Appropriately, on the day Canadian mayors gathered in Ottawa to make their infrastructure financing demands of the federal government, Toronto suffered a significant infrastructure failure affecting tens of thousands of residents. Broken water-mains have become common place in Toronto, especially in the winter. Usually they inconvenience a few dozen homes or businesses and local traffic, get 5 seconds on the evening news and are forgotten. There is a year-long back-log of repair and maintenance work required on the city’s water and sewer systems that matches the equally long list of overdue street repairs which city administrators blame on a shortage of funds. The funding issue doesn't stop city councillors and the mayor from spending lavishly on non-essential services such as designer-parks, luxurious community centres and ornate libraries which stand as memorials to the councillors’ support for their neighbourhood, but it keeps the city from providing basic services likes roads, water, sewers and power.
Last night a broken water-main resulted in the flooding of a Toronto Hydro transformer station cutting electrical power to huge area of the city. That would be the “old city” of Toronto or the pre-amalgamation city whose politics continue to prevail on almost every issue and where the mayor draws his support. With an overnight temperature of -20C, thousands of homes are without heat or light and Toronto Hydro is stating that the problem will not be fixed for more than 24 hours. It’s a problem Toronto Hydro doesn’t need in a week it is revealed that its faulty underground wiring, in the past few months, has electrocuted two dogs walking on city sidewalks; fortunately no humans have died.
Hydro and city officials this morning are telling residents to go to friends’ and relatives’ homes to keep warm because the power will not be restored today. That will be small comfort to the shivering masses who have to stand-by prepared to drain water pipes or the elderly trapped in high-rise apartment buildings and unable to walk down flights of stairs and face the hazards of ice-covered sidewalks to get to a transit stop where the buses run late, as usual, or to the subways which are not running. For those who get to work today, this will be a Friday they ask to work late, maybe until Sunday.
No doubt the sleuths at city hall will take a year to decide if the broken water-main was old infrastructure that should have been replaced years ago. There will be bureaucrats hoping all the shivering residents will have forgotten the long cold nights of January 2009 when they release a report laying blame on the federal and provincial governments for not giving the city enough money. The report will not examine the Toronto policy that prohibits hiring outside contractors to maintain and repair water-mains and sewers, even though they can do the work faster and far more economically than the feather-bedded unions workers the city employs. It will not examine how many times city council diverted funds from infrastructure to build a posh health club in an upper-middle-class neighbourhood where local residents pay a minute fraction of what taxpayers in the most of the city pay to use commercial gyms. But, what the heck, those residents support the mayor in droves.
It appears our federal government is about to embark on an orgy of infrastructure spending in an attempt to stimulate a sagging economy or, at least, to appear to be attempting to help restore employment levels and tax revenue. We will know in a couple of weeks if Toronto mayor David Miller’s lecture to the federal government yesterday helped or hindered the city’s cause. Miller arrogantly challenged the feds to “give us the money now”, without conditions or what he called red tape. It was a big gamble; most observers believe our federal government doesn’t appreciate lectures especially from its “inferiors”. And from communities that haven’t sent a capital-C conservative politician to Ottawa in years and show no signs of doing so any time soon. Let’s see how much money flows to Calgary, Montréal and dozens of other smaller cities who are more inclined to vote CPC.
When the lights come back on and homes warm again, I hope the thousands of inconvenienced Toronto voters will take time to think and make some notes about who they think is to blame for the crumbling infrastructure. The astute among them will surely conclude that keeping their lights on and water flowing is not really the responsibility of a federal prime minister. Perhaps they will resolve to throw the mayor and half of city council from office at the next election. Frozen water-pipes, flooded basements and hypothermia-induced illness may be enough to convince them the time has come.
UPDATE: It is now being reported that the original attribution of the flood to a broken water-main was incorrect. The incident now is blamed on a broken fire suppressing sprinkler system, with no mention, or not, of weather related factors. Quick to shift responsibility, outgoing NDP leader Howard Hampton blamed it all on the province’s crumbling infrastructure. Does this mean he would favour more money to the provincial Liberal government and less to the City’s NDP administration?
