Tag Archives: Bob Chiarelli

Those Friday Afternoon Transit Blues

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On a scale of 1 to 10, I’d rate This Week In Transit News at about a 4. The grade’s only that high because I’m trying to put my best foot forward. Smile on the outside when I’m really crying on the inside as I sift through and evaluate all the pertinent information.

It started with our federal government voting down a national transit strategy put forward in the House of Commons by the NDP. National Transit Strategy? Strategy? National? Sounds a little interventionist. The outcome was hardly a surprise.

That element was saved for a day or so later when Queen’s Park announced through their agency, Metrolinx, that the design, construction, building and operation of the Eglinton LRT was going to be outsourced as part of a public-private partnership. Take that, TTC! Who’s yer momma? Huh? Who’s yer momma, TTC? Say it. Say it! Metrolinx, baby! Metrolinx.

Now, I’ve been battling hard for the past couple days to suppress my gut reaction to the news. I don’t want to disappoint my friend Matt Elliott and be one of those on the left giving over to immediate, unthinking nayism. Maybe a viable case can be made for the move. Perhaps it is the first step toward a fully integrated regional transit system and, hopefully, that would be a good thing. Metrolinx’s track record to date in dealing with local concerns gives me pause however.

But for now, I’ll attempt to see the upside. The general consensus seems to be success or failure of the Eglinton LRT P3 will come down to the details of the agreement, how the ‘i’s are dotted and ‘t’s crossed. If the private sector can actually deliver the necessary transit at a lower cost, and if that’s the only element we’re looking for, I’ll hop aboard and go along for the ride.

I’d probably have more confidence in the whole thing if the McGuinty Liberals had any robust credibility on transit. I have long since concluded that Mayor Rob Ford has been nothing but manna from heaven for them, providing cover for a rather lacklustre, wishy-washy approach since they came to power in 2003. Announce big, deliver significantly less. What is now $8.4 billion for 4 LRT lines was once supposed to be 7 lines with an additional $4 billion in funding. Delay has followed delay and we’re now talking decades hence not years.

And remember that initial election promise of restoring provincial funding for half the TTC’s annual operating budget? Nine years on. Tick tock, tick tock.

As if to add insult to injury, Transportation Minister Bob Chiarelli seems to be suggesting that once the Eglinton LRT is up and going and the TTC no longer runs buses along the street, the money it saves should be handed over to the private company running the LRT. Yeah, really. Of course, our mayor is otherwise occupied and hasn’t weighed in on the matter to defend the city’s interests, leaving that – along with almost all matters dealing with transit — up to the TTC Chair, Karen Stintz.

Defenders of the province will, with much justification certainly, point to our electing of Rob Ford as mayor and the subsequent subway-versus-LRT battle as a prime example of the city not being a serious player in this transit debate. They wouldn’t be wrong. Toronto took a big step backward on many fronts when Rob Ford became mayor.

But I’d argue, at least on the transit file, the city righted itself. The TTC chair took control, sidelined the mayor and his most ardent supporters and got everything back on track. (Yeah. I just wrote that). All of it done without any assistance from the province who, when it mattered most, indulged Mayor Ford’s subways, subways, subways fantasy and further exploited the situation by delaying the start of the Sheppard LRT construction yet again, making it vulnerable to any changes in power at either City Hall or Queen’s Park.

It’s all part of a familiar pattern for the McGuinty Liberals of appearing to be just slightly less worse than the other guy. Think they’re bad on public transit? Look at Toronto and Mayor Ford. We may be outsourcing control of the Eglinton LRT but remember Mike Harris buried the subway there.

I am trying to keep an open mind but the province inspires little confidence. Rather than see the move to a P3 as a cost containment measure, it just smacks of outsourcing responsibility and governance. I’m willing, though, to be convinced otherwise.

— forced smiledly submitted by Cityslikr

Queen’s Park Strangers

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“Too much time has been wasted,” intoned Ontario’s Minister of Infrastructure and Transportation Bob Chiarelli last week, “and we need shovels in the ground and improvements to public transit starting now. There is no time left to waste.”

All reports suggest he said this with a straight face.

If it wasn’t obvious before, it couldn’t be any clearer now: the election of Rob Ford as mayor of Toronto has been nothing less than manna from heaven for the Liberal government of Dalton McGuinty. In the havoc Mayor Ford’s wreaked on this city’s transit file (havoc the provincial government could’ve stemmed if it so chose but more on that later), Queen’s Park has been able to cover its tracks, hiding nearly a decade of neglect and indecisive mishandling of such a vital portfolio. So much so, that after TTC Chair Karen Stintz launched what was nothing more than an embryonic idea about further transit expansion in Toronto with One City, Minister Chiarelli was able to condescendingly brush it aside as a ‘future-looking concept’ with ‘a lot of merit’ but – and hold your stitches together with this — “We must not and cannot allow further council debate and delay,” the minister said. “Transit in a city like Toronto isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity.”

The stones on these guys. Really.

For the past 17 years, transit in this city has been little more than a political football to successive provincial governments of both red and blue stripes. Kicked and punted this way and that, depending on the direction the winds were blowing, there hasn’t been anything really resembling an overall strategy as much as there’s been basic calculated ad hockery.  While the current transportation minister mouths the word ‘necessity’ in terms of transit, it’s really only been about expediency from Queen’s Park for some time now.

1995.

The newly elected Progressive Conservative government of Mike Harris decides to bury the already in progress Eglinton subway line. Unaffordable. So we’ll wait a decade and a half when the costs of building transit inevitably come down and we can have this debate all over again in its entirety.

Later on as a sop to then Mayor Mel Lastman, the Tories OK a Sheppard subway line. This little stub of a thing contributes little to alleviating congestion much. In fact, it only seems to be helping load up the Yonge subway line to past capacity. It also serves as a flashpoint to the great subway debate of 2010-12, a key element to the delays the transportation minister bemoans.

And then there was the decision to stop funding the provincial half of the TTC’s annual operating budget, a decision that candidate for premier McGuinty promised to reverse if elected but has yet to get around to nearly 9 years on in his mandate. Taking a very conservative estimate, say $150 million a year, for 17 years now, that adds up to some $2.5 billion that the TTC and taxpayers of Toronto have had to shoulder or simply dispense with for the better part of a generation now. That’s a lot of expansion of services deferred and new technologies ignored.

What Mike Harris taketh away, Dalton McGuinty hath kept tucked away.

And like his predecessor, Premier McGuinty also bestowed upon the city a subway that had more to do with politics than with practicality. The Yonge-University subway line extension up to Vaughan was hardly where a new subway was needed most. Transit? Sure. But a subway? If there, why not Scarborough was a legitimate question asked during this spring’s transit debate. Until you elect a high ranking member of the provincial government, Scarborough, might’ve been the actual answer.

Then there’s Transit City.

Until we elected Mayor Ford in 2010, the main culprit in the delays in implementation of Transit City has been at the provincial level. Originally planned to build 7 new LRT lines and upgrading the Scarborough RT, along with new rapid bus lanes, Queen’s Park blanched in the face of the economic meltdown in 2008 and pulled funding that reduced the plan to 3 new LRT lines and the work on the Scarborough RT. (What’s that again about transit in Toronto being a necessity, Minister Chiarelli?) This reversal signalled that Transit City was subject to change and opened the door for Mayor Ford to crayon in a few alterations of his own.

As our friend David Hains pointed out last week, the Liberal government seems to have a selective memory when it comes to what, who and when modifications to a plan can occur. While brushing aside One City with a pithy ‘the train has already left the station’ bon mot from Minister Chiarelli, they weren’t as decisive when Mayor Ford unilaterally declared Transit City dead in December of 2010. Fearing for their own political future in the face of the supposed might of Ford Nation, Queen’s Park played along with the charade, allowing the debate to drag on until city council itself sorted things out. Now, it’s like, time’s up, folks. The clock is ticking. Time is money.

This is not to absolve Toronto city council of all responsibility for the transit woes it now faces. We elected an obvious anti-public transit mayor in Rob Ford. We demanded our councillors repeal the VRT and put further pressure on our own ability to pay our share of things. The subway-versus-LRT debate revealed a continued parochialism running deep throughout the city.

But, as they say, a fish rots from the head down. (I don’t know if that’s true but the saying comes in handy at the moment). This city and this region have suffered from a provincial leadership vacuum on transit for nearly two decades now. At least. $6 billion in lost productivity due to traffic congestion per year in the GTA and Metrolinx’s report on funding ideas for its Big Move isn’t expected until June of 2013. If still in office then that will be almost 10 years after the McGuinty government took over power. It hardly screams urgent or not a luxury but a necessity for transit from them.

So you’ll have to excuse me, my dismissal of the provincial government as honest or serious brokers on this issue. It reminds me of my favourite line from The Sopranos. “They shit on our heads and want us to thank them for the hat.”

— snittily submitted by Cityslikr

Our Harmful Politics Of Transit

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So, a few days of bashing Mayor Rob Ford’s flailing, rearguard action to save some semblance of his ad hoc transportation city plan, it’s time to pause and not forget the other contributor to the sad, sad state of transit affairs in these parts: our negligent overlords at Queen’s Park.

You got to hand it to them for possessing the sized stones they obviously possess, chiming in now, telling us to get our ducks all in a row so we could push ahead with building us some transit. Didn’t we already have that up until March of last year when the premier caved in and signed the Memorandum of Understanding that allowed the mayor to unilaterally rip up a plan that was in place at the time, that thing called Transit City? Where was the province’s demand for council approval back then?

I know, I know. It’s all political. The wobbly provincial government facing a fall election was unsure of the power of this thing called Ford Nation that the mayor touted. Better safe than sorry. Live to fight the fight another day. Besides, if Premier McGuinty forced Mayor Ford’s hand then, the mayor might’ve won the day and we’d already be on the wrong track of transit expansion.

But the equivocation, the serious case of constant cold feet toward public transit have been the rule rather than the exception for provincial governments, if not forever, than for the past 27 years or so. (And lest you think I’m letting Ottawa off the hook on this, I consider them largely an absent parent who shows up occasionally with a gift of electoral bribery.) What if the Mike Harris government never filled in that hole along Eglinton Avenue in 1995 and killed the subway plans? Or, had the same government not ceased paying its portion of the TTC’s annual operating budget? While there is much to criticize about the TTC, it would’ve been a different organization had it and the city not been forced to pick up the provinces half of the tab.

A situation Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals promised to rectify in 2003 when it was elected. And has continued to promise for the past 9 years. It seems the timing just hasn’t been optimum, money-wise. Ever.

Even their grand gesture to finally solve the city’s transit woes with their backing and funding of Transit City, quickly became a little less grand. When the economy went south with the global financial crisis in 2008, they began to blanche and waffle to the tune of some $4 billion, and a scaled back version established a certain easy come, easy go tone to the government’s attachment to the project. A tone the mayor quickly exploited in his bid to kill it last year.

Unfortunately this m’eh attitude toward public transit shown by Queen’s Park is ingrained. Hell, one might even call it endemic. Yeah, yeah. We know there’s a problem but, hey, we already got a lot of balls in the air. When the time’s right, the money’s flowing, when pigs fly, we’ll get right on it. Until then, here’s a biscuit. Don’t count on getting one regularly but be ready to jump when we say jump.

There was that favourite line of mine from The Sopranos, back in season one I believe it was. They shit on our heads and want us to thank them for the hat?! If you’re going to go around acting all mature like you’re the only responsible grown-ups in the room, might I suggest accepting some of the responsibility that goes along with that? Including, but not exclusive, to making deals and then backing out of them on a fairly regular basis.

As the senior level of government in this relationship, shouldn’t they be instilling a certain degree of stability into the dynamic? Isn’t that what good parents do for their children? Bring a sense of consistency.

Whatever you thought about the government of Mike Harris, they couldn’t be knocked for a lack of consistency. They hated Toronto and couldn’t give a fuck about public transit. Unfortunate but you were never dealing with surprises.

This Liberal government? All over the map. And there’s not even a pattern to its inconsistency. We’ll call it, willy-nilly.

Champions of Transit City, then not so much. Do whatever you want kids. Come on! Make up your mind already!

There’s no rhyme. There’s no reason. No vision. No leadership.

So why are we answerable to them? A historical glitch. This once rural country gave provinces sole domain over what were, at the time, insignificant cities. An after thought. A, yeah whatever.

Sadly, an attitude that remains in place nearly 150 years later, long after the country has become predominantly urbanized. A haphazard, outdated approach that puts the province’s interests first, ignoring the glaring obviousness of the new reality that as go the cities, so goes the provinces, the country. So a bad decision (or worse, an ill-informed, solely political one) on transit at this juncture as we already lag so far behind other cities throughout the world, will not only adversely affect Toronto but Ontario and Canada.

And the galling thing about it for us (perhaps not the politicians involved) is that we have a built in structure of plausible deniability. No one has to take the blame. We gave them money. They wanted to build subways. Kids, eh? What are you going to do?

— chidingly submitted by Cityslikr