Christopher Hume has an excellent column in today’s Toronto Star. Ostensibly about the fate of the Gardiner Expressway, which runs scar-like across the city’s waterfront, it’s really about politics and “civic cowardice,” as Hume calls it.

Last week, the board of Waterfront Toronto voted to launch an environmental assessment to study dismantling the east end of the Gardiner. Mayor David Miller, a board member, declared that this was the first proposal he’d seen that was doable. He was talking about the politics of demolition, not the reality.

It seems that Miller, not known for vision or boldness, won’t be the mayor who leads Toronto into the 21st century. With leaders such as Prime Minister Stephen Harper and federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, he will be remembered as one who tried to prolong a period of history fast winding down. It will turn out to have been a blip, a mere two generations whose lives were based on utterly implausible assumptions about endless cheap energy and land.

It really is sad, what’s become of David Miller. There was such optimism when he took the mayor’s office, and it’s been slowly beaten down by the bureaucracy of city hall, despite the hopes that he might climb out of the quagmire.

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him… The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself… All progress depends on the unreasonable man.” -George Bernard Shaw

Time for David Miller to get unreasonable.

[tags]toronto, gardiner expressway, christopher hume, david miller, george bernard shaw[/tags]