To my friend from Oshawa, thank you for those remarks. I wanted to follow up on something given the skepticism you expressed and others have expressed about Metrolinx’s capacity to build transit. It would seem this bill itself, as I mentioned earlier in debate, is a vote of non-confidence in Metrolinx if we’re asking municipalities to take on this risk burden.

I also note, from the Auditor General’s 2020 report on the Eglinton Crosstown, my friend, that Metrolinx was continuing to work with an agency, Crosslinx, despite the fact that Crosslinx has over 380 rejected designs. They were continuing to build in a capacity called “building at risk,” which meant they were building with designs that had not been properly approved by people required to scrutinize them.

So, my friend from Oshawa, what the heck is going on at Metrolinx?

This is what I tried to mention. The aftermath of Bill 23 is a lot of those municipalities are a lot more cash-poor when it comes to the idea of major infrastructure projects. That’s where I worry about consultants playing a role of saying, “Well, do you know what? You don’t have to put all your money from your community down in one go. Fund us on a rental basis as a consortium for 30 years, and we will pull this off for you.” It didn’t work out very well for us in Ottawa. It didn’t.

I will say to Metrolinx—I’m just reading between the lines, and a member of the government can clarify if I’m right—it’s almost like this bill is kind of a vote of non-confidence in Metrolinx, because we’re talking about a station administration fee for municipalities to build infrastructure that Metrolinx should be building. It is absolutely astounding.

Again, I really hope to not see Mr. Verster in his role by next week. I would really like to see the Premier barge into that office and say, “Hey, it’s time for some change here.”

In the Wheel-Trans example, going to York region, as long as there is reciprocal availability of that service and it doesn’t rely on service differences or quality differences, it’s kosher according to the collective agreement. Somebody is telling the government otherwise, and we’re going to have a discussion this week about what ends up—but the objective we share is the same. We want someone to get on a bus in Durham and get dropped off in Scarborough and not at the border.

The member from University–Rosedale told the story about a baggage handler at Pearson that used to have to sleep in their car because couldn’t afford the double fare. I mean, that’s ridiculous. We can fix that.

There’s something we can do right now and that’s change the chair at the top. The leadership really matters. All of the other consultants in that building, if they want to work for the province in good faith to build things, and I want to believe in my heart most of them do—having a new leader at the top, signalling, “We are going to get this done. It is going to be safely built.”

But 260 deficiencies at the Eglinton Crosstown, all the way to the rails being improperly installed, station platforms being broken up and taken away in bulldozers? The Premier has to get these consultants in line. The Premier has to start cleaning some house at Metrolinx and getting to the bottom of this mess. That can happen right now.

Thanks for that context. I had no idea that that happened to you. That’s really rough. When your dream has to go up in smoke because of something you didn’t account for, that’s rough.

I’m going to see what bears out in this debate, quite frankly. We’ve had a caucus discussion already. We want to see what you guys are putting on the table.

But I will say again, for the record, the notion of building in laws here that would intervene in other people’s collective agreements is a red line. It’s a red line for anybody who believes they want to stand up to help working people. The good news, as I tried to communicate today, is that you don’t need to do it. You do not need to do it. There are provisions within the collective agreement that would allow the government, I think, and TTC to do that transit service integration.

So I’m cautiously optimistic—let’s put it that way. But on Tuesday, I would like to see schedule 1 out of this bill. Any help you could provide in persuading your colleagues on that front would be great.

—$39,000 a year?

Interjections.

So I said to the neighbour, the Conservative neighbour back home, “I understand the province is a powerful entity. I understand they can introduce back-to-work legislation. They can legislate a collective agreement. They can threaten fines. But, ultimately, they require the compliance of the working people responsible for administering that fine.” And I told him, “I don’t know how many people are going to be motivated to walk up to a low-paid education worker, who spends their day working with people with disabilities, and say, ‘Here’s a $4,000 fine.’”

What I’m saying with this particular bill is if you open up transit workers’ collective agreements and they are faced with the prospect of their working conditions dropping, when these are the people, during the pandemic, that made sure we could get safely to work or to the hospital, that took risks of getting sick and getting hurt on the job—I don’t know where this is going to lead, but it won’t lead to a good place, not a good place. As my friend from Sudbury will say and has said many times, you come up in the labour movement by demonstrating your capacity to listen to members and fight for them. You don’t hold on to your job as an elected representative or a staff member in the labour movement if you do not rise to the occasion.

Let’s hope, in our country, unlike other places around the world, it doesn’t have to get to that. But in November 2022, we almost got there. We almost got there. When I was a university professor, Speaker, I used to have to teach about labour history in this country. We would recall moments like the Winnipeg General Strike, and the students would say to me, “I can’t even imagine what that would look like.” Then, of course, we went through the convoy movement and have a heckuva better idea of what throttling a city looks like.

But the fact of the matter is I don’t want and I don’t think—I hope no one in this place wants to pick a fight with transit workers. I don’t think we want that. I think what we want to do, as I began, is build public transit.

If the government wants to work with willing municipalities who would administer a transit administration fee to build GO stations in their communities—places like Bowmanville or elsewhere—it sounds like a great idea, provided the regulations make sense and we’re not favouring people like Mr. De Gasperis, who, as I understand from my friend from Spadina–Fort York, purchased the land across from the Ontario Science Centre a month before the Ontario Line announcement. Or the $450-million, now $600-million, subsidy we are putting into a parking garage for an Austrian spa, at a time when, if we were all to go together and go down under the Don Valley Parkway, we would see people living under bridges, and we would see, as we have said in this place, young people trapped in their parents’ basements, looking for housing—and we have $600 million to give to an Austrian conglomerate to build a luxury spa at Ontario Place? And we have a transit authority like Metrolinx, which has increased the price of building subways to $1 billion a kilometre?

Alarm bells should be going off in the Premier’s office. Alarm bells should be going off, Speaker. We need to clean a little house, as my grandmother used to say. We need to get our act together.

The good news is, we’ve got people—smart people—who know how to build public transit. We’ve got a public desperate for more public transit. We’ve got workers who are ready to operate and build public transit. But who we work with matters—who we work with really, really, really matters.

My colleague from University–Rosedale once said in this place, on October 29, 2020—her words—“Toronto is a graveyard of failed transit” plans. To quote from what she said, “It’s an absolute graveyard.”

She says, “The Eglinton West project”—that was, you know, the Crosstown that we are discussing ingloriously today—“which has a lot of merit, would have been built right now” if then-Premier Mike Harris hadn’t filled in the holes that were being prepared to build it then. It might have been built 20 years ago, according to my colleague, had we followed previous progressive mayor—previous to the progressive mayor we have in Toronto right now—David Miller’s Transit City plan. We might have had a line “from Pearson to Kennedy.” The Sheppard extension could have been built back then. The Finch West extension could have been built back then. The Eglinton East extension could have been built back then, but, according to the member from University–Rosedale, what seems to be the recurring theme—and we heard Matt Gurney talk about it before is—idea after idea, vision after vision, and the consultants’ meter starts running, but the product does not get built, or in our case, in Ottawa, when it does get built, it does not operate terribly well.

So here is what we can do. We can commit, as a Legislature, to recognize that transit is critical and valuable, that active transit is critical—let me go into some more positive notes, Speaker. Something I love to use, in the city when I have to take a plane—I try not to, but when I have to take a plane—is the Bike Share program that Metrolinx offers. That’s a success story. Let’s say something positive about Metrolinx for a moment. All you got to do is put an app on your phone, you tap it, and a bike pops out of its docking station. You don’t have to bring your own bike to Toronto. You jump on it and you head to wherever you need to go at a very, very, reasonable cost. In my case, I’ll go all the way down to Billy Bishop, if I have to. It’s fun. I don’t drive fast. I need to remember to bring my helmet, but it’s a great way to get around the city; it’s a fun way to get around the city. So that’s a positive thing. It’s a pilot we have.

Down the road from me—I see the member from Glengarry–Prescott–Russell over there, so it’s down the road for both of us into the province of Quebec—is the city of Montreal, which may be the foremost cycling destination right now in all of North America. They have a plan from 2023 to 2027 to build an incredible amount of bike infrastructure.

Commuters with cars love it, because the streets are less congested. Cyclists, wheelchair users, walker users and pedestrians love it, because they’re protected. Montreal is currently in a boom. It works, but here sadly in our city—the run-up to the last mayoral by-election—we had many mayoral candidates presenting themselves as anti-bike-lane warrior and divisive. That’s not going to get us far at all.

I don’t believe in the war on the car. I don’t believe in the war on the bike lane. I don’t believe in that language at all when it comes to how we get around our cities, because the obligation instead is for us to all keep each other safe. It’s for us to all keep each other safe.

On my bike ride that I just did to Toronto, before I left, I had occasion to talk to a mom, Anita, whose daughter Serene, 14 years old now, will have a brain injury for the rest of her life. She was struck with her brother when she was crossing Fisher Avenue. The driver, if you can believe it, fled the scene and later tried to sell the car to avoid being detected by the Ottawa police. I give the Ottawa police full credit, because they did a full publicity campaign, a picture was found and they ultimately found this guy. But that was the level of malevolence that that person exhibited behind the wheel.

If you are a young person trying to get around your community—going to school, doing groceries for the family, meeting up with your friends—what’s going through your mind? Because what happened to this fellow two weeks ago is before a justice of the peace, he was levied $1,000 fine and had his licence suspended for a year—and that is the exception to the rule. That is more penalty than normal. The maximum fine normally is $500, but only because he fled the incident was the penalty worse, was the licence suspension in effect. In the beginning of the sentencing, the guy showed no remorse. He was smirking, in fact—smirking. I was talking to Anita, the mom, and she was just saying, “It’s really hard for us to live through that moment and to know for our other kids and for Serene that there is no justice.” So what would any parent do? You’re going to put that kid in a car, which you deem to be a safe place, and you’re going to drive them where you feel they need to go. But now we’re moving in the direction, as we talked about off the top, that we don’t want to go.

I talked to a lovely fellow named Randy when I stopped in Brighton, Speaker, who was one of the coordinators for the cycling groups out in Brighton, Ontario. I talked to Minister Piccini before getting there and got a sense of the different groups to contact before I got there. But Randy tells me that, out there, it is all too common, when they have those group rides and they’re doing them safely, that someone will buzz them within like six inches, that people will be swiped off the road.

I’ve talked to dump truck drivers, construction workers who don’t feel like cyclists or pedestrians or other drivers have a sense of how poor their sightlines are. I’ve sat in the cab of the truck and I’ve tried to imagine, could I see someone down there? The dump truck driver had told me, “You know, when I’m on a construction site, I’ve got a flag person following me around everywhere to make sure people are safe, but when I leave the construction site, that person’s not there and I’m just expected to figure it out.”

There’s so much we could do with this legislation, with the companion pieces of legislation to make the province safer. I really, really do think, as critical as I have been of aspects of this legislation, that there’s a lot here that we can come around and work together on: expanding public transit, GO stations. There’s a lot here we’ll agree on. The notion of people being safe, getting to work, getting home—we’re going to agree on that. These should not be partisan issues. They should be political priorities of this place. We should be able to come behind it. We should be able to give parents and kids and everyone out there confidence that this House will design laws that will make sure people can get around this city and other cities, that people can do that safely and, moreover, to return to the context, that we’ll do our part for the climate crisis.

Thirty years from now, you and I, Speaker—I don’t think I’m ever going to retire, it’s just the nature of my hyperactivity, but whatever I’m doing 30 years from now, I’ll be able to say, “You know what? I did my part. I worked across the aisle. I worked with my caucus. We were active in our community. We made sure that you had the opportunities that I was lucky to have.” Let’s hope we can make Bill 131 like that. I welcome questions.

Falling up.

Speaker, the Ontario Line the government has proposed that would end up at its science centre, with its world-leading spa run by this Austrian company, is now costing, according to experts like Steve Munro, who is one of our country’s experts on transit, up to $1 billion a kilometre. The Spadina extension that was approved before came in at about $370 million a kilometre. Now, I know, people will tell me, “Oh, well, the war in Ukraine, the commodities crisis, global supply chain issues”—a tripling of cost per kilometre? A tripling of cost per kilometre presided over a company—let’s face it, Metrolinx, in my opinion, has not assumed its role as a agency responsible for the well-being of our transit infrastructure—

Interjection.

This is an agglomeration of managing consultants supervising other consultants. Perhaps—I’m just speculating here—they don’t want transit projects to be complete because then the gravy train stops. But the hard-working people who have suffered and made sacrifices—because that’s what construction is; you’ve got to put up with disruption until your project is complete. You’re from Hamilton, Speaker, you’re familiar with this debate.

Let me talk about them for a moment, because I think that will help the government understand what this looks like at a community level. I want to talk about Dane Williams. Dane Williams, a wonderful community leader I had the occasion to meet, is the co-founder and director of partnerships at Black Urbanism Toronto. He has seen the impact of the Eglinton Crosstown LRT project on Black-owned businesses in Little Jamaica in and around this area.

We did a round table, and these were the words that Mr. Williams submitted to that round table: “Metrolinx has shown gross negligence in the way they operate on the ground, and this has impacted small business owners’ ability to thrive and grow. There have been barricades on the roads, debris blocking business establishments, lack of parking for patrons. Many of the business owners in Little Jamaica who were in operation in 2011 when the project started are no longer operating. This LRT project has been at the expense of business owners who have been in operation for 20 to 30 years before it.

“There must be a policy change that requires a more fair economy. This means implementing a system of compensation directly to the small business owners affected by any LRT construction project. This would not only provide support for the impacted business owners, but also build more accountability into LRT construction projects”—that makes a lot of sense to me.

Further down the road, I want to cite the words of Dante Thorne, who is a lead building operator at the Holy Blossom Temple. He’s been working in Eglinton West for six years. He’s a daily commuter that uses transit, and these were his observations about Metrolinx—who is our partner for bills like this one—and their capacity to build transit. Mr. Thorne says, “There’s a reason people feel disconnected from the political process. People know that those who are responsible and making money from this are not facing consequences and will just move on to the next project.

“When I first moved here, I saw huge rats running around Yonge and Eglinton because this project and its surrounding space were not treated with respect”—the detonations. There were warnings about this, but it was unsettling to see.

“There is a stretch on Eglinton where the concrete barriers came out so far into the street that there is insufficient space for two TTC buses to safely pass each other. This is another example of negligence and the right hand not knowing what the left is doing on this project.

“The LRT project is funded by taxpayer dollars and lacks an incentive to finish on schedule, as there is no punishment or consequence for delays. The longer they take, the more paycheques come in.”

Speaker, I think I want to return to the positive aspects of where I began. There’s no person in this House that doesn’t want to see more public transit and more rapid transit. I’m taking that on faith. There is no person in this House that doesn’t want the people who operate our transit systems and encourage people to use active transit to be supported. We all do. But the conundrum happens when we think about who we rely upon to make these things come to be. That’s missing from this bill.

Let’s return, on a lighter note, because my friend from Kiiwetinoong is here and I’ve heard you, my friend, say this in the past—let’s acknowledge that public transit and what this bill will do will help some communities, but not all communities. The member for Kiiwetinoong has often joked that there are no subways that service the 28 fly-in communities he serves. There are limitations on what we can do with this bill in encouraging public transit in the rural areas and the wild areas of Ontario.

But the fact remains, Speaker, that 80% of people in Ontario do live in metro areas and there are 107 transit agencies operating in this province, according to a recent estimate. And believe it or not, there’s been a lot of innovations in smaller towns. Some towns I had occasion to visit, like Brighton, Ontario, on my bike ride down here from Ottawa, are coming up with different busing initiatives for seniors and persons with disabilities to help them get around because they don’t have access to their own vehicle and they want to stay living in a beautiful town like Brighton where they are. So public transit takes many different shapes and sizes, and I think the case for encouraging it remains incredibly strong.

I want to cite from a recent report by the International Transport Forum. I’m going to quote directly from it so people will have a sense of what public transit can do to help us become more sustainable and to help us create jobs: “Buses and trains can release up to a fifth of emissions per passenger kilometre” as opposed to “ride-hailing and about a third that of a private vehicle. Simply put, public transport, along with bicycling and walking, is a climate solution staring us in the face. Embracing it in this next decade will be a determining factor in reaching climate goals.” This is a global assessment.

“Public transport,” they also write, is “key to an intersectional approach to addressing climate change in the transport sector—connecting with equity, health and economic development. When done well, it can provide more equal access to jobs, education, services and other economic opportunities, particularly to those without private vehicles and in underserved areas—all at a lower cost to consumers” than if they had to deal with it on their own. “The transit industry also provides millions of jobs globally that are important to local economies.”

There are other health challenges addressed through public transit, Speaker. I am a booster this afternoon. “Cities with good public transport have fewer traffic fatalities. Transit riders tend to have more active lifestyles,” like walking home from a station or rolling home from a station or on their way to work, “and cleaner buses carrying more people than private cars can improve air quality and reduce exposure to dangerous pollutants in traffic.” So the next time you’re stuck on a 400-series highway, let’s return to that collective mission we have in this place to encourage public transit, because that’s one critical way we can work together.

In the time I have left, I want to go back to schedule 1 of this bill, because I talked about the labour rights dimension of this, which I expressed to the ministers responsible. I think there are good moves this government can make this week to resolve that. We don’t need a conflict. But let’s just quickly talk about what could happen if we let it fester—if I come back next Tuesday and we still have the incompetent management of Metrolinx and if we still have a potential major conflict with the people who operate our transit systems.

The law has been pretty clear on whether or not Legislatures can interfere in the collective bargaining process. They said very clearly that section 2(d) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees collective bargaining as a right, and it’s not a right that can be suspended or massively interfered with by legislation that we put in this place.

I will point to a ruling for Bill 28, that the government introduced, in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, which said they “accepted the applicants’ position that a governmental measure, such as legislation, will interfere with the collective bargaining process if it:

“(1) prevents or denies meaningful discussion about working conditions;

“(2) prohibits provisions from being dealt with in collective agreements;

“(3) prevents employees from having their views heard in the context of a meaningful process of consultation and discussion; or”—and this is important—“(4) imposes arbitrary terms on collective agreements.”

Speaker, I read from the arbitrator’s ruling, Mr. William Kaplan, who very much affirmed this. So I know that sometimes governments can say, “Well, we’re elected. We want to drive policy. We don’t share the concern that ATU 113 has. We think that the TTC has their best interests at heart, and we’re not going to concern ourselves with operating any way other than opening up the City of Toronto Act and saying, ‘Your contracting-out provisions for your collective agreement don’t apply.’”

With benefit for my colleagues here, let me just share an anecdote I had in commuting back home to Ottawa once in the midst of that massive labour uprising that happened around Bill 28. I’m taking the VIA train—which has a lot of issues; we’ll talk about it another time. I’ve complained to the federal Minister of Transportation several times—but I’m taking the VIA train home, and I’m getting past Kingston, where the cell reception is working relatively well. A text comes across my phone from taxi drivers I know in the city of Ottawa, because I’ve done a lot of work with them over the years about their working conditions. And they write, “The plan is to take the road in front of the Ottawa airport.” I immediately respond by saying, “I’m an elected official. I’m not a member of your union. Please take me off this chat.”

But what I found striking about that was that they were seized with what they perceived as the injustice being brought to bear on low-paid education workers in the public school system in Ontario. The 55,000 people who are ECEs, EAs, library technicians, receptionists, custodians—as I saw in the text stream, which they looped me into, and then I looped myself out—were incensed and had family members who worked in these occupations. And they said, “Look, these people make some of the lowest wages. Our union, which isn’t even party to the negotiation, out of sympathy with the negotiation, is going to shut down the airport parkway in” my city. That would have an enormous impact on transit coming in and out of Ottawa. It would shut the airport down, probably.

And I put the phone down after getting myself off that, and I said to myself, this could really be a galvanizing moment for the labour movement. I spent many years in my life, blessed, learning from people who have organized unions, people who have negotiated collective agreements, doing research for them, and I’ve met people in all different sectors, in all different places in this country. And what I always remember is their lives are so busy. They’re like politicians; their phones are tied to their head. They are always trying to figure out ways to help members with their problems to address grievances, but when bargaining comes up, to make sure the union is as well represented as it can be at that critical, critical, critical table. It’s a sacred place, the bargaining table.

But here are unionized taxi drivers in the city of Ottawa telling me that, in a fight that is not their direct fight and a labour negotiation that is not their direct negotiation, they are prepared to blockade the airport parkway in solidarity with education workers—55,000 of them across Ontario. And they indicated, before I jumped off, that this wasn’t just an Ottawa thing. This was going to happen everywhere. And anecdotally, when I started talking to people—and you remember those times, Speaker, I’m sure; we had a lot of people visiting the Legislature, upset and rallying and such—I heard that story from other employee groups.

I have lots of Conservative friends back home. One gentleman rung me up and told me I shouldn’t be supporting the strikers. We had a good conversation. He said, “Well, the government has introduced a bill, Bill 28, Joel, that will levy $4,000 fines on those people if they decide to strike and defy the law, and a $500,000 fine on their union. They will absolutely back down. That’s the power of the province there. They’ve got to listen to the people who were elected.” This is what the neighbour told me. And I said back to the neighbour, “Well, who do you think levies that fine on the striker? It’s an OPSEU member. It’s somebody working for the Ministry of Labour.” How motivated do you think that person is going to be to walk up to an EA, who works eight months of the year, and makes an average of—what was it, member for Sudbury, the average wage—

Interjection.

They need a better tailor—the member from Waterloo is right.

What I was hearing was an improperly designed light rail system. That’s what the engineers told me.

And worse, what I was told on one occasion at the doorstep—we were just doing a community canvass to see how people were doing and check in on health care concerns—I was told by an engineer that normally, you replace those wheels, the undercarriage of the trains, about every 90,000 kilometres. But in the maintenance shop for the consortium now running stage 1 of our LRT, they’re being swapped out every 12,000 or 13,000 kilometres. It dramatically increases the costs of operating the train.

It’s posing some fundamental questions back home. Do we have to rip up this track and start from square one again? Why did we hire these public-private partnership consultants? Why did we hire Mr. Guest? And I guess by “we” I mean the decision-makers at the time at the city of Ottawa and the province of Ontario. Let’s be fair to the current government, Speaker: This goes back to the Liberals. This doesn’t go to the current government. This decision with Ottawa’s LRT goes directly to the Liberals. Why did we believe they could deliver a transit project in Ottawa, a light rail project we desperately need, for $2.1 billion? It was by far the lowest bid of the bids available.

So the good people of Toronto right now, having heard that absurdity of a press conference earlier this afternoon, are furious. My social media is filling up. I don’t check it; I’m blessed to work with people who look at the social media. That’s not my job. But the people who represent transit riders in this city, the people who represent the folks working in the system, are furious. So it falls to this government to seek accountability. And if Mr. Verster still has a job when I get back here next Tuesday, I will be very disappointed, because I don’t know anybody who can fail upwards better than this guy right now. I don’t know anybody who can have a salary expand by a factor of five while presiding over failing transit systems.

Speaker, I rise today as the transit critic in this House for the official opposition. This is my first one-hour lead in response to transit legislation proposed by the government. Before I get into the substance of my remarks about Bill 131 and its two schedules, I have a few people to thank because I needed to be a quick study this week. I found out about the bill on Monday and I am blessed, as the transit critic, with some great resources both inside this caucus and inside this great province, and I want to take the moment to thank them first.

First of all, I want to thank the member for University–Rosedale, who did incredible and impressive work on transit policy for this caucus through the current Parliament and in the previous Parliament. I want to thank her very much.

Secondly, I want to thank the hard-working people at Amalgamated Transit Union Local 113, who get Toronto’s folks moving, who move people around all over this city—13,000 people.

Interjections.

I want to thank, in particular, ATU 113 president Marvin Alfred and strategic consultant Ian Fellows. I want to thank ATU national president John Di Nino. I’ve had occasion to have many conversations with them, Speaker, and I’ve learned a lot about what happens every single day on the public transit system in this great city of Toronto and, through John, right across the whole country.

Before I jump into the substance of my remarks, Speaker, if you’ll permit me a little sidestep. Someone important in my life passed away four days ago, a professor I studied with at York University: John Saul, one of Canada’s experts on human rights in the continent of Africa. He spent a lot of his time supporting the freedom struggle launched by the global giant Nelson Mandela as an American and Canadian citizen. I know a lot of us who were graduate students who worked under John were blessed to have Africans come to York University, where I trained. I want to thank him, and I want that to be read into the record of this place. There are many human rights champions in Ontario and John Saul was one of them. So I’m thinking of you, John, when I’m reading out this speech today.

Let’s get to the substance of Bill 131, and its two schedules, and what it does. I had occasion this morning to listen to the Minister of Infrastructure, who I’m glad to see here today. I also had occasion to listen to the Associate Minister of Transportation’s remarks supporting this legislation.

As I understand it, this bill is attempting to do two things. On the one hand, it seeks to align service integration between transit agencies. It’s amending the City of Toronto Act, as the government purports, to make sure that the Toronto Transit Commission is simpatico in its relationships with other transit authorities from outside the TTC’s boundaries, because the TTC has a monopoly in providing transit service for within the TTC’s boundaries. That’s what I understand the first schedule of this bill to do.

The second schedule of the bill is about building more GO Transit stations, which, for those folks—like my friend from Oshawa—who come to this place representing communities outside the downtown core, is a really popular thing. This is something I have heard in my short time as transit critic in this place. The government is proposing a mechanism that municipalities would have to defray the costs of them themselves, taking on the responsibility of building provincial infrastructure. That’s what I understand this bill to be doing, the specific task.

But, Speaker, I feel it important to talk about Bill 131 in a much bigger context than those two things, although I will get into them in great detail this afternoon. I have heard members of this House often say that public transit and active transportation are priorities for Ontario. I heard it from the Minister of Infrastructure this morning and the Associate Minister of Transportation. Making transit and active transit a priority is certainly something that bears repeating, and why? Let’s get to the context. Speaker and friends in this place today and folks watching at home: We are living in a climate emergency. That is not hyperbole. It is proven by science. We must take bold steps to put our province on a sustainable path for our children and grandchildren. That’s the context for a conversation about public transit.

We saw it this summer—didn’t we, Speaker—all over Canada, in the historic wildfires that happened here. If you can believe it, there’s been a study done to measure the impact of those wildfires. Over two billion—billion—tonnes of carbon dioxide was released into the atmosphere as a consequence of those wildfires, and some are still raging. As Canadians, we like to get out into the wilderness to find peace and solace and to reconnect with nature. Those trees that we reconnect to, that land we reconnect to, are a giant carbon sink that is supposed to provide that role of helping balance off the benefits of industrial modern life. But as a result of those wildfires this summer—which are linked, according to scientific efforts, to lack of progress in our country on the climate emergency—we released three times the value of that carbon sink, two billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere. It bears mentioning.

We know—and the Minister of the Environment, previous and current, has mentioned—that extreme weather is linked to these things. We celebrate the first responders who run to those communities to help people. But we also know that our climate action plan has to include public transit. Public transit is part of that. It’s part of our focused effort to reduce emissions.

We know that one third of Ontario’s emissions comes from our transportation sector. Anyone who has braved a commute on our major highways has seen what that looks like, the congestion, the smog and, let’s face it, the frustration on our roads. Many people are hurt by the violence that results often from that frustration. I want to name, for the record, sadly, a tragedy that happened not far from my community in downtown Ottawa yesterday. A 63-year-old German cyclist, a tourist to our country, was critically injured on Highway 17, south of Pembroke.

When I recently had occasion to ride my bicycle from Ottawa to this great city of Toronto and stop along the way, I met with people in big communities and small communities who were telling me the same thing as vulnerable road users: They do not feel safe. But at the same time, they are trying to do their part for the climate crisis.

Let me be very clear, Speaker: By taking the bus, the train, the streetcar or some mode of active transport like a bike, a wheelchair, a walker or even a good old pair of shoes, you’re taking action. It’s an act of hope for our future, notably our children’s future. This House, by encouraging public transit, as I understand the Minister of Infrastructure is purporting in this bill—we have to support that choice. We are obliged to support that choice. We have to make public transit and active transportation much more attractive and viable for a greater number of people. So that is my departure point for my comment on this legislation today.

When I think about that, I think of the great Brazilian novelist Paolo Coelho, the author of The Alchemist, who once said, “The world is changed by your” actions, “not your opinions.” We’ve had a lot of talk about public transit in Ontario. I’ve occasioned to learn thanks to the member for University–Rosedale about a lot of the research she had done that she shared with me in my preparation for today. We’ve had a lot of visions, but we haven’t necessarily had enough follow-through, and I’m going to be talking about that this afternoon.

Four years ago, Matt Gurney, who’s a columnist who frequently comments on public transit, summed up Toronto’s transit woes this way: “Elections,” Mr. Gurney said, “come and go, politicians are elected and serve out their terms,” Toronto “and its sprawling suburbs keep growing—but precious little transit ever” gets built.

That’s why, Speaker, this opposition supports efforts to broaden access to public transit—we do—to improve service levels and to improve the quality of the transit we have by supporting the operating funding of those systems. And I have good news for you, Speaker. It’s important to talk about good news today because some of these challenges we are talking about are serious. This is what the city of Toronto has just accomplished under the leadership of their new mayor, Olivia Chow. The city of Toronto was dealing with a massive deficit in its operating infrastructure for the TTC. Transit systems all over the world have been struggling during the pandemic to recover. And I’ll acknowledge the government has done its part to make moves in helping transit systems in this province recover.

But what Mayor Chow just committed to was to put the TTC on a path to 91% of pre-pandemic service levels. That’s a big boost. The way that her team is doing it is by utilizing funds that were otherwise allocated to manage the failing Eglinton Crosstown system.

So we have a civic leader managing the urban community around this great building who has taken a purposeful decision to make significant investments in the operating lane—not necessarily new visions and ribbons to cut and all of that important stuff—I’m talking about helping those trains, those streetcars, those buses show up on time and respecting the people who drive and fix them. So it is possible to do better.

The Premier said this in question period yesterday: “We have to find ways to get people out of cars and into other modes of transportation.” I want to say off the top, if that is what Bill 131 is intended to do, that is a worthy goal. But I’m going to explain this afternoon, Speaker, that I find aspects of Bill 131 need work if that’s the goal. I’ll outline these now and I’ll get into more detail as I go through them one by one.

First, the responsibility to build and operate transit at the moment, in my opinion, is not being appropriately shared between provincial and municipal governments, and Bill 131 has the potential, although it doesn’t have to, to make that situation worse. Schedule 2 of this bill, as I mentioned, allows municipalities, pending approval of the Minister of Transportation, to assume the financial risk of building GO Transit stations, which is provincial infrastructure normally built by Metrolinx. So they assume the debt for the infrastructure, but they charge, as the minister said this morning, a station administration fee to recoup that cost. They charge that fee to developers who are seeking to build housing—which, I take the point, we urgently need, particularly affordable housing—and other amenities around GO Transit stations.

But this option being offered by the government through this schedule in this bill is coming at a time when the government has also dramatically reduced the revenue capacities of municipalities through its controversial Bill 23. Bill 23 withdrew a billion dollars of potential revenue for municipalities across Ontario, and it was one of the reasons why the Association of Municipalities of Ontario said loud and clear at their most recent meeting that they wanted to see those powers restored. It’s also the reason Mayor Chow proposed to the Premier that Toronto have some new revenue-generating powers to pay for some of those needs She has yet to persuade the Premier. AMO has yet to convince the government to walk back some of the moves it made under Bill 23.

The 440-odd municipalities in Ontario are short a billion dollars, and they’re being told, “If you want to build a new GO station, a provincial piece of infrastructure, you take on the costs and we’re going to give you the tool to defray that cost after the fact.” It’s voluntary, my friends in government are saying, but, Speaker, I want to submit to you, that’s rather like telling an asthmatic that their puffers are voluntary. You know? Because we need public transit.

For a community like Bowmanville that has had occasion to go through—they are so excited for the prospect, and the member from Oshawa can confirm this better than me, of their new GO station. There are other communities that want them too. Let’s dispense with that—it’s not voluntary. I said earlier, about the context, we have to build public transit. There’s no choice. But we’re asking municipalities to do it with dramatically less revenue. We’re asking them to shoulder more debt after having gone through legislation previous to this bill that reduces their revenue.

The other thing that concerns me, Speaker, on a related note—and I’ll get into more detail later—is that the government has said, without a lot of detail, that municipalities can charge these station administration fees to developers building housing projects and other amenities around GO stations, provided some kind of an incentive is given back to the developer for the privilege of using this incentive.

This morning in debate, I heard the minister say it could involve being flexible with municipal requirements for parking for large buildings, because, as the minister said—and I take her point—we want to be building infrastructure not premised upon the single occupancy vehicle or single vehicles. We want to encourage people to utilize the transit that’s right at the new building. Okay, I could see a rationale for that case, but what is the scope of other incentives that are proposed by this bill? What’s going to be determined in regulation? Often what we’re dealing with, when we’re talking about the developers who will be building these amenities around GO stations, are some of the most profitable companies in the home-building industry and commercial building industry in our province. I’m not necessarily convinced that we need to bend over backwards to reduce their cost. We certainly need to work with them. We certainly need to work with them, but I’m worried about the scope creep of this particular thing, and I’m going to be talking about that today.

Thirdly, Speaker, I want to persuade the government—and this is where I would like everyone’s focused attention because it’s an urgent priority—that schedule 1 of this bill needs to be repealed because I don’t think it’s necessary. I don’t think it’s necessary because it concerns an amendment to the City of Toronto Act that would render the contracting-out provisions of the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 113’s collective agreement null and void. It would basically say that when the TTC collaborates with another transit agency, there is no complaint that could be brought to bear based upon the negotiated achievements of those transit workers around reciprocity of service, around wages, around standards of vehicles that could be used.

I can tell you, my phone has been burning up a bit today and yesterday, Speaker. People are concerned. The leadership of ATU 113, Marvin Alfred and the gang, are in Alberta right now, visiting some of their colleagues and talking about transit policy for the country, but they found time in their schedules today and yesterday to talk to me and our leader at length about this.

There’s good news here, Speaker, and I was mentioning this to the minister earlier today. There is a provision within the ATU 113’s collective agreement with the TTC and the city of Toronto that allows for service integration between the TTC and other transit agencies. It already exists because pilot projects have already been started because riders want it; workers want to collaborate and be flexible; and the massive achievement that people in this place have fought for, on all sides of the House, the notion of eliminating double or triple fares that the Associate Minister of Transportation was talking about this morning, bringing down those costs for transit riders. Everyone has agreed on that, and this is the service end of that, but—and this is a big “but,” Speaker—we can’t, from this place, from this House that our grandparents built, open up the collective agreement of a transit union whose responsibility is to negotiate not with us but with the TTC, and ultimately the leadership of the city of Toronto. That can be construed as interference in the collective bargaining process. And I’ll tell you something, in the time I’ve had to get to know transit workers, I wouldn’t want to mess with them. I wouldn’t want to get them angry, because their jobs, every single day, is dealing with conflicts. Sometimes our neighbours are in their worst position when they jump on the bus or the subway.

Can I just look around the room today and see, have people had that experience? When you’ve been on public transit, you see someone is having a really hard time. They could be homeless, they could be dealing with an illness—there could be any number of issues that require our attention. I have risen in this place, and I’ve spoken about the violence on public transit. This is what the women and men who work for the TTC have to deal with every single day, and they do it with dignity and they do it with honour, but if they get a sense that, from this building, we’re going to diminish the integrity of decades of work at the negotiating table—the member from Sudbury has lived his life doing this sort of work, and other people here have. They are not going to respond terribly well.

The good news is, we don’t have to go the road of schedule 1. We don’t need it. If the government’s objective is to merge service agreements between transit jurisdictions as the Associate Minister of Transportation said this morning—riders don’t care what the colour of the bus is. They just want to get on in Durham and get off in Oakville or get off in Markham, wherever the case may be. I take the point, but we want to make sure that all the hard work that’s gone into making sure that bus is in good shape, runs on time, is driven by a competent professional, is repaired by a competent professional—we want to make sure that all of that work is maintained and there is no backsliding, because safety comes first. Safety for everyone comes first.

I’ll also just mention for the government that there has been a recent interest arbitration ruling by Justice William Kaplan, who said very clearly, and I will pull out my weapon of mass distraction here to read out the words. This is the award that Justice Kaplan mentioned—because the TTC management had been pushing for this particular flexibility. He said, “Having carefully considered the proposals of the parties and with the foregoing observations being borne carefully in mind, I direct that a note be added to the collective agreement called E-27 pilot project. This will allow the parties, in the limited time remaining during the term of the current collective agreement, to test the cross-boundary integration. The pilot project will provide that the TTC may implement cross-boundary integration on any or all of 50 Burnhamthorpe, 105 Dufferin North, 49 Bloor West and 25 Don Mills.” These were the nodes being proposed for inter-jurisdictional transit. “I note that these routes were identified by the TTC involving roughly equivalent service hours to the number of hours some TTC buses”—and again, identified by the TTC—“are currently being driven outside the city. These, or equivalent cross-boundary routes will continue so long as this pilot project is in effect.

“There will be no layoff or termination resulting from the pilot project. The TTC will not directly engage in any third-party contracting for the provision of vehicle operation. Actual language of the provision will be remitted to the parties.” That is to say, if you want to change it, change it in bargaining. “The parties are further directed to regularly and jointly monitor any cross-boundary staffing operational matters that arise when these corridors are established so that they can be fully informed by the actual implementation of this pilot project, and thus addressing the issues that may arise in the next collective bargaining round, including expansion of the number of corridors. No finding, needless to say, is made about the best manner of general implementing reciprocity, which will undoubtedly continue to be a feature in future cross-boundary service integration.”

The conclusion line reads: “At the request of the parties, I remain seized with respect to the implementation of this award.”

What Justice Kaplan is saying is that the legal reading of the collective agreement is, we can have pilot projects around service integration, but we can respect the collective agreement at the same time. That strikes me as a very good path. It strikes me as a path that doesn’t require schedule 1 of this bill.

I also want to say, fourthly—and this is based upon information I received as recently as an hour and a half ago—that something not covered by this bill are the partners provincially we are continuing to work with in building public transit in Ontario. Phil Verster, the CEO of Metrolinx, just got up before the province of Ontario—the people of Ontario rely on those services—and told us that there remains no deadline for the completion of the Eglinton Crosstown project. This is a project that is going on three years late. Speaker, it’s over a billion dollars over budget. There have been lawsuits between the consortium building the project and Metrolinx that now exceed over $500 million. But meanwhile Mr. Verster’s salary has increased from the $200,000 range to now almost a million dollars a year—a million dollars a year.

Speaker, when my friends in government campaigned in the 2018 election and they said, rightly, that under the Liberals the $6-million man ran our hydro system into the ground and criticized the governing Liberals of the day for that, I thought there was a lot of credence to that. One of the first things the Premier did was let that executive go, because you couldn’t have a situation in Ontario where people had to choose between heating—if they had electric heat—or eating, and it was obscene that we would have at the top of our power authorities someone making that kind of money in that kind of context of energy poverty. Well I would submit to you, Speaker—and I will get into details this afternoon—that Mr. Verster’s time should be up too. It’s time for him to go. The official opposition has said it clearly this afternoon; the people around the Eglinton Crosstown who have been dying for this transit service deserve it.

Let me get into some comments that I made—because I think it’s related—at committee to the transportation minister of the day. I went over two different reports from the Auditor General into the Eglinton Crosstown LRT. I noted that Metrolinx as a company has 59 vice-presidents—59 vice-presidents. I noted, in fact, that there are 19 C-suite executives—the “C” being the CEO, CFO, the C-whatever-O. The amount of executive bloat in this organization truly defies belief. So I asked the minister at the time, does she think that Metrolinx needs 19 C-suite executives and 59 vice-presidents to deliver a project that, at that time, was not operational and was a billion dollars over budget? I didn’t get an answer to my question.

I also asked—because this concerns this bill, Speaker. It concerns who we’re working with to build public transit in Ontario, these GO stations we want to build. I also asked because, as you know, in Ottawa Centre we had a very strong community movement to fight for a public inquiry into our own failing light rail system, and I was glad that the Premier decided to listen to us, respond to our call and declare that public inquiry, and Justice William Hourigan’s report is now public. But a name that keeps coming up in that report, Speaker, is Brian Guest. It keeps coming up, and it’s because this fellow, who lives in Ottawa, had never, before the Ottawa LRT phase 1, been involved in building a transit system anywhere in the world, let alone Ontario. Mr. Guest had not only played the critical role in stage 1 of our LRT, he had gone on to advise Metrolinx as a vice-president in the construction of the Eglinton Crosstown.

So you can imagine, Speaker, my reaction, and the reaction of people in Ottawa. We have been through the wringer, most recently with our LRT, if you can believe it—we have a fantastic music festival in the summer; it’s called Bluesfest. Part of what we encourage people to do—patrons of Bluesfest—is to not travel with their cars into the downtown. Utilize the LRT. But guess what, Speaker? We had a 28-day shutdown, because engineers told us the station was over-utilized. The Ottawa police told the community not to use our LRT station on Canada Day because the police assessment of the major stations was that they were not appropriate—get ready for this, Speaker—for high volumes of people. That is the level of deficiency with the Ottawa LRT, and the architect of the Ottawa LRT was spreading this madness to our friends here in the city of Toronto with the Eglinton Crosstown.

So I asked the minister—given that Mr. Guest’s name keeps popping up across these Metrolinx projects and that Mr. Verster has overseen all of this at the executive level—in this place in question period and I asked at committee, “Are you going to investigate Mr. Guest?” At the time, if you remember, we pushed hard enough that the minister let Mr. Guest go under a cloud of suspicion. But that’s not enough. For our friends here at the Eglinton Crosstown, who are relying on that transit project to be viable, we wanted to know what decisions were made. We wanted to know what was going on.

We asked the minister responsible, “Have you done an investigation into Mr. Guest and what he has done or not done for the Eglinton Crosstown project?” We were told—let me find it for you, Speaker—on two separate occasions at committee: “An internal review was done.” On another occasion, the minister said, “A review was done internally, and it was concluded that everything with respect to the procurement that you are discussing of those services was fair and competitive.”

So we, as the official opposition, did a freedom-of-information request for any records pertaining to the minister, the minister’s staff, the Ministry of Transportation and the Ministry of Infrastructure about any investigation of Mr. Guest. What came back to us was a field that said “zero records.” That doesn’t inspire confidence for me. It doesn’t make me think that Mr. Guest was held to account at all, and it makes me seriously worried about what the good people of Toronto are about to experience because frankly, Speaker, I have seen this movie before.

What we learned—not at today’s press conference that Mr. Verster stumbled through—at his last press conference was that there are 260 deficiencies at least with the Eglinton Crosstown project and that some of those deficiencies relate right to the rails that are put into the system. If we think about the virus that has spread from Ottawa to Toronto—and I hope it’s not the case, but I worry that it is—this is precisely what we’re dealing with in our city. There is a stretch of the track for stage 1 of our LRT from the Tremblay Road station that crosses the Rideau River that if you stand by that river and you listen to the trains go across the track, the screeching of the wheels is piercing to listen to.

The engineers I’ve had occasion to speak to off the record privately, who do not want to talk publicly for fear of their own employment, will tell me that for a working light rail system, the wheels of the undercarriage of the trains have to be bespoke to the rails. They have to be absolutely perfect, like a perfectly fitting suit. But what I was hearing, the engineers told me, was a lack of fit between wheel and track.

I listened to my friends in the government intently, for both of those addresses. Thank you for those this morning.

My major concern as we looked through Bill 131, when it was given to us on Monday morning of this week, is that—the women and men who work in our transit systems do really difficult jobs, and they’re very proud of the working conditions they’ve built up in those jobs over decades. They’ve contacted me this week with concerns that schedule 1 of Bill 131 is an unnecessary intrusion into their bargaining rights; that there is an aspect of their collective bargaining agreement that allows service integration to happen between transit agencies; that the government doesn’t have to go back to this particular provision of making the contracting-out language of their collective bargaining agreements null and void, as it did under Bill 2. So my question to the minister and to the parliamentary assistant is, are you prepared, this week, to work with those transit partners who could help you get to where you want to go without going down that road?