Petition

Member of Parliament

RE: OPERATION AND MAINTENANCE OF THE NEW HAMILTON LRT

Metrolinx, the provincial arm’s length transit planning organization, has a history of pushing municipalities away from Operation and Maintenance (O&M) of the transit lines they build in Ontario Communities, they would rather outsource our transit services to private for profit consortiums.

Ontario municipalities have suffered with the ongoing privatization exemplified by examples from Ottawa and Toronto. The Eglinton Crosstown LRT infrastructure fiasco in Toronto – with 12 years of construction, billions in cost overruns, no end in sight, and no accountability. The O-Train Ottawa debacle saw derailments, delivery delays, trains that don’t work in cold weather, and a long list of serious safety issues, including lack of testing which sees the trains frequently out of service. Under the terms of Hamilton’s agreement with Metrolinx we all pay for the Operation and Maintenance of the Hamilton LRT. However the agreement does not specify who will perform that O&M. We have a chance to push back against the trend of privatization and keep our transit public.

We the petitioners believe that transit should be publicly operated and maintained. We know from multiple examples that privatizing transit doesn’t work – it ends up more costly, less safe, and robs our communities of our shared public assets and good local jobs.

We have three demands:

1. That Hamilton City Councillors reaffirm their August 2017 motion to have the Hamilton Street Railway (HSR) responsible for both operation and maintenance of the new Hamilton LRT line.

2. That Metrolinx keep operation of new transit infrastructure public and build the capacity for maintenance in our public sector.

3. That Ford Government tells Metrolinx to move away from P3 models for transit projects and Keep Transit Public.

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