The 1976 Metropolitan Toronto Draft Official Plan, known as Metroplan, may be viewed as the Planning Department’s response to the Toronto Transit Commission’s 1969 and (revised) 1973 concepts, and perhaps more significantly, as Metropolitan Toronto’s official political response to the Metropolitan Toronto Transportation Plan Review of 1973–1975.
A casual review might suggest that
Figures 11.0.1 and
9.0.2 (Concept for Integrated Rapid Transit and Commuter Rail Systems in the Metropolitan Toronto Region, February 1973), are similar, but this similarity is largely the result of the paucity of major arterial corridors in the area.[
1] However,
Figure 11.0.1 (Metroplan) indicates three significant deletions from the TTC’s (revised) schematic plan shown in
Figure 9.0.2:
- The Queen Street–Don Mills corridor subway is nowhere to be seen.
- The southward extension of the Spadina–Allen Road subway from Bloor Street West to serve Harbour City, the residential development proposed in 1970 for the Island (now Billy Bishop) Airport site, and the proposed branch to Exhibition Place and Ontario Place, were eliminated when the Harbour City project failed to materialize.
- The territorial limits have reverted from “the region” to Metropolitan Toronto (now the City of Toronto) boundary.
The third deletion represents the end of the original (1953) concept in which the city was viewed as being the core of a dynamic urban region, which encompassed almost all of what now constitutes the Greater Toronto Area.
The Province of Ontario’s early 1970s transformation of several former neighbouring counties into the “Regional Municipalities” of Durham in the east, York in the north, and Peel and Halton in the west essentially ended serious attempts to plan Ontario’s (and Canada’s) largest metropolitan concentration on a regional scale. In fact, the creation of these entities effectively put Metropolitan Toronto into a straitjacket in terms of providing fully integrated transportation facilities to serve a high-growth city-region, a situation exacerbated by the skeletal GO Transit commuter rail service with its single focal point in the Toronto core and its part-time schedule.[
2]
This restructuring could be considered a logical response to political aspirations then emerging in areas beyond the Metro boundary, including concerns expressed by certain provincial agencies and politicians that a more unified metropolitan region containing about half the provincial population might become too competitive with the province itself for capital resources and centralized functions.
Whatever the reasons for the disaggregation of what had once been the Metropolitan Toronto Planning Area, the ramifications continued to hobble responsible planning for the remainder of the 20th century, despite pronouncements of the importance of regional thinking. Even with provincial policy initiatives such as the Greenbelt Plan of 2005, the
Places to Grow growth plan of 2006, and of course, Metrolinx and The Big Move of 2008, earlier policies continue to make it difficult to achieve consensus in the region on infrastructure plans.
