The East York-Riverdale Mirror

Over a 48-hour period, winds reached 110 kilometres per hour and 285 millimeters, or about 11 inches, of rain fell, leaving a path of destruction.

By the time the storm had passed, 81 people were dead, thousands were homeless and entire streets and bridges were washed out.

The price tag for the storm was an estimated $100 million (about $1 billion today) in total damage, which was devastating for the economy of the city and province.

I am, of course, talking about Hurricane Hazel, whose arrival 53 years ago this week helped to push Toronto into the modern age.

Prior to Hazel, the state of municipal government in the Toronto region was not different than it had been 50 years earlier and ran on a shoestring budget.

Municipal planning was virtually non-existent, as can be seen in the hodge-podge construction of older neighbourhoods, with infrastructure investment made one penny at a time.

The delivery of municipal services was always at their absolute minimums in order to keep taxes down, with municipal employees always receiving lower pay than their private sector counterparts did.

Hurricane Hazel crashed into that world and exposed every weakness found in it as municipal employees struggled to keep up with the devastation while using inadequate equipment and outdated methods.

Soon after the storm had passed and the full extent of the damage understood, politicians, with public support, acted decisively to deal with the realities that had been uncovered.

What they did was spend large amounts of tax dollars to re-build the city region, not to what it had once been, but to an appropriately modern level of operation.

This involved the undertaking of entirely new approaches by employing the most up-to-date ideas in urban governance and planning to guide the direction in which the city grew.

This included the creation of a new level of metropolitan government to facilitate growth through the hiring of an expanded work force of highly trained and well-paid civil servants.

Tax money poured into roads, sewers, municipal buildings, along with other infrastructure projects through out Metropolitan Toronto.

Most of Toronto today is a reflection of that previous willingness to invest tax dollars into the community, which created the world-famous city that worked.

Thanks to 10 years of destructive provincial and federal policy, we are looking out upon a city that is as devastated today as the Toronto of old was after Hurricane Hazel passed over it.

We can no more build a livable and sustainable community using the discredited fiscal philosophy of tax cuts than we could 50-odd years ago.

The bottom line is that Toronto will need new sources of revenues, including a significant rise in property and business taxes, in order to return to being the working city it once was.

There is simply no other way to deal with this crisis.