Battling cancer often means battling the 401
Last week news dropped that Doug Ford’s government had quietly dismantled the group planning a high-speed rail link stretching from Windsor to Toronto’s Union Station. In Waterloo Region, where I live, this news was predictable and depressing.
Right now, there is no reasonable way to get from Waterloo to Toronto without getting on Highway 401. We have a few trains, but they’re timed for travellers or workers only going to Toronto in the morning and returning in the evening.
Communities outside the GTA have begged for regular train service to Toronto since the Liberal government first started breaking politically costly transit promises in 2008. Recently, when Waterloo MPP Catharine Fife asked the Ford government for clarity on the commitment to all-day-two way GO service, she was condescendingly told to “stay tuned,” by Transport Minister Jeff Yurek.
Ontario’s transit situation is untenable. Every morning, one fender-bender is all that stands between getting to work on time and thousands of commuters unproductively grinding through traffic. But fair transit is about more than economics (and the environment). For many it’s about life or death.
In 2016, I was diagnosed with stage-three testicular cancer. Over several frustrating months, inexperienced local doctors failed to identify my excruciating back pain as “innumerable” tumours growing in my abdomen, lungs, kidneys and brain.
Told we couldn’t get the care I needed in Waterloo, my family put my tortured body into a vehicle and drove up the 401 to Princess Margaret Cancer Centre. After some begging and lying about where I lived, I was admitted.
Miraculously, within 24 hours, I had an accurate diagnosis, chemotherapy schedule, and a 50 per cent chance of survival. In that terrifying instant, everyone I love had their life reoriented115 km east to my hospital room on University Ave.
I am lucky. I’m relatively affluent and between my wife and parents I always had a driver confident enough to ferry me to treatment and offer critical support while life-saving chemicals, blood, and plasma were pumped into my exhausted veins.
I can’t imagine how someone outside the GTA with limited access to cars could get to life-saving treatment they literally can’t get anywhere else.
The timing of chemotherapy matters. You can be late for work if there’s a blizzard. You can reschedule a missed flight. You cannot miss chemotherapy.
On hundreds of trips — anywhere between 90 and 200 minutes each — my loved-ones battled and fought through a gridlocked core, then onto a crawling Gardiner Expressway, and finally a dangerous 401. I’d often wonder, “What are the chances of us dying on the 401 compared to me dying of cancer?”
This stress took a tremendous mental and physical toll on everyone. It was also expensive. We spent thousands of dollars in parking, gas, and lost vacation days. Car travel was by far the biggest expense of my otherwise miraculously bill-free health care. I’m not suggesting I would have taken a train to my appointments. But visitors offering crucial support could have. Even now, near-monthly followup appointments are lost vacation days trapped in traffic.
It makes sense that PMH, and services like it, are in downtown Toronto. They serve the most people and concentrate expertise. The trade-off is that we need fair and durable options for regional travel that at least keep roads clear for those who need them most.
Between 2008 and 2016, 98.6 per cent of all net new jobs in Ontario happened in Toronto and Ottawa. Every day thousands of Ontarians perched on the Megacity’s event horizon have no choice but get sucked into Toronto’s core for precious jobs and services they need to survive. Most have little choice but to drive. Just ask the 3,000 people in Oshawa now looking for work.
Every year commuting on our roads becomes more unbearable. It’s distorting the housing market, cutting off opportunity and fomenting cultural and political resentment.
The real tragedy might be that this resentment fuels the same governments who refuse to commit to sustainable transit. We need solidarity between citizens in and outside Toronto who are forced to drive, and who don’t want to. Until then, stay tuned.