So, Toronto, one question: How much of our fair city should we let Google gobble up in its epic quest to make Canada’s largest city the smartest in the world?

None of it? Some of it? Or should we take the plunge and let Google and friends have everything they want, up to and including the takeover of vast swaths of prime Toronto waterfront outlined Monday by the digital giant’s sister company, Sidewalk Labs.

Originally broached as Quayside, a futuristic yet affordable and sustainable city-within-a-city on 12 acres of vacant land at the foot of Parliament St., the project just got exponentially larger — a multi-phase undertaking that over time could encompass an additional 178 acres of Toronto’s eastern waterfront, anchored by the future home of Google Canada headquarters.

The raising of the stakes to something much bigger than previously imagined came in the Manhattan-based company’s master plan, a 1,524-page document titled Toronto Tomorrow: A New Approach for Inclusive Growth.

And for all its ambition, the trove of long-awaited details from Sidewalk Labs introduced a whole new basket of questions without answers — and prompted at least some degree of frustration from Waterfront Toronto, the tri-government agency (city, province and the feds) that now finds itself staring at plans that paint innovative redevelopment well beyond the margins of its mandate.

It’s easy to get lost in these 1,500-plus pages of tantalizing hopes and dreams: wood-boned buildings with wide-open, walkable streetscapes shielded by “raincoats” from rain and ice, an always-connected live-in, work-in community incubator poised wirelessly to ride the next digital wave. And if you don’t like the Wi-Fi-everywhere vibe or find it altogether too Orwellian for comfort, ponder the climate goal for a moment — the project proposes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 89 per cent. If they get nothing else but that right, what will (maybe) get built in Toronto will be a model for everywhere.

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But at its core, what Sidewalk Labs now envisions is a high-tech, low-carbon makeover of the original 12-acre Quayside site, together with Villiers West, an additional 20-acre parcel of nearby Port Lands owned by the City of Toronto. Sidewalk Labs, together with “local partners,” would serve as the lead real estate developer on both parcels, with Google itself planting its Canadian corporate HQ at the Villiers site.

Once those sites are up and running — and demonstrably successful — Sidewalk Labs envisions adapting its innovations and taking them beyond, into what it dubs the “IDEA district” — Innovative Development and Economic Acceleration. All told, the various phases add up to 190 acres (77 hectares) of the broader Port Lands area.

The vastly upsized proposal prompted a chorus of new objections, with New Democrat MP Charlie Angus wondering how a “very small” 12-acre project now, on paper at least, adds up to something more than 15 times larger.

“At what point did we decide to turn over some of the most valuable real estate in all of North America to the creation of a company town?” Angus told the Star’s Jesse McLean.

“This is what this will be. Welcome to Googleville.”

One person’s notion of digital dystopia is, arguably, to others less worried about data privacy, nothing short of clicks-and-mortar paradise. One presumes that those less worried about privacy — or those whose need for affordable housing exceeds those worries — are the likeliest to want to live in Google’s world.

Google — which by some forecasts will sell almost a third of all digital ads worldwide in 2019, sales valued at more than $135 billion (Canadian) — may know that you are looking for a toaster or a new phone almost before you know it. But it doesn’t quite know — or at least isn’t quite prepared to say just yet — precisely how much this is going to cost us.

On paper, Monday’s plan outlined some $1.3 billion in funding and investment from Sidewalk Labs and its Canadian partners — money that the company says will “catalyze $38 billion in investment, primarily by third parties.” That initial seed money includes $80 million to establish a state-of-the-art Ontario production facility for so-called Canadian “tall timber” — strong-as-steel and sustainable engineered wood beams that will provide the backbone for every building envisioned.

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There also are added provisions for Sidewalk Labs to take profit from the successful rollout of its plan — and, separately, an innovative provision for profit-sharing, with the public coffers earning a 10-per-cent portion for 10 years of earnings by any newly developed technologies that are used in the IDEA district.

Less clear, however, is where the estimated $1.2 billion might be found to build the proposed LRT line that Sidewalk Labs says is essential to the project. An earlier incarnation of the scheme involved the company providing up-front transit financing, to be recouped from future tax revenues generated by the development. But Monday’s plan instead broached “optional credit financing” of $400 million that Sidewalk Labs said would be to accelerate both the construction of an LRT line and the construction of “advanced infrastructure systems” necessary to make the plan a reality.

Any way you slice those numbers, transit-starved Toronto’s needs just got a little bit greater, if Sidewalk Labs intends to saddle government with the up-front cost of getting to and from its vision of the future.

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