Deputy Mayor Glenn De Baeremaeker wants to change Scarborough subway plan
Mayor John Tory asked one of his deputy mayors, Glenn De Baeremaeker, to “champion” the planned Scarborough extension to the Bloor-Danforth subway line.
De Baeremaeker says he is fully supportive of the three-stop extension he helped get approved. He has simply concluded that a four-stop extension would be much better.
De Baeremaeker urged council last year to choose the three-stop subway over the previously approved seven-stop light rail line. As the city now embarks on an environmental assessment to “confirm the final alignment and station locations,” De Baeremaeker says he intends to release a letter formally asking for a fourth stop, at Danforth Rd. and Eglinton Ave.
The cost of a hypothetical extra station is not known. De Baeremaeker (Ward 38, Scarborough Centre) said Tuesday that he has been told it would likely be $100 million to $150 million.
He said the expenditure would be worthwhile “from a transit perspective and an economic development and a social equity perspective.” Without the extra stop, he said, there would be a four-kilometre gap between Kennedy Station and the next stop. With the extra stop, the gap would be two kilometres — still far bigger, he said pointedly, than gaps between stations downtown.
“We’ve been paying our fair share of taxes for decades without receiving our fair share of the transit pie. So I think it is our turn. We have been last in line,” he said.
The eternally unfinished Scarborough transit debate has become notorious for political meddling. Tory, whose office did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday, has said he wants to simply “get on with it.”
Asked why he did not suggest a fourth station during the lengthy pre-vote debate, De Baeremaeker said he was “too busy” trying to convince unsympathetic non-Scarborough councillors to support a subway “to get into the finer details of which alignment and which station.”
And De Baeremaeker said he has since learned from LRT advocates.
“I’m listening to the criticisms of people like Councillor (Josh) Matlow and mayoral candidate Olivia Chow,” De Baeremaeker said, “who said, ‘You don’t have enough stops. More stops are better. The subway only has three stops.’
“Well, you know what? I listen to my opponents, and I thought, their criticism of the Scarborough subway proposal is that it doesn’t have as many stops. Well, you know what? That’s a valid criticism. It only has three stops, not seven stops. Seven stops might be too many, but certainly a fourth stop, to me, makes a lot of sense.”
Matlow (Ward 22, St. Paul’s) said “it is outrageously irresponsible to be changing tracks again on improving transit for Scarborough residents.” He said the credibility of the project is diminished when “the so-called champion of the Scarborough subway is now questioning the very plan that he has said in the past he wants to move forward with.”
“This is not how transit should be planned. Transit should be planned based on realistic projections, on good urban planning, on real needs, and on realistic funding sources,” Matlow said. “The anointed champion of the Scarborough subway thinks building transit is just about picking numbers of stops out of the sky? Unbelievable. Something needs to change here.”
