TORONTO – After telling the city council that ‘the Mayor should be the one to do it,’ a quietly crying John Tory has walked down to the Gardiner Expressway with a loaded shotgun in his hand.
“I know it’s been loyal to the city for sixty years, but it’s time to let the Gardiner go,” said urban planner Gloria Chang, gently patting the Mayor on his shoulder. “Put the old girl out of her misery.”
Although red-eyed city councillors had debated other ways of managing the Gardiner’s ailments, such putting bandaids over the raw spots where chunks of concrete have fallen away, getting it cataract surgery so it can see its food dish again, or putting a roof over it so it doesn’t have to be out in the cold all winter, in the end they voted that it ‘was kinder this way’.
“No, no, no,” said Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong, wrapping his arms around a shivering concrete support near Jarvis street. “Please, she’s my only friend.”
Other councillors attempted to calm Minnan-Wong by reminding him about the painful hacking noise the Gardiner made every time somebody drove over it, and eventually managed to soothe him with an ice cream cone and a promise to get him either a chinchilla or an expanded section of Lakeshore East.
This is not the first time that the city has had to face the loss of an expressway. In 1971, the remains of the stillborn Spadina Expressway were buried in a shoebox in Cedarvale park.
At press time, after the Gardiner had given his hand a tired lick, Mayor Tory was still holding the tear-splattered shotgun in unsteady hands, trying to get up the will to pull the trigger.
