Chris Selley: Ontario Line should be the beginning of the end of Canada’s infrastructure-surcharge nightmare
Thirty-four billion Canadian dollars ; $2.2 billion per kilometre. Three times more than projected, with more increases possible, we are warned, which is to say certain.
“Impossible” is a big word, but that’s the new estimate from Metrolinx, the Frankenstein’s monster of a Crown agency whose thundering herd of 7,000-odd employees — 124 of them vice-presidents, at last report — is nominally in charge of building transit in the Greater Toronto Area, with nominal oversight from Queen’s Park. And while almost nothing will shock those who follow this file closely, this is at the very least well beyond the realms of what should be possible.
In 2025, the Ontario Line’s three VPs with “Ontario Line” in their titles, two of them sharing the title of “executive vice president, subway delivery, Ontario Line,” made $902,0000 between them. They should be fired for cause and the entire agency closed down. The Ministry of Transport can screw this up perfectly well on its own, and own it.
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Of the Ontario Line’s 15.6 kilometre running length, 57 per cent is at grade or (mostly) elevated, rather than tunnelled. London opened the Elizabeth Line in 2022, featuring 21 kilometres of new twin-bore tunnels under, over and around all 11 existing Underground lines and through 2,000-odd years of city history, for something like $1.7 billion per kilometre (that’s 2025 Canadian dollars, at the current exchange rate, per the Transit Costs Project at NYU’s Marron Institute of Urban Management — as are all subsequent figures).
As it turned out it was actually 9,000-odd years of history, workers having discovered stone-age tools near the Thames, along with the Bethlem mental hospital’s cemetery, the tusk of a woolly mammoth, a “rare Tudor bowling ball ,” “horseshoes … near a well-preserved Roman road, … ancient DNA in the skeletons of victims of the Black Death and 13,000 well-preserved pickle pots and jam jars from (a) 19th-century … factory at Tottenham Court Road,” as a fascinating 2017 exhibit at the London Museum Docklands recounted.
Oh, and there were untold quantities of unexploded German ordnance to keep an eye out for. ( Safety glasses on , people!)
5News aggregated this summary from the outlet’s public feed. The full article, with all the context, is on nationalpost.com — the content belongs to National Post.
