Sprawl and Scandal: How Premier Doug Ford’s Policies Are Failing Ontario

There are few facets of policymaking that are as vitally important and difficult to execute as good urban planning. The issue, of course, is that, unlike water treatment, with its binary delineation between “water safe to drink” and “poison”, or electric utilities where the lights are either consistently on or off, urban planning choices irritate as many people as they please. There are no universal criteria for success: one person’s brilliant plan to expand, say, park infrastructure is another’s tree-hugging boondoggle. But that is the nature of policy which in large part daringly attempts to predict the future and its needs. Done well and with total transparency, urban development can be done in a fashion that excites and can stand on its achievements. It is this that makes Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s series of virtually universally-panned failures on this front all the more stunning to observe. If Steve Jobs said one should aim to at least please “some of the people, some of the time”, Ford has shrewdly reinvented the maxim as “none of the people, all of the time.” Except those few wealthy donors and property developers whom he knows well. 

Urban planning often seems like a purely municipal affair, and indeed mayoral candidates of Ontario’s urban centres often run as though this is the case. It is not. The Planning Act of 1990 establishes the provincial government as the chief arbiter of land use, with municipalities responsible for carrying out what is dictated by the Premier’s office and the Ministry of Municipal Affairs. The logic of this is simple: a scattershot approach to housing, transport, or ecological development is far less efficient than a master system established by the province. This particularly applies in Ontario, where nearly half of the province’s entire population is concentrated just in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), and 94.5% live in a straight line from Windsor to the Quebec border. Naturally, Queen’s Park will take a strong interest in urban planning when virtually the entire province lives in one semi-continuous inhabited sprawl. But Ford and his Progressive Conservative government have not tended to use that authority for the cogent, consistent, future-oriented policy the Act provided for in the slightest. Instead, it has been subordinate to two factors: Ford’s deeply personal ideologies of planning, and the interests of construction magnates and donors. 

We can see how these apply in the scourge of brutal congestion. It is indisputable that it is becoming harder to travel by car into and out of Toronto. An evidence-based, forward-thinking urban planning approach would seek to lessen the dependence of Ontarians on automobile transport while strengthening other, more efficient avenues (this is before getting into the ecological benefits of moving away from cars). Trains, subways, cycling, and simply walking are all preferable, and Ford is not wholly unaware of these realities. He has proudly debuted both additional train services on the ‘GO Train’ lines (a common commuter method of getting into Toronto) and has gone ahead with an expansion of Toronto’s subways to ease the burden on the beleaguered Yonge/University line. So far, so good. 

Yet even these more admirable projects have been mired in a Tammany Hall-esque shadiness. Ford’s government selected the worst of three transit routes for a new subway line extending north to the city of Richmond Hill. It scored the poorest – according to their own internal assessment – on performance for commuters, number of expected riders, and travel time savings. What it does brilliantly is impress select developers, who will soon have a subway line artificially hurtling into parcels of land preemptively purchased to take advantage. This is the same kind of policymaking which led to the Green Belt scandal. That saw Ford attempt to prioritise new developments on protected conservation land, also conveniently owned by developers with close access to Ford’s inner circle. It is now subject to an RCMP criminal investigation. The terms of the deals with developers have, naturally, remained under lock-and-key from the very municipalities affected by the decisions, like Markham and Richmond Hill (a theme in Ford’s dealings with townships). Markham has long sought support for a revitalization initiative to build what urban planners call the “missing middle” – neighbourhoods of medium-density housing, shops, schools, facilities, and the like on a walkable human scale. Toronto is desperately missing this, and has long been paying the price as housing balloons and increasingly soulless developments multiply. Instead, Ford and his associates in the property world seek to establish a cityspace of looming tower blocks proudly surveying overly wide streets with scarcely a community centre for its assumed residents.

In isolation, one could view these actions as mildly-corrupt overzealousness – the provincial equivalent of the Canadian federal government’s desperate desire for railroads in the 19th century which, while beleaguered by corrupt deals and profiteering, successfully achieved spectacular economic gains. But the Progressive Conservative government picks and chooses when a project excites them. Ford clearly despises bicycles and loves automobiles. This is despite the fact that adding highway lanes is either ineffectual at best or actively worsens traffic congestion through the “induced-demand” effect of added road space. No matter: his government seeks to dig a ludicrously expensive tunnel underneath Toronto (it could cost $55 billion) while spending money and political capital to rip up the city’s already-built bike lanes, let alone build the new ones it desperately needs. Ford is desperate to construct an entirely new Highway 413 as a ring-road around the GTA, bravely expending public funds to save commuters a staggering 59 seconds in travel time. Meanwhile, his justification for tearing down the long-beloved Ontario Science Centre (servicing its local, working-class community) and moving it downtown is supposedly based on prudent dollars-and-cents calculations. 

Urban planning is more than just throwing a few million here, a few billion there. The decisions made have effects that ripple on for decades; grave errors of the past like driving the enormous Gardiner Expressway right through Toronto’s core has done nearly as much to hamper the city’s walkability as plopping down the Berlin Wall would have. Good urban planning can unite communities, save time for workers, increase economic productivity, and beautify our everyday lives. The decisions made in those fluorescent-lit consultation rooms can mean the difference between families congregating in a park or shuffling under the darkness of an overpass. We noted that other forms of governmental reach into our lives are often invisible; the tap turns on and water flows, the mail gets unceremoniously delivered. But the design of our homes, streets, and cities? This is where government action can shine, literally planting the trees in whose shade some of us may never sit. Surely, then, we can do better than the Ford government’s unimaginative and arguably corrupt perversion of it.