Among our Thanksgiving traditions, particularly when we invite guests to our gatherings over Turkey dinner, our family usually engages in “What if?” talk. Often the Q&As reveal attitudes among family members we didn’t know. Other times, it’s a chance for guests to tell us about themselves and stimulate conversation. Over Monday’s turkey dinner, my granddaughter hit me with this question:
“Twenty years from now, what looming event do you think you’ll have difficulty explaining?”
I thought long and hard about challenges we’re all facing today – democracy threatened by the race for the presidency in the United States, global preparedness for the next pandemic, pushing back xenophobia in Canadian society, ensuring career opportunities are there for our grandchildren and their children.
But I guess, if I’m still around in 2044, I’ll probably find it difficult to rationalize how western civilization, with as much access to information as any society in modern history, didn’t recognize and rise to the challenge of slowing climate change.
“I don’t think I’ll be able to rationalize our incompetency,” I told my granddaughter “for failing to save the planet from greenhouse gases.”
We have nobody to blame but ourselves. Equatorial nations still cut down or burn tropical rain forests that cleanse the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Third World countries continue to burn coal to try to catch up to First World economies.
And instead of replacing internal combustion engines with less-polluting electrical vehicles and/or public transit, we let politicians all around us promote more cars on more roads with more absurdly environmentally unsound policies. Take for example recent announcements about GTA gridlock by Premier Doug Ford.
“Ontario is growing too fast,” he told reporters at a media conference near his home in Etobicoke couple of weeks ago. So, his solution is to dig a tunnel under Highway 401 from Mississauga to Scarborough.
He scoffed at criticism of his plan to bury the problem of east-west gridlock across the top of Toronto beneath the busiest thoroughfare in Canada, quipping, “We’re getting the tunnel built!”
Was I the only person in Ontario to say to myself, “Where did this come from? Has the premier ever dangled a 40-kilometre-long tunnel panacea in the Ontario Legislature or on the rubber-chicken speaking circuit before?” Just about everybody I know remarked, “WTF?”
One would think the premier might have considered the history of the Eglinton Crosstown system and its delayed christening. A good portion of the long-overdue light rapid transit line from was hampered by going underground.
And that doesn’t come within a country mile of the equally postponed, delayed and fumbled Scarborough subway extension that the premier’s brother promised years ago. I guess this premier equates digging – either digging up farmland to build Highway 413 or delivering one layer of traffic chaos upon another – to solving gridlock in the GTA.
One would think before standing in front of the media championing tunnels, the premier might first have done a little homework.
In 1982, the city of Boston launched a megaproject to elevate the city’s central artery – Interstate 93 – and build tunnels linking Interstate 90 on one side of downtown with Logan International Airport on the other. Construction lasted from 1991 to 2007, 16 years, and ultimately became the most expensive highway project in U.S. history.
The “Big Dig” suffered from not unexpected cost overruns, delays, leaks, design inconsistencies, accusations of substandard materials and poor execution. The original estimate for construction was $2.8 billion (US), but ended up costing $8.08 billion (US), or $21.5 billion in dollars adjusted for inflation. For context, that’s twice what Canada spent on its war effort during the entire Second World War.
But the real problem here isn’t so much the out-of-rightfield notions of a premier with no particular vision, except a “damn the torpedoes” support of development and growth. With the Ford government’s latest pronouncements this week to prohibit municipalities from installing bicycle lanes in place of car lanes without provincial permission, it’s clearly all-out war on clean transit in favour of dirty transit.
Clean air, water and soil be damned. It’s hard to imagine what plans the premier might unveil next to deal with the shortage of doctors, the growing lines at food banks, the lack of affordable housing, the waiting times in hospital emergency rooms, and, oh yes, the overheating planet.
And I thought again about our “What if?” talk over Thanksgiving. The notion of sticking the GTA’s gridlock problems into a tunnel under the 401, versus dealing with climate change and congestion more sensibly, could only make me think of the proverbial ostrich with its head stuck in the sand.