Reality check: Looking through the rearview at last week’s subways versus LRT debate.
Why it doesn’t have to be over for Rob Ford – but probably is anyway.
It was always understood that the left-right-centre coalition that has come together to wrest control of the transit file from the mayor, was a tentative alliance. There are still some trust issues left over from the Miller years. And those mushy middlers who can turn at any moment.
In fact, right up until Thursday’s vote to go with LRT on Sheppard East, some among the lefty contingent on council were having second thoughts about whether their newfound allies would end up supporting some watered-down subway scheme. That didn’t happen. Quite the opposite, in fact. The mayor huffed and puffed, but couldn’t manage to budge one vote with his histrionics in that last-ditch speech that oozed desperation. The worrisome sign for Ford: even the impressionable rookies have tuned him out.
Where do we go from here?
Some Fordists were left bemoaning the lack of leadership from the mayor’s office after Thursday’s vote. Indeed, most of the heavy lifting to save Ford’s subway was being done by Scarborough councillors who’d been working for weeks, Norm Kelly in particular, on coming up with plan to fund Ford’s extension from Don Mills to Scarborough Town Centre, or some version thereof.
With the mayor in re-election mode, or so he says now that he’s lost his subway vote, who’ll be setting the agenda for council? The business of governance has been left somewhat up in the air. With the mayor checking out, the really tricky work of consensus building begins if in fact it’s now the responsibility of council to set direction for the city. New protocols will have to be developed around interactions with staff.
Does professional advice from the city staff get cycled through council and then sent to the various committees for debate? In that regard, higher ups in the city bureaucracy have signaled they see the worm turning – or was I reading too much in the subtle shift in tone from some of them during questioning on the financial hole subways would put the city in? Maybe that axe that fell on former TTC chief Gary Webster has given them something to think about.
More disrespect for the will of council.
Unlike the first time he was outvoted on the transit file, Ford didn’t call council’s decision to go with LRT over his subway extension “irrelevant.” But he might as well have.
Even before issuing a terse statement declaring “I respect the will of council,” Ford was threatening to do everything in his power to derail council’s call, declaring the 2014 election on.
The real election Ford’s waiting for, though, is the provincial one, in which he’s banking on his buddy Tim Hudak winning so he can bury council’s LRT plans, even if it means tearing up track on Sheppard.
There’s a precedent for Ford’s madness. Mike Harris buried work already begun under the NDP on an Eglinton subway back in 1995 in favour of the billion-dollar boondoggle known as the existing Sheppard line. Respect for taxpayers? Not when it doesn’t suit the mayor’s political agenda.
Metrolinx spies.
Just how closely has Metrolinx, the provincial transit agency that’s funding council’s LRT plans – and will end up owning the track – following the transit debate? One employee from the agency’s stakeholder relations and strategic communications arm was tailing Scarborough Councillor Norm Kelly, he the concocter of 11th hour plans to raise taxes on everything from smokes and booze to pay for Ford’s subway, to various town halls in the days before council’s debate. Metrolinx’s mission? Find out just what a Lib (self-described) like Kelly was doing advocating new taxes when funds for LRT were sitting there waiting to be used. That mystery remains unsolved.
Subways are a “no-brainer.”
Much was made by Fordists during this council debate about the fact subways carry more people than LRT and therefore are a more effective mode of relieving gridlock that’s costing the city billions.
But the fact subways carry more people doesn’t mean they’d encourage more people out of their cars. In fact, the experience with the existing Sheppard line tells us that subways are no antidote to gridlock. Even with all the residential condo development brought by the subway between Yonge and Don Mills, the line itself continues to be underused to the tune of about $10 million a year a decade after it officially opened.
It’s commercial development, head offices and employment uses, that create the kind of numbers that would warrant a subway.
Accessibility and connectivity to transit is also an more important determining factor when it comes to getting people out of their cars, and on that count, LRT beats subways hands down.
On the operational side of the equation, the costs of maintaining LRT was another area Fordists have been hammering to make their case for subways. But when those overall costs are measured on a per kilometer or per passenger basis, LRT comes out ahead. Also lost in the operational cost equation, is the economic spin-offs, increase in property values and street-level development associated with LRT.
Sheppard West test.
Forgotten in the whole subway debate is the fact a Sheppard West line from Yonge to Downsview station formed part of the mayor’s subway proposal, until it was clear the money wasn’t there for his Sheppard East extension and talks of a subway line west of Yonge magically disappeared from the discussion.
Arguably, a subway along Sheppard West makes less sense than one on Sheppard East. Room for the kind of development needed to fund a subway is just not there, the section of the street west of Bathurst already pretty much built out.
A secondary plan approved for the area around Downsview park also places restrictions on the heights of buildings that would be allowed, making funding of a subway through air rights or some other scheme undoable. Don’t tell that to area Councillor James Pasternak, though.
Monkey business.
Doug Ford’s “monkeys” crack during council’s debate, as in, “You just don’t get anywhere with these monkeys,” was quickly forgotten after he apologized for it. But in the context of the councillor’s earlier set-to with Raymond Cho, methinks the mayor’s older brother got off light on this one.
Cho called Ford out for referring to LRT vehicles as “streetcars,” asking at one point if Ford had a hard time understanding English “like me.” It was the best line of the entire debate, and a self-effacing one at that, given Cho’s sometimes broken command of the language.
Ford didn’t take it that way, however, complaining he might be labeled a “racist” if he’d said as much to Cho. The two don’t compare, and I’m not occupying the space between Doug’s ears, so can’t account for his twisted logic on that one.
But to suggest fellow councillors haven’t evolved beyond primates is clearly either racist or supremely ignorant. Hard to know with Doug. All I’ll say on that count is that Ford’s monkey remark has its origins in a common racialist formulation – that to describe someone who is not all there as being “out of their tree.”
