Preville on Politics

Uploading the TTC

Posted on October 25, 2007 by Philip Preville

Persistent rumour holds that Queen’s Park is willing to take over all or part of the TTC. At least one councillor favours the idea. No one knows for sure what the plan is, though certainly Adam Giambrone is not treating the idea like a rumour, and nor should you. If you’re Dalton McGuinty, you are probably looking at the situation like so:

Once upon a time, the province paid for social services and shared the cost of running the transit system. Your predecessor, Mike Harris, sloughed all those costs off onto cities. Ten years later Toronto is nearly bankrupt. So you have a choice to make:

a) you can save Toronto’s bacon by going back to the way things were before, in which you quietly and reliably pay the bills and get no credit for it whatsoever, or
b) you can see Toronto’s pending bankruptcy as the best opportunity you’ll ever have to fundamentally change the relationship between your government and this too-big-for-its-britches money-pit of a city. Like maybe taking a subway system off its hands.

What would you do?

There are many other ways McGuinty could change the relationship between the city and the province, and the TTC is not the only bargaining chip. Nor, I suspect, have we heard the last of the trial balloons. I have no idea what’s coming, but I find it hard to imagine that McGuinty won’t try to do bust the old paradigm in some important and lasting way.

Comments

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DR October 27, 2007 at 3:48 p.m.

It would not go over well in the rest of Ontario for Queen's Park to be paying for Toronto transit riders and stupid Bombardier contracts. It is also wrong, being no different than making Canadians pay for Quebec's tax cuts.

Mcguinty should just take back the social services and make Toronto pay for it's own damn transit system. After uploading welfare and drug benefits, McGuinty could rightly saay that the province has done it's part, and Toronto should take responsibility for itself for the first time in a decade.

Chris October 31, 2007 at 8:59 p.m.

I agee with the previous comments except that many others who do not live in Toronto use the TTC and should not be subsidized by the tax payers of Toronto. In all other jurisdictions other levels of government contribute to transit. Even in the USA the federal government contributes.


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Philip Preville

Veteran freelance writer Philip Preville lived much of his life in Montreal and Edmonton before he was lured, like so many Torontonians before him, by the promise of more work and a better living. A National Magazine Award winner and former Canadian Journalism Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Massey College, Preville writes Toronto Life’s politics column. He lives with his wife and one-year-old son in Riverdale, just close enough to the Don Valley Parkway that he can hear it when he steps outside his house—but just far enough away that it doesn’t keep him awake at night. On his office wall hangs a 1938–39 press pass belonging to his grandfather, Elias Gannon, who wrote for the Montreal Star.


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