LILLEY: Crosstown set to miss another opening deadline?

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I’ve been joking for a while that the Ontario Line subway expansion would open before the Eglinton Crosstown LRT.

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The Crosstown broke ground in 2011 and still hasn’t opened – the Ontario Line was announced in mid-2019 and is years away from completion.

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Still, with the Crosstown now more than five years behind schedule, the joke doesn’t seem so crazy.

After years of announcing missed deadlines, then going silent for a time on when they might open, it looked like we might see the LRT line open this September. While that’s still a possibility, it’s also up in the air.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford and officials from Metrolinx were asked about the delay this week and couldn’t give a clear answer.

“We’re going to do it safely. We’re not going to do it like the City of Ottawa did, and the thing is breaking down every second day,” Ford said Wednesday.

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Ottawa opened their LRT in September 2019 in a highly political way. Mayor Jim Watson, a highly partisan Liberal and former McGuinty-era cabinet minister, opened the city’s LRT early, before it was ready, to help local federal Liberals in their re-election.

The results were a debacle and, in some ways, Ford’s reluctance to open the Crosstown early is understandable.

That said, the Crosstown broke ground in November 2011 with Toronto’s late Mayor Rob Ford joining then-premier Dalton McGuinty at a time when Sexy and I Know It was topping the Billboard charts in Canada and Puss in Boots was one of the top grossing movies of the time.

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A child born in that week is about to enter high school and is thinking of getting their driver’s licence.

The Ford government wants to continue to blame the former Liberal government for what has happened, but the Ford team has now had more days in charge of the Crosstown than the McGuinty/Wynne team. At a certain point, you need to own your failures and the Crosstown is as much a Ford failure as it is a McGuinty/Wynne failure.

Thankfully, there are new people in charge.

Gone is the former Metrolinx CEO Phil Verster, who thought the best way to solve every problem was to take contractors and sub-contractors to court, thus delaying everything. Gone also is “super-consultant” Brian Guest and his firm Boxfish, which ran Metrolinx like they owned it.

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Guest was instrumental in the former Ottawa LRT debacle – he shows up often in that report and is a big part of the issue with the Crosstown in my view.

This was a project where tracks were laid incorrectly in 2021, more than a year after the project should have opened, and the problem still wasn’t fixed when the Toronto Sun broke the story in April 2023.

Newly appointed Metrolinx CEO Michael Lindsay says the LRT is closer to completion than it has ever been and may still meet the September opening.

“We’re in the middle of serious trial running of the system right now,” Lindsay said.

“As of late July, TTC personnel are also now showing up at Eglinton stations to put the non-rolling stock infrastructure through its paces too. Escalators, elevators, HVAC systems, etc.”

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That’s not an idle concern – these stations have been sitting there, not operating for years and making sure that the AC, the escalators, the elevators and the doors work is a big part of the job.

What was not expected is that the train cars are now old and in need of repair.

“These vehicles are 10 years old, they’re only just now beginning to run the kilometres that were intended for revenue service,” he said.

That means figuring out maintenance schedules for train cars that are a decade old and haven’t been used like they should have been. This presents new problems for Metrolinx to figure out.

Could we see a mid to late September opening?

I still have my doubts, but I have more confidence with Michael Lindsay in charge than I did with Phil Verster overseeing this debacle.

blilley@postmedia.com

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