If Rob Ford is going to build a Ferris wheel on the waterfront, he’s going to have to overcome fierce opposition from the public and at all three levels of government.
Local councillors and NDP representatives of the provincial and federal governments met with nearly 200 concerned citizens at an emergency town hall meeting Sunday, with the goal of organizing opposition against the mayor’s plans for redeveloping the Port Lands.
The new plans have been championed by Doug Ford, the mayor’s brother and councillor for Ward 2, and would wrest control of Port Lands from Waterfront Toronto and hand it over to the Toronto Port Lands Company. Preliminary desings from the company include a Ferris wheel and mega mall.
“I’ve been working on issues relating to the Don and the Port Lands for over 20 years now,” said Peter Tabuns, NDP MPP for Toronto Danforth. “We have won battles and lost battles. This is one that we cannot afford to lose.”
Tabuns pledged to make the Port Lands an issue at Queen’s Park, and Matthew Kellway, NDP MP for Beaches-East York, promised to take up the issue with the federal finance minister.
Kellway and Tabuns joined councillors Paula Fletcher, Mary Fragedakis, Pam MacConnell, and Mary-Margaret MacMahon at the community meeting in south Riverdale, and in front of a crowd of roughly 180 people, they all argued that Waterfront Toronto has been an effective steward of the lakeshore since it was established in 2003 as a joint effort of the municipal, provincial, and federal governments.
Aside from derailing eight years of development work, critics says the Fords’ vision for the area would do away with plans to naturalize the mouth of the Don River, which they believe could lead to flooding of downtown neighbourhoods close to the shore.
Opposition to the Fords’ plans has been quick to mobilize since they were introduced in a surprise motion at Ford’s executive council earlier this month. Fletcher, whose ward encompasses the Port Lands, compared the fierce backlash to the historic grassroots movement to stop the construction of the Spadina Expressway in the 1970s.
“The voices speaking out against this are loud. People in Toronto are rising up,” Fletcher said. “I don’t think Ford and the executive ever thought that people felt this strongly about the waterfront.”
As of Sunday afternoon, the activist group Code Blue TO has accumulated 4,600 signatures on a petition to save the Waterfront Toronto plan.
Fletcher accused the Ford administration of abandoning nearly a decade of sound planning in order to sell off the Port Lands for a quick shot of cash.
Doug lent that accusation some credibility earlier in the day, when he called in to a local radio show hosted by Councillor Josh Matlow. He told Matlow that the city needs the money that could be generated by selling off the Port Lands in order to make up its current budget shortfall.
“We have to look for new revenues,” Doug said. “When you look across the city, one area stands out. It’s the Port Lands. It’s revenue.”
Doug is currently the subject of a complaint with the city’s lobbyist registrar over the Port Lands, after the media published allegations that he improperly met with an Australian development firm before unveiling the new plans.
The fate of the Port Lands will go to a vote at city council on Wednesday, but it looks increasingly unlikely that the Fords have the support they need to squeeze Waterfront Toronto out of the project altogether.
Matlow and MacMahon, both members of the unaligned centrist bloc that holds the balance of power on council, have said they can’t support it. Even members of the mayor’s executive committee have expressed deep doubts about the proposal and the way it’s been hastily presented to council.
But it’s equally unlikely that the pre-existing plans will survive without some alteration, and the Ford administration is reportedly working on finding middle ground between the two proposals.
“I understand that they’re scrambling to come up with something else,” said Fletcher. “We need to make sure that the alternative does not leave Waterfront Toronto out. We have faith in Waterfront Toronto. We don’t have faith in this administration.”
