Every fiscal conservative in this city should thank TTC chair Karen Stintz for daring last week to speak truth to power about the Eglinton Crosstown fiasco. Yes, fiscal conservatives. Not just Transit City lovers. By asking whether Metrolinx will be using the appropriate vehicles in that 19-km tunnel, Stintz nailed the key technical question hanging over Mayor Rob Ford’s plan to bury the entire LRT at a premium of $2.1 billion. But by proposing ways to stretch those dollars (a Sheppard subway extension to Victoria Park and a BRT corridor on Finch), she has, in effect, posed a hard-headed question that no one, to my knowledge, has adequately answered: Can Metrolinx prove to Ontario taxpayers that it will maximize its massive investment in Eglinton by proceeding with Ford’s faith-based burial scheme? Nope. In fact, the curious reality is that neither the province, nor the city, has a clue. While Metrolinx has conducted so-called “benefits case analyses” on several other of its undertakings, Spacing has learned that the agency didn’t apply this kind of rigour to the Crosstown, even though it officially ranks as Canada’s most expensive infrastructure project.

This just in: thanks to the fiscal disciplinarians in the Ford administration, the TTC will be able to sock away $135 million for transit vehicles. Can we surmise that in Rob Ford’s Toronto, we’re now building transit on the lay away plan? Just 37 more years and we’ll have enough to buy us a subway on Sheppard…. I’m being facetious, but that $135 million will do nothing to alleviate the persistent lack of capital for transit development in and around the City of Toronto. Meanwhile, the mayor’s perverse decision to bury $2.1 billion of provincial transit funding in the soil under Eglinton Avenue East – about a quarter of which comes from provincial taxes collected inside the City of Toronto – is a capital-B boondoggle, and leaves nothing but crumbs for other transit expansion projects (including the Sheppard subway) for years to come. But as TTC chair Karen Stintz said in a speech to the Board of Trade a few weeks ago, the Commission (and, by inference, the Ford administration) wants to completely cede responsibility for financing transit expansion to Metrolinx, which has a $50 billion plan for Greater Toronto, but no clue how to pay for it. (The agency has pledged to release a revenue-generating plan in 2013.) Here’s my unsolicited advice for both Stintz and Metrolinx chair Rob Prichard: If you want to figure out how to rapidly and permanently crack the long-term funding riddle, then look to Los Angeles — a quintessentially car-addicted city that, in the past three years, has found religion on transit in a serious way. But be warned: the story of LA’s dramatic conversion puts us to shame.

  Monday morning pop quiz: Is the labour relations ball in the city’s court, or CUPE’s? The latest volley from the bargaining front took place Friday, just hours after the City filed a no board report with the province but with plenty of advance notice from a labour-friendly public relations firm. That morning, CUPE 416 president Mark Ferguson held a press conference to announce its members will take a three-year wage freeze. The political not-so-sub-text: we get the financial pressure story (see high-stakes stand-off over the budget), and our members will do their part. All heads in the audience then swiveled in the direction of deputy mayor Doug Holyday, who oversees the Ford administration’s labour relations war room. It’s a start, he told reporters, but added what everyone in the city knows perfectly well, which is that this stand-off isn’t (and has never been) merely about money. Ball’s back in CUPE’s court. That was fast. So now what? I am not waiting up for a return conciliatory gesture from Holyday or the city’s labour negotiators; indeed, one could argue that CUPE’s gambit on wages reveals a telling glimpse of concern on the part of the union’s leadership and could serve to fortify the city’s determination to break the outside workers. But the exchange also poses an increasingly important question: can CUPE actually win the hearts-and-minds of the public in this looming knife fight, and if so, how? Or should the union even try?

Every finance minister with even a dram of savvy knows that a critically-important part of the job description involves finding new and innovative ways of keeping the supplicants feeling somewhat defeated as budget day approaches. In that distant era of federal surpluses, Paul Martin, it often appeared, would order the drones in the finance department to take incoming revenue estimates and hack off a zero or two so no one got too excited about spending the windfall. More locally, city financial officials ritually low ball assessment growth estimates and put out imaginary “pressure” numbers to scare the minions and the activists. But Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals have devised an artful variation on the theme by first hiring and subsequently un-muzzling TD Bank economist Don Drummond. This past week, Drummond, an ex-Department of Finance official with impeccable Liberal connections, came out with some scary pronouncements on future provincial spending and the credibility of the Liberals’ deficit predictions. Don’t for a moment think he’s freelancing: lacking a majority and faced with the increasingly imminent realities of budget-making in an aging society, the Liberals are more than happy to have Drummond serving as their in-house prophet of doom. Much of the attention will fall on the two big spending programs — health care and education, with special focus on the former, given the Harper government’s recent decree that the 6% funding escalator, a fiscal artifact of the Liberals’ 2004 federal-provincial health accord — will go the way of all flesh.

Did anyone hear Mayor Rob Ford so much as grunt a word of thanks, on behalf of all Torontonians, to his predecessor for backing a slate of policies that has brought the city’s murder rate down to levels not seen since the 1980s? Didn’t think so. In a bit of an ironic twist, our police-involved chief magistrate surely owes a huge debt of gratitude to Socialist Mayor™ David Miller for the latter’s role in the long-term improvement in Toronto’s violent crime rate, which crested in 2006 during the so-called year of the gun. And while he’s at it, Ford should toss a great big bone to the provincial Liberals for their role, which has also been significant. Of course, Ford and his right-wing cronies will do nothing of the sort. But the record strongly suggests that the Miller/Bill Blair approach – a mix of community policing and outreach, preventative measures aimed at disenfranchised young people and broad-ranging, multi-agency investigations of gun-and-drug import operations – has clearly proven to be far more effective on the ground than Julian Fantino’s militaristic manner. A little history is in order: At the close of Mel Lastman’s term, police-community tensions in high-crime neighbourhoods like the Jane-Finch corridor were running very high, thanks in part to media revelations about racial profiling but also because of Fantino’s great love of coded language and racial insinuation. His most noteworthy response to the mayhem: the establishment of a guns and gangs task force.  

WHAT WE TALKED ABOUT: By the end of last Tuesday’s news cycle, Mayor Rob Ford had steered his gravy choo-choo train to a politically intriguing destination: after the tumult of the summer core service review, Ford’s subsequent threats about drastic tax increases, and the left’s dire warnings about gutted municipal services, city manager Joe Pennachetti delivered a spending plan for 2012 that was hardly apocalyptic. Yes, there will be some service cuts, a few closures, layoffs and a tax hike of 2.5% (which is actually a shade over the inflation rate yet a whole lot less than what Hazel McCallion is poised to inflict on Mississaugans). But the recommended budget is hardly a catastrophe. So Ford, with cover from Pennachetti, got to make good on his pledge to bend the curve of city spending, and do so on the first anniversary of taking office. By the end of Friday, however, the mayor’s party had succeeded in snatching defeat from the jaws of victory…again. We had budget chair Michael Del Grande’s what-were-you-thinking moment, with his revealing rumination about the possibility of banishing non-English language books from the city’s library system. (Memo to Mike: Every other Torontonian is an immigrant. This isn’t Gravenhurst, in case you hadn’t noticed.) Paul Ainslie, one of Ford’s generals, simply couldn’t get himself up to the press gallery fast enough to denounce council’s bean-counter-in-chief.

If Unbuilt Toronto chronicler Mark Osbaldeston gets around to penning a third installment of our city’s missed opportunities, Michael van Valkenburgh’s extraordinary vision of a naturalized estuary for the mouth of the Don River will surely have pride of place in those as-yet unwritten pages, if not in the city itself. After Friday’s briefing by senior waterfront officials, I came away with the distinct sense that the Brooklyn designer’s award-winning plan – the product of an international design competition, extensive public consultation and intense technical and regulatory review – is pretty much dead in the water, so to speak. Yes, deputy city manager John Livey and Waterfront Toronto CEO John Campbell talked in very general terms about “staging” and alternative financing approaches and still more public consultations (the first session is Dec. 12 at the Toronto Reference Library). But it seemed quite clear from their comments that price and speed will determine Toronto’s port lands development plans from here on in. As Campbell, never one to mince words, put it, “The handcuffs are off.” Handcuffs, John? C’mon.

Scanning the fascinating images in Mark Osbaldeston’s second compilation about Toronto’s “alternate history,” — Unbuilt Toronto 2 — I found myself strangely unmoved by some of the architectural projects that never made the great leap off the drawing board. Unbuilt 2, in some ways, is a collection of opportunities probably best missed. There are the monumental and vaguely totalitarian government and commercial structures from the earlier decades of the 20th century, as well as strange post-mo confections, such as Moshe Safdie’s jumbled plan for the old Maclean Hunter site at the corner of Yonge and Highway 401. From the space age 1960s, we have stadia floating in the lake, and a flared bottom to I.M. Pei’s CIBC tower that reminded me of nothing so much as bell-bottom pants. The heavy grid that undergirds the 1980s plan for the Ataratiri lands is crowded and deadening. The cover image, of a possible Bloor Street wing for the Royal Ontario Museum (shown above), has the lovely feel of antique lithograph, inspired, as Osbaldeston explains, by a British architect whose resume included the façade of Buckingham Palace. Look more closely, though, and the façade turns its back onto Bloor while two Italianate towers loom inexplicably above the roofline.

Mayor Rob Ford’s plan to bury the 19-km Eglinton Crosstown LRT from end to end, instead of just through the crowded core of the city, will be rightly remembered as the single most expensive infrastructure mistake in Toronto history. In fact, this optimistically-priced $8.2 billion scheme — which is $3.6 billion more than the original amount budgeted for the Crosstown, and includes $1.4 billion to replace the Scarborough RT — will make us harken back nostalgically to an innocent era of smaller flubs, like the Ontario government’s original Scarborough RT or even Mike Harris’ decision to cancel the Eglinton West subway after the province and Metro spent $100 million digging a tunnel stub that was subsequently filled in. Ford’s vision of an Eglinton Crosstown that’s hidden from view will bring a deep blush of shame to the faces of future generations of Torontonians. And here’s the pungent irony at the heart of this billion dollar boondoggle: Ford and his fiscally-conservative allies would never approve this kind of wasteful spending if they were using the city’s own money, as opposed to funds provided by Queen’s Park. When the cash is coming out of someone else’s coffers, however, those lofty principles vanish in a miasma of political opportunism. Why Metrolinx and their bosses in the Liberal cabinet are continuing to play along, then, is anybody’s guess. As the agency’s vice-president of investment strategy and project evaluation John Howe remarked piously during Thursday’s Toronto Talks Mobility conference, “We need to demonstrate that we have credible leadership and projects selected on the basis of good evidence.” Indeed.

Spooked by a middle-aged woman who looked like she just flounced off the set of an amateur Wagner production, Mayor Rob Ford seems to have neglected the remedial math homework I assigned a couple of weeks ago in this space. Case in point: on Friday, Brother Doug helpfully emailed around a lengthy list of year one accomplishments – real and imagined – that claims, right near the top, that the Ford administration saved the taxpayers a whopping $899,000 by reducing councillors’ annual office expense budgets from $50,445 to $30,000. To get $899,000, one multiplies 44 times the difference between $50,445 and $30,000 (brackets first). Alas, most councillors don’t spend the whole sum – not even close, as we can all see from the  councilor expense disclosure. So let’s tease apart this claim. Under the profligate ways of l’ancien regime, the maximum councilor expense spend would be $2.2 million (that’s 44 x $50,445 if you’re following along). But as the spending disclosure report clearly indicates, the total expense outlay for 2010 was just $1.55 million (I’m rounding). The maximum allowable under the new system of fiscal Fordism is $1.32 million. In other words, the real savings is just under $230,000, which is a much, much smaller number than $899,000.