Mississauga to Toronto: Wait your turn for more transit cash
Mississauga city councillors say Toronto’s sudden shift to a subway for Scarborough had better not come at the expense of its planned LRT.
“As soon as I heard it, I said: Uh-oh, where are they going to get the money?” Councillor Ron Starr said after hearing that Toronto City Council passed a motion Wednesday to pursue a Scarborough subway extension to replace the Scarborough RT, instead of the light rail planned by Metrolinx.
On Thursday, Ontario Transportation Minister Glenn Murray said the province would pay $1.4 billion of the $2.9 billion cost to build the subway line.
With Mayor Hazel McCallion out of the country, other councillors picked up the argument McCallion has been making for months: Queen’s Park and Ottawa shouldn’t provide any additional transit funding for Toronto before Mississauga’s planned $1.5 billion LRT along Hurontario St. and other Big Move projects outside Toronto get funded.
“Toronto already got $8.4 billion of Big Move funding that’s been allocated — the lion’s share,” said Councillor Bonnie Crombie. “Now they want more.
“What about Mississauga’s portion?”
The Big Move is a 25-year, $50 billion plan to build transit in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton area. About $17 billion has been committed for phase one, with $8.4 billion of that dedicated to Toronto’s Eglinton Crosstown LRT project. Funding for a second round of projects has not yet been finalized.
Crombie and other Mississauga councillors are concerned that the extra $1.1 billion Toronto would need to build a Scarborough subway reduces the size of the pie left for its LRT.
“Toronto will scream the loudest,” Starr says. “Where does that put us on the pecking order? We don’t get the money, or to get it our project gets pushed back two or three years.”
Starr and Crombie said Toronto should accept Metrolinx’s original, and less expensive, plan for an LRT.
“It’s already been planned,” Crombie said. “What kind of a delay would all the other Big Move projects see so the subway can now be planned? Our project is ready to go.”
Crombie said that even if Toronto raises the extra $1.1 billion on its own, the indecisiveness is frustrating.
“They’re going to have to go through a redesign. And if Toronto residents are going to have to pay more (through a special levy for the subway) it negates from the region-wide funding tools Metrolinx proposed.”
Crombie said other municipalities, through those proposed funding tools, will have to subsidize even more transit costs in Toronto if the province has to pick up any of the additional $1.1 billion.
Councillor Pat Saito thinks the Toronto decision was the right one.
“In a city that already has a subway system, expanding the system and making it better just makes sense ... I will be interested, however, in seeing where this project will fall on the list for funding through Metrolinx and if it will impact our requests, or not.”
