Councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker reflects on 15-year career after pulling out of race, saying he shouldn’t have compromised on subway plan

Thestar.com
August 14, 2018
David Nickle

Over the past four years, Ward 38 Councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker has positioned himself as the single-stop Scarborough subway extension’s most vocal booster.

But in announcing the end of his 15-year political career at city hall, De Baeremaeker told Metroland Media Toronto that in hindsight, he should never have supported the single-stop subway that he and Mayor John Tory spent the past three years defending.

Councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker announced Monday that he’s pulling out of October’s municipal election race.

“I think it was a mistake,” said De Baeremaeker. “I think that we pro-subway people compromised.”

De Baeremaeker made the comments Monday, just an hour after he issued a press release announcing that he would not be running in the fall election, in which he said he determined “the odds are against me” attempting to run in either of the two new wards that contain part of his current ward.

If Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s legislation to reduce the size of Toronto council to 25 seats from 47 survives court challenges, then De Baeremaeker would be facing off against one of two veteran councillors: Michael Thompson (Ward 37, Scarborough Centre) or Paul Ainslie (Ward 43, Scarborough East).

In either case, De Baeremaeker said that he would be entering the race with just half of his own current constituents, while the other councillors would have all of theirs.

“It would be very difficult. if not impossible to beat them,” said De Baeremaeker. “They have 100 per cent of their turf and I have half of mine.”

De Baeremaeker said in his news release that he regretted the sometimes acrimonious debate over plans to build the subway. But in the interview, he indicated that what he regretted was compromising on the subway plan, that in its original iteration would have had three stops -- four, if De Baeremaeker had his way.

“I can tell you the people of Scarborough don’t like it,” said De Baeremaeker of the 2016 plan to scale back the number of stops on the subway to just one, at the Scarborough Town Centre. “They want a stop at the Scarborough General Hospital. They want one at Lawrence Ave. Lawrence Ave. in the rest of the city has subways. Why would you go from Eglinton to almost Hwy. 401? It’s six kilometres.”

De Baeremaeker said he supported the plan for the six-kilometre subway line -- which included an extension of the Eglinton West light rail line as well as integration with Mayor John Tory’s SmartTrack heavy rail plan -- as an attempt to compromise with subway opponents on Toronto council.

“But the pro-subway people were not happy with the compromise,” he said. “In hindsight I thought it was a mistake. I certainly was trying to make peace ... But now our premier will get it done. And if that takes money away from the LRTs, who’s to blame? The people who have fought the subway so hard have made it a very easy issue for the premier. All the premier had to do was stand up there in Scarborough and say subway subway subway. And people started clapping.”

According to a 2016 report to Toronto’s executive committee, a three-stop subway would cost $4.6 billion.

De Baeremaeker said the political fallout from the Scarborough subway debate “is going to have an impact on the downtown elites for a long, long, long time.”

“There are people who look at them and say we can never trust these people today,” he said. “I cannot trust my downtown colleagues because I know it’s them first, us second.”

De Baeremaeker urged voters to support pro-subway candidates in the fall election -- particularly Tory, with whom De Baeremaeker served as a deputy mayor, but also councillor.

However, in stepping away from the race, De Baeremaeker acknowledged that will make it easier for anti-subway councillor Ainslie to gain a seat on the new council.

Ainslie is one of two councillors likely to run in a portion of De Baeremaeker’s current ward -- the riding of Scarborough Guildwood. Ainslie has been a supporter of a light rail to replace the Scarborough RT between Kennedy Station and McCowan Rd., over the more costly subway extension.

De Baeremaeker said he didn’t think Ainslie or anyone else opposing the subway could turn the decision to build the subway around. But De Baeremaeker said that he did not see how he himself could prevail in the October election.

He said that he has “zero” plans as to what he will do after leaving politics.

“I’ve been 100 per cent laser-focused on this job, because I love it,” he said. “There’s so much going on -- I’m in the middle of so many things. But they’ll continue without me. There’s no plan B, I’m not on LinkedIn, I wasn’t shopping a resumé, because I had no intention of leaving.”