Brampton mayor tries to reverse her LRT vote

'I made a mistake,' Linda Jeffrey says.

Thestar.com
Oct. 28, 2015
By San Grewal

Hours after Brampton Mayor Linda Jeffrey surprised everyone by voting at 1:30 a.m. Wednesday to kill an LRT route she had backed for months, she tried to reverse her vote.

“I made a mistake,” Jeffrey said before lunch at a council meeting. Her failed attempt to change her recorded vote would not have changed the outcome of the light rail transit decision, which passed 7-4.

But Jeffrey said she wanted to show that the vote should have been 6-5, with her on the losing side, instead of in support of the decision to kill the Main St. option.

At the end of a marathon special council meeting that began Tuesday evening to decide the future of a $1.6-billion LRT project, Jeffrey voted along with the majority to remove the Main St. route from consideration and end the LRT at Steeles Ave. for now - with the understanding that alternative routes will now be considered.

Her surprise vote stunned many, including fellow councillors who had supported Jeffrey's aggressive, months-long lobbying effort to get the LRT up Main St.

Asked afterward why she had voted as she did, Jeffrey told reporters she wanted to “make sure that we still have transit on the table.”

But later Wednesday, at the regularly scheduled council meeting, she said, “It was my intention to support the LRT on Main St., I said so publicly.”

Jeffrey admitted she had not read the motion properly: “It was a very long night and I didn't read all of the motion.”

Some councillors were unsympathetic about her request to adjust her vote.

Councillor Elaine Moore pointed out that Jeffrey had already publicly explained why she chose to support killing the Main St. option.

“If you made a wrong decision, well, then you just have to live with it,” said Councillor John Sprovieri. “It's up to you to justify it to whomever it is that is criticizing you.”

The mayor apologized individually to each member who had supported her on the LRT issue for months and voted against killing the Main St. option., then expressed disappointment over the vote that rejected her bid to change her vote.

“I'm sad,” she said, “that this council wouldn't have shown me that courtesy.”