Looks to me like the subway game was rigged

Ridership numbers discredited, procedural rules were sidelined — and we’re still going ahead?

What to make of the perpetual Scarborough subway crap show, as it slowly exposes the maggot-infested rot that lies at the core of how our government makes generation-defining municipal decisions?

It’s not that the decision itself is extravagant pandering nonsense. Well it’s not just that. Wasteful populism is crappy, but it’s a perpetual feature of government, a nasty but occasionally unavoidable side-effect of democracy.

The childish blithering of Glenn De Baeremaeker and the brothers Ford and the rest of the underground pep squad about who “deserves” massive overbuilding of infrastructure seems relatively reassuring compared to how the process unfolded and continues to unfold.

See, it sure looks more and more to me like the game was rigged — that the numbers were suspiciously unreliable and the rules that govern how these decisions are made were sidelined.

And when this is pointed out, the response of those in charge is basically to dismiss it with a shrug and a smirk. Let’s review: For the longest time, no one seriously considered a Bloor-Danforth subway extension to replace the aging Scarborough RT. Rob Ford and his gang wanted a Sheppard subway extension, but the building plan he made with the province called for an aboveground LRT to replace the Scarborough RT. (In Ford’s scheme, it was an extension of the Eglinton Crosstown LRT.)

After Ford’s entire plan was torpedoed by city council (led by Karen Stintz and assisted by De Baeremaeker) and the LRT network plan was reaffirmed (and signed and sealed and so on), De Baeremaeker and Stintz brought forward this new Scarborough subway plan, which is where the intrigue begins.

As I’ve written before, its proponents claimed then that it would cost only $400 million more than the approved $1.4 billion LRT plan. We now know that the actual difference in price was not the 30 per cent they claimed, but at least 130 per cent, as the subway plan now seems likely to cost more than $3 billion.

We also now know that whatever the cost, this item was brought before council improperly: as my colleague Jennifer Pagliaro recently reported, the motion that allowed the new debate to happen was in violation of council’s procedural bylaw. The city clerk advised at the time that it was improper, but it was allowed by a subway-friendly council speaker who justified her decision working from notes provided to her by Rob Ford’s office.

We also know, also thanks to Pagliaro, that the ridership numbers central to that debate were questionable: mysteriously, the planning department suddenly changed its ridership estimate from 9,500 riders at peak time in one direction to a range that conveniently topped out at 14,000, just near the edge of what would justify a subway. Chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat was privately questioning that number in the lead up to the debate, though both she and TTC CEO Andy Byford defended it publicly before city council. Now Keesmaat says that estimate was “problematic,” though no one is explaining who came up with it or what logic went into it.

So: the debate itself was improper, and the key numbers that formed the crux of the debate were questionable and now discarded and discredited.

This raises a lot of questions. Were the books cooked? And if so, by whom? Were the procedural rules intentionally sidelined?

And knowing all that we know now, what should we do about it?

“It’s done. Council accepted it, and that was that,” clerk Ulli Watkiss says about the procedural monkey business.

“You’re asking an irrelevant question,” Keesmaat says about the numbers her office apparently produced, which formed the basis of a 30-year dedicated tax increase and a $3-billion infrastructure decision. Irrelevant, you see, because her department is now acting on that decision! “Today we’ve moved far beyond that analysis and have good, robust numbers that we are working with,” she said. Whether those new numbers are good or robust or not, they have not been shared with the public.

“On the basic decision of whether or not we’re going to have a subway in Scarborough that train has left the station,” Mayor John Tory says.

“I’d like to see us move forward as opposed to relitigate decisions we’ve already made,” Premier Kathleen Wynne says.

“My support for this was predicated on the notion that I think people want to see us move ahead and actually do something,” Tory says.

The battles of the past have already been fought, people! Now we must carry on with the war!

A wise organized crime lieutenant on The Wire once counselled, “Fact is, we went to war, and now, there ain’t no going back . . . If it’s a lie, then we fight on that lie. But we gotta fight.”

As it is in gang warfare, so it is at city hall, apparently.

The rules that govern decisionmaking were disregarded. The key numbers that informed that decision were way off. And the spending and construction haven’t started yet, so there’s still time to . . .

What can you do? The past is the past! Why do you want to keep relitigating this old argument?

“We were not expected to go through a fulsome process because it was a politically driven process,” Keesmaat says.

Ah, yes. Politics. Why would we expect anything different? Edward Keenan writes on city issues, ekeenan@thestar.ca. Follow: @thekeenanwire.