God. This is an echo chamber. The election is not 24 hours done.
Doug Ford is many things. One thing he will be is busy. I doubt he’ll have time - let alone the mental capacity - for his own plan. Let’s imagine in the best “Yes, Minister!” sense that he asks the professional civil service to bring him an appropriate solution.
If anything is really Doug’s plan, then we are in trouble. Not much (of anything) will be done. Just the Del Duca style backslapping needs a few hours a week. That will eat into his time for personally developing GO service plans.
We are all conjecturing without data, for sure.
Rather than look for bogeypeople under the bed, why don't we consider what economies there might actually be that be available if a more disciplined and penny pinching provincial regime were in place? Ford says he wants to find economies. There may actually be plenty
Some suggestions:
- Suspend the GO station building program, and reopen the bad decisions that were made when Del Duca decided that Kirby was his Waterloo. The original GO study recommended only 2 stations, IIRC, whereas ML ended up approving 11 because once Kirby made the list, other more deserving stations had to be put on the list. A station is $100M-$150M, after all. Revisit the recommendations with an eye to only approving 4-6 of them. That gives some legitimate flexibility to merge political and technical input (the original Park Lawn no-go recommendation ought to get someone fired, IMHO) but easily cuts $500M from the current plan.
- Suspend any ongoing International Design Competitions for ML architecture. Fire ML's Design Review Panel. Restrict new station construction to a design consisting of a few bus shelters on an ashphalt pad. Ensure there are no more John St footbridge boondoggles. Probably good for $50M
- Fire the ML Board (mostly Liberals, after all) and replace it with 2 fewer Board members. Keep Verster, his severance would be pricey and he may prove to have some good ideas now that the Liberals aren't breathing down his neck. That's an intangible saving but it clears the slate.
- Cancel the "Mother of all DBFOM" RFQ's and replace it with a structured, in house decisionmaking process to reach some key decisions where there should be direct accountability by ML (equipment procurement being one, hydrogen vs electric being another). Then tender for actual delivery but not leaving key decisions to the vendor. Consider using government borrowing instead of commercial financing, to get a better interest rate. Easily $100M in lower borrowing costs, and removes contingencies from the bidders' submissions because Ontario accepts the risk, thereby lowering the bid prices. ML's passing the buck to the DBFOM contractor is probably costing us $250M or more because vendors don't accept risk for free.
- Establish a timetable to electrify only two lines: Barrie and UPE. That keeps work flowing on establishing the core infrastructure at Union Station, an EMU maintenance base, and some of the substation infrastructure which is very long lead time to order anyways. Barrie has to be electric because of the commitment to Davenport, and UPE just makes sense. That knocks $1.5B or more off the budget, provides a more sensible easing in of electrification, and demonstrates forward motion. Use diesel for the rest for now, aiming for 15 minute 2WAD.
- Suspend work on all the wayfinding, route number unification, and related overall system planning that is going on in ML. It's mostly navel gazing, is heavily consultant based. Should never have built this ivory tower in the first place. Does anyone care that Oshawa has a Route 1 and Hamilton has a route 1? Ditto signage replacement - GO replaces perfectly good bus stops with new ones because they changed their logo. (Oh, and fire whoever proposed that last branding change)
- Suspend and hold a challenge process to review all current contracts for technical advisors and contingency based engineering. ML has huge slush funds for ad-hoc engineering and consulting. Turn some of the Tories' hard nosed auditors loose on this, looking for justification, results delivered, and value for money.
- Institute a publicly accessible CEO's scorecard similar to TTC's. ML claimed it needed an IT system before it could deliver this. I have seen these systems used, and while pretty, you can spend a lot of time and money putting it in place where a couple interns doing cut and paste of Excell graphs works just fine in the short turn. Let the public interrogate this data until it confesses. Do not accept the fluffy and non-informative responses that ML's people churn out. Restate plans as commitments, performance contract items, targets stating what by when at what cost. None of the 'by 2024, a miracle will have happened and it will all be there' non-specificity to goals and deliverables.
Just some ideas. Note that no routes or projects cut in the process.
- Paul
