Last week, I proposed in this space three key moves that Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals could make to signal their seriousness about funding GTA transit expansion. But if the re-elected premier wants to take things to the next level and make a bold and region-altering move, here’s a fourth: Implement the revenue tools recommended last year by Metrolinx (HST, gas tax, parking levy, development charges) as a means of making up the approximately $20 billion gap between what the government has pledged to invest in transit and the sum required to complete the Big Move over the next twenty years.

If there was ever a propitious moment to make, well, a big move, we’re absolutely in the middle of it. In almost 20 years of covering urban affairs in Toronto, I can’t remember another opportunity quite this ripe.

Consider the architecture: politically, Wynne not only finds herself at the helm of a solid, urban-based majority, while she also faces two opposition parties in shambles. The seat-reduced Tories will be leaderless — and toothless — as of July 2. The NDP’s Andrea Horwath hasn’t yet had her head handed to her, but the election results suggest that progressives abandoned her pocket-book electoral agenda in droves. It’s an alignment perfectly suited to pushing ahead with important but unpopular decisions.

Fiscally, Wynne is promising the sun, the moon and the stars. But her proposed spending levels, and the associated deficit projections, are unsustainable. Bay Street and the bond rating agencies have already started pressuring the Wynne government to dial back the borrowing required to implement her progressive agenda. And with the threat of higher debt servicing costs added to Ontario’s staggering $295 billion in outstanding debt (yes, you’re reading that number correctly), the government will yield – it’s not a matter of “if”, it’s a matter of “when.”

Wynne, in short, will face a fork in the road: either adopt a far more modest agenda than the one she ran on, or impose new taxes to make up the shortfall.

Economists and business groups [PDF] like the Toronto Region Board of Trade (TRBOT) have already signaled their support for revenue tools, including road-pricing measures, such as a gas tax. Indeed, I’d like to see TRBOT come out now with a reminder to Wynne’s Liberals that the region’s largest business lobby backs the type of policy fix adopted by other cities (e.g., Los Angeles and Vancouver) that had to make tough decisions about how to fund such long-term investments.

Yet if Wynne’s Liberals truly want proof of concept, they need only look back to 2003 and the aftermath of Dalton McGuinty’s first majority. During the campaign, Premier Dad solemnly pledged to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation that he wouldn’t raise taxes. After the election, however, the Liberals made an unpopular but necessary decision: to impose a health care levy to tackle runaway medical costs and re-build a system hobbled by Mike Harris’ common (non)sense agenda.

McGuinty, of course, was attacked as a promise-breaking hypocrite (to wit, here’s a press release from one John Tory, then the Progressive Conservative leader, waving an accusing finger). But as Tory well knows, we expect governments to make difficult choices and that responsibility often entails confronting the confusion in an electorate that invariably says it wants both more services and lower taxes.

Tory’s 2007 campaign to call out McGuinty on the health care levy failed. Since then, the levy has faded in our political consciousness, although certainly not to those who mind the provincial treasury. Even Tea Party Tim Hudak didn’t utter a peep about it in this past campaign. The price of McGuinty’s alleged duplicity is a stable health system. The economy didn’t collapse, and Ontario’s hospitals are far better equipped to deal with the needs of an aging population.

To my mind, Wynne now has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to tackle the congestion crisis in much the same way that McGuinty seized the opportunity to break the back of the health care cost spiral Harris created.

Yes, she’d be roundly accused of betraying the voters, blah, blah, blah. But Wynne is also the same politician who promised to lead us through an adult conversation about revenue tools, which was a polite way of saying that if we want less gridlock, better transit and a healthier region, it’s gonna cost something.

What’s equally clear is that this moment will pass quickly. The opening months of a majority term, as her strategists well know, represent the window when one spends one’s political capital. Leaders who preen or consult excessively squander that opportunity, and it doesn’t come back any time soon.

As World Pride Week opens, we’ll hear a lot about how Kathleen Wynne has made history by becoming Canada’s first out premier in an election in which her sexual orientation didn’t cause so much as a ripple. And that’s fantastic.

But if she really wants to leave her mark on the GTHA, she’ll firmly inform her cabinet, and the region’s 6 million residents, that her government has no choice but to impose new transit taxes as a means of delivering its progressive agenda.

Just do it, Kathleen. (P.S.: The sky won’t fall.)

photo by Bobby Hidy