Kelly McParland: Flaherty has little time for Toronto's fairy tales
If you really want to get Jim Flaherty exercised, ask him about the city of Toronto and its needs.
That the city has needs is unquestionable. The clean, safe, somewhat dull Toronto the Good of old has morphed into a seedier, dirtier, more frightening version of its old self, like a Bay Street banker who lost his job and has taken to selling dubious penny stocks to gullible widows.
The traffic gridlock is all-encompassing, and eternal. The pollution is awful. Waterfront development has been criminally mishandled, so the city is now separated from the lake not just by the ugly old Gardiner Expressway (which is falling apart), but by dozens on dozens of lookalike condominiums offering scenic upper-floor views of their neighbour’s windows, at extortionate prices. To walk down the sidewalks is to perform a dance around panhandlers and street-sleepers. There were ten shootings last weekend alone; today the parents of two young men gunned down while they sat quietly in their car outside a friend’s house several months ago offered $50,000 reward after the police admitted the still don’t have a clue who did it.
So the need is there. Mr. Flaherty, the Finance Minister, is well aware of it. He represents nearby Whitby and spent years in the Ontario legislature. What he isn’t, is sympathetic to the city leaders who regularly pester Ottawa to do something about it.
“What doesn’t help is Mayor Miller with his hand out all the time,” Mr. Flaherty said Wednesday during an editorial board meeting with the National Post.
“When he can’t get his commercial tax rate to be competitive with other municipalities and he complains about businesses leaving the city...You have to get some economic fundamentals right, fiscal fundamentals right whether you’re the mayor or the premier or the prime minister or the minister of finance. I don’t like this fairy tale discussion by some of the mayors.”
He continued: “Look at Mayor Tremblay from Montreal. He came to us and said ‘The most important thing you can do is make the gas tax funding permanent because that gives us a stream of money that is coming in perpetuity and then we can get into public-private partnerships. The City of Toronto won’t even do public-private partnerships. So it’s not an urban problem across Canada. There are some governance problems in the City of Toronto that need to be fixed if the city is going to progress as it should progress.”
It’s not surprising that Mr. Flaherty wouldn’t see eye-to-eye with Mr. Miller. The finance minister is from the conservative wing of a right-of-centre party. Mr. Miller, like most Toronto politicians, is on the left, and a bit mushy to boot. He got elected largely on his opposition to construction of a short bridge that would have linked the shoreline to a small island airport. The bridge wasn’t built, so passengers take a 30-second ferry ride. Big victory.
What seems to irk Mr. Flaherty is the sense of unreality that permeates so much of the city’s activities. Last year the province announced a plan to spend $17.5 billion on a series of transit projects, with $6 billion coming from Ottawa. The Ottawa portion still isn’t guaranteed, despite regular pleading. Flaherty has promised to kick in $700 million to extend the city’s subway system. With all that going on, a regional political grouping called Metrolinx went ahead on Tuesday and unveiled a grandiose scheme for 100 transportation projects across the Greater Toronto Area that would cost $50 billion and take decades to build.
Mayor Miller, a board member of Metrolinx, wasn’t there for the unveiling, because he was in Montreal with a group of other mayors asking for even more money.
“We’re not asking for a bank machine,” he said. “We’re asking for a partnership in the investment in the success of our country.”
The cost of that partnership would be -- $123-billion. The spokespeople for Metrolinx, meanwhile, acknowledged that -- even if built -- their plan would boost transit use just 25% and cut the average commute by just five minutes.
$50 billion, to save five minutes, 25 years from now.
That’s the sort of thing Mr. Flaherty might consider a “fairy tale discussion.”
National Post
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