The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Human Pain for Infrastructure Gain?

Episode Date: September 17, 2024

Are the infrastructure projects in some Ontario cities worth the pain homeowners, businesses, and commuters are feeling? Ontario is steadily growing but its major roads and bridges need repair and new transit is sorely overdue. What is the cost to Ontarians and will the benefits outweigh years of inconvenience? For insight, we welcome: urban affairs journalist John Lorinc; University of Toronto civil engineering professor Shoshanna Saxe; urban planner Neil Loewen; and York-Eglinton BIA managr Steven Spencer.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ontario is steadily growing and some of its infrastructure has needed upgrading for many, many years. Now it seems as though it's happening all at once. With the new Ontario Rapid Transit Line in progress, GO Train expansion, a record number of cranes around the province, and construction on Highway 413 set to start next year, Ontarians are feeling the pain these projects are bringing to their day-to-day lives. Will the benefits outweigh the years of inconvenience? Let's find out as we welcome Shoshana Sachs, Associate Professor in the University of Toronto's Department of Civil and

Mineral Engineering and a Canada Research Chair in Sustainable Infrastructure. Nia Lowen, Senior Associate Planner at Urban Strategies. Jason Mac McDonald, chair of York Eglinton BIA and the owner of Casual Hair Salon. And John Lawrence is here, the urban issues writer at Spacing and the Globe and Mail. And it's great to have everybody around our table here. Let's start with this quote from Nicholas Hune Brown writing in Toronto Life magazine just after, this was a few years ago after the announcement of the Ontario Line.

Sheldon bring it up if you would and I'll read along for those listening on podcast. The Ontario Line is the first downtown subway in Toronto in more than 50 years. A massive undertaking that has the potential to be as transformative and as destructive as any infrastructure project in living memory. The skirmishes erupting along the Ontario line are a sequel to the battles that have marked the last decades of city building in Toronto, pitting the sanctity of neighbourhoods against the needs of the region, the rights of current residents against the viability of future Torontonians.

In a city that does its best to avoid hard choices, the massive project comes with an implicit message. In order for the majority of us to win much needed transit, some of us will have to lose. And as the line races forward, for those set to lose, the stakes couldn't be higher. Okay, John, come on in here and tell us why the stakes couldn't be higher.

Well, Toronto has an inadequate rapid transit system, for the most part, for a city this size. And we have these bottlenecks, like at Young and Bloor, that have produced terrible crowding, congestion, and backups for years. And so the Ontario line essentially creates an additional part of a network that will allow people to travel around the city and the region more efficiently.

Do we need it? Yes. We do need it. We do need it. Has your thinking evolved on that at all? No. I mean, we've needed it for a long, long time, and it got renamed because downtown Leafline was unpopular, but it's still needed.

If you look at the transit map of what's being built right now, LRTs on Finch, LRT on Eglinton, Ontario Line coming in, UP Express finished a few years ago. There's a lot going on here right now. Why is everything happening all at once? It feels like everything's happening all at once. A lot of things are happening now-ish because we did a whole bunch of nothing for about 20 years.

And so now we're paying catch up, given that we waited too long and also our population grew. But the Up Express opened in 2015. That's almost a decade ago. So our perception of now is also a little bit off. Good point. It just felt like a few years ago. It's been around for a while.

But it does feel, I'll put this to you, Neil, it feels like there's an awful lot going on right now all at once. Is that the way you want to plan building transit in a city if you had your druthers? I think if you had your druthers, which I think we're getting our druthers, you know what the critical infrastructure is

and take the steps to get there. As Roshana said, we had a lost generation where our the GTA population grew by three million people and we had a shepherd subway of five kilometers built. Three million people who have no choice but to drive or take the bus on roads that were laid out by someone named Lord Simcoe. It obviously wasn't designed for three million cars to fit onto our roads. We know that rapid transit is the only way

to efficiently move that many people around the region. And we've suddenly gotten very good at actually getting these projects approved, and so they're happening right now, but we need to continue to work to ensure that the disruption is minimized as much as possible. Well, that's where we get to Jason. Okay, that's the macro view that we've heard here.

Now here comes the micro view. Tell us what you do for a living. I'm an owner of a hair salon, 1572, Edmonton Avenue West Casual Beauty Salon. I'm also the chairman of Edmonton West Little Jamaica. Pertain to your conversation about this, if we need this. We're not doubting if we need these things. These things are things that we should have saw years ago.

However, what does the community have to say about these developers and if we need these things. These things are things that we should have saw years ago. However, what does the community have to say about these developers that come in? Normally, whenever developers come in, they need approval from the community. Did they get it? Well, in my circumstance, well, I know I didn't approve that personally.

However, I wasn't the chairman at the time of the BIA. But- It's the business improvement area. The business improvement area. that personally, however I wasn't the chairman at the time of the BIA but um This is the business improvement area. The business improvement area. Tell me the the light rail this is a 12 what is it 11 12 billion dollar light rail transit line that is presumably going to be going right in front of your salon right? Okay. And has been in the process of being built for a decade can you talk to us about what it's done to your life and or business? Well, my business personally, they told us

when they first came on the scene that this would be a five year project. This was supposed to be finished 2015. 2018, it was supposed to finish. I think it went to 2020. I don't really listen to when it's gonna be finished anymore because after five, six, seven, eight, seven eight ten we're what 15 years in now so um and they still don't know when it's going to open well you know this is the

next thing when you're asking the question about if we need these things I don't think that's the right question the question you should be asking these people is how long is this project gonna take and do they have approval from the community you know like if approval from the community? We know that we're updated. We know Canada is really behind time when it comes on to subways, LRTs, all of these. They told us that I would have been able to reach

Air Canada, the airport, from my business place in 15 minutes. They told us that in 2009. So we're still waiting on that. Okay, let me go to Shoshana on that. This is, I think, you know, you have made the case about why it's important to build public transit all the time and well.

Here is a real life example of what can happen when it's not done well or on time. How do we balance these things off? Well, for one, we should stop screwing up. We never should have let the Ellington Crossdown get away from us the way it was. There were a lot of mistakes made at the beginning. So one, we have to stop making those mistakes

at the beginning. We've got to take seriously how to build projects well. But somewhat ironically, continuing to build things is a really big part of that. Because of the last generation, we forgot how to build big projects. And we had to relearn from the beginning. We had to figure out how do we get the tradespeople

to know how to do this? How do we get contractors to know how to do it? How do we get staff within government who know how to do this? How do we get contractors to know how to do it? How do we get staff within government who know how to manage it? And that takes learning and maintaining. So one thing is we shouldn't stop for another generation, which is sort of ironic to the let's not screw up. But that's a really big thing. We've got to learn how to do this well.

We've got to take seriously doing it well. But we also have to keep believing that we can so that we can keep improving. John, how is it that basically every significant infrastructure project that the province of Ontario, either through Metrolinx or whatever, undertakes, whether it's a streetcar line on St. Clair, whether it's Eglinton Crosstown, LRT, whether it's the renovation of Union Station down by the waterfront, it always seems to go over time and over budget

How do we how do we tell guys like Jason? Don't worry. It'll be worth it in the long run well, I think that First off you need truth in advertising. I mean in most infrastructure projects in most big cities They go very they go long. It takes longer than people project. There's a way of getting political approval, is that the politicians will say to people like Jason, this is what we're going to do. You're going to have these benefits.

It's going to happen quickly. And there's no world in which that is the case. So I think we don't do a really good job in managing expectations. And I think that we've kind of locked into a system of using these private consortia to build these big transportation projects with an eye to getting them built on time and on budget which has perversely produced the exact opposite effect. You know, the last major subway project that was completed in Toronto was the extension of the Young University subway line up to Vaughan Metropolitan Centre.

That was basically done by the TTC and, you know, it wasn't like exactly on time, it wasn't exactly on budget, but it wasn't bad. You know, whereas compared to the Eglinton Crosstown and however long it's going to take to build the Ontario line, I think that there's a problem with the model that we're using. That's what I was referring to as the big mistakes at the beginning. I worked on both the construction of TYSSE,

the extension, and on the Eglinton Crosstown in a previous- What was that acronym you said? TYSSE. What's that? Toronto York Subway, Spadina Subway Extension. Oh, OK. Got it. You worked on that. Eglinton Crosstown in a pre- What was that acronym you said? TYSSE What's that? Toronto York Subway, Spadina Subway Extension Oh, okay, got it. You worked on that.

That was one of my first jobs. So for me it's a career and a half ago. That's how long these projects have been going on. So you see where the insult lies now. The insult is when I hear this lovely lady say they're going to try to prevent the screw ups. I hear this gentleman over here, the reporter, he's talking about Bel-Lai.

He's lovely, too, incidentally. Well, you know, the point I'm trying to make is as a business owner, I can't work off of you screwing up and lies. I can't tell my workers screw-ups. I can't tell my workers lies. So I have to hold the government, the city, to the same accountability that my workers hold me.

This nice lady here is telling us that they screwed up. I know this from 2012, from Catherine Nguyen was in office, I wrote Catherine Nguyen when she started her bullying program. I feel as a business owner, I've been bullied. I've been bullied the last 14 years of my life. My whole family has been subjected to being hostage on Eglinton West by Metrolinx.

This lady here says it was a screw up. This man says they lied. I know you guys are talking about bringing the next Ontario line to people. Make sure when you bring it, because I can't stop you, make sure you don't screw up people's livelihoods. Make sure you don't lie to people.

That's my advice as a business owner. So Shani, you want to finish the point? Yeah, I mean, I'd like to respond to that. The thing is there is absolutely no way to build these big projects without, to a certain extent, screwing up people's livelihoods. Which is horrible. Excuse me?

There is going to be, they should not have taken this long, they should not have been lying, they should not have said we'll be done and then not be done. But a certain amount of disruption will absolutely come with the Ontario line. And so the question becomes, how do we treat people with dignity while we make their realities harder? What kind of support would you have wanted, could they have given you during the time period to help make it less bad? Well, we know we're living in an economy

where everything goes up. So, like how you have a project, it's how much billions? How much billions are we at now? 15 billion? If we're at 15 billion for this project, For the Edwinston Crosstown? How much billion are we at?

I think we're at 12. We're at 12. OK, just 12 billion. OK, so how much businesses have closed down? We have over 250 small businesses that have closed down within Little Jamaica. When I say Little Jamaica, I'm the BIA chairman from Marley to Dufferin.

However, Little Jamaica goes, extends, all the way to Keele. So from Keele to Marley, Metrolinx has held business owners, and when I say business owners, I'm not just talking about people who look like me. I'm talking about McDonald's closed down, the funeral home closed down. You know what, Jason? Let me show some other pictures here,

because I think this makes your point. Because you're, obviously you're suffering, but you're not the only one in this capital city. Exactly. That's the point I'm going to make. Sheldon, we're going to go to the bottom of page two here. Let's show some photos of what's happening right now for the Ontario line.

This is Pape Avenue, Ontario line construction earlier this year. Yeah. That looks like it. Well, they all look the same. This is barricades in front of Pape and Danforth businesses with signs indicating they are still open, but as you might imagine, it's a little difficult to navigate your way into those businesses to do your business. Okay, here's a second photo.

This is Queen Street, one of the major east-west thoroughfares in downtown Toronto. This shows pedestrians and a cyclist navigating a road closure on Queen Street. A portion of Queen Street closed last year and will not, this is if things go according to schedule, will not reopen for five more years. And then the one Jason is so thrilled with, this is the Eglinton Crosstown construction. Now, this is a photo, admittedly, from a few years ago.

This is in the east end of the city. So Jason, you're in the west part of Eglinton. This is east part of Eglinton between Warden and Kennedy. And what do we say? It's a construction site. And frankly, that's what Young and Eglinton looked like for several years as well. One of the most significant intersections in the whole city, Young and Eglinton, 100 yards north of where we sit right now in this studio.

And it looked like that basically for a few straight years. I guess the question is, okay, come on in on this. Is this all too much for people to handle, regardless of how well it turns out in the end? I think it's a lot for all of us to handle. I think we all experience, as you're moving through the city, the level of stress that it takes. If you're not sure if your street car is going

to follow the route it's supposed to take, if your drive is going to take half an hour longer than it typically would. And I think it's really difficult to say to someone, this is all worth it in the end. This is short-term pain for long-term gain, because it's a decade. It's not that short-term.

Exactly. It's not that short-term. Exactly. And I think that while we definitely know how to build these things and the technical side of things and the engineers involved, Transit Project of this scale is also a social impact project. It's also an economic development project.

And the kind of planning that has to go into that in advance is as critical as the design of this. And often it's the decisions that are made 15 years before the transit line opens that determine how difficult it's going to be to live through construction on this. Go ahead. I think I have to be a little bit devil's advocate. It's really easy to say as we're living through it, and especially for the communities that

are disproportionately having the pain for other people's gain, that it's too much pain for too much gain. We have to build a modern city. We have no other choice. And we're acting like the alternative would have been less painful. It wouldn't have been. The traffic just gets worse and worse. It's not that we don't have the roads for 3 million cars.

There is no such thing as the roads for 3 million cars. So we have two choices. We can try and get ahead and build the city we want, or we can just let everything get worse around us and say, oh, whoa, that was really bad, and just be chasing later. No, you have a next choice. What's that? You can compensate the small businesses that you affect bad, and just be chasing later. No, you have a next choice. What's that?

You can compensate the small businesses that you affect. Yes, that's- Compensate them. Hold on. Compensate them thoroughly. Don't compensate them minimally. Don't give them crumbs, because what you do to a business when you arrive, when you arrive, you destroy all livelihoods.

For example, I guess you don't have, you're not from a small business background, but if you're from a small business background, you know that this business provides for the entire family. I am from a small business background. Well, if you're from a, so if you are from a small business background, you should know that.

But it's a few generations ago. Well, this man over here said we should suffer for the short term. I would say we would suffer from a life, a lifetime. We have to suffer this lifetime for the next lifetime. That's what you're asking us to do. Well, what kind of compensation have you been offered by Metrolinx or the city or whatever? You know what?

I don't even want to talk about that publicly, because all I have to say is if they compensate small businesses, maybe we don't have a ground to walk on. But I'm saying to you that the compensations that they're offering, what you have to do to prove that they're screwed up. She just said they screwed up. My sign fell down.

And when my sign fell down, they came. Lance Field Morgan came to my store. He said they're going to repair my sign. When he left, I had to get all type of people to come in and see if it was testing, if it was the noise, if it was the vibration. I have to prove this. I have to pay money out of my pocket

to prove that you guys drilling, my sign falls. My sign never fell. And how much I'm a business owner for 25 years. My sign never falls, Metrolinx comes, my sign falls, then I gotta prove that you made my sign fall, my basement floods seven times. Seven times I have basement floods, rat infestation. Let me get John in here.

I mean, all of this presumably contributes to an aura of distrust around the things that, as Shoshana says, the city needs to do regardless. So how do you fix this? Well, I think that we spend an enormous amount of time planning for big projects. And we spend comparably less time dealing with the sort of fallout from big projects.

So I think that that balance could be improved. So it isn't until like 10 years into the construction of the LRT that somebody wakes up and says, oh, OK, well, we better do something for Little Jamaica. But I just want to take your point for a second. I mean, I'm starting to feel hold on for a second. I mean, there was a moment a couple of years ago, just before the pandemic, where there was a breakdown

on the Young University line. And suddenly, there was this, they had to bypass trains. And suddenly, there was a crowd on the Young University, sorry, on the Yonge Street platform of Yonge and Bloor that was packed, that was people pressed up against the wall all the way to the edge of the- Dangerously packed. Very dangerously packed.

And all it would take is like a couple of people to sort of get very uncomfortable. And you get real critical problems. You get people injured, pushed on the tracks. And the other part, which I think is really important, is that this is maybe slightly less in the post-pandemic period, but a lot of people spend an enormous amount of time traveling back and forth to work.

And that's all time that you take away from your family and from recreation and whatever else you want to do with your life. And so I think that there is some onus on the city and the region to kind of deal with that. Now, the problem is that the balance is not good, right? So you're saying, OK, well, in the future, we'll have shorter commute times.

But in the meantime, you have to suck it up because this is what it's going to take. And so we don't have that balance in place, but I think we have to keep in mind that there are real people who depend on these systems and if they don't work, it makes their day really bad. There will be people who would have been at the age where they could probably use rapid transit when this thing started and when it was planned to be opened, who I don't know if you use this expression with riding transit but who may age out right they may be too disabled or infirm by the time these things get done before they

get a chance to ride these things and maybe too late for them. Jason has his business issues with Metrolinx. There are others who will have other issues as it relates to writing. It's, in a way, the same question. Does all of this add up to affect the trustworthiness of whether we need to do this and how we do it? Absolutely.

The way we are doing it is affecting trustworthiness. I don't think any of us would deny that. But that doesn't change the fact that we have to keep investing in the future. You can't not invest, right? Right now, on my way here today, I went through some slow zones on the TTCs that they're doing maintenance. That's annoying.

I've heard people talk about them. They affect their commute. They affect your day. They affect what businesses you can shop at, et cetera. But I also lived in Toronto in the 90s where we didn't do that, and a train drove into the back of another train Right, so we have to do the things we have to be bold. We have to be ambitious about our construction We have to be serious about what it takes to maintain and grow a city of this size

But we also have to take very very seriously How do we make it dignified for people? But the question of whether or not people are gonna age out right? I'm definitely gonna age out of a lot of the infrastructure that I talk about or work on. But I want it also to be there for my children and for their children's children. And there is no way to build big infrastructure over that is convenient. As you think about the degree of difficulty for all of these things, because the current government of Ontario is doing subways,

they're doing LRTs, they're doing highways, and they're probably in Thunder Bay buying street cars and buses and that kind of thing as well. So they're doing a lot. What's the degree of difficulty of all of the different things that they're trying right now? These are very complex projects, right? And like you said, they're all happening at once.

For a single transit line, the space beneath our feet is a lot more complicated than you might think. Number of utilities, the bedrock, the water, all of that. And then these are going through communities that are constantly in flux and dynamic things and over the time scale of a project they change as well. It's extremely difficult to not have impact, it's not possible, right? No one has figured out how to build a subway line secretly, without anybody noticing. There's going to be

impacts, but what we need to have is the planning around pre, during, and post construction. So who is going to be impacted by this? Who is there right now? What are the impacts going to be during construction? And what's the mitigation and compensation that is possible? Well, let me pick up on that. What would you like to hear right now, Jason,

from either Metrolinx or the Premier or whomever on what he can do to regain, or what they can do to regain your trust on all of this? Well, my trust will always be tainted. And there's millions like myself who don't really have as much faith as maybe you guys do. I do know that these things need to be done. I don't think I'm knocking that these things

don't need to be done. I don't think I'm knocking that these things don't need to be done. However, I notice in certain areas, these timelines last longer than certain areas. The word gentrification gets thrown out there. You know what I mean? In certain areas, like 15 years, Egmonton West, come on, there's towns that's been built in less than that time.

Towns, plural, you know what I mean? So what I would love the government to do is honestly have a program where compensation is really met at a high standard, a business loss. 15 years, for example, a business loss on Eglinton. 15 years. If they were to give a business even 10 grand a year, right, that's 140 grand.

They're not even doing that. I'm just giving an example. These basic requirements that I'm asking, I offered Metrolinx a few of my suggestions. Did you hear back? I heard back, but my suggestions weren't met. So it is what it is. Maybe we could get the engineer here to help us understand.

When a project is announced and they say it's going to take this much time and cost this much money, but then it turns out to cost a lot more and take a lot longer, what are the things that happen to require that? It varies so much from project to project. It depends a little bit what we're talking about. Some of the things that Eglinton Crossdown were not actually about engineering at all. They were about contracting and the relationship

in between the people hired to build it and the people in charge and how they knew or didn't know how to talk to each other. This wasn't that much about engineering. And a lot of it has been kept secret. So, you know, there are rumors about what's going on. But I can't comment on much of it from an informed place because they chose not to be very open about it,

which I would put in the category of screw up just for the record. Well, we have it on tape. But there are other things. I did research on this a few years ago. There's a bunch of colleagues from here and in other places in the world. And we looked at what's taking our project so long.

And the main thing is really not the engineering. It's deciding to do something, funding it, and following through. And often, you announce something before you have the funding. You wait a couple of years. Things become more expensive. Now you've got to start out the funding again.

You wait a couple more years. But the other thing I would just say is have you ever renovated a bathroom in your home or painted the walls in your bedroom? Did it happen on time and on budget? No, it went up, and it's more budget. But however, you can't compare your house to a livelihood. This is why I'm asking you how much.

No, but I'm not comparing it to your livelihood. I'm comparing it to a construction site. And how there are unexpected things. And sometimes we just don't totally understand what's going on. I can always agree with that. I can always, I have nothing, listen, I'm gonna make my point clear here.

I'm not against progress, I'm not against upgrades. I am for progress, I am for upgrades. However, I know the realistic facts. If you have a project you're doing in your bedroom or your washroom and it costs us more, you know you have your bills you gotta pay still, you still gotta pay your bills. So just because you did your project,

doesn't mean you're not gonna pay your bills. You got community, you got a people's. But I think your point is whether you're paying in the bedroom or whether you're building a things happen that you don't expect. Six billion dollar LRT stuff happens. No, and I'm not knocking that. I'm saying compensate the small businesses.

And I'm not knocking that. That's my issue. I'm not saying, listen, I'm not saying things. I'm saying compensate the small businesses. And I'm not knocking that. That's my issue. I'm not saying, listen, I'm not saying things like, make your subway, take your time, make it proper. There are all kinds of things that happen. And I don't think any of us are disputing that. But one of the important things I would notice is that it's not actually Metrolinx on time links.

It's CrossLinks. We moved away from a model of the government building things to the private sector. It matters because in Toronto up until this project we had a very professional public service who knew how to build public transit and we move away from that all of a sudden we're doing things in a new way that we don't know how to do and we're seeing proof in the pudding. So just to be clear, CrossLinks is this private sector consortium that's building the thing that's suing Metrolinx and vice versa.

And I was telling this nice lady outside that the public doesn't want to get involved in that. That's you guys. That's your uncle, your brother, your cousin, your sister. That's a family issue that's separate from the public. The public looks at Metrolinx, CrossLinx as the same. I'm just giving you... I'm understanding the truth. We look atlinks as the same. That's, I'm just giving you, I'm understanding the truth. We look at you guys as the same. And if you guys wanna argue about whose fault it is, no problem, when you guys, hold on. You know, Jason, you know what I can't argue with?

The clock, and it's out of time. But I do wanna thank you for coming in today and sharing your views on this, along with Shoshana Sachs from the University of Toronto, and on the other side of the table, Neil Lowen from Urban Strategies, and John Lawrence from Spacing and the Globe and Mail. That was a raucous discussion, everybody.

Thank you very much. Thank you. It's all in respect. Thank you. Thank you very much.