It doesn’t take much digging back through Mayor John Tory’s Facebook albums to come across the voice of Nick Kouvalis.
Would-be memes from the 2014 election sit there with all-caps entreaties intact: “BUILT IN 7 YEARS. NOT 17” “DO YOU WANT 22 MORE STATIONS WITHIN 7 YEARS?” “CITY WIDE RELIEF. NOT JUST DOWNTOWN.” This pugilistic bluntness was a hallmark of Kouvalis, the Tory campaign strategist who previously brought such focus-grouped sloganeering to Rob Ford’s 2010 run.
To differentiate Tory from opponent Olivia Chow, his campaign created SmartTrack, a rough outline of a transit proposal that was aggressively sold on its ostensible superiority, rather than on its merits. It wasn’t about what was right or what was needed for the city, or even what was possible to build — it was about selling something that sounded appealing and just a little bit more plausible than what Ford was pursuing.
The SmartTrack backgrounders still on Tory’s campaign site remind us that the original idea was to:
• essentially re-announce and absorb some of the credit for the Regional Express Rail plan that Metrolinx was already in the process of implementing but which many people had not yet heard of
• have “22 new station stops,” nine of which were GO stations that already existed or, in one case, was already planned
• build a heavy-rail spur out to the airport
• charge the same fare as the TTC, with free movement between the systems
• pay for the city’s third of an $8 billion price tag through tax-increment financing (TIF)
Tory’s rivals and a good chunk of the media tore much of it to shreds, particularly the airport spur (impossible without expensive tunnelling) and TIF funding (extremely unlikely to work on the required scale). Tory rebuffed the criticisms and accused skeptics of embodying the kind of needless negativity that’s held Toronto back from achieving its dreams. He insisted his can-do attitude could overcome any issues.
Now here is the current state of SmartTrack, 15 and a half months after Tory took office:
• It is still essentially just GO RER but won’t even have its own distinct trains or schedules.
• It will have between four and eight new stops that would otherwise not be built.
• It will no longer travel to the airport, instead leaving in place the planned westward extension of the Eglinton LRT that was already on the books, to help more riders at a reasonable cost.
• Fares will be determined by Metrolinx as part of its regional fare integration strategy, which could mean anything but likely rules out a cross-city trip at the price of a TTC flat fare.
• The total cost is up in the air — and it’s not yet clear how the city intends to pay for the part that isn’t covered by the $2.6 billion committed by the federal goovernment last spring.
These developments long appeared inevitable, but most have only occurred since January.
The last couple months have also seen a partial climbdown from Tory’s ferocious earlier defence of the Scarborough subway in the form in which it was previously approved by council. At enormous cost, that plan would’ve extended the Bloor-Danforth line by three stops, to terminate at Sheppard. Tory now backs city staff’s preference for a one-stop extension just as far as the Scarborough Town Centre, with the rest of the cash put into an LRT running northeast from Kennedy station to U of T’s Scarborough campus.
As with SmartTrack’s western spur giving way to the Eglinton LRT, the new Scarborough plan is a significant improvement on the position that Tory himself had frequently championed. The mayor finally conceded to facts, data, and reality and is now stuck trying to spin it as a victory.
At a March 9 press conference held the day his Executive rubber-stamped the various revisions, Tory faced questions about the dismissive condescension with with he used to greet the very same arguments that he now embraces.
Unsurprisingly, he framed his open-mindedness as preferable to the alternative:
“What would you be saying to me right now if I said, ‘No, you know that math I put forward and those brochures I published? We’re sticking to that exactly. And I’m not willing to move an inch on anything — not a dollar, not an inch, not a stop.’ You’d be saying to me, ‘What kind of stubbornness is this? You know, that is gonna lead to endless debate and polarization and nothing getting built.’ I don’t operate that way. I won’t operate that way.”
On the one hand, Tory was correct people want leaders to make decisions based on the best evidence and expertise available. On the other hand, he appeared to be seeking praise for his current flexibility rather than forgiveness for his earlier intransigence.
Yes, politicians should be lauded and given credit for eventually doing the right thing positive reinforcement can be powerful. But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t also be judged for having held fast to untenable positions long after it had become unreasonable to do so.
We can be glad that a person is open to changing their mind but still question what took them so long in the first place.
Or as a Clickhole headline once put such ambivalence: 3 Years Ago He Hated Gay People. Today He’s A Completely Different Person. Still Pretty Weird That He Used To Hate Gay People Though.
At the presser, Metroland Media’s David Nickle asked the mayor what conclusions could be drawn about the honesty of his convictions.
Nickle: “In [the] election, you presented your SmartTrack plan with great certainty, and when people brought up many of the objections that have actually come out in this report, you gave an indication that those objections simply had no validity. If I can nail down to what people are concerned by…”
Tory: “If I stood behind it too enthusiastically, then I’ll plead guilty to that. But I will just say this to you: If I had indicated, sort of, ‘Well, you know, there may be parts of this that don’t work very well, and I’m certainly willing to reconsider those’ and so forth and so on — you’d have been nailing me for that during the election campaign. So the bottom line is, I stood behind an idea.”
It was an uncommonly candid admission that — at least during a campaign — it’s better to be confident and wrong than thoughtful and correct. SmartTrack was at least as much about attitude as it was about substance.
And for the purpose of Tory’s election, it worked. Let’s see what the repercussions are for Toronto.
