Del Duca won’t verify he lobbied for GO stop

Transportation Minister Steven Del Duca wouldn’t declare whether he advocated for Metrolinx to approve a new $100-million GO Transit station in his riding, saying only that he has a “collaborative relationship” with the transit agency and he believes the stop is justified by sound planning.

As the Star reported Monday, last June the Metrolinx board approved a new station in Vaughan at Kirby Rd., despite a government analysis that found adding the stop on the Barrie line would induce more people to drive than take transit and would have negative economic and environmental impacts.

Following his remarks at an unrelated news conference Tuesday morning, a reporter asked Del Duca whether he played a role in advocating for Kirby station.

“As minister of transportation there’s a collaborative relationship that exists between my ministry and the agency responsible for delivering the transit that we need in this region,” said Del Duca, who has represented Vaughan for the Ontario Liberals since 2012.

Asked whether that meant he did advocate for the stop, Del Duca said “That’s the answer that it is. There’s a collaborative relationship.”

Del Duca said there is strong rationale for building the station, and argued that “for the first time in a generation,” the province is “planning to build transit as communities grow, instead of trying to force the transit infrastructure in after the fact.”

“And when you do it (after the fact), you run into a few problems. One is you don’t have the infrastructure in place as the community is growing. Number two is it’s often more disruptive to come back and do it later on. It takes more time, and it’s actually more expensive,” he said.

Del Duca said the station “will be built in an area that over the next 10 years will see 35,000 new people” living nearby.

The Metrolinx report, which was prepared by a private consultant, projected lower densities around the station, using numbers from a draft secondary plan study that went before Vaughan city council in February 2016. The study projected that at “full build-out” there would be between 19,000 and 26,700 people living in the wider area around the station, known as Block 27.

Kirby was one of 12 new stations Metrolinx approved in June.