Usually when I head to Ottawa, it’s to play a gig. But on Tuesday, May 4, instead of doing a sound check at Zaphod’s, I’m getting a security check on Parliament Hill in advance of a meeting with Federal Transport Minister John Baird.
NDP candidates along the west-end rail corridor – Parkdale-High Park MP Peggy Nash, York South-Weston’s Mike Sullivan and I – are meeting to talk public transit with Baird.
Surreal? Yes, a trip to Ottawa to talk about public transportation in Toronto is a real mind-bender. Our expectations have been lowered so far that it almost never occurs to us to wonder where the hell the federal government is when it comes to local transit needs.
So while residents concerned with the massive increase in diesel rail traffic and deadly pollution along the western rail corridor have rightly focused their attention on the province and its regional transportation agency, Metrolinx, as well as seeking allies on city council, the federal government has quietly been given a pass. Ditto on Transit City.
Yes, the feds are forking over some coin for the Sheppard East LRT. The fact that this is the only Transit City line going ahead as scheduled proves the point that the federal government has big role to play here.
And play it does. It’s spending a whack of dough on a subway extension to Vaughan that no one in Toronto can remember asking for.
It’s hard not to see a theme emerging: the federal government does have a huge impact on shaping the direction of transit in Toronto, but it’s usually the wrong direction.
And while the Board of Trade estimates that we lose about $5 billion a year in productivity due to gridlock, Canada is the only OECD country without a national transportation strategy.
Toronto’s is also one of the few big-city public transit systems among G8 countries that don’t receive some form of stable operating funding from their national governments.
But we’d sooner attack a snoozing ticket taker than hold the feds to account.
Transit advocate Steve Munro suggests the only solution is to devise a revenue stream that becomes permanent and can be counted on from year to year.
While the feds cough up gas tax money, it covers less than half the annual costs of repairs.
Since the crazy plan to impose hundreds of diesel trains’ worth of air pollution a day on communities that are already wheezing began with a few hundred million federal bucks, we thought we’d tell the minister what the locals are saying. It seems no one else is.
Baird tells us that until our meeting he hadn’t heard from Toronto Libs that there’s a problem.
Out of 22 federal seats in Toronto, 20 are held by Liberals. They have raised the issue only once.
Davenport MP Mario Silva, silent until now, finally asked Baird his first question about electric trains in the House this week. Hmm, coincidence?
While our federal politicians play games with Toronto’s transit, we are asked to wait – wait for Transit City, wait for a fully funded TTC.
Until then, line up your kids and your grandmothers for asthma puffers.
Andrew Cash is the federal NDP candidate in Davenport.
