As the streetcar slid down the portal leading underground into Spadina station, my daughter commented that it would be far better if all streetcars ran underground rather than jostling with traffic at grade. "Like subways, but not," she said. "Streetcars underground."
"That's a great idea," I said, adding that the Toronto Transit Commission proposed building just such a thing under Queen Street more than half a century ago, even going so far as to construct a ghost station that still sits unused under Queen Street at Yonge.
"Queen Street would be perfect!" she said. "Why didn't they do it?"
"Too cheap," I replied.
After getting off, we entered the long, long tunnel connecting the two halves of the bifurcated station, and Mary pined for the old moving walkways that once made the trudge bearable. I explained that they had broken down.
"Why didn't they get new ones?" she asked.
"Too cheap," I replied.
Exiting the station at the north end, she commented that only once in her life had she ever seen an attendant on duty at the booth. "Why isn't anybody ever there?" she wondered.
But by then, she had figured it out. "I know, Dad. Too cheap!"
Such is the education of a young Torontonian in the 21st century.
It wasn't always that way. The Toronto of my own youth was a wonder. New subways and subway extensions seemed to open every other year, along with fantastic new highways and flyovers that I adored at the time. Yorkdale was the largest shopping mall in the world and downtown was exploding in a tectonic building boom unequalled before or since.
We have all since learned not to love expressways so much as we did in those days, and to love old buildings and neighbourhoods more, but few who can remember postwar Toronto will easily lose their ingrained expectation of constant progress. The Crombie-era reformers changed direction without abandoning faith. Instead, they fulfilled it, and Toronto skirted with greatness.
Nobody then -- none of us -- imagined the helpless giant the city has since become, huge and supine, sustained on life support by a grim but efficient band of scalpel-wielders while Wizard of Oz images of the mighty "megacity" play on a big screen nearby.
Relentlessly progressive-minded Toronto voters demonstrated their naiveté with the huge exhalation of high expectations that greeted the election of Mayor David Miller. Today, many are bitter because nothing seems to have changed, and they blame the mayor. In truth, the mayor is guilty only of raising expectations while secretly knowing he could never deliver once he submitted to the chains of office.
Like mayor Mel Lastman, who pretended not to know about provincial offloading when he first ran for election, thus enabling himself to promise an indefinite tax freeze, Mr. Miller swept into office on the pretense that he could fix that problem, a wound that brought the city down almost a decade ago and is still bleeding heavily.
Today, there is little reason to expect that the heavy bleeding, as ordered by former federal finance minister Paul Martin, inflicted by former premier Mike Harris and kept flowing by current Premier Dalton McGuinty, will ever stop. With the province declaring the Harris cuts permanent and a hostile government taking power in Ottawa, Mayor Miller's touted new deal is a wreck.
This year, the Miller regime is facing a $500-million shortfall even with the now-usual tax hike. Deploying public resources in Toronto today -- the heady business of progressive government -- has become simply a matter of keeping what you have from falling apart. The technocrats figure it out and the politicians say yes. There are no real choices in the matter.
Shall we argue about where the next subway line should go? Ha! Postwar Toronto built subway lines continuously. With more than twice the population and an economy several times larger, 21st-century Toronto cannot even afford to plan one. The most reliable gig in transportation planning today is making up the annual list of suggested service cuts.
Redevelop the waterfront? Don't go there! Back in the day, the big question around Toronto city hall was how to accommodate the growth of the financial district. The notion seems so quaint today, but 20 years ago all those big office towers were a big problem.
We still imagine ourselves to be progressive and our impulses are statist, but our city is increasingly laissez-faire. Local government sticks to its knitting -- keeping things from falling apart -- while exigency rules the skyline and guns blaze in the once-hopeful, now-crumbling housing projects.
On Monday politicians will make a big deal about knocking down Regent Park, the first and most famous of the bold experiments in modern public housing undertaken by progressive-minded postwar Toronto. Today, Regent Park is seen as a failure. But knocking it down in the current circumstances invites a deeper failure. Unless Prime Minister Stephen Harper changes his spots overnight and provides the funds needed to do the job, there is a significant risk that the lost housing will never be replaced.
Postwar Toronto bequeathed a vision of decent, sanitary housing for its poorest citizens. Twenty-first-century Toronto is celebrating its destruction, the occasion marked by a potentially long-enduring monument of rubble.
Our children at least will get used to it.