It’s around midnight on a Wednesday, and Rob Ford is riding the Scarborough RT. When one of his communications staffers, Isaac Ransom, tweets a picture of him, it makes for a classic Ford image—the mayor obstinately taking his populist message on the rails in the wee hours of the morning at the end of a long day at city council that ended with a historic 25–18 vote against his transit plan, and for one backed by TTC chair Karen Stintz.
The transit vote was a devastating political defeat for the mayor, and one that followed other losses, like the fight over the future of the Port Lands and the city’s budget. But in the press conference immediately after council finished, Ford showed no sign of conceding. “Technically speaking,” he told the press horde, “that whole meeting was irrelevant.”
And so the mayor called Ransom at 10:30 p.m., and told him that they would ride transit in Scarborough with Toronto Sun columnist Joe Warmington to promote his plan. On the day of the biggest mayoral defeat in modern Toronto history, Rob Ford went ahead as though nothing had really happened, confident that his was the true path. (Read The Grid senior editor Edward Keenan’s take on where the transit decision leaves the mayor and the city here.)
But there had been rumblings within the Ford camp for a while. Within a few months as TTC chair, Karen Stintz had concluded that there were major funding and planning problems with the mayor’s transit vision. Deputy Speaker John Parker, a former backbencher in the Mike Harris government, echoed Stintz’s concerns, referring to running the entire Eglinton line underground as “the goofiest LRT in the world.“
So when Karen Stintz told the Globe and Mail‘s Adrian Morrow towards the end of January that the Eglinton line should be an LRT at street-level wherever possible (what’s referred to as “at-grade”), or, failing that, a heavy-rail subway underground—neither of which Rob Ford had been publicly supporting before—she thought it would be okay. After all, she had spoken with the brother’s keeper, Doug, who told her as much.
But when the mayor’s office made it clear that they were definitively not on board with having the eight-kilometre eastern portion of the Eglinton LRT being at-grade (in spite of that plan saving between $1.5 and $2.1 billion), the wheels were set in motion for a different plan—one that Rob Ford had no desire for, and couldn’t see the need for. As he made his late-night pilgrimage into Scarborough, two questions must have entered his mind: First, why didn’t council have faith in his vision? And second, how on earth did this happen?
With the beard, glasses and considered pauses, Joe Mihevc acts as much like a professor (which he was) as the councillor for Ward 21, St. Paul’s West (which he is now). Mihevc has a Ph.D in theology, and he sees in Ford’s governance an approach he calls political fundamentalism. “In a plural world,” he explains, “I understand that my truth is different than your truth, and we can create a truth together through a process…a fundamentalist says, ‘Follow me—are you one of the believers or non-believers?’”
He wasn’t surprised at how Ford handled the process. “Having observed Ford for ten years, having observed his actions as mayor, he would rather lose on a matter of principle—and almost everything is a matter of principle to him—than get something out of a process and also give up something.”
For Mihevc and others, this was the antithesis to getting things done in politics. As soon as the mayor’s office blasted Stintz for her Globe and Mail comments, five councillors from across the political spectrum set meetings with the aim of reaching a plan that could provide the compromise the mayor could not broker. While an executive committee meeting went on in the background, TTC chair Stintz, left-winger Mihevc, TTC commissioner and conservative John Parker and centrist Josh Matlow discussed how to craft a plan that would provide a transit—and political—win for everyone. Left-wing TTC commissioner Maria Augimeri would quickly join the group, as they needed representation from North York, which would be affected by any plan.
Rob Ford’s plan was considered a non-starter. In March 2011, he reached a non-binding memorandum of understanding (or MoU) with the province that was contingent on support from city council. The plan was to re-allocate money that was originally intended to build LRT lines on Sheppard, Finch, and Eglinton—with the Eglinton line, called the Crosstown, operating at street level for most of its length—in order to put all of the Eglinton Crosstown LRT below-ground.
The advantages of LRT are that it’s cheaper to build, cheaper to maintain and is suited for less dense areas than could be economically justified for, say, a subway. Eglinton Avenue East is such an area, and has the added benefit of wide streets and three lanes of traffic going in each direction. The province felt strongly about that, too, and offered to pay to expropriate properties to ensure that the one bus/high-occupancy vehicle lane along Eglinton wouldn’t be lost. But Ford declined: he wanted to keep all new transit underground and uphold the purity of his election promise, damn the cost.
The other component to Ford’s deal was that he would finish the Sheppard subway, which would cost around $4 billion. His team argued that this could be financed through private money and insisted, when anyone asked, that the private sector (they never said who) was constantly knocking on the door of City Hall to inquire about their role.
The Sheppard line was considered a great flight of fancy to all but Ford’s true believers on council, which Augimeri contends number only 12, based on her conversations. “Many on the so-called right have serious issues with Ford’s policies and comportment,” she told The Grid. “These councillors, keep in mind, were Rocco Rossi supporters, [and] only Frances Nunziata endorsed [Ford] right away….they’re major players on the executive committee, and they’re ashamed of him.”
When crafting their plan, the five councillors kept that majority on council in mind. Their compromise proposal put the eastern portion of the Eglinton Crosstown LRT at-grade and reallocated the money saved to a separated bus route on Finch, as well as to one or two new subway stations on Sheppard. Even though Augimeri opposed the BRT option on Finch and indicated she would vote against it, as would fellow North York left-winger Anthony Perruzza, the mayor, the five councillors thought, could claim it as a victory. But Rob Ford turned the deal down.
