Ford’s latest folly a truly terrible idea
Doug Ford wanted to pave over the Greenbelt, the rich protected lands that surround Toronto and Hamilton. “It’s “just farmer fields,” he told a gathering in a February video just publicized by the Liberals.
Ford now claims to have cancelled the plan that he never told voters about in the first place, which suggests he might just as easily hop right back to it if elected.
Ford wants to be Ontario’s next Progressive Conservative premier — it’s time for them to drop the absurd “Progressive” in favour of “Wayback” — and he may get his way. But the scheme would have hurt him with voters in city, country and town.
Ford’s solution to the problem of affordable housing sounded easy, as all of his so-called solutions initially do. Yes, subdivisions and condo developments could line the roads all the way to Timmins and they’d be cheap, though the seven-hour daily commute would be daunting.
They wouldn’t have water as such, or sewerage or ready access to food, all the handy things made easier by greater density. Even birds don’t fly that far for sustenance. One wonders where Ford thinks food and water come from. Quick, what is a “wetland”?
Ford, like Donald Trump, has always self-identified as a businessman, rabbiting on about cutting costs and making payroll, just as Margaret Thatcher used to rhapsodize about the national household budget. But government is not like this. Neither analogy works.
If Ford wins, his Ontario will be run like an autobody repair shop or, postwetlands, a deep-fried-bird fast food chain called Wing-a-Ding-Ding or House of Tern. Stork on My Fork. It will be retro.
What kind of premier would say things like this out loud? “I’ve already talked to some of the biggest developers in this country and again, I wish I could say it’s my idea, but it was their idea as well. Give us property, we’ll build and we’ll drive the cost down. That’s my plan for affordable housing.” The small group of suited men that were his audience looked at him blank-faced.
“We will open up the Greenbelt — not all of it, but we’re going to open a big chunk of it up — and we’re going to start building and making it more affordable and putting more houses out there,” Ford told them. What is a chunk?
Ford said later that the detachable Greenbelt could be expanded elsewhere but that sounds like building over Algonquin Park and replacing it with a park along the Manitoba border.
Ford doesn’t understand just how much land is available for development within Toronto. Does he even grasp what “density” means? Does he know how hard citizens have worked to redefine this word?
Here’s a case study. The Danforth is still fresh and lively at Broadview, tailing out into battered despair the further one travels east. The stretch is long, low and underpopulated despite the subway line. Here a new city will be built up instead of the postwar sprawl that so damaged this city.
The wonderful New Yorker illustrator Bruce McCall grew up in the 1950s at Woodbine and Danforth, just northwest of the Beaches. He hated it and wrote a grim memoir of Toronto life titled Thin Ice: Coming of Age in Canada. The soul-destroying dullness of that era was far worse than in any small town.
His family lived in grim, stubby, brown-brick apartment buildings called Woodbine Court, surrounded by short shabby buildings as far as the eye could see. Here’s the weird part. It hasn’t changed. I’d send a photo to McCall — badly scarred, he fled the country in 1962 — if only to scare him.
Canada, “the sleeping giant, had slept in,” he wrote. Postwar Toronto is waiting for modernity still. There are many neighbourhoods like this, long streets with empty storefronts, unused parking lots, and scattered one- and two-storey housing. It needs people and height. Instead, Ford proposed more sprawl and longer commutes.
Imagine hotter weather, unpredictable storms, power shortages and the death of the car. Where do you want to live when that time comes, in or near a city or in a shaven landscape hours from safety?