Federal budget's transit promises do little to help cities now

Give it up for my least favourite sentence in the freshly-unveiled 2015 Canadian federal budget:

“Economic Action Plan 2015 proposes to provide PPP Canada Inc. with new funding of $750 million over two years, starting in 2017–18, and $1 billion per year ongoing thereafter for a new Public Transit Fund.”

It’s repeated, with some variation, a few times throughout the document. At a glance, it sounds like genuinely good news. Big numbers are promised for new public transit spending — exactly what advocates have been calling for. Time to break out the champagne, right? The federal government is finally going to fund transit in Canadian cities!

Record scratch! It's just sneaky phrasing from the government, and optimism quickly fades when you start to parse it.

First, there’s the weirdness of saying the spending will first come in the form of “$750 million over two years.” Why talk about the combined spending over two years? Why not break it out?

Perhaps it's because spelling out the actual annual spending plan makes the federal government’s vaunted commitment to public transit look far less impressive. The details call for a mere $250 million to be spent on public transit in Canada for the 2017-2018 budget year — not even enough to build one measly kilometre of subway track. That will go up to $500 million in 2018-2019, then a billion dollars in 2019-2020, assuming everything goes according to plan.

That's a big assumption.

But wait, there’s something odd about those dates, isn’t there? Why are we talking about years like 2017, 2018 and 2019? Reliable sources tell me the year humanity is living in right now on Earth is, in fact, 2015.

So does this budget propose any spending on public transit from this “public transit fund” this year, maybe to fund some of the dozens of planned transit projects that Canadian cities need?

It does not.

Despite there being a very good case for increased federal involvement in public transit, and despite Canadian cities facing massive state-of-good-repair backlogs and costly congestion problems, the budget proposes zero immediate action.

That's why it was so baffling to see John Tory, the mayor of a city grappling with those exact problems, lavish praise on this budget yesterday.

“Finally, and for the first time in history, Canada has a permanent national fund for transit that will soon add up to $1 billion annually for transit projects.” he told reporters.

The mayor has a very loose definition of “soon.” That billion dollars won’t come until after the next municipal election. More importantly for him, it won’t arrive until two years before his promised deadline to deliver SmartTrack.

If I were in the mayor’s shoes, that would worry me. Tory has committed to an aggressive seven-year timeline for SmartTrack, and a funding plan that calls for about $2.7 billion in federal funding.

It’s still early in Tory’s term, sure, but the clock is ticking — and the 2015 federal budget does nothing to help.