Look, over yonder: it’s a band of conservatives, in their blue hats, galloping across the horizon to save… Transit City?
What’s with that?
In a Friday speech at the Board of Trade, Conservative leader and renowned urbanist Tim Hudak pledged that if he was premier, he’d “ensure” the City of Toronto would have access to reliable funding so the new mayor wouldn’t have a fiscal sword of Damocles hanging over his or her head every time they sat down the do the books. And some of the money, he added, would go to transit. Believe it!
Next up was Eglinton Lawrence councilor Karen Stintz, whose intriguing trek towards the ideological centre led her last week to a kind of political level crossing, if you will. As the mayor’s office happily announced, she and David Miller have made common cause on restoring the Transit City funding, a substantial chunk of which will be spent boring a tunnel along the southern border of her ward.
Stintz says she supports the Metrolinx “Big Move” plan, which includes the LRT network. “We came together,” she told me on Friday, “because it’s not a partisan issue, it’s a city building issue.”
Finally, we have John Tory, who used his CFRB 1010 drive-time show on Thursday to scope out the broad terms of a cease-fire and possible armistice.
Saying that he’s worried the mayor is “mishandling negotiations with the province,” Tory urged Miller to halt the Save Transit City campaign and instead ask Dalton McGuinty for a meeting. Then he called on the premier to stop being vague about delays and work out a binding, ten-year funding arrangement with the city. “Let’s nail down this money with dates and no going back a second time,” Tory said.
Let’s take them in order:
Hudak is obviously looking to do nothing more than score a few points on McGuinty with an unconvincing bait and switch. He’s nobody’s idea of Bill Davis.
Stintz, since bowing out of the mayor’s race, has been busily reinventing herself, presumably with an eye to the post-Miller era. She’s talked about parking levies as a way of raising funds for transit. And last week, writing in the National Post, she threw her support behind the University Avenue bike lanes, describing them as “an interesting project” put at risk by “apoplectic” election rhetoric.
Given that the Eglinton LRT won’t make a huge impact on her constituents’ commuting patterns, I’m guessing Stintz’s decision is at least partly tactical. But I’m willing to give her the benefit of the doubt because she’s adopted some risky positions on the city’s transportation woes in an election year.
And Tory? When I spoke to him on Friday, he said the fight has further underscored the point that the city and the province to need to consider a suite of transit funding options that include tolls, parking levies, and dedicated sales or gas taxes. Tory, of course, attacked Miller with hammer and tong in 2003 for musing about road tolls, but he insists he’s acknowledged the error of his views. “We have to have all that stuff on the table.” Easy to say when you’re not shilling for votes.
As for Miller’s campaign, Tory correctly pointed out that the Liberals seemed far more anxious about the political fall-out from the sex-ed curriculum controversy.
Thus his argument for a change in tactics: “I’m willing to bet money that if David Miller put down his tools and asked for a meeting, he’d get the meeting.”
Tory’s proposal makes good sense. But the reality is that it’s an election year.
Miller spokesperson Stuart Green says the mayor’s office did ask for a meeting with the premier on April 7th, before the campaign started in earnest, but they have yet to get a reply.
Not coincidentally, the new and improved George Smitherman was busily telling reporters on Friday that he “won’t wait until after the election to do what I can to lend influence in getting these projects moving.” He implied he’s been leaning on his former cabinet colleagues in order to “champion” the Transit City projects. Translation: the guy on the white steed turns out to be wearing a red Stetson.
So many saviors, so little will.
photo from Toronto Archives: series 648, file 127, id 0010
7 comments
At least transit is finally an election issue! Then it’s up to the electorate to figure out who’s lying, who’s posturing, and who’ll really come up with the money.
If David Miller hadn’t made this an issue, it would quietly have disappeared off of the table. Saying that he should just sit down for a quiet meeting with McGuinty, especially when he has already been trying to do just that, ignores the fact that the funding cut was a unilateral move by Queen’s Park that could have been handled differently. What will the media and pundits do when they don’t have David Miller to blame for everything?
David Miller is one of the few leaders who truly cares about transit (too bad it’s LRT), and the TTC announcements show that. Other politicians would have just driven their high-end luxury cars out of their office and called it a day.
It’s only logical though that every party would concern itself with the issue of public transit, because it’s key to the growth and prosperity of the built-up parts of Greater Toronto. But cities don’t just naturally fall on “the right path”; it takes leadership to advance the issue.
Is Tim Hudak really an urbanist? I did not know that.
I thought that after his comments about how City Hall obsesses about how many lanes to take out of Jarvis/University showed how little he understands about city projects and trends that are taking place in major cities across the world.
If he is an urbanist, I would really like to read his philosophies on urbanism.
@TRANSITY CYCLIST Tim Hudak isn’t so much an urbanist as much as he is trying to look like he isn’t anti-urban. It’s hard to say if it’ll work, but it’s not a dumb move. Many of the vote rich communities that gave the conservatives their last victories, like Markham and Mississauga, are increasingly dealing with urban issues like transit and increased density. The conservatives last won a huge victories after NDP mismanagement compounded by a nasty recession that caused a paradigm shift. But though the Liberals have made mistakes, they’re not as far gone as the NDP were in 1990 so he’s actually having to court votes. So I guess what I’m saying is that cutting spending at the municipal level isn’t on their radar.
He’s talking out loud about funding the city long term, but I would guess it wouldn’t be a blank cheque and it won’t be to anybody he sees as pandering to “left wing” projects or unions. Still, he’s probably the best conservative for cities since Bill Davis, ignoring John Tory’s un-electibility.
As somebody who’s never voted for the conservative party (federal or provincial), I’m at least keeping an eye one them.
In the mean time, economic development for Mount Dennis planning twists in the wind as the future acquisition of the former Kodak site for the Eglinton LRT Service Facilities is now in question. Cancelliung or postponing this investment means more than badly needed access to all parts of the City for Mount Dennis, it means jobs for a priority neighbourhood.
Mr McGuinty, the Eglinton line was promised since the 80’s, and shovels were in the ground in the 90’s until Mike Harris filled in the tunnel. Promises of it being built in the future are no longer good enough for Mount Dennis.
End the budgetary shell games. Restore the Transit City funding commitments today–sign the agreement with the City that says how much funding flows and when, and use the City’s financial support to keep the start date THIS YEAR as planned and announced with the Ontario government.
It is a bit strange to call places like Markham or Mississauga “vote rich”. Thanks to rapid population growth, the vote of a Markham or Mississauga resident is worth less than the vote of almost anyone else in the country.