.... Toronto’s most influential institutions and thinkers live or work or act from downtown. Often, they tire of the babble from the rabble in the suburbs. Just give us back our old, pre-amalgamation Toronto, they say. Spare us from the car-loving, beer-drinking suburbanites. And the echo comes back: “Save us from the latte-drinking, pinky-in-the-air downtown elites.”
The stereotypes are ridiculous, we acknowledge; we fall for them time and time again. ......
Toronto’s suburbs need the kind of political representation that downtown gets: active, progressive, NDP-type city councillors who move heaven and Earth to rebuild parks, erect community centres, stock libraries, renovate swimming pools and splash pads, revitalize neighbourhoods. Too often, what they get are tightwads who arrive at city hall looking to pull down the city to the bare bones desolation of the worst-served neighbourhoods in the suburbs......
The Fords have done everything to take advantage of the natural rifts and annoyances. Etobicoke parks are nothing like the programmed and animated ones in downtown or North York. So, Rob Ford blames this on a downtown-centred council. Rather, it’s a function of different focus and vision in the old cities. Etobicoke provided wide open spaces and little else. Mel Lastman wanted water features in North York’s parks and delivered them.
Downtowners get subways, you get buses and LRT, Ford baits Scarborough residents — as if the TTC and the former Metro council spurned the wishes of the suburbs to favour their buddies downtown. In fact, subways require densities and office complexes not existing in Scarborough. Planners expected more than 100,000 jobs to be present in the North York to Scarborough city centre corridor between 1986 and 2011. They got fewer than 1,000 by 2006. Subway proponents who talk about Paris and other European cities might want to consider that Paris is building LRTs to its suburbs that have Scarborough-like ridership.
