Federal Environment Minister Peter Kent quipped that it was the first “boring” political speech he had ever made.

His was only one of many lighthearted ‘digs’ at the ceremonial launch Friday of the first of four giant boring machines the TTC will use to tunnel the Toronto-York Spadina Subway Extension.

York Region chair Bill Fisch talked about his dog and TTC chair Karen Stintz couldn’t contain her amusement at the names selected from a public contest for the TTC’s new Toronto-built customized machines — Holey, Moley, Yorkie, and Torkie.

Ontario Transportation Minister Kathleen Wynne got a laugh when she congratulated the construction workers and engineers gathered at the site of the future Sheppard West subway station in Downsview Park. That’s where the first tunnel borer is positioned at the bottom of a two-storey deep shaft from which it will start digging south in the next two weeks.

“This is hard, intense labour and a day of it would do any of us in,” she said, gesturing to her political colleagues.

The $2.6 billion subway, that will stretch 8.6 kilometres from Downsview Station to Vaughan Metropolitan Centre, is the first TTC subway to cross Toronto’s municipal border. Expected to be complete in 2015, it represents a new cross-regional approach to transit, said Wynne.

“Projects like this are changing the culture in the Greater Toronto Hamilton Area. We have assumed cars are the answer for everything . . . It’s not easy to address that culture shift . . . The reality is these projects take a long time to get started and to complete,” she said.

That’s particularly true in York, “a region that has nothing but cars, a region that has the highest proportion of four-car families in North America,” said York Region chair Bill Fisch, who went on to remind the gathering that York would also like the Yonge subway extended north.

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford underlined his own subway platform.

“I’m a big, big fan of subways. Subways are the future of rapid transit,” he told the reporters and construction workers assembled at the launch shaft.

The subway will act as a gateway to Downsview Park, York University and Black Creek Pioneer Village and as a link to GO Transit and York Region Transit, said Ford.

The $58 million tunnel boring machines that will be launched in pairs this summer and fall are digging the first subway to cross the city’s borders.

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The cost is being split between Ottawa, Queen’s Park, York Region and Toronto.

Standing on the sidelines Friday, Toronto Councillor Joe Mihevc, a member of the previous TTC board, said it takes a miracle to make a subway — “a political miracle to get this amount of money together and this amount of political co-operation.”

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