Even without the Games, Toronto needs Olympic-sized ambitions

Theglobeandmail.com
Sept. 15, 2015
By Marcus Gee

Toronto Mayor John Tory’s decision not to launch a bid for the 2024 Olympic Games makes sense, for all sorts of reasons.

The push to bid was late and half-hearted, coming in the small window after the Toronto Pan Am Games and just before an International Olympic Committee deadline. Other cities have been teeing up their entries for months. Paris got into the race in earnest in June, said Mr. Tory, Rome as far back as December.

Business support was underwhelming at best. As Mr. Tory put it, no one was rushing up to him with an open chequebook to help Toronto with the huge expense of mounting a bid.

Governments were lukewarm, too. Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne said straight up that the provincial government did not want to be on the hook for costs. The federal political parties made mildly encouraging noises, but in the midst of an election campaign, Mr. Tory couldn’t get any real commitments from Ottawa. As for the public, the most recent opinion poll showed Torontonians roughly divided between those who backed a bid and those against.

Still, it was hard to avoid a sense of letdown when Mr. Tory delivered his Olympic “no” at a press conference on Tuesday morning. The mayor made the announcement from a raised patio in Nathan Phillips Square that gives a postcard view of City Hall. That dramatic edifice, a symbol of the city, just turned 50 years old. The anniversary served to remind Torontonians of the soaring ambition and faith in the future it took for, what was then, a rather provincial town to embrace such a radical design for the home of its civic government.

Where is that ambition now? Where is the can-do spirit, the determination not just to maintain the city, but to build it for the next generation?

Toronto is a thriving 21st-century metropolis with a bustling downtown and growing suburbs. Construction cranes crowd its skyline and thousands of immigrants from around the world are thronging to live here. But, in a sense, it is stalled.

Decades of foot-dragging, poor planning and underinvestment have left it with a transit and transportation system that falls far short of the needs of North America’s fourth-largest city. Its waterfront, despite recent progress, is still an underexploited asset. Its public amenities, from parks to bike paths to ice arenas, are not nearly what they should be.

To achieve its ambition - well within reach - of becoming a true world city, it badly needs a push. That is why Mr. Tory and others were tempted by the idea of putting in a bid. For all the vast expense, hosting an Olympic Games often jump-starts city building, shaking loose the big dollars it takes for a city to move to a new level. Barcelona, mostly famously, used the 1992 Games to remake its rundown waterfront, now a lovely stretch of beaches and promenades, and put itself on the map for international visitors.

A Toronto Olympics offered the possibility of redeveloping the Port Lands, the huge, underdeveloped tract at the east end of the harbour that would have made an ideal site for an Olympic village and other facilities, and at last building a new downtown subway line – called the relief line for good reason - to take the pressure off an overburdened, undersized subway system.

That is why Mr. Tory was right to say: Not now, but not never. Toronto - prosperous, orderly, vibrant, multicultural - could one day make a magnificent site for a Summer Olympics.

In the meantime, Toronto needs to find a way to city build without the goad of an Olympic deadline. Mr. Tory used his press conference to urge other governments to join him in taking that leap. “Together we should be making the investments talked about in the context of the Olympics,” he said. “We should be making them to build up Canada’s largest city for its residents, past, present and future.”

He insisted: “I know that we can and will achieve these things without seeking the Olympics at this time.”

Can we? There was something almost plaintive about Mr. Tory’s plea. Toronto mayors, one after another, have been saying similar things for years. Their words are left echoing in the ether.

It is time to act on them. Mr. Tory is right. It shouldn’t take the prospect of the Olympics to build the Toronto of tomorrow.