Tory says those riled by Scarborough subway editorial are ‘manufacturing outrage’

TORONTO:Mayor John Tory says backlash from an editorial he wrote defending the Scarborough subway extension came from critics who were “manufacturing outrage.”
Speaking to CP24 Tuesday morning, Tory responded to accusations that he was being divisive in the editorial, which appeared on The Toronto Star’s website Monday.
In the editorial, titled ‘Why I support the Scarborough subway,’ Tory wrote, “Many of the subway’s loudest critics do not live or work in Scarborough, where more than half the population is born outside of Canada. When they say this is too much to spend on a subway, the inference seems to be that it’s too much to spend on this part of the city.”Tory said Tuesday that in the editorial, he simply meant to highlight that Scarborough is in desperate need of public transportation.
“I think people who are opposed to the Scarborough subway are kind of manufacturing outrage over this particular sentence,” Tory told CP24.
“All it was saying was simply this. Scarborough is underserved by public transportation. That is a fact. The people you hear about in Toronto that are taking two hours to try and get to a job, are people who live in places like Scarborough and we have to fix that because they need to have equal or equitable access to opportunity as do people in other parts of the city.”
Tory added that Scarborough is the only part of the city where its city centre in not connected to the “higher transit order,” such as a subway line.
“I believe 25 years from now, nobody would be debating the decision we are going to make now, I hope, to build this subway extension,” he said.
“The notion that anybody would look at me and the way I tried to bring the city together and continue to try to do so, including by building transit to connect up parts of the city that feel like they don’t have adequate access, is just the sort of politics over the top.”
The debate over the Scarborough subway extension has been one of the most polarizing issues at city hall in recent years.
Initially council approved a seven-stop, provincially-funded light rail transit line for Scarborough but when former Mayor Rob Ford took office, he eventually convinced council to support the three-stop extension of the Bloor Danforth line into Scarborough.
A revised plan for the extension that was revealed this January scrapped two of the stations and suggested there would be $1 billion in savings that could be reinvested in a 17-stop LRT line to the University of Toronto Scarborough campus.
Last week, however, a staff report revealed that the city would actually need an additional $1.18 to $1.27 billion in funding to build both the Scarborough subway extension and the LRT.