Oh the stories the Don could tell; if it only had a mouth. Alas, that disappeared decades ago. Filled in and set with concrete, the river has suffered silently ever since.

Now, 25 years after Torontonians began agitating for the Don to be given back its voice, or rather, its mouth, the city is edging ever closer to doing just that.

Though no one really knows what that entails, renaturalizing the Don’s entrance into Lake Ontario has been one of Waterfront Toronto’s top four priorities since its founding in 2001. In a time of climate change, the project was considered urgent.

But it was the unprecedented storm of July 8 that brought the Don back into focus. The deluge fell mostly on the west side of Toronto, though there was flooding in the Don Valley, most of that between Gerrard and Queen Sts. Indeed, the water barely reached the berm constructed to protect the West Don Lands.

At a public meeting Wednesday night, officials from WT and the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority showed off their latest plans. Devoted largely to the technicalities of flood-proofing the Port Lands and environs, the session was part of a process that will have lasted decades by the time anything happens at the Don.

What barely got mentioned was the fact that, even if the plan were approved tomorrow morning, it remains unfunded. And so far, nobody knows where the money will come from.

What makes this so richly ironic is that the urgency is the result of Councillor Doug Ford’s brief Port Lands’ fling in 2011. With visions of Ferris wheels dancing in his head, the eminence from Etobicoke was ready to order the cranes when someone told him that the Port Lands are in a flood plain — which would give pause to most developers, though not all. So much for the Ferris wheel. Hold the monorail.

Then again, all the talk about flood plains and the like has never really bothered brave Toronto. Much of the Don Valley Parkway finds itself under water several times a year. That’s right; it’s in a flood plain.

Which brings us to the mouth of the Don, which was diverted into the Keating Channel during the 1920s, after Ashbridge’s Bay, where the river historically entered the lake, was polluted and degraded beyond human endurance.

The bay was filled in and the Don encased in concrete, which pretty much killed its chances of being a river in anything but name. The river celebrated for its trout and Bare Bum Beach became an open sewer and a symbol of the city’s contempt for the environment of which it is part.

These days, Torontonians are paying closer attention to the world around them. So are most cities. At every turn, it seems, another “natural” disaster is unfolding: floods, droughts, hurricanes, storms, super-storms … even our own deluge earlier this month.

It wasn’t just a wake-up call, but also a reminder of why 21st-century infrastructure will look a lot more like the past than the future. There will be no high-tech solutions to problems such as flooding; only the restoration of the natural processes we so assiduously destroyed.

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Even that’s more compromised than it sounds; as the TRCA’s Ken Dion points out, “We’ve designed a plan that will survive a Hurricane Hazel-like event, and avoid the catastrophic damage it would cause now. We’ve also added extra capacity if and when climate change should occur. But the project isn’t going to bring back the giant wetland that was there. We’re removing the concrete straitjacket on the Don and bringing back elements of what used to be there.”

Christopher Hume can be reached at chume@thestar.ca