If you read only the headlines this morning on the province’s revised transit plan for the city – the one the mayor insisted on when he killed Transit City – you’d think our city and Rob Ford himself had just won some stupendous victory.
The Globe weighed in with: Ontario agrees to Rob Ford’s transit plan. The Star’s headline: Queen’s Park and city have $12.4 B TTC deal. The Sun’s: $12.4 billion transit plan rolled out for T.O. The National Post was a bit more circumspect in its appraisal of the “deal”: Province yields to Mayor’s tunnel vision.
What exactly did we, or Ford, win?
Boil this “deal” down and you come up with a big fat zero practically. So, now we’re getting a completely underground Eglinton-Crosstown, a part of which between Laird and Kennedy was supposed to run aboveground.
Ford’s Sheppard subway plans? The mayor will have to find the $4.2 billion it will cost for that, the province says.
The use of the word “deal” to describe this turn on the transit file suggests some win-win, when it isn’t really that for the city.
All it means is that, instead of getting four aboveground light rail transit lines totaling some 50 kilometres of track as envisioned under Transit City, we’re now getting just an Eglinton line completely underground. And… that’s it.
The “deal” kills the Finch West LRT and Sheppard LRT.
“A slap in Scarborough’s face,” says Councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker, who is among a group of councillors calling on the mayor to put the “deal” to a vote of council. Good luck with that. The group has called a press conference for this afternoon.
Maybe if the mayor hadn’t decided to unilaterally to blow off the billions from Transit City simply because he doesn’t like streetcars (they’re LRT vehicles, Rob), we wouldn’t be headed down the wrong track and more years of gridlock and overcrowded transit.
We also wouldn’t be leaving behind areas of the city that badly need the infrastructure investment.
The 11 kilometres of track that would have been built on Finch West under Transit City, for example, means the loss of some 3,700 jobs – and immeasurable benefits from street-level economic development.
The silver streak in this “deal,” if there is one to be found, is the signal from the province that McGuinty’s Libs are muscling up when it comes to Ford.
The Grits know they had to do something for Toronto when it comes to transit and a line on Eglinton, while long overdue, is giving a little while not appearing to give in to Ford’s demands, a tricky political proposition.
The Eglinton-Crosstown is slated to run right through ridings the Grits need to keep if they are to have any hope of winning the fall election, but will it be enough to hold that softening Lib support in the city?
The Grits can always blame Ford’s insistence on subways for killing the grander Transit City scheme, but that comes with its own political perils. However you slice it, Toronto loses.
