On Wednesday, a man rode the subway.

He emerged at the end of his trip in shirtsleeves, a mist of sweat on his face — after suffering “considerable discomfort,” he said, from the train’s lack of a working air conditioner on a sweltering, humid, late-summer morning — and a half an hour late for his work appointment due to multiple delays along the way.

For many thousands of Torontonians these days, this is called “a standard commute.” But around city hall we call it news.

It was news because the man was Mayor John Tory. He rides the subway most mornings, of course, and we don’t hold the presses for a report. But in this case, Tory was putting on a performance. A command performance.

Local citizen Bianca Spence had challenged him on Twitter to ride an air-conditioning-free subway on the Bloor line end-to-end with her, to demonstrate he understood the craptacular conditions transit commuters have experienced on that line this summer. The TTC claimed in July that about a quarter of trains on that line had no air conditioning. Many of us were skeptical: my own scientific survey put the exact number of train cars without air-conditioning during July closer to “every single one I rode in every day.” After working all summer to fix cars, the TTC now says 15 to 20 per cent of cars are hot boxes.

Anyhow, the point is: unlike the majority of subway riders, who tolerate crowding into mobile steamrooms in the morning because they need to get to work on time, the mayor was suffering through the fire in the hole on purpose. St. Augustine explained the Catholic tradition of self-punishment by those who have done wrong: “It is not enough for a man to change his ways for the better and to give up the practice of evil, unless by painful penance . . . ” On Wednesday, Tory was performing a public act of penance. Having embraced this mortification of the flesh to personally atone for the sins of the city government he leads, he swore to do “much, much better” in the future.

But talk is cheap, and air conditioning is expensive. This performance of discomfort was perhaps made necessary, in the public’s opinion, in part because the breakdown of the cooling systems came just as another performance was underway. I’m talking about the ongoing performance of budget frugality led by the mayor.

The TTC, like every other city department, has been told to prepare an operating budget 2.6 per cent lower than last year’s — and this in a year when, due to factors outside its control (labour costs already negotiated, inflation, startup costs for a subway extension), the TTC faces new costs that amount to more than 10 per cent of its total budget. This according to numbers compiled by transit activist and writer Steve Munro, who calculates the TTC has actually been asked to propose a budget showing a 12.4 per cent cut from its previous baseline plan.

Perhaps understandably, the TTC and its supporters have balked at this demand. A leaked memo showed TTC CEO Andy Byford saying such cuts — which might involve delaying the opening of the new subway extension or cutting bus service, for example — would be “unpalatable” and his agency could not recommend them. The mayor has insisted the proposed cut budget be prepared anyway. After Byford’s memo, he even suggested, “If (the TTC) can’t do this themselves, and I’m confident they have enough good management there to find these ways of doing things better and differently, then I guess we could help them,” and further said the only reason they couldn’t find the cuts without reducing services is because they didn’t want to.

Lay observers, and not a few city councillors, have reasonably interpreted this demand by the mayor to mean cuts are coming. And when your existing daily transit ride is a sweaty, overcrowded, often-delayed exercise in frustration, the suggestion of cutting budgets seems like just further torture.

But I call this whole budget debate a “performance” because Mayor Tory has frequently said he won’t actually cut the budget if it means service cuts. He wants the TTC to see what it can cut, and propose a budget that has the requested cuts in it. If those cuts are, indeed, “unpalatable,” Tory has suggested, they won’t be made. It appears he wants the TTC to examine what it can do without (or do more cheaply), but also perhaps that he wants to have a budget that shows how little there is left to cut — a way to justify not cutting for a politician who promised the electorate a penny-pinching approach to finances (and no property tax increases beyond inflation). A performance of fiscal discipline.

“I don’t know how many times I have to explain this,” he said Wednesday to reporters after his ride in the hot subway car. “We have asked them to submit a list of things that would be necessary to be done in the way of efficiencies and doing things better to achieve a 2.6 per cent change. That is a list of proposals . . . We’re going to look at those lists, we’re going to determine the impact they would have on people and the city, and then we will make some decisions. But we’re just asking people to submit the list.”

In even more blunt terms, he said he wouldn’t cut service. “It doesn’t make sense to think that I, for example, am going to show the leadership I did personally in investing 135 million new dollars in transit over the last two years, and then go about accepting some list that suggested all those improvements be undone.”

Well, he’s right, that wouldn’t make a lot of sense. But then, it doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense to demand a list of over $200 million in proposed budget cuts just so you can not make them. It doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense to ride for over an hour in a sweatbox if you don’t have to.

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But politics is a strange business, and the ritual performances it demands don’t always make sense. After all, it’s a business in which, on some days, “man rides subway” is big news.

With files from Ben Spurr

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