Posts Tagged ‘TTC’
McGuinty, Smitherman, Miller, the Streetcars and the Jobs
”I do think that in these times you have to be a little bit careful about writing cheques that you don’t have the ability to back up, Smitherman said.” No streetcar budget: McGuinty – Toronto Sun, April 30th 2009
Isn’t this baffoon of a Minister a giant verbal cheque writer? You know, in the ‘don’t let your mouth write cheques your body can’t cash’ kind of way? His attack first, be thought for later, approach to public policy and governance has him backpedaling and side stepping his own piles of BS and embarrassment more than any other Minister in the cabinet.
I don’t know how the politics of this went down, I do see a mayoral ‘wannabe’ and the real Mayor lining up for a jousting match that affects millions of Ontarians. Who knows how it will end, but I’m with the Mayor on the purpose, and the benefits for regional development in two parts of the Province that badly need it.
For McGuinty to pretend he is showing any financial restraint, when he will literally double the debt over the course of the eight year tenure his government before they are defeated is almost laughable, if it wasn’t so serious for my generation. He will be the Premier who will go down in history is running the largest deficit this Province has ever seen, and adding more to it’s debt than any other Premier in the history of Ontario. I will likely be far past punditry or active involvement in politics before this Premier’s debt legacy is paid off. (Don’t say, but the melt down, the melt down, because he had been running deficits almost annually since 2003, while raising taxes and spending along the way.)
Maybe Miller just saw the piles of debt financed cash Smitherman and McGuinty were mindlessly shoveling out Queen’s Park, and genuinely thought he could get in on the fun without asking… I mean when you have Smitherman preaching about the need for ‘green’ everything and having billions upon billions for a ‘smart grid’ and for the folks who bought and paid for the Green Energy Act, could you hardly blame him? Public transit is one of the legitimate opportunities to address carbon dioxide emissions, considering 75% of Ontario’s existing electricity supply does not generate carbon dioxide, but certainly all those vehicles on the road do.
If it wasn’t discussed in advance, I can understand why the Premier and his rabid attack dog are upset (although I think Smitherman’s emotional range starts at ‘angry’). At the same time, it is a project with a whole lot of merit and even if toes were stepped on and rings weren’t kissed, the economic benefits, and environmental realities of this should not be ignored.
McGuinty sucks at looking tough, and if he chooses this as the issue to be the bad guy, he will vilify himself and give Miller a giant political two by four, even if there may be some cold hearted merit to what he would be trying to say. That being said this is the same Premier who yesterday said he wasn’t closing any emergency rooms in small communities, just ‘consolidating them’.
2 Comments »Toronto's New LRT Vehicles An Example of Smart Decision Making
Toronto’s investment in transit is certainly valuable for Toronto but also has the potential to be economically valuable to other areas of the province that have been hurting over the last number of years. It is no secret that even before the widespread, much discussed ‘economic crisis’ Ontario’s manufacturers were hurting and workers had lost 300 000 jobs. Many in the labour movement, and on the political left have been calling for ‘buy in Ontario’ policies to better leverage government spending to aid our economy.
The Bombardier LTR deal is a perfect example of how we can and should use an unofficial buy in Ontario policy, that will give us to benefits of buying local without the political or economic risks that a formal policy has. Bombardier’s selection will mean jobs in Thunder Bay and around the province for parts manufacturing and depending on where Bombardier opts to source it’s materials from, it could also mean a local demand for local supplies.
This is $1.2 billion well spent and what’s more it’s about $500 million cheaper than the next bid, meaning even without the local benefit one could make the financial case for the purchase. I am hopeful the City of Toronto, Ontario and Canadian governments will recognize the importance of finding opportunities like these to encourage production of Canadian resources and manufacturing where possible and continue to award contracts not just on narrow merit of that individual project, but also on the spin off effects it can be seen to have on our economy. What’s more when Toronto relies on the Provincial and Federal governments to pick up 2/3rds of a large infrastructure bill, it is politically wise to ensure there is a broader benefit to be felt by the Province and the Country.
It is important that this be done sensitively, without the appearance of local favouritism or specific requirements being built into the request for proposal that would contravene existing trade agreements. In the Bombardier contract award, I think the City of Toronto found an ideal way of dodging the politically messy and economically dangerous issues of ‘buy local’ policies. They were still able to extract the benefit of such a policy, and for that, I’m sure many thousands of non-Torontonians are happy, especially the folks in Thunder Bay, who probably love Toronto’s rail transit system better than even many Torontonians do, simply because the strong economic benefit their community has seen from our investments.
As someone who relies on public transit and my feet to get around, I know I too am looking forward to the big investment in LRT’s and while Transit City may still leave Scarborough inadequately covered with subway stops, the LRT systems going East will make rapid transit more accessible for hundreds of thousands, and especially those in some low income communities.
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Toronto’s Power Outage and the TTC
I don’t necessarily want to re-tell the story of what was a very likely unavoidable interruption in power to residents of Toronto’s west end, but it is important to look at some of the opportunities to learn from what happened to see what we as a City can do moving forward to minimize the impacts of power disruptions in the future.
First, it is important to recognize that as of 6:50 pm as I write this, some families have been without power for over twenty hours on what has been an extremely cold night and following day. For anyone with electric baseboard heating, it would be simply unbearably cold, even for those who have heat, there is no light and no one has the kind of batteries required to light a room for this length of time. Also, any food, particularly meat that is in a powerless fridge or freezer is probably unsafe to eat. This should serve as a lesson or at least a reminder to Toronto residents that we all need to be prepared for major power disruptions for any number of reasons. When Toronto lost power in 2003, we were fortunate that it was the summer.
We all can recognize how unprepared many residents were for an extended power outage. We all can appreciate that the City of Toronto and the Humane Society sprang into action to help citizens without power and their pets stay warm. The City also sent staff out to known elderly and disabled residents to check on them throughout the day. That being said, the TTC is woefully unprepared for power outages and frankly other challenges that face the subway system during peak times. Anyone who has ever needed to utilize a shuttle bus when the subway is down understands how bad that service is regardless of how many buses are out there. I am not faulting the TTC for providing poor service, because I don’t think they do. But, from my own experience and what I witnessed today is that the sheer number of passengers who rely on the TTC simply overwhelm any shuttle service the TTC attempts. It just doesn’t work effectively.
The main point I want to make relates to the subway infrastructure and the trains themselves. I recognize that the TTC runs on electric trains and presumably when electricity isn’t flowing in the area where the tracks are, the trains cannot run. I am not an electrical engineer so I don’t know, but it does seem reasonable to me that it would be possible to have some sort of electricity supply backup that would allow stations and the tracks themselves to receive electricity from parts of the grid in areas where electricity is still flowing. A backup system could allow for portions of the track in an affected area to receive power from other areas along the track that do have power. The idea is basically to “plug into” areas of the grid that have power and capacity that can serve the area that is without power until power can be restored. This would allow the city to keep moving even with power disruptions. Perhaps the TTC should also explore the viability of having some diesel electric trains within the system that would be able to continue to provide service during extended power interruptions.
From my perspective, the TTC is a critically important service to Toronto residents (I chose the words ‘critically important’ to dodge other words that stress importance but carry political meaning) and it is worth exploring how we can ensure even when there are challenges facing the city residents, particularly those who rely on transit to get around the city can still do so. It is simply put, just too important to allow huge chunks of the system to go down when there may be other ways to keep the system up.
I would like to close by saying I do believe Mayor Miller did a good job in handling the City response to this challenge. This position that contrasts my view of his response to the last major incident on his watch, the Sunrise Propane explosion last summer. My only criticism on this particular issue was the City decision to deny reporters access to the City run warming centres where residents in the area were heading. As a general principle, I do think reporters should have the opportunity to let residents speak about their experiences, particularly when those of us who were fortunate enough to go to bed last night with power are concerned about those without.
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