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However questionable the Scarborough subway decision is, it must be said Tory still talks a great game as a reality-based transit-builder. Asked by a reporter if taxpayers would be footing the bill for all these projects, he quite rightly scoffed.

“Ultimately all this money comes from the taxpayers,” he said, refreshingly. “Even if you finance this through some kind of a design-build-finance option and P3, that money is ultimately paid back by taxpayers.

“So the taxpayers pay but, by the way, they’re the same people telling me they want the transit. And I think they understand that transit is not free.”

That’s a bold call. I get emails. If provincial and federal largesse doesn’t last, and if the “revenue tools” Tory has promised to back in the fall yield only a billion here or there, his legacy is a busted soufflé. If you want Toronto to get busy building transit, you ought to hope that won’t happen.

And whatever you think of any of this, Wednesday was only further proof that Toronto simply cannot keep planning transit the way it does. Even as councillors entrusted expert planning staff to pursue billions upon billions of dollars worth of projects, some of them directed the same staff to study all manner of pet projects and local bugbears, some of which have been repeatedly discredited.

“The reason that I supported the one-stop version (of the subway) … is I got a fully funded LRT through my ward,” Scarborough councillor Paul Ainslie said. He has since been dismayed that escalating subway costs had eaten into LRT funding.