The Scarborough Mirror

As I write this, federal Transport, Infrastructure and Communities Minister Lawrence Cannon and Finance Minister Jim Flaherty met in London, Ontario to let Ontarians know they are good for $6.2 billion in infrastructure money that will, among other things, create a subway from a relatively remote spot in Downsview to an even more remote one in Vaughan.

By the time you read this, Flaherty will have joined Mayor David Miller and TTC Chair Adam Giambrone to announce something else at York University that has something-or-other to do with transit.

Yes, by the prickling of our thumbs - it's an election.

One might be sorely tempted to cynicism on this count: big-talking announcements about subways through York University have yet to move a single student or faculty member, but they certainly have propelled many an election-call.

But let's resist, just this once. It's mid-July after all. Maybe it will be different in the fall, but no one feels like an election right just now; and this town has been well-and-truly battered by partisan politics and bad economic news - and, for good measure, a nasty whack of rain.

The fact is that seeing the Spadina subway extension into Vaughan actually getting its funding in order, for whatever reason, is a major step in building this city in directions other than toward the lake.

You can argue, as many do around Toronto City Hall, that light rail is a more efficient use of tax dollars than subways like this one.

But when it's finally in place, the Spadina subway will literally open up a section of north-west Toronto that has spent the last 30 years in gridlocked limbo. While Mayor Miller and WaterfrontToronto make the rounds with touched-up architectural drawings of the utopia that a tear-down of the Gardiner Expressway will set free, Downsview residents are left to glare resentfully at the late-blooming park/mosh pit/flea market at Parc Downsview Park and wonder why they ever started paying taxes. A fully-funded subway, up and running between Union Station, York University and York Region will go a long way to providing an answer.

While we're in the uncritical, count-your-blessings mode of mid-summer, it might do us well to tally up some of those other blessings. There may not be any more subways, but Transit City, the spiderweb of light-rail crossing the six former municipalities of Toronto, seems also a good bet to receive a piece of the federal infrastructure pie. The good folk of Rexdale stand a good chance of getting some of that light rail through the middle of that big WoodbineLive! retail/entertainment complex that Toronto councillors, without even a looming election to motivate them, lured with tax incentives just last meeting. The long-suffering citizens of north Scarborough won't be getting a Sheppard subway, but they'll be getting a dedicated light-rail line along the same route.

If the whiff of an election in the air is what it takes to get Jim Flaherty and his boss Prime Minister Stephen Harper to sign a cheque for the federal share of all these things, then bring it on, I say.

Absent a regime of rational, needs-based planning for cities and towns - you know, the day-to-day work of governing a G-7 nation - pre-election porkbarreling is hands-down the best hope for city and community building in this town, this province, this country. There is nothing else.