Candidates with least to lose have the most to say

By DAVID NICKLE

It seems as though the candidates with the least to lose have the most to say. Rocco Rossi, coming in to the race a distant third in the polls, kicked off his campaign last year by promising to just go ahead and sell Toronto Hydro. Giorgio Mammoliti started off his from-behind race with talk of red-light districts and casinos as a way to drum up cash and tourism.

And now Sarah Thomson, a magazine publisher with no political experience who practically no one thinks has a shot, has introduced the most audacious proposal of all: a $5 road toll on the Don Valley Parkway and the Gardiner Expressway paid during weekday rush-hour, to cover the cost of a massive, 58-kilometre subway expansion plan.

The toll would last for 10 years, or until the new subway lines along Eglinton, Sheppard, through the downtown core and connecting Kennedy Station to the Scarborough Town Centre, were paid for.

Thomson announced the plan on the bare patio of a downtown Toronto pub Wednesday morning - just a day after she'd told me about another transportation idea, to lay down a grid of bike lanes, no more than three streets apart from one another, across the whole city. It's safe and sensible, she told me.

Until the business with subways and the road toll, I'd have pegged that as the riskiest move in the war-on-the-car event in the mayoralty race.

A road toll is the bogeyman that stalks would-be mayors in election years: the issue has achieved almost legendary status. Mayor David Miller's ascent to the mayoralty slipped in 2003 at just the hint that he might consider tolling roads.

And as to subways: while everybody likes the idea of subways, promising to build them in the current climate is akin to promising to set up a municipal space program. The expense of tunneling a comprehensive network of rail has widely been considered to be out of the city's price range.

Yet what is an election campaign but a series of dreams and nightmares leading up to election day? And with the introduction of her $14-billion transit plan, Thomson may have done both.

Subways do have an allure. They're more comfortable and workable in winter storms, they last longer and they move more people more quickly than any of the alternatives. The new light rail lines making up Transit City will be better than bus and streetcar - but for moving fast and comfortably across a wintery Toronto, they won't compare to subways.

And while the idea of road tolls created quite a stir in 2003, the fact is that their greatest impact would be on non-residents from the 905 and beyond, who currently use Toronto's road network without contributing a penny. Cities across North America have used tolls to make sure all road users contribute to the health of their infrastructure. Toronto could certainly get away with asking for the same.

Whether Mayor Thomson could actually turn the ship of state not only here but at Queen's Park and Ottawa - who both have significant stakes in Toronto's transit future - is another matter. Given her hindmost status as a greenhorn, in a race full of experienced political hands, it's a question that we won't likely ever be able to answer.

But Thomson has at the very least performed a valuable service, of putting forward a feasible, politically daring alternative to Miller's Transit City vision. Until now, talk about changing direction on that plan has been nothing but contrarian, driven by NIMBY-ism and fearfulness of the cost of expanding a much-needed service.

So it's good to see, in the week before right-wing Etobicoke councillor Rob Ford cannonballs into the pool of nervous mayoralty candidates, somebody is willing to brave the deep end.