{"id":50450,"date":"2014-12-08T07:30:33","date_gmt":"2014-12-08T12:30:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/?p=50450"},"modified":"2014-12-07T22:04:56","modified_gmt":"2014-12-08T03:04:56","slug":"lorinc-denzil-goes-waterfront","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2014\/12\/08\/lorinc-denzil-goes-waterfront\/","title":{"rendered":"LORINC: Denzil goes to the Waterfront"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"feature-lorinc\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Not long after amalgamation, when Toronto council still had 57 members and met at Metro Hall, I set up a lunch-time interview with Denzil Minnan-Wong at Il Fornello\u2019s on King West. He was a newbie North Yorker who had popped, fully-formed, from the Young Progressive Conservative candidate birthing machine. We had a mutual friend, and he seemed like an upwardly mobile politician who might offer some insights into Mel Lastman\u2019s megacity and the state of Ontario\u2019s Tories, then in the control of Mike Harris\u2019 cabal of common-sense revolutionaries.<\/p>\n

Although it was a lunch interview, Minnan-Wong didn\u2019t eat \u2013 he was on some kind of fasting diet. At one point, as I was scarfing down my pasta, scribbling notes and pumping him for background about Lastman\u2019s fraught relationship with the province, he looked furtively to either side, leaned in close and said, sotte voce<\/em>: \u201cI\u2019m really a red Tory.\u201d<\/p>\n

Oh.<\/p>\n

In the years since, Minnan-Wong\u2019s been many things \u2014 a part-time pol who spent more time tending to his law practice than his constituency; council\u2019s taxi reform dude (twice); a founding member of the conservative faction that reared up in the late David Miller era; Rob Ford\u2019s works committee boss; the Sherbourne bike lane guy; and, most recently, a self-appointed Waterfront Toronto antagonista who falsely accused the agency of wanton profligacy involving toilets, pink umbrellas, and salaries.<\/p>\n

Along the way, he\u2019s morphed from an apparently closeted red Tory into a kind of all-purpose dyspeptic-cum-social conservative. He occasionally makes a half-hearted bid to position himself for a mayoral run, only to see others snatch the prize. Needless to say, the exploding cigar moments (duking it out on Twitter with a Doug Ford parody account<\/a>, and the\u00a0 hilarious washroom memes<\/a>) haven\u2019t helped.<\/p>\n

Which brings us to Mayor John Tory\u2019s decision last week to name Minnan-Wong to be not just his statutory deputy mayor, but also a board member of three heavy-hitting agencies: Waterfront Toronto, Invest Toronto and Build Toronto.\u00a0Theories about this decision have been swirling ever since: one, that Tory is positioning Minnan-Wong as a potential successor; second, that Tory is keeping his enemies closer, as the saying goes; three, that Tory\u2019s choice, along with his nomination of Frances Nunziata as speaker, was all about hurling a piece of bloody meat in the direction of the Ford Nation; four, that Tory is showing his true colours, as many on the left had warned during the election.<\/p>\n

Certainly, Minnan-Wong\u2019s appointment to the\u00a0Waterfront Toronto board \u2014 a position that Rob Ford held and then boycotted \u2013 has caused much tensing of muscles, given his conspicuously hostile ad hominem attacks on the agency. The tenor of his nit-picking sounded way more like the Fords (notwithstanding Minnan-Wong\u2019s late-in-the-game repudiation of their conduct) than anything that\u2019s come from the federal Conservatives, represented first by the late Jim Flaherty and now by Joe Oliver.<\/p>\n

Indeed, Flaherty was unwavering in his support for\u00a0Waterfront Toronto (he was one of the architects), and Oliver, as recently as last July, heaped praise on Corktown Common and pledged that waterfront revitalization \u201cwill remain a priority\u201d for his government.<\/p>\n

Minnan-Wong\u2019s arrival comes at a delicate moment: For one thing, Waterfront Toronto, which is running out of its funding allocation, has sensibly proposed that it be granted borrowing powers for the balance of its statutory term. That seems like a safe bet: the agency, noted the Toronto Star<\/a>, generated over $2 of direct investment for every $1 it spent since 2001, and has triggered $9.6 billion in spin-off benefits. (Those umbrellas, by the way, show up on all sorts of tourist promotion materials and have punched way above their weight when it comes to place-making, so it\u2019s hard to know why they got so far up Minnan-Wong\u2019s nose.)<\/p>\n

Minnan-Wong will, of course, be expected to, um, encourage Waterfront Toronto to spend prudently. But he’ll have to do so without making a complete spectacle of himself. After all, he\u2019ll be sitting on a board\u00a0with some heavy hitters, including Brookfield director Jack Cockwell<\/a>, Liberal rainmaker Ross McGregor, and Progressive Conservative\u00a0stalwart David Johnston. Given that Tory\u2019s mayoralty will be all about backroom deals and proper behaviour, it\u2019s hard to imagine that that crowd — which is Tory’s crowd — will have\u00a0much patience for this\u00a0sort of political flatulence.<\/p>\n

But I think the real reason Minnan-Wong may emerge as a somewhat more politic presence has to do with the complex and as yet unarticulated relationship between Smart Track, the re-configuration of the Don mouth and the redevelopment of the huge Unilever property, on the east side of the river immediately to the north.<\/p>\n

Tellingly, the state-of-the-city report that Tory delivered a few days before being sworn in made no reference to waterfront issues at all. It wasn’t an oversight.\u00a0The reality is that Tory\u2019s Smart Track tax-increment financing scheme turns, to a considerable degree, on transforming the Unilever property into what some are calling Toronto\u2019s Canary Wharf, a game-changing mega-project that will be fitted out with its own rapid transit stop, pristine lake views, hip shopping, etc. But that kind of multi-billion-dollar office\/mixed-use scheme (see Brookfield connection, above) can\u2019t go ahead unless Waterfront Toronto finds a way of raising the $1 billion needed to re-route\/naturalize the mouth of the Don as a means of providing the flood plain protection required under provincial regulation.<\/p>\n

Chicken, meet egg.<\/p>\n

According to city and federal sources, Oliver \u2014 who had a\u00a0cone-of-silence\u00a0meeting with Tory on Friday afternoon \u2014 is said to be keen to ante up Ottawa\u2019s third of the necessary funding (election year!), and the province, in turn, is on the verge of approving the environmental assessment recommendations. The city, my sources say, has also identified development charge revenue streams for its portion.<\/p>\n

If I had to bet, I\u2019d say that what we should be watching for at some point in the next three to six months is a big bang public-private announcement \u2014 a major multi-stage mixed-use\/office development for the Unilever site, plus public money for the Don as a means of creating those construction jobs, apprenticeships, investment opportunities, greening, etc., plus a helpful push for Smart Track. (Much depends, however, on whether Stephen Harper will end his spat with Kathleen Wynne.)<\/p>\n

In other words, lots of political boxes getting ticked off.<\/p>\n

So will Minnan-Wong have permission to screw with something of that magnitude, or even a more modest version? Absolutely not. In fact, his simultaneous \u2014 and not coincidental \u2014 appointments to Build Toronto and Invest Toronto mean he\u2019s going to be up to his ears in developers and commercial brokers and foreign investor delegations coming here to kick the tires of post-Ford\/open-for-business Toronto.<\/p>\n

From where I sit, it seems Tory may have figured out how to keep his obstreperous deputy busy by requiring\u00a0him minister to the needs of real estate moguls\u00a0who likely don\u2019t have the time or patience to be lectured to about toilets and pink umbrellas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Not long after amalgamation, when Toronto council still had 57 members and met at Metro Hall, I set up a lunch-time interview with Denzil Minnan-Wong at Il Fornello\u2019s on King West. He was a newbie North Yorker who had popped, fully-formed, from the Young Progressive Conservative candidate birthing machine. We had a mutual friend, andContinue reading “LORINC: Denzil goes to the Waterfront”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4051,"featured_media":50455,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","category-waterfront"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nLORINC: Denzil goes to the Waterfront - Spacing Toronto<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2014\/12\/08\/lorinc-denzil-goes-waterfront\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"LORINC: Denzil goes to the Waterfront - Spacing Toronto\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Not long after amalgamation, when Toronto council still had 57 members and met at Metro Hall, I set up a lunch-time interview with Denzil Minnan-Wong at Il Fornello\u2019s on King West. 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