Passengers prepare to board a streetcar on opening day for Line 6 at the Finch West station in northwest Toronto on Dec. 7, 2025.Colin N. Perkel/The Canadian Press

Many readers will have heard by now about Toronto’s latest public transit debacle: the Finch West light-rail line, on which the cars move slower than a person can run. What they might not know is that the debacle had its roots in a desire to serve the disadvantaged. Seldom has the road to hell been so well-paved.

To understand how this happened, we need to go back two decades to the mid-aughts. David Miller, a left-leaning former Bay Street lawyer, was mayor. Toronto was booming, spreading in all directions and adding throngs of new residents from every corner of the globe.

Its transit system had failed to keep up. While other cities from Madrid to Shanghai were building vast transit networks to carry their commuting millions, Toronto had stood still. The only new subway line that had been built for years was on Sheppard Avenue, a five-stop spur line justly nicknamed the Sheppard stub-way. In 1995, the cash-strapped provincial government even cancelled a subway on Eglinton Avenue that was already under construction.

Mr. Miller proposed a solution: Transit City, a network of light-rail lines travelling mostly above........

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