At 2:30 pm on Wednesday, Mayor Rob Ford tweeted, “Happy Rosh Hashanah Toronto. Here’s to a happy and healthy New Year.” It was accompanied by the hashtags “#TOpoli,” “#Toronto,” and “#RoshHashanah.”
For most of the afternoon, that was all we heard from the mayor, if indeed you can consider the tweet to have been words from the man himself.
Nearly an hour and a half earlier, provincial Transportation Minister Glen Murray was out in the windy parking lot of the Scarborough Town Centre attempting to ring in his own new beginning of sorts.
Or perhaps it was a new end. Or a new middle. It’s not entirely clear.
“People in Scarborough want their subway. They’re tired of talk,” he said, as he announced yet another plan to build rapid transit in Scarborough, this one involving a short extension of the Bloor-Danforth line along the current route of the Scarborough RT.
The official statement from the province referred to it as a proposal. Murray, like everyone else who announces new transit infrastructure, made it sound like a pretty-much-done deal. Which it’s not.
But Council may not care enough to fight it.
Murray made it abundantly clear that he has zero respect for how Ford and TTC Chair Karen Stintz have handled the file. He portrayed the provincial government as the lone adult with a funded plan, the only ones who would make things happen. Which is perhaps true, in the sense that if you scale back your ambitions far enough, reaching a barely-adequate goal counts as a kind of victory.
The map displayed at the press conference showed just two stations on the subway extension (Lawrence East and “Scarborough City Centre”), replacing the current five RT stops beyond Kennedy (Lawrence East, Ellesmere, Midland, Scarborough Centre, and McCowan). Murray – perhaps realizing that the plan appeared modest to a fault – repeatedly attempted to downplay any suggestion that the eventual stops would be limited to these, but no one really believed him.
The province can’t unilaterally go ahead with anything. They would need the support of the TTC and very likely City Council. And Murray went out of his way to crap on them, while simultaneously daring them to reject a proposal that he argues is more solid than anything they have yet put forward. (The LRT plan, of course, is already signed, funded, and ready to go… but yeah.)
In most circumstances, you could count on the offended parties to get their backs up and go to war with the minister as a matter of personal pride. But Murray seems to have correctly guessed that, at this point, they would be happy to accept any subway at all.
To say Murray’s remarks were dripping with contempt would be like saying Rob Ford has a mild preference for subways. Rather, the words from the minister emerged, Venus-like, from an ocean of passive-aggressive hate-water, riding a shell of a subway plan atop its surface.
Here are some of the things Murray said Wednesday:
“The mayor has been mayor now for almost a full term. He hasn’t delivered 5¢ for a subway yet. None. We’ve had several conversations about this. He’s raised taxes every year. He made two promises to us: he said ‘I’m not gonna raise taxes,’ he’s done that. And he said ‘I’m gonna fund subways,’ he hasn’t done that.”
“We have subway champions coming out of our wazoo, we don’t have subway funders.”
“I think that most thinking people realize that if you’re waiting for $3 billion, you gotta be smoking something.”
“Now I’m very open, if the mayor or Councillor Stintz or Mr. Flaherty have some change of heart, get hit by lightning, something happens – they can write a cheque. And we can add another subway station. God knows, we can name it after them.”
“Every project we are building, not one of them is a result of negotiations with the Ford administration. Every single thing we’re building right now is a result of negotiations with the Miller administration. Mr. Ford, as I said, made two promises to us: ‘I won’t raise your taxes, I’ll cut them’ he’s raised my taxes. ‘I’ll build subways’ we haven’t got 5¢ out of him.”
“Lots of opinions at City Hall, not a lot of cheques.”
“We have waited for a mayor now for three quarters of his term or more to deliver 5¢. We have not yet got money. I wish Mayor Ford great efforts in trying to get money and an actual, real financial commitment that can actually be sent and pay for something, rather than a theoretical conversation about raising a tax.”
“Mr. [Rob] Prichard, on behalf of Metrolinx, early on in Mayor Ford’s mandate, went to Mayor Ford and offered exactly what we did today. He turned that down. He said he did not want this configuration and did that. When I talked to Mayor Ford just over a month ago, he was fine. He agreed that we had to get on with it and get it done.”
“The unrelenting squabbling and conflict and criticism, and the inability to actually write a cheque… We’re having a lot of discussions about things we’d like to do at every order of government, but there’s a big difference between what you’d like to do and what you’re actually doing. And it’s become very clear to me in the last 30 days, since Minister Flaherty asked for a business plan from Mayor Ford – haven’t seen it. We asked for a business plan – haven’t seen it. We’ve asked for a financing plan – haven’t seen it. We’ve had almost no communication.”
“Here. I’ll put a nickle on the table. I’ll put a dime. [He acts this out.] That’s more money than he has [put in].”
“When the mayor actually offers to put some money into it, we’ll have a much more serious conversation with the City.”
There was more, along the same lines, about Karen Stintz and the federal government.
Here’s what Ford said in response, in a statement emailed to the press three hours later:
I campaigned on extending the Bloor-Danforth Subway Line to the Scarborough Town Centre. I want to thank the Province for helping me deliver on that promise.
Over the last four years, I have fought against the LRT for a subway to Scarborough – because that is what Scarborough residents asked me to do.
I said we were going to build subways to Scarborough and that is exactly what we are doing.
The City of Toronto and the Province of Ontario are now ready to build transit.
This is great news and a huge victory for all of us. Scarborough will finally get its subway.
I look forward to continuing a strong working relationship with the Premier and the Province of Ontario.
Moving forward, my administration will keep working with the Province of Ontario and the Government of Canada to continue expanding Toronto’s transit system.
Right. This is exactly what you campaigned on. And Murray just couldn’t have been happier to work with you on it.
