City should reconsider things it undertakes given Province’s reluctance to support them
Down the years, Queen’s Park has kept itself in the business of torpedoing the best laid plans of Toronto governments. Tolls and their revenues are just the latest example of the city’s wishful thinking.

thestar.com
By Edward Keenan
Jan. 27, 2017

If you’re the mayor of Toronto, you need to know that you will wake up one morning with the premier’s knife in your back.

Sooner or later, the province will always screw you.

Because it can.

And because it has its own elections to worry about.

And it is unlikely to care about consistency or local democratic legitimacy or the promises it made to you or whatever other principle you thought might align your goals with theirs.

It’s a story as old as the city.

Really.

The very first mayor of Toronto was elected in 1834, and, by 1837, he was leading an armed uprising against the government of Ontario or Upper Canada, as it was known in pre-Confederation days.

One suspects many of his successors in the mayor’s office have felt the urge to follow his example.

The tendency has not diminished with time.

From the Spadina Expressway to the Scarborough subway, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse, Queen’s Park has kept itself in the business of torpedoing the best laid plans of Toronto governments.

Kathleen Wynne knows this as well as anyone. She began her political career as the co-founder of a movement called Citizens for Local Democracy, formed to oppose the provincial government’s unilateral plan to dissolve the six elected city governments that made up Metropolitan Toronto and replace them with a single city government.

“Local government belongs to and should be responsible to the local citizens who elected it, not to the provincial government,” that group’s first “Fundamental Principle” read.

Friday it was Wynne’s turn, now that she is premier, to announce that local democracy in Toronto is an annoying fly to be squashed by a flick of the premier’s newspaper, if she happens to read in that newspaper that her approval rating has tanked.

She announced that the toll plan for local, city-owned, city-financed highways in Toronto that Mayor John Tory had proposed - apparently in co-ordination with her office, in line with principles she stood for since she first ran for leader and with the active encouragement of the provincial policy direction of the last few years - the toll plan supported by a vote of 32-9 at city council, was going to be killed.

As she taketh away though, she also giveth; Wynne announced further that she’d double the gas tax revenue the province shares with municipalities for transit. Transportation Minister Steven Del Duca was on hand to helpfully point out that this helps towns across Ontario, including even Wawa, with its single bus. (Sioux Lookout, he said, stood to gain a cool $7,500, which won’t build a subway line, although it might cater some transportation committee meetings with subway sandwiches.)

Toronto’s share is expected to be about $170 million.

That’s a lot of money.

Announced under any other circumstances, this is something that would have politicians considering building a statue of the premier in Nathan Phillips Square.

It remains a helpful addition to the city’s budgeting, as the mayor and other city councilors acknowledged.

But it is less than the mayor and his allies had said they expected to get in toll revenue; they often bandied about $300 million as a possibility.

Tolls on the DVP and Gardiner represented a first step to a different approach in Toronto. One that might see other tolls or congestion charges become more palatable. One that might raise more revenue down the road if the value of tolls became clear to drivers, as has happened elsewhere where they’ve been introduced.

And, moreover, tolls were an approach that stood a real chance of reducing congestion in this city.

They would do this by inspiring people to change how they commuted - carpooling, travelling at different times, taking transit, moving closer to where they work and so on.

That line of experiment, in which Toronto lags behind many other cities around the world, appears dead for the time being.

And that is, in some ways, a bigger loss than the revenue.

Of course, the city’s mayor and government have a lot of blame to share for encouraging the widespread attitude that car drivers should expect to have their whims catered to.

Meanwhile, on the money front, Tory has set up the logs for a giant bonfire of cash, just waiting for the dollars to be put in place for igniting, beginning with the Gardiner East rebuild, which seems to grow hundreds of millions of dollars more expensive with each report and the one-stop, six-kilometre extension of the Bloor subway line.

If the city plans to spend billions on things like that, how can it cry poor?

For that matter, when it continues to have lower property taxes, by far, than virtually any sizable city anyone can name, and has frozen them after inflation for years, how dire can they credibly claim things are?

In reality, they are dire, in part, specifically because of that reluctance to raise property taxes and, in part, because of decades of provincial screwing-over.

Even the best-case road toll revenue was not going to be nearly enough to pay for the things mayor Tory and his council have said they want and for the things we all know we need.

But the toll suggestion was a fairly bold first step towards taking responsibility for paying for it.

Tory says, indignantly, that as the mayor of Canada’s “only global metropolis,” he shouldn’t be treated “as a little boy in short pants going up to Queen’s Park with my hand out saying, ‘please, could you help me out . . . ?’ ”

He’s right.

His further response is that the province that kills tolls now needs to deliver more money for things. Or, to paraphrase: “Please, could you help me out?”

He’s not wrong that the city should have more authority to do more things on its own. I’m a member of the Province of Toronto cheering section over here. But it doesn’t have that authority, today.

Maybe it has to start looking again at things it can do that don’t involve saying “please.”

Because we’ve all just seen, yet again, how that strategy works out.

It’s a pain in the back and a bloody mess.

It always has been.