All Fried Up In The Big Smoke

Less political. More fictional.

The Golden Rule

Posted on September 17, 2013 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

When it was announced last week that Anne Golden had been approached by the Ontario government to head up a panel to look at revenue generation to go toward building transit in the GTHA, I joked that we should all be very excited as Queen’s Park has a history of listening to recommendations made by a panel chaired by Ms. Golden. Listening perhaps, then ignoring.

OK, joke may be too strong a word for it. That would suggest the statement was funny. More sagging, really. Under the weight of bitter, disillusioned sarcasm.

But it did get me thinking about the old Golden Report on the governance, competitiveness blah, blah, blah of the GTA, commissioned back in the twilight of the Bob Rae government. Delivered up to the Mike Harris crew in the early days of that government, it was greeted largely with a shrug. It wasn’t something they’d asked for.

That’s not exactly true either. The Harris Tories did use the report as a little bit of cover in the next couple years as they descended into an amalgamation frenzy including the one here in Toronto. Reading through Andrew Sancton’s account of what happened, Amalgamations, Service Realignment, and Property Taxes: Did the Harris Government Have a Plan for Ontario’s Municipalities?, the immediate impression is of the ad hoc nature of it all.

To begin with, the idea of amalgamation wasn’t really on the party’s radar when it sat on the opposition benches at Queen’s Park. It certainly wasn’t a key part of the Common Sense Revolution. Here’s Mike Harris speaking in 1994, less than a year before he took over the reins of power.

There is no cost to a municipality to maintain its name and identity. Why destroy our roots and pride? I disagree with restructuring because it believes that bigger is better. Services always cost more in larger communities. The issue is to find out how to distribute services fairly and equally without duplicating services.

Bigger isn’t better? “Services always cost more in larger communities”? This was the exact opposite of what we were being told by the provincial government when they were ramming the megacity down our throats. How times changed.

Sixteen years on, water under the bridge aside from pointing out that the 1994 Mike Harris was right about amalgamations while Premier Mike Harris was wrong. The change of heart might be easier to accept if there’d been a straight forward reason why he did what he did but there really didn’t seem to be.

Sure, there was the desire to bury the dissenting voice of the old city of Toronto’s council under the more friendly voices of the suburban municipalities but that seems to be just a small part of it. The Tories also wanted to remove the taxation power of school boards and put them on a tight fiscal leash. Plus, the whole matter of updating the property tax system was also in play.

Perhaps as important as any of these, the provincial government needed to keep a campaign promise of reducing government. Any ol’ government would do, regardless of the consequences. Six municipalities into one, plus Metro council? A double fucking trifecta.

Keeping up appearances, in other words. This anti-government government eliminating levels of government. It would make for good re-election campaign literature.

There are echoes of this jumbled miasma of reasoning currently going on with our whole heave-ho debate on transit. Everybody knows that the region’s public transit system is substandard. Everybody knows that we’re going to have to pay substantially for the necessarily substantial expansion.

That seems to be where the agreement ends. Who pays? Who knows. What gets built where? Another head shaker. There are metrics to quantify the debate just like there were during the era of amalgamation. Unfortunately, few are very politically palatable.

Adding Anne Golden to the mix only serves to fuel the feeling that the provincial government is doing little more than throwing up more obstacles. Decisions aren’t the desirable outcome here. The appearance of process is, due diligence.

What’s weird about the way the Liberals are going about things here is, unlike how the Harris government did an about face on amalgamation, the Liberals are subverting a plan they themselves put into place. The Big Move. A breakdown of transit needs and priorities throughout the region and a smorgasbord of possible revenue tools to access in order to implement the plan.

Already the Eglinton crosstown construction is underway. The Master Agreement with Toronto has been signed for 3 other LRT lines, one being the Scarborough LRT extension of the Bloor-Danforth subway line that the government seems determined to undermine at this point, ably assisted by a majority of city council. The motivation behind such a move is hard to discern.

You could just write it off to pure political pandering, to keep those Scarborough seats red in any upcoming provincial election. Pretty straightforward. But if it’s just that, why not go all in and build an actual subway? You know, at least all the way up to Sheppard? That way, you can put pressure on the proposed Sheppard LRT too. A subway to the west. A subway to the east. Complete the line from Yonge to Kipling with a Sheppard subway loop.

This two stop proposal just seems like a half-measure. How could this government be that invested and find themselves at this point of time so indecisive? To give the Harris government its due, they did a 180 on amalgamation and in the face of fierce political opposition pushed it through, damn the torpedoes. These Liberals appear to have little inclination to be as bold even when they have the good cause on their side.

Instead of having to pull some clarity (misguided and malevolent as it was in the case of amalgamation) out of a stew of conflicting policy initiatives, the McGuinty-Wynne government seem bound and determined to reduce transit planning in the region to a chaotic mix of parochialism and unfinished business. If you are able to find a coherent narrative as to why, you have much better eyes for this kind of thing than I do. I just see a glaring lacking of leadership and a desperate desire for expediency coalescing into an all familiar puddle of incompetence that has plagued this city and region in transit building for a generation now.

— disheartenedly submitted by Cityslikr

Giving Ourselves A Wedgie

Posted on September 14, 2013 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

I was watching the National’s At Issue panel Thursday night – I believe it behooves me to occasionally seek out what white people are saying about current events, especially the ones who only have regular recourse to a national newspaper once or twice a week – when the topic of the charter of Quebec values came up.

As a godless heathen, it’s a subject I’ve largely avoided paying much attention to. People and their religious symbolism is something of a mystery to me. But live and let live, I say. As long as no one is forcing me into a garment I have no interest in wearing, have at it. I will keep my views to myself except to note that if a crucifix is regarded as a cultural object maybe so too is a hijab.

But anyhoo…

My interest in the chat was peaked when the Toronto Star’s Chantal Hébert suggested the whole thing was little more than a wedge issue for the Parti Québécois. A way to galvanize the sovereigntist vote, largely outside of Montreal, in order to form a majority government. Divide and conquer, and all that.

Again, I don’t know enough about that particular issue to weigh in further than I already have but wedge politics, am I right? The surest sign a politician or party has run out of positive ideas. As was stated on the show last night, wedge politics is the evil twin of good policy. It benefits a few at the expense of the majority.

We’re watching it right now a province away here in Toronto with the never-ending saga of the Scarborough subway. This has been a wedge issue used by Mayor Ford to keep suburban and downtown voters at each others’ throats. When the words ‘deserves’ and ‘2^nd class’ are bandied about in favour of something, you know you’re dealing with a wedge issue. There’s no rational or logical reason behind it. It doesn’t stand up to the light of day yet you can’t put a stake through its heart to kill it for good.

Like any effective wedge issue, the Scarborough subway is not good policy. It’s good politics in the sense of a useful tool to maintain a faithful base of support but terrible long term public policy.

It ultimately wouldn’t matter if the mayor was left to his own devices to try and use suburban subways for re-election. If everybody recognized it for what he was doing and just went ahead with the business of carrying out good policy. Unfortunately, too many politicians have reared up in fright, trembling at the prospect of being painted as anti-subway, anti-Scarborough, anti-suburb.

And it’s not just councillors looking out for their own best interests. The provincial government too has scrambled desperately to get on side, even to the point of turning their back on a transit plan years in the making. So determined are they to be seen as Scarborough subway proponents champions that even the premier is sabre-rattling her intention to ignore whatever city council decides and disregard the signed Master Agreement that’s still in place stating that a LRT line is to be built from the Kennedy subway station up to Sheppard Avenue. Replacing that with a shorter, 2 stop subway makes absolutely no sense, fiscally or transit wise.

“We will keep our commitment to the people of Scarborough to build the subway in Scarborough…,” the premier proclaimed on Thursday.

Whether or not it makes any sense. We said we would (at least as far back as the August 1^st by-election campaign). The people of Scarborough said we should. That’s good enough for us.

Is it a surprise to anyone that voters have grown cynical and apathetic? Our politicians can’t even be bothered pretending that it’s not self-interest driving them rather than leadership or good governance. Who needs bold ideas when you can just exploit differences and divvy up just enough of the electoral spoils to maintain power?

I’d be much more indignant if the tactic didn’t work so well. Politicians wouldn’t do it if it didn’t, right? The question is, why do we so easily allow ourselves to be put into warring camps and exploited for political gain? In Quebec, I guess there’s a certain degree of tribalism at work. Pure lainism and all that. But even that’s showing some serious cracks in it.

How did we become so tribal over an ill-advised subway extension?

It really doesn’t seem like something to circle the wagons over especially when there’s a much better alternative in place. Yet here we are, ready to plunge forward because enough of the potential electorate has been persuaded they’re being short-changed and are deserving of better, whatever that means. I guess if we’re simply looking out for number one, if we can’t see past our own little shires, there’s no reason to expect better instincts from our politicians.

— splitly submitted by Cityslikr

Are We Finished With The Nonsense Yet?

Posted on September 12, 2013 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

There’s this from Steve Munro over at Torontoist. And Ben Spurr here at NOW. Both based on Metrolinx’s Feasibility Study Subway in Scarborough RT Corridor, comparing and contrasting Toronto city council’s Scarborough subway proposal with one announced by the Ontario government’s Ministry of Transportation last week.

Essentially, the province’s 2 stop subway addition to the eastern terminus of the Bloor-Danforth line will not clock in at the price the transportation minister is claiming, and the ridership numbers very, very suspect without the line running past the Scarborough Town Centre up to Sheppard Avenue. Moreover, the conversion of the planned LRT extension running along the current SRT route into a subway will necessitate station design changes that threaten the timing of the Eglinton LRT crosstown, one of the transit projects in this city actually being built.

So, shorter, serving fewer people with fewer stations, more expensive and quite possibly throwing a spanner into the works into another project already underway.

Whatever. It’s full steam ahead according to Transportation Minister Glen Murray.

“People are fed up with the debate,” Murray declared. “We’re building now. We’re past debate.”

It’s a terrible plan, in some ways worse than the terrible subway plan council and the TTC chair, Karen Stintz, championed in the summer. If you didn’t know any better, it’s almost as if the provincial government is attempting to run a subway along where an LRT more logically fits only for the opportunity to claim having built a subway in Scarborough. That’s hardly leadership. It’s politically pandering of the worst kind.

The odd thing is, because of the province’s expediency on this file, jettisoning sound policy decision making for crass political gain, our city council has been given yet another chance to emerge from this wreckage as the less dysfunctional governing body. A low bar to clear, for sure, given the transit debates we’ve seen over the last few years decades generations decades. Nonetheless, council can reassert control over the Scarborough transit debate and appear almost like the adults in the room.

The subway it asked for and the funding for it is not what the province now has on offer. Many of the councillors’ support for that subway was contingent on those two things. Having not received it, they can now walk away, saying they tried delivering this Scarborough subway unicorn but were rebuffed by the senior levels of government. Embrace the Master Agreement that’s still in place that will return to the more sensible LRT plan that never should’ve been set aside in the first place.

More importantly, perhaps this discussion can now move beyond the platitudinous banner-speak that has polluted it since 2010. Let’s now start talking transit planning based on logistics and practicalities not grievances. What’s been revealed about both proposed Scarborough subway plans is there’s not enough money available to build one that would actually utilize the technology to the fullest. Even if there were money, a subway running either of the possible routes doesn’t make particular sense. Much of it would be running at grade or elevated just like an LRT or it would be underground through established residential neighbourhoods where the necessary development to feed the ridership numbers might not be possible.

And any sort of Scarborough subway would be at least a decade away. We could start building the LRT tomorrow.

Despite Minister Murray’s chest-thumping claims, this debate isn’t over. But maybe, just maybe, if a majority of council so chooses, it can take a turn for the sensible and rational. There may be no precedent for such a thing but all the alternatives have led us down blind alleys, on foot, still waiting for transit.

— hopefully submitted by Cityslikr