EDITORIAL: Push to modernize transit will be Ford’s legacy

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Ontario Premier Doug Ford has had a successful run since being elected in 2018, but perhaps more than anything else, he deserves credit for expanding the subway system in Canada’s largest city.

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The Ontario Line will introduce nearly 16 km of track to the fastest-growing city in North America, but it wasn’t easy. Initially conceived as the Downtown Relief Line, it has been mired in politics and bureaucracy for decades – until Doug Ford came along and made it happen.

Without Ford’s initiative, the Ontario Line would still be aspirational rather than under construction, although that seems lost on Toronto’s chattering liberal class, for whom swallowing cyanide might be preferable to bestowing even a soupcon of credit upon a Conservative.

The Ontario Line is no doubt a legacy project for a premier who will be remembered for building the most significant infrastructure project the city has seen in decades.

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Ford is presently being chided from all angles for his stance on bicycle lanes in Toronto, even though it’s one of the most congested cities in the world. It doesn’t take an urban planner to figure out that augmenting mass transit, not expanding underused bike lanes (which are used by a mere 1.2% of the residents, according to census data), is the solution.

Nearly two decades after the Ontario Liberals introduced the Places to Grow Act, in part to curtail congestion, the tribulations of navigating Toronto’s factory farm-like conditions have exposed kinks in the legislation’s armour.

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Bloor Street is down to a single lane in either direction along the hyper-dense expanse west of Spadina Avenue. Further to the north, Eglinton Avenue has been saddled with a bike lane that virtually no one uses but has somehow managed to make traffic around the notoriously congested Allen Road intersection even worse than before.

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Ford’s initiatives have nevertheless done precious little to stem the barrage of criticism he receives on a quotidian basis. And the Toronto Star, which dropped the mitts against the Ford family long ago, is unsurprisingly front and centre.

It recently ran a column accusing Ford of trying to hoodwink voters with trivialities like permitting grocers and convenience stores to sell alcohol. It’s a shrill rebuke that reeks of the same patronizing paternalism that’s mugged the province’s hard-working taxpayers of the same consumer liberty that neighbouring Quebec has enjoyed from what seems like time immemorial.

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The Star’s petty, low-rent reprimand ignores the fact that Ford is merely adhering to arguably the most salient principle of free-market capitalism: competition between vendors results in lower consumer prices.

The Star must have forgotten that its columnists have also advocated for the exact thing Ford codified into law, having noted in the past that the Beer Store is a foreign-owned “cartel-cum-monopoly” and that its stores feel like “Stalinist relics … designed by Communist apparatchiks for the beer-swilling lumpenproletariat.”

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The Star might need a primer on its on its own founding principles and mission statement, which says that it believes in “individual and civil liberties,” and works to “focus public attention on injustices of all kinds.” Those “injustices” apparently don’t include corporations colluding to price-gouge increasingly immiserated consumers.

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The reality is that such free market policies augment razor-thin profit margins for entrepreneurs, many of whom pour their life savings into ventures like neighbourhood convenience stores, and in case the chattering liberal class in Toronto hasn’t noticed, everything is more expensive.

That includes small businesses’ overheads, but alcohol sales will help – and considering that you’d be hard-pressed to find a pint anywhere in Toronto for under $9, Ford’s push to increase competition and choice is great news for consumers and businesses alike.

The portion of Hwy. 401 running through Toronto is North America’s busiest and the bane of the city’s drivers. Weekday or weekend, day or night, drivers can expect a slow commute.

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Ford has proposed building a tunnel below the highway to augment traffic flow. It’s an ambitious project that comes with considerable risk – just look at Boston’s “Big Dig,” which suffered years of delays and billions in cost overruns. Yet Ford’s army of media critics have only admonished his idea instead of offering their own solutions to the city’s traffic woes.

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Ford is a lightning rod for Canadian media, most of which has a liberal bias that perhaps explains why they’re more interested in tearing him down than proffering policies of their own. They offer criticism without any real solutions of their own, which reeks of partisanship and does little to further public discourse.

Urban planners and left-wing commentators are fond of gaslighting Canadians by pointing to bike-lane usage in cities such as Beijing, Paris and Amsterdam, where temperatures rarely dip below freezing, and using the “If you build it, they will come” argument.

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But the fact remains that Canada does not have the bike culture of a country like China, and no matter how bad traffic gets, the prospect of riding a bicycle through the snow when it’s -20C outside will remain unappealing to most Canadians.

Unfortunately, Ford’s critics seem completely devoid of solutions of their own, repeating tired cliches about how bike lanes are the answer to all our problems and building new roads will only invite more traffic.

Toronto fancies itself Canada’s answer to Manhattan – and in a way it is, if exorbitant rent and gridlock factor into the equation – but if that dream ever becomes reality, Ford’s push to modernize transit and ease congestion will have played an outsized role.

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