While Christmas is a long way off, Mayor Rob Ford decided to dangle a shiny bauble in front the eyes of North York and Scarborough voters, pledging during his radio campaign commercial, uh, show, that privatizing garbage collection east of Yonge will be on his to-do list for the 2014 election. This obvious diversion tactic must be considered in the light of a pair of new polls that offer some key insights into the changing complexion of voter attitudes towards the city’s most vexing problem, which, it must be said, is not garbage. Last week, Stratcom (whose principals worked on George Smitherman’s mayoral campaign) released a poll showing that Ford’s approval ratings fell sharply in both Scarborough and North York since February. In North York, his numbers plunged from 56 to 40%, while Scarborough’s approval rating dropped from 48 to 41%. Just over a third of Toronto respondents overall felt he is doing a good job — a figure that nudges up against David Miller’s all-time low of 29%, during the garbage strike. (Stratcom’s poll of 954 voters is accurate within 3.2%, 19 times out of 20.) Voters in those parts of the city, it would be reasonable to surmise, may be growing weary of Ford’s empty and undeliverable transit promises. Indeed, according to a new Environics survey of GTA residents, Ford looks to be on the wrong side of one of the region’s most top-o’-mind concerns: transportation. The Focus GTA poll results, which Environics generously agreed to share with Spacing Toronto readers, reveal that the number of respondents who cited transportation as the GTA’s single most pressing issue jumped sharply, from 22% to 38% between last fall and this spring. Six in ten found commuting to be stressful or very stressful, although that figure is somewhat smaller (52%) within the 416. (Environics’ results are based on 1,436 responses to an online survey.)

If one follows the logic of this week’s casino rhetoric to its logical conclusion, it seems probable that the ballot question in 2014 will be this: Should Toronto have a casino on the waterfront? I’d put money on it. The brothers Ford desperately want the 2014 election to be about that most reliable of motherhood issues, subways. But finance minister Dwight (“Golden Mile”) Duncan and Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. chairman Paul Godfrey may have unleashed a willing-host process that could dramatically alter the race – in effect, setting in motion a dynamic that could favour a challenger who figures out how to conflate a referendum on casinos with a referendum on the incumbent. Consider the emerging architecture of this issue: The province is determined to build a casino in the Greater Toronto. But as Duncan told The Globe and Mail in April, “We will work with those who want to work with us. We certainly won’t impose anything on anybody [italics added].” While Godfrey has warned that the OLGC would choose Mississauga or some other exotic suburban locale if Toronto didn’t get its act together quickly, one casino official who appeared at executive committee Monday quickly put the lie to that particular threat. As MGM Grand and Gerry Schwartz and all the other, uh, gamers have said in no uncertain terms, a Toronto waterfront site is the proverbial jackpot. In other words, the deep-pocketed suitors are saying to the province, don’t fold just yet.

In  Saturday’s Globe and Mail, I wrote about a Markham councillor – a conservative, no less – who has a radically sensible notion: That Metrolinx and the Toronto Transit Commission should actually work together to create an integrated transit network. Imagine that: cooperation in the public sector. What a concept! In particular, Jim Jones has been talking up a plan to twin the tracks on the GO rail corridors, buy electric trains, and develop a two-tier express/local commuter rail service linked to the TTC’s east-west lines. Building on the anti-diesel movement in the west end, Jones’ scheme not only delivers rapid transit to Scarborough, it also opens up a space to re-cast the debate about the downtown relief line, which, to date, focuses mainly on another subway line. But before Jones’ untested idea can receive any kind of serious technical and financial scrutiny, the province and the city need to make a concerted effort to coordinate the way Metrolinx and the TTC carry out their long-ranging planning. The lack of interoperability between GO and the TTC is an old and much commented-upon phenomena rooted in jurisdictional rivalries and the physical constraints of the city’s rail infrastructure. The consequences are writ large on our geography: with a few exceptions – Union Station, Yorkdale, Finch, etc. – the GO network doesn’t connect to the TTC, and the city, for its part, turns its back on the GO stops (e.g., Oriole Station, hidden cleverly under the 401, off Leslie).

Is there an app that would help Mayor Rob Ford figure out the transit file? Late Friday afternoon, the mayor’s office leaked the news that the city’s 2011 year-end surplus will be $285 million (net), which is a good deal larger than the initial projections, although somewhat south of what David Miller (and his budget chair Shelley Carroll) achieved in the final year of the previous term. Those dollars, according to council policy, are to be placed in a fund for the purchase of replacement streetcars. When I consider the current council’s fiscal policies, this one stands out and deserves praise, on several fronts: First, municipal governments need healthy reserve funds. Second, council’s decision to impose policy discipline on said reserves not only establishes an important precedent – earmarked transit funding; it also builds some much needed transparency into the always opaque budgeting process. The provincial Liberals, prior to the recession, enacted a similar measure – legislation requires that any budgetary surpluses be distributed to municipalities for infrastructure – as did Paul Martin, who, in his tenure as federal finance minister, split surpluses evenly between debt reduction and targeted investments, such as post-secondary education.

It often seems that Greater Toronto is forever poised at the cusp of an ah-ha moment when it comes to creating a more sustainable and sensible transportation system that is at least marginally less fixated on the needs of the private automobile. There was the great federal gas tax debate of 2004; the McGuinty government’s decision to establish Metrolinx to manage regional transportation planning; the launch of David Miller’s Transit City; the province’s Move 2020 strategy; the Board of Trade’s wake-up calls about the costs of gridlock. And so on. Now consider the past week: Following the release of the Spacing-Environics poll showing 74% public support for an Los Angeles-style regional sales tax, we had John Tory’s CivicAction coalition launching a big push on the need for a GTA-wide transit investment strategy (which Metrolinx must deliver by June, 2013), as well as the release of a Pembina Institute survey, which showed that stressed out drivers are willing to try a bunch of different fixes – everything from tolls and pay-as-you-go insurance to a regional sales tax – to reduce the time they spend stuck in traffic. The support levels vary from poll to poll, but what seems clear is that public interest in paying for some kind of solution has crept up since last year and now hovers, ever so precariously, in majority terrain. The reason, as Royson James correctly observed in The Saturday Star, is that Mayor Rob Ford’s preposterous pledge to build a no-money-down subway on Sheppard took this debate out of the policy shops and onto the streets, where it belongs.

Greater Toronto residents would overwhelmingly support the concept of a Los Angeles-style regional sales tax dedicated to transit and infrastructure, according to a new poll conducted by Environics exclusively for Spacing. The poll indicates that 74% of the respondents said they “somewhat” (49%) or “strongly agreed” (25%) with an earmarked tax, while only 26% said they were opposed (“somewhat opposed” 17%, and "strongly opposed" 9%). The dramatic results suggest a significant number of GTA voters would back taxes that promise to relieve worsening vehicle congestion that now costs the region $6 billion a year in lost productivity, according to the Toronto Board of Trade. "The findings show public is primed and ready for a meaningful discussion about the future of transit in the GTA," says Darren Karasiuk, Environics' vice-president of corporate and public affairs. Using an online survey (see method description at bottom of this post) rather than a random phone sample, Environics asked 1,436 respondents the following question: “In 2008, the Los Angeles regional government held a binding referendum that asked residents if they would support a 0.5%increase to the L.A. County sales tax for 30 years, with the proceeds – estimated at around $40 billion – dedicated to rapid transit and some road infrastructure. If this sort of tax – with the proceeds clearly dedicated to transit and local infrastructure – was introduced in your municipality, would you support or oppose it?” For Metrolinx, the GTA regional transit agency, and the provincial Liberal government, the most attention-grabbing detail about the finding is that the level of public support runs high right across the GTA, not just in the City of Toronto, with its high level of transit usage.

The problem with the #StClairDisaster debate, so-called, is that the extreme rhetorical polarization whipped up by the brothers Ford precludes any rational discussion about how to make practical improvements where they are warranted. The Fords couldn’t give a damn about St. Clair — their target audience mainly lives elsewhere. But you’d think that Cesar Palacio, the local councillor, would realize his incessant carping about the alleged carnage on St. Clair is inflicting all sorts of brand harm on the retailers he purports to support. After all, he’s spent years telling their prospective customers to steer clear. At some point, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy (in case the Corso Italia BIA is still looking for someone to blame). As for local drivers, Palacio and the dwindling collection of Ford allies have been conspicuously silent about how the city might make some targeted fixes to improve bottlenecks, especially on the western stretches of St. Clair. Again, the question begs: why isn’t Palacio trying to mitigate his constituents’ driving problems instead of whining ceaselessly? After all, the right-of-way ain’t going anywhere. From what I’ve heard and observed, there are a handful of hot-spots that raise everyone’s temperature: the bottlenecks under the railway bridge near Keele, the westbound turn lanes east of Oakwood, and on the east-bound lanes between Vaughan and Bathurst. It’s also clear that parked cars pose a particular sort of impediment when they’re left on those stretches adjacent to the streetcar stops.

How many times, since Mayor Rob Ford took office, did we hear how his patrons in Ottawa would make subway dollars appear, both as a reward to the good folk of Scarborough for seeing the conservative light, municipally-speaking, but also as a sly down-payment for future federal elections? As recently as this month, Prime Minister Harper turned up at Toronto’s island airport and waxed on about how he prefers to take subways when he takes transit (which, I’m guessing, is something he hasn’t done in many a moon). But last week’s federal budget contained no new money for transit, much less a subway. Despite positioning the 2012 budget as a kind of long-term planning document, the Tories had nothing to say about a national transit strategy. They offered no private sector pot-sweeteners (e.g., funds for Triple-P projects). The only (very) remotely transit-oriented move was additional funding for VIA repairs. In short, the Ford-Flaherty-subway love-in turned out to be nothing more than the usual political bait-and-switch operation (are you listening Scarborough voters?). And the days following the budget announcement the Fords, of course, didn’t call out the Tories for abandoning them on the transit file. Indeed, the loathed Dalton McGuinty Liberals turned out to be much more trustworthy on the transit file, coming through (in the context of their budget) on the pledge not to whittle more off the $8.4 billion earmarked for rapid transit in Toronto. The brothers had nothing to say about that budget either, even though, as we all know, the LRT will create untold #StClairDisasters in ‘burbs.

Rob Ford’s truculent behaviour in the wake of last week’s council decision raises a question that is surely setting Dalton McGuinty’s teeth on edge: How will the mayor react to Metrolinx’s long-overdue investment strategy that will lay out a plan to create a system of levies and taxes designed to fund the balance of the agency’s $50 billion/25 year Big Move plan, approved in 2009. Under the Metrolinx legislation, that strategy must be released no later than June 2013. The mayor, cheered on by the mischief-makers who comprise the Gang of Six Scarborough Liberal MPPs, is threatening to spend the balance of the term doing everything in his power to oppose LRTs on Eglinton, Sheppard and Finch. He doesn’t have a paper-clip’s worth of regulatory authority to block those projects, but he can certainly keep moving his mouth. And since he soaks up media attention like stale bread soaks up water, his rabble-rousing rhetoric is a problem of the first order. I’d say it is almost 100% certain that at some point in the near future, the brothers Ford will add Metrolinx to the list of villains allegedly seeking to screw Scarborough. After all, the agency will build, own and possibly operate those lines, so it becomes a convenient target for the Fords’ anger, as well as their dual-track political goals: getting re-elected and defeating the Liberals, who created Metrolinx. Indeed, the investment strategy — which could either be imposed on the GTA by fiat or foisted on the municipalities to implement individually — becomes a choice bogey-man for the Fords and Tim Hudak’s Tories: a massive tax grab that will wreak decades of St. Clair-style “boondoggles” not just on Toronto, but the entire region.

The Great Subway Battle of 2012™ was Mayor Rob Ford’s to lose, and he lost it with such single-mindedness and determination that this episode may well go down in Toronto history as the textbook example of political self-immolation. Future generations of urban government students and ambitious party operatives will sift through the sorry details for shards of insight on how to avoid IEDs and devastating missteps. Indeed, a new phrase – “they really Forded that issue” – should enter our lexicon. Scarborough’s long-suffering residents will be encouraged to believe that their craving for rapid transit was thwarted — again! — by a collection of hypocritical downtown pinkos and a small team of ideological turncoats.