Metrolinx Worse Than Transpo: THE VOTER

02/10/2025

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I think we would be wise to give some serious credence to what Toronto Councillor Mike Colle has to say about Metrolinx and its workings.

He is not only a councillor and previous chair of the Toronto Transit Commission but was the MPP for Eglinton-Lawrence for many years. That’s the area where Metrolinx has been supposedly building the Eglinton Crosstown LRT Line which is five years late and way over budget. He knows whereof he speaks.

One of the differences between Metrolinx versus OC Transpo control of the LRT is precisely that. If the LRT is handed over to Metrolinx, we would lose all possibility of influence over our train system and would be extremely unlikely to ever get it back. It would be permanently in the control of an organization we have no part of. If Metrolinx decided that a train system in London or Thunder Bay were deemed more important than our LRT, it could prioritize that other system and bump ours further down the road and there would be little we could do about it.

What happens if Metrolinx, in their Toronto-based wisdom, decides that the Moodie station should be the western terminus of the LRT until 2053 and builds a mega-station to facilitate the transfer of passengers at that point to and from buses that would serve all points west or southwest of Moodie Drive and the 417? Across the city, OC Transpo and its buses have been the residual service where the LRT doesn’t provide transportation whether that’s temporary, as in the R1 and R2 buses, or on an ongoing basis through the regular bus routes.

For as long as Metrolinx does not provide a train service, OC Transpo will be responsible for picking up the slack and the bill. Council and the residents of Ottawa will have no meaningful input into Metrolinx’s decisions and operations so will have to continue to operate bus routes that should have been long since served by the LRT. You think transit planning at the city is atrocious now? Wait until Metrolinx is upending whatever planning the city does.

Case in point: had Metrolinx taken over the LRT six or seven years ago, they would have been the people bringing us the Trillium Line upgrade and extension, the one that’s only now opening more than two years late. Given that a) Metrolinx has a history of being over-time and over-budget and b) they would have no incentive to work any faster since OC Transpo would continue to carry the cost of running the buses that provide the service in the interim, it’s unlikely that we would be in a better situation than we are now and could well be worse off.

It might seem at this moment to be a great idea to hand our LRT headache over to someone else to deal with. However, we must look a lot deeper than just solving the problems we have now and be absolutely certain that, by unloading LRT, we aren’t just changing the issues we will have problems with in the future while removing any ability to remedy those future difficulties. Sometimes the easy, immediate solution on offer can be one that causes great cost in the long run both financially and in other ways. Would we be jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire? Even if the frying pan is clearly on fire at the moment, are there ways to put that fire out before resorting to more extreme solutions?

Metrolinx’s track record doesn’t have much ‘track’ in it. We would do well to heed Toronto’s experience with them and not make it ours.

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