SoVote

Decentralized Democracy

Peggy Sattler

  • MPP
  • Member of Provincial Parliament
  • London West
  • New Democratic Party of Ontario
  • Ontario
  • Unit 101 240 Commissioners Rd. W London, ON N6J 1Y1 PSattler-CO@ndp.on.ca
  • tel: 519-657-3120
  • fax: 519-657-0368
  • PSattler-QP@ndp.on.ca

  • Government Page

To the member for Mississauga–Malton: He will certainly be aware that there has been a huge breach of trust between the government of Ontario and the people of this province because of the government saying that they weren’t going to touch the greenbelt, and then going forward to carve it up for developers.

Now, given the total lack of details that the government has released about its Transit-Oriented Communities Program, given the delays that we’ve seen with Metrolinx and its failure to deliver on the Eglinton Crosstown, given what we saw with the Ottawa LRT as the result of a public-private partnership transit project, how on earth can Ontarians trust this government to deliver on transportation projects?

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I’d like to thank my colleague the member for Hamilton Centre for her powerful and insightful remarks based on sharing her personal experiences as someone who uses a wheelchair and tries to use transit, which often fails her.

My question is around the government’s Transit-Oriented Communities Program, which has been very, very short on details. There is certainly a cloak of secrecy that surrounds that program. In light of that, does the member feel confident in the government’s ability to ensure a transit system that actually meets the needs of all Ontarians, including Ontarians with disabilities?

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I want to thank the member for Oshawa for her comments. She started out by saying that it’s not just that the government does something, but that they do it well. We have seen a lot of examples from this government where things have not gone well, and I wanted to share the experience of London with the GO Transit pilot that was announced two years ago by Metrolinx.

There was going to be a GO train connecting London to Toronto. Now unfortunately, that train left London in the wee hours of the morning. It spent four hours on a meandering route to get to Toronto. And after two years—guess what, Speaker?—Metrolinx determined that the pilot showed that it wasn’t viable to have this service because people weren’t taking that four-hour option to Toronto.

So I want to ask the member, is there anything in this bill that would address the transportation needs of communities like London and southwestern Ontario?

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