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There's been a lot of response to last week's announcement by Harper/Flaherty of money for the Scarborough Subway plan which sees it as a win for Ford.
My own guess is that it's a poison pill for Ford; the person to gain the most from it is probably Karen Stintz.
The problem is that the city will have to kick in a fair amount of money for the project. The absence of federal funding would have let the councillors off the hook on this: they would have gained political points for championing a Scarborough Subway; now they have to accept the need to raise taxes or to wear the down-scaling of the plans themselves. (In addition, the federal funds probably put the Glen Murray alignment out of play, especially given the endorsement of the Sintz alignment by the TTC.
This should not hurt what I will call business conservatives of the Board of Trade / Stintz type. They've been arguing for some time that the costs of inaction are so great that they will champion, generally, tax increases to deal with congestion. (The fact that the Scarborough Subway is less effective a plan, at less cost, than the LRT plan seems to have become politically irrelevant.)
But for populists of the no-tax-increases type that Ford represents... He either has to support a much more substantial tax increase than he would like or will have to oppose his "own" subway line. And I'm betting that tax rates are dearer to the hearts of most of his supporters than subway-vs.-LRT.
My own guess is that it's a poison pill for Ford; the person to gain the most from it is probably Karen Stintz.
The problem is that the city will have to kick in a fair amount of money for the project. The absence of federal funding would have let the councillors off the hook on this: they would have gained political points for championing a Scarborough Subway; now they have to accept the need to raise taxes or to wear the down-scaling of the plans themselves. (In addition, the federal funds probably put the Glen Murray alignment out of play, especially given the endorsement of the Sintz alignment by the TTC.
This should not hurt what I will call business conservatives of the Board of Trade / Stintz type. They've been arguing for some time that the costs of inaction are so great that they will champion, generally, tax increases to deal with congestion. (The fact that the Scarborough Subway is less effective a plan, at less cost, than the LRT plan seems to have become politically irrelevant.)
But for populists of the no-tax-increases type that Ford represents... He either has to support a much more substantial tax increase than he would like or will have to oppose his "own" subway line. And I'm betting that tax rates are dearer to the hearts of most of his supporters than subway-vs.-LRT.
