Critics of city projects often proven wrong
People die for their beliefs. So who are you to think you can change their minds?
Civic leaders are wise to remember this as they navigate the murky and divisive waters churned up around attempts to improve the public realm and make our city more livable and sustainable and environmentally friendly.
Do you want to guarantee that streetcar travel along King and Queen Sts. is faster than the journey on foot? Don’t be surprised to get the middle finger for your efforts.
If you advocate for the safe sharing of road space for bikes on Bloor St., expect turbulence on an issue that should be slam-dunk easy for most to embrace.
When “reduce, reuse, recycle” became a rallying cry, starting in the late 1980s as Toronto was running out of space to dump its waste, the naysaying reached extraordinary levels. Taxpayers would absolutely refuse to sort through mucky, smelly garbage at home, the skeptics said. “That’s why we pay taxes — so the garbage man can sort our trash.” Who could have believed that in two decades the green bin and blue box would become permanent features of the urban landscape where the garbage bag once dominated?
There are those who still chafe at the loss of the Spadina Expressway trundling through the heart of the city — arguing illogically that the expressway would have solved our traffic mess, had it not been stopped at Eglinton Ave.
Thanks to the late mayor Rob Ford, the St. Clair streetcar line cannot be Googled without the “disaster on St. Clair” popping into view. It doesn’t matter that the transit service is more efficient and the thoroughfare is improved.
When Paul Godfrey, as Metro chair, pushed for group homes to be accepted across the city and not just in some downtown neighbourhoods, the protest was furious — often stoked by local politicians, mostly in the suburbs, who warned of the end of civilization. Remember how basement apartments were supposed to destroy our great city? And, at the other end of the NIMBY spectrum, so-called “monster homes” assaulted our sensibilities like meteorites from outer space.
It’s nearly impossible to recommend any change, any advancement or reform without a concomitant push back and blow back that sort of plays to Newton’s third law of motion, “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.”
Dissent is good. Opposition invariably results in better policy as proponents are forced to answer tough questions, improve their game and address the unintended consequences of the desired initiative. Push back should be a good thing. But, oh, some people do make it an insufferable exercise.
Take Councillor Giorgio Mammol- iti, for example. There is no claim so outrageous that he would risk avoiding it. Forever aggrieved, he aligns himself with anything and anyone that brings him publicity.
If the subway is opening a stone’s throw from his ward, he stresses that his constituents are on the outside again. When the province offers nearly $1 billion to build a state-of-the-art LRT along Finch Ave. W., he promises to lay down in front of the tracks and demand a subway — never mind that studies show that fewer than one in 10 along the corridor are heading downtown, where the subway is destined.
Of course, the majority of us want to believe that a subway under every street is the only real transit option. Everything else is inferior. With such an orientation we are suckers for councillors promising subways, subways, subways that we can fund with, get this, lower taxes.
Along King St., where there are more than enough riders to justify a subway, the city is studying ways to provide transit priority for the 65,000 who ride the King streetcar daily. This is the city’s busiest surface transit route and third overall, behind only the Yonge subway and the Bloor-Danforth subway.
A one-year study is underway, severely restricting car traffic along the route. No one should be surprised there are vocal opponents, especially those most directly and immediately affected. The rest of us should listen and be skeptical of what we hear — all the time judging the source of the information. And decide when we get all the facts.
We should be especially sang-froid and suspicious of the naysayers when the desired outcome is clearly for our own good.
Take the smoking bans now universally accepted. Despite the evidence of the harm of second-hand smoking, so many opposed this public-health initiative.
One such vociferous opponent was the same restaurateur who has erected an ice sculpture outside his King St. restaurant that gives the middle finger to the proponents of the King St. streetcar project.
Al Carbone used to claim that his business would be destroyed if patrons were not allowed to smoke at his restaurant. How wrong he was.
He’s been opposed the growth of condo towers in the area. Now he claims that the King St. streetcar is not as slow and congested and traffic-clogged as city planners say. How many strikes before he’s retired to the dugout?
I walked that route a decade ago — twice over a four-hour stretch, from city hall at Queen and Bay Sts. to Adelaide and Bathurst Sts. — and not a single streetcar passed me on the way, both ways. Congestion in the area and its impact on transit is a problem long in the making and too slow in the fixing.
While all this is bubbling, the police association has launched a totally predictable campaign to convince the public that muchneeded reforms on how police services are managed and deployed are putting the public at risk.
Let’s listen to all sides. Understand who are paid agitators and paid advocates of a particular position. But I’ve found that it helps to remember the perennial blowhards who have been proven wrong over and over.
The police association lost me when they sued the Toronto Star for about a billion dollars. Why? Because the Star published a carefully researched series of reports that showed police racially profiled Black and brown people — no matter how you looked at the statistics.
Mr. Carbone? Cries wolf too many times to be credible.
Mammoliti? The fact he still has the title “councillor” after all his public shaming, his blatant stretching of the truth, his politically motivated stances and stunts only proves again that people believe what they want to believe.