The worst thing about this municipal election campaign is that it’s all about Rob Ford. The second worst thing is that it’s all about transit — meaning that the price of escaping another four years of Ford could well be John Tory as mayor derailing the entire city by actually trying to implement his high-handed, half-baked, financially fraudulent SmartTrack gambit.
In either case, the credit for victory would be Ford’s. Only a city conditioned to believe anything — whose politicians are accordingly willing to say anything — could embrace a contraption like SmartTrack as uncritically as Toronto appears to be doing.
Olivia Chow misfired badly with a sensible transit policy broadly in line with the recommendations of TTC officials: more buses, better service. But Tory has learned the lesson of Fordism well — and SmartTrack is the result.
Before he felt a need to win election at any cost — ours, ultimately — Tory was as sensible as Chow, emphasizing in one pre-campaign speech that “transit plans without money are almost worse than no transit plans at all, because they create nothing but false hopes.”
Accordingly, he entered the race with sensible ideas about transit. But he only took flight once he ditched that policy and cynically embraced the power of false hope.
