Subway dominates Scarborough talk
Town hall felt more like a rally where the mayor implored residents to backstop extension
Mayor John Tory was the main attraction at a Scarborough town hall Monday evening that felt more like a rally where he directly implored residents to support the plan to build a single subway stop extension costing at least $3.35 billion.
“I’m going to try and make the case to you for why what we’re doing is the right thing to do,” Tory told the room of more than 150 at the Centennial Recreation Centre in Scarborough. He asked them to contact his council colleagues with that message.
“We are ending years of indecision and waffling with transit across the city.”
Tory framed an upcoming vote at council to advance the subway plan as the last stand in an ongoing “war” waged by advocates of an alternative light-rail plan that would see a network of LRTs built across the region — including a seven-stop LRT that was to be fully funded by the province to replace the aging Scarborough RT.
He was joined by local politicians from both city hall and the province who also pushed support for a subway, citing projected future job growth in a region that has fallen well behind in both commercial and residential development.
“I think we’ve waited long enough,” said Scarborough Centre MPP and Ontario’s Economic Development Minister Brad Duguid. “The time for talk is over.”
Those arguments received raucous applause from the local crowd. But when it came time for questions, the politicians were met with anxiety from residents over access to new transit. Many asked about the commitment to a 17-stop LRT along Eglinton Ave. E. that was promised as part of the revised subway plan, whether it could be built at the same time, and if the city would ensure funding. Last month, a staff report announced the cost of the one-stop extension had increased to $3.35 billion, not including financing and other necessary costs that staff calculations show could push the cost above the allotted $3.56 billion in funding from all three levels of government.
Tory and senior staff originally promised both the subway extension and the Eglinton East LRT could be funded within that envelope. But with increases to cost estimates of the subway — what is still less than 5 per cent designed and at risk of further cost fluctuations — the LRT has been effectively priced out.
The mayor has said he will look to the provincial and federal governments to make up the $1.6-billion funding shortfall, and earlier on Monday said without that line “we cannot truly serve the people of Scarborough.”
On Monday evening he said the major “impediment” to building both lines was “money.”
Duguid — who told Tory the subway will be cancelled over his “dead body” — earlier told the Scarborough Mirror no additional money is available from the province for the LRT. He made no pledges to finance the LRT Monday night.
The city has applied for federal funding for the LRT line in the next round of infrastructure spending, which has yet to be announced. One woman asked if there would be a new transit stop at Centennial College, which sponsored the event and whose Progress Ave. campus is located less than two kilometres from the recreation centre where the town hall was being held.
Local councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker (Ward 38 Scarborough Centre) explained a station would not be built there.
What was left unsaid is that the original plan to build a seven-stop LRT would have included a station at the Centennial College campus. With the subway, there is no plan to connect the school to rapid transit.