Comment 81278

By RL (anonymous) | Posted September 26, 2012 at 17:56:14

Hamiltonians, don't get worked up over the LRTs Toronto gets. From Toronto myself, I can assure you that the deal Toronto gets isn't as promising as it sounds. There's no free lunch, let alone $8.4 billion. The province does not have a stack of cash stored in a vault in the basement of Queen's Park. Metrolinx has been relunctant to discuss its funding plans, but we all know that it's coming down to some combination of regional sales surtax and road tolls in the GTA, which are disguise for a rather large municipal share towards the projects (hopefully Hamilton will be exempt from them if it doesn't get funding for the LRT). Meanwhile, Toronto's LRT lines have already been scaled back in 2009 as result of retracted promises from McGuinty (is this anything new?). Even then, the future of LRT is still uncertain, for there has been non-stop political tension (councillors vs mayor, TTC vs Metrolinx, etc.) over the lines from day one. Given the province's current fiscal position, the Liberals couldn't have done better watching from the sidelines and hoping something would derail the projects without making them look like the culprits. And if nothing works, the province can always tell us "sorry, we don't have the money we thought we'd have" and turn this into another Network 2011 fiasco.

And meanwhile, be realistic and don't expect Queen's Park to pay for the full cost of Hamilton's LRT. Given the province's track record, you should be happy if your LRT ever gets built at all.

Permalink | Context

Events Calendar

There are no upcoming events right now.
Why not post one?

Recent Articles

Article Archives

Blog Archives

Site Tools

Feeds