Toronto Ontario Line 3 | ?m | ?s

TheTigerMaster said:
There is no funding for the Relief Line in the 2017 budget.
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Didn't it get $150 million for design work to get it 'shovel ready' before it has an up-to-date pricetag and can be funded?
 
aquateam said:
Didn't it get $150 million for design work to get it 'shovel ready' before it has an up-to-date pricetag and can be funded?
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It's funny how this subway needs to be studied before it can be funded, while everyone's favourite subway extension is being studied after being fully funded. In fact, has there been a Toronto transit project that was built after it had money allocated only for detailed study first? I am genuinely curious.
 
goreckm said:
It's funny how this subway needs to be studied before it can be funded, while everyone's favourite subway extension is being studied after being fully funded. In fact, has there been a Toronto transit project that was built after it had money allocated only for detailed study first? I am genuinely curious.
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That's very funny.
 
TheTigerMaster said:
There is no funding for the Relief Line in the 2017 budget.
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Or any other transit funding for Toronto.

What's odd is that a bomb has gone off, and instead of screaming once the concussion has worn-off, there's almost complete silence. I'm not surprised in the least. If I were QP, Tory's snivelling, grovelling and then demanding for manic projects with no business case established would reach the point of wondering: "Why give him money for gladbags when we can spend the money for our own projects and fully integrated to serve the wider community, not just entitled Torontonians?"

Just reading TVO's piece on this:
Stuck in transit: Ontario budget has lots more money for infrastructure, but little to ease congestion

ANALYSIS: Schools and hospitals get plenty of cash to expand in this year’s budget — transit, however, does not
Published on Apr 27, 2017
by John Michael McGrath

On Wednesday night, Hamilton's city council voted 10 to five to go ahead with a light rail transit (LRT) project through the city’s downtown. Mayor Fred Eisenberger and his council didn’t realize it at the time, but that might make Hamilton the last city to get provincial help for a major new transit project for the foreseeable future.

The 2017 budget, presented Thursday at Queen’s Park by Finance Minister Charles Sousa, contains only $1 billion in new cash for rapid transit projects — and that comes from federal transfers, not new provincial money.

Which isn’t to say the government isn’t spending a lot on transit: next year the Liberals will put $7 billion toward transit, including the GO Regional Express Rail (RER) expansion that will substantially increase GO train speed and frequency. That’s no small sum, certainly compared to the $3 billion the province will spend on highways during the same period. At a more than two-to-one ratio, the province’s preference for spending dollars on transit over highways has never been stronger. But this year’s increase in transit spending (the government spent $3.8 billion last year) is entirely due to existing projects entering more expensive phases of construction (such as the GO RER or the Eglinton Crosstown) and not new projects.

The pause in new transit projects is significant for the Liberals: it's been a marquee issue for the party since at least the last election, and one Premier Kathleen Wynne has made part of her own personal brand as well. She led her party to a majority in 2014 based in large part on a promise to spend $29 billion over 10 years on transportation infrastructure, a number that increased to $31.5 billion in 2015. The 2016 budget included commitments to several new projects, including the Hurontario LRT in Peel Region and Hamilton’s light rail plan, too.

But in the 2017 budget, the government's preferred mode of transit is a cricket riding on a tumbleweed.

When discussing the budget with reporters on Thursday, Sousa denied that the government was getting out of the transit-building business, saying that "there will be room" for projects that aren't yet on the books, though he did not specify how or when. "We're just going through the process," he added.
[...]
But the decision to forego new transit developments is likely to make some municipalities anxious — most obviously Toronto, where Mayor John Tory and the council he heads have said they need to move more quickly on major projects like a light rail line on the waterfront or the long-discussed, never-built new subway line to address crowding in the city's core. And if there’s room in Liberal spending plans for cities such as London, which is still arguing over the route of its express bus service, this year's budget doesn’t say so.

When the Liberals announced their intention to transform GO Train service in 2015 they proclaimed it as a major improvement over the traditional morning and evening commuter service the province had traditionally operated, even though that plan also consumed much of the funding municipalities across the GTHA had hoped would go to local priorities.

At the risk of being unfair, the Liberals are nominally committing to planning a high-speed rail line between Windsor and Toronto, offering a vision of faster trains cutting the time from Ontario’s southwest edge to its economic centre in half. The party made the same commitment in 2014, immediately before the last provincial election — a promise that has been collecting dust until now, just over a year before the next election. It’s been proposed numerous times in Canada’s history, in fact, but like every prior occasion, the item in this year's budget has no dollars attached and promises no timeline for actual passenger service.

The election coming in June 2018 means the Liberals can’t really make any promises that extend beyond that timeframe anyway, except of the “elect us and here are the goodies you'll have in store” variety. Hamilton councillors can at least congratulate themselves that their LRT plan made it in under the wire.
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http://tvo.org/article/current-affa...-infrastructure-but-little-to-ease-congestion

There's more going on with this than just 'no announcement on transit funding'. It's a re-think, and rightly so. It's time to involve private capital more in doing these projects, Crosstown being an example, but also the Federal Infrastructure Bank working in conjunction with Infrastructure Ontario.

And Tory, for all his bluster on his past business acumen, must learn the importance of a "business case" to get funding. Who knows? He might end-up getting a job after working for a corporation...like Rogers.
 
It's not that surprising - there is enough transit projects on the menu right now to make it a non-issue relative to bad news of school closing and patients waiting in hospital hallways, NDP wanting pharmacare, etc. The budget is literally designed for that.

AoD
 
TheTigerMaster said:
There is no funding for the Relief Line in the 2017 budget.
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My guess is they are saving that for next year's budget in time for the election. There is no rush for it since the DRL is still in the study/evaluate phase. My feeling is that this budget was to show the Province they balanced the budget. The DRL will be the star for next year in time for the election.
 
I think Coyne puts it best (although the point has been made by many):
Where was I? Ah yes. Last year at this time, I was telling you that the government of Ontario was on the verge of balancing its budget, and that it did not matter. Now here we are a year later, and the government of Ontario is indeed promising a balanced budget. And it still does not matter.

The only reason it can even claim to have balanced the budget is by pushing more and more of what would previously have been deficit spending off-budget. Until 2003, when the Liberals came to power, Ontario’s net public debt was essentially its accumulated annual deficits. Since then, the two have diverged sharply: accumulated deficits, at $193.5 billion, are now just 62 per cent of net debt, at $311.9 billion.

So while Kathleen Wynne’s government is boasting of a “balanced budget” this year, the reality is that public borrowing will increase by another $10 billion — on top of the $180 billion the Liberals have already added to the debt to date.

Ontario Finance Minister Charles Sousa, right, delivers the 2017 Ontario budget next to Premier Kathleen Wynne at Queen’s Park in Toronto on Thursday, April 27, 2017.

The government line on this is that this does not count, because all of this new borrowing will be for investments in capital assets, rather than operating spending. A budget handout helpfully refers to the former as “Good Debt,” while the latter is “Bad Debt,” a somewhat unfortunate phrase for the government with the largest debt of any sub-national jurisdiction in the world.

That’s one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is to note that the $10 billion in new borrowing is also equal to how much program spending for the coming fiscal year, at roughly $130 billion, has increased over what it was projected to be just two budgets ago. Had they kept to that not very exacting standard of fiscal discipline — spending would still have been higher, after inflation and population growth, than at any time in the province’s history prior to 2010, nearly one-fourth higher than in the last days of Bob Rae — there would have been no increase in either Good or Bad Debt.

Of course, the distinction between Good and Bad Debt depends on a critical assumption: that borrowing to spend on capital assets results in higher economic growth and therefore higher government revenues, sufficient to offset the associated increase in interest costs. [...]
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http://news.nationalpost.com/full-c...a-balanced-budget-but-it-doesnt-matter-a-whit

As for transit funding....of course there's more announcements to come, Ontario is committed to transit, you don't have to follow any particular political bent to realize it saves massive sums of money in the long-term, and promotes better living and value, but I sense a very real change in how that's to be delivered. (Edit: Caveat! If done sensibly and devoid of political meddling)

Even Tory skulked off quietly after cancelling a news conference. He knows the game has changed, and not in his favour.

We've yet to read an objective analysis of this in the press, unless I've missed one. Surely they are due sometime soon? The silence is peculiar...
 
nhui06 said:
There is no rush for it since the DRL is still in the study/evaluate phase
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It's a reasonable point, but I suspect, as Steve Munro has pointed out in his last blog post, a lot of RER planning is to be revisited, a lot of what's now on the books is based on older, highly questionable reports, and with that 'revisit' will come different views on how to address the 'Relief Line'. This is conjecture, of course, but with this 'pause' I think a re-examination of approach must also happen. Massive amounts of taxpayer investment is being squandered with rather poor results, considering the sums.

Meantime, I remain boggled as to no mention of The Missing Link of late. The IBI study pegged the cost at $5B. Double that, as studies are almost always wrong, to $10B. In the big scheme of things, it's a freakin' bargain considering what it would render. Ditto for VIA's HFR at est. of $5B. And yet that's the sum touted for SSE (and it will continue to climb). It doesn't make sense.

Things just aren't adding up...a course change is necessary.
 
I 'spoke' too soon...

Just up at TorStar:
John Tory says Wynne government ‘turned their backs’ on Toronto with 2017 budget

Mayor says a lack of investment in transit and social housing leaves Toronto short-changed.
By Ben SpurrTransportation Reporter
Jennifer PagliaroCity Hall reporter
Fri., April 28, 2017

Mayor John Tory has accused Premier Kathleen Wynne’s government of turning its back on Toronto following a budget announcement that provided no new money for social housing repairs and failed to match federal commitments for transit.

“The most crucial needs of the people of the city of Toronto were not met by this budget,” Tory told reporters a day after the province released a balanced budget that was touted for new drug coverage and increases to childcare. “Premier Kathleen Wynne and her government had a chance to stand up for Toronto on transit and on housing. Instead, at least on the pages of this budget, they turned their backs.”

RELATED STORY:

Ontario Liberals reject Mayor John Tory’s calls to match federal transit funding

Tory flatly admitted that without provincial funding, the transit projects that council has designated as its top priorities won’t be completed. The recent federal budget committed what city officials estimate will be between $4.5 billion and $5 billion to pay up to 40 per cent of new transit projects.

The mayor had called on Queen’s Park to match the federal funding, but his hopes were dashed with Thursday’s budget announcement.

“Let’s be clear, without matching dollars from the province, the relief line cannot be built,” Tory said. “Waterfront transit will not be built. The Eglinton East LRT cannot be built.”

On Thursday, Ontario Minister of Transportation Steven Del Duca argued that the province is already investing billions of dollars in Toronto transit, including money to build the Eglinton Crosstown and Finch West LRT lines, and to expand GO Transit service in the city.

Tory acknowledged that the province has contributed to projects already underway, but argued “decades of inaction on transit” means that “continuous investment” from Queen’s Park is required.

“I don’t think there’s a single person you would find in the city of Toronto who would say we should just stop building transit now with the list of projects that we have and not bother going forward,” he said.
[...]
Council has designated four transit projects as its top priorities: the relief line subway, Waterfront LRT lines, the Eglinton East LRT, and Tory’s SmartTrack plan.

Although the city has agreed to pay for SmartTrack without a direct provincial contribution, the other projects are almost completely unfunded and the lack of funding in Thursday’s budget leaves them in limbo.

The shortfall for the $1.6-billion Eglinton East LRT in particular could prove politically problematic for Tory as it threatens to throw a wrench into the highly charged debate over Scarborough transit.

Tory pitched the LRT, which would be an extension of the Crosstown to the University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus, as a part of package of Scarborough transit that includes the controversial one-stop subway extension to the Scarborough Town Centre.

The mayor originally said that both lines could be paid for using a $3.56 billion in funding previously secured from all three levels of government. However, since he first floated the plan in January 2016, the cost of the subway extension has ballooned by over $1 billion to $3.35 billion, leaving no money for the LRT.

Tory refused to concede that Scarborough could end up with just a single subway stop out of the plan, however, saying he would pressure Toronto Liberal MPPs to change the premier’s mind.

“I’m not going to go to the place that says, well it’s not going to get done – any one of these,” he said. “I’m determined to see it built because it is part of the plan for Scarborough.”
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https://www.thestar.com/news/city_h...-their-backs-on-toronto-with-2017-budget.html

OK, now the analysis is starting, and I think I know where this is headed, and Johnny ain't gonna like it. Time for a bake sale...
 
This government has completely lost my support. They haven't committed a dime to new transit lines in Toronto in a decade. They've twice canceled components of Transit City, and have delayed implementation of Transit City at least five times. I'm sick of their lies and broken promises.
 
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