Shortchanged on rapid transit

In the wacky lottery of Ontario government transit funding, the lucky cities of Mississauga and Brampton just won the jackpot. Unlucky Waterloo Region got the shaft.

Last week’s provincial budget sealed Queen’s Park’s love affair with the two, riding-rich Toronto-area cities by committing the government to fund 100 per cent of their soon-to-be-built light rail transit system known as the Hurontario Line. That pledge will cost Ontario taxpayers, including those in Waterloo Region, $1.6 billion.

Those numbers will — and should — stick in the craws of the people of this community. The province came through with $300 million for us. That amounts to just over a third of the project’s cost. While the citizens of Brampton and Mississauga pay almost nothing for their light rail, people in this community have to chip in $253 million for our Ion — almost a third of the cost.

That’s unfair. Our forward-thinking regional government began its light rail odyssey more than a decade ago, exploring and studying the idea, coming up with proposals and weighing options before making a decision. While the Ontario government originally promised to pay two-thirds of the project’s cost, it later cut its contribution back to a third.

Liberal apologists will argue the populous and growing cities of Mississauga and Brampton urgently need the better kind of public transit service that will be provided by light rail. In contrast, the apologists would say light rail in Waterloo Region is about urban renewal, about creating greater density in city cores, as it is about moving people around.

Nonsense. The need for better public transit may be greater in those two cities than in Waterloo Region at the moment. But directing more growth to Waterloo Region’s urban cores and, because of this, affording greater protection to our countryside is as important a goal as putting riders in light rail trains. Indeed, provincial law, in the form of the Places to Grow Act, insists on greater urban intensification in this region.

So what did we do wrong? Should we have screamed or jumped up and down? Informed by the Liberals that the province was short of cash, the region’s leaders and light rail supporters gracefully accepted the responsibility to pay a share of the project. Today, we look like chumps.

But light rail isn’t the only area where the Ontario government’s action doesn’t live up to its sales job in Waterloo Region. Premier Kathleen Wynne has dangled the prospect of full-day, two-way GO train service for Kitchener over this community the way a pet-owner would tempt a cat with a toy mouse.

What we have now are two trains taking more than two hours to go to Toronto each weekday morning and two trains taking more than two hours to return to Kitchener each weekday afternoon. By the end of 2016, that service will double. But we’ll have to wait five years for rush hour trains that depart from Kitchener every 30 minutes in the morning and return from Toronto with the same frequency in the afternoon. Sometime between now and 2024, an express GO train will run from Kitchener to Toronto. As for Cambridge’s repeated pleas for GO service — they’re not even being considered at the moment.

We don’t mean to sound entirely ungrateful in all this. The Liberals did come through with light rail funding and they did extend GO service — albeit a painfully slow service — to this region. They deserve credit for that. But when we see Waterloo Region chipping in for the cost of its light rail tickets while Brampton and Mississauga get a free ride, we get annoyed.