Every time he opens his mouth, Doug Ford reminds me more and more of Simon, of the Land of Chalk Drawings.
This is not a bad thing. Simon was a nice guy. You might remember him from bygone days: Simon was the line-drawn hero of a British kids show, known to public-television rug rats of a certain generation. Simon loved to draw on his chalkboard, where his creations assumed life, with the significant caveat that things never went entirely according to plan.
Every episode, Simon would peek over a wall into the Land of Chalk Drawings, a principality full of well-meaning but perpetually distempered citizens. Fortunately, Simon had a special power: He could go home and draw up solutions on his chalkboard —and the things he drew came true.
Once again, the elder Ford brother has had a new infrastructure idea. He was musing on it just the other day.
“If we have a firm anywhere in the world that wants to come and tunnel underneath the Gardiner all the way downtown, God bless them,” he told the Globe. “If you’re asking would I pay five dollars to get downtown quicker and not knock off 14 bicycle riders on the way down Queen Street, I’d do it in a heartbeat.”
Without having done a formal survey, I can tell you that 14 out of 14 cyclists would rather see Doug Ford put in a tunnel, too. But we’re not just talking about taking down the Gardiner and burying it, the Big Dig solution that’s been the subject of innumerable urban fantasies.
He’s thinking bigger: “What I’d really like to see is three levels, one for a train, one for the toll and one for regular traffic with no toll and let’s develop on top of the Gardiner and that would pay for itself,” he said in a Star interview the same day.
This would involve digging beneath a 50-year-old highway in such a way that it didn’t collapse, before re-engineering it to support a triple-layer cake of roads in a neat first-class, second-class, steerage arrangement.
By the time that the Globe’s Siri Agrell got around to politely pointing out that the tunnel idea had been mooted long ago and rejected on technical grounds, it was too late. News stories about Doug’s latest brain-fart were everywhere.
Doug Ford’s role at City Hall is, as I say, nebulous. He is widely credited with being his brother’s closest advisor, the Luigi, if you will, to Rob Ford’s Mario. In public, however, he’s given to spitballing infrastructure ideas that might be more at home, say, on a child’s chalkboard.
First there was the NFL stadium to be built on the cheap in the Portlands by using the foundations of a power plant, and connect it to the city with a monorail. Then he wanted to dig down in the middle of Rogers Centre to turn that into an NFL stadium. Then he wanted to rename the Spadina subway station after McDonalds. Now, this.
I, for one, can’t wait to hear his decree for the Toronto Pleasuredome, which will be built on top of those Ontario Place pods on stilts, using even bigger stilts. It will have a zoo and a roller coaster and and separate stacked stadiums for NFL, CFL, LFL and XFL and will be accessible only by being shot out of a cannon. Sound impractical? You’re right, that would take a lot of cannons. Tell you what, let’s put a bunch of people into a monorail, then shoot the monorail out of a cannon. I was talking to some guys, they say they can do it. The private sector will pay for it all!
Sooner or later, the media will have to wake up to the realization that they’re being trolled. Doug Ford has an unrivalled ability to suck the air out of the conversation just by mooting an incredibly stupid idea, and nobody — starting with your humble correspondent — can resist an incredibly stupid idea.
It’s a shame, though, because these headlines arrived in response to a report from the Toronto Board of Trade that suggested road tolls as a way of funding the desperately-needed transit infrastructure. Meanwhile, councillors like Denzil Minnan-Wong, the chair of the Public Works committee (note the actual title), is working on concrete steps like a network of separated bike lanes. Alas, level-headedness is not really selling in Toronto this season.
As far as I can tell, Doug’s vision of infrastructure development goes as follows: He draws his ideas on a chalkboard, and thanks to the magic of the private sector, the things he draws come true — and with that, the people are happy.
Here’s the catch: Simon’s chalk drawings didn’t always work out for the best. The show was kind of fascinating in that regard. Its entire premise was that Simon was the benificent guardian of a soverign state full up troubled citizens, whose lives he was continually trying to improve by the addition of chalk-drawn infrastructure. But most of the time, his efforts backfired in one way or another, and he was forced to alter course.
Take, for instance, the episode where the children of the Land of Chalk Drawings want cars. So Simon draws them cars, which they gleefully drive about.
But cars, Simon found, had consequences. “The land was in a terrible mess,” intoned the narrator. “Fences were smashed, trees bent, and noisy smokey cars were speeding everywhere! The train driver was by his engine, miserable. Now that the children had cars, he had no passengers to carry.”
Eventually, the chalk schoolteacher implores the children to stop driving.
“The children wouldn’t listen,” explained the narrator. “They thought the train was too slow, and besides, cars were much more fun. They drove off, more fond of cars than ever.”
So Simon had an idea: He took out his chalk and drew even more cars, until there were so many cars there was just a giant traffic jam, and all the chalk people grew weary.
“Cars were alright, when only you had one,” concluded the narrator. “But whenever everyone else had one, cars were no fun at all.”
Simon in the Land of Chalk Drawings was produced in the early 1970’s, a time when Britain was still reeling from the dismemberment of its railways; car culture arrived in that green and pleasant land later, and rougher, than it did here. But its lessons ring true.
We’re blessed that Doug Ford’s magic chalk drawings don’t come true. If they did, however, it might at least provide him with an educational experience.
