The province may be rejecting TTC chair Karen Stintz’s bold OneCity transit plan, but a poll commissioned by the Toronto Star suggests residents are overwhelmingly prepared to support the tax-for-transit scheme.

Eighty per cent of Torontonians favour the $30-billion, 30-year plan with 47 per cent indicating strong support in the poll by Angus Reid Public Opinion/Vision Critical.

More: How TTC chair Stintz and her allies made the OneCity transit plan

“Torontonians are quite critical of public transit. It’s always at the top of the list of concerns so anything that comes forward as a large-scale expansion or improvement gives a lot of hope. Even if it is very early days, people are very excited to see the colours on the map and all those different routes,” said Jodi Shanoff, senior vice-president of Angus Reid Public Opinion/Vision Critical in Toronto.

Support for OneCity is highest in the downtown. But even in Mayor Rob Ford’s suburban strongholds of Etobicoke and Scarborough, only 16 per cent and 17 per cent, respectively, were strongly opposed to the plan unveiled by councillors Stintz and TTC vice-chair Glenn De Baeremaeker on Wednesday.

It envisions a web of interconnected routes extending to all corners of Toronto, linking the downtown, as well as the suburbs. A copy of the plan and the map of proposed lines was provided to poll respondents.

Among the 20 per cent who were opposed, 60 per cent indicated they disagreed with having to pay the tax that the city councillors suggest to cover a third of the transit expansion. Senior governments would each provide another third.

Almost one in three residents who voted for Ford strongly oppose the plan.

Asked if they were willing to support a 2-per-cent property tax increase to fund transit expansion, 67 per cent of the 800 residents polled, said yes. Forty-eight per cent of those who voted for Ford, however, were not in favour.

Even when residents were asked specifically if they supported a $180 annual property tax increase — the average prescribed once the OneCity tax plan is fully phased in — 59 per cent remained in favour, with 38 per cent opposed.

“Support is as high as 74 per cent among Torontonians who did not vote for Rob Ford,” said Shanoff. Fifty-five per cent of Ford supporters oppose a tax increase.

The high acceptance indicated for the transit tax is unusual.

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“Historically, Canadians have only ever had an appetite for a tax increase when it was in the vein of being dedicated to better health-care delivery,” said Shanoff.

The poll has a 3.4-per-cent margin of error 19 times out of 20.

It was conducted Thursday, a day before Ontario Infrastructure and Transportation Minister Bob Chiarelli swiftly dismissed some of OneCity’s key proposals.

The Ontario Liberal cabinet has already approved a plan to spend its $8.4 billion in Toronto transit funding on LRTs on Eglinton, Sheppard East, Finch West and the Scarborough Rapid Transit route. The OneCity plan, however, envisions the SRT as a subway.

Chiarelli also dismissed turning the premium Pearson-to-Union Station express train shuttle, scheduled to open by 2015, into public transit, another OneCity proposal.

Residents can’t wait for another long city council debate, Chiarelli said.

“Too much time has been wasted. . . . The province has been patient and nimble. What we need now is action and implementation,” he said.

He repeated his comments from earlier in the week that the city already has the power to raise property and other taxes, so there’s no need for the province to approve the legal change OneCity proposes to allow Toronto to capture the uplift in property assessments.

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Stintz (Eglinton-Lawrence) said the provincial announcement is premature She plans to ask council to approve a staff study of OneCity in July, which would then come back to council in October.

Extending the Bloor-Danforth subway northeast of Kennedy to Sheppard rather than converting the SRT to LRT is one element of a much larger plan, she told reporters.

“The big component of OneCity is that the city is willing to step up and fund our one-third,” said Stintz.

“If there is a (council) decision to find the money and to ask the province to reconsider then we would expect the province to take that under consideration. If they come back and say, ‘No we’re sorry it’s too late,’ that’s the decision we will respect,” she said.

Councillor Peter Milczyn (Etobicoke-Lakeshore) said councillors should leave transit planning to the province’s Metrolinx authority.

But he’s in favour of extending the Bloor-Danforth subway up to Sheppard so it can be linked to the Sheppard subway and “create a loop that’s been on the books for years in all the planning documents.”

In that case, though, Stintz and her council colleagues will be reopening the subway-versus-LRT debate that bitterly divided council earlier this year.

That’s when a majority of councillors, led by Stintz, rejected Mayor Rob Ford’s insistence on a subway rather than an LRT on Sheppard East. Council decided it would be better to spread the province’s $8.4 billion in transit funding to more lines and that the mayor did not have the private sector he promised in the election would pay for the Sheppard subway.

Also on the Star:

Dramatic OneCity proposal floated by Stintz, DeBaeremaeker

James: Will Toronto pay for subways?

With files from Paul Moloney

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