City trees tower over Ontario Line plans

The iron fence and gates around Osgoode Hall have stood since the late 1860s and have defined the institution’s lush grounds.

During the Second World War, there were calls to dismantle all that iron for scrap metal for the war effort, but people rallied to save them and the landmark endures. Today, Osgoode is again a reason for rallying, but instead of iron it’s for a historic grove of trees inside the fence that Metrolinx wants to cut down.

The cutting is part of the preliminary work for the Ontario Line, the long-awaited transit “relief” subway that is to run from Don Mills south to and across downtown, ultimately ending in Exhibition Place. In the summer, Metrolinx signalled it would hold off on tree cutting until a design review was completed in early 2023. It now says cutting will begin by Dec. 5 or sooner, landing the transit authority into another public conflict.

“Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood,” said architect and city planner Daniel Burnham as he designed and redesigned vast swaths of Chicago in the early 1900s. Had he been around today he would see that big plans do indeed stir all kinds of blood, but perhaps not in the way he intended.

Such is a central tension of Metrolinx: the agency is tasked with dramatically expanding and redesigning how we get around in the Golden Horseshoe and bringing our often-inadequate public transit system into the 21st century. Transit has a big footprint and the changes will touch many neighbourhoods. Like any massive change, there will be some destruction of what exists and lots of temporary inconvenience.

Osgoode Hall is also a bit of a perfect storm as it involves trees, beloved things that routinely get the public fired up (the outrage over the continued attack on the Greenbelt is ongoing evidence of this). Trees resonate with people. Cutting one down is an archetypal act that riles people up.

Despite being the fourth-largest municipality in North America, whether or not an individual tree can be cut down is routinely debated during city council meetings, making that tree — for a brief moment — locally famous.

Whether or not it’s ideal for council itself to spend time on individual trees, Toronto has strong urban forest protection bylaws, something long fought for that aim to preserve and enhance the city’s life-giving tree canopy. Metrolinx, on the other hand, can largely do what it wants, and as Osgoode Hall is provincially owned, it doesn’t have to get an arborist’s report as similar tree cutting elsewhere in the city would require.

Of particular issue with tree advocates is not so much the individual trees themselves, but that the Osgoode property has a rare “tree canopy” in downtown Toronto. In a sea of concrete, it’s the only large green space in the core, and a rather precious one. Can Metrolinx be encouraged to come up with a solution that saves the canopy and builds transit? Designers and architects will tell you there are always alternate solutions to such problems.

Like so many provincial things, Metrolinx is near-omnipotent next to municipal power. In some ways this is good as our own city hall has dithered on transit often, itself beholden to NIMBYism.

Toronto even threw out Transit City on its own, a perfectly good and funded transit plan that would have been largely built by now. And the Ontario Line desperately needs to be built.

Toronto has been looking forward to this rapid transit line for almost as long as the Osgoode fence has been up, give or take half a century. The earliest plans for what’s evolved into the Ontario Line date to 1910, so it’s long overdue and the bulldozing power, literally and figuratively, of Metrolinx is needed to make it finally happen. Yet those big plans keep stirring blood.

Metrolinx has also got into community tree trouble over Small’s Creek, a beautiful pocket of a ravine west of Woodbine Avenue tucked on either side of the Lakeshore East Corridor that it is expanding.

Visiting this week, I saw a considerable number of mature trees had been cut down to facilitate rail expansion, and bulldozers had pushed earth into the wetland. The local community had hoped the trees could be saved and some even advocated for a pedestrian-accessible creek crossing under the tracks if such extensive work was going to take place.

On the westside, the “Davenport Diamond” project is taking shape, but it too came in conflict with the local community and its initial images, which included art and manicured landscapes, l ater disappeared. A Metrolinx layover facility planned for the Don Valley is yet another area of concern. On it will go.

Metrolinx has a large and expensive communications department, testament to how much it bumps into the community with its omnipotence. Great plans need great power. Finding a balance is political magic, but public omnipotence does need a critical check, and the details really do matter.