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Transportation injustice comes in two flavours in Ontario: federal and provincial. The latter is more recent, but it’s just as sour.
The federal vandalization of Ontario’s rail service has been going on for decades, all the way back to the 1940s when Liberal cabinet minister C.D. Howe dropped all concern about the health of our railways in favour of his publicly-pampered lap dog, Trans-Canada Airlines. As CN and CP struggled to keep their trains appealing, full of passengers and covering their costs, the feds did everything conceivable to poach railway traffic to prop up what is now Air Canada. They also lavishly funded the construction of another subsidized rail killer, the Trans-Canada Highway.
No one would argue against the provision of a decent amount of highway and air transportation, but there was no balance in the investments or the cost-recovery formulae. The rail option was dropped like the gnawed bones after a barbeque. But as this federal destruction of our rail option was occurring at our expense, we could still count on the provincially-owned Ontario Northland Transportation Commission to do its bit to protect Northeastern Ontarians. The same could be said of the embryonic GO Transit in Toronto, which was launched in 1967 thanks to Premiers Leslie Frost and John Robarts as a cost-effective alternative to highway expansion.
But then reckless politics reared its ugly head. Awash with tax revenue from the booming economy of the early 1970s, Conservative Premier Bill Davis started spending like a drunken sailor and allowing his political operatives to cook up no end of dream schemes that were funded with our taxes. If it had even a hint of catching some votes, it got funded. That applied to a smorgasbord of transportation programs, some old, some newly hatched.
The most blatant example was the creation of the Urban Transportation Development Corp. to craft technological solutions to flood world markets that didn’t exist or didn’t want this stuff or already had it. Looking for showcases to hock its dubious wares, the province stuck Ontario transportation providers with them. Operators had no choice but to take UTDC’s junk and its schemes if they wanted to keep receiving provincial funding. He who pays the piper calls the tune.
As a provincial agency, sticking the ONTC with this UTDC “expertise” was a snap. Once a model of rational thinking and program delivery, the ONTC’s managers and commissioners had previously set their minds to logical projects. One was to use modified bi-level commuter cars from Hawker-Siddeley’s Can-Car Division in Thunder Bay to improve their passenger service. Another was buying the CN North Bay-Barrie-Toronto line to provide single-carrier passenger and freight service between Toronto and the North.
Under the new and more forceful provincial thumb, the CN line purchase idea was scuttled and the passenger equipment option was replaced by UTDC’s misguided plan to buy some elderly European passenger trains and drop them into an environment and on to tracks for which they weren’t suited. They looked nice, but they soon had the daylights beaten out of them.
With its board now full of political friends, ONTC next replaced the exhausted European trains with cast-off GO single-level commuter cars, rebuilt at a hideous cost in North Bay to create local jobs – and votes. They lasted a shorter time than the bedraggled European equipment.
Where was the public interest in all of this? Pushed aside to cover exposed political rumps. And always accompanied by gushing press releases about the ONTC and its political masters of the day being guardians of northern interests and models of transportation efficiency and government thrift.
Where the politicians and their flacks once merely stretched the truth, today they do violence to it. A prime example is the string of whoppers told by the government about the oft-promised return of the Northlander – cancelled by Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals in 2012 because the equipment was beat and in need of definitive replacement, which was deemed unaffordable.
With the usual press releases and self-congratulatory media event, a limp initial business case got wrenched out of the ONTC in May after a concerned citizen pursued its release through a series of Freedom of Information applications. Three full years after this government promised during the election campaign to have the train back on the rails before the end of what they said would be their first mandate, the report contains nothing of substance.
The most intriguing item in the 70 pages of fluff is the revelation that three more studies are required at a cost of $5 million. The next one shall be hurled at us in 2022 – an election year – and the service may be relaunched in the mid-2020s. The politicians and their handmaidens have now switched from talking about “when” the train will relaunch to “should” it be relaunched.
Lurking underneath this bag full of baloney is a disturbing relationship with the province’s Metrolinx, the McGuinty-spawned agency that gobbled GO and then added many self-created transportation and planning functions to its mandate. It has been inflated to elephantine proportions by Conservatives who once slammed it in the Legislature as an example of Liberal waste. Its board members, all provincial appointees, are now friends of Ford Nation.
Do you know… In 2009, Metrolinx had 90 employees making $100,000 or more annually. Under those thrifty Conservatives, that tally has grown to 1,144 Sunshine List members and another 76 at ONTC.
These Metrolinx empire builders are in the midst of spending $75 billion on Toronto transit projects – and seemingly infuriating citizens everywhere they go, to judge by the daily Toronto newspaper headlines about some Metrolinx project or another that has a neighbourhood up in arms.
Now, this controversial and thoroughly politicized agency, with the unexplained involvement of the pro-highway Ministry of Transportation of Ontario, is playing puppet master to ONTC on the passenger plan. What this collection of low-wattage bureaucrats and their high-priced consulting buddies know about intercity rail service remains to be seen. But what could possibly go wrong?
So, the same political disease that destroyed our federally-operated trains is now thriving provincially. It’s a double helping of transportation injustice, all of it rancid and unhealthy.
- The Great Train Robbery – Part 2 - June 12, 2023
- The Great Train Robbery – Part 1 - March 19, 2023
- Railroaded: A National Train Wreck - February 3, 2023