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.