Transport Committee on Nov. 2nd, 2011

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to meeting number 10 of the Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities.

The orders of the day are before us. We have the report issued by the subcommittee that met on Monday. I believe that everybody has a copy in French and English, and I would ask members to look at this. There was quite a bit of discussion on the agreements that we came to on that particular day.

I'll open up the floor for comments.

Mr. Nicholls, go ahead please.

[Jamie Nicholls, NDP, Vaudreuil—Soulanges, QC]

Mr. Chair, we'd have liked it if the study of the bill had been a little longer. We're a bit disappointed that only about three sessions remain to study the bill. We really haven't had the time to call witnesses such as representatives of the Union des municipalités du Québec, the mayors of Quebec municipalities, and the mayors of big cities like Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto. I think that's a shortcoming...

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

A point of order, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

Mr. Richards, on a point of order.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

We're discussing committee business at the present time, correct?

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

We're discussing the report that's in front of us, yes.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

Yes. Should we not be in camera for that discussion?

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

We're not obligated to be in camera, but if it's a motion we would have to entertain it.

Mr. Richards?

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

I move that we go in camera for the discussion of committee business.

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

There's a motion on the floor that we move in camera to discuss the subcommittee's report. It's non-debatable, so I will call the vote now. All those in favour? All those opposed?

(Motion agreed to)

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

With that, I'm going to take a two-minute recess and ask everyone in the back not affiliated with the discussion, to leave, please. We won't be long. We'll come back out to get you.

[Proceedings continue in camera]

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

Thank you. Welcome back to the Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities. Our orders of the day are pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), a study of the national public transit strategy.

Joining us today from Metrolinx is Bruce McCuaig, president and chief executive officer, and Dina Graser, acting vice-president, strategic communications.

Welcome. I know that you have a visual presentation. I will ask you to start and then we'll move to committee questions.

[Bruce McCuaig, President and Chief Executive Officer, Metrolinx]

Thank you very much. It's a real pleasure to be here today and an honour to appear before the committee.

I have a short presentation that will take me about 10 minutes, and then I think there's an opportunity to engage in a bit of a discussion and to dialogue after that.

In the first few slides, we really just talk a little bit about who Metrolinx is and what our role is in transportation planning for the greater Toronto and Hamilton area.

As you can see in slide 3, we're a relatively young organization. We were created only in 2006.

We were created to develop a more modern, more efficient, and more integrated transportation system for the greater Toronto and Hamilton area. We have three key words that drive our activities.

First of all, we're planning for the future. We're thinking in the short, the medium, and the long term, and we think typically in 25-year horizons. We deliver--and our objective is to deliver--quality transportation projects on time and on budget.

We also are responsible for the delivery of direct services to the public. You may be familiar with the GO Transit service, for example, the regional rail and bus service in the greater Toronto and Hamilton area.

We are a multimodal agency. We deal with all modes of transport. But today's focus really is to talk a little bit about the transit system, and I'm going to focus my remarks to that.

We have three operating divisions at Metrolinx. GO Transit is our rail and bus service that crosses the area. PRESTO deals with the smart-card-integrated system that allows people to pay for their transit fares on multiple transit systems. Our newest division is the Air Rail Link, which I'll talk about in just a few moments.

GO Transit is the largest part of our organization. It was launched in 1967 and came into Metrolinx as part of the organization in 2009. We carry about 59 million passengers on an annual basis. This means that about 150,000 passengers are carried into downtown Toronto each and every workday, and it has been growing very quickly over the past five years. We've had a ridership increase of about 21%, which works out to about 5% in each of the past five years. This year to date we're growing at about 8%.

We're proud of our 94% on-time performance, and we're also proud that one of our leadership responsibilities in the greater Toronto and Hamilton area is to raise the bar in customer service and improve the customer experience. We've issued what we've called a Passenger Charter. It gives a series of promises to our customers about the level of service they can expect from us.

We're using key performance indicators to report publicly, in a very transparent fashion, on how we're achieving against the promises we've made. We believe that's part of our role and responsibility: to drive change in the transit world in the region.

The PRESTO system is smart-card technology. It came into the Metrolinx organization in 2011. I'm pleased to say that we've rolled out this system across the entire GO rail and bus network, as well as in all of the local transit systems in what's called the 905 area, the regional or suburban transit systems in the greater Toronto and Hamilton area. We are currently at 12 TTC subway stations as well.

We are going to be deploying PRESTO here in Ottawa starting in the spring. We're in the final stages of negotiations with the TTC about deploying PRESTO on the balance of the TTC system over the next few years.

There currently are about 90,000 customers who have PRESTO in their wallets and purses. This is a significant information technology project that we've been able to deliver on time and on budget.

The Air Rail Link is a project that's under construction right now. Our objective is to have an operating air-rail link between Union Station, in downtown Toronto, and Pearson International Airport, by the spring of 2015. This will provide a reliable, fast, and comfortable level of service between the two largest passenger transportation hubs in Canada, with service every 15 minutes and travel time of approximately 25 minutes door to door.

The region that we're serving is a large, diverse, and growing area. There are currently about 6 million people in the greater Toronto and Hamilton area, which stretches from Hamilton in the west, through to the Oshawa-Clarington area in the east, and up to Barrie in the north. We have linkages to the areas immediately outside the greater Toronto and Hamilton area. We provide service to places like Niagara Falls, Barrie, Peterborough, Kitchener-Waterloo, and so on.

Because we're a transportation agency, we have to look at all modes of transport, particularly from central and eastern Canada. This is an important goods-movement corridor, with all rail corridors and road-based corridors heading toward the U.S. markets through the greater Toronto and Hamilton area.

We're growing by about 100,000 to 150,000 people each and every year. There are 10 transit agencies, and integrating and coordinating our activities is one of the big objectives that we have as an organization, in addition to making sure our connections are made to the surrounding area as well.

Just to give you a bit of a sense of the challenge we're facing, this slide shows an image from 2001, and the blue area does not necessarily represent good transportation service. These are areas where we're having congestion in peak periods. We estimated that in 2001 the impact on the regional gross domestic product was approximately $6 billion and resulted in 26,000 fewer jobs in the regional economy, and that's on an annual basis. That occurs each and every year.

We've also done forecasts to 2031, which is our planning horizon, of what it would look like if we did a business as usual approach. If we continue to invest in transportation at the rate we're investing, what would happen to our transportation system, based upon population and economic activity?

In that timeframe, we would have 2.6 million more people moving into this region. There would be about seven million more trips because of people travelling both to and from work, on leisure trips, and for other family reasons. Our current travel time in the region is estimated at 82 minutes a day, which, we're not proud to say, is among the highest in North America. In a business as usual environment, we estimate that our average annual commute times would grow to about 109 minutes each and every day, for both transit and road-based transport, and that $6 billion impact on our regional GDP would increase to about $15 billion, again in a business as usual context.

We clearly don't want to see that happen. We do have a plan, which we call “The Big Move”, which is about how we make sure that our future in the greater Toronto and Hamilton area is a more positive one, both for the region and in terms of the contributions we make to the national economy as well. We do have the largest transit expansion program in Canadian history under way right now.

Our 25-year integrated transportation plan is, again, a multimodal one, but we have four key transit-related goals. Our first goal is to double the mode share that transit has of daily trips. Our second goal is to triple the length of rapid transit in the region, which would include the subway system, the GO rail network, light rail transit, bus rapid transit, and those kinds of dedicated transit routes. Our third goal is to have 75% of the region's population living within two kilometres of transit, because accessibility to transit is a key determinant of people's use of transit, and it also makes sure that underserved communities have access to transit--to give them access to employment opportunities, for example. Our fourth key transit-related goal is to reduce commuting times.

I mentioned a few moments ago that business as usual would take us to an average commute time, on a daily basis, of about 109 minutes. If we implement the Big Move, as we've outlined it, we would drop that down to about 79 minutes, which you might say is not that great an improvement over the existing 82 minutes, but if you factor in the fact that we're also absorbing 100,000 to 150,000 people every year.... Keeping up with growth is a significant objective for us.

The final thing I would present as an objective is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Transportation is the single largest source of emissions to the environment. We estimate that we can reduce our urban transportation emissions by 40%.

The next slide really shows what we have today, which is a radial system that brings people very efficiently to downtown Toronto and has served that marketplace very well. What we want to move to in 2031 is something that imposes an east-west and north-south grid of transit services. That would essentially continue to serve the downtown area but, more importantly, would extend services to all the new employment areas that have been growing up all around the greater Toronto and Hamilton area, so that we would be serving not just the downtown Toronto area but the other employment nodes we have.

We have seven major projects under way right now to kickstart the implementation of our Big Move. This amounts to about a $16-billion investment and an unprecedented amount of work.

I'll just very quickly list the projects: the crosstown light rail transit, which is a project that spans 25 kilometres across midtown Toronto; York Viva bus rapid transit along Yonge Street and Highway 7 in York Region; the Air Rail Link, which I mentioned earlier on; a total refurbishment of Union Station; the 403 transitway in Mississauga; the subway extension of the Spadina line to Vaughan Corporate Centre; and the Brampton Züm system. This is a start towards the implementation of our transportation plan. It will be transformative in and of itself, but the key point is that we need to continue to invest in the transportation system for the future.

To give you a sense of where the funding is coming from for the $16-billion investment, we have about $14 billion of that coming from the provincial government and just over $1 billion from each of the federal and municipal governments.

I'd like to extend our appreciation to the federal government for the level of investment that has occurred over the last few years. It has been a great start to help us move on the implementation of the Big Move.

These funds do not include the numerous other small and medium-sized projects that are scattered across the region as well.

How do we move towards a more sustainable system? My premise is that there are unique challenges faced by the large city regions in Canada. The greater Toronto and Hamilton area, greater Montreal, and Metro Vancouver all face challenges from a transportation perspective that are different from those of other major cities.

Those challenges are caused by the geography and the size of the area we're dealing with, the scope of the population and the employment activity, and the complexity and the governance issues when we're dealing with multiple municipalities. In essence, we've outgrown the ability to solve our transportation challenges on a municipality-by-municipality basis. We need a regional solution to what is really a regional challenge.

We also have these city regions that in essence are our flagships globally. Supporting them is really important in terms of projecting the Canadian economy and what Canada is all about.

We also represent the area where about two-thirds of our transit ridership exists, and it also represents the biggest opportunity to increase transit ridership because of the strong connections among higher densities, mixed land use, and the transportation system.

The importance to the Canadian economy is really about congestion and relieving congestion in getting goods and services moving and also in the direct employment we can create through the implementation of the Big Move. We estimate that there will be about 430,000 new jobs, $21 billion in employment income, and GDP growth of a significant amount, as well as tax revenues going to all levels of government.

We realize, though, that at the same time there are significant fiscal realities that we must address. All levels of government are facing challenges right now. Municipalities lack the revenue capacity to make large investments in the transit and transportation systems. We are looking at alternative ways to raise revenue, because we are aware that governments at all levels have limited opportunity to make contributions through traditional revenue sources.

We do recognize that there's a role for the private sector, where appropriate, through alternative financing procurement. We believe that there's a need to use a suite of delivery models, from traditional methods of building, designing, and constructing transit through to alternative financing and procurement based on the nature of the project. We also believe that it's important for everybody to come to the table to deal with what is a large regional challenge that requires a regional solution.

We're very unique in that we have in our legislation for Metrolinx a clause that directs us to report to the province and the municipalities, by June 2013, with an investment strategy, which would include proposals for revenue-generating tools that may be used by the province and municipalities to support the implementation of the plan. Right now we are in the process of completing our global scan of how other jurisdictions have been using different revenue tools. Our next step is to engage with stakeholders and the public as to how we might apply some of these lessons and best practices from around the world in the greater Toronto and Hamilton area.

We believe the issue is urgent and the time is right to take action in terms of a national approach to transit infrastructure. We know through the research we do that transportation is the number one top-of-mind issue for residents in the greater Toronto and Hamilton area. The quality of the transportation system is a bigger concern to residents in the GTHA than the quality of health care or the quality of education. Reducing congestion on major highways is the number one priority, followed by improving mobility and expanding the public transit system, and there is widespread public support for solving our transportation challenges through a long-term plan that's dealt with on a regional basis.

Finally, the issue is urgent and the time is right for action. The need is significant. We are facing relentless growth. Again, 100,000 to 150,000 people are moving into the region on an annual basis. We are dealing with the fact that we have a generation of under-investment that we're also recovering from in terms of the state of good repair and catching up in terms of the expansion of the system.

The costs of inaction are quite severe, we believe, in terms of lost productivity to the economy, job loss, taxes, and investment. We believe the benefits of action are worth it to all levels of government. It helps to position our global cities in the world economy and it improves the quality of life for millions of Canadians.

That concludes my opening remarks. I'll be happy to take any questions from you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Sullivan, you have seven minutes.

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

Thank you.

Thanks to all of you for being here.

You're aware that the nature of this bill that has been presented is to try to create a national strategy, a strategy that guides the formation of public transit at the local, regional, and inter-regional levels, but from a national perspective, because there's a significant amount of federal money in most large public transit projects. In addition, there is a gas tax that is headed off to municipalities, which is a significant amount of money, and essentially there may be more money in the future.

One of the things that the bill would attempt to do is to coordinate transit in a much better way than has been done. I think you're all too aware of what happens when there is political infighting over transit projects: we have a ditch dug on Eglinton Avenue that's filled in later in the mid-1990s, and also, part of your plan for light rail all over Toronto has now been axed by the recently elected mayor of the City of Toronto.

Part of what we've heard other witnesses say is that creating some transparency and some accountability in transit decisions would be a good thing. Do you agree that a national strategy would be helpful?

[Bruce McCuaig]

Thanks for the question.

I think it's a really important point to look at the need for some national strategies for how we deal with our public transportation requirements in the nation. I would say that a principle-based approach for dealing with a national transit strategy is something that the committee should be thinking very clearly about.

It's important to have a broad-based consensus about the need for investment in public transit and to recognize nationally the importance of public transit to our economy and to our quality of life in our urban centres. It's really important to take a principle-based approach, without a national strategy getting into the details of local decision-making in terms of what makes sense in a particular regional or community context.

Here are some of the principles you might want to think about in the context of national transit strategies.

One would be about the need to be thinking in the long term. This might be something that you look to the local community or the regional transportation authority for in asking where is their long-term strategy or plan for the area.

Another is predictability in terms of an ongoing investment in transit and transportation. Flexibility for local choice is another one: in the end, this is all about giving residents in communities choice about how they move around the community. Another is accountability: it's really important to give the tools to local communities and regional authorities and then hold them accountable for delivering on the outcomes that they said they would deliver on.

Another principle is to have decisions made at the lowest possible level, because that's where you get the right match between the needs of the community and the nature of the projects and the investments. You've mentioned transparency in decision-making, and there should also be an evidence-based decision-making process so that you can demonstrate why you're making choices between different projects.

I think those are important principles, which we've been trying to apply in developing the Big Move in the greater Toronto and Hamilton area and in trying to implement it over the past few years. If we are studying a national transit strategy, I think those are elements that would be important for such a strategy.

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

You developed a mechanism within Metrolinx for choosing which projects go first--or maybe for proving that the projects have value. I'm not sure what the term is; I call it cost-benefit-analysis, but you have a different term for it.

That's one of the things we've heard about throughout this: how do we put a value on the investment? In other words, there are two things. Is there a net dollar value and is there a net social value? Also, are we creating infrastructure that cities are not going to be able to afford to maintain, so that therefore they are going to be looking for handouts in the future to operate the system or to maintain the system. Have you any comments on that?

[Bruce McCuaig]

That is an excellent question. At Metrolinx, we basically look at it in three ways in terms of how we make project selection decisions in the end.

The first level is the plan stage, when we look at all the needs—the linkages and the land use—and try to identify what the overall plan is for moving forward in the short, medium, and long term. The second stage I would call the program level, when we go through a process that we've called our prioritization process. We look at the social, economic, and environmental benefits of different projects, and compare them to each other so that we can provide some advice to our board of directors about which projects provide the most value in the end. Value isn't just in the sense of the dollar value, but in terms of the whole range of social value, environmental value, and economic value.

Then at the project level, we also have business-case analysis that we do—I think that's what you referred to—where we look at the cost benefit. We basically use that tool to look at different ways of delivering a project. If you adjust the project in a certain fashion; or if there are different values or results you get from that adjustment that are better than the original concept; or if you stage it differently; what are the different impacts of your phasing plan? If you deliver it in different models, what's the value you get from your different delivery mechanism?

There's a plan level we do, with prioritization among projects, and then business-case analysis within a project. It's important to be thinking about an evidence-based approach at all of those levels.

[Mike Sullivan, NDP, York South—Weston, ON]

I can't ignore one of the issues that we've dealt with in Toronto for the last eight or nine years, and that's the Air Rail Link and the use of diesel to get there. I'm aware that it's not a project that was one Metrolinx itself wanted to do, and that the province kind of handed it to them and told them to do it. Again, it's not a benefit-case analysis that drove you to do that. It was the province saying they needed the project done.

I know that Metrolinx has now conducted a study and has said that if we want to electrify these services—because Canada will be the only country on the planet with an air-rail link that's diesel—it's going to take us a long time. The study came back and said that it will take 32 years to electrify all of the GO transit system. If there were federal money in electrification, could that timeframe and the health of citizens be improved?

[Bruce McCuaig]

I have a couple of points I would suggest. One is that the Air Rail Link, we believe, is a very important project for the regional economy. It is part of the Big Move. When we look at cities around the world, especially global cities that have a financial services core, we see that an air-rail link between their downtown area and their international airport is critical. It is a common element and is something that we're missing in the Toronto region.

About 5 million trips occur every year between downtown Toronto and Pearson airport. Right now, the only choice is getting into a car, taxi, or limousine. We're going to be providing a reliable alternative choice for the first time, which is going to take a lot of cars off the road. We think it's a really great project.

In terms of electrification, we did do a very comprehensive study of the alternative ways we could look at electrification of the entire network. We took a report to our board of directors that recommended we look at the electrification of what we call the Lakeshore corridor in the Toronto region and the Georgetown quarter, which would include the Air Rail Link.

The board endorsed that strategy. We got an endorsement from the province to start the environmental assessment work for the electrification of the first step, which is the Air Rail Link. We would anticipate that, subject to subsequent funding decisions, we could move to electrify the Air Rail Link in about seven years, but it's a long-term process to electrify an entire system.

There could very well be a role for the federal government in terms of participating in the process of electrification of the GO Transit rail network.

The key thing is to get through the environmental assessment process first and get an endorsement that this is a project that we're going to pursue in terms of the Air Rail Link. Then that would be a good time to be looking for partners with regard to how we might deliver on that project.

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

Thank you.

Mr. Coderre.

[Denis Coderre, Liberal, Bourassa, QC]

Thank you very much.

I invite you to put on your headphones; we have to give the interpreters something to do.

Congratulations. I really enjoyed that, and not because I'm from Montreal and I don't know what's going on in Toronto.

I really enjoyed this. This is the real thing. This is exactly the kind of witness we need today for a future strategy.

What I'm wondering may be a neophyte's question. Obviously, our experience is different with the Société de transport de Montréal. Greater Montreal's political reality is certainly different from that of the agglomeration of Toronto and Hamilton.

I put the question to you out of curiosity. There are no politicians on your board of directors. In the end, did it turn out to be the only way, that is, excluding politicians from the process, because they were all promoting their own particular project, you could talk about such a large region as Toronto and Hamilton, and public transit? I'd like you to tell me about this.

Accountability is essential. Mayors get elected to represent a particular population. There are real needs with regard to public transit services. How do you explain the fact that there are no politicians involved in the process? How can you speak on behalf of a large region and establish priorities and make sure you're protecting people's sensitivities and take into account the needs of every part of the region?

[Bruce McCuaig]

Thank you very much for the question.

That's a really important question, because we take our accountability to the public and to the municipalities very seriously. Fundamentally, we can't deliver on our objectives as a corporation unless we have a strong partnership with our municipalities and, in the end, with the public we're serving.

Metrolinx originally started with a board of directors that was largely comprised of municipal politicians. The mayors of many of the municipalities in the greater Toronto and Hamilton area were on the board, and they were very successful, in 2006 through to 2008, in coming up with a first for the greater Toronto and Hamilton area: a regional transportation plan. We have never had, in this region, a comprehensive plan that all the municipalities bought into. They were given the task to come up with a plan and they succeeded. We owe a huge debt of gratitude to the mayors and councillors who were on the board at that time.

The province took a look at how Metrolinx was going to evolve in the future and, first of all, merged it with GO Transit, an operating agency. They felt that it was time to switch from planned development to delivery of specific projects. They felt it was appropriate to bring in public-spirited citizens to help remove some of the tension around decision-making about which projects go first, second, third, and fourth, and to bring a very deliberate approach to how we build the infrastructure going forward.

That doesn't mean we conduct our work in secret. Our meetings are basically built into two elements. We have a public session, where the media and the public are fully engaged and hear about the work of Metrolinx, as everyone else does. Then we have a closed session, like any public agency tends to have to talk about contractual or commercial or property issues and things of that nature.

We've tried to maintain our accountability and we've tried to be true to the government objective of moving forward with delivery.

The other thing we were able to do when we brought in the public-minded citizens was to identify specific skill sets. We have a member of our board who is the leader at the Four Seasons Sheraton for customer service. Nick Mutton chairs our customer service committee and has been very successful in raising the level of customer satisfaction in our operating arm--

[Denis Coderre, Liberal, Bourassa, QC]

I don't want to be rude, but I'm going to interrupt you, because I've only got seven minutes. I'll come back to you later on this.

One may not be in favour of a decision. For example, in Scarborough, people think that what should have been done wasn't done. Obviously the role of municipal politicians is to ensure service and monitor the quality of the environment and the quality of life of their citizens. If one isn't in favour of a position, is it possible to intervene? I imagine you have an ombudsman, or something like that. It's important, in terms of the National Public Transit Strategy.

If politicians are excluded at some point to ensure delivery of service, are there any executory or extraordinary measures enabling one's opinion to be heard, so that there is that democratic balance between the elected representative and the representative of your organization?

[Bruce McCuaig]

Those are very good points. First of all, all of our planning work is done in public, so the public has a complete opportunity to participate, provide their input, and raise any concerns through the process. Those processes are ultimately approved under various environmental legislation. Sometimes that's federal. Sometimes that's provincial. Sometimes it's both.

As I said earlier on, it's impossible to deliver a project in a local municipality if you don't have the support of the local municipality. We have to work very closely, in context, with agencies like the Toronto Transit Commission and the City of Toronto to make sure that what we're doing on the Eglinton crosstown project, for example, is coincident with their local aspirations as well.

If we don't do that, we're going to fail on the delivery of the projects.