“A cross between Woodstock and the Algonquin Round Table,” is what Michael Redhill called it. Dorothy Parker grinding out an electric cover of “The Star Spangled Banner”? Well, not quite. Rather, Redhill, the literary curator for Luminato 2013, was describing A Literary Picnic, the annual festival’s celebration of storytelling, creativity, and the written word.

The 2013 Toronto Jazz Festival descends on the city this Friday with a huge “free for all” event. That means all of Friday’s programming at every Jazz Festival venue is, yes, completely free of charge. There will be concerts from local favourites Molly Johnson and Mary Margaret O’Hara, plus a show by Smokey Robinson and Martha Reeves, who will be launching the fest from its epicentre, Nathan Phillips Square.

Here’s a rundown of some of the shows worth checking out on Friday—and during the rest of the festival, when you’ll actually have to pay.

Folks who are planning on having a swim in the pool at Scadding Court Community Centre over the next few days may find themselves a little disappointed. Those who want to go fishing, however, will probably be ecstatic.

For the rest of the week, the Community Centre will be holding its annual Gone Fishin’ event, meaning its indoor pool will be an indoor fish pond. The pool has been drained, dechlorinated, and refilled with 2,000 rainbow trout, to be caught by local children and families.

A screencap of YolkRegion.ca, as it appeared earlier today.

Aside from our brief flirtation with the likes of RebelMayor, the 416 just hasn’t had any ongoing political satire of note (arguably it hasn’t needed it lately, but let’s put that aside for now). And yet, quietly, upon our northern border, the 905 seems to have spawned its own, Onion-style blog.

The anonymous “Heironymous Bouche” launched YolkRegion.ca less than two years ago. Since then, what once seemed like a niche venture has managed to establish its foothold. The site is the result of “mostly one person’s mania,” says its editor, who describes himself merely as an “ordinary male, newshound ratepayer.”

Bouche may not be willing to disclose his real identity, but he clearly has a finger on the pulse of the local polity—no mean feat in a 1,776-square-kilometre community with nine local governments. Some of the jokes are generically suburban enough for anyone to get (e.g. “Region Celebrates 30,000th ‘Drive Your Car to Work’ Day” or “Area Militias Working Hard to Keep Poor Out of York Region”). Others, meanwhile, require at least some local knowledge to get, such as a mock editorial supporting a Richmond Hill councillor who used his expense account to purchase some nice golf clubs.

Humour is surely in the eye of the beholder, but you don’t have to know who Tony Van Bynen is to at least chuckle at the notion of Marg Delahunty taking shots at suburban mayors after her ambushing of Rob Ford didn’t quite go as planned. You don’t have to know Pefferlaw from Purpleville to get all the gags, is what we’re saying here. (And, come on, Tony is the mayor of Newmarket, folks! Know your suburban leaders!)

As with most satire, there’s a real point underlying most of the humour on Yolk Region, though Bouche acknowledges there are souls more courageous than he fighting the good fight in small-town council meetings and bland OMB hearings, where big decisions are going down. For all the jokes about it, he’s clearly not especially amused by York Region having ammassed a debt so large it needed provincial approval to exceed the legally prescribed limit.

“With local councils back-stopped by a developer-friendly OMB, developers generally get everything they want,” he says. “The region has been growing too fast and could be in real trouble if a major housing crash disrupts its ability to pay for infrastructure. Essentially the region has been divided and conquered and the developers love it.”

Many local residents don’t even know how their two-tier municipality is governed (or how many local officials made the Sunshine List), so if a little humour helps the medicine go down, so much the better.

Asked about the site’s raison d’etre—why does a boring ol’ suburban community even need its own parody news source?—Bouche offers that, “People seem to be hungry for stories that give them a sense of place and belonging, even when it’s a fiction. So, probably the region does not ‘need’ a satirical blog, but apparently [I feel] compelled to write one.”

Remember how we chuckled in Argo when Ben Affleck explained that people from Canada don’t say the second “T” in Toronto? That’s because we’re from Toronto and we need Americans to validate our existence (just look at this past week’s late-night TV show coverage of Rob Ford’s latest scandal). Well, suburbanites feel the same way when Toronto deigns to acknowledge them, so it’s perhaps not surprising that Yolk Region occasionally widens its horizons.

“In the beginning, I was aiming for a local York Region audience, but the connections between the 905 and 416 regions make it hard not to cross the border now and then,” Bouche says. “You could say that the money and political will to grow the 905 came from downtown.”

Hence, the site has attracted wider notice with some of its stories lately. Whether talking about transit taxes or casinos, Yolk Region‘s articles provide a reminder that Toronto isn’t actually the centre of the universe. With prospects for a casino in the city now extinguished, for example, Markham and Vaughan are among the municipalities considering just how awesome it would be to pick that dirty apple off the ground. So when Bouche suggests that running riverboat-style casino subways might be a way to kill several birds with one stone, he’s reminding us that the burbs and the city have plenty of real issues and foibles to share.

York Region, for those who fear looking beyond the confines of downtown, stretches from Steeles Avenue clear up to Lake Simcoe and includes everything from populous urban inner suburbs like Markham and Vaughan, to more rural communities like Georgina and East Gwillimbury. Its population is at more than one million now, and it has one subway en route and another planned. In short, the burbs ain’t what they used to be. Heck, if you ignored Richmond Hill, you’d be ignoring one of the best figure skaters this country has ever produced, the school that trains our Olympic trampoline medal winners, and, oh yeah, the current premier.

Yolk Region advertises itself as “an attack-ad free zone,” and while the humour is often political, it tends to be more politely Canadian than biting and edgy. (That said, Bouche acknowledges that he espouses a commitment to Colbertian truthiness.) “I’m torn between writing about more important issues and off-the-wall bits, but it’s all good,” he says. He hopes to push the humour envelope a bit further (albeit without going negative), the longer he keeps at it.

In the meantime, Bouche seems to have the market cornered on humour related to urban sprawl and infrastructure spending. When there’s something to laugh about in Toronto, maybe someone else can open a southern franchise.

—In a press release issued earlier today, Horwath, the Ontario NDP leader, announced a deal with the Ontario Liberal party, putting an end to the possibility of an immediate provincial election. In exchange for not opposing the Liberal budget (and thereby toppling Premier Kathleen Wynne’s government) Horwath won a few concessions, including the establishment of a new Financial Accountability Office and a 15 per cent cut to car insurance premiums.

Breaking with just about every precedent of his mayoralty thus far, Rob Ford has decided to call it quits on an issue he’s championed rather than fight it out (and lose) on the floor of the council chamber: today he proclaimed proposals to build a casino in downtown Toronto “dead” and cancelled the special meeting of city council that had been scheduled for Tuesday, May 21 to debate the issue.

Seeking to overturn his cancellation, just minutes later several councillors said they were going to try and hold the meeting anyway. Those councillors, all opposed to a casino, aren’t satisfied with a cancelled meeting: they want to make sure the matter is well and thoroughly settled, and decidedly vote against the proposal. Officially, it won’t be dead until and unless they do.

Speaking at greater length than he usually does, the mayor convened a press conference this afternoon to say that he remains committed to the idea that a major “entertainment complex” including a casino is a good choice for Toronto if it meets certain conditions, and in particular if the province guarantees to give the municipal government a “fair share” of the revenue it generates—at least $100 million a year. The province has been dragging its feet on confirming how much revenue Toronto would receive, however, and in the wake of today’s announcement by Finance Minister Charles Sousa that the province might not be able to commit to a hosting fee formula before city council met, Ford decided to cancel the debate altogether:

If the province won’t agree that $100 million then, folks, the deal is dead. We are not going to carry on with the casino debate.

I had planned to tell you today how I [intended to] recommend council allocate that revenue… The full $100m we could put towards transit: more specifically, [to] what council adopted last week, a subway extending the Bloor-Danforth subway line to the Scarborough Town Centre and north to Sheppard, and extending the Sheppard [line].

(According to all estimates this would provide only a fraction of the needed money.)

Ford also said that he had planned to move a separate motion which would see any additional property tax revenue generated from a casino put towards Toronto Community Housing’s major repair backlog, and another that would require any casino operator to “commit at least $4.5 million a year to a Toronto community benefits fund that would be divided up equally between every councillor and ward in the city…for improvements to their parks and public spaces.”

Painting a casino complex as a major economic boon to Toronto, Ford blamed the premier for dashing his hopes: “I don’t think the premier gets it.”

Context and Background: A Toronto Casino?

New-ish premier Kathleen Wynne has certainly been far cooler to the idea of expanded gaming in Toronto than her predecessors. (By contrast, former Finance Minister Dwight Duncan waxed enthusiastically about a “golden mile” on Toronto’s waterfront, anchored by a casino development.) Given that a clear majority of city councillors had already confirmed that they’d be voting against a casino proposal when the time came, however, Wynne’s reluctance may not be causing them much distress.

Not Over Yet

In light of all this, the mayor said that instead of holding a special meeting next week the casino item will be added to the agenda of the next regularly scheduled council meeting, at which point he’ll recommend that councillors simply go through a basic procedure that would see them receive the major staff report about a potential casino for information, but take no action.

One consequence of that: the issue wouldn’t actually be dead, since council wouldn’t have decidedly voted against a casino at all.

Just moments after Ford finished speaking, news broke that a petition was circulating among city councillors to override the mayor and hold next Tuesday’s meeting anyway. (A simple majority of city councillors—which is 23 of them—can trigger a meeting on a particular issue by signing a request that gets forwarded to the City clerk’s office.) Some councillors learned yesterday that the mayor was thinking of cancelling the casino meeting, and began talking amongst themselves about whether to proceed despite him. “It’s not up to him to make that decision,” Mike Layton (Ward 19, Trinity-Spadina) told us shortly after the mayor spoke, saying that this debate has gone on for too long already and that many councillors want to have the issue settled one way or another for good: “we should be saying with conviction what we think should happen.” Several councillors told us that they do believe the required support exists to convene that special meeting, and that it is likely to go ahead on Tuesday despite the mayor’s announcement.

The Hosting Fee Question

Also right after Ford spoke came this response from the provincial finance minister, via a spokesperson: “The City of Toronto should make its decision based on the various characteristics of a casino. We appreciate the Mayor’s comments but we’ll put out the formula when we’re ready and are confident that it is fair to all municipalities.” In short, if Ford’s idea was to try to pressure the province into committing to a hosting fee, they’re not biting.

Meanwhile, Layton said, the hosting fee isn’t actually a decisive consideration for many councillors. “This has much more to do with what we’re hearing from our constituents, that this will overwhelm infrastructure and suck money out of the local economy,” he concluded, “and that the people of Toronto don’t want to be raising government money off of addiction.”

The question may well be moot: the Toronto Star is reporting that they’ve learned the proposed hosting fee for Toronto, including both a downtown casino and the existing Woodbine site, would be $53.7 million—far short of the $100 million needed to secure support from the mayor and most of the swing votes on council..

Photo by joshlabove from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

Ontario’s still new-ish premier, Kathleen Wynne, wants us to know that she takes transit, and our lack thereof, seriously. She is willing, she’s said repeatedly, to stake the future of her government on introducing new taxes and tolls to pay for new transit lines—certainly a political risk when she leads a minority, and when her government faces accusations of mismanagement and waste on gas plants, ORNGE, and in several other portfolios.

Her government’s first budget, unveiled today, took one small step towards achieving that goal, by proposing a new series of high occupancy toll (HOT) lanes: once the system is in place, drivers who are alone in their cars will be able to pay to use high occupancy vehicle lanes (HOV) otherwise reserved for carpoolers.

The initiative is expected to raise only a fraction of the total sum we’ll need, though that’s only partially the goal. What the government is hoping to do, officials said today, is move the conversation forward—start easing Ontarians into the idea that new tools for transit are coming.

Photo by Daily Grind Photography from the Torontoist Flickr pool.

Metrolinx is the provincial agency in charge of planning transit for the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA). They’ve developed a long-term plan for building the next several rounds of transit in the region, called The Big Move. On May 27, they’ll release their recommended “investment strategy”—a suite of new taxes and tools to pay for all that new transit. In interviews the premier has been clear that she doesn’t want to “pre-empt” Metrolinx by committing to specific revenue tools in advance; frustratingly, she hasn’t even been willing to clarify how she’ll go about weighing their advice when it does come, and what values are most important to her in deciding among the various new taxes and levies.

Nonetheless, one of the revenue tools on Metrolinx’s short list is in this year’s draft budget: the HOT lanes are among the taxes and levies the agency may include in its final recommendations. Provincial officials today tried to clarify that the budget isn’t meant to interfere with Metrolinx’s process; they are still looking forward to seeing Metrolinx’s recommendations when they come. All they are calling for in the budget, officials say, is the beginning of a process: they will hold consultations and devise a specific plan by the end of the calendar year. That may end up coinciding with Metrolinx’s plan, should that agency also like the idea of HOT lanes, or it may provide the government with an additional option not included in Metrolinx’s recommended list of tools.

One on One: Kathleen Wynne on the Future of Transit

Estimates vary wildly about how much money HOT lanes could raise. In its recent report on the subject the City of Toronto projected it would generate $25-45 million if levied on all 400-series highways in the region. Today finance minister Charles Sousa put the revenue estimate at $250-300 million. Given that the details of the plan haven’t yet been worked out, we can take that as the government’s revenue target; it won’t be clear for a long time how they’d reach that figure, how many or which roads would have a toll, or what rate it would be charged at. No matter which figure we end up with, it’ll only be a small piece of the final equation: the cost of the new wave of transit construction is $2 billion a year.

Effectively, the HOT lanes are a way of trying to acclimatizing us—it’s the shallow end of the pool. This specific new tool will go down easier, the thinking goes, because it coincides with a substantial expansion of the number of HOV lanes in the GTHA: Sousa said today the province is more than doubling the HOV lanes in the region, and “as we do that we want to be able to offer choices to those who use them.” HOT lanes might also go over better with residents because it’s an opt-in system (since drivers can choose to use toll-free lanes) rather than a mandatory levy, and because it’s being levied on an activity that has a clear correlation with transit, in targeting drivers who are alone in their cars.

There’s some evidence to bear this theory out: when the City of Toronto commissioned a survey on the range of revenue tools under consideration, HOT lanes were one of the most popular options, with 49 per cent of residents saying it was among the tools they’d be most interested in. (This put HOT lanes in third place, after development charges and a parking levy.) Whether the NDP will agree, and sign off on a budget that includes a new revenue tool (something they have previously opposed), remains to be seen.

Sikhs march through the downtown core on Khalsa Day. Photo by j-riviere, from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

Sikhs from across Southern Ontario gathered downtown on Sunday to celebrate the twin holidays of Vaisakhi and Khalsa Day. The celebrations included a parade (called a Nagar Kirtan) from the CNE to Nathan Phillips Square, as well as a massive feast (in the square) with food donated by Sikh places of worship across the province.

Vaisakhi is a harvest festival, celebrated by people of all faiths across the northern half of the Indian subcontinent. It was on Vaisakhi in 1699 that the final guru of Sikhism, Guru Gobind Singh, revealed the Khalsa, or code of conduct, for practicing Sikhs. Khalsa Day marks the anniversary of that event.

The crowd assembled at Nathan Phillips Square listened to speeches from members of the local Sikh community, as well as politicians of all stripes. Liberals, Tories, and New Democrats all thanked the Sikhs for their contributions to Canadian culture, while trying to win Sikh support.

“My favourite thing in the parade was the float that said ‘Sikh Values are Canadian Values,’” said Premier Kathleen Wynne. “We share a value system of compassion, caring for each other, and creating a fair society, and that is what our government is working with you to do.”

Provincial NDP leader Andrea Horwath and provincial Conservative leader Tim Hudak said basically the same thing. Two federal leaders—the NDP’s Thomas Mulcair and the Liberal party’s Justin Trudeau—were also on hand for the celebrations.

At least one group of young Sikhs sought to make this year’s celebration a little different. The organizers of Smart Seva distributed healthy snacks along the parade route. (“Seva” refers to the concept of selfless service, a core tenant of Sikhism and one of the reasons groups provide free food on Khalsa Day.) Co-organizer Sarnpal Panesar said the goal was to provide an alternative to the fatty, sugary fare traditionally eaten on the day.

“During this parade, people like to hand out a lot of food and snacks,” he said. “We got some donations from family and friends, and we just went and got water, no-sugar-added juices, fruit, and granola bars, to give out during the parade. All the things you need to keep your energy up during the day. You don’t want to have a greasy sandwich or a samosa at the beginning of a parade and need a nap by the end.”

His colleague Aiksimar Singh said that, beyond promoting the healthy living, his goal is to emphasize the importance of selfless service to his fellow young Sikhs.

“We want to get other people involved, to have the same approach,” said Singh. “We all have companies and businesses, and we could say, ‘This from our business, we sponsored this and that,’ but it’s not about that…We want people to come forward and help out without any ulterior motives.”

The Smart Seva team has also spearheaded efforts to get Toronto’s Khalsa Day celebrations on social media. The group started the @NagarKirtanTO Twitter account. Singh said that, while it didn’t gain huge traction this year, he and his fellow volunteers are hoping to have it be a major part of the celebrations in 2014.

“There’s no dedicated social media for this,” he said. “You can search hashtags, but Nagar Kirtan is the phrase used for all the parades, so we wanted to have something dedicated to Toronto, which is one of the biggest ones in North America.”

“Another part of the idea of Smart Seva is to update with the times and make things a little more relatable for the youth.”

He hopes that, with an improved social media push, Khalsa Day can become as much of a part of the fabric of the city as other parades, like Caribana and Pride.

“We get a lot of people coming up and asking us what’s going on,” he says. “We have similar numbers to these other parades, it’s just a matter of people knowing what it’s about.”

Kathleen Wynne takes the future of transit—and crucially, transit funding—seriously. It’s why she’s given two major speeches about it this month so far, and it’s why she invited several reporters to her office last week for a series of one-on-one interviews on the subject. More seriously, her commitment is measured in the political risk she is taking: actively campaigning for new taxes and fees is difficult for anyone in elected office, harder for a provincial leader critics already think is too much a Torontonian to understand northern or rural Ontario, and harder still for someone leading a minority government many think won’t last a year. Perhaps most of all, it is difficult for someone who inherited a government weighed down with a series of spending and mismanagement scandals that have left the electorate skeptical it can oversee large public projects effectively.

The premier is tackling this predicament by going on the offensive, putting a direct spotlight on an issue many before her have avoided. In our interview Wynne reiterates that she’ll let her government fall over the matter, if it comes to it. She has warned municipal governments that while she very much wants their support, these new revenue tools are coming, like it or not. She has made this her issue, in particular, making a point of pitching residents herself rather than leaving it to Transportation Minister Glen Murray. In summary, Wynne is staking a fair bit of her government’s viability on the proposition that the Toronto region is ready to support a politician who asks them to pay more money, because we know it’s the only way to get the transit we so badly need.

All of which makes it that much more frustrating that when we ask her how exactly she’ll be approaching the issue, Wynne is consistently vague.

Wynne, as we’ve been told often since her selection as the Ontario Liberals’ new leader, is a trained mediator, and it shows when we sit down to talk with her. She doesn’t take potshots at her opponents, and when we ask for her thoughts on how we got to this point—decades behind in our infrastructure and with many cities outpacing us in construction—she doesn’t mention Mike Harris once. (The Progressive Conservative premier famously filled in the tunnel that was meant to be the start of an Eglinton subway line in 1995; his government also cut Queen’s Park’s contribution to the TTC’s annual operating budget.)

What she does talk about is growing up in York Region, and how her generation took the bus only until they turned 16 and got their licences—after that, it just wasn’t a question that you’d drive. There was, she says, a great sense of space, and no sense at all that it might run out one day. She attributes our many years of inaction to that culture, one she says was very slow to shift, as well as to the usual political complexities of supporting projects whose benefits won’t be visible for many years.

Full transcript of our conversation with the premier

But Wynne hedges often when we ask about specifics, about what she wants to do now to remedy matters: “I don’t want to pre-empt Metrolinx” is the sound bite of choice.

Metrolinx is the provincial agency responsible for transit planning in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area; it will unveil its proposed strategy for raising the $34 billion it estimates we need to complete a major round of transit projects, called The Big Move, on May 27, 2013. (The front-runners for those new revenue tools: a sales tax, a parking levy, and a fuel tax.)

It’s not just that she won’t issue her own list of preferred tools; Wynne won’t even articulate much by way of the principles she’ll rely on to guide this decision.

It’s crucial, she says, that we have a dedicated tool, but that doesn’t rule anything out—in theory we could even have a dedicated portion of the income tax set aside for transit projects. Is it important to her that whatever tools we come up with are progressive, that they are in some way scaled based on an individual’s capacity to pay? We get no straight answer. Is she prepared to go outside of Metrolinx’s list, if that’s what it takes to get one of the opposition parties to sign on? Maybe.

The premier hasn’t shied away from providing direction to government agencies before—most notably the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation, which is currently revising its formula for how municipalities and the province should share in new casino revenue, based on Wynne’s instructions. Her reluctance to pick two or three revenue tools right now is understandable; her refusal to articulate clearer decision-making principles in general doesn’t really wash.

To many though, the major breakthrough has already happened: we have a premier who is willing to stake her leadership on introducing new taxes and fees, whatever those end up being. And while there will be a tremendous amount of political wrangling to come, as the specifics of which revenue tools we end up with are worked out—between Wynne and NDP leader Andrea Horwath (PC leader Tim Hudak wants none of this), and between Wynne and all the GTHA mayors—it’s that initial step that may matter most. As one city councillor we spoke with recently put it: “Do I have preferences about which tools we pick? Sure. But that’s a fight I’m happy to lose. As long as we end up with something.”

Wynne hasn’t left herself much wiggle room, and she hasn’t left us with much, either: if the premier fails to deliver the transit funding she’s now advocating, it will make it much more difficult for the politicians (of any party) who come after her to tackle this anytime soon. Her commitment is laudable, and essential, but it isn’t enough—we need to know what framework and what values the premier will be bringing to bear as she weighs Metrolinx’s advice and enters into negotiations with the opposition. And we need to be given specific reason to believe that this time really will be different.

Ontario is gearing up for a major debate about how to pay for a major round of new transit infrastructure, a set of projects collectively called The Big Move. Metrolinx, the regional agency responsible for transit planning, is expected to deliver its strategy for raising the requisite $34 billion on May 27, 2013. We sat down with the premier recently to talk about that strategy, and about the transit issues that plague the Toronto area. Here is the transcript of our discussion.

Torontoist: Everyone from transit activists to the Board of Trade keeps saying we’re decades behind in our infrastructure. How do you think we got to this point? Why has it taken us this long to have this conversation, and why do other cities—L.A., famously, loves cars and had a referendum on transit funding—seem to have made more progress?

Kathleen Wynne: I think there are a couple of factors. I think that [for a time] the congestion wasn’t that bad—people could get around. There was a perception that there was space, that our space was infinite, and we were never going to have to worry about this. I grew up in York Region, and my generation, we never thought about taking buses. Until we got our drivers’ licences we could take a bus down Yonge Street, but [otherwise] it just wasn’t an issue, and everybody had cars. The culture hadn’t shifted: there wasn’t enough density, there weren’t enough people who were expecting that they would have alternatives.

I think we have that now. I think we have so many people from other countries who have lived with better transit than we have, and just the absolute density of population has pushed us. So I think there’s been that shift.

The other thing is that unless there is a public outcry, unless there is pressure from the public, investing in infrastructure that takes a long time to build is very difficult for politicians. It’s not something we do as a matter of course. It’s not difficult to invest in roads because everybody can see the roads and everybody needs roads and that’s part of our culture. But investing in water pipes and investing in systematic transit is difficult because it takes a long time to complete, and you don’t cut a ribbon. I’m fighting for projects right on which I will not cut the ribbons, and I know that. I think it’s the right thing to do nonetheless.

The Big Move is a plan about building things. It leaves unanswered the question about how we will pay to operate them. The province used to pay approximately 50 per cent of the TTC’s operating cost. That changed a while ago, and many people think that’s permanently hobbled the TTC—and the TTC is going face added pressure as these Big Move projects come online. Do you think the province needs to reintroduce contributions to the TTC’s operating costs?

Well first of all we’re not just talking about the TTC—we’re talking about all of the regional transit systems, and so I think that it’s really important that we open the discussion about how we get the transit built. Part of that obviously has to be what can we afford to run—we collectively—and what is the relationship going to be. I’m well aware of the operating issue, and I think that it will be an ongoing conversation. I don’t think we’ve got an answer on that one yet.

Will you be asking Metrolnx to offer a strategy for that?

I don’t know if the minister [of transportation] has been talking to Metrolinx about that at this point, but it’s certainly something that’s part of the broader discussion about transit in the region.

The other reality is that the $350 million in gas tax money that is distributed across the province—part of that is used for operating dollars in some circumstances.

Kathleen Wynne Discusses the Future of Transit in Toronto

You were minister of transportation when some Transit City projects were scaled back or delayed due to the economic crisis at the time. We’re still dealing with the fallout from that economic crisis—we still run a deficit provincially—and you deal with the added pressure of being in a minority government. In the face of those pressures, and given that history, what assurance can you offer Torontonians that you won’t at some point say ‘sorry, we need to pull the plug on some of these lines we’ve been planning’?

I have no intention of doing that. I have no intention of pulling back on my commitment. It’s the reason that I’m working to build consensus around a dedicated revenue stream now. There will be an ongoing discussion about which lines, the order in which they’re built—because Metrolinx reviews its plans and makes those changes on a somewhat regular basis—but my commitment is to work to build the consensus to take action on finding dedicated revenue streams, and that’s so we can build the transit that we need.

Do you understand why some people are unconvinced? Having seen operating funding lost, having seen an Eglinton subway tunnel be dug and then filled in again—do you understand why people might be skeptical?

Yes. I believe that people’s confidence in the ability of government to follow through on transit building is rightly low. I know that we’ve got a history—it’s not just in the last 10 years, in the last 10 years we’ve actually been building transit—but there’ve been 40 years when that hasn’t happened, and you’re right, there’ve been stops and starts. I believe that the work we’ve done over the last 10 years should give people some confidence that we are committed to this, that we’re a government that believes that this is important, and that I’m a premier and a member of provincial parliament for whom this is a priority.

You’ve indicated that you very much want all the municipal governments to be on board, but that you also view it as your responsibility as premier to make sure that this gets done, period.

Yes.

In order to get this done though, you need to work with someone from across the aisle. How much political capital are you willing to expend on this? Would you, for instance, be willing to make it a confidence motion?

I have said that if this an issue that brings us down as a government I’m willing to take that risk, because I think it’s that important, in the same way that I think infrastructure spending across the province is important. Municipalities need a roads and bridges fund, they need to know that the province is going to support them in that infrastructure deficit that they’re dealing with. I am absolutely committed to all those infrastructure initiatives.

You’re often described as a progressive, as tending to the left end of the Liberal Party. How important is it to you that whatever revenue tools we come up with are progressive and means-tested in some way?

It’s very important to me that people have choice, whether it’s as a driver having another option or a non-driver having a transit option. And it’s very important to me that people know where the money is going. There’s a whole range of tools that are being talked about right now, so I think we need to let that discussion play out. I’m not going to rule certain ones in and certain ones out—I think it’s really healthy that we have the whole conversation.

But prescinding from asking you to judge about any particular tool, are you committed to working within whatever Metrolinx ends up recommending, or would you consider going outside their list?

Again, I’m not going to pre-empt that process. I know that the folks who are writing the report at Metrolinx are taking into account all the other thinking that’s going on, so I suspect that they will distill all of that material and that we’ll see a broad range of options.

You’re going to need a partner in all this, and based on his comments it’s probably not going to be Tim Hudak—it seems more likely right now that it’ll be Andrea Horwath, and she’s expressed some concerns about the notion of having a new tool rather than, say, having a portion of the income tax set aside for this. If Andrea Horwath looks at this list when it comes out and says ‘You know what, I’m committed to transit, I want to work with you, but these tools aren’t right for the people I represent. Can we talk about alternatives?’—is that a conversation you’re willing to have?

If she’s willing to have that conversation and put some possibilities on the table.

But I think to suggest that we can just divert money that’s already in the treasury to build transit—we need a new revenue stream. This isn’t money we can find within the treasury right now.

I don’t know where she’s going to land. My hope is that she’ll work with us and I’m going to let that process roll out.

Recently some York region representatives said that we need to build the Richmond Hill extension of the Yonge subway immediately, but Karen Stintz maintains that we need to do the Downtown Relief Line first…

I don’t believe we can do the Yonge Street line [right away], and I’ve said this to people from Richmond Hill: I don’t think we can build another north-south extension until we have a relief line. I think having more traffic funnelling into the Yonge line will be problematic. I agree with Karen Stintz that we need the relief line.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Kathleen Wynne at the Ontario Liberal Party’s nominating convention.

Ontario’s legislature is back in session, and kicked off this afternoon with new premier Kathleen Wynne’s first speech from the throne. Delivered by Lieutenant Governor David Onley, the speech was Wynne’s attempt to set a more collaborative tone than has characterized Queen’s Park lately—crucial if the minority Liberals are to retain their hold on government and avoid an early election. “For the benefit of the entire province,” read Onley in the opening minutes, “your government intends to work with opposition parties, in a spirit of renewed cooperation, to get the people’s business done.”

As expected, the speech called for a balance between fiscal prudence and social justice, and attempted to define those goals as mutually supporting. Economic prosperity will mean fair-paying jobs for more Ontarians, went the argument, and the more Ontarians participate in the workforce, the more the province as a whole will prosper. (Among the kinds of programs and initiatives included here: working to increase the number of people with disabilities employed in the private sector, focusing on youth internship and apprenticeship programs, and establishing a new venture capital fund to help small- and medium-sized businesses.) There were—also predictably—some nods to some PC goals (such as reducing the debt-to-GDP ratio) and some NDP ones (like cracking down on corporate tax evaders).

Like most throne speeches, today’s was short on specifics, but it did include some strong hints about how Wynne and her government will be approaching some Toronto-area issues, in particular.

Transit

For many Torontonians this was the most-anticipated portion of the speech. Wynne reiterated her commitment to new revenue tools, and took some not-so-subtle shots at naysayers, who have either rejected such tools outright (Mayor Rob Ford) or said we’re not ready for them yet (PC leader Tim Hudak). Ontarians want to have “a serious conversation” about infrastructure needs, went this portion of the speech, which in Toronto’s case means “accelerated, integrated transit planning.” And then: “To build these things and facilitate Ontario’s success, your government believes that smart infrastructure investment can no longer be mired in political rhetoric… If we continue to argue about the tools this investment will require then we are deaf to the symphony of progress that echoes around us. The new government is confident that the people of Ontario are willing to participate in a practical discussion of these costs if they can be guaranteed measurable results.”

The speech also called for greater cooperation between different levels of government on transit specifically. The government will “advocate for a national strategy on infrastructure and transit”—something NDP stalwart Olivia Chow has been championing lately as well, which so far has been rejected by Stephen Harper.

Municipal Relations

“Your government intends to work with municipalities on other issues” besides transit, the throne speech continued. It was more subtle, but it addressed some concerns about, for instance, the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation’s strong interest in building a new casino in Toronto, though many in Toronto itself are less sure it’s a good idea. Local communities “must have a voice in their future and a say in their integrated, regional development,” Onley read, “so that local populations are involved from the beginning if there is going to be a gas plant or a casino or a wind plant or a quarry in their hometown.”

Youth Violence

In the post-speech scrum reporters asked Wynne about working with Toronto Mayor Rob Ford and Police Chief Bill Blair to address youth violence, especially in the wake of several recent shootings—four Toronto shooting victims in the past few weeks were under the age of 16. She noted that we need to better address the context in which youth involved in violence are often living, calling attention to the social assistance report authored by Frances Lankin and Munir Sheikh as an example of the kind of approach she thinks this situation requires.

The full text of Premier Kathleen Wynne’s throne speech is online. It will be debated at Queen’s Park on Wednesday.

Progressive Conservative: 23%

Liberal: 24%

NDP: 20%

Green: 7%

Other: 2%

Undecided: 14%

Refused to answer/would not vote: 11%

Which of the following leaders would make the best Premier of Ontario?

Tim Hudak: 18%

Kathleen Wynne: 24%

Andrea Horwath: 13%

Other: 1%

None of the above: 7%

Undecided/don’t know: 34%

After the past few years, I am so angry at the Ontario Liberals, I will never vote for them again.

Strongly agree: 16%

Somewhat agree: 14%

Neither agree nor disagree: 6%

Somewhat disagree: 33%

Strongly disagree: 25%

Don’t know: 4%

The poll also, and we can only hope, finally, puts to rest the purported worry some Liberals had that Wynne would have a hard time winning a general election because she is gay: the survey found that 80 per cent of respondents were either neutral or agreed with the statement, “It’s a good thing Ontario has an openly lesbian Premier.”

Wynne will be officially sworn in as premier, as will the members of her new cabinet, on February 11.