…. Toronto seems doomed to get what it “needs”, not what it wants.
Doug Ford, the Premier of Ontario, having just ensured that we can crack a cold one in the park, has very public, very bad plans for the people of Toronto, Ontario’s, and Canada’s, largest city. Taking more than a hint from Trumpism, which he performatively abhors, but not-so-secretly admires, Ford, I suspect, also has plans for himself. Neither of these plans has any connection with making Toronto more liveable, more compassionate, or even more financially secure.
Let’s deal with his plans for himself, because they’ll take up less time. You may have noticed how Doug Ford thrust himself forward during the power vacuum that occurred between prime ministers Justin and Mark. His pushback against Trump’s rhetoric about 51st states and tariffs on Canada the Terrible seemed almost noble, when you didn’t look at it too closely.
But Doug doesn’t do anything just to be noble. There’s always something in it for Doug. He was so in yer face with his defence of Canadian values (yes, it’s a thing) that for a time I was convinced that Americans would think he was the new prime minister.
That confusion out of the way, he continued hogging, and I use the word advisedly, the spotlight, pouring bottles of Crown Royal whiskey onto the ground for the benefit of bemused reporters (he brought the bottle from home, of course) to protest the closing of a bottling plant, and even commissioning an anti-tariff ad showcasing Ronald Reagan voicing his objections to tariffs from beyond the grave.
It’s getting interesting when a dead Ronald Reagan is shown to have more common-sense insight into the downside of tariffs as policy than a living Prez, but then, it’s hard to think of any politican in history who hasn’t been rehabilitated in comparison, including George W Bush and maybe even Napoleon. (Is Elba still open for exiles?)
It was at this sore point of Ford poking the American bear that Mark Carney “had a word” and Ford reined it in. Mark may just be a clever bureaucrat at present, but it must have been galling to have a provincial premier forget his place and subvert Mark’s attempts at serpent-charming (which at any rate are always temporary, seeing as Trump has obvious and serious problems with short-term memory).
But you know, and can I just say, seriously. I couldn’t help but see, in Ford’s anti-American bluster, inklings of testing the waters for a run at prime minister. He seems to be firm in denying any such ambitions; though he famously joked, in 2020, when he was mistakenly referred to as Prime Minister, “not yet”. I’ll just leave my crystal ball on the table, and we’ll see what horrors the future brings. Ford is famously opaque, so his repeated assertions that he wants to end his days as Premier, merely subverting the federal conservatives whenever he fancies, as a kind of low-impact sport, like pub darts, may very well be a rare instance of his stating the unvarnished truth.
I will say, Ford gave a pretty convincing show about not wanting Canadians to be pushed around. And it caused me no end of mental cramps, a physical state I suffer from when someone of such consistently malevolent intent seems to do something I could approve of. It confuses me, makes me suspicious. For example, until he started opening up businesses way too early during the pandemic because of impatience (grandmas are a dime a dozen, but you only ever get one economy, y’all) and giving conflicting messaging about lock-downs and masking, I was almost grudgingly on the verge of declaring him a competent leader.
This is what happens when someone is so ideologically, blockheadedly driven, so lacking in humanity and so unattuned to the will of a huge constituency of unwilling subjects, then does the bare minimum expected: mere competence becomes the ultimate macaroni picture that you stick on the fridge because your six-year-old made it, their splayed clumsy fingers clotted with craft glue.
That’s how I figured out what was going on with the noble defence against Trump: It’s jealousy. If anyone’s going to push Canadians around, especially Torontonians, it’s going to be Ford. He’s got it all: the self-serving public projects that no one wants, the ruling by edict, the public complaints against judges who won’t grant his injunctions, the insistence that public benefits like healthcare need a private restructuring.
All in the family
If you know Rob Ford, Toronto’s lowest of the low Mayor in 2011, who famously admitted to smoking crack (well, there was a video as proof) and who raised Toronto’s profile immensely as a punch line for late night TV hosts, you know Doug. Doug’s fun moment came when Margaret Atwood objected publicly to proposed library cuts, and he remarked, not ironically, “Margaret who?”
That’s Ford to perfection: just plain folks, none of that artsy literature that’s only useful to catch the splishies from your Tim Horton double-double.
Credible sources came forward in 2013 to claim Doug, in his earlier, wilder days, was a dealer in hashish; he has always denied this. (To quote Mandy Rice-Davies: “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?” ) Interesting parallel with MAGA: the Ford equivalent, dubbed “Fordnation,” became ever so much more loyal after these allegations.
It’s the same playbook: he’s the feisty rebel, unafraid to take unpopular stands, deplore “red tape” (environmental studies), affirm folksy wisdom and common sense, to shame those effete liberal bleeding hearts. (“Woke” wasn’t yet a thing, but if it had been, they would have.)
Rob Ford’s term as mayor ended in disgrace; not long after, he died of cancer. Enter Doug, with Fordnation already primed to support him, and, with the amalgamation of the City of Toronto with its suburban fringes in place since 1998 (under the leadership of another common sense conservative, Mike Harris), Doug sought, and won, the premiership.
Now it was time for the humiliation of Toronto, payback for the humiliation his brother had suffered while in office. Progressive Toronto, overwhelmed by the conservative ‘burbs, would have to fight for its life, for its bike lanes, harm reduction sites, affordable housing, cultural institutions aspiring to be world-class, a beautiful waterfront snatched from the maw of past industrialization.
Our common sense foes were the yokels, clueless, well-meaning suburbanites, Doug’s neighbours, in fact, who demanded more roads for their cars, and sneered at cyclists; who balked at helping drug users they saw as criminal, who lived in detached suburban homes on an acre of golf course, and, dedicated to the hockey rink like novices to their religious order, never darkened the doors of a theatre, concert hall, library or opera house. They’d swim in their swimming pools, thanks, not Lake Ontario.
For you see, Toronto, as a Canadian city, is a creature of the province, with virtually no way to raise revenue except through property taxes. It goes cap in hand, begging, to the provincial and federal governments.
And it’s been every bit as dire as you can imagine. But the worst was yet to come.
Thank you, we hate it.
Toronto does not know, cannot know, what we want or what is good for us, ungrateful, elite wretches that we are. We just live here.
In Toronto’s harbour lies a serene, car-free archipelago, the Toronto Islands, a much-beloved park which is a 15-minute ferry ride from the aggressive glass and steel skyscrapers of downtown. Originally a peninsula formed by littoral drift (basically sandbars), these interconnecting islands were cut off from the mainland by a violent storm in 1858. The surge was so powerful, it breached the narrowest part of the peninsula, creating a channel 150 metres wide.
The islands were expanded in the early 20th century with sand dredged from the bottom of Lake Ontario. The Islands are now a treasured retreat from the city, featuring a nostalgic amusement park with fountains and rides and picnic areas; a bohemian village of a few hundred people who reside year-round, a clothing optional beach, hidden lagoons, manicured parkland, and even an historic “haunted” lighthouse.
There is also a small airport dating from the 1930’s, now going by the official name Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport. Hold that thought.
As with Trump, it’s hard to focus when there are so many egregious violations of public trust by the Ford government, from taking over bike lanes from the city, cancelling speed cameras on dangerous stretches of city roads, abrupt closing of safe use sites for people struggling with addiction, an attempt at developing a green belt around the city to raise the land’s value for the benefit of donors to Ford’s election campaigns… today I want to tell you about Toronto’s waterfront. It’s a proxy for everything frustrating, corrupt and bloody-minded that Ford has attempted.
Since the 1990’s, Toronto has poured loving care and millions of dollars into developing our waterfront to be a treasure for current residents and future generations. Formerly characterized largely by industrial wasteland, the city has created beaches, parks, housing, and cultural venues that are meant to capitalize on our glorious Lake Ontario waterfront, offer recreation and respite to city-dwellers, and attract tourism. That we’re a lakefront city is our “brand”.
Enter Doug Ford.
Remember that small airport on the Toronto Islands, dating from the 1930s? It’s a STOL (short take off and landing) facility, and Porter Airlines operates Turboprops there: aircraft that use gas turbines to drive a propellor. They’re suited to short-haul flights, and can get airborne very quickly, a necessity when the runway is limited by the surrounding water.
While you’ll see small private “Cessnas” and the occasional “Ornge” air ambulance helicopter, the workhorse of the island is the De Havilland Dash 8-400 (formerly known as the Bombardier Q400).
The Q stands for “quiet”, because they have an active vibration and noise suppression system to minimize disruption to the Islands’ and downtown core’s residents.
Porter Airlines wants to extend the airport runway so that fully-fledged jet aircraft can use the airport, but the federal government quashed that idea for environmental reasons in 2015. (Porter already deploys jet aircraft from Toronto’s Pearson International.)
Now Porter is reviving the idea and Doug Ford is so very much salivating at the prospect of more money in provincial coffers. Provincial? Yes, because he intends to wrest control of the airport from the city to ensure expansion and the introduction of jets “one way or another”.
That grim determination in the face of every objection is utterly typical of Ford’s penchant for signing on to deals that, despite his plain-talking fakery, invariably are wildly one-sided, to the point of bribery.
(He’s already penned a deal for a waterfront spa on the mainland, to be built by an Austrian company with no track record, with a 95-year lease, and a 2-million dollar penalty if the negotiated parking spots aren’t ready in time. Prep has just started for this white elephant, and has already destroyed a heritage site, a park, eight hundred mature tress, and may necessitate a messy and polluting infill to the lake for an underground parking garage, for a facility that no one in Toronto wanted. If it fails? Toronto’s on the hook for 650 million.
(Similarly, he is determined —”this will happen!”— to create an underground highway under an existing highway, the 401, that traverses the city east to west, thinking to ease traffic congestion, ignoring the long-proven result that more highways simply fill with even more cars; it’s called “induced demand”, and even a five-year-old could figure this out. Contractors have also pointed out that there are no boring tools up to the task, and that the tunnel would be in grave danger of collapsing.)
Getting back to our runway extension: true to the Trumpian script, he described the Island residents as “squatters who pay $1 a year”, characterizing them as standing in the way of an “economic driver” for the province.
As you’d expect by now, this is a grossly misleading Trumpian description. The Island residents pay a one-time lease cost (currently $60k – $78k) and maintain their homes (really just cottages) under strict provincial legislation. His comments are intended to fuel resentment, to color these residents as hopeless hippies and Luddites.
That shocking, contemptuous attitude is a baked-in Ford feature, whether he’s talking cuts to student grants (now to be loans):”Stop taking basket-weaving courses”; protestors (“get a job!”) or environmentalists (“worried about a couple of birds!”).
But that’s not all. Just days ago, on March 11th, the environmental assessment was released that details the impact that lengthening the runways would have.
But here’s the deal: The EA was done in 2017 and buried, never released until now, nine years later, because it is a damning account of how jets at Billy Bishop would destroy the waterfront and become a permanent blight.
One way or another?
Waterfront For All’s summary of the EA is a depressing list of what Ford is bent on gifting us. On public health, a jet scenario increases micro particulates in the atmosphere, raising the risk of lesions in the upper airway, as well as cardiac problems—Ford, it seems, is glad to risk your long-term health for the sake of his pet project. On marine navigation, jet blast in the Western Channel could overturn small recreational boats and create manoeuvring problems even for larger vessels. On socio‑economic effects, the EA lists the obvious: more congestion, more air traffic affecting residents’ use and enjoyment of their homes, a runway extension that visually intrudes on the lake, and a squeeze on the space available for kayakers and sailors.
Then there’s the look of the thing. To make jets “safe,” the design calls for 20‑foot‑high jet‑blast walls—fibreglass barriers propped up on steel girders—at the runway ends and along the sides, plus sound barriers and, as the report delicately puts it, “potential for increased odours.” Nothing says world‑class waterfront like living in the shadow of a fibreglass bunker that smells like a gas station.
What makes this more than a parochial noise fight is the way it locks the city in. A jet‑expanded Billy Bishop is not something you easily unwind in twenty years when downtown is hotter, denser and more climate‑stressed than it is today. Runways, blast walls and terminal expansions are capital‑intensive, politically sticky infrastructure; once they’re in place, they will be impossible to unravel; future councils will be told they’re “too important to touch,” no matter how bad the externalities get.
The late arrival of the Billy Bishop EA is a gift, in a bleak way. It gives Torontonians something Doug Ford and the Port Authority would rather we didn’t have: proof of Ford’s deviousness, his truly evil intent to put profit before people.
The 2017 assessment and its peer review show, in careful bureaucratic prose, that jets at the island airport are fundamentally at odds with the waterfront we have spent a generation trying to build. They show that the costs—health, noise, lost public space, lost flexibility for the future—are real and borne by the many, while the benefits go to the few.
Ford would like to turn that into another culture‑war skirmish: downtown elites versus “jobs,” cranky homeowners versus “progress,” kayakers versus “growth.” The truth is more boring and more damning: this is yet another instance of his government treating democratic processes, evidence and long‑term public interest as obstacles to be bulldozed in favour of short‑term headlines and private gain.
And to think Ford called the speed cameras on Toronto streets, that are proven to reduce drivers’ speed and save lives, a “cash grab”! What a nasty piece of hypocritical, snake-oil peddling trash he is, our “Peoples’ Premier.”
Toronto Can Say No
Toronto’s citizens are fed up with the wanton destruction of our city, with treating our environment as infrastructure, with treating future generations as not worthy of consideration, helpless victims of one man’s dismissive wave of his hand.
Toronto can say no. We said no in the late sixties, to the Spadina Expressway, a highway that would have destroyed neighbourhoods and split the city in two. With the grass-roots leadership of the great Jane Jacobs, and the persistence of dedicated citizens, that “inevitable” project was stopped cold. But then, we had a premier who listened and understood.
To whom can we insist that any decision about the future of the island airport starts with the people of Toronto? Who do we turn to? We have to, one way or another, make a noise, my friends: an ear-shattering noise, born from our outrage,
a noise that Doug Ford won’t easily mistake for the roaring of the jets he so contemptuously insists upon.
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