The TTC is in the early days of a Request for Proposals for the supply of new subway cars. See:
The RFP was issued in December 2024 and was intended to go through several stages including:
- Pass/Fail screening: January
- Confidential cybersecurity meetings: March to April
- Commercial confidential meetings: April to early July
- Proposal submission deadline: July 22, 2025
We have just reached the point where early discussions with would-be vendors are to get underway, and actual submissions are three months off.
This means that no details of potential bids such as Canadian content, manufacturing plans or, of course, pricing are known to the TTC.
On April 23, 2025 (yesterday as I write this), Ontario’s Minister of Transportation, Prabmeet Singh Sarkaria, wrote to Mayor Chow asking:
I am writing to you about the importance of standing up for Ontario workers as a critical consideration during the procurement of the 55 new subway trains for TTC’s Line 2, which our government is supporting with a $758 million investment.
[…]
I am requesting that the City of Toronto recognize this historic opportunity and consider a sole-source procurement with Alstom, which would support Ontario workers in Thunder Bay and across our province.
Coverage of this appeared in The Star on April 24. In an unusual move for a government so enamoured of media exposure, this was not accompanied by a formal press release or media conference, but by a posting on the Minister’s LinkedIn feed.
Mayor Chow issued the following statement in reply:
Mayor Chow supports Buying Canadian whenever possible. With President Trump attacking Canada’s economy, we need to support local workers, jobs and businesses. We are working in collaboration with the provincial and federal government to deliver public transit for Torontonians and to support Canadian jobs. A Request for Proposal was issued in December. The Mayor speaks regularly with Minister Sarkaria and we will work collaboratively with the province and assess the feasibility of their request.
Past comments at both the Provincial and Federal level have suggested that this contract should automatically go to Alstom’s Thunder Bay plant, and yet the TTC issued an open RFP with all of the cost and complexity that entails. Of course, Trump’s machinations against Canada had not begun in December.
This RFP proposes not just the 55 replacement trains for the current Line 2 fleet, but trains for extensions to Scarborough and Richmond Hill, growth in demand, and eventually replacement of the current Line 1 fleet (all as options). Whoever gets this contract can well lock in decades of work supplying the Toronto subway system.
Sarkaria hints at the possibility that a sole-source contract to Alstom might require some adjustments:
The Ontario government will work with the city and the federal government to ensure the successful delivery of the trains should this decision lead to any changes in the project scope.
With a Federal election in progress, we will not know soon how much more funding might be on the table, but any extra cost would likely come out of Toronto’s allocation of the 10-year Federal funding plan already in place. It could be a stretch to get net new funding.
We have already seen the effect of cost projections on this project which was originally scoped at 62 trains, but was cut back to 55 to stay within the requested funding.
For the record, the Canadian content requirement in the RFP is 25%, and much of this contract could go offshore based on the RFP specs. If we are really going to “buy Canadian”, that number must be higher to the degree possible. (Some components, notably electronics, are not made in Canada.)
Vendors who are already involved in the RFP process will, no doubt, be upset that “the fix was in” for Alstom and resent the waste of their time. What added economic benefits might have come with an alternate vendor we will never know. Any such proposal would have to be weighed against the possible closure of Alstom’s facilities for lack of work.
I will update this article as the story develops.
Steve Munro 