There are few elected officials who understand the politics of driving, with its brain stem triggers, quite as acutely as the Fords — first Rob, who zapped the vehicle registration tax and laid waste to Transit City, and then Doug, who (lest we forget) began his term in office by trolling drivers with anti-Liberal carbon tax decals on gas pumps and has lately bounced from one shark-jumping moment to another with his hare-brained congestion-busting ideas.
It seems blindingly obvious to me that the plan here, if one can describe all these pronouncements that way, is to box in Bonnie Crombie and Marit Stiles by forcing them to defend…TRAFFIC JAMS! Ford isn’t an overthinker, gord knows, and he understands better than most that policies that either have zero chance of coming to pass (The Big Doug™) or will have negligible impact on the endless back-ups on arterials like Major Mac or Hurontario carry a kind of dopamine-fueled satisfaction. They’re platform planks designed to make voters believe that things are improving when, well, they aren’t (and won’t).
The latest of these, of course, is the bike lane veto, which Tory transportation minister Prabmeet Sarkaria introduced in one of those cleverly titled omnibus bills (the “Reducing Gridlock and Saving You Time Act” lol). For the presser, he obligingly travelled — by car, as we all know — to the Kingsway, which is apparently up in arms about bike lanes but, more relevantly, sits at the heart of the riding held by Kinga Surma, who is destroying Ontario Place and, as infrastructure minister, will eventually be tasked with digging The Big Doug™.
The question to my mind is how Mayor Olivia Chow will respond to this frontal assault on municipal responsibility, that is, beyond putting out a mild statement opposing the bike lane move and scolding the Tories for failing to open the two Metrolinx LRT projects. She’s also proposed rolling back some bike lanes — ah, memories of Jarvis Street — in order to stave off the provincial bureaucrats and their blue pens.
Chow is a cyclist. She famously rode to her own swearing in, and of course made up one half of the political power couple that pushed cycling advocacy into Toronto’s consciousness long before we began building bike lanes that weren’t just paint on the road.
Yet I am worried about how Chow will fend off this hand grenade, given that her default so far has been to cut deals with the Ford government and generally cosplay the role of co-operative governmental partner to the mouth breathers at Queen’s Park.
To be fair, her most significant achievement — uploading the Gardiner and the DVP in exchange for almost a billion in funding, plus a proviso to give up the Ontario Place fight — was a pretty good example of the art of the deal. Whatever else you think about the Ontario Place disaster, that rapprochement will almost certainly mean that the giant Therme/Live Nation garage won’t be built in a massive hole in the lake. (It seems likely the site will be a corner of the CNE grounds.)
Despite that victory, Chow now faces — really for the first time in her mayoralty — the political rite of passage that all Toronto chief magistrates must eventually confront, which is figuring out how to push back against aggressive jurisdictional incursions by a rival order of government, and, in this case, one led by a man who fantasizes about being the mayor of Greater Toronto.
The list of powers that have flowed north on University Avenue is a long one: reduced electoral representation, reduced planning authority, limits on revenue generating powers, etc., etc. Sometimes, power does flow south, e.g., when David Miller negotiated the City of Toronto Act (COTA), to provide council with more independence, or the introduction of a local planning appeals body. Yet these gains tend to be short-lived. The Ford government gutted parts of CoTA, and has busied itself shifting planning authority either back to developers or the minister of municipal affairs.
To my mind, the most egregious example involves the Ford government’s attempt to sever the subway system from the TTC and upload the operation to Metrolinx. John Tory managed to negotiate a watered-down compromise, but did it in such a half-assed way that Toronto and the TTC no longer have any ability to deliver major capital projects.
The problem, of course, is that this fight is never a fair one. Queen’s Park controls all the legal and constitutional levers, so a mayor’s only move is political. And in the case of bike lanes, I think it’s fair to assume there are plenty of Torontonians, not to mention noise-makers like Brad Bradford, who aren’t at all upset about Sarkaria’s bike lane veto.
So Chow has to decide two things: whether this is a hill she’s prepared to die on, and, if so, how she’ll marshal enough effective opposition to force the Tories to at least water down what is a demonstrably dangerous piece of legislation.
I have no special insights into how her team is thinking about the political calculus Suffice it to say that they could assemble allies, both inside Toronto and beyond its borders, and both cycling advocates as well as those concerned about municipal independence (e.g., much of the Association of Municipalities of Ontario).
The point here is that there’s a bigger point, and it has to do with how far Chow is prepared to allow Ford to go in his lust for control over municipal government, both in Toronto and beyond. I would argue that Chow has to spend some of her considerable political capital opposing this incursion, both on substance and principle.
After all, Ford, by most appearances, looks like he’ll win re-election. So at some point soon, Toronto needs to stand up to this premier and remind him, in no uncertain terms, to stay in his lane.
photo courtesy City of Toronto
