There is an image that speaks powerfully about the true nature of Toronto the Good Enough as it makes a sincere effort to fool the International Olympic Committee into thinking that it is Toronto the Great.
Former city councillor Howard Levine found it in this very newspaper recently: a picture of a city worker in a cherry picker fixing a crisp, bright new Olympic banner to a crooked old cedar pole festooned with wooden crossbars like some relic from Dodge City.
"That symbolizes Toronto so well," Mr. Levine commented. "They've got lots of money for the Olympics but they've never had the gumption to bury those stupid wires."
I know, you've never noticed that hideous clutter of overhead wires. Few people do. Even fewer care about it. But the city's attitude toward wires is telling. It's also distinctive. In my experience, one of the first things outsiders notice about this place is the tangle of overhead wires that interferes with every view: the emblem of Toronto's notorious ugliness.
Sydney has no overhead wires and, needless to say, Paris has none either. Even scruffy Beijing has managed to bury most of them, according to Mr. Levine. Except on main streets downtown, however, Toronto the Good Enough makes do with an electrical distribution system so antiquated it could have been designed by Thomas Edison.
That's not quite fair: Toronto Hydro did upgrade its ancient 4,000-volt system about a decade ago, which was probably the last one in captivity at the time. Instead of burying the new high-voltage wires, however, we strung them from new, even taller poles with new, even bigger transformers.
In some cases, Toronto Hydro simply strung the new wires on the old poles.
That's why you still see so many main arteries -- Bathurst Street, for instance -- lined with wooden poles.
Even cities that haven't gone fully underground retired their wooden poles with crossbars decades ago. But, at a time when the private sector is spending billions stringing fibre-optic cable under every second street, antique electrical distribution is still good enough for Toronto.
That's not quite fair, either, because Toronto Hydro did adopt an ambitious wire-burial policy in the late 1980s. It has since spent more on the job -- about $100-million -- than any other city on the continent, according to Hydro spokesman Blair Perbody. But the program was cut back drastically during the lean years of the mid-1990s. Only main streets are now eligible for burying wires, and only a few kilometres of those are done every year.
The problem is that the job is so expensive: about $1-million a kilometre, according to Mr. Perbody. The cost of burying all the wires in the former City of Toronto was pegged at $1.4-billion.
Despite that, the utility managed to finance the original job with an annual 1.5-per-cent increase in the price of electricity -- a few dollars for every household. It was the cost of paying off the Darlington nuclear reactor, which also found its way onto your electricity bills around the same time, that killed the scheme.
Today, there is little chance our utility will revive that ambitious program. The reason is this complicated restructuring business, which has stripped away much of its ability to raise new capital.
To make a long story short, the money that could be helping to pay for a modern distribution system has been diverted into city coffers to help contain a ballooning debt.
Another reason it isn't happening is that so few Torontonians care where the electrical cables go. As exemplified by the Olympic banner on the wooden pole, we have come to neglect the basic tasks of continuous improvement, seeking instead deliverance by means of the grand slam.
Instead of putting the ball in play with continuous, tangible improvements to the city, our leaders prefer to sit on the Olympic fastball, hoping one big swing will make everything right.