How the MSF Will Forever Stain the legacy of those Planning the Ontario Line

Members planning the Ontario line face a large possibility of having their legacy completed stained with the incomprehensible decisions being made in Thorncliffe Park. Attached below is a letter to Caroline Mulroney pinpointing all her faulty and inconsistent actions.

Hon. Caroline Mulroney

Minister of Transportation

777 Bay Street, 5th Floor

Toronto, ON M7A 1Z8

Dear Minister,

Thank you for your letter responding to the inquiries I made to Premier Ford.

I represent a grass-roots community group that was formed in response to a decision by your government to locate the massive Ontario Line MSF in our Thorncliffe Park community without any prior consultation by your government, or its proxy Metrolinx, to assess the social and economic impacts that decision would have on the residents of our community today and how it would neuter its growth potential for the future.  After all, locating a train yard beside a subway station is contrary to every other policy your government is pursuing to capitalize on such investments to build more housing faster, deliver more jobs and create transit-oriented mixed-use communities– see East Harbour, Liberty Village, 407/Yonge, Corktown, etc.

It is encouraging that your letter states that “Having open lines of communication with communities is a critical part of the transit planning and building process.”  In this instance, however, the lines of communication about the MSF were only opened AFTER the MSF decision was announced on an unsuspecting community after two years of secretive plotting by Metrolinx; an organization that deliberately withheld critical information about the location of the MSF while publicly discussing all other major aspects of the project including station locations and alignments.

While planning the MSF, Metrolinx hid its intentions from the community, chose not to try to understand its dynamics, undertook no social or economic analyses of local community impacts and did not speak to any community leaders or their elected representatives prior to finalizing the location of a 700,000 square foot public infrastructure facility in a densely populated urban environment.  There is no other example in Ontario where such a project could be approved with no prior public consultation, transparency or access to an appeals process. 

In its haste to meet arbitrary timelines for the Ontario Line, your government granted Metrolinx extraordinary powers that enabled it to railroad another vulnerable community forced to host an unwanted MSF – streamlining the playbook already used in Mount Dennis and Jane-Finch communities.  Clearly, the strategy was to target yet another vulnerable community without the resources to adequately challenge the talking points and assumptions ladled by Metrolinx spokespeople to rationalize an unjust and arbitrary decision.  As a result, the so-called consultations by Metrolinx that you reference are limited to standard implementation issues about wall heights, the look of sound barriers, and maybe a mural or basketball court thrown in as a gift to assuage the offended and occupied.  As a Minister of the Crown, this should be unacceptable to you especially when your government is locating the yard adjacent to a subway station where your own TOC policy would target opportunities to create new residential and affordable housing, jobs, and community amenities.  The Ontario Line and its new stations should be a catalyst to city-building in Thorncliffe Park and elsewhere - especially when alternative locations are available on dirty industrial properties nearby that are distant from residents, have relatively few employees, and clearly operate with a limited lifespan in an increasingly dense urban environment.

Therefore, we respectfully request that you cast aside the talking points provided to you by Metrolinx  PR staff and take a critical look at how your government arrived at this decision to determine if you are fully satisfied that this aligns with your stated assertion that “communication with communities is a critical part of the transit planning and building.”  Metrolinx has interpreted that direction by only communicating with our community about the building process after omitting the critical planning phases.  As the Metrolinx CEO has said repeatedly, the MSF was never up for consultation. We are confident that any serious review of this site selection process would prompt you to re-visit its merits and its simple, over-reliance on its dubious job impacts as the sole indicator of ‘community impacts.’

Your letter advises that the Thorncliffe Site was selected over other technically feasible options because “it has the fewest job impacts”.  First of all, community impacts extend well beyond those jobs numbers and second, Metrolinx has provided aggregate numbers for larger than needed site areas but they do not specify exactly where the jobs are located within each site area and the City of Toronto Employment Survey they relied on does not provide those specific numbers on their website. 

·         Therefore, we ask that you provide the specific job numbers associated with each property within each short-listed site area (Overlea, Leaside and Wicksteed) and enumerate which ones would be permanently lost and unable to be re-located should their current premises be displaced for the train yard and how those assertions were determined and verified.

·         The Metrolinx CEO has repeatedly made it very clear that the policy criteria used to determine the site were provided by you. 

o   Please explain what those policy criteria were, how they were weighted and the details, costs and benefits associated with each one and how they were ranked and evaluated.

o   What community impacts did you direct Metrolinx to consider beyond the dependency on a single, voluntary vague employment survey to assess the social and economic impacts of this decision on the Thorncliffe community? 

o   We also believe that Ontario and Federal taxpayers should know the cost-benefit analysis that lead to your governments decision to locate the MSF in Thorncliffe Park over the other short-listed options, and;

o   What is the estimated breakdown of costs for this MSF and what were the estimates and actuals for the two other MSF’s currently under construction at Mt. Dennis and Jane-Finch?

As you answer these questions you will undoubtedly be dismayed by the paucity of information that was provided to your government by Metrolinx in reaching its decision; we are confident that it will prompt you to recognize the deficiencies of the process undertaken and proceed to re-visit this exercise to determine the most appropriate location for the Ontario Line MSF.  This is a facility that will forever be remembered as a stain on your legacy as Transportation Minister if you don’t. 

Thank you in advance for your consideration of this request and for further exploring the truly awesome potential that the Ontario Line could add to this part of the City by taking a more comprehensive view of what the Thorncliffe Station could really mean from a city-building perspective that achieves several stated objectives of this government that everyone can support.

Sincerely,