Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty announced last week that he would like to see the Toronto Transit Commission eventually taken over and run by the province.
This would be accomplished by having it run by Metrolinx, formerly the Greater Toronto Transit Authority that was created to provide better and smoother transit service throughout the Greater Toronto Area.
Needless to say, the city mothers are upset by this wishful incursion into their precious turf. The city’s answer is that Toronto’s transit should be run by Torontonians although the case why this should be so is not exactly clear. Except for the ideologues, transit riders don’t care who runs the buses, streetcars and subways as long as those conveyances get them to where they want to go in a comfortable and timely manner. If going from Point A to Point B involves crossing into other municipalities, those boundaries have no particular meaning to transit riders. Having the province run transit throughout the GTA would mean not having to transfer systems or buying more than one ticket to get to their destination.
As has often been said, but rarely listened to, there is only one taxpayer. Having the province take over more and more of municipal services would decrease the prime directive of Toronto City Council which is to beg other levels of government for more and more money. And the current Toronto City Council is hardly unique when it comes to silliness and petty bickering; not to mention general indecisiveness when it comes to running the city. The province, no matter which party is in power, would do a much better job.
Although Dalton McGuinty has been criticized for some of the decisions that he has made throughout his tenure, at least he is able to make a decision. After a year in office during his first term in office, he announced a health tax after promising not to raise taxes. But he went ahead and imposed the tax that is still with us four years later. And McGuinty announced during the last election campaign that the third Monday in February would be a provincial holiday. And barely five months later, well, Happy Family Day! Contrast this with the David Miller regime in Toronto who announced a 21 per cent increase in some user fees, only to relent and drop the increase to 8 per cent when the going got tough. Local councils seem to waste more time referring matters to committees or “staff” because they lack the courage to implement them. The city council spends more time talking about property tax increases than they spend trying to balance their budget. The reality is that this level of government is simply too inefficient to deal with major items such as transit that are as complex as any of those areas that fall within federal or provincial jurisdiction. Those levels of governments and their civil or public servants are set up to handle these complex issues while Toronto City Council has to make several attempts to get a class picture taken.
The latest “crisis” to hit our city is the large amount of snow that has fallen since the beginning of the month. The city’s response was essentially to do as little as possible while hoping that all the snow would eventually go away. There is no way that the city could ever be as efficient as the provincial government.
The councillors seem to spend half their time defending their unnecessary perks and the other half criticizing a couple of councillors who spend too little. How can these people realistically be expected to properly run a huge transit system? If the councillors get their way and continue to run Toronto’s transit system, people will continue to face delays and increased costs whenever they have to travel between Toronto and Durham, York or Peel.
There are several areas of municipal responsibilities that could be handled cheaper and better by the province instead of local politicians. And the beauty of that would be if the province ran Toronto’s transit and people didn’t like the way they were doing it, it would be a lot easier to throw them out and bring in a new government, provided of course that there was a realistic alternative.
Toronto’s transit run by Torontonians; it makes a nice slogan but it doesn’t help solve our transit problems.
