Scott Stinson: If this is how infrastructure projects get built in Canada, we are doomed

Only Mark Carney and Doug Ford know if there was actually a deal between them to each support a major transportation infrastructure project that the other had championed.

Maybe it wasn’t quite that formal, but The Toronto Star reported this week that it very much was: An agreement that the federal Liberals would wave through the Ontario PC plans for a massive expansion of Toronto’s island airport, and in exchange members of the Ford caucus would give their tacit blessing to Carney’s Alto high-speed rail vision. The pact was made between the two leaders at the premier’s Toronto home. There was reportedly a handshake and everything.

That arrangement was certainly given credence this week, when no sooner did the Liberals shelve Ford’s Billy Bishop dreams than a bunch of his MPPs in eastern Ontario — 11 of them, including two members of Cabinet and the government House leader — went public with a letter that declared their constituents needed to be fully consulted on Alto before it goes much further. The Ford caucus is tightly controlled, comms-wise, and there’s no way that letter sees the light of day without the blessing of the premier’s office. The timing cannot be a coincidence.

But while there are valid questions to be asked about whether Carney balked on his apparent deal with Ford to help his party in an upcoming Toronto byelection, and what that might do to their working relationship in the future, there’s an even bigger question that needs asking: what in blazes were they doing making that kind of deal in the first place?

It is, in a word, insane.

Both the proposed Billy Bishop expansion and the Alto high-speed rail concept are massive undertakings. The rail plan, such as it is to this point, is many magnitudes larger than Ford’s airport vision, but each involves many billions of dollars and years of investment. It is simply alarming that the two leaders would agree to some kind of quid pro quo on infrastructure projects of this scale without any, you know, facts. It is staggering. It’s unconscionable. Someone needs to invent a new word, because ridiculous does not begin to cut it.

We are used to Ford shooting for the moon with some of his ideas, for example the tunnel under Highway 401 that is currently in the middle of the world’s most pointless feasibility study. But Carney is supposed to be a business-school pragmatist. What is the point of the shiny new Major Projects Office if an airport expansion can simply be traded for a train line?

The fairest criticism of the Billy Bishop proposal at this point in its existence is that it lacked details. Proponents talked about the jobs it would create and the economic benefits it would bring, predictions that were highly speculative, but how it might work was left for another day. How big would the runway need to be? Where would the expanded terminal fit? How could the congested foot of Bathurst Street possibly deal with a quadrupling or more of passenger volumes arriving at the gateway to the island? None of that stuff, among many more questions, had been answered. And yet, we are to believe, the federal government was fine with all that as long as they got their train thing moving.

Not that the provincial government comes away looking any more discerning. The problems that the MPPs raised in their letter — chief among them, land expropriation along the train corridor — have been there all along, as have countless other concerns. (Readers have been well-informed by colleague Chris Selley in this regard.) And yet, until Tuesday, Ford’s caucus, even the rural members, had been quiet as church mice on the rail plan.

As this country embarks on tremendous infrastructure spending that was spooked by a broken trade relationship with the United States, is this seriously how major projects are going to be decided? Do the merits of any such project matter less than whether leaders can quietly fist-bump over the broad strokes of a proposal at dinner?

You’d like to imagine that the particulars of a given multi-billion dollar plan would matter a great deal to any leader before giving it an endorsement, tacit or otherwise. You would be wrong, evidently. (Lest anyone argue that this is what Carney has done by pulling his support, his transport minister cited public feedback as the reason for their decision, not doubts about the viability of the plan.)

Even at their most basic level, both proposals deserved skepticism. Would an expanded island airport really drive economic growth, or just move flights from one Toronto airport to another? And would an incredibly costly high-speed rail corridor really be a wise investment in a province that has struggled to build even the simplest of light-rail commuter lines?

Even those doubts weren’t enough to scare off either the premier or the prime minister, it would seem.

You back my project and I’ll back yours, details TBD. They might as well have written “big jets = speedy choo-choos” on a napkin and been done with it.

It seems like a crazy way to run a country. But here we are.

sstinson@postmedia.com