Toronto transit funding needs to stop relying on Queen's Park and the feds

With Toronto’s mayoral race already in high gear, we’re going to hear a whole lot about transit plans over the next few months — so let’s establish some parameters.

A good transit plan is based on the advice of experts. It’s fully costed and funded, with chosen routes based on projected ridership, not politics. And it uses the technology — subway, LRT, hover board, whatever — that can best serve that ridership in a cost-effective way.

And also, it doesn’t completely hinge on the provincial and federal governments giving Toronto cash.

Don’t get me wrong. Queen’s Park and Ottawa absolutely should be contributing more money toward the TTC. Toronto’s transit system is woefully underfunded compared to pretty much every other North American city.

On the federal side, Canada remains the only G8 country without a national transit strategy, so federal money for transit pretty much only materializes when something like the Olympics comes to town. On the provincial side, the expansion of our rail network pretty much stopped after the provincial government withdrew from a funding agreement that saw the province cover 75 per cent of the cost on all TTC projects.

This status quo should change. It desperately needs to change. But recent history tells us that change isn’t likely to happen — no matter who wins the mayor’s job in October.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, as always, has little to gain from pandering to Toronto. Meanwhile, Premier Kathleen Wynne continues to talk a good game about her commitment to transit — she’s set to make a “major announcement” regarding transit funding today — but the fact remains that she leads a fragile minority government that may not even get a chance to deliver on their commitments.

As a result, I don’t care if your name is Chow, Tory, Stintz, Soknacki or Ford — no one can assume there will be more transit money coming from these governments.

That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t try, of course. But it also means candidates need a Plan B: a strategy for how they’ll deliver on improved transit if the other levels of governments don’t respond to Toronto’s appeals for transit cash.

Yes, that’ll force them to talk about things politicians don’t like to talk about during election campaigns. Things like how municipal revenues, taxes and debt might be leveraged to support transit construction that actually happens some time in the next decade.

That won’t be easy, but it could represent a big opportunity. With its own money on the table, Toronto would actually be in control of its own future — and not subject to the whims of other governments. We’d be masters of our own transit destiny.

And that’s important. Because more than anything else, a good transit plan is one that actually leads to shovels finally getting into the ground.