Wednesday, August 17, saw Rob Ford going up to Queen’s Park in a time-honoured Toronto tradition asking for money for the transit system. I won’t go into much detail on this as you can (and already may have) read all about it in other media:
Karen Howlett and Patrick White in The Globe
Daniel Dale in The Star (with a wonderful photo in which Ford appears to be channeling the subway gods)
Mayor Ford’s dream of a subway paid for entirely by the private sector has evaporated. Brother Doug Ford claimed on CBC’s Metro Morning in February that developers were just waiting to invest $5-billion in the line, but they’re not queuing up chequebooks in hand. Desperation set in a few months back when even Ford’s hand-picked transit fixer, Gordon Chong, openly questioned the proposed financing. Since then, any public sector funding that Ford could scrape together was thrown in the pot so that the private sector “ask” would drop by a billion or two.
Back in March, Mayor Ford signed an agreement with Queen’s Park (a document that has not yet been ratified by Council) in which Ontario takes over responsibility for an underground Eglinton line (at a cost of $8-billion or so, using up almost every penny of the Transit City money), and Toronto is on the hook for the Sheppard subway. If there’s money left over on Eglinton, up to $650-million will be given by Ontario to Toronto. Ford wants that money now, and fears that a Federal contribution of $330-million to the Sheppard LRT project will be lost if the Sheppard project doesn’t get on the rails soon. He has also been after money from “PPP Canada”, a federal agency, but they’re a pesky bunch and want to see a business plan.
The Mayor came away from Queen’s Park empty handed, and Premier McGuinty made it quite clear that Ontario is in no position to advance funding for the City’s project until the true cost of the Eglinton line is known.
This has to be the biggest waste of a bilateral meeting in quite a long time. Continue reading
Steve Munro 