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What Osgoode Hall’s trees tell us about the future of progressive politics

OPINION: In days past, Toronto progressives would likely have universally opposed the move to sacrifice trees for transit. But times have changed
Written by John Michael McGrath
Green fabric is tied around trees at Toronto’s Osgoode Hall on February 3. (Frank Gunn/CP)

A segment of Toronto opinion was seized, over the weekend, by the fate of a copse of trees at the downtown intersection of Queen and University. What makes the trees special? They are at least decades old and in a part of the city where green space is hardly abundant. But that somewhat charmed location adjacent to Osgoode Hall and the Ontario Court of Appeals may now seal their fate. As part of the construction for the Ontario Line, Metrolinx — the provincial transit-building agency — is proposing to start early work to site the entrance for an eventual station. And, so, according to Metrolinx, those trees must die. A court order sought by the Lorax Law Society of Ontario has given the trees a reprieve, but right now it doesn’t look likely to be permanent.

A lot of Metrolinx’s critics are acting as if there’s a simple solution to this problem that Metrolinx isn’t pursuing, because they’re Doug Ford’s toadies, say, or maybe because CEO Phil Versters’s dog was killed by a tree when he was a kid and he’s never forgiven the arbor community. But we don’t have to guess at what the real-world choices facing Metrolinx are, here.

One analysis, conducted by Parsons, looked at 10 alternatives for the entrance location, but two have received the lion’s share of attention. The first: putting it in University Avenue itself and permanently closing a section of the north-south street. Even if that were politically easy in to do in Toronto — and it’s not — Metrolinx notes that there is already a subway running under University and that trying to build the entrance into the street risks interrupting service on the city-critical Line 1. The second: building it across the street on the same property as Campbell House (a city-owned heritage property and museum). That might spare the trees, but then we’re trading the politics of disturbing the city’s inadequate canopy for the politics of destroying a heritage building; the Parsons analysis cited above notes that Campbell House would have to be “temporarily removed,” but that may well be just a new frontier in euphemism.

I’m hardly the staunchest defender of heritage buildings in this city, but even I think it’s hard to defend preserving Osgoode Hall’s trees over preserving Campbell House — and that does seem to be the actual choice before us. The more substantial point is that this was always going to be what building a new subway line in downtown Toronto was going to look like: siting major infrastructure in an already built-up area leaves policymakers and planners with few good options and lots of hard choices. Would it be easier if the city had built the Ontario Line or one of its antecedents (the Downtown Relief Line) before the hypertrophy of the post-2000 condo boom? Sure. But it didn’t, and we are where we are.

What’s even more interesting to me is the division I saw on social media over the weekend. Once upon a time, I think this city’s progressives would have been unanimous in their desire to preserve the Osgoode Hall trees. Not anymore. Plenty of voices — many, though not all, associated with the YIMBY pro-housing movement — spent their weekend defending the choice to build the Ontario Line subway on a tree graveyard, so to speak.

Absent rigorous public-opinion polling, I won’t hazard a guess as to which side represents a majority, but the division itself is notable: there is a constituency of younger progressives who are increasingly impatient with some of the orthodoxies of prior generations, especially when those seem to be getting in the way of improving people’s lives in basic, material ways — whether through transit or housing policy — in the urban heart of the province (and country).

In an op-ed in the Ottawa Citizen, Jen Hassum, executive director of the Broadbent Institute, an NDP-aligned progressive think-tank, warned that progressive parties risk having their lunch eaten by conservatives like Pierre Poilievre who have made delivering basic, material improvements in people’s lives their core message. “For too long, left-wing political parties have abandoned working-class, materialist politics in the pursuit of a cross-class majority that unites along false culture wars. This strategy has run its course,” she writes. “The left must recommit itself to the material politics of the better deal, and a more comfortable life. Because if it does not, the right will continue to fill that void, and we’ll all suffer the consequences.”

That’ll be easier said than done, if the trees at Osgoode Hall are any indication. When the Ontario Line is up and running, it will make material improvements in the lives of the people who ride it directly and of the people who’ll have a bit more room to breathe on the city’s other transit lines, which will be slightly decongested. The fact that the Ford government has moved this subway farther and faster in five years than any previous government has in the last 50 ought to be something that even its critics can support — and, indeed, learn from.

Instead of demanding that Metrolinx be held to the same standard of systems that failed to deliver badly needed transit for decades, progressives should instead be thinking about what they could do if they were willing to move as quickly and aggressively as Ford’s government has with the Ontario Line. They might find that it’s worth felling a few trees to build a better world.