Mayor blasts Metrolinx over lack of public consultation on transit plans

Mayor Tory also defended the city’s fair wage policy, which the provincial transit agency has refused to follow.

Thestar.com
June 9, 2022
David Rider

Toronto officials are at loggerheads with the provincial agency building new transit lines over a 129-year-old city policy aimed at preventing the exploitation of contracted construction workers.

Mayor John Tory is defending the city’s so-called fair wage policy, while blasting Metrolinx’s record on public consultations with Torontonians over other concerns related to the routes of planned transit lines and coming construction disruption.

Tory told his executive committee Wednesday he strongly supports transit expansion, but if Metrolinx officials don’t like being “left with a degree of uncertainty,” as deadlines loom to sign construction contracts, they should “speed up the work” answering questions and concerns from residents and city council.

The mayor made the remarks after Mount Dennis residents repeated pleas for the province to bury a planned elevated section of the Eglinton Crosstown West Extension. City staff said Metrolinx hadn’t responded to a past council request to look at that option.

Metrolinx is “certainly not up to, and accustomed to, the standards we set for public consultation in anything we do, whether it’s transit or not,” the mayor said.

A city staff update on transit plans and negotiations included a note about city utility work that Metrolinx will be asked to do, and bill the city for, while it has tracts excavated for tunnels and stations on the province’s subways, light rail and GO expansion programs.

The transportation agency refused a city request to agree to follow, while doing that work, the fair wage policy long in force to ensure workers for private companies hired for city projects get competitive wages and equal treatment.

Metrolinx itself, as a provincial agency, is not bound by the policy. But it is concerned, city staff say, that extending wage and work-condition guarantees to its crews doing work for the city could force it to do likewise for workers on Metrolinx projects including public-private partnerships, driving up costs.

City staff, facing the spectre of city crews redigging holes and dismantling work done by Metrolinx, thereby increasing city costs, recommended granting the first-ever exemption to fair wage policy enacted in 1893.

That triggered protests from Toronto trade union officials. They said contracted workers doing Metrolinx jobs would likely be unionized and earn at least the city-set fair-wage pay scale, but suspending the policy would set a terrible precedent.

“Working people, including construction workers, are struggling to make ends meet, and Metrolinx’s attempt to circumvent fair wages for the very workers who build our infrastructure is objectionable, worrisome and plain wrong,” said Marc Arsenault of the Provincial Building and Construction Trades Council of Ontario.

Tory proposed a successful motion to delete the exemption and replace it with a recommendation that city staff work with Metrolinx to find a way to let transit projects proceed while maintaining the integrity of the fair wage policy.

City staff were directed to report on progress at next week’s city council meeting.

Metrolinx spokesperson Anne Marie Aikins said the agency did not receive any direction on fair wages from Premier Doug Ford’s government and, given executive committee’s vote, “we will continue talking with the city to find a resolution.”

Toronto’s fair wage policy has come under attack in the past. Rob Ford was elected mayor in 2010 promising to scrap the policy, saying it would save the city money, but he did not do so during his term in office.