Who To Blame For Senior Fare Hike: CULLEN
Former MPP and long-time Bay councillor Alex Cullen tells us where the controversial senior take hike originated.
Cullen names names.
The proposed five-per-cent transit-fare increases (and the 120-per-cent seniors pass increase) came from the Long Range Transit Working Group according to the mayor in a CBC interview.
Members of this group are transit commission chairman Glen Gower, councillors Tim Tierney and Jeff Leiper, plus Mayor Mark Sutcliffe.
If you want to know why the train doesn’t run well, the bus system is a shambles, Lansdowne got approved, why the new central library is woefully over budget and you can’t get a pothole fixed well, these are examples of the people behind these kinds of decisions.
This hike is terribly uninformed unless … unless … unless this is a defection to take residents’ eyes off an even more egregious budget hike.
Ken Gray
For You:
Mayor Knew About ‘Staff’ Senior Fare Hike: THE VOTER
Transit Fares: The City Doesn’t Get It
City Bullies Seniors With Massive Transit Fare Hike
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It’s been a while since we’ve seen a better-informed proposal for an increase in an Ottawa draft budget.
Just look at how little conversation there is about the other increases in the transit budget, many at double the usual rate, let alone any budget measures in other departments. The attention of the public has been largely focussed on the seniors’ pass to the joy of councillors who have no desire to defend the other rate hikes. Even the increase of the single fare for seniors by 10% has slipped under the radar along with the removal of the free child’s fare from 11 and 12 year olds.
Make no mistake – this was definitely put forward as an attention-getter to draw all eyes away from the rest of the budget and, by and large, it’s working wonderfully. I will be unsurprised if Sutcliffe’s opening speech for the budget debate on December 11th starts with a paragraph drawing attention to the seniors’ pass and how responsive he and other councillors have been to the community’s concerns. Then we will be told that finding that money has used up any cushion there might have been and they, ever so regretably, won’t be able to change anything else in the transit budget.
I’ll hold my applause for any of it until I see where they’re taking the money from to “correct” what they’re framing as a staff mistake. Although if the “miscalculation” leads to Renee Amilcar’s departure, I will definitely applaud that. Again though, let’s not let any focus on Amilcar distract from the other people who knew or ought to have known that this proposal was a non-starter. That would include, at the very least, Cyril Rogers, the CFO, and Wendy Stephanson, the City Manager, on the staff side and Mark Sutcliffe and Glen Gower, chair of the Transit Commission, on the political side.