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News and Articles>
Both a hero and a villain
Toronto Star --
Oct 12, 2005 --
KEVIN MCGRAN
TRANSPORTATION REPORTER 
Margaret Smith is proof you can fight city hall.
While she may be Enemy No. 1 among transit enthusiasts and city planners, she's certainly a hero to many businesses and residents for her continued, committed and successful opposition to a streetcar right-of-way down the centre of St. Clair Ave. W.
"Margaret Smith is an unbelievable individual," said Jeff Gillan, owner of Designs For Children on St. Clair. "We probably would not have won the war had it not been for her."
It began in 2002. Smith had just retired from Ontario Hydro shortly after it became Ontario Power Generation — for which she ran environmental assessments — when the city and Toronto Transit Commission announced plans to launch an assessment as part of the plan to revamp St. Clair.
With new-found time on her hands, she was determined "to get involved in the neighbourhood," to follow the city's plan closely.
By 2003, she didn't like the reference to her neighbourhood as a "transit corridor."
She worried about dedicating two lanes of the six-lane road to streetcars, and she figured that the city and TTC had already made up their minds: that no matter what the environmental assessment revealed, dedicated lanes for streetcars would win the day.
"That's when I realized that it was a classic `Decide and Defend'" Smith said. "What it means among EA practitioners is when a proponent has already decided what they want to do and the EA process is reduced to defending that decision."
But she was determined to fight, forming the Save Our St. Clair committee, representing some residents worried about the changing nature of their neighbourhood, and businesses worried about losing customers due to a lack of parking spaces. They raised $56,000 this year to launch their legal challenge.
"She was the leader," Gillan said. "There's absolutely no question about that."
Smith, perhaps more than any of the thousands of residents who showed up to the hundreds of meetings, understood the often confusing world of the environmental assessment process.
"She very clearly recognized just how big the impacts could be for thousands of people along the entire corridor," said lawyer Eric Gillespie, who relied on Smith's expertise in forming his case before Ontario's Divisional Court. "Her professional background also allowed her to understand many of the secondary effects that a project like this can potentially have."
Smith believed from the beginning that the city didn't follow procedures properly, leading Gillespie to argue that the city violated the Planning Act by going ahead with the project without amending its official plan.
"She's probably the only person that truly knows and understands all of the steps that have taken place up to where we are at now," Gillespie said. "She was a constant source of information and inspiration to keep moving forward against some pretty formidable odds."
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