The unravelling of the city continues. The action has moved now to the waterfront, where Toronto’s unelected mayor, Doug Ford, announced last week that government has no business in the affairs of urban revitalization.

What makes this latest pronouncement from Hogtown’s First Family so appalling is that it displays such deep ignorance about the one subject on which the Fords claim experience and expertise — business.

According to the councillor from Ward 2, Etobicoke North, Doug Ford, waterfront reclamation is a job for the private sector.

“It’s nothing against the folks at waterfront,” he declared last Wednesday, “but that was the biggest boondoggle the feds, the province and the city has ever done.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, the work of Waterfront Toronto, the tripartite agency created in 2001 by the federal, provincial and municipal governments, has been one of the city’s major success stories.

“You don’t subsidize the most valuable property in Canada to the tune of $10 million an acre,” Doug Ford continued. “You let the private sector buy it and let them develop it.”

He’s dead right, and that’s exactly what’s happening, except for one small detail — the waterfront’s 2,000 acres were not “the most valuable property in Canada” until the agency stepped in a decade ago.

Since then it has turned a long-neglected lakeside wasteland into a place people can now imagine living and working. And just as important, it has made the waterfront a place where developers are willing to invest, so far to the tune of $1.5 billion.

No surprise, then, that it was the developers who rushed to defend Waterfront Toronto last week and provide the Fords with a lesson in how business works. Above all, business wants certainty, which is precisely what the Fords have destroyed.

No question the process has been slow and painful, but such is the nature of city-building. Toronto only has one waterfront and the pressure to get it right is intense, especially after the “condo curtain” that sprung up on Queens Quay before the corporation was set up.

As much as anything, Waterfront Toronto’s mandate was to ensure this sort of visionless development never happens again. The idea was that the agency would handle planning and infrastructure, and leave rebuilding to developers. So public-sector money has gone to creating the framework in which growth will occur. That means everything from sidewalks and sewers to parks and promenades. Most importantly, it includes a series of precincts plans that will lead to fully sustainable neighbourhoods based on urban principles.

Doug Ford likes to use the example of Chicago, his adopted home, and its waterfront. But if he looked a little closer, he would know that city adopted an identical approach to Toronto’s.

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So far, the mayor hasn’t shown up at Waterfront Toronto, where he has a seat on the board, or toured the site. Were he to take a look, he’d find a lot has changed in this part of the city. Sugar Beach, Sherbourne Common, Corus House and the new George Brown College campus are part of an emerging landscape that will transform Toronto.

Clearly the time has come for one of Waterfront Toronto’s strongest supporters, federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, to have a chat with his old pals, the Fords. They may not get it, but he does. Flaherty has taken advantage of every opportunity to extoll the agency and its public/private strategy. He has held up Waterfront Toronto as a paragon of corporate and civic virtue as well as a model of co-operation between governments, sectors and soon, we hope, friends.

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