As protesters outside City Hall decried possible delays to the construction of a much-needed relief line, from his office Toronto Mayor John Tory insisted the plan to move forward with the province’s proposed Ontario Line was a good deal for Toronto.
“We actually have to get on with building as much transit as we possibly can, as quickly as we can, with no excuses,” Tory told reporters at a Wednesday morning press conference.
The tentative agreement with the provincial government was before the mayor’s executive committee Wednesday ahead of final consideration by council.
Under the deal announced on Oct. 16, the city would support Premier Doug Ford’s relief-line rewrite in exchange for keeping ownership of the subway system— which the province had threatened to upload.
“The city negotiated with a gun to its head,” NDP MPP Chris Glover told CTV News Toronto Wednesday.
“The province threatened to steal the subway.”
City officials were initially reluctant to back the Ontario Line, a unilaterally-mapped plan that Ford unveiled in the spring after municipal staff had spent years, and hundreds of millions of dollars, planning their own council-approved version.
The revised expansion line would stretch nearly 16 kilometres from Ontario Place up to the Ontario Science Centre, costing $10.9 billion. Toronto city staff confirmed in a report to the executive committee last week that on the surface, the plan was viable.
“The City and TTC believe the projects as proposed have the ability to deliver positive benefits to Toronto’s transit network, and are therefore supportable in principle,” staff wrote in the Oct. 15 report.
But critics allege the 2027 timeline cited by the province is unrealistic, and worry that changing plans now will delay shovels in the ground.
“We still haven’t got any answers as to why the relief line was cancelled,” NDP transit critic Jessica Bell said at Wednesday’s protest. “It was a perfectly good plan, people had agreed on it. Why are we cancelling it?”
“We don’t need more delays as we plan some totally new project,” Bill Worrell of the TTCriders group echoed. “We need to have the original relief line be built.”
The city staff report states that municipal and TTC officials are unable to assess the validity of the 2027 timeline given the early state of the project.
“If it’s going to take a little bit more time, and we need to get it right and have a better line, let’s take the proper time,” Deputy Mayor Denzil Minnan-Wong told CTV News Toronto Wednesday.
Other members of the mayor’s team touted the agreement as the best-case scenario given the provincial ultimatum. In addition to the city’s retention of the subway network, the TTC will continue operations control of the subway and the province will build $30-billion worth of transit expansion projects, including a revised three-stop Scarborough subway, the Yonge line extension and the Eglinton West LRT.
The city, meanwhile, can redirect its own capital transit expansion funds to state-of-good repair expenses.
The province has also pledged to absorb the sunk costs the city incurred in planning its own version of the relief line. Staff are currently updating the dollar figure, but a previous city report pegged that expense at $200 million.
More than 50 members of the public were signed up to speak at Wednesday’s executive committee meeting, some with concerns about the potential noise and transit impacts of re-aligning the relief line.
But the mayor promised to call for expanded community consultation as the planning continued.
“This is a good deal for our city,” Tory pledged.
