Moments come and moments go.

Canada had a moment in 1967. The centennial year was a legendary time when we built grand buildings and infrastructure across the country, such as the Ontario Science Centre, though it ultimately opened in 1969.

Likely one of those places you last went on a school trip, it’s worth a return visit. The building has had some unfortunate additions inside and out over the decades, but much of its brutalist concrete grace can still be felt. Designed by famed Toronto architect Raymond Moriyama, the Science Centre leaps over a ravine then crawls down into the Don Valley. For many visitors, it was likely the first experience of Toronto’s hidden topography, and Moriyama’s design celebrates the contours of the valley itself.

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It was fitting, then, that the Science Centre played host to a symposium last weekend put on by the Architectural Conservancy of Ontario’s Toronto chapter that, in part, looked at the centennial legacy of Expo 67 and other building projects from that period. Back then, Ontario and Canada were thinking big and investing in all manner of modern projects that were seen as province and nation building efforts. In hindsight, not all were successful and some bulldozed parts of cities that shouldn’t have been, but that spirit of creating new things seems intoxicating in retrospect.

The 150th birthday of both Ontario and Canada this year has a much different sense to it: more of an introspective time for the country as it figures out what it means to be Canadian, coupled with an overdue reckoning with its colonial legacy. Yet Ontario is at a historic, once-in-a-lifetime moment again in terms of building things: there’s money on the table for a number of massive transportation infrastructure projects, yet the opportunity is being squandered in some places.

Certainly Cicero or Plato have a passage somewhere where they predict that Light Rail Transit (LRT) will be the final undoing of the social contract, ripping apart civil society. At least they would if they visited Hamilton recently.

The provincial government has promised that city $1 billion to build an LRT from McMaster University, east through the downtown, connecting with the Hamilton GO centre and ending on the city’s east side. Hamilton’s got one of Canada’s great and solid downtowns that’s seeing a slow, hard-fought renaissance after decades of decline, and the city has been absorbing people moving from Toronto and elsewhere while new businesses are opening up. It’s an exciting place, and the kind of place where an LRT line seems natural.

Instead, it’s become one of the most divisive political issues in recent years. The Hamilton Spectator even shut down comments on an LRT story because they were more vicious than the usual viciousness of newspaper comment sections, and one Hamilton city councillor even said if the city rejected the $1 billion it would be a “kick in the groin.” After endless debates, this week city council voted to move ahead with the LRT, though there’s still a chance it could be cancelled next year.

Is it because we have so much space in Ontario that transportation issues are so politicized? Is it holding onto the dream of the car, even though an LRT won’t prevent driving? Resistance to change? Perhaps it’s all three.

Much has been made of younger people opting for generally car-free lives, preferring to live in walkable, dense communities rather than the suburbs. A poll commissioned by some Hamilton councillors this month showed LRT support is highest among younger people and drops lower as age increases. Much like Brexit in the UK, it’s easy to interpret the young looking towards the future with older folks searching for some past glory.

The glory, though, is downtown Hamilton. LRT, as a “higher order” of transit, is a statement that what civil society invested in over the last decades or even centuries is worthy of reinvestment. LRT has brought prosperity and life back to places that need a kick-start, and the laying down of permanent tracks is a message of long-term commitment to a place. It’s deeply ironic that Hamilton’s public bus agency is still called the “Hamilton Street Railway,” as it ran streetcars from the Victorian era until the 1950s. Much of solid, downtown Hamilton is a legacy of those rails.

Some parts of Ontario have embraced this kind of re-investment. Kitchener-Waterloo opted to connect its two downtowns and beyond with an LRT set to open next year, and Ottawa is expanding its O-Train with a new line. Mississauga is also forging ahead with an LRT project along Hurontario St. too.

However, Brampton city council rejected a plan that would have connected its own downtown to Mississauga’s with an LRT line on Main St., losing out on provincial cash — just as Hamilton will if it ultimately rejects the LRT plan — and instead rerouting the line into an industrial area where few people live, missing out on all the spin off benefits LRT brings.

Even Bramptonian Bill Davis, Ontario’s premier from 1971-1985, came out against the Main St. plan, helping kill it. That was a surprise, considering Davis was part of the “think big” era of Ontario and a respected elder statesperson today. Yet at age 87, his forward thinking days seem over, out of tune with the younger generation he once championed and the spirit of the era he came to power in.

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There’s a real sadness to debates like Hamilton’s. Transit connects people, physically and socially, and though not branded as such could be a worthwhile Canada 150 project that reinvests in what we’ve already spent considerable effort building: our cities.

Alas, Ontario seems to have lost the forward thinking ambition it had in 1967.