It’s up to McGuinty to save Toronto from Ford

It’s up to Premier Dalton McGuinty to take control of the transit file to save Toronto from itself. The ball’s in his court.

Christopher Hume, Opinion, The Toronto Star:

As Toronto Mayor Rob Ford has made humiliatingly clear, cities — this one, anyway — are not just dysfunctional, but incompetent.

The ritual firing of TTC chief general manager Gary Webster this week was a case in point: The five Ford minions who did His Worship’s dirty work at the commission didn’t know the first thing about what they were doing. In the end, they couldn’t even appoint Webster’s 2IC, Australian Andy Byford, acting chief general manager because his work permit doesn’t allow it.

That’s why it’s up to Premier Dalton McGuinty to take control of the transit file to save Toronto from itself. The ball’s in his court.

Cheaper and more efficient, surface light rail transit is the way to go, the experts tell us. Subways are nice, but cost three times as much. Ontario, let alone Toronto, is economically strung out, lurching from crisis to crisis, its credit rating hanging by a thread.

Given that the province is covering the $8.4 billion price tag of Toronto’s transit expansion, it will want to ensure we get the biggest bang for its buck. In Ford’s scheme, the Eglinton LRT would run underground from end to end, adding $2 billion to the cost, money that could be better spent elsewhere on Sheppard or Finch.

Ford’s rigid insistence that all new transit go below grade makes so little sense, it provoked an unprecedented council revolt led by his chosen TTC chair, Karen Stintz. She persuaded council to bury Ford’s plan in favour of hers, which would run partly above and below the street.

Ford’s response, nasty, brutish and petulant, was to brand council “irrelevant” and fire Webster “without cause.”

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