A game-changing week for John Tory: Analysis

Here’s why last week’s transit reversals - and renewed commitment to evidence-based decision-making - may mark a watershed moment for his mayoralty.

Thestar.com
Jan. 24, 2016
By David Rider

After a picnic of a rookie year, Mayor John Tory set off a week of political fireworks likely to affect transportation in Toronto for generations to come.

Tory backed major resets for SmartTrack (the transit centerpiece of his 2014 mayoral campaign) and the Scarborough subway extension (which he had vowed to protect) last week, plus an east Gardiner Expressway plan reconfigured to appease his downtown council critics.

For SmartTrack, he jettisoned plans for a heavy-rail spur between Mount Dennis and the Mississauga airport corporate centre in favour of a light-rail line. Tory also listened to expert advice in Scarborough, replacing a three-stop subway extension with one stop to Scarborough Town Centre and an LRT extension on Eglinton Ave. E.

With the transit reversals and his recent pitch for a property tax surcharge to help fund capital purchases, Tory has bent, if not broken, three central pledges to the voters who elected him.

That has opened the mayor, as never before, to attacks from Councillor Rob Ford and his brother Doug. Tory’s surprise moves follow a year in which a fear of the Fords, and of losing the suburban support he’ll need to get re-elected in 2018, seemed to be a guiding force.

The ailing Rob Ford waited a day before his office offered an uncharacteristically wordy criticism of Tory’s Scarborough switch. Doug, who lost to Tory last year, called a radio show to thunder: “This is disgusting. It’s a dog’s breakfast!”

So what’s behind this pivotal week in Tory’s mayoralty, and maybe in the development of this city?

Tory says the barrage of big changes was mostly coincidental, but all of it shows the natural evolution of a leader who values expert opinion, evidence-based decision-making and an eagerness to broker consensus.

“If Rob Ford would like to fight an election with me on the basis of our relative listening skills, whether I’m prepared to rely on experts as opposed to pure political rhetoric and orthodoxy, and on doing what’s best for the people as opposed to do something that is carrying through with a slogan, I’ll happily fight that election,” Tory said in an interview in his city hall office Thursday.

“I’m trying to think of the long term. I’m trying to improve the decision-making, and the decision-making environment around here, all of which was broken.”

The mayor also admits that year-end interviews with reporters helped convince him he needed to get moving.

Reporters “would say: ‘What will you be able to tell us by next year?’ For the first year I was able to say, ‘I got things to calm down here,’ and so on. Then I realized I had to start to produce some results.”

Another reason for change might lie in Tory’s office. Most of his core staff are campaign veterans who fought the Fords for 10 months. Last fall the mayor hired Siri Agrell, a former journalist who had worked on David Soknacki’s aborted mayoral campaign, to be his director of strategic initiatives.

The mayor and his staff seem pleased with the week. Still, you could forgive Torontonians, especially Scarborough residents, for feeling like they have whiplash.

In February, asked about the contentious three-stop Scarborough subway that seemed like it would cannibalize ridership from a SmartTrack line, Tory said: “I’m committed to the present plan ... I don’t want to reopen this debate.” In July, he insisted: “The train has left the station.”

Tory says now that, the whole time, he was busy behind the scenes trying to fix an obvious problem. That included visits to Scarborough Centre MPP Brad Duguid to present one idea, which Duguid soundly rejected, and much later the current plan that Toronto chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat first showed Tory last October.

“It’s seared into my brain that when he endorsed me during the campaign, one of your colleagues asked him, ‘What if anybody tries to take a run at the Scarborough subway?’ and he said, “That will happen over my dead body.’ I thought, well, I better have this (Keesmat plan) and run it past him.’”

Councillor Josh Matlow, council’s loudest and most persistent critic of the three-stop Scarborough subway, says he now feels “neither a grand sense of jubilation nor the frustration and angst I’ve experienced over the past four years.”

Matlow lauds Tory for listening to expert advice to get to an “admittedly imperfect but perfectly workable” result, while saying the actions of the Fords - and others - were no credit to Toronto transit planning.

“This journey has seen so many people lied to, so many tax dollars wasted, so much time wasted, while residents have been desperately waiting for the service that they need,” Matlow says.

“I can’t say we’ve arrived at an absolutely evidence-based process that is free of people’s political and financial interests, but I can see we can still try to get there.”

How the Scarborough subway plan came together

Pressure for change

Transit experts are adamant that surface light rail with lots of stops would help residents more than a three-stop subway. Awareness grows that the subway and SmartTrack lines would cannibalize each other. It looks like the subway plan would go back to council facing likely defeat, with nothing to replace it.

The city planner’s plan

As part of her work on an environmental assessment, chief planner Jennifer Keesmaat devises an alternate with a one-stop subway extension and light rail along Eglinton Ave. E. She shows it to Mayor John Tory in October. He sees enough potential to tell her to continue working and start consultations.

Final approvals

Scarborough MPP Brad Duguid, who had rejected an earlier plan, tells Tory that Keesmaat’s plan has enough “legs” to merit more work. Scarborough councillors come around. The LRT connection to U of T Scarborough, where Duguid’s brother works, is “helpful” in negotiations, a source says. Tory green-lights the plan.