In Dustup Over Streetcars, Canada Transport Minister Tells Toronto To ‘F— Off!’

Very little is certain or solid in this endeavor we call human life. But, in truth, any day you can write a headline like this is a day to be grateful for.

The situation: Toronto wants 204 new streetcars. The city has a large and well-used network with nearly 350,000 daily riders. The streetcars the city wants to purchase would be made by the Bombardier company, located in Thunder Bay, a city located on the far side of the province of Ontario. For the purchase, Toronto officials put in a request for $300 million from the Canadian government’s $4 billion pot of infrastructure stimulus funds.

But John Baird, Canada’s Minister of Transportation, Infrastructure and Communities, thought the request didn’t meet the appropriate criteria for the funds. On Monday, he flew into rage with some reporters standing around him. “Twenty-seven hundred [cities] got it right! They didn’t! That is not a partnership and they’re bitching at us,” he said. “They should fuck off!”

Ha, right? Yes, ha.

Yesterday Baird, who is a conservative, called David Miller, Toronto’s liberal mayor, and apologized for “speaking out of frustration” and offered some high-sounding verbiage about how the “best is yet to come” for Toronto’s transit system.

Curser John Baird (left) and cursee David Miller, in happier days

Fair enough. But there are a couple of interesting and noteworthy things going on here (which is always nice in story that features a politician saying “fuck”). First, apparently Baird would have much preferred that Toronto spend the stimulus money on roadwork–that is, something that would have directly and immediately put money into the local economy. Miller adopted a less strict interpretation of “stimulus” and figured that local jobs would be created by a better transit system. Miller said the economic benefits of the streetcars to the city would be “extraordinary.”

“We recreate a manufacturing industry that had been very damaged, and the federal and provincial governments will get probably hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue through the income taxes paid by the workers,” Miller said.

That expansive view is spot on and there’s plenty of data to back up the high multiplier effects of transit investments. Rather than just frittering away billions on small scale stuff like adding fancy guardrails to highways, he’s thinking of “stimulus” in a context of thirty or forty years. In 2050, that $300 million will probably still be stimulating the Toronto economy, assuming we all don’t get eaten by robots in the meantime.

Here’s another thing: David Miller’s words should echo in the ears of US politicians. Not to say it will be easy, but it’s insane not to try to kickstart a domestic railcar and streetcar industry in this country, as Jennifer Granholm has suggested doing in Michigan. The rail build out now gaining momentum around the world has many decades to go. Now is the time to, you know, get aboard.

Streetcar pic; Politicans: Toronto Star