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The very day Mayor Rob Ford took office, he announced he was going to cancel Transit City, the multibillion-dollar plan that would create a network of light-rail lines through the northern part of the city.

Hang on just a minute, said his critics. Tens of millions have already been spent on Transit City. Your plan to build a subway to Scarborough in its place doesn't make sense. The demand isn't there, the money isn't there.

So what? Mr. Ford's critics are bleating into the wind on a lonely hillside. Transit, even more than most things, is all about politics and, for the moment, the politics are on Mr. Ford's side. He knows what he wants and he is determined to get it. That cannot be said of any of the other big players in the transit game.

The main advocate for Transit City, former mayor David Miller, is gone, gone, gone. The provincial government, which once backed Mr. Miller's plan with public enthusiasm, has no particular interest in going to bat for an ex-mayor's pet project that a new and popular mayor is determined to kill.

With an election coming in the fall, how likely is it that Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty will pick a fight with Mr. Ford if the mayor insists he wants to build subways and nothing but subways? Mr. McGuinty has spent the past few months struggling to take any possible ammunition out of the hands of his surging opponent, Conservative Tim Hudak. Mr. McGuinty is in a battle for survival. Fighting to save an unbuilt new rail system that the public barely understands may not look like a winner from the Premier's office.

The regional transit projects that Queen's Park really wants to get done, like a rail link from Union Station to Pearson airport and the extension of the Spadina subway to York University, are outside of the Transit City plan. They will go ahead regardless of whether it lives or dies.

Privately, Mr. McGuinty's people say what they really want is progress on transit, whatever form that progress takes. Subways are certainly progress, though whether it makes any sense to scrap a whole web of light-rail lines to get one subway line is another matter. Sadly, sense doesn't enter into it.

Rapid transit is so expensive that it needs a forceful champion to push it through. The existing five-stop Sheppard subway went ahead partly because of the advocacy of Mel Lastman, mayor of North York and then Toronto. The Spadina extension is going ahead because it had the backing of a powerful McGuinty cabinet minister, Greg Sorbara, whose Vaughan riding the subway will eventually serve. Mr. Ford has now become the champion of extending the Sheppard line to Scarborough, yet another political subway. Who is going to stand in his way?

The left-leaning city councillors who supported Mr. Miller over Transit City are either in eclipse in the dawn of the Ford era or out of politics altogether, like former Toronto Transit Commission chair Adam Giambrone. The transit commission is packed with councillors named to their posts because they promise to support Mr. Ford's transit plans. The commission's chair, Councillor Karen Stintz, is thrilled to have an executive role and seems unlikely to tangle with her new boss after he gave her such a plum.

The TTC's chief general manager, Gary Webster, is a professional manager paid to do the bidding of his political masters, not stand in their way. The same could be said of the regional transit agency, Metrolinx, a bureaucratic animal whose role is to study and advise and implement decisions, not make them. Its leaders, chairman Rob Prichard and chief executive Bruce McCuaig, no doubt have their opinions about what kind of transit would be best for Toronto. Mr. McCuaig told me, for example, that the projected demand for transit on Sheppard is about one-fifth the level that would justify a subway on paper. But Metrolinx is looking more and more like a cipher in the transit debate, with no heft of its own.

And heft is what counts. Not ridership figures, not financial efficiency; pure political muscle. So far, Mr. Ford is the only one willing to go to the mat over his vision for transit.

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