David Miller for musing about road tolls, suggesting his rival’s support for such a measure made him a “highway robber.”

Tory also rejected road tolls in the 2014 mayoral race.

In October, when Tory was heading out of town with his wife, Barb Hackett, staff tucked a Pembina Institute report, titled Fare Driving, into his binder. It endorses tolling as a fair way for the city to generate badly needed cash.

When Tory arrived back at city hall, he jokingly asked his staff if they were “trying to propagandize” him on tolls? But he also told them he was “more open to it than you think,” despite his lingering doubts on how to square it with his previous position in 2003.

On Oct. 28, Agrell and Gupta met with a group ofalso heard Tory many times, as head of CivicAction, admit he regretted that. Still, that was before he was an elected official.

“It was a really surprisingly great step . . . a kind of Nixon-to-China moment . . . (and) seems to be landing relatively well at this early stage.”

(U.S. Republican president Richard Nixon surprised the world by opening diplomatic dialogue with communist China in the early 1970s.)

With files from David Rider

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