Ottawa’s cold cash is even cooler when it lacks subway sizzle
Money coming to Toronto from the federal government for un-sexy infrastructure improvements promises relief for hot-and-bothered TTC riders.

thestar.com
Aug. 25, 2016
By Edward Keenan

Will it be cool?

For a commuter on an eastbound train awaiting the big announcement of federal transit and transportation infrastructure funding on Tuesday, that maybe was the most pressing question. Please, can we have some cool?

Not like, “Hey, there’s the hunky shirtless prime minister in the background of that family photo! Again!” cool - mere hipness is oddly now an assumed quality where the federal government is concerned, especially after this summer.

But also especially after the summer we’ve had, the question: Will it be cool. Literally. Like, will this infusion of dollars make the air-conditioning work in our subway cars, or will the TTC continue operating its wildly unpopular sauna-on-wheels service in the years ahead?

The short answer is that the dollars to make the air conditioning work on all subway cars have already been available to the TTC this summer, but after years of delayed maintenance, the short-term problem is the logistics of taking cars out of service to repair units. The slightly longer answer, according to the mayor’s office, is that the slew of state-of-good-repair dollars announced as part of this federal package should ensure that the problem with the on-board temperatures doesn’t recur.

But that question is just the sweaty edge of the wedge. And thank heavens. It is a big wedge, this funding announcement, opening up the wallet for scores of projects from the city’s 10-year capital plan: transit maintenance, improvement, and planning (including, encouragingly, millions for the relief subway line and Eglinton East LRT, accessibility (including new Wheel-Trans buses), pedestrian safety improvements, and an astonishing $42 million for cycling infrastructure (more than doubling the money, it appears, that the city planned to spend on cycling in the next two years). In all, $474 million in new cash.

One interesting thing to note is that this announcement only includes projects the city had on its list with budgets under $50 million. As encouraging as this list is, the biggest-ticket items on Toronto’s to-do list are still pending approval from the Treasury Board, which means another monster announcement of even bigger projects is expected in the months ahead (perhaps, one suspects, even including entirely new subway cars with fully functioning air conditioning).

One question about this is about the city’s share of the spending. These are matching funds from the feds, so John Tory’s government will need to cough up $474 million of its own over the next two years to get it - and get all this done. Because these are projects from the existing backlogs in the capital plan, the city government is already aware of the need to pay for them, but I’m told a report this fall will deal with speeding up that funding plan, issuing debt on a faster schedule than planned to meet the federal timeline requirement.

It’s not clear to me yet whether that will necessitate the new revenue sources the mayor has been promising to introduce or not. But it may mean that, paradoxically, this announcement of a federal cash injection will put more pressure on the city’s operating budget, rather than relieve it. A project plan sitting on the shelf only theoretically costs money. A commitment to match federal funds this year requires cold hard cash. Money borrowed today for capital projects creates debt service costs in this year’s operating budget.

We’ll know this fall how big or small a factor this is, but it’s one more card shuffled into an already complicated (and already contentious) 2017 budget deck. More so if these projects push the city to its self-imposed debt ceiling, which it has been approaching in recent years.

But those are weeds to slog through on another day.

In this summer week, it’s enough to marvel at the idea of actually spending money on projects that, while much needed, lack the sizzle of a new subway line, as TTC chair Josh Colle noted. (“It’s hard to ribbon-cut for a subway pump,” he told the Star.)

I wrote a column earlier this year, when the fund these dollars are drawn from was announced, about the longstanding problem of getting big money for things like elevator installation and signal repair. Now, in an itemized list 89 items long, we can see there will be a whole lot of long-overdue dollars going to just such projects.

Unlike so much else associated with this federal government, it doesn’t have sex appeal. But it is cool. Or will be, soon enough.