Why Should Toronto’s Writers Care About the Subway Upload? // Jason Freure

The government of Ontario is taking Toronto’s subway. Though the news has changed faster than I’ve been able to write this piece, that’s more or less the gist of it. After decades of shirking its responsibility to pay for the maintenance and expansion of the only subway system in Ontario, the provincial government now wants to rip the spine out of the TTC and keep it for itself. It’s all just headlines now, but this move will likely have consequences for life in Toronto for decades–probably bad ones, which is not something anyone beleaguered by high rents, renovictions, endless congestion, rising transit prices, and crumbling transit service really wants to hear. But it’s coming, and the effects will, incidentally, shape the literary scene in this city, too.If I sometimes use this space on The Town Crier to write more about Toronto than I do about books, it’s only because I think that the living conditions in this city will affect how writing, publishing, and readings happen in this city, and who will get to participate in them.Over the past few years, writing from Scarborough has come into the limelight. Books like Catherine Hernandez’s Scarborough, Carrianne Leung’s That Time I Loved You, David Chariandy’s Brother, or Adrian de Leon’s Rouge have floated to the surface of what de Leon calls a renaissance of Scarborough arts. Then there’s the burgeoning writing scene centred around UTSC, out of which came many of the younger writers recently featured in The Unpublished City Volume II.You don’t have to live or write about downtown Toronto to write in this city, but at one point or another, you are going to have get there. Whether you’re reading at Pivot or the IFOA, the lengthy trek to the downtown core and the neighbourhoods nearby is an inevitable part of a writing career in this city. It can also be an enjoyable one–a chance to make new connections, find new opportunities, and even find friends.But the distance is a long one. On a Monday at 5 p.m., the TTC journey from UTSC to the Harbourfront Centre takes 1 hour and 45 minutes, assuming everything is running smoothly. The trip involves a bus trip on the 116 and then a lengthy trip down the perennially overcrowded Yonge line—one that’s now in danger of becoming useless to most Torontonians as the mayor of Markham jostles with the Relief Line for a Yonge subway extension, appealing to a provincial government with much to gain from keeping suburban GTA votes.The biggest threat to cross-Toronto connectivity emerged in the middle of January, when the PCs announced that their upload plan included private developers footing the bill to pay for extra stations on the Scarborough Subway Extension. This was a pipe dream Rob Ford had promised for the Sheppard extension–one that never materialized (and neither has that extension).The problem looming over the SSE is that the Scarborough RT has reached the end of its useful life. It must be updated or replaced. The TTC is working to extend the SRT’s lifespan by 10 years from 2016, but internal documents reported on by Jennifer Pagliaro (this Twitter thread explains it all) suggest that 2026 is the furthest the TTC can safely operate the SRT.Already, the one-stop Scarborough Subway Extension, meant to be completed in 2026 and just barely in time to replace the SRT, may be behind schedule. Contrary to the PC propaganda that blames Toronto city council for the lack of new transit in Scarborough, the delay is mostly the fault of the Fords and subway boosters like Councillors Stintz and De Baeremaeker who switched from a fully-funded, fully-designed, seven-station light rail line that would have been finished around now.If the PC government intervenes seeking private money to build a three-stop subway, the SRT will be decommissioned before any rail replacement is built, and Scarborough commuters will be stuck on replacement buses, likely for years. (To be fair, that would have been the case with the light rail plan as well, but at least the province had promised to pay for all those shuttle buses.)Among rational human beings, there’s little optimism that private developers could or would fork over the money to pay for these subway stations. The cost difference between a one-stop and three-stop SSE is $1 billion. Subway stations can cost $100 million to build. The $4.6 billion three-stop SSE was scrapped because the sites were poor candidates for the kind of intensification that would help the city pay for it through increased property taxes. In other words, whether we wind up with one stop or three, Scarborough commuters will be stuck on buses for years, and taxpayers across Toronto will wind up paying for it. A handful of condo developers might get public lands to build on in exchange for pitching in a fraction of the costs.So what does all this have to do with the literary scene in Toronto? Rapid transit is the best tool the city has to bridge the distance that physically separates the downtown from Scarborough–and parts of Scarborough from itself. Ask writers in just about any part of Canada that isn’t Toronto or Vancouver if they feel like they matter, and you will probably hear that they feel left out in one way or another. They participate in Canadian literature online rather than in person. It’s easy to feel jaded about readings and launches after living in Toronto long enough, but they can feel like the centre of everything when you can’t get to them. While New Brunswick may always be on the margins of Canadian literature, it’s a failure of city building if Scarborough feels similarly.Better transit isn’t a one-way street, either. At the magazine, we often talk about how we can make connections with people who might not know about us already, or people who might not know how to reach us. Can we send someone to FOLD? Can we go to events in Scarborough? Transit is good enough that you could do these things without a car. But getting downtowners to more distant parts of Toronto and the GTA is an uphill battle even today. I can barely get my west-end friends to cross the DVP. A broken subway system won’t help.The physical barriers to reaching new scenes and groups were never clearer than this past January. The University of Toronto Scarborough Campus (UTSC) hosted an event called Scarborough Lit! David Chariandy, Catherine Hernandez, and Carrianne Leung, the stars of Scarborough’s literary renaissance, in conversation, with a Q&A and book signing.It also happened to fall on the same day that blowing snow shut down the SRT. Shuttle buses struggled to keep up and it was a taste of what the city can expect every day when the SRT is no longer safe to run. If you made the trip from downtown Toronto without a car that day, I admire you, but it wasn’t a journey I was about to brave if I didn’t have to.I’m sure this piece deserves the scorn of those who make this commute every day. All I can say in my defence is that I hope your commutes get easier, though they will almost certainly get worse. If the literary scene of Scarborough already feels like another province to downtowners, it’s a feeling that’s not going to go away quickly.