My last column at TVO Today contained an aside that was a combination of wry, tongue-in-cheek joke and something akin to primal-scream therapy. Writing about the “new deal for Toronto,” I observed that the deal included some significant annual cash outlays by the province to help Toronto operate two LRT lines that are currently under construction. One, the Finch West LRT, runs through a transit-starved area in the city’s northern inner suburbs; the other, the Eglinton Crosstown, runs through (mostly under) the densely populated midtown area, where the population and demand for transit have (long since) surpassed what bus service can provide.
Here’s what I said on Monday. The quip/therapy is the final bit: “Toronto will also receive some stable funding from Ontario to operate the Finch West LRT, expected to open next year, and the Eglinton Crosstown LRT, which theoretically may one day open.”
It’s probably a safe bet that you got the joke, but on the off-chance you didn’t — you lucky, blessed person — the Eglinton Crosstown is late. Like, really late. Years behind schedule. The construction has been bumpy and prolonged, beset by legal spats between Metrolinx (the province’s transit-construction agency) and Crosslinx Transit Solutions (the contractor building the line). It was originally intended to open in 2020. It didn’t, and it had been clear for a while before that that it wouldn’t. Then the pandemic happened, and, okay, fair enough — it’s not reasonable to fault either the government or the contractor for the further delays related to that globally disruptive event. The problem, though, is that a series of deadlines have come and gone since then, and not only has the line not opened, but the government just stopped talking about it.
It was wild. Metrolinx just stopped talking, and my own sources there confirmed that this was on the order of the government. The government itself, normally in the form of then-transportation minister Caroline Mulroney, would refuse to answer any specific questions and respond only with the most banal generalities, when there was any comment at all. This went on for months. Tracking the government’s sustained silence on the status of this multi-billion-dollar piece of public infrastructure — or, as I came to call it, the big empty concrete tube under my house — became a regular feature of these columns. After months of that, but likely more specifically after a few blistering columns by the Toronto Sun’s Brian Lilley, the government finally gave something of an update almost exactly seven months ago.
That update basically confirmed what we all knew: the project was way behind schedule, because of both delays in finishing elements of construction and hundreds of open quality-control items that had yet to be addressed on those parts of the line already built. My personal understanding is that we can break down the problems into two broad categories: major construction challenges where Eglinton Avenue crosses Yonge Street and the existing Line 1 subway that runs north-south under Yonge, and hundreds of fiddly little details on the rest of the line (though there was a major problem with track alignment in one area that required significant work to address). The details are just a matter of throwing workers and money at all the little problems and checking them off the list. Figuring out the mess at Yonge and Eglinton, a major intersection that remains an absolute commuter catastrophe at street level, seems to remain a major problem.
That was seven months ago. We hadn’t heard much about it since. I live quite close to Eglinton and regularly pass a series of future (in theory, anyway) Crosstown stations. They look pretty complete, at least from street level and at a glance. And all along the surface-level portions of the route, things look pretty good, right down to the digital signage that has been installed and offers updates on trains that aren’t running.
What’s the situation now? We got an update this week. And the update was … no one knows.
Well, alright, to be fair, it was a bit more detailed than that, but only insofar as we’ve been promised a bigger update sometime in the coming weeks. In the meantime, all the Metrolinx CEO could offer the public was that work continues and with a “sense of urgency.” Oh. Good.
Look, the real failure here isn’t that the LRT project has been serially delayed. That’s a failure! The ability of either Crosslinx or Metrolinx to pretend that things had gone well on this project evaporated when they started taking each other to court. This has very clearly not been a smooth, successful project. We may ultimately end up with a desperately needed and fully operational transit line that makes lives easier for thousands of people and operates with an excellent record of both safety and mechanical reliability. We may also end up with a fiasco along the lines of the Ottawa LRT, which has been a financial and political disaster. It would be nice to assume that things would go better in Toronto, but that’s all it would be — an assumption. And it doesn’t feel like a particularly safe one at present.
But even so, the real failure here, and it may prove an enduring and damaging one, isn’t the damned trains. It’s the decision by the government to just stop talking about it. Canadian governments have always been horrific when it comes to transparency and accountability — this has been a recurring theme in my writing here and will undoubtedly remain so. But the total silence around the Crosstown for many months still reflected a grim new evolution in our aversion to transparency.
Because, and let’s not be coy or shy in our language, what happened here was that the government had a political problem on its hands, and it seems to have simply decided one day that not saying a damned thing about it to anyone was the least politically risky option. It chose to say absolutely nothing to avoid the hassle of saying anything, and based on what I’ve heard from officials at Metrolinx, it chose to further impose that silence on others. This was a complete perversion of the job of government, which is to be accountable to the public and to hold others — like, say, transit-construction consortiums — accountable on behalf of the public. The government going dark for what certainly look like crass political reasons was a fundamental betrayal of a pretty basic tenet of democracy: they work for us, on our behalf.
And it worked, more or less. Eventually, Brian Lilley — with maybe a bit of help from me and a few others — was able to publicly shame them into saying something. But it took months, and our success was not a foregone conclusion.
Sooner or later, the Eglinton Crosstown will probably open, and it might even work, more or less. That’s about as far as I’ll go in making any predictions on that front. But one prediction I will absolutely make is that the issues-management-via-total-silence strategy is going to be deemed by those inside government as at least a partial success, and we’ll continue to see more and more of it in the future.
I’ll continue to resist that. So will others. But unless the public gets angry, it’s likely to endure for some time. It may even become the new normal.
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