It’s probably overstating things to say John Tory’s SmartTrack plan won him the mayoral election in 2014. There was too much going on in that race to single out one proposal as decisive.

But it was, without a doubt, the central plank of his winning campaign platform. The little SmartTrack logo appeared on his lawn signs. SmartTrack was a big deal, in that election. As big a deal as anything else he promised or proposed.

With the next campaign about two weeks away from officially kicking off, and the latest report on the plan’s progress on the Executive Committee agenda at city hall Tuesday, perhaps it’s time to check in and see how his signature “surface-rail subway” has held up.

What was promised in 2014 piggybacked on the provincial government’s Regional Express Rail (RER) plan by adding more local stations and service in Toronto, running mostly on the existing GO track network. Including a new spur line running west on Eglinton to Mississauga, the network would consist of 22 stations in total. These would see frequent, subway-style service all-day, both ways (“every 15 minutes or better” was a phrase used a lot at the time.) This service would be offered for a TTC fare. The entire thing would be completed and in service by 2021, and was expected to cost $8 billion, of which the city’s share was to be $2.5 billion. And the city’s share of this would be paid without any increase in property or other tax rates, through the use of something called Tax Increment Financing.

It’s actually hard to do an apples-to-apples comparison of the proposal to the current plan, because the western heavy-rail spur has been abandoned for the Eglinton West LRT plan (part of the old Transit City phase two) to serve that same corridor.

The Eglinton West LRT plan now calls for 10 stops and is a separate project, even though it is branded as “part of the SmartTrack program.” These may be in service by 2023 and could cost somewhere between $2.5 billion and $3.5 billion, of which the city is expecting to pay about $1.2 billion (though that number could be a billion dollars or more higher if grade separation is pursued, as Tory and some council allies have suggested.)

So what’s left of the rest of SmartTrack? Fourteen total stops, six of them new, along the Kitchener and Stouffville/Lakeshore East GO lines. The total cost is difficult to tease out, since much of it is part and parcel of the provincial $13.5 billion RER plan that was underway with or without SmartTrack. The cost of the new Toronto stations — the key SmartTrack construction modification — is just under $1.5 billion, and the city is expected to pay about $878 million (with the feds chipping in the rest.) The report considered at city hall this week suggests that should be the extent of the city’s contribution.

The executive committee report under discussion now makes clear that the campaign’s financing idea was an almost complete load of bull. Tax Increment Financing, which Tory’s campaign insisted back then was the magic bullet, is now expected to cover only a slight portion of the bill. Some of the rest, the report suggests, will come from new development charges. And the rest will come from a capital construction fund fed by a dedicated 2.5 per cent property tax increase Tory already began phasing in back in 2017.

And the SmartTrack/RER opening date now appears to be 2025. Exactly how frequent service might be is still a subject of discussion — the city plans and Metrolinx plans for this show differences. It appears likely at least every 15 minutes (the minimum promised during the campaign), though real subway-style service and the ridership that comes with it would require more frequency than that. The fare situation is still up in the air a bit too, as the province had recently proposed drastically reduced GO fares in Toronto, but actual TTC fare — as in a transfer or Metropass would get you on at no additional cost — is still not guaranteed.

In the broad strokes — number of total stations, order of magnitude of the cost to the city, service standards — Tory can claim he is on track to deliver something similar to what he promised (even if it doesn’t look as transformational as his rhetoric would have led people to believe.)

And yet the plan has changed substantially since it was promised in 2014. It will take at least four years longer to complete than anticipated. The way it will be paid for will be substantially different than promised. There’s an LRT component where a heavy-rail spur used to be. A few really key questions remain to be answered.

If you look back at what many of us were saying in 2014, all of these changes were completely predictable, even though Tory swore up and down they wouldn’t be necessary.

SmartTrack isn’t exactly as was promised, but it is about what any informed person would have expected. It’s like much of Tory’s mayoralty in that regard.

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Edward Keenan is a columnist based in Toronto covering urban affairs. Follow him on Twitter: @thekeenanwire

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