Thank you to the member for her presentation.

With respect to this government’s claim that the reason to overturn local transit decision-making has oftentimes been the proposition they’ve put forward, that Metrolinx will build transit on time and on budget—and that’s what they said in 2019. They repeated it in 2020, and now we see the Ontario Line, which is, of course, already quite significantly delayed. But more importantly, it’s actually the most expensive transit project we’ve ever seen, which they like to brag about because it’s a billion dollars per kilometre. It is one of the most expensive projects being delivered around the world, in numbers and magnitude that we’ve never seen before.

My question to you is, how can the people of Ontario trust this government with any legislation that hasn’t gone through consultation with the community, that has no technical review—and that they expect us to just vote for? Can we trust them?

Thank you very much to the member for the question. I am a firm supporter of transit integration, especially as we have people who are coming from further and further outside of the core of the city to come in to work. We rely on those individuals, those commuters, to come and actually fill up our office towers. We rely on them to actually help build this economy. To me, it’s all about one Ontario, to be quite honest. One southern Ontario is how we’re competing region to region.

Fare integration is absolutely critical in order for us to have a successful, well-connected transit system that’s reliable. But we also need to make sure that we work with our labour partners. We need to work with the men and women who actually provide the transit service itself—that they’re at the table. I hope to see that in the coming days, even if there’s an amendment to this bill or if there’s an announcement saying that you’re going to start talking to ATU 113.

Any time we can support transit integration and do it well, I’m definitely with you.

So, yes, when new plans and new strategies are coming up without actual consultation and deep engagement with municipalities or the transit workers, there is going to be cause for concern, because that has been the history that we’ve had with the Premier.

But the bill is not just one schedule, is it? The bill has two schedules, and I think the second schedule is worth digging into and exploring, because that is the section of the bill that I will challenge you and any member of this House to give me an economic study that will tell me and everybody else in Ontario that you can have the private sector pay for transit exclusively without you putting in any money. It’s just not going to happen.

What we see in this bill is some troubling outcomes, and the troubling outcome is that it doesn’t actually talk about supporting the construction and the funding of transit through this House. This order of government, which has the most responsibility when it comes to regional transit; this government, which actually has the most—

Thank you to the member across for the question. I absolutely do support the expansion of transit, especially transit that’s well-studied, transit that should connect communities to where they need to go on a daily basis and transit that is funded, not just capital costs upfront, but with provincial dollars for operating and that is sustained into the future. Without all of that coming together, the transit that’s being talked about in this bill, that’s being referenced in this bill, will actually not come to fruition. And that’s why I have trouble with this bill, because I want your community to have the public transit it deserves and this bill is not going to deliver it.

Absolutely: Torontonians want further accountability, stronger accountability, more accountability from the provincial transit body. If anything, it’s actually been written about in most major newspapers in Toronto and by most transportation and transit journalists covering the issue: It’s that Metrolinx is not accountable to the people that they are supposed to be serving and the people that they are supposed to be building for. And in the city of Toronto, things are happening to us and not with us, especially when it comes to transit.

It’s always an honour to rise in this House to speak on behalf of the great people of Toronto Centre and, in particular, today’s debate is around Bill 131, the government bill entitled Transportation for the Future Act.

You know, when it comes to public transit, I have a very personal and deep relationship to this critical piece of infrastructure in the city of Toronto, this essential service that my family and I have used for my entire life in Canada and my entire time in Toronto. My parents never had a car. They never had a driver’s licence in this city. I was the first person in my family—believe it or not, Speaker, this might be a very challenging story for folks in the House to comprehend, but I was the first person in my family to actually get my driver’s licence here. So, for the majority of my life, right up until being a young adult, if the TTC, the Toronto Transit Commission, didn’t take us there—meaning it didn’t travel there or the route wasn’t covered—we simply didn’t go. That meant that my mom, my dad, my grandmother and three children would all pile onto a streetcar or a bus or the subway if we were to make any journey as a family. Imagine that being difficult for newcomers, especially with young children, kids who didn’t always listen, who were always being sort of pulled around. That was very, very difficult.

So I am deeply invested in the quality of public transportation, the quality of public transit in Toronto, but also recognizing my experience is not so uncommon, for many people don’t necessarily have access to a vehicle. And, if some families do have access to a vehicle, you may have five or six people who need to go in many different routes—someone in the family is reliant on public transit.

This bill is actually very important, especially as we talk about the future of transit in Ontario. I want to be able to support the spirit of the bill because I think that’s important, but as we dig deeper into this bill, things start to unravel, and it unravels very quickly, so I am very pleased to be able to provide some thoughts and some feedback with members of this House.

Transit riders in Ontario have been waiting at stations, as well as bus stops, for far too long. We have seen advocacy groups, like those in the city of Toronto called TTCriders, who have been calling for fare integration for literally years and, beyond that, decades. I’m very happy to know that this government is listening, as previous governments have said that they are very interested in fare integration. This is a long time coming. Fare integration, of course, will reduce expenses for transit users, especially those who have the furthest to travel. Like you and many who are still using transit, I don’t want to necessarily spend my time calculating how much my trip will cost. I just want to be able to go in and tap. With the rising costs of gas, insurance and maintenance, fare integration and the reduction of fares overall is actually going to be welcome.

But we’re not talking about the reduction of fares; we’re simply talking about fare integration. At the same time, the cost of operating transit is on the rise.

Let’s not forget that the government has refused to continue the previous Liberal government’s commitment to at least reducing GO riders’ fares by $1.50 in 2020. This government scrapped that. There was another short-lived fare integration project that predates this one, and this is where Torontonians were asked to pay an extra $60 a month for a little sticker that we would have attached on the back of our monthly metro pass that would allow us to ride the GO system within Toronto. While those measures may have been well intentioned, they never really did meet its obligations, and that also was a problem, as it hurt thousands and tens of thousands of Ontarians trying to get through their daily commute.

I worry about the fate of our small businesses in the downtown as more and more people are now working from home and they don’t oftentimes go out to buy their lunches or perhaps do their local shopping while they’re here. Workers have obviously created their own schedules, and they do this oftentimes in collaboration with their employers, but I would hate to think that small businesses who are actually reliant on the reliability of the connectivity of transit in order to move shoppers and diners through the city—if you don’t have a reliable transit system that is going to be properly maintained and staffed, you will also see the decline and the struggle of small business. Of course, we saw that during the pandemic, and many of the businesses in the core of the city have said they are still not up to the sale and revenues of where they needed to be before the pandemic. And we know that many businesses in Ontario are still covered in debt. The average small-business debt these days is $134,000. When we build transit—good, reliable transit—it’s going to foster and help our economy. Not only are we moving goods and services along when we build good roads, a connected highway system, but transit actually allows us to move people along, which then drives the economy as well. So those are definitely good, attainable goals that we should all be striving for, but if the transit isn’t there, it’s not going to be helpful.

Let me share with you, Speaker, an experience that I have had sitting on Toronto city council, and it was the first of many experiences that we had at city council. On the first day of then-Mayor Rob Ford’s tenure, he stood up at city council and he tore up Transit City, which was an $8.15-billion LRT plan which covered 120 kilometres across the city over seven LRT lines. Shovels were already in the ground. Shovels had to be put down. Contracts that were signed up to $1.3 billion were then torn up, and everybody was frozen. They didn’t really know what to do. Some 150 Transit City staff were told to stop working, and $130 million that was already spent was gone, with another $65 million of sunk costs that we would never recover.

We have a legacy here where we have Conservative politicians coming into Toronto and ripping up our transit plan. In 1995, Mike Harris did the same thing; he came into power with the Common Sense Revolution. Very shortly afterwards, he actually said no and tore up two significant projects that were under way. One of them was the Eglinton West line. A couple of years later, he began the most horrific impact to the TTC that, generations afterwards, we’re still living with, and that’s when he cut the operational funding and the subsidies to transit in Toronto. To this day and time now, the transit system in Toronto is one of the least-funded—regionally, provincially, state-wide funded—transit systems in North America. What a horrible title that we hold there, Speaker, but yet we are living with the legacy, unfortunately, of Conservative politicians constantly meddling in the affairs of city council, and in this case with the transit plans that the city had already put under way.

But they’re not alone, Speaker; they were supported. In this case, with Mayor Ford at that time, he was supported by the Liberals at Queen’s Park as well as the Liberals in Ottawa. What we saw there was, if the Liberal government of the day here said no to the mayor—“You shouldn’t be tearing up a transit plan. You should build what’s already under way. Finish the LRT system”—Toronto would be moving faster today than it ever would be, because that’s what would have happened.

We have two significant factors that cannot be ignored where we have Conservatives and Liberals constantly working together in partnership to undermine local transit planning as well as local transit construction. Now we have the Premier who took a crayon, and he decided to redraw the downtown relief line. When he did that, he moved stations around and then dropped stations without any consultation, without any technical review or design. We are now building the Ontario Line—or you’re building the Ontario Line—and it’s creating a little bit of chaos and a lot of confusion, largely because we are watching the Eglinton Crosstown fiasco unfold—and I would say it’s a fiasco. You can ask the residents and the business owners along Eglinton how that line has served them over the past 13 years while it’s been under construction. As billions of dollars have ballooned in terms of overrun and with no opening date on the horizon, there is lots of cause of concern for whether or not this will actually work well for the local residents.

Speaker, the other thing I want to point to your attention is that we had a mayor, John Tory, who actually created a new transit plan called SmartTrack. Largely, everyone would agree that that SmartTrack cinched him the 2014 victory. Ten years later, SmartTrack is nowhere to be found. It’s a shadow of itself. The project went from 22 stations under the Transit City banner to about five stations, and who knows if they’re going to actually be realized? We have a city that’s growing, bursting at the seams. The project has dragged on, as projects sometimes do when you don’t have core funding and it’s not properly vetted and if it’s not properly acknowledged by all parties, and you have it now left sort of floating, again, in the wind.

So it’s not that Torontonians in particular don’t rely on transit. I just told you my personal story. Without a transit system that’s well funded and properly operating, my goodness, my family wouldn’t have been able to get to work. And both my parents worked. I hardly saw them because they worked so darn hard. Everybody else who doesn’t have a car is reliant on transit. That’s why the stakes are so incredibly high.

We now have a new mayor in Toronto who is deeply committed to public transit. Her first few political acts in the city of Toronto have already shown us that she’s going to be reversing service cuts, she’s going to be putting money back into transit as she can. But Mayor Chow and Toronto city council can’t do any of that work on their own. None of that can be done without actual government support here.

And that’s what brings me to Bill 131 and why I think we need to be able to move through this very carefully. Cities need to build transit in partnership with the province. That is non-refutable. But when you defer those costs, and you download the responsibilities to the cities, and you talk about building transit for the future when you can’t even get transit done today, there isn’t going to be a lot of trust. We know that through Bill 23, cities are going to lose about a billion dollars already in Ontario, and so we’re also seeing an economic real estate slowdown. Every developer that I speak to, especially in the busiest part of the country, in Toronto Centre, they tell me it’s coming.

When you have a bill that’s largely structured—that talks about attracting development and levies to build the transit that government should be building, you’re walking into a timeline right now that is not going to be proven to have a good outcome. Nothing is going to be built, especially when you have developers who are already very nervous, as they all are right now, about the future of construction, the future of the housing sector because of high interest rates, because of high labour costs, because there’s disruption in supply chain. All of that is before us, and you’re putting forth a piece of legislation that has very little details, that doesn’t say anything with respect to how you’re going to operationalize it. It’s very vague on how you’re going to fund it, except for that some developer, some private sector partnership with the municipalities is going to build it for you. It makes no sense.

Developers will tell you, because it’s been tried before in the city of Toronto—many conservative politicians have said, “The development industry will build you transit.” They will tell you they are not going to do it. Every single one of them will tell you that transit is provincial, it’s a city responsibility or it’s a federal responsibility. “You build it. We come to build the housing.” That’s what they’ll tell you.

This strategy, this legislation as laid out, is not going to be producing the transit that you think it will, because it’s not going to work. It has been promised over and over again, and it has never, ever really built a network of connected, reliable, affordable, well-operationalized transit.

It’s clear to me that the government’s actions are going to create that condition where municipalities are backed into a corner, and that corner is: They’re starved for transit. They haven’t really had working partners in the provincial government that will sit down with them on a regular basis and take a look at their expansion plans and how they want to grow up their neighbourhoods, grow up their cities. They haven’t had that mutual relationship and constant back-and-forth feedback loop where everyone is working together. It’s always “my plan or your plan,” and “If you don’t do what I say, I’m going to withhold funding. If you will take up my plan, I might give you a little bit of funding, but you have to come up with more on your own.” This is why we have gridlock, and that’s why we are struggling in Ontario right now, as we see transit start and stop, transit plans drawn up and ripped up constantly.

I want to join the members of ATU Local 113, the hard-working men and women who actually run Toronto’s transit system, in sharing their concern that this bill could have very significant implications to how they operate the system, the largest transit system in Canada. They haven’t been consulted. They haven’t been asked to come to the table, to work with the government to resolve some of these big loophole questions. You put forward a bill that’s going to impact ATU 113 and the transit workers, who are deeply committed to keeping Toronto running, but you haven’t talked to them, and that, of course, is a big, big problem. We know that you and I are not going to operate those trains, buses and streetcars, so you’ve got to talk to them, and that needs to happen as soon as possible.

If Bill 131 interferes with collective bargaining rights or their collective agreements, then you’d better bet that we will oppose it every step of the way, because we are not going to allow anything that will actually upend their collective agreements. The courts will not let you either.

Bill 131 also requires municipalities to negotiate with developers when it comes to the construction of GO stations. I have shared with you that that doesn’t work. I’ll tell you that if you think you’re going to be building housing on the greenbelt, and that it’s going to be highly desirable and it’s not going to further urban sprawl, there isn’t a single piece of construction of transit that’s going to connect those new homes, which should be built elsewhere, especially on lands that are already approved, that are already within our urban municipal boundaries.

Any reliance on development charges or any type of levies is really tipping into the P3 partnership. Of course, P3 partnerships have been proven to be an utter disaster for public coffers, for public decision-makers and, ultimately, the public taxpayer. They are always much more expensive. They never finish on time. They’re always, always a disaster. We have so many examples to point to, and they don’t necessarily need to be transit. It could be hospitals; it could be other types of public buildings. They’re all stuck in the same boat when you’re trying to contract out your risks and you think that somebody is going to do it for you without the profit structure. That’s just not possible. That’s not how capitalism works, and they’re not doing it because of benevolence.

What we’ve also seen with the government’s transit agency, which is tasked with building transit in Ontario, is that they’ve been mired in secrecy. I’ve experienced that and the good member for Toronto–Danforth has experienced that, when we had political staff in the Minister of Transportation’s office direct them to actually exclude us from notification: “Take the names of the member for Toronto Centre and the member for Toronto–Danforth off the notifications.” That was revealed in a Toronto Star article. When I tried to ask some questions, it was shut down. When I tried to FOI this information, I was given a very long list of costs. It was very hard, and I am a public office-holder. I have every right to have that information, because a public agency is tearing down 21 trees in my community. It happened on a bitterly cold weekend, and without any notice to my community, which is an absolute disrespect there.

We are now seeing Metrolinx and the Eglinton fiasco unfold even further. It is an absolute joke. It really is a painful pressure point in the city, as it actually has created so much additional gridlock with no end in sight, and the costs continue to balloon. When we ask for accountability, we’re told that it’s almost like it’s not really ours to ask for. Well, it is—it is every Ontarian’s right to know what’s happening with those billions of dollars being spent with no service being offered, with no infrastructure coming online that we are aware of. And of course we want it to be safe, but we’re not getting the answers without a tooth-and-nail fight.

Madam Speaker, thank you very much for the opportunity of speaking to this bill. I look forward to any questions that come forward and it’s been an honour to speak to this House.