Just before midnight on June 6, the Toronto Transit Commission and the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 113 announced that they had a tentative agreement for a new three-year contract. Further work continued beyond the midnight deadline to reach a proposal the union executive could support.
No information has been released, and the deal is described as a “framework” with details to be finalized before the package goes to union members and the TTC Board for ratification. However, both union leadership and TTC management sound hopeful for a settlement.
This was not the situation only days earlier when Local 113 stated that there was little progress on major issues, notably job security, and transit riders braced for a possible strike.
By comparison with previous TTC labour negotiations, this round did not spill over into public rounds of finger-pointing. At the political level, pressure was not overt, although behind the scenes guidance must have affected bargaining. This bodes well for a less contentious relationship than would exist with polarizing, blowhard media statements that can undermine whatever trust might exist between negotiators.
On CBC’s Metro Morning, Local 113 President Marvin Alfred noted a shift in TTC negotiating posture to remove management conditions attached to some union proposals that would have limited their benefit. This led to a tentative agreement. What triggered this change is not public, but that was key to unlocking the negotiations.
Assuming that the framework evolves quickly into an approved contract, the focus now must turn to the future of transit in Toronto. The TTC faces major financial problems, but lurking behind these are issues with service quality, maintenance and TTC management culture.
On the financial side, common discussions focus on the Capital budget including the backlog of “state of good repair” funding, notably for a new Line 2 fleet of trains. However, the more pressing challenge lies with the Operating budget that is funded primarily by the City of Toronto and fares. Through the pandemic, special federal and provincial funding allowed service to remain frequent, but this revenue has ended. Any policy to maintain, let alone improve service falls to the City and to riders.
The options are not fully understood, but with 2025 budget planning now underway, it is vital that any debate be well-informed. For many years, the TTC budget landed with a thud on the Board’s public agenda in December or January with all significant decisions about funding, service and maintenance solidly baked in. After the annual charade of public consultation, Board and Council tweaks, the budget sailed through. At best, one might see requests for options going into the the next year’s process.
TTC has been without a Budget Committee of any significance for years. Now is the time to create one and to ensure that it actually meets for substantive debate. There must be open discussion of options. The TTC’s Five Year Service Plan includes some costed proposals, but other issues such as fare structure, service quality and reliability need review at the same time. The Board has a bad habit of cherry-picking items for debate in isolation from the larger context.
Major issues for the union are wages, understandably, and job security. On the wage side, the recently published TTC 2023 draft annual report includes a table showing the hourly cost of wages and benefits from 2014 to 2023. Over that period, this value rose from $49.01 to $61.67, a ten-year increase of almost 26%. Individual annual changes varied considerably with some years seeing values well under 2%.
From a system cost point of view, the wage and benefit rate does not tell the whole story because the combined effect of traffic congestion and more generous terminal recovery times in schedules push down the amount of service delivered per vehicle hour. Putting it simply, if the average speed of buses goes down by 1%, then 1% more vehicle hours are needed just to maintain the same service. Unless there are offsetting service cuts, this adds to service costs beyond the basic hourly rates and benefits. Management can claim an improvement in service operated, measured in hours, while scheduled frequency and capacity can actually decline.
Job security is also important because of creeping outsourcing of work from formerly union jobs to outside contractors. This began with some of the simpler tasks such as bus cleaning, but more recently regional service integration schemes raise the question of which transit operators (and their respective staff) will provide service in Toronto. Current proposals involve minor parts of the system, but the clear intent is to shift TTC costs to other providers.
Service quality is a big issue for riders, and this is an area where both management and the union must co-operate for improvement. There is a need for honesty in reporting about crowding levels and reliability about which I have written many times before. Management cites all-day averages and uses a measure of reliability that does not reflect real-world rider experience. Crowding is directly related because bunching produces uneven vehicle loads with most riders on crowded buses. Management must accept the need to manage service and report on its actual quality. “On time” performance metrics disguise actual quality problems including vehicles running in groups for extended periods.
Options for increasing service must recognize the large pool of spare trains, buses and streetcars available to provide more frequent service today. “We don’t have enough resources” is a common response to calls for better service, and years ago this applied to vehicles and garage space. Today it applies mainly to budget constraints, not physical fleet and infrastructure. Toronto might not be able to afford to run all of the vehicles it owns, but that decision should be made openly recognizing implications for the attractiveness and future growth of the transit option.
Maintenance is a big issue both for the fleet and infrastructure. This affects both reliability and safety. Many factors are at work including budget limits and an extended period when the TTC did not have to field full service during the pandemic. Some maintenance can be put off for a short term, in a pinch, but when the new, lower quality becomes normal, climbing back to a once-demanded level can be hard. An organization can forget its standards, or adjust them to fit available funding and hope for the best.
There is no question that system inspection and maintenance are not keeping up with current conditions as we have seen in reviews of the Scarborough RT, subway track and streetcar overhead areas. What we do not know is how pervasive these issues are in other parts of the transit system, nor what other problems will threaten rider confidence in the TTC’s ability to provide safe, dependable service.
Finally, there is the long-standing matter of TTC culture. It is no secret that the top-down management style has hurt the organization, cost the system in lost expertise and corporate memory, and fostered a climate where appearance of success takes priority. TTC messaging overstates the progress in post-pandemic service recovery without acknowledging the decline in service riders actually experience. Maintenance problems are hidden until events force them into the open.
The Board, after years of ceding power to management, must now shift to a more hands-on role if only to ensure that the City and transit riders are not blind-sided, that key issues are not downplayed. This could work against a political incentive to get “back on track” and report good news as soon and as often as possible. The Board needs management it can trust, but also the political support to be open and honest about what the transit system needs.
With labour issues more-or-less settled, Toronto must turn to rebuilding and expanding its transit system. Speeches and plans about improvements are worthless without honesty, transparency, funding and sustained commitment. Plans for subway lines in the 2030s make for good press, at least among those who only look for the photos ops, but they don’t carry riders today, let alone address issues with changing travel demands where suburban travel is as important as trips downtown.
Does Toronto really want better transit?
Steve Munro 