National Post
Rob MacIsaac vs. gridlock
Posted: October 24, 2008, 6:19 PM by Rob Roberts
Kuitenbrouwer
Rob MacIsaac, the former mayor of Burlington, may be the most soft-spoken man on Earth, which is perhaps a good trait to have for his new job, which is to knit together the fiefdoms of greater Toronto’s transportation infrastructure, i.e., Brampton Transit, Missisauga Transit, the TTC, GO Transit, York Regional Transit, etc., into something that works. After what he calls “a generation of lost investment,” this will not be easy.
Mr. MacIsaac, chair of Metrolinx and pictured above, drove up to the National Post offices in Don Mills the other day to share with our editorial board his new plan, which he called The Big Move: Transforming Transportation in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area.
He usually takes the GO train from Burlington to his office at the foot of Bay Street, but, he says, “I drove today because you guys are so inaccessible.” Writ large, of course, this is the problem of Toronto: you can’t get easily to most places in town by transit, so you drive.
Mr. MacIsaac, who has a budget of about $14-million and a staff of 50 people, has lots of keen ideas, such as electrifying GO’s Lakeshore express rail line, extending the Yonge and Spadina subways, running rapid transit on Finch Street West, Sheppard Street East, and on Eglinton Avenue, and bringing rapid transit to Durham and York regions, to downtown Hamilton, Brampton and Mississauga.
We dearly need all these things, but the problem is cash; as for imposing road tolls to pay for all this, Mr. MacIsaac, in a word, chickened out.
“I do not believe that, as the Bloc Québécois says, that we have the winning conditions for that proposal,” he says. “I’m not naive, I don’t think the public will ever rise up and demand road tolls. But I do think that we can create a better set of conditions for a discussion of sustainability than we currently have. We are a brand new transportation agency. We haven’t really delivered on anything yet.”
So how do we get the first $11-million for the first projects? Easy: change the accounting rules!
“These dollars will be spent in accordance with accrual basis accounting, which is a relatively new advent of the province, which allows them to amortize these costs over the useful lilfe of the capital project,” Mr. MacIsaac says. “I expect that the money will be borrowed by the province and accrued over the life of the project which allows a favourable accounting treatment.”
Another courageous move, of course, would be to smush the seven transit systems in Greater Toronto into one big, seamless web of bus, streetcar, train and subway lines, but as Mr. MacIsaac points out, there remain ideological differences about the right way to run a railroad. He is in favour of private involvement, noting that Bombardier operates GO Transit on the heavy rail lines already, whereas in York, Veolia, a U.K. conglomerate, designed, built, operates and maintains the VIVA bus service.
“We are more than open to private involvement .... to design, build and — in some cases — finance, operate and maintain the systems,” he says. “But there are parts of the region and elements on my board who are very reticent about it. My view is that we need to use the private sector wherever it makes sense. York has shown itself quite open, and the City of Toronto has a pretty well-known reticence.” Councillor Adam Giambrone (Davenport), who is chair of the TTC, Councillor Norm Kelly (Scarborough-Agincourt), and Mayor David Miller, make up 3 of 11 Metrolinx board members.
In the meantime, Mr. MacIsaac has other plans, namely, to take over GO Transit and, in the process, get some “operational heft.”
“We’ve got 50 people today,” he says. “By pooling resources with GO Transit we can get some bench strength that will allow us access to project management expertise and just generally capacity that we don’t actually have. It could well be a reverse takeover because it would be 50 people taking over about 1300. Our legislation says that GO Transit would become a division of Metrolinx.”
I confess I’m a little troubled by this last bit. I swung by Union Station the other morning to watch the GO trains roll in. Pulled by sleek new MP40 locomotives, which look almost like big green bullet trains, three trains pulled in, bells clanging, in a five minute period, each disgorging a tsunami of workers. This is, today, already the regional bit of our transit network, plus it’s the fastest-growing and most successful component. It ain’t broke and it don’t need fixing.
Mr. MacIsaac would be better off to spend his time fixing transit in Mississauga, Brampton and York Region, and linking them to the TTC, than tinkering with the one bit that works.
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The one bit that works? GO?
