Long play?
Marcus Gee today says there is a long play behind the Jarvis hit-job. He says Denzil Minnan-Wong needed a sacrifice so he could credibly justify bike lanes to Ford supporters in an "only Nixon could go to China" sort of deal.
It is possible that similar reasoning was behind the rejection of free public health nurses, so that Premier Hudak can justify increased municipal spending to his Toronto-hating base, or so Harper can justify similar spending on transit and municipal infrastructure. Both can point to Ford's Toronto and say, "obviously Toronto needs this money, because Ford has certainly done his job to keep spending under control."
I have long believed that the City cannot sustain social services and big-ticket infrastructure with property taxes, which are not levied based on ability to pay and do not grow with the economy. David Miller made this argument repeatedly, but he did very little to smooth the way politically such that the province or the federal government could credibly give the city more money. And I regularly slapped my forehead whenever Miller would waste precious political capital on
symbolic gestures (eg: Stintz's bags, bottles, and I'm sorry but yes: suburban bike lanes) that a child should have known would needlessly alienate conservative voters.
Jarvis, the Fort York Bridge and the public health nurses did not involve huge amounts of money, and so are a kind of mirror opposite of Miller's symbolic pinko policies. These policies don't cause
too much damage, but
really piss off the pinkos, who can reliably be counted upon to shriek and fume in that way so satisfying to Ford supporters. This lends support to the "long play" hypothesis.
But scrapping Transit City and incurring over $100 million in cancellation penalties is a big deal, and Ford has yet to produce the federal money he said is coming in exchange for Toronto's support of Harper. On the one hand, as Matt Elliott
points out, the City has not actually formally pulled the trigger on the Transit City cancellation, and is not yet on the hook for the $100 million in cancellation penalties. But on the other hand, even if we got the Sheppard subway
for free, this overcapacity would still be a massive ongoing drain on our operations budget, the very reason Ford rejected the public health nurses, where far less money was at stake (if any was).
Moreover, the Fords' massively misinformed musings about Waterfront Toronto puts billions of dollars of private investment at risk, which suggests that these guys are making it up as they go along, and when they screw around with downtown infrastructure, it is because they really, truly do despise all those downtown pinkos.
I predict three years of headaches and indigestion as Marcus Gee's hypothesis gets put to the test.
