Doug Ford and a coterie of his top ministers will travel to Ottawa later this week with a list of funding requests they’d like to see covered in the next federal budget, including a sharp increase in transit funding to help deliver the Ontario premier’s subway-centric plans.
Ford is seeking some $11 billion, or more than double Toronto’s total allocation of federal transit funding for the next decade, in order to deliver a four-part transit expansion that is expected to cost $28.5 billion.
Under the terms of an existing deal between the province and the federal government, Ottawa is typically expected to provide 40 per cent of the funding for new transit projects. But the size of Ford’s plan is much larger than had been anticipated in previous federal budgets.
“We’re moving ahead at lightning speed and these projects couldn’t come soon enough,” Ford said at a provincial transportation maintenance garage in Scarborough on Tuesday.
“The people of Scarborough have been waiting for decades, I repeat, decades, for a fast, reliable three-stop subway,” Ford said.
The event was ostensibly to publicize a call for qualifications for companies seeking involvement in the tunnelling work on the Scarborough extension and Eglinton Crosstown West Extension, both projects which critics say would be more cost-effective and less environmentally damaging as above-ground projects.
The other projects on Ford’s funding wishlist include the Ontario Line, a downtown relief subway line the province hopes to build by 2027 at a cost of $10.9 billion, and an extension of the Yonge subway line north to York Region.
A spokesperson for federal Infrastructure Minister Catherine McKenna said that Ottawa is eager to work with Ontario on its public transit priorities but that the province hasn’t yet provided detailed plans.
“At this time, Infrastructure Canada has not received an official project application from Ontario for any of the four public transit priority projects (Ontario Line, Scarborough Subway Extension, Yonge North Subway Extension, Eglinton Crosstown West Extension),” David Taylor said in an email. “Infrastructure Canada cannot commit funding to any projects without official project applications that it can review.”
Meanwhile, Transportation Minister Caroline Mulroney’s office told National Observer on Tuesday that Mulroney has discussed the issue directly with federal Transport Minister Marc Garneau.
“On February 13, Minister Mulroney met with Minister Garneau ... in Toronto and formally requested that the federal government provide a minimum 40 per cent contribution to the four projects in the forthcoming federal budget,” spokesperson Christina Salituro wrote in an email.
Ford’s overarching transit plan was accepted by the City of Toronto following months of negotiations after the province agreed to leave the existing Toronto Transit Commission network under the city’s control. The deal also stipulated that Toronto could use its typical share of transit-building plans, in this case some $6 billion, to instead maintain a good state of repair.
But one of three city councillors who voted against the deal said that Ford’s singular focus on getting funding for his construction plans ignored agreements to seek long-term funding for ongoing maintenance and vehicle purchase.
“When the city did the deal with the province, a condition of the deal was that the province and the city would work together for our state-of-good-repair and vehicle fleet,” said Gord Perks, who represents the city’s Parkdale-High Park riding.
“Today, the premier went out and did not advocate for our state-of-good-repair or vehicle fleet, but instead for his pet projects,” he added. “This shows that the province is not working in good faith with the city and really is indifferent to the state of public transit in Toronto and cares only about promoting their signature projects.”
He said that while the province and the federal government hash out a deal behind closed doors, “the point that is lost is we are now experiencing subway closures every other week and do not have enough buses and streetcars to even cope with population growth.”
The head of the Canadian Urban Transit Associations said he was just happy to see both the province and Ottawa seemingly moving forward.
“Governments can always move faster, but both levels are moving in a positive direction thus far,” he said. “I have good confidence that this is going to be a budget that is oriented around transit.”
“The bottom line is that there is a plan that is coherent, that is ready to be funded over the next decade. That’s where the federal and provincial decision-makers can prioritise or select or review parts of the plan, but that’s not to say we should wait for another decade before getting to the construction.”
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