“People Drive Automobiles”: Esther Shiner, the Silent Majority, and the Popular Case for the Spadina Expressway, 1971–1987

This article examines pro-expressway politics in Metro Toronto in the 1970s and 1980s. It focuses on Esther Shiner, a North York housewife and later councilor who led a 16-year battle to revive the Spadina Expressway after it was canceled by premier Bill Davis in 1971. Shiner founded an advocacy group, Go Spadina, and became a beacon for what one journalist called the “Spadina revivalists”—groups of (mostly) suburbanites, inside and outside municipal government, who articulated a popular rather than a technical case for building the expressway. I argue that Shiner’s campaign was an early example of the “auto populism” now common in Toronto politics and also one expression of a much broader “silent majority” politics in the 1970s and 1980s. Although Shiner’s campaign was ultimately a failure—the expressway was never completed—her Spadina revivalism should be understood by historians as one early example of a deep and popular impulse in suburban politics.