When Mayor John Tory (open John Tory's policard) talks about the $8 billion SmartTrack proposal as his top transit priority, do you get the sense it’s a fait accompli?

When the federal government announces a paltry sum of money for a national fund to finance transit across Canada — and John Tory appropriates the couple hundred million dollars due Toronto to kickstart SmartTrack — would you imagine SmartTrack is just in the first stage of studies and city council has not yet debated its feasibility?

When the provincial government expressly puts a line in its budget document linking SmartTrack with billions of dollars in funding for the electrification of GO Transit lines, are you left wondering how come the unapproved SmartTrack has funding, but the fully funded Sheppard LRT is pushed aside past 2021?

The fix is in. Again.

And, again, you don’t seem to care. Nobody does, really.

For when the subject is transit planning in the Toronto region, the fix is the norm. Better to embrace the reality and hope for the best.

The architects of the fix, as always, are the politicians, the self-anointed experts in how to move people and goods around the GTA. And they were at it again this past week.

They announced funding for projects transit planners have not yet studied. They pledged money for concepts that conflict with long-held transportation designs. They advanced the Finch LRT even as they stopped the progress of the Sheppard LRT, offering thinly disguised excuses.

They propped up the politically motivated plans of their political allies, knowing that, unbeknownst to the public, they have quid pro quo, back-scratching agreements to receive similar considerations.

And our mayor was right in the middle of it — all smiles, selling SmartTrack as if it’s a done deal long before city staff and consultants prepare the studies city council needs to help determine the project’s viability.

Mayor Tory was elected on a platform promising to build SmartTrack in seven years, with no property taxes, borrowing against unprecedented and ambitious and unproven levels of tax financing derived from projected development along the route. The western leg of the 53-km project is dubious. The eastern leg would be way too close to the Scarborough subway, a project chugging along as if it is not connected to or affected by Tory’s project or any other, for that matter.

Voters imagined city council would work out the issues, get real data from non-political and independent planners, make considered decisions on its viability and, only then, proceed with Tory’s campaign ideas where feasible.

Not so.

Tory has interpreted his election as a mandate to promote the idea ahead of and in spite of all other transit projects that butt up against his baby. Advocacy becomes a mayor. This campaign though, propped up by the mayor’s political friends at Queen’s Park and Ottawa, exceeds prudence and propriety.

This way of thinking, and of transit planning, has become so ingrained in our psyche we don’t question it anymore.

But in a political era where transit is seen as a huge vote-buying enterprise, and governments are lining up to spend huge sums, Toronto is on the precipice of a monumental screw-up if facts don’t guide the political largesse.

What if the Downtown Relief Line is needed above SmartTrack? What if SmartTrack is great but only with an LRT (not a subway) where the Scarborough RT is now? What if Finch really needs a BRT, not an LRT? And Sheppard should be subway all the way?

Who would dare tell us, in the face of the current political momentum?

What if city staff can’t tell us what they really think because the politics render them mute?

Pointedly, it wouldn’t be the first time.

In his political memoirs, released last fall, Greg Sorbara, former deputy premier, makes a candid admission. Transit planning in Toronto is a “comedy of errors,” he writes.

Conservative Premier Mike Harris filled in the hole being dug for a Eglinton subway, ending NDP Premier Bob Rae’s designs.

“Priorities change when governments change,” Sorbara writes. The subway to Vaughan, through his riding, made more sense to him than the Eglinton Subway in Rae’s bailiwick, “but that was Rae’s call, he was entitled to make it, and he did.”

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Yes. That’s how the political class thinks. But you knew that already. That’s why you’ve tuned out, opting to adopt the mindset of, “I don’t care anymore; somebody, just build something!”

Our kids will surely curse us.

Royson James usually appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Email: rjames@thestar.ca

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