From 2022:
Behind the scenes of an $11-billion subway war
"The letter wasn’t a formal notice of expropriation but rather a friendly heads-up. “We thank you in advance for your understanding,” it read.
Three of Keeley’s neighbours received the same letter that week, sending a current of panic crackling through the community. The homes were to be bulldozed to make room for the tunnel entrance of a subway line that would, theoretically, emerge from the earth beneath their properties before rocketing across the valley on a new bridge. Residential expropriations in downtown Toronto are rare, but they do happen. Metrolinx will typically negotiate with homeowners and offer them market value for their property based on third-party appraisals. Often, they can’t come to an agreement, kick-starting the expropriation process and dragging both parties into a complex bureaucratic back-and-forth. In the end, if the province decides it needs a house, there’s little the homeowner can do about it. Since the letter’s arrival, Keeley and his neighbours have been in a state of anxious paralysis. You can’t sell a house that’s about to be taken by the government. How do you live with a wrecking ball hanging over your head, with the knowledge that every tulip bulb you plant or cabinet you fix will soon be pulverized into the dirt?
The Minton Place letters were part of a wave of Metrolinx announcements that washed over the city during the pandemic, each arriving with the same infuriating we-thank-you-in-advance-for-your-understanding tone of inevitability. In Thorncliffe Park, residents woke up one day in April of 2021 to discover that a storage facility the size of 21 soccer fields was being plunked down in their dense community. In Riverside and Leslieville, residents were shocked to learn that the agency planned to run the transit line right through the heart of their neighbourhood. And in August, the province expropriated the First Parliament Site on Front Street over howls of objection from residents, who had long-standing plans to turn the historical city block into a library, park and community hub.
Each of those moves was to make way for the Ontario Line, a 15.6-kilometre subway track...
The Ontario Line is the first downtown subway in Toronto in more than 50 years—a massive undertaking that has the potential to be as transformative, and as destructive, as any infrastructure project in living memory.
Announcing a megaproject is exciting. Cutting the ribbon is a triumph. In between is the ugly, contentious, sometimes devastating reality of building the thing. Oppositional neighbourhood groups have sprung up like mushrooms along each stretch of the line. They’ve formed war rooms over Zoom and in backyards, strategizing about how to beat back the Goliath of a provincial transportation agency. Expropriation lawyers, accustomed to a glacial pace of change in their field, have been jolted into action by the new legislation and by anxious clients.
The skirmishes erupting along the Ontario Line are a sequel to the battles that have marked the last decades of city-building in Toronto, pitting the sanctity of neighbourhoods against the needs of the region, the rights of current residents against the viability of future Torontonians. In a city that does its best to avoid hard choices, the massive project comes with an implicit message: in order for the majority of us to win much-needed transit, some of us will have to lose...
If it seems like the Ontario Line is happening fast, it’s also a century behind schedule: plans for a transit line along that approximate route have existed since 1910. In 1985, fresh from two decades of transit building, Metropolitan Toronto released its “Network 2011” plan... The plan was broadly popular, but downtown progressives mounted opposition to the relief line. Ten years earlier, these activists had defeated the Spadina Expressway, which would have torn through the Annex and destroyed scores of homes in the process. The urbanists who fought the expressway were part of a continent-wide rejection of the postwar megaprojects that plowed through neighbourhoods and razed low-income areas in the name of the greater good.
Jack Layton, then a young alderman, led downtown resistance to the relief line in the 1980s. He argued that the suburbs needed to be developed into their own self-sufficient communities. Making it easier to get downtown would only bring more people into the delicate ecosystem that was the old city of Toronto. In a 1984 Globe and Mail op-ed, John Sewell, the former mayor who had come to prominence during the Spadina Expressway battle, argued that the city needed to “stop talking about more expressways and subways going downtown.” He wrote, “we can’t grow forever and as things are now, the city works quite nicely, thank you.”
Network 2011 never happened. When transit-friendly premier Bill Davis resigned, he was replaced by leaders who balked at the plan’s $2.7-billion price tag. The next 40 years of transit planning were defined by political backtracking and indecision, with successive premiers and mayors unceremoniously cancelling the plans of their predecessors. By the mid-2000s, however, rush-hour hordes were crowding onto the Bloor-Yonge platforms, and in 2018, the TTC hit historically high congestion, with trains that were either 100 per cent full or near full for 90 minutes every morning.
Today, the basic concept of a relief line is that rarest thing in Toronto transit planning—a project that just about everyone acknowledges is necessary and overdue. And yet the politicking around the project has only grown more complicated. Today, the protective stance of Layton and Sewell has ossified into the dominant mode of thinking in progressive downtown neighbourhoods. You can hear its core themes at planning meetings and city hall deputations: a Jane Jacobs–inspired defensiveness over the heritage and character of communities, a distrust of large government projects, and an insistence on the primacy of consultation. The rhetoric once used to stop a neighbourhood-obliterating expressway is today used to protest an unsightly daycare or an inconvenient bus lane.
The response to the excesses of postwar urban renewal projects has been the rise of what urban planners Alan Altshuler and David Luberoff call the era of “do no harm planning,” where governments do everything in their power to steer away from opposition. In practice, that means burying subway lines at great cost in places like Scarborough in an effort to avoid contentious surface construction. It means putting transit lines along highway medians to avoid disrupting residential communities, even if those routes bypass the neighbourhoods most in need of transit. And it means pre-emptively cutting back on ambitious projects that would benefit the region but might inspire the ire of local groups...
When Maggi Redmonds first learned about the plans for the Ontario Line, she was appalled...
Metrolinx will add three tracks to the three that already exist, raise the entire track bed and rebuild six bridges. At peak hours, trains will zoom by every 90 seconds, guaranteeing a near-constant flow of rail traffic. For Redmonds, the plan seems like a blueprint for devastation that would turn her neighbourhood into a construction site for several years and then leave it as little more than a rail yard.
In early 2020, Redmonds attended a meeting organized by her neighbours and found they all had the same concerns. Why was an above-ground subway being pushed through the middle of their historic neighbourhood? And why was Metrolinx acting like this was a done deal? The residents quickly formed a group, EastEnd Transit Alliance, or EETA, to push back against the plan.
Throughout lockdowns and successive waves of Covid, as plans for the line moved forward, the group grew more militant. When some members of EETA wanted to meet with Metrolinx to figure out how to work with the agency, others were horrified. “The phrase they kept using was ‘We want a seat at the table,’ ” says Redmonds. If EETA members were discussing noise barriers with Metrolinx, it meant they’d given up on fighting to bury the line. To her, that wasn’t advocacy, it was capitulation. Shortly after, Redmonds and other hardline members left the group and moved to a new organization that would be single-mindedly devoted to pushing the Ontario Line underground.
The new group, “Save Jimmie Simpson,” was named after the beloved park east of the rail corridor that, the protesters believed, would be destroyed if Metrolinx had its way. Metrolinx says that the park is not, and has never been, in jeopardy of being expropriated, a fact that Save Jimmie Simpson now acknowledges. But the name stuck. This kind of misunderstanding has become a pattern for the Riverside protesters. They’ve extrapolated based on what little they’ve been told, and always with the underlying assumption that Metrolinx—which they have dubbed “Metrolies”—isn’t telling them the whole story. Then they present the most attention-grabbing version of that interpretation to their fellow residents.
One of the leaders of the new group was Eon Song, a 37-year-old finance worker. Song had moved to the neighbourhood just months earlier, buying a home on Wardell Avenue, a pretty stretch of red-brick homes across the street from the train corridor. Before putting in an offer, he and his partner, Pierre, a science teacher, had gone to the property with a decibel reader to make sure the sound of the GO trains wasn’t too disruptive. “Before we bought the house, we knew there were plans from Metrolinx,” says Song. “But we thought they were many years away and that there’d be an opportunity for people to have a say. And we didn’t think they would proceed with an above-ground line right through a residential neighbourhood. We just didn’t think that would happen.” The more he learned, the more outraged he became. He dug into noise guidelines put forward by the Rail Association of Canada. He found World Health Organization reports about the effects of vibration and noise on human health.
The fight between Save Jimmie Simpson and Metrolinx has devolved into a vicious PR battle. A poster blitz by the activists in the fall of 2020 warned residents they could “Kiss tennis goodbye” and “Kiss basketball goodbye.” In 2021, someone in the neighbourhood spray-painted a green line through the middle of Bruce Mackey Park, which hugs the west side of the rail corridor—slicing the park in two to show, protesters said, how far the rail corridor would need to expand to accommodate the Ontario Line.
In response, Metrolinx put up billboards and flooded social media with ads. In the summer of 2021, they published a post rebutting the “misinformation” coming from activists. The truth is that Metrolinx has no plans to remove basketball courts or any other park amenities. In fact, it claims it will increase the square footage of the parks flanking the corridor by installing retaining walls. Rather than reassuring activists, this has only served to make them more enraged—evidence of a behemoth government agency throwing PR money around to brand concerned citizens as liars.
Throughout these squabbles, the protesters in Riverside have taken great pains to say they’re in favour of public transit. The neighbourhood, Song points out, was behind the TTC’s underground relief line, which went through a long consultation process. They’re just against this particular line in this particular place. It’s the same sentiment we’ve heard from resident groups for years. And the fact that it’s undoubtedly true doesn’t particularly matter. When a group derails a specific project, how they feel about transit in theory is irrelevant. The line doesn’t get built...
Going above ground through Riverside, MacKay says, is a smart way for Metrolinx to take advantage of a huge swath of land they already own. It also buys the agency the time and money to extend the line to neighbourhoods like Thorncliffe Park and Flemingdon Park, where transit is sorely needed...
The activists in Riverside aren’t the only ones frustrated with the agency’s consultation style. Fred Keeley and his neighbours at Pape have found their meetings with Metrolinx infuriating. Keeley understands that the line needs to go somewhere. He believes in public transit and the greater good. But he says no one from the agency has been able to show him the slightest bit of proof that this is the best path for the line. “That’s really what I think drives us all crazy,” says Keeley. “If this has to be it, then all right, this has to be it. But let’s make sure it’s the best route.”...
“What we do on our projects is we work out technically what is the best and the right option to follow,” says Metrolinx CEO Phil Verster. “And then we consult on how to implement that option. This is our mandate.”
This unyielding approach has the benefit of being fast—a seductive idea for Torontonians who have been waiting generations for transit. But Metrolinx’s job isn’t just to create a transit map that’s ideal on paper. It’s also to guide people through a massive transformation, to help accentuate the gains and minimize the hardships. The spokespeople at Metrolinx, it seems, have mistaken a human problem for a technical one...
The neighbourhood where the Ontario Line will have the largest footprint is Thorncliffe Park, just north of the DVP and east of Leaside. There, a massive maintenance and storage facility is set to be built in a dense, low-income neighbourhood of immigrants.
Metrolinx’s stated plan in Thorncliffe Park is to tear up the community, or at least a good chunk of it. The maintenance and storage facility will displace the neighbourhood’s mosque, as well as an entire plaza that is home to 34 businesses, including Iqbal’s, a beloved halal grocery store. MacKay insists that Metrolinx will find a new location in the neighbourhood for each and every business—a promise that is, on its face, completely unrealistic. “There is nothing available in the area,” says Apexa Kotak, the owner of Trupti, a specialty spice store that’s been in the neighbourhood since 1997. “I don’t know why they chose this place,” says Kotak. “They’re hurting so many people.”...
Metrolinx insists Thorncliffe Park was selected for technical reasons. Its staff looked at nine potential sites and compared them across a variety of criteria, with the aim of minimizing impact on residents, businesses and the environment. “We have no other place we can build it,” says Phil Verster bluntly. But Sukhera is convinced no one would suggest plunking down an enormous storage facility in a wealthier, whiter neighbourhood. “Why is it us?” he asks...
During the pandemic, with TTC ridership down and work patterns forever altered, some have questioned whether this is the right time to invest so much in public transit. Metrolinx says this view is short-sighted—you build transportation infrastructure for the needs of a city a half-century from now, not two years from now.
In December, opposition groups got a wink of hope. Metrolinx abruptly announced they were changing the route of the TTC’s Yonge North Extension, bowing to pressure from neighbourhood protesters. The abrupt switch, in an Ontario PC riding, enraged anti–Ontario Line activists, newly convinced that the process was purely political. But it also suggested an opening: with enough pressure, it seemed, Metrolinx could be forced to bend.
The agency also recently announced a $50-million deal with the Islamic Society of Toronto that will bring a new mosque as well as a gymnasium and business centre to the community. For Sukhera, the deal seemed like a payoff to win support for the Ontario Line. “This is a transaction between a party that is being expropriated and Metrolinx, with no involvement from the Thorncliffe Park community,” he says.
The Save Jimmie Simpson people, meanwhile, have only intensified their efforts. Over the summer, they raised more than $18,000 and commissioned their own Health Impact Assessment, which concluded that a below-ground option would be better for the health of the neighbourhood, and hired a publicist to help get the message out. “The work feels less like community organizing,” Eon Song says, “and more like a political campaign.” They’ve requested to meet with the federal government, the federal NDP, and all provincial parties. Song sees no reason to stop fighting, even once contracts are signed and construction starts. The Harris government, he points out, halted work on the Eglinton subway after it broke ground. “They had dug a hole and spent millions of dollars filling it,” he says. “I have no plans to give up the fight.”...
Despite Metrolinx’s relentlessly upbeat prognostications, any project as massive as the Ontario Line creates real losers as well as winners...
The benefits of a subway line, meanwhile, are so distant that they can seem almost abstract. The kid from Don Mills and Eglinton who, 12 years from now, will be able to get a job downtown won’t show up to any town hall sessions. The couple who will move into the apartment building created by transit-oriented development two decades from now can’t give a reporter a sound bite.
Serving this silent, theoretical constituency is not something this city has done well. We’ve been slow to acknowledge that in the time since Layton and Sewell, the nature of our problems has changed. The biggest issues facing Toronto today—the housing crisis, climate change—will require more big government projects, not fewer. The neighbourhoods in need of protection in 2022 are not the residential enclaves of downtown Toronto but the inner-suburban communities of immigrants who need more transit and more opportunities, not more heritage designations. In seeking to do no harm, we’ve too often ignored the damage that comes from inaction. The Toronto of today—a place where the average semi-detached house costs $1.3 million and the average commute is 42 minutes—is not a city that anyone intentionally designed. It’s the result of decades when no one planned a different one."
Damn automobile lobby making public transport impossible!
Left wingers are terrified of change and progress
Clearly everything progressive activists claim is true and if you fact check it, you're a bad person
Driving up the cost of building by pandering to everyone (including by buying more expensive land because of racial justice) is no problem, because it comes out of the public purse and you can "tax the 'rich'" to pay for that
The same people who demand lots of public transit make it impossible to build
