A report on the mayor’s transit plan mistakenly included inflated numbers. City staff knew but failed to fix them before council voted

Senior staff’s decision to not correct numbers in a SmartTrack report is a serious violation of public service’s duty, say some councillors.

Thestar.com
Feb. 2, 2022
Ben Spurr

Senior city of Toronto staff knowingly presented council with figures that exaggerated the benefits of Mayor John Tory’s signature transit plan ahead of an important vote last year, the Star has learned.

Emails obtained through a freedom of information request show staff inadvertently published projections in an attachment to a January 2021 report that overstated how many riders, residents and jobs Tory’s $1.46-billion SmartTrack program would serve.

The errors were the result of staff accidentally including a station that wasn’t part of SmartTrack in their analysis, according to the emails. Senior bureaucrats were alerted to the problem after the report was posted online but days before it was debated by the mayor’s executive committee and council, yet they decided not to correct it.

According to the city, high-ranking civil servants determined the errors weren’t significant enough to change staff’s overall advice or affect the decision councillors were being asked to make, so there was no need to rectify the mistakes.

But some council members say staff’s decision not to correct the figures represents a serious violation of their duty to provide council with accurate information, and risks further undermining public trust in Toronto transit planning.

“The revelation that SmartTrack’s numbers have been inflated is a serious breach of trust,” said Coun. Josh Matlow (Ward 12, Toronto--St. Paul’s). “They outright decided to provide incorrect information to council that made SmartTrack look better than it was.”

Matlow has criticized transit planning in Toronto as overly politicized, and said staff exaggerating the benefits of SmartTrack will fuel concerns that bureaucrats haven’t given impartial advice about projects backed by sitting mayoral administrations. He said he would request an administrative inquiry into the incident ahead of the scheduled council meeting in March.

“The public deserves answers, accountability, and an honest transit plan that they can rely on,” Matlow said.

According to the city, staff never discussed the faulty SmartTrack projections with the mayor or anyone in his office, and their actions weren’t based on a desire to avoid making edits that would have made Tory’s transit plan look worse than the report initially suggested.

“The Toronto public service act with integrity in all they do; any suggestion to the contrary would be unfortunate, and patently false,” said city spokesperson Brad Ross.

Don Peat, a spokesperson for the mayor, said Tory and his office had no knowledge of staff’s handling of the report until contacted about it by the Star.

The mayor and council “rely on the expert advice of city staff on this and countless other matters and we are confident they approach this with the utmost professionalism and commitment to the city of Toronto,” he said.

SmartTrack was a central plank of Tory’s successful 2014 mayoral campaign. The original idea was for a “surface subway” of 22 stops that would quickly deliver badly needed transit to Toronto by adding stations to existing provincial GO Transit rail lines in the city. The stations were originally supposed to be in service by 2021.

But the plan has withered since Tory took office, and by early last year city staff had landed on an updated version that consisted of just five new stops. The stations would be funded by the city and federal government but built by the province as part of a wider regional GO expansion, and wouldn’t be complete until 2026.

On Jan. 20, 2021, the city published a staff report seeking council’s approval to go ahead with the revised program. The report was scheduled to be debated by Tory’s executive committee on Jan. 27, before going to council for a final vote on Feb. 2.

The emails the Star received through the freedom of information request are incomplete because the city withheld thousands of pages’ worth of emails related to the SmartTrack plan, claiming they fell under exemptions to freedom of information legislation.

But the nearly 700 pages of documents the city did release show that on the morning of Friday, Jan. 22, two days after the SmartTrack report was posted online, a manager in the city’s transportation planning department alerted James Perttula, Toronto’s director of transit planning, that numbers in an attachment looked wrong.

The manager said the figures appeared to be based on outdated modelling that included the effect of a station at Spadina-Front that had once been considered for the SmartTrack plan, but had been removed months earlier.

By including the extra station, the published report overestimated how many people would use the SmartTrack stations. According to a corrected version of the attachment that was included in the emails but never published, instead of reflecting the city’s up-to-date analysis that the five SmartTrack stations would serve 21,000 boardings and disembarkings at their busiest hour and 3,100 new daily riders by 2041, the public report mistakenly projected they would serve 24,000 and 3,400, respectively.

Some of the published projections were off by much more. The published attachment said the five stations would be located close to 103,000 existing jobs, more than double city planners’ actual estimate of just 46,000. It also said more than 113,000 residents lived near the station locations, while planners had determined the figure was just 72,000.

The published attachment also wrongly stated the stations would support about 40,000 residents experiencing social and economic inequities, while planners had estimated it was actually about 30,000.

Derrick Toigo, executive director of the city’s transit expansion office, recommended that staff stick with the report and the attachments with the incorrect numbers, but that adjustments could be made later if they were needed.

Shortly after being alerted to the problem, Perttula asked a staff member to find out “how we can correct the numbers.” Hours later, Perttula alerted high-ranking city staff that numbers were incorrect.

“We discovered a few errors in some modelling numbers,” he told deputy city manager Tracey Cook, in an email he also sent to Derrick Toigo, executive director of the transit expansion office, chief planner Gregg Lintern and one other staffer.

“Are you comfortable with us updating this with (city clerks)?” he asked Cook, suggesting they discuss the issue on Monday morning.

On Monday, Jan. 25, Toigo wrote back to the group, saying that after speaking with Perttula, he’d concluded the city’s unpublished estimates were “more up to date,” but “will not make a difference in the overall information that will be communicated to the executive committee and to council.”

“My recommendation is that we stay the course with the current report and the attachments,” Toigo said, adding that “at some point in the future we can make adjustments or provide clarity if it is required.”

Cook, who holds the second most powerful position in the city bureaucracy, agreed. “I am fine we can speak to it if raised,” she said.

Tracey Cook, deputy city manager, agreed in an email that the staff report should remain with the incorrect numbers.

In the two ensuing city hall debates about the report, including a 40-minute discussion at council during which Toigo and Perttula took questions from councillors, staff never mentioned the SmartTrack projections before them were based on the inclusion of a station that wasn’t in the plan.

Spadina-Front wasn’t part of previous council-approved versions of SmartTrack. In response to questions from the Star, the city explained staff had been asked to look at adding a stop after two stations in an earlier six-station version of the plan, at Gerrard-Carlaw and Lawrence-Kennedy, were removed.

Staff did modelling based on Spadina-Front’s inclusion, but the stop was eventually dropped. Instead, a fifth station, at Bloor-Lansdowne, was added to the revised plan. The other four stations still in the program are King-Liberty, St. Clair--Old Weston, East Harbour and Finch-Kennedy.

By January 2021, councillors had already approved previous iterations of SmartTrack, and there’s no indication they would have voted against the plan if staff had provided more accurate projections about the revised version.

But Coun. Gord Perks (Ward 4, Parkdale--High Park) rejected staff’s explanation that there was no reason to correct the report because they believed the errors weren’t material to council’s decision.

He said that reasoning might be acceptable in the case of an inexpensive, routine city project, but SmartTrack “is a very controversial multibillion-dollar project, and staff revise reports to correct errors all the time.”

“It is a breach of the most fundamental relationships when city staff knowingly misinform council,” he said. “It’s unacceptable.”

Matlow agreed. “It’s not for city staff to unilaterally decide if factual information would be material to the outcome of the vote. Their job is to provide city council with factual, relevant information,” he said.

Tory continues to support the SmartTrack plan, and says it will deliver real benefits to Torontonians. Peat, his spokesperson, said “SmartTrack is part of a modern, integrated and expanded transit network that the city is getting built.”