Scarborough “deserves a subway,” goes the saying.

Actually, we all deserve better than facile slogans.

This column is dedicated to the 5 million residents of the GTA, the 13 million denizens of Ontario, and the 35 million people of Canada who don’t live in Scarborough (population 600,000) but wish it well — and just wish we would all grow up.

The rest of us won’t directly benefit from the latest round of brazen suburban vote-buying. But we will all pay a heavy price for it.

What happens in Scarborough goes beyond Scarborough. When politicians from all three levels of government and all three major parties shamelessly outbid each other with our money, pandering to Scarborough’s subway psychosis, they are hurting all taxpayers in the pocketbook.

Stephen Harper and his moneyman, Jim Flaherty, have jumped on the Rob Ford gravy train to Scarborough by offering yet more cash for an overpowered subway that makes no sense. Kathleen Wynne and her transit sidekick, Glen Murray, are scrambling to get in front of that train. And Toronto councillors are taking us all for a ride.

You can’t blame politicians for placating the loudest voices. The rest of us are letting them get away with it.

It seems nothing less than a subway will do for the suburb that is the beating, bleating, pleading heart of our polity: Scarborough is our Quebec.

Burdened by an oversized inferiority complex, sensitive to every slight and perceived humiliation, the voters of Scarborough have persuaded themselves — and hence our politicians — that they get no respect, publicly or fiscally. Ransomed by emotional and political blackmail, must we show our love by opening our wallets?

Every expert planner says a subway extension is a poor fit for this low-density suburb, which cries out for the flexible, sleek and swift LRTs found in major world cities. Yet the LRT has been caricatured into a clunker — damaged goods, second best — beneath the dignity of a proud people who won’t be taken for granted.

Politicians thoughtlessly echo Ford’s fiction that world-class cities (such as Scarborough) deserve nothing but subways, despite the long list of successful LRT routes in big cities abroad (and supposedly second-class Calgary). And if the Eaton Centre can have a subway station, the Scarborough Town Centre must have one, too.

In a perfect world, politicians who sell out so obsequiously to local vested interests would be severely punished — publicly flogged and defeated at the ballot box. But in a political world, where democratic pressure points distort the common good, vote-rich Scarborough must be placated while the rest of us look the other way.

Flaherty, our self-styled thrifty finance minister, has just promised federal funding as a personal favour to the mayor, a longtime family friend. Now it falls to city council — led by former taxfighter Ford himself — to raise property taxes in order to make up a looming funding shortfall.

Extending the subway northeast to Sheppard would cost as much as $3 billion. Queen’s Park has capped its contribution at $1.4 billion — the amount first budgeted for a high-speed LRT from Kennedy all the way to Sheppard, but now reallocated to a proposed truncated subway ending at Scarborough Town Centre.

An additional $660 million announced by Ottawa this week is supposed to extend the subway back up to Sheppard. But the combined federal-provincial funding adds up to just over $2 billion — and takes us only two-thirds of the way. Will Ford and his fellow councillors embrace $1 billion in new taxes to reach their final goal?

Do the rest of us taxpayers want to pay that surcharge for a vanity upgrade, just to bump Scarborough up from an “economy class” LRT to “first class” subways? Is it worth diverting $660 million in federal funds to make Scarborough feel special?

As Harper and Flaherty love to lecture us, there is only one taxpayer: Whether the funding is federal, provincial or municipal, it all comes out of our pockets.

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All governments must be accountable to all taxpayers, not merely amenable to voters afflicted by suburban subway psychosis. Yet politicians reflexively take the path of least resistance.

We all deserve better. But in politics, the squeaky wheel gets the subway.

Martin Regg Cohn’s provincial affairs column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. mcohn@thestar.ca , Twitter: @reggcohn

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