Mayor John Tory says backlash from an editorial he wrote defending the Scarborough subway extension came from critics who were “manufacturing outrage.”

Speaking to CP24 Tuesday morning, Tory responded to accusations that he was being divisive in the editorial, which appeared on The Toronto Star’s website Monday.

In the editorial, titled ‘Why I support the Scarborough subway,’ Tory wrote, “Many of the subway’s loudest critics do not live or work in Scarborough, where more than half the population is born outside of Canada. When they say this is too much to spend on a subway, the inference seems to be that it’s too much to spend on this part of the city.”

The comments sparked outcry from members of the public and some of his council colleagues.

Tory said Tuesday that in the editorial, he simply meant to highlight that Scarborough is in desperate need of public transportation.

“I think people who are opposed to the Scarborough subway are kind of manufacturing outrage over this particular sentence,” Tory told CP24.

“All it was saying was simply this. Scarborough is underserved by public transportation. That is a fact. The people you hear about in Toronto that are taking two hours to try and get to a job, are people who live in places like Scarborough and we have to fix that because they need to have equal or equitable access to opportunity as do people in other parts of the city.”

Tory added that Scarborough is the only part of the city where its city centre in not connected to the “higher transit order,” such as a subway line.

“I believe 25 years from now, nobody would be debating the decision we are going to make now, I hope, to build this subway extension,” he said.

“The notion that anybody would look at me and the way I tried to bring the city together and continue to try to do so, including by building transit to connect up parts of the city that feel like they don’t have adequate access, is just the sort of politics over the top.”

Executive committee debates one-stop extension:

The debate over the Scarborough subway extension has been one of the most polarizing issues at city hall in recent years.

Initially council approved a seven-stop, provincially-funded light rail transit line for Scarborough but when former Mayor Rob Ford took office, he eventually convinced council to support the three-stop extension of the Bloor Danforth line into Scarborough.

A revised plan for the extension that was revealed this January scrapped two of the stations and suggested there would be $1 billion in savings that could be reinvested in a 17-stop LRT line to the University of Toronto Scarborough campus.

Last week, however, a staff report revealed that the city would actually need an additional $1.18 to $1.27 billion in funding to build both the Scarborough subway extension and the LRT.

The Scarborough subway extension was one of a number of transit plans, including Tory’s SmartTrack plan and a Downtown Relief Line, that were up for debate at Toronto City Council’s executive committee meeting Tuesday.

The executive committee is discussing whether or not to scrap the three-stop extension and support the one-stop plan that is currently on the table.

Some councillors were vocal in their opposition of the revised plan and its high cost.

“Everyday, every week in fact, the one-stop Scarborough subway proposal gets worse and worse and it costs more and more. We’ve now found out it is going to cost $3.2 billion for a single stop. For that same amount of money, we could build 25 LRT stops that would serve more residents in Scarborough and be built quicker.”

Speaking at a news conference at city hall Tuesday, Tory said the people of Scarborough were clear in their desire to have a subway over an LRT.

“All three levels of government said they support the construction of a subway extension of the Bloor-Danforth Line. We’ve had elections on it, we’ve had council decisions on it, we’ve changed our minds on it before,” Tory told reporters.

“My belief is that if we try to go back to anything or any other plan other than the one we have put forward … we will be years before we do anything. And I think that is going to deny the people of Scarborough the ability to get around better in a way that is open to people in other parts of the city. It will deny them equitable access to opportunity and jobs and I think that is very unfair.”