Marcus Gee writes in the Globe and Mail today (Saturday,September 7, 2013) that Beijing has managed to build as many as a dozen subway lines in the last 25 years whereas Toronto hasn’t added much if any capacity to its underground service This is, as you will gather, a criticism of everything transit in Toronto. Mr. Gee is a perceptive man and is seldom wrong in his commentary on the state of the municipality. His dismay at the performance of the present transportation minister is fully understandable. Mr Murray seems to be trying to build a subway to Scarborough by having a temper tantrum a day. Our quibble with Mr. Gee is his comparison of Toronto and Beijing. It’s a common device when we want to complain about Canadian underachievement. The Bulldog would submit that China’s subways have been built as much for reasons of nation-building and international status as for commuter convenience. Happily, Chinese subways aren’t finished up with laughable Greek columns like those in Stalinist Moscow and St. Petersburg. But there’s a similar kind of nationalism at work. In a country with woeful public health, spotty pensions and a bumper crop of orphans, subways may or may not seem to have been a sensible first priority. Of course it is also quite cheap to build anything in China for all the reasons that every factory owner knows. It’s true, we have been neglectful of heavy transit in Toronto but for many years there has been little public outcry about that. Even today transit is not the thing that inspires lawn signs in Leaside, or perhaps even Scarborough. The depth of our dark night of transit tragedy occurred during the mayoralty of Mr. Miller and his youthful keeper of the streetcars, Mr. Giambone. The construction of the St.Clair right-of way was an insanity by any way of measuring it and a shameful crushing of the will of the people of that street.
