What is there left to say about Brampton? The very name has become synonymous with suburban dysfunction. If it’s not mayors who seem to treat the place like their personal fiefdom or pressing the wrong button at voting time, it’s a council prepared to go along with its most unenlightened, self-defeating members.

Yet even for the Flower City, the decision to refuse an LRT line — its $1.6-billion capital costs fully covered by the province — represents a new level. Whatever the stated reasons for the move — heritage, routing, operating costs — Brampton has put another nail in its own coffin.

The city’s fear of transit reflects a mentality of a municipality in which the majority will resist change no matter what form it takes. It also reflects an individualist mindset that precludes any allegiance to a larger civic entity. Transit, which by its nature demands a sense of community, civility and tolerance, is at odds with the get-out-of-my-way attitude of Brampton’s car-based culture.

Not only is the heritage argument laughable, it’s a joke. For a city that long ago sold itself to the forces of sprawl to wrap itself in the flag of history is either an insult or the result of profound self-delusion. Light-rail vehicles happily roll past centuries-old buildings in many European cities. If anything spoils the integrity of old Brampton, it is the cars and trucks that have turned it into little more than an arrangement of highways and parking lots interrupted by malls and subdivisions.

And how interesting that the Grand Old Man of Brampton himself, illustrious former Ontario premier Bill Davis, should come out against the line. In Toronto, of course, Davis is revered as the last true Progressive Conservative and the man who killed the Spadina Expressway in 1971.

“If we are building a transportation system to serve the automobile,” he famously said at the time, “the Spadina Expressway would be a good place to start. But if we are building a transportation system to serve people, the Spadina Expressway is a good place to stop.”

Nearly half a century later, Brampton’s transportation system still serves the automobile. Though we tend to forget, Davis was also one of the premiers who made suburbia possible. His willingness to pay for sewers, roads and water allowed suburban politicians and planners approve endless subdivisions without regard to their cost, which is only now coming due.

The arguments over the route will never end. Critics want the line to run along Steeles, north to Queen and then east to the Bramalea GO station, or all the way to the Vaughan subway extension, now under construction.

But if an LRT doesn’t belong on Brampton’s downtown Main St., where should it go? Most importantly, the cancelled route would have provided a transit connection to the larger GTA.

But perhaps that’s exactly what Bramptonians don’t want. The suburban ethos, after all, is one of disconnection and separation. It rejects the urban ideal for something that, though it adds up to less, demands less. Except for the fact that congestion is out of control — and that municipalities can no longer afford basic services — everything would be hunky-dory.

While suburban communities from Mississauga to Markham have figured out that the future will be denser and more urban than they imagined, Brampton remains oblivious to anything but itself. That some of its elected representatives were unable to rise above their own self-regard and respond like adults has set the city back decades. Not that anyone cares. It’s just Brampton, after all.

Christopher Hume can be reached at chume@thestar.ca

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