Gardiner mess evokes question: is city well governed?

The $500 million bill to repair the Gardiner Expressway forces a number of momentous questions to the fore,  then raises the question of whether the city has been well governed for the past few decades. Should city council just decide to tear the thing down and live with whatever the transportation consequences might be?

That’s what San Francisco did when an earthquake damaged the Embarcadero Freeway in 1989 and there were unexpected positive consequences. Or should only the portion east of Jarvis be demolished? If it’s to be repaired, where does the city find the money? Could a toll be put on the vehicles using it? And since that probably wouldn’t create enough revenue to make the repairs, what gets cut to feed the expressway?

Does city council have the political will to make any of these decisions?

The Gardiner decision is stark example of how badly the city has planned for the future during the past two or three decades‚ or rather, there has been no planning. City council has no plan of how to reduce homelessness that continues to grow. It has no plan about what the kinds or uses of new buildings that should be encouraged in the city. Every development proposal has been treated as a one off, and what we’ve got is a forest of towers for single-person households.

There is no serious plan about public transit needs. Currently two rapid transit lines are being built (the line to York University and the Eglinton line) but both are funded with provincial money, and the province has dictated how they will function, including that the Eglinton line won’t be operated by the TTC, the city’s transit arm.

It’s hard to say they are part of the city‚Äôs plan. Mayor Rob Ford had a plan for subways which he could never fund. As for Transit City, the plan city council endorsed this past year, it is something of a mirage since they city hasn’t the money to implement it.

There are no plans to improve recreation opportunities for youth, to better serve the many immigrants arriving in Toronto, to provide more child care, to fix our aging high-rise apartment towers, and so forth. You get the general picture: City council seems incapable of looking ahead.

Certainly the financial constraints encourage the mayor and councillors to forego vision.

In 1997 with the creation of the megacity, then-Premier Mike Harris downloaded expensive provincial programs onto the city and then cut off provincial subsidies that had been around for many years. Those financial woes have beleaguered council ever since.  But at some point our leaders must stop feeling sorry for themselves and start making plans to get out of the mess. That has yet to occur.

I suspect the problem reaches even further back. Alan Tonks provided little leadership as Metro Chair from his appointment in 1989, and the city of Toronto found no better value in its mayors during the same period. Financial constraints, short-term thinking, and no serious leadership: these shortfalls have created the quandary the city now finds itself in.

Whether Rob Ford continues on as mayor or not, I’ll bet city council decides to appoint his successor rather than order a bi-election if Ford loses his appeal on his removal because of conflict of interest. We still face the same problem.  We desperately need city leaders who force us to think about our future and how we want to get there. We need a discussion about all the big issues: the city’s financial and social health, where we might find new sources of revenue including from new and/or improved taxes, appropriate structures for good governance. That’s our challenge for 2013.

Sorting out what happens to the Gardiner Expressway can only take place within this larger context.

John Sewell is a former mayor of Toronto.