Olivia Chow has tried announcements, arguments and advertisements to undermine SmartTrack, John Tory’s key policy proposal. On Thursday, she deployed an unconventional weapon: a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.

Chow’s campaign issued a detailed financial model produced for her by former Ontario Hydro chief economist Mitchell Rothman. Using some of Tory’s own assumptions about future office development, the model concludes that Tory’s plan to pay for the 53-kilometre rail line using tax increment financing (TIF) will fail.

“Its findings are damning,” Chow’s campaign said in a news release.

Specifically, Rothman finds that TIF will produce, at most, $929 million of the $2.7 billion Tory says he needs to find as the city’s share of the project he pegs at $8 billion.

Rothman’s analysis suggests the plan would fall short even if there were indeed 42 million square feet of new offices built in three particular parts of the city over 30 years — a Tory estimate deemed “optimistic” by Jones Lang LaSalle national research coordinator Thomas Forr — and even if Tory is conceded his highly questionable claim that SmartTrack will be responsible for 64 per cent of all of the new development.

“Downtown is already undergoing a significant office building boom, which is obviously occurring without SmartTrack,” the Chow campaign said. “Yet, Mr. Tory says almost two-thirds of new office construction will be directly attributable to his scheme. This seems unrealistic.”

The model is generous to Tory in some ways, but it does not take into account all of his potential revenue options.

It does not include any residential development, which could increase the revenue total by hundreds of millions; Tory’s campaign says it will seek to use residential development money as well as money from office buildings. And it assumes that the province will not give SmartTrack any portion of the education tax, which could produce hundreds of millions more.

The Star’s own analysis concluded that Tory’s proposal could well fail. Tory, though, is steadfast in his insistence that it will work — and that he does not even need a backup plan. He argues that critics of the proposal are naysayers looking for a reason to reject his “bold” idea.

He questioned Rothman’s credibility on Thursday, telling the Star’s editorial board the analysis was produced by a “longtime friend of Olivia Chow’s who’s an NDP kind of activist.”

Tory said all of the figures he has seen about population growth and future development have convinced him that the plan is sound.

He dismissed people he said are critical of his willingness to use “confidence in the future growth of the city” as a way to know that “those numbers will be achievable.”

“We’ll get those buildings built. We’ll get them built, I hope, in a sensible way, too,” he said.

Rothman said he is a longtime acquaintance of Chow and late husband Jack Layton, and that he joined the NDP to support Layton’s bid for leader, but has not maintained his membership and is “not a dyed-in-the-wool NDP supporter at all.” He noted that the spreadsheet has been posted online for anyone to manipulate if they disagree with his own estimates and assumptions.

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“I have 20 years as an independent consultant. I’ve advised all kinds of governments and people,” he said. “And I and the company that I was working for are known as independent analysts. We run the numbers and we tell people what the numbers say, not what it is they wanted to hear.”

TIF is basically a three-step process: Certain parts of the city are declared TIF zones. Money is borrowed to pay for the project. And when there is new development in the TIF zones, much of the new tax revenue goes to paying back the debt rather than to the city’s general coffers. If there isn’t enough development, the city has to find other sources of funding, such as tax hikes.

Tory is attempting to weather an unceasing barrage of SmartTrack criticism from both Chow and Doug Ford (open Doug Ford's policard). He launched a new radio ad Thursday that cites praise from three experts, including the University of Toronto’s Eric Miller. Chow has suggested that Tory’s transit platform ignores expert opinion.

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