My name is Adam Vaughan. I am a city councillor from the city of Toronto and represent one of the waterfront wards in that city.
We're going to be speaking today about some of the concerns we have about how this policy impacts the city of Toronto from a variety of perspectives. More importantly, we are also going to be speaking—and you might be surprised to hear this from a local politician, in particular one from Toronto—about the worry we have that making Toronto accessible to these funds will not be a good thing for the city.
We would rather you spent this federal money in other cities and other jurisdictions. It is not something you hear often from cities; it's not something you hear often from the city of Toronto. But to finance our port, which is a port in name only, is to do so to the detriment and the harm of other ports across the country that actually need the strategic investment to facilitate international trade and local economic development.
The city of Toronto's port is really internal to the local economy of Toronto. There are three main things that arrive by ship, and three things only. There is sugar, for a sugar refinery on the waterfront that is largely a throwback to an industrial era when we had a significant distillery and beer manufacturing based in the downtown core. That doesn't exist any more, and the sugar, if it weren't for cheap Cuban sugar, probably wouldn't exist in Toronto either; nonetheless, it survives. It is adequately served by the odd ship that comes through and it doesn't require a massive infrastructure and delivery of dollars from Ottawa to sustain its activities.
The other two things that come are salt for our roads, which is cheaper to ship by water—but if the port were to disappear tomorrow, I can assure you that the salt would still arrive some way, by rail or by truck—and aggregate and gravel for the construction industry, again for the healthy downtown building boom we currently have underway. Again, if the port weren't there.... Other cities across this country somehow manage to get gravel and sand and aggregate into their communities for construction mixing.
The really serious components of this lie in the lack of accountability of the Toronto Port Authority. For many years while the Liberals governed, no federal appointments were made to the port authority. It ran without a city of Toronto appointment. We have refused to appoint and we refuse to acknowledge the authority that this agency has over our waterfront. The federal government didn't appoint the five federal members, and it ran with a single provincial member making all the decisions on behalf of the federal infrastructure program. That was it. That was somehow deemed to be accountable and proper management of a port authority.
Since the Tories have taken office, we have had a series of appointments, and my colleagues will speak to that. But Toronto refuses to appoint and acknowledge the authority of this port authority upon a non-existent port in the city of Toronto.
It doesn't move anything. The container ships that you think come and drop off the containers.... Those containers are empty. They don't even arrive by water; they arrive by truck and are there for the port authority to practise loading and unloading the non-existent boats. This is not a port. It really isn't a port.
But there are some other problems here. For example, I've been on council for a year, and twice already I've ended up in court courtesy of the port authority, one time for wanting to build a sidewalk next to a public school on the waterfront. They deemed that the federal agency's need for a parking lot trumped the local responsibility we had to get kids to and from the neighbourhood to their local school. So they've taken us to court, forbidding us from building a sidewalk next to a public school and a community centre. They said if they don't get their way on this issue, they'll tear up the local neighbourhood park, because they have an easement across it to build a bridge, which they are no longer going to be building. It's absurd.
There are other problems as well. These have to do basically with the situation that sees two competing federal investments on the waterfront in contradiction with one another. The federal port authority will move if you give it the ability to raise money, to not spend on the harbour wall.... The harbour wall is collapsing in Toronto, and they refuse to repair it. They refuse to even acknowledge ownership of the harbour wall. They say it's not their business to maintain the harbour wall. This is the port authority speaking.
If you fund these sorts of initiatives and if you give access to federal infrastructure dollars for transportation to the port authority, what do we tell the TTC? What do we tell the trucking companies in Ontario that can't get through the gridlock in Toronto?