Against the odds, Rob Ford’s opponents won the budget fight. Now they’re coming to rescue Transit City—and they might actually pull it off.
The local group of activists calling themselves Code Red, who are dedicated to overturning the mayor’s transit policy, got a morale boost on Jan. 17. That’s when a group of centrist city councillors managed to rewrite the mayor’s budget and prove that fighting Rob Ford (and winning) is possible if the public makes its wishes known.
Their cause gained yet more traction earlier this week when TTC chair Karen Stintz, a Ford appointee and loyalist, told The Globe and Mail that she opposes the mayor’s vision for an entirely buried rapid-transit line on Eglinton Avenue. The next day, the chair of the provincial agency Metrolinx, which is ultimately responsible for building transit in Toronto, said his organization was open to reverting to the pre-Ford above-ground rail plan if that’s what the people of Toronto want.
Stintz joins conservative councillors John Parker and Michael Thompson in opposing the mayor on his underground dreams—and they are merely the most influential voices in a growing choir calling for a return to at least some aspects of the less car-centric transportation plan put forward by previous mayor David Miller.
Ford’s decision to bury the entire length of the Eglinton line, at a premium of some $2.2 billion, has drawn widespread scorn. Momentum to revert to the original blueprints, at least on Eglinton, is clearly mounting. Still, changing course on the transit file will be much tougher and more complicated than rewriting the budget. To reverse course on transit, Ford’s opponents will have to convince the province to veto the mayor’s beloved subway plan and implement an entirely different strategy, over his loud objections. But such a feat is not unprecedented, and the lessons of one of Toronto’s proudest moments show how such a fight can transform the city’s political culture.
When the beloved urbanism guru Jane Jacobs moved to Toronto in 1968, she was already famous for writing The Death and Life of Great American Cities—the most influential urban-planning book in history. But she quickly made her mark on her new home by helping to stop the construction of the planned Spadina Expressway, and with it the construction of an entire network of expressways that would have criss-crossed Toronto.
The expressways had been in the works for more than 20 years by the time Jacobs arrived; the network had begun with the building of the Don Valley Parkway and the Gardiner Expressway. The planned Spadina Expressway was under construction by 1963, and the city planned to build another five expressways—levelling parts of Rosedale, Scarborough, Eglinton West and either Keele or Clinton Street in the process.
By 1969, the Spadina Expressway already extended south from above the 401 to Eglinton Avenue (today’s Allen Expressway). Plans called for it to proceed down along Spadina through the Annex, terminating in Chinatown. But a number of Annex residents who would have seen their neighbourhood bulldozed by the new road began organizing to stop it. Jacobs formed a group called the “Stop Spadina, Save Our City Co-ordinating Committee” with University of Toronto professors David Nowlan and Alan Powell, shopkeeper Nadine Nowlan, politician John Sewell (who was elected to Toronto city council to oppose the expressway in 1969), architects Colin Vaughan (father of current city councillor Adam Vaughan) and Jack Diamond, artists Michael Snow and Harold Town, and many others. They sent around mimeographed newsletters, circulated petitions and threw parties, neighbourhood by neighbourhood. Communications visionary Marshall McLuhan even made a short film to agitate against the expressway’s construction.
The Liberal chairman of Metro’s regional government, Albert Campbell, and the NDP mayor of Toronto, William Dennison, remained firmly committed to the road-building plan. Dennison said it was simply a small band of downtown loudmouths protesting: “Lots of tracks in the mud but really only a very few rabbits making the marks.” After a legal battle, the Ontario Municipal Board ruled in favour of the city’s plan.
Unbowed, the protesters, now representing a mass movement of Torontonians, appealed directly to the one person who could overrule the municipal authorities: Progressive Conservative Premier Bill Davis. In June 1971, Davis rose in parliament to declare the expressway dead. “Cities were built for people and not cars. If we were building a transportation system to serve the automobile, the Spadina Expressway would be a good place to start,” he famously said. “But if we are building a transportation system to serve people, the Spadina Expressway is a good place to stop.”
Indeed, the rest of the highway network was eventually cancelled and, in 1972, the movement that stopped Spadina helped sweep a reform council into office that was led by Progressive Conservative “Tiny Perfect Mayor” David Crombie. The environmentalist, urbanist, neighbourhood-based principles that had motivated the anti-expressway movement found application in building the city: Crombie’s mayorship led Harper’s magazine to nickname Toronto “The City That Works,” and the era is widely remembered as a renaissance in Toronto’s development.
The death of the Spadina Expressway and the U-turn it marked in the philosophy of city-building in Toronto is invoked so often it can seem like the greying Annex book-launch crowd’s answer to winning the high-school football championship.
Still, the parallels here are almost too clear to ignore: Both the Spadina Expressway battle and the current struggle to change the mayor’s transit strategy involve giant, expensive infrastructure plans. Both involve authorities openly advocating quick car travel as the top priority. Both feature the provincial government as the highest court of appeal, and a popular movement of residents hell-bent on overruling the mayor’s office to better serve the many neighbourhoods of Toronto.
There are a lot of things Code Red and its supporters can learn from the Spadina Expressway story, but three core principles stand out:
1. It’s not about lines on a map, it’s about making better neighbourhoods.
Code Red has begun earnestly trying to build support for revisiting the mayor’s rapid-transit plan. A few key activists, including some who helped lead the successful debate to overrule Doug Ford’s waterfront ferris-wheel vision, say they noticed the groundswell of disgust with the mayor’s new plan and started talking to various other organizations—Save Transit City and the Toronto Environmental Alliance—about organizing a movement. They’ve already got the attention of centrist politicians such as Josh Matlow and the support of leftist politicians. But they already know, as Stop Spadina did, that the most influential voices will be those of residents living on the proposed or cancelled transit lines, especially residents on Finch West in Etobicoke and Sheppard East in Scarborough, who find themselves left out of Ford’s revised plan. Code Red has prepared postcards contrasting the two transit plans and pointing out why—both in dollars and in service levels—they think the old light-rail plan was superior. And they’re taking their message out to Rexdale and Malvern to rally local residents to their cause.
2. Good city-building is blind to political affiliations.
In the Spadina battle, prominent Liberals, New Democrats, Conservatives and unaligned hippies and artists got together to ask a Tory premier to veto the plans of an NDP-Liberal city administration. In this sense, both the entrenched Miller/NDP allies on council, as well as its centrists (many of whom are members of the Liberal Party) and proud conservatives such as Parker and Stintz, can be enlisted in a common cause, made stronger for its pan-partisan membership.
3. The specific battle over transportation is about something much larger than rail lines—it can transform the city.
Just as the Stop Spadina movement served as both focal point and incubator for a civic philosophy that transformed Toronto’s government for two generations, today’s fight over transit is about an entire philosophy of city building.
It’s about spending money wisely, first and foremost, and about a city run by democracy rather than by mayoral fiat. It’s also about re-affirming that the city’s primary function should not be to facilitate high-speed car travel. But in a larger, more important sense, it’s about finally connecting (literally and metaphorically) the residents of the city’s furthest inner-suburban corners to the network that ties the city together. Metrolinx has indicated that a clear statement of the city’s desire will be enough to overrule the mayor. Building the kind of movement that can articulate that desire could—as the Spadina fight did—spark a new city-building political culture that has the potential to define Toronto for decades.
