Even as the new mayor’s executive committee spent Thursday afternoon debating and approving study on our Next Big Transit Project (his SmartTrack proposal), news of the cost of our waffling on the Last Big Transit Project (the Bloor-Danforth Scarborough subway extension to replace the Scarborough RT) kept coming.

The city budget we’re all looking at now, the one presented on Tuesday, includes money to pay cancellation costs for the Scarborough LRT that the subway extension will replace, the Star learned. Of course, if you look at that budget, you won’t see the money. It’s hidden. But it’s there.

“Yes, it’s in the capital plan,” city manager Joe Pennachetti told the Star’s Jennifer Pagliaro. “No you’d not be able to see it.”

You and I are going to pay those cancellation costs. How much we’re going to pay, and how, and where in the capital budget the funds are earmarked? Top secret, apparently.

The mystery cheques are being prepared on our behalf behind the scenes, even though the agreement with the province to build the LRT has yet to be replaced with an agreement to build anything else.

The subway extension seems a sure thing, of course, since John Tory won the election claiming it was his “top work priority.” But as we all know, there are no sure things in Toronto transit.

This is the city where an under-construction subway tunnel on Eglinton was filled in. Where construction to build the Sheppard LRT was halted. Where assessments and engineering were completed on the Scarborough LRT and contracts were signed to build it, before city council changed its mind — which, coincidentally, is how we came to incur these costs the city has now secretly budgeted for.

This isn’t a small amount of money we’re talking about. Though neither Pennachetti nor Metrolinx CEO Bruce McCuaig would confirm the number, Metrolinx has long suggested it could be around $85 million, and the Star has been informed by a source that it’s likely to be at least $75 million.

To give you a sense of how much that is in city terms, this same budget set aside $31 million to construct four new fire and paramedic stations, and will buy 50 new buses for $13.9 million. Seventy five million dollars to $85 million is a lot of coin, no matter how you slice it.

And what will we get for it? Nothing at all. Or more precisely, we will get to not build something.

That’s the really frustrating part about paying cancellation costs, as it was in the case of the provincial Liberal gas-fired power plant scandal. The massive amount of money — valuable government money that is in short supply — spent for the explicit purpose of achieving nothing.

Of course, in the minds of those who made this decision, the cost is justified because it is a necessary step to building something else. In order to construct the Scarborough subway extension — and/or the voter base it is thought to bring with it — you need to first not build the LRT.

Given the subway as the desirable endpoint, blanching at the cancellation fees may seem to be engaging in the “sunk cost fallacy” (that is, the impulse to keep throwing good money after bad, rather than walking away from what’s already spent to pursue something better). Except, let’s always remember that this isn’t money the City of Toronto has already spent that it is walking away from. It’s not money that the City of Toronto was even going to have to spend anyway. Under the old plan, the city was never going to have to pay a cent in capital costs — 100 per cent of the bill was to have been covered by the province. So this “sunk cost” is actually, on the city’s books where it now secretly resides, an entirely new cost.

Properly then, we need to consider it a part of the bill for the city’s share of the three-stop subway extension — a roughly 8 per cent increase over the much-reported cost to the city of $910 million.

No deal is yet in place to build the subway. But we’re already paying property taxes for it. No deal is yet in place to cancel the LRT agreement. But the city is budgeting for us to pay for that, too.

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Will the subway extension be built? When? Who knows? But we’re already paying astronomical costs for it — through phased-in property tax increases, and now through cancellation fees. We just haven’t been publicly shown the final bill.