Torontonians who use public transit often commiserate over their public transit woes – and it appears those sentiments even extend itself into city council meetings.
During Toronto’s city council meeting on Wednesday, councillors discussed the future of the SmartTrack transit station program first pitched by former mayor John Tory, with several of them expressing their frustrations over the project.
Originally, SmartTrack was set to have 22 stations – at a price tag of about $8 billion – running along existing GO Transit rail corridors between Markham and Union Station, through Toronto’s Pearson airport. The transit project was one of the key promises during Tory’s successful 2014 mayoral campaign and at the time he promised that construction could start in 2021.
Years later, the plan was substantially pared down to five new stations along three existing GO corridors.
Then at Wednesday’s meeting, councillors voted to make three of those stations – East Harbour, Bloor-Lansdowne and St. Clair-Old Weston – a priority and ask the province for additional money to pay for the remaining two, King-Liberty and Finch-Kennedy.
Following the vote, Coun. Gord Perks moved to “replace” the names of the SmartTrack stations, with pointed monikers toward the project.
Among the proposed names, Perks suggested: Boondoggle Station, Too Good to be True, Won’t Get Fooled Again, Ever Get the Feeling You’ve Been Cheated and Tory’s Folly.
“We need to be more serious as a government than we were in under the previous administration. We need to make real commitments to the people of Toronto about the future we want and fight and work and deliver,” Perks said during the meeting, pointing to the city’s current “big gap” in transit service with long-delayed projects like the Eglinton Crosstown LRT and Finch West LRT.
“I can’t think of any other moment in my lifetime where the City of Toronto took such a terribly wrong turn. My motion makes light of the fact because, quite frankly, if I wasn’t laughing I’d be crying. So, I encourage all of you to fight for a real future for Toronto instead of the fake ones that we get promised sometimes.”
Coun. Brad Bradford lambasted the “cheap shot motion,” saying Mayor Olivia Chow’s administration is wasting time and taxpayer dollars.
“Debate the merits of a policy? Sure. But this is an unserious motion from an unserious government,” Bradford wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
Council speaker Frances Nunziata ultimately ruled Perks’s motion out of order, concluding that if the city is “pleading with the province to fund it, I don’t think this is the way to do it.”
The current budget for SmartTrack is $1.689 billion, according to a staff report, with the city contributing $878 million, the province $226 million, and the federal government $585 million. This budget is actually a $226 million increase the city requested for in June 2023, as the original SmartTrack program budget was $1.463 billion.