It's easy to write a blog post when your target is so grotesquely stupid.
When he was first elected, Rob (coward) Ford announced that he was going to kill the long-delayed public transportation expansion "Transit City." In return for keeping his suffering suburbanite constituents waiting in the cold and the rain for late, crowded buses, Ford was prepared to pay anywhere from $50 to $150 million in cancellation fines.
Since Canadian politics isn't really designed to accomodate nazi-style government,* there's always a delay in the response to nitwitted bulldozing such as is engaged in by the likes of Rob Ford. Dalton (lying prick) McGuinty acquiesced and gave Ford a chance to grandstand over what is turning out to be a shitty deal for Toronto. Ford would get provincial money to bury the Eglinton Avenue light-rail service and he could find all the private sector money he wanted to expand the Shepard Subway line. Then, TTC Chair (and sometime Ford ally) Karen Stintz, realizing that Ford's plan was garbage tried to suggest a compromise. No deal. Then, Councillor Mihevic hired municipal lawyer Freya Kristjanson to comment on the legality of Ford's unilateral decision to kill transit city. According to Kristjanson, Rob Ford is not the King of Council and did not have the power to kill transit city.
So what's Ford's response?
“'I didn’t overstep my boundaries; I did what the taxpayers want,' he said."
Oh, really? Why is that Mayor Ford?
“I did what the taxpayers want. They want subways. That’s it.”
How do you respond to a complete shit-head like this? His legal argument for his power to unilaterally overturn past Council resolutions is: "The taxpayers want it"???
Then the moron starts yammering about subways. As if he thinks a light-rail system becomes a subway just because you spend $2 billion to bury it!!! As if his failure to find private-sector investors for the Shepard Subway is somehow delivering on the "taxpayers'" demands for subways!
Everything that comes out of this guy's mouth is a mistake. And there's no real debating with this human garbage. (Him and his fans.) You just scorn them. Insult them. Ignore them. Abuse them. Shame borderline people from voting for this drivel. Get the country back on track.
* Oh, but the left-wing on Toronto City Council are two steps to the left of Joseph Stalin, right?
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2 comments:
In fairness to Ford, he said Transit City was dead, and McGuinty asked him what he wanted to do instead, based on the belief he had a majority on council which he likely did at the time. Everything else you say is correct though.
I think everyone would agree they prefer subways, but this was based on his claim there was a huge amount of gravy. Presumably so much gravy that the savings would pay for it.
That's where he was a liar. He was an insider, had access to the budgets, and should have known the actual "gravy" was minimal.
I've heard before that buried LRT is not a subway. I'm not familiar enough with this, what is the difference? Subways have level access from platforms. Is LRT more like a GO train you have to climb into? Would not seem like a huge difference in expense to build. The Spadina subway runs above ground north of Lawrence. Is it still a subway?
McGuinty wasn't very popular and there's still this right-wing created perception that Rob Ford is incredibly popular. So McGuinty caved, and so did Metrolinx.
City Council was kind of stunned and just sat there wondering what to do.
But now that the tide has turned somewhat, and now that the reality of Ford's insanity has sunk in, people are fighting back. (Also, Stintz says that she was waiting and waiting for a report about the Shepard line from Gordon Perks but it kept getting delayed.)
Light-rail systems are smaller than Toronto's subway trains. They don't carry as many people. They were picked for the "Transit City" project because they'd be cheaper and would bring a quicker fix to a problem that's been festering for decades.
But because they're smaller and cheaper, you don't want to spend billions of dollars burying them in the ground. You save that investment for a larger-scale people-moving project like a subway line.
Ford's entire behaviour on this file has been completely asinine.
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