At the TTC Board meeting on June 20, 2024, CEO Rick Leary announced his intention to resign effective August 30 saying:
“I believe there are some new opportunities and challenges that await me before I fully retire.”
That’s the polite sort of announcement made when someone overstays their welcome. It is no secret that there were earlier moves to oust Leary including a failed attempt in October 2023 and questions about his role in creating a poisoned workplace. [Links are to Toronto Star articles.] Neither Leary nor Board Chair Myers would answer questions from the media about the investigation into his behaviour beyond saying that this was not the reason for his departure.
In a dramatic change from the usual TTC Board meetings, there was a truly private, private session. Almost all of the management who normally sit in on these meetings left, including Leary himself. Eventually, the room reopened and was set up for a press conference. Leary announced his decision to resign, and TTC Chair Jamaal Myers made brief remarks thanking Leary for his work. The full Board meeting then resumed for other business, but with an odd air that nothing would top Leary’s announcement, not even the formal ratification of the three-year contract with Amalgamated Transit Union Local 113.
According to Myers, plans are that an Interim CEO will be named to take over from Leary pro tem at the end of August, and with a parallel search for a new permanent CEO. The sense is that this process will not be rushed. Further details are expected in a few weeks.
In his role as Chair, Myers praised Leary both at this and at the previous Board meeting when Leary’s 10-year TTC anniversary was celebrated. Among the accomplishments cited were “Performance Standards for service quality, vehicle reliability, cost control and personnel”.
Leary’s performance standards leave much to be desired as I have explained in previous articles. Service quality is measured only at terminals, and with enough leeway for “on time performance” that badly bunched service can meet standards. Service quality is reported only on a broad average basis with little relevance to actual rider experience
Vehicle reliability values are artificially capped and show exactly the same mean-distance-before-failure month after month. Comparison between vehicle types, and especially the performance of new battery buses, is impossible.
Cost control is laudable in the proper context, but when this leads to staffing constraints, falling maintenance standards and deferral of key capital programs, that is sweeping problems under the rug, not responsible fiscal management.
Myers also cited Leary’s work on creation of the TTC’s diversity program. Although this may have its benefits, too often this been the focus of CEO reports when other pressing issues stayed on the back burner. Good news to avoid the bad.
Other accomplishments Leary himself cited include improvement of surface operations, creation of the Capital Investment Plan, and prioritization of “greening” of the fleet with electric buses.
Leary’s surface operational improvements rest on a one-size-fixes-all solution: pad running times so that short turns are never required. In practice, this blocked the use of a valid tactic for service management and artificially sustained vehicle bunching. Another tactic, the use of “run as directed” buses looks good on paper, but many of these vehicles do little to improve service and their actual contribution is hard to track.
The Capital Investment Plan first appeared on Leary’s watch, but work on it dates to the Byford era. As for electric buses, repeated bragging about the fleet’s size is no substitute for good vehicle performance. Only the large size of the bus fleet with a spare ratio well over industry norms protects TTC from service cuts due to lack of vehicles.
Although the resignation appeared to be sudden, this was clearly in the works for some time. Leary’s statement includes:
Some will ask about the timing of this announcement, and that’s fair.
For me it was about seeing one last major undertaking over the finish line – that being the new Collective Agreement with ATU Local 113, our largest union partner.
I believed that it was my duty and obligation to ensure the new agreement was in place before I stepped down.
The challenge now is where to go from here. It is clear that some Commissioners are less than pleased with the current situation, especially Councillor Saxe who chairs the Audit and Risk Management Committee. She has seen up close the quality of management and reporting, and spoke on CBC’s Metro Morning (June 21) about the need for improvement. The Board overall has a better sense of the need for “Risk Management” after severe incidents including the SRT derailment and premature shutdown.
However, one aspect that the Board has not pursued is their duty to ensure that management practices are not, in themselves, a risk to the organization. Leary drove many senior people out of TTC, some with severance payouts and non-disclosure agreements. This depleted both management strength and institutional memory, while rewarding loyalty as a prime talent.
The ongoing failure to advise the TTC Board, and through them, Council on the true state of the TTC should have earned Leary an exit from his role even without considering his effect on the work environment. The Board was far too lenient, and Toronto will pay for this for years to come.
If the interim and eventually permanent CEO’s job will simply be to “preserve Leary’s legacy”, one might almost ask why bother. That legacy is a sham of misleading reporting and decay through operations and maintenance. More subtly, the Leary era has seen budgets trimmed to fit City spending targets with no public discussion (or apparent Board interest) in what these trade-offs entailed. This included deferral of the badly-needed Line 2 replacement fleet (and its associated new carhouse) that was on the books under Andy Byford, but pushed back under Leary. This “solved” a City budget problem, but exposed the TTC to the risk of not having a reliable fleet later this decade.
A timing challenge lies in the date when Leary will finally leave 1900 Yonge Street and a new, albeit interim CEO takes over. Building the 2025 budget and plans beyond requires attention now, including from the Board who in years past were content to receive a finished document at year end. We must not go into 2025 with yet another year of minor change and no real debate on transit’s capabilities and future.
Budgets and work plans going forward must not just keep pace with inflation and a small growth in service, but must tackle the maintenance backlog and decline in the TTC’s capability to look after its own assets. Much focus on the Capital budget, including for new trains, deflects attention from problems in the Operating budget. A new CEO must be willing to “look under rocks”, to find areas that need attention and improvement, not just continue with “good news” reports that everything is just fine, thank you.
A new CEO must inspire the full TTC even though rebuilding will be difficult and, for some, uncomfortable.
Steve Munro 
Perhaps your next post can list potential full time candidates to fill the role – and list the pros and cons?
my guesses:
Steve: There are others and I’m not going to get into speculation. As for your dark horse, we can do without someone who has no transit background.
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I don’t know enough to evaluate Leary’s performance as CEO, although I’m certainly sympathetic to many of your criticisms.
However I suspect that the root cause of many of the issues you identify is in fact that we – the citizens of Toronto – refuse to fund the TTC at the levels required to run and *maintain* a modern transit system. Changing the CEO is not going to alter this.
I’ve been lucky enough to travel on several EU and Asian transit systems. It’s always a wake up call. I suspect people who don’t or can’t afford to travel don’t appreciate how run down the TTC is – which as a public transit enthusiast makes me quite sad.
Steve: Leary’s failings included playing up to the then-Mayor by cutting his budget to fit Tory’s needs without raising red flags, and failing to inform the Board about serious developing problems and incidents on the system. We are now in a “the sky is falling moment” about subway car funding, a project Leary delayed, when we should have been beating the drum about general system maintenance for years.
Yes, more money is needed, but also a clear view of what we need it FOR. Vanity projects need not apply.
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‘Daveings’ is correct: Scratch a Toronto taxpayer and you’ll find a citizen who sees no connection between their personal tax bill and the necessary spending required to prevent their city from becoming a dump.
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TTC definitely needs a ceo that has experience managing a successful airline.
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The CEO won’t have the courage to fire Josh Colle. If the CEO can start there, they have my support.
David Gunn is unfortunately too old, and I’m sure some of his ideas will be too outdated for this day and age.
I’ve heard many people say Kirsten Watson was more qualified than Leary. She would be good because she was once deputy CEO and is a female, and also uses transit.
The General Manager from OC transpo Renée Amilcar, she at least has shown she can cut dead wood within mgmt in Ottawa. Also a female, which will represent the majority of TTC users.
I hope Jennifer Kessmaat is not CEO. Someone that’s actually worked and as a passion for transit.
Maybe we can go the Gary Webster route by hiring from within? I’m sure there’s still plenty of TTC managers that know the inner workings of TTC that can get transit to the next level. The only problems with that is, they might be too comfortable with the status quo, and won’t make the necessary changes.
I doubt they’ll be actually changes, ultimately it comes to the political landscape and fundings. Only so much magic a person can do. And that’s if the Board and politicians want that. David Gunn was like that, but that’s once in a generation CEO/GM.
I know Steve, you said you won’t get into speculation, but we all know between now and when the next CEO is named, you will be harassed about it.
A new CEO needs to be here in time for the next budget cycle. Actually, before the next budget cycle so they know what’s needed , what’s not, and what changes are necessary for the organization, etc. And someone can get familiar enough to even present a budget for TTC. So it’s a balancing act of getting the right person but in a timely matter.
And with talks of Leary leaving since October 2023, let’s not act like it’s going to be an intense search, by now they should have an idea of their top 3. And that’s being nice.
I know it won’t happen, but this should also be an opportunity to replace or shuffle the TTC board, especially the citizen members. They’re still John Tory’s minions.
Steve: Renée Amilcar is now the President of the UITP, the International Union of Public Transport (the acronym is from the French version of the name) at least to mid-2025. I don’t think she is available.
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With taxpayers, there is denial – common throughout North Americar – that cars (and sprawl) are well subsidized through many varied and less-obvious subsidies, including inefficient land use and climate change as the mobile furnaces are used more often for greater distances etc. See, vtpi.org as a somewhat local source, and the figure from Vancouver was c. $2700 per car per year about 25 years ago. Will we get the fare inspectors asking the 905ers for a transit fare? – which is rhetorical as we’re ruled by ‘carservatives’. But we could try a VRT of, say, $500 per car, much of which is allocated to TTC, and also road repairs, including around bus stops as the bus knuckles etc. do exist.
So that’s a basic equity point, and it ripples through to urban vs. suburban and yes, women pay more for transit and use it more, and also have a bit more susceptibility to excess heat. And many women won’t try biking as it’s not safe enough yet, including the fasthole/passhole types, another set of inequities, which the TTC aids and abets in the old core as the margins of streetscar tracks are often seroiusly broken up and not safe to ride on and the tracks themselves are known to be entrapment. A shame that we want to bury transit in the most costly way in lower-density areas eh? but ‘sub-bray-ing’ won.
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Hi Steve,
Thanks for your thorough article. I couldn’t help but notice the first media reports of Mr. Leary’s departure included a quote from him of a “September surprise announcement” do you believe he is alluding to a potential opening date for the Eglinton & Finch LRTs? If not, any sense of when these two projects will finally be open for public use?
Much appreciated,
Adam
According to material on the Metrolinx website, new software has been installed for the train control system, and training has resumed. There is a Board meeting on June 27, and we will see if this brings any further announcement.
As for the TTC in September, it will be the next round of service improvements, and if past experience is anything to go by, this might be oversold. We shall see. The service budget includes a roughly 3% bump in September, but part of that is provision for Line 5 opening.
The June-July service is about 2% below budget because a planned live service demonstration, part of the start-up process, will not occur. This implies that Metrolinx is not going to hit the September opening date.
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Whether you like Josh Colle or not (I have no particular opinion at this time), there is no way he will be “fired” any time soon. Heck, he hasn’t even started his job! Maybe after a couple of years, if he doesn’t fit into the new organizational paradigm, whatever that will become. Even then, it’s easier to shuffle him out of the way into some symbolic make-work role.
I am struggling with the future CEO’s required balancing act between knowing the ins and outs of transit, versus knowing how to create an effective and motivated organization.
Depending on how much the management remains Leary-ized, it may be futile to concentrate on operations because as we have seen, the Leary approach does not create the overall organization that the TTC needs. It’s not just the track and the scheduling that needs to be fixed here.
Unfortunately a lot of the CEOs who can show organizational skills tend to manage for investors, creating “bottom line results” and “shareholder value“. That would be a terrible approach for a public transit organization. Well, unless results and value are re-defined as being for the million-odd riders the TTC gets each day. I am quite skeptical that Jack Welch would be such a CEO!
If you want a good read on how organizations can go terribly wrong because of perverse management goals and incentives, try Flying blind : the 737 MAX tragedy and the fall of Boeing
Finally, Steve, because you have followed the TTC closely for all these years, it would be interesting if you could do a summary of the various GMs and now CEOs you have observed. Possibly to avoid libel, you might just want to list the top two or three, and what made them particularly good at the time.
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Must say that I agree with Flight81 that it is past time to look at the ‘civilian’ Board members and even look at whether the balance between Councillors and civilians is right. The current situation is SIX Councillors and FOUR Citizens.
From rather limited watching, I think Councillor Saxe is the Councillor who is most clued-in (and asks questions that clearly ‘annoy’ TTC staff) and Holyday is his usual penny-watching and status quo self. Myers seems a fairly alert Chair. Not sure if any of the Citizens are good but, even if we can only expect 2 good Councillor members, it REALLY should be possible to find four active and sensible citizen Board members and maybe the balance between Councillors and Citizens should be 50:50?
Steve: thoughts?
Steve: I am of two minds about citizen board members. They can bring useful knowledge to the board provided that they are not simply stand-ins for their patron in the Mayor’s office. Otherwise it gives a clear lock on any vote via four members who have no public accountability.
As you know, I have often said when asked if I would want to be on the Board that I have problems with the concept of an unelected member, and this is separate from the fact that I would not be able to conduct public debates as I do here as a board member.
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Along with changes at the CEO level, do you also think that the COO should be replaced?
Steve: There are several who “surely won’t be missed” to quote Gilbert & Sullivan, but I’m not going to get into naming names. It is entirely possible that some, freed of the overburden of reporting to Leary, might blossom and show their full talents. The job of the transition team and interim CEO will be to figure out who can be trusted as a member of the rejuvenated TTC. Also, I suspect that major changes will not occur until there is a permanent CEO so that they can put their stamp on the organization.
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You should take into account future politics: the likely right wing junta that will form in the stark face of climate change. Other cultures celebrate forced labor, goon fare collectors, and, expropriation of lands. Maybe they will, too.
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I know it will never happen, and Steve would not even entertain the idea. But it would be interesting to see what a CEO Munro would do at the helm of one of North America’s largest transit agencies. A guy can always dream.
Steve: I have said before that I am not CEO material. An advocate and advisor yes, a CEO no.
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