Transit experts and opposition critics say the Ontario government has to learn from its communications mistakes on the Eglinton Crosstown LRT to ensure the rollout of the remaining pieces of its multi-billion dollar transit expansion have public buy-in.
After years of delays and cost overruns, the Crosstown is set to begin a phased opening on Sunday, something announced to the public just days before the trains will officially roll.
While Premier Doug Ford’s government says the start of service on the 19-kilometre line is cause for celebration, the Tories are being criticized for a lack of transparency about problems with the project dating back years.
Premier Doug Ford has repeatedly expressed his own displeasure with the Crosstown delays, sounding off once again Wednesday.
“That was a nightmare, I’ll tell you,” Ford said during a speech before the Mississauga Board of Trade, where he raised the topic of the light rail line (LRT).
Work on the Eglinton LRT began in 2011 with an estimated price tag of $9.1 billion to build and maintain the 25-stop line. It was to have been completed in 2020.
In 2022, documents obtained by CBC Toronto showed the project costs had jumped to at least $12.8 billion.
The Eglinton Crosstown LRT is set to open this Sunday, 15 years after construction first began. CBC’s Greg Ross asked Torontonians what they think of the news.
Crosstown part of costly provincial transit plan
The project is part of a broader transit expansion plan that has seen the Ontario government spend tens of billions — and will see it spend tens of billions more — to build light rail and subway expansions across the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area.
Transit planner and consultant David Cooper said the Crosstown was a highly complex project built in a densely populated part of Canada’s largest city.
It caused serious disruption for residents and businesses for years and lack of information about the construction problem compound public frustration, he said.
“People want information. They want to understand the ‘why,’” Cooper said.
“Why are things happening? Why are things not happening? … When we start answering the ‘why’ I find people are generally pretty accepting of the answer, but we just didn’t give it to them.”
Former Metrolinx spokesperson Anne Marie Aikins handled some communications on the thorny Crosstown file before her departure from the agency three years ago.
In the lead up to the line’s opening, she said there hasn’t been enough information provided to help answer basic questions and concerns from the public.
“There just hasn’t been any information about what’s going on? Why are there delays? Why is information leaking out from all kinds of different areas?” she said.
“Gaining the public’s trust again, is going to be extremely challenging.”
You’d be surprised just how forgiving and understanding your audiences can be if you speak quickly, transparently and honestly with them.– Anne Marie Aikins, former Metrolinx spokesperson
Aikins said the project’s delivery model presented problems when it came to communicating with the public.
Prior to the Crosstown, the TTC planned, built and operated major transit expansions. But after the agency ran into delays and cost overruns on the York-Spadina Subway extension more than a decade ago, the province turned to a public-private partnership, or P3 model, to build the Eglinton LRT.
Ontario should refocus comms strategy: Aikins
Aikins said that arrangement put multiple parties at the table, all with control over different responsibilities and access to different pieces of information.
The province needs to refocus its communications on the future transit projects to give one central spokesperson all the available information and authority to answer questions for the public, she said.
That includes delivering bad news, Aikins said.
“You’d be surprised just how forgiving and understanding your audiences can be if you speak quickly, transparently and honestly with them,” she said.
The public-private partnership model also grants companies involved protections for commercially sensitive information on the project, said Matti Siemiatycki, director of the University of Toronto’s Infrastructure Institute.
Those agreements can be used as an excuse to block some communication, he said.
“What we found in research is that oftentimes there will be sort of a creep of a scope of what’s considered confidential,” Siemiatycki said.
“You create these areas where there’s just like a gap of information,” he said. “And when you have a project that’s gone as poorly as the Eglinton Crosstown … we just have not been seeing that to any degree that’s given people confidence.”
How confidentiality ‘creep’ impacts info sharing
It’s incumbent on the province to not only push the companies involved in the deals to disclose more, but to also do so itself, said Murtaza Haider, professor and executive director of the Cities Institute at the University of Alberta.
He questioned the need for many of the confidentiality clauses in the first place.
“I think it’s a red herring,” Haider said. “This is a recipe for incompetence and a recipe for a lack of transparency.”
Opposition critics are pressing the government to hold a full public inquiry into the problems with the Crosstown, but to also adjust course on how it communicates about its ongoing transit builds.
“The public are intelligent,” said NDP MPP Tom Rakocevic. “They deserve to know what’s going on, what the truth is, and we need to get those answers. And if the government continues to make mistakes and not learn from it, well that doesn’t speak well for the future for all of us.”
Green Party Leader Mike Schreiner called the delays and cost overruns “unacceptable.”
“A public inquiry is needed to restore public trust — to say, you know, we’ve investigated what went wrong, we’ve learned from it. We’re going to fix those mistakes moving forward in a non-partisan way,” he said.
Ontario’s Ministry of Transportation and Metrolinx did not respond to requests for comment.
Cooper, the transit planner, worries that frustration with poor communication around the Crosstown could contribute to a softening of support for transit expansion. The work only happens with buy-in from the public, he said.
“I think it’s a risk,” Cooper said. “If people don’t see the benefits of the transit project … they don’t understand why there’s implications or impacts on them, [and] you will lose the public confidence.”
