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rfmcdonaldToronto Council, after over a day and a half’s debate, has approved the construction of a Sheppard East LRT from Don Mills to Morningside by a vote of 24-19. This completes the rout of Mayor Ford’s subway plan and returns transit plans more or less to their position when he was elected. The Mayor vows to fight on, but now sees this as a future campaign issue.
Today’s debate was, for the most part, more civil and organized than what we heard yesterday, except for an outburst from the Mayor and a speech showing his passionate hatred for streetcars.
Now the ball is in Metrolinx’ court to come up with a construction staging plan allowing for the year-plus delay. During the debate, some members of the pro-subway faction claimed that, according to private conversations with Metrolinx, work would not start on the Sheppard LRT until 2016. My own sources tell me that this is not true, but we must await a definitive word from the Provincial agency.
The Sheppard LRT decision also ensures that the Scarborough RT extension will be part of the plan with the new LRT line running, initially, to Sheppard Avenue and using Conlins Road carhouse as a base. A motion by Councillor Cho, which passed as part of the package, seeks funding for extending the SRT/LRT northeast to Malvern Centre and the Sheppard LRT south via Morningside to UTSC campus. “Streetcars” might reach Malvern only five decades or so after the TTC’s original proposal.
[. . .]
This is an important day for Toronto. We are on track for an LRT-based plan and for a more detailed evaluation of our transit future than we have seen for decades. Talking about one line at once, about fundraising for one project at once, is no longer an accepted way of building the city. Leaving the debate to a secretive Provincial agency is no longer acceptable, and the City is clearly setting out on its own review. Co-operation is essential given the funding arrangements, but Queen’s Park must stop hiding from the transit planning and financing files.
Finally, a personal note. Throughout this debate, I have been gratified by the broad understanding of transit issues displayed by many Councillors, advocates and media. This blog and my own advocacy have helped, but there is the compound effect of so many people working with an informed sense of the topic. Congratulations to everyone who had a hand in this victory.
"People hate the St. Clair...they hate these streetcars," Ford angrily shouted during today's debate. "You can call them what you want. People want subways folks. Subways, subways." But for all the ire he expressed earlier in the session, the mayor was calmer in his final address to council and when he briefly scrummed with reporters post-vote.
By that point he must have realized that there wasn't much point in putting up a fuss. And besides, as he and his supporters have said all along, this is the type of "loss" they believe they can build a future campaign on. That might sound paradoxical, but Ford will still be able to say to Scarborough residents that he fought tooth and nail for a subway, even if all he did was blow hot air.
Given the divisiveness of the whole subways vs. LRT debate, it's almost hard to believe that the issue has been resolved once and for all, but the reality is there is very little recourse that subway proponents have to alter the decision made today. Toronto has given the province the mandate that it demanded, and it's for LRT-based transit expansion.
Can we just get down to building now?
Option A: He could view this loss as the unofficial launch of his 2014 re-election campaign. Until a rival formally registers on January 1, 2014, he’ll use some combined caricature of Stintz/Lindsay Luby/Cho/Augimeri as a proxy opponent. This medusa, Ford will tell us, is responsible for visiting the boundless horror of mulish trams on the long-suffering folk of Scarborough and North York.
Thus positioned, Ford gets himself back to his preferred stance as the principled truth-teller and the quintessential council outsider. Moreover, when he tries to press ahead with the balance of his mandate – cutting council in half; eliminating the land transfer tax, etc. – he can again claim victory in defeat. The Stintz coalition, I’m guessing, will put the brakes on these measures, and the Fords, in permanent campaign mode, will continue tilting at windmills with impunity.
Option B: If he makes a herculean effort to move beyond his normal mode, Ford could find the learning to be had in this fiasco and attempt to recast his mayoralty to respond to pointed accusations from his own supporters (e.g. Jaye Robinson) that he’s failed to lead. This realization would mean firing his senior staff and replacing them with seasoned advisors who don’t view the world – which is to say council and the city’s residents — in purely Manichean terms. And it would entail recasting his cabinet to include not just obedient allies (an ever diminishing cast of characters) but also councillors from elsewhere on the political spectrum.
[. . .]
I think we can pretty much predict which route the mayor and his brother will pursue. After all, Option B requires not just a measure of introspection, but also the ability to listen to those voices on the right who are quietly aghast by the disgraceful way the Bros. Ford have squandered the mayor’s considerable mandate.
But the point can’t be made often enough: Rob Ford is uniquely unqualified for the position he holds. He is a spectacular example of the Peter Principle at work. There’s nothing in his past to suggest he’s going to grow into this job anytime soon.
Never mind that no comprehensive poll shows that Torontonians both support subways and that they are willing to pay more to have them. Never mind that the councillors who voted in favour of light rail were elected, just as Ford was, by residents of this city who were choosing representatives to fight for their concerns and represent their interests at City Hall. Never mind that Ford hasn’t come up with a detailed funding plan for subways after 15 months in office. Never mind that the expert panel—one which, despite Rob Ford’s rhetoric, was stocked with people who have backgrounds that equip them to offer sound advice—said LRTs were preferable. Never mind that Ford ran on a campaign whose central plank had nothing to do with subways, and everything to do with gravy trains—who, if he has a mandate for anything, has a mandate to keep taxes and levies as low as possible and reduce spending wherever possible.
In recent months, Ford and his allies have floated, and then quickly retracted, ideas about any number of revenue-generating tools that would help pay for those subways. To the extent that we now seem to be over our collective childishness and are willing—left, right, centre, everyone—to discuss revenue tools without anyone threatening political death, our months-long transit debate has been a genuine advancement.
But Rob Ford was not elected with a mandate to impose new revenue tools to pay for transit. In fact, he campaigned on eliminating the last two revenue tools the City imposed under former mayor David Miller: the Vehicle Registration Tax and the Land Transfer Tax. So when Ford began to realize that he might need an actual financing proposal to pay for his subways, he couldn’t, much as he protested otherwise, just act as though he had the political backing to build those subways by any means necessary. He had to persuade his colleagues, one by one, that he had a plan worth supporting—precisely because he was venturing further afield than any mandate he might have won at the polls. In this he failed spectacularly.
One by one during debate today, Ford’s allies rose to defend subways, but also to lament the lack of leadership that has marked the battle for them. David Shiner, Peter Milczyn, Mike Del Grande, Michelle Berardinetti, Jaye Robinson, Michael Thompson: all serve on the mayor’s carefully selected Executive Committee, and all said openly they were disappointed in Ford’s failure to develop and champion a real plan for transit. When it came time to vote, they had before them only one proposal that included any kind of funding tool to pay for Rob Ford’s subway—only it didn’t come from Rob Ford, it came from budget chief Mike Del Grande. Ford himself didn’t have any proposal at all to build more than the two stops we can afford on the billion dollars the provincial and federal governments have promised us. And so even Ford’s allies had to proceed without him, to try and accomplish his goals with motions he wouldn’t put his name on. (Del Grande’s proposal failed, as it should have—you don’t pass a $100 million levy without so much as a staff report that lays out its implications.)
As a councillor, Rob Ford was always the lone wolf in City Hall—often quite literally a minority of one when it came to votes. As a mayor, he seems to be reverting to that position, with even his supporters and allies working around rather than with him. It isn’t because they haven’t tried. The mayor is increasingly isolated at City Hall, and it’s an isolation of his own making. Never one for policy details, he is trying to govern in platitudes, and increasingly, he is doing it alone.
