The simmering debate over Rob Ford’s transit plans escalated Tuesday into a messy political battle that has left the TTC board fractured and the province pleading for the city to get its act together.
At a meeting of the TTC board Tuesday, Ford’s allies outvoted TTC chair Karen Stintz and scrapped a recommendation that staff file a full report on the Eglinton Crosstown LRT line. The report, first approved by the board last December, was expected to contain information detrimental to Ford’s plan to have the entire length of the line run below ground, and Stintz had urged other commissioners to back it. They refused, and afterwards she accused Ford-friendly councillors on the board of deliberately withholding information vital to Toronto’s long-term transit strategy.
“There are so many fundamental issues that need to be addressed, not just for this commission but for the next fifty years of this city,” Stintz said. “The commission had a decision to get that information and debate it and consider it, or they could not get it. They chose not to receive it.”
The vote also scuttled a recommendation that the commission support discussions between the TTC and the province to resolve ongoing issues with the project, and nixed a request that Queen’s Park delay any major decision on the Crosstown until such issues were solved.
Stintz, who was Ford’s choice for TTC chair, had been on a collision course with the mayor and his allies since coming out against his underground-only transit design last week. Tuesday’s vote signals that on the TTC’s most important project, the board is prepared to undermine her and leaves her future as chair in doubt. Visibly emotional after the surprise vote, she said she had no plans to quit but acknowledged the board could remove her if they chose.
Vice-chair Peter Milczyn denied that the vote had been orchestrated by the mayor, and pointed out that staff was still authorized to write a report on Eglinton, albeit with a narrower scope. He said he voted against the report because he didn’t want TTC staff taking positions that were not necessarily supported by the board.
“We didn’t want to give TTC staff a blank cheque to take whatever position they want,” he said. “We want that report to come back to us, telling us what are the areas of dispute.”
TTC manager Gary Webster is now tasked with completing the report, which he says will no longer include information on the pros and cons of burying the line.
Initially he was asked to weigh in on the suitability for the underground plan of $700-million worth of light rail vehicles that were designed to run above ground and have already been ordered. Instead, he is now limited to assessing the roles of the province and the TTC in the project, a task he says will be difficult because the wording of the motion seems to preclude him from talking to the province.
“I can’t tell you what they want or they don’t want,” Webster said of the board. “I’m confused.”
Such uncertainty at the top of the TTC will likely send a troubling message to Metrolinx, the regional transit agency in charge of building the Eglinton Crosstown. Earlier in the day, Metrolinx chair J. Robert S. Prichard released a strongly-worded open letter to the mayor and Stintz, warning that his “concern has been sharply elevated” by recent disagreement at City Hall over whether Eglinton should be built entirely below ground. Stintz and other councillors think it should be “daylighted” in the suburbs and the money saved by doing so used to build other rail lines, as proposed by the Transit City plan Ford scrapped in 2010.
“We will soon have to choose between these competing proposals,” Prichard wrote. “In order to continue with this important project we require the support of, and clarity from, the City of Toronto.”
Proponents of Transit City say that clarity can be achieved by bringing the matter to a vote at council, where they believe the mayor does not have enough support for his plan. If the mayor doesn’t put his subway-centric transit scheme on the agenda at his executive committee next month, Councillor Joe Mihevc says that councillors could call a special meeting of city council.
“Somehow we have to find a way to bring that to the floor of council. They’ve lost it,” said Mihevc, who on Monday released a legal report finding Ford never had the authority to unilaterally cancel Transit City.
To convene a special council session, Mihevc would have to convince 23 councillors to sign a petition and submit it to the city clerk, and he admits he’s not sure he could reach that number yet. But critics of the mayor like Councillor Gord Perks say that only Ford and his closest followers are still backing his plan, and council needs to have a chance to vote on the future of Toronto’s transit.
“It’s very clear that this small group of allies of the mayor has to be reined in, and city council has to take control of this issue,” Perks said.
