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The city replaced that plan with the line now a few months away from completion, running from Tunney’s Pasture to Blair Road.

Under Watson, the city had already put together money to extend the O-Train as far south as Bowesville, on the edge of Riverside South’s future boundary, as part of a $3-billion rail project that’s to send trains as far as Moodie Drive in the west, Algonquin College in the southwest and Trim Road in the east. But the money for the extra three kilometres, it just didn’t have, Watson said.

The result didn’t make any sense, Watson admitted now that it’s no longer the plan: “The initial spot where we let people off was basically in the middle of a field,” he said Thursday.

Photo by Wayne Cuddington / Postmedia

Chiarelli is now the MPP for Ottawa West-Nepean and the minister of infrastructure, and is facing an election again that his Liberal party could well lose. He got to pledge the $50 million to build the extension, and declined an opportunity to gloat.

“All I have to say about that is, you know, that particular debate resulted in my losing the election, and I exercised the discipline from that particular date to today to not comment on that,” Chiarelli said, and went no further on it.

The $50 million is, he said, money left over in a provincial infrastructure fund after the rest was spent on joint projects with the federal government. (Of course, if Chiarelli’s party loses power, the whole thing could go out the window again.)

Richcraft and Urbandale, Riverside South’s major property developers, have agreed to a special levy on sales in the area that will raise the other $30 million (they had the rug ripped out from under them in 2006 and have been lobbying to reinstate some form of the Chiarelli plan ever since). Neither the city nor the federal government will put money in directly.