No doubt about it, when John Tory won the election last month he sold Toronto voters on his SmartTrack plan.
Now, having made the pitch, Mayor Tory is getting down to the somewhat messier business of actually making the case — a backwards approach, perhaps, but one familiar within the machinery of municipal politics.
It is to Tory’s credit that he was up-front about that, as he asked his Executive Committee to support a suite of studies and reports aimed at honing and justifying his plan to spend future property tax revenue to build an amped-up subway-style surface rail line along the soon-to-be-electrified GO tracks running through Scarborough, downtown Toronto and (once and if they’re built) Etobicoke.
Tory said of his seven-year-to-completion, 22-station surface subway plan: "That was a campaign claim, I’ll admit, made by me. Now the express purpose of what we’re doing here is to move forward with a fact-based, transparent process."
That process will be doing the work that one might have hoped Tory’s campaign team did last winter before he settled on the promise in the spring of this year, but as Tory admitted, did not. The reports, he said, were "to get the information we need that I couldn’t possibly have had in a sophisticated, proper manner you would expect."
The committee is, however, working with teams that seeded the idea: the University of Toronto’s Eric Miller, who endorsed the plan during the election, and the not-for-profit consortium Strategic Regional Research Associates, who have been arguing in favour of electrified regional rail programs similar to SmartTrack long before the Tory campaign made it cool.
Does that make it stacked? If the U of T and SRRA were making the final call, then perhaps. But of course they’re not: the whole project will move through the filter of the Toronto Transit Commission, the city’s finance department and soon-to-depart City Manager Joe Pennachetti, who literally has nothing to lose in speaking truth to power on how practical the project will be. And of course that power is invested in Toronto City Council, not only the newly-elected mayor.
And aside from all that: who better to make the case for tax-increment-financing of a rail project than the experts who have essentially proposed the whole thing?
By comparison to the last few transit debates, this one is shaping up to be a pretty reasonable one. When Rob Ford was pushing his Sheppard subway, he did so by hiring a former Metro Councillor Gordon Chong to write a report justifying the project largely on his own. When former TTC Chair Karen Stintz and Scarborough councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker attempted one better, they did so in a news conference, at once surprising and alienating the rest of council and dooming their project.
The Scarborough subway that council approved last year came about through a process about as coherent as an old Marx Brothers movie.
SmartTrack is off to a very coherent start when held against all that business. Hopefully as it unfolds, we’ll have a real understanding of just how viable that business case might be.
Stay tuned.
David Nickle is Metroland Media Toronto’s City Hall reporter. Reach him at dnickle@insidetoronto.com