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John Tory has staked his mayoralty on a promise to usher in a new era of transit planning for Toronto. It’s a promise that will be put to a serious test in coming weeks.
Since his election in 2014, Tory has relentlessly criticized his predecessors for bungling the transit file and insisted that under his watch the city won’t repeat the mistakes of the past. No more transit lines based on drawings “on the back of a piece of paper,” no more approving projects without a plan to pay for them, he has said.
After a speech Wednesday to the Toronto Region Board of Trade on his transit vision, he derided politicians who came before him as “champion hand-wringers, champion ideologues, champion polarizers” who talked a lot about building new transit but never got any of it done.
Later the same day he promised to match his own ambitious transit plans with funding to build them. “To try to fool people into thinking there’s going to be free transit … would be something that I won’t do,” he said at an announcement of new GO stations being labelled as part of his SmartTrack line.
“It’s not honest.”
Yet at a meeting of his executive committee on June 28, Tory will ask councillors to do precisely what he has criticized previous city leaders for doing — move ahead with billions of dollars’ worth of transit lines, with no clear plan to fund them.
When senior staff prepared a brief public accounting earlier this week on a network of proposed subways, light rail lines and new stations to be built over 15 years, they needed only to copy-paste: “Unfunded. Unfunded. Unfunded. Unfunded.” The shortfall currently totals at least $11 billion.
While Tory insists he won’t accept any excuses for failing to make progress, the mayor, in lock-step with the city’s chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat, has pitched the latest network expansion plan at a time when Toronto’s finances have hit a wall.
