Maguire's transit platform won't carry him to office
Joanne Chianello, Ottawa Citizen
Published on: October 1, 2014, Last Updated: October 1, 2014 7:48 PM EDT
Mike Maguire insists he’s running to be the next mayor of Ottawa.
And some of his platform will no doubt appeal to some voters: bring back weekly garbage pickup, aim for a zero per cent property tax increase, lobby the provincial government to buy hydro electricity from Quebec.
But his transit plan — scrapping the second phase of LRT and replacing it with four commuter trains that run just four times in each of the morning and evening rush hours — is so out of touch with what the city wants that it’s difficult to believe that Maguire is serious about wanting our town’s top job.
“I don’t agree it’s a huge obstacle,” Maguire told the Citizen’s editorial board Tuesday morning when asked about the unsaleability of his rail plan.
“I’ve got weeks left to make this abundantly clear to the right number of people who will look at this and say either they agree or they disagree. This is a matter of public policy and what better way to (make) a decision on public policy than to have a vote.”
Fair enough. But the citizens of Ottawa have already voted on this particular point of public policy — in the provincial election last June.
It was during an Ottawa campaign stop just a week before the June 12 election when PC leader Tim Hudak said that, if elected, he wouldn’t go ahead with Ottawa’s planned second phase of light rail. That didn’t go over so well in most Ottawa ridings, where voters delivered larger-than-expected victories to many Liberal candidates (with some notable exceptions).
Why Hudak’s campaign failed to engage Ontario voters is an issue the Progressive Conservatives are grappling with as their search for a new leader evolves. But there is no doubt that the PCs’ pledge not to fund LRT was a key factor in their failure to break through in most of urban Ottawa.
If abandoning LRT was a political non-starter for Hudak, what makes Maguire think it’ll work for him?
It’s also hard to buy Maguire’s claim that people don’t really understand Phase 2 of LRT. What’s not to understand? From 2018 to 2023, the city wants to extend light rail east to Place d’Orleans, west to Bayshore Mall, southwest to Baseline and south to Bowesville.
If anything, it’s Maguire’s plan to use existing rail that’s complicated. (Full disclosure: My Monday column incorrectly indicated that Maguire’s Kanata line involved at-grade crossings at Merivale, Woodroffe and Greenbank. In fact, the grades are separated at these crossings, which Maguire also seemed unaware of when asked. However, his plan does call for trains to cross at, among other roads, Anderson, Renaud, Navan, Mer Bleue and Tenth Line, and includes the Barrhaven crossings that have been the subject of so much trouble this past winter.)
Now, Maguire is right when he says that light rail won’t make it out to Kanata in Phase 2, and that the federal funding for a third of the $3-billion bill is far from secured. Indeed, as it currently stands, the federal government’s infrastructure fund commits $10 billion over the next 10 years for all projects in the country. It’s difficult to foresee a scenario where Ottawa gets 10 per cent of the entire infrastructure budget for the next decade.
And perhaps it will turn out that we can’t build LRT out in all directions as quickly as we’d like, which would be disappointing.
But like Maguire told the Citizen’s editorial board about his obstacle-ridden rail plan, “There’s not going to be a problem-free solution. That doesn’t mean you just throw up your hands and walk away.”
That’s exactly what most people would say about light rail. In the 2010 municipal election, voters made it quite clear they wanted to move ahead with LRT. It would be bizarre if they now decided to abandon the 12.5 kilometres being built in the centre of the city and side with an entirely different plan.
Indeed, it’s hard to know at whom Maguire’s plan is aimed, other than, perhaps, the 3,200 people that his rail plan would accommodate, people who don’t care about transit or the environment, and people who, for whatever reason, don’t want to re-elect incumbent Jim Watson.
That might be as many as 30 per cent of voters. But the fact is, after taxes, transit is the issue that most concerns Ottawa residents, a Forum poll (and anecdotal evidence) shows.
And Maguire, like Hudak, doesn’t have a transit plan. And that means he doesn’t have a plan to be mayor for most of Ottawa.
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