It may seem odd initially, but we are reassured that Professor Sancton's review of our book (Sancton, Reference Sancton2020) displays such ambivalence about its analysis and the ways that we have expressed our findings. For as we have sought to demonstrate in this volume, there is considerable equivocation related to the construction, financing and management of major mobility infrastructure in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.
We suggest that mix of bouquets and brickbats that have been thrown at our work add to the evidence confirming Canada's equivocal reaction to the city building conflicts that we have analyzed. And as is common during conflicts, unfamiliar and unexpected behaviour triggers the attack instinct. Our focus on global flows of people, money and ideas and how these confront locally rooted ideas and identities might seem like looking through the wrong end of a telescope for someone skilled in identifying how advocacy coalitions pull and push on formal institutions. Unaccustomed language can trigger an adverse intellectual reaction. But like the proverbial box of chocolates invoked by Forrest Gump, our conceptual diversity offers something palatable for many readers.
We appreciate being recognized for assembling the evidence on what it has taken to build the expressways and rapid transit infrastructure in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. Understanding when, where and how these investments were organized is a challenge that no one had previously attempted to puzzle through, after almost a century of such efforts. Additionally, although casually dismissed in the review as “swamp (ing) the reader with data” and with inconclusive results, no other publication has comprehensively laid out, with hard data, where and to what extent Canadian cities are different or similar to each other and to other cities around the world (see Table 3.2 containing 27 variables with clear conclusions about the particularities of Canadian urbanism). These data require more than just a political analysis to elicit a thorough understanding of Canada's urban outcomes. We would thus encourage readers to join us in a broader consideration of what went into building Canada's major urban mobility infrastructure and what it can reveal about how our cities function and what they might share in common, even amid their diversity of infrastructure development.
Politics turns out to be necessary, but not sufficient, in explaining the juxtaposition of metros and expressways in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. And the places that have influenced those outcomes extend well beyond the political boundaries of the city and its suburbs. For example, Montreal and Vancouver have both been reshaped by decisions made in Lausanne, Switzerland, home of the International Olympic Committee.
We have aspired to show why the unusual diversity of major mobility infrastructure across Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver can only be explained by the interplay of global forces and community values at specific decision points for these lumpy, and transformative, investments. Our analysis takes the reader well beyond urban politics to reveal the contours of both a pan-Canadian urban ambivalence and an equivocation in policy making that characterized the twentieth century major mobility development in each of the cities that we examined.
