TTC takeover may be tempting

Cross-posted from Eye Daily.

The Toronto Star is in a tizzy over speculation that the province may want to upload responsibility of our beloved TTC to the Greater Toronto Transportation Authority (GTTA). Yesterday, it reported that the TTC was building a public relations campaign in the event that the province tries to pull such a move, and Chair Adam Giambrone has publicly stated that the TTC belongs to Toronto.

Today, the Star has GTTA chair Rob McIssac saying his organization has no interest in taking over Toronto’s public transit, and provincial sources (whomever they may be) say that although the cabinet did bounce around the idea pre-election, it was dismissed. But Ian Urquhart’s column in yesterday’s Star gave cause for concern (at least for those of us who think a takeover would be bad for Toronto’s public transit). First, he argues that the province is unlikely to upload all social programs because it isn’t as awash in cash as us Torontonians think.

“Even if there is a large surplus, the province faces many competing demands for money — to pay for improvements to health care, education, transportation, the environment, and so on,” Urquhart writes. “The struggle for dollars, then, is not so much between the municipalities and some amorphous entity called ‘the province.’ Rather, it is between municipalities and hospitals or schools.”

(I would argue that if all these very important things are in need of funds, the province should use its ability to raise money through taxes to support them. Steal some of the Green Party’s ideas and levy fines against companies that produce toxic emissions, for example, or tax plastic bags. Or, if the federal government is going to cut GST by 1%, raise PST by 1%. The province has the power to implement much fairer taxes than cities do and they should use it if the quality of these services are in jeopardy. To pit schools and hospitals against cities (which also provide vital services) is a cop out. But I digress.)

Since any municipal uploading would have to be done province-wide (which means a higher price tag than if Toronto’s programs were uploaded alone), Urquhart suggests that the province might look for a Toronto-specific solution (i.e. a way to ease Toronto’s financial woes, without having to ease anyone elses). Taking over the TTC, argues Urquhart, would be one way to get away with providing Toronto financial help while not providing help to anyone else. There could be other benefits as well: as Giambrone was quoted as saying, since public transit is important to voters, “the province might have an interest in managing that file directly and being able to take credit for it.”

Today’s article implies that the reason cabinet ministers dismissed the idea was because if the province took over the TTC, they would have to take responsibility for other transit systems as well. Others might argue that the province already gives the GTA special treatment by having the GTTA.

So should we be worried about a provincial takeover of the TTC? Urquhart poses a different question: “Are the city’s budget woes big enough to persuade the mayor and councillors to surrender that turf?”

photo by Tanja-Tiziana Burdi.

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