Has Amilcar’s Best-Before Date Expired? THE VOTER

Maybe the higher levels of government, but particularly the federal government, need to turn Mayor Mark Sutcliffe’s so-called “fairness” campaign back on him.

Where’s the fairness in telling the federal government to make its staff come into the office more often when you don’t provide the necessary, reliable transit for them to get there? How about when you threaten to hike their transit fares from the zero they were paying while working at home by astronomical percentages that will approach double what people paid pre-pandemic? Is it fair to expect people to make their way to work regularly when service on both the train and the bus is being reduced by tens of thousands of hours?

Sutcliffe’s not astute enough to see the irony of an O-Train shutdown in the middle of rush hour on the first day of public servants’ forced return to work. OC Transpo claims it can’t increase service to accommodate all the returning workers because it only found out about it in May. It appears its planning process was already underway for their fall schedules and Transpo isn’t nimble enough to make changes without more than four-months notice. That puts the lie to its claims, when it cut the O-Train frequency recently, that it would be watching ridership and could make adjustments on the fly if the cuts were too much. So which is it – changes take more than four months or they can be made almost immediately?

Someone should do a freedom of information request to see the local travel claims for all Ottawa politicians and senior bureaucrats at all three levels of government. How many of them rely on the transit system that they believe is good enough for their constituents?

Does OC Transpo approve mileage claims for their management personnel to travel between 1500 St. Laurent Blvd. and 110 Laurier Ave. plus the cost of parking? Why aren’t they required to take the “exceptional” transit service they provide to us? Does Transpo general manager Renee Amilcar own a bus pass?

Speaking of the transit company’s manager, at what point will she reach her best-before date? Was there not included in her hiring documents some list of what she was to do? And did it not include a requirement that she deliver a functioning transit system across the city? That would seem to be the very least that should have been expected of her.

She has failed miserably but there is no sign of any consequences for her. Should she not have also had a firmer grip on OC Transpo’s finances than appears to be the case? If we are about to be billions of dollars on the wrong side of a balanced budget, should she not have been on top of that and taking remedial action long before now?

*’Exceptional’ can be a measure of something at either the top or the bottom of the scale.

The Voter is a respected community activist and long-time Bulldog commenter who prefers to keep her identity private.

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