, including several former metro councillors, voted in 1999 to tear down the Gardiner between the Don River and Leslie St.
“They were able to think outside the box,” following decades of regional representation, she said.
“After this many years of amalgamation, everyone’s stuck in their box.”