I understand, at a basic level, why some Markham commuter who drives downtown instead of taking GO is suddenly furious he had to pay Toronto money in tolls.
I want to address this because it's a common argument in favour of tolls, and the core reason that the Premier said no to implementing them.
Not everybody has good public transit as a feasible alternative for a variety of reasons, and the reason the tolls were struck down was primarily that it's unreasonable to force people to pay tolls when they have no good transit near them.
Perhaps this commuter in Markham lives 10-15 minutes' drive from the nearest GO station, with no usable local bus service connecting them to it. So, they have to pay for a car, insurance, etc. already just to get to+from the GO station. For one, maybe they don't have sufficient income to handle all of those expenses plus GO fares each month.
Additionally, GO trains in Markham operates pretty strictly southbound in the morning rush and northbound in the afternoon rush. Maybe this person needs to get downtown sooner or later than the trains, and head home sooner or later than the homebound ones?
And here in Aurora our station is way past capacity for parking, even with the huge garage, and even before the current partial lot closure for tunnel construction. With 5 southbound trains in the morning half an hour apart, the last two trains routinely don't have parking, and the third one is a little tricky if you get there late. From what I understand, this is a problem common to most GO stations, but I'm welcome to correction if Markham is somehow immune, however much I doubt that.
Then there's GO buses as an alternative, which offer a substantially slower trip than driving downtown at that point even if one's ultimate destination is the Union Bus Terminal in either case (which is unlikely), suffer from near-zero parking availability at stations by the time all trains have departed, and in addition to the slower trip have a constrained schedule vs. just getting in your car and going, and the one time I was visiting Markham and tried to get on a GO bus to Union, I arrived 20 minutes early at Unionville and the bus was full, I ended up waiting about 1 hour in total because the second bus was late. That simply isn't feasible if one has to get to work and has a family to get home to at the end of the day. Trains are great, the buses aren't for daily commuting if you already have a car and have to drive to the station anyways.
There's also YRT/Viva+TTC, but to get downtown from Markham, that's way, way worse than even the GO Bus. Those services are very slow, crowded, and delay-prone.
So, in the end, this is the main reason the Premier said she was nixing the tolls, and I agree with her. I wholeheartedly agree with road tolls in general, but here in the GTA for existing major highways, at the present time, it's absurd to start tolling them, except for adding new HOT lanes, though I believe those should remain HOV only since I think HOV lanes are a more sustainable long-term strategy in general and the HOV lanes were already congested before letting permit owners in too.
Once GO RER is operational with 15-minute bidirectional truly-all-day service, and the GO parking issue has somehow been figured out preferably by improving local connecting transit, and assuming that GO RER covers enough of each line rather than, for instance, terminating at Unionville, then I'd be interested in seeing a well-thought-out plan for road tolling, not a $2 flat fee, but an actual competent strategy including time-of-day pricing, discounts or free travel for carpool and electric vehicles, distance-based tolls, discounts or free travel for Toronto residents already paying property taxes, an analysis of ways in which 905 residents contribute directly and indirectly to Toronto's revenue and general economy and vitality, etc.
