It’s ironic that an arguably bad transit decision — replacing the fully funded LRT with a subway extension to the Scarborough Town Centre and up to Sheppard Ave. E. — may help grease the path to the transit decision of our generation.

The Greater Toronto and Hamilton Region may be closer than ever to tackling encroaching gridlock by funding a $50-billion transit expansion.

If we get there — navigating around the current wobbly provincial politics of minority government and historical public reticence — we might look back and recognize a key injection of fuel from an unlikely source: the block of voters who support subways above all else.

They are not enough to carry the day; but their embrace of new property taxes to pay for a limited, localized subway line signals that opposition to taxes for transit is not as inviolable as feared.

That is good news for Premier Kathleen Wynne. It should buoy the spirits of an advisory panel, headed by Anne Golden, that is to recommend funding measures to Wynne mid-December. It should also instruct the candidates lining up to run for Mayor of Toronto in 2014.

The Premier needs wide support from the politicians who serve the regions that will benefit from the investment. That’s not asking too much seeing the Liberals have promised the first $16 billion of the $50-billion payout.

Golden’s recommendations will likely say the public is prepared to pay for transit — if everyone contributes (not just motorists, for example) and the money is dedicated and locked in for transit, not susceptible to being siphoned off to general revenue. And the panel will list the funding tools the public say they will stomach.

For the recommendations to have any chance of being accepted at Queen’s Park, they need to have a ring of credibility; a sense that what Golden says she heard in public meetings over two months is reflected in opinion polls or emerging public attitudes.

As such, reaction of Toronto residents to the Scarborough subway tax (1.6 per cent property tax hike over three years) is being watched carefully. So far, there’s been little public discord — including silence from the conservative voters who are allergic to taxes.

In essence, transit funding is becoming a wedge issue not easily navigated along traditional party lines.

For example, Mayor Rob Ford continues to claim that he can get subways built without taxes — even as he gets more than $2.4 billion in taxes from the federal and provincial government and voted for $800 million in taxes from the city government.

Ford’s supporters, bolstered by the Scarborough majority that advocated for subways over LRT, must swallow the new taxes in order to get the subway. This means the opposition is not absolute — and this provides an opening that must be exploited.

The stage is set for a mayoral candidate or two or three to campaign on a platform of careful and responsible taxing for transit improvements. It’s the chance of a lifetime — one that sets our region on a path to better transportation options over the next quarter century. But it will take political guts.

The auto lobby will continue to oppose road tolls. A stubborn minority thinks we should just build more highways so cars can be free to roam the urban landscape. And a wild card segment of the population is unalterably opposed to transit, arguing that it does little or nothing to solve encroaching gridlock.

But in supporting a special tax for the Scarborough subway, the no tax brigade, including Ford, has lost its virginity. It may be time to pounce.

Imagine a transit platform that outlines the massive benefits of the new transit plan and challenges Toronto and the region to tackle the issue, anchored in the following principles:

All money collected is dedicated to transportation needs, not general revenues.

Everyone contributes: transit users, property owners, business, consumers, road users, the federal government and the province.

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Match the transit mode — bike, bus, LRT, subway, road — to the need and solution as the experts advise.

It will take political guts — just what Toronto needs.