A GO train heading into Union Station travels past traffic heading north on Lower Jarvis St. to the westbound Gardiner Expressway on ramp is backed up from Queens Quay East, in Toronto, on Sept 27, 2023.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Every time I come home from a trip to Europe, I feel a little ashamed. Ashamed and perplexed. Why is everything so much better over there? The parks, the public transit, the highways, the squares, the museums – even the garbage bins are better than ours.
Arriving in Toronto, where I live, feels like crossing into the East Bloc from the West during the Cold War. Everything looks so shabby. The main route into downtown from the airport is in scandalous shape. Rusting guardrails. Garbage and weeds on the shoulders. Potholes and bumps. The inbound drive along the Gardiner Expressway is like a ride on a decrepit roller coaster.
And this, remember, is the gateway to Canada’s biggest, richest city. What kind of first impression does this leave with visitors? Why can’t we manage a simple task like routine maintenance of a major thoroughfare?
The highways of Spain, which I visited last month, are vastly better designed, engineered and maintained. A system of standard European signage makes it nearly impossible to get lost. Cat’s eyes and other reflective markers on even smaller roads make them much safer at night than our poorly marked roadways. Carefully trimmed greenery decorates the medians and the shoulders. When we were there, the oleander shrubs were just starting to bloom.
The public transit in European cities is on a whole other level than ours. Though Madrid is around the same size as Toronto, its Metro network is at least four times as big, with 15 lines and more than 300 stations. It is clean, fast and easy to navigate. It connects to a comprehensive system of light-rail, commuter rail, high-speed rail and buses (many of them fully electric). Construction of new subway lines is famously fast and, by North American standards, cheap.
Even smaller cities like Porto, in Portugal, have modern, efficient systems. Porto’s is in the midst of a big expansion, with construction cranes sprouting all over.
The parks, too, are incomparably better. Toronto has an extensive park system, much of it lovely, but nothing like Madrid’s magnificent Retiro, the 350-acre gem with its rose garden, artificial lake and rows of blooming chestnut trees. The jewel of Toronto, High Park, is positively scruffy by comparison. So is the heavily used but poorly tended Trinity Bellwoods downtown.
The efficiency experts at the Toronto parks department have seen fit to install rolling plastic garbage bins in the parks like the kind homeowners put on their curbs. Easier to empty, I’m sure, but frightful to look at. Imagine the groundskeepers at the Retiro putting up with something like that. Unthinkable.
Toronto is in the process of replacing the trash bins on its streets because the old ones tended to fall apart and overflow. How is it we can’t even get garbage pails right?
There is really no excuse for failures like this. Canada is a wealthy country. It has higher incomes than either Spain or Portugal, and a level of taxation that provides governments with plenty of capacity to build and maintain the public realm in our cities.
The historic legacy of grand old cities such as Madrid give them an advantage, yes. The Retiro was a royal park before the monarchy gave it over to the masses. But Toronto is no scrub. It has a rich history. It has a well-heeled elite. It has a robust city government with an ample budget. Its mayors are elected by the populace at large, imbuing them with considerable authority to lead.
Yet somehow it feels as if no one is in charge. We stumble along year after year, missing big chances to up our game and watching things unravel. Toronto’s transit system is undergoing its own belated, multi-billion-dollar expansion, yet we can’t even get a notoriously delayed part of it, the Eglinton Crosstown line, up and running.
The revitalization of the waterfront is proceeding nicely, yet it lacks the big idea – a harbour pier, a signature park, a major public market – that would pull it all together. Our two most important museums, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Royal Ontario Museum, have undergone a series of piecemeal renovations over the decades, leaving each a bit of a dog’s breakfast.
A self-respecting city with serious leadership would not have let this happen. Looking at European cities should make us not just ashamed and perplexed but angry.