Tory and Wynne wage war of words
More is needed than mayor of Toronto turning rhetorical guns on province as Queen’s Park neglects TCHC in housing affordability measures
If you’re the mayor of Toronto, as I’ve written before, sooner or later the province will always screw you. Because it can, and it has its own priorities that are different than yours.
And so sooner or later, if you’re the mayor of Toronto, you have to get into a war of words with the province about it. Because what else can you do?
Mel Lastman said of Mike Harris, “everything he has touched has turned to crap.” David Miller said Dalton McGuinty was being “disgraceful.” Rob Ford was “furious” over a “last-minute blindsiding” from Kathleen Wynne.
And now it’s John Tory’s turn to turn his rhetorical guns on the province and raise hell about their neglect. Tory has hauled out his signature move — holding lots of press conferences in different parts of the city to announce the same thing over and over — to complain about the province stiffing Toronto by not chipping in to repair or build social housing. “Premier Kathleen Wynne and her government had a chance to stand up for Toronto on transit and on housing. Instead, at least on the pages of this budget, they turned their backs,” he said last week, outlining the theme of the week to come.
The man has a point. It is hard to imagine the gall it took the premier to announce a whole suite of measures aimed at housing affordability and entirely neglect to address Toronto’s social housing among them. There are 181,000 people on the waiting list for Toronto Community Housing, and the buildings we have are in such disrepair that we’ll need to close 1,000 units entirely before the end of 2018.
There’s this 10-year plan to fix the units that costs $2.6 billion, of which the city has paid or plans to pay about $900 million. The federal government has chipped in $23 million toward next year’s planned spending of $438 million in repairs. Kathleen Wynne’s government has contributed next to nothing. And the provincial budget contained no new dollars for the cause.
This is unconscionable. Especially since those crumbling buildings were, for the most part, built by the provincial government before being shifted onto the city’s books in the 1990s.
And especially since this failure to contribute comes just shortly after Wynne spiked John Tory’s grand road-toll plan to raise infrastructure money. She can claim — and she does — that the gas tax money she offered instead compensates, but it doesn’t. It delivers less money and is not adjustable by the city for its own needs, and unless I’m misunderstanding, is earmarked specifically for transit.
Many of Tory’s critics like to offer a big “on the other hand” when he shouts at the province about this: he’s spending a lot, mostly needlessly, to rebuild the Gardiner East and to dig a one-stop subway extension in Scarborough. In both cases, it appears to many of us, objectively better options are available that also happen to cost hundreds of millions of dollars less. Look, these critics say, there’s your money for social housing, going into an elevated highway and an underground subway tunnel.
But Wynne can’t really play that game since her government shares responsibility for the Scarborough subway decision — she and her cabinet are as much to blame for saddling us with that money pit as Rob Ford and Karen Stintz and John Tory.
And then look at the reason she decided to stab the mayor in the back by reversing her support to him on toll roads after he’d already staked his political credibility on implementing them. She feels like her road to re-election runs through the 905. Try selling those voters on the idea a highway into Toronto is a waste of money. And doing so after saying that road was too necessary to allow tolling on. And while spending billions to build and expand highways yourself.
Critics may have a point. Wynne has absolutely no standing to make that point.
Which hasn’t stopped her from battling back at Tory, claiming he’s essentially lying and sending a cabinet minister down to city hall unannounced to ambush a photo-op Tory was holding with provincial Progressive Conservative Leader Patrick Brown.
If it’s gonna be a war of words, both sides are gonna wage it.
It would almost be fun to watch, at least as much as this stuff is ever what you would call “fun,” except this war has actual civilian casualties. While they’re fighting, poor people in Toronto need places to live. Social housing is falling apart. This is a crisis.
Tory is right to shame the premier if she’s decided to try to win reelection on the backs of Toronto’s poorest people. But while pointing the finger at the province may be necessary, it isn’t sufficient. Tory also has an obligation, if the province is going to screw us, to find a way to pay the bills locally — either by raising new taxes or by shifting money from his other priorities.