The recent revelations of political meddling in technical matters suggest that the system of checks and balances in Ontario is not functioning.

The Ministry of Transportation in Ontario has reportedly pressured Metrolinx to construct two additional GO Transit stations that will cost tens of millions of dollars and will decrease the operating transit efficiency. One of the stops (Kirby) is in Transportation Minister Steven Del Duca’s riding.

Toronto Mayor John Tory is also pushing for a $3.5-plus-billion subway extension in Scarborough, which many transportation experts believe will worsen transit accessibility. Moreover, the Bloor-Danforth and Yonge subways are already operating at their respective capacities during peak periods and have little room for additional riders.

Citizen groups and political parties in Ontario are encouraging the auditor general to conduct a special audit of the apparent lack of due diligence to prevent billions of dollars being spent on transit that will build the political fortunes of a few.

The auditor general must act now to prevent wasteful spending rather than conducting audits after billions of taxpayers’ dollars are misspent.

A similar subway extension in Quebec, which was primarily politically motivated, could serve as a precedent for the auditor general in Ontario whose counterpart in Quebec wrote a scathing review of the governance lapses and mismanagement that caused a project approved initially for $179 million in 1998 to cost taxpayers more than $750 million on its completion in 2008.

Just a few weeks shy of provincial elections scheduled in November 1998, the provincial government in Quebec passed an order-in-council instructing the Agence métropolitaine de transport (AMT), the Quebec equivalent of Metrolinx, to extend the subway from Montreal by 5.1 kilometres to the Island of Laval in the north.

The incumbent provincial government made the last-minute announcement of a subway extension in exchange for support of suburban voters in the forthcoming elections.

When the Quebec government increased the budget to $547.7 million in 2003, the auditor general of Quebec acted proactively in the public’s interest and ordered an audit of the under-construction project to determine “if the AMT had managed the project carefully and with a concern for economy and efficiency.”

The Quebec auditor general’s report exposed a complete lack of due diligence on the part of the AMT and the provincial government. The auditor general concluded that the project was poorly conceived since the $179-million estimate “was not based on any document showing the justification of this extension, its costs, the location of the subway stations and the choice of layout.”

This must sound eerily familiar to Torontonians because the Scarborough subway extension (SSE) cost estimates, which have been revised upwards, also appear to be based on guesswork. Detailed engineering design work is currently being undertaken.

A thorough cost-benefit analysis of transit alternatives is missing for the SSE. There is no evidence that a one-stop subway will offer superior transit service than the seven-stop LRT. In fact, independent studies have shown that the LRT option is preferred for improving the transit network in Scarborough.

The Quebec auditor general found similar gaps for the Laval extension. Its report concluded that “the analyses seeking to evaluate alternative solutions were carried out without detailed technical studies” and the Quebec government did not have the necessary information to decide on the subway extension.

Quebec’s auditor general also held AMT responsible for gross oversight and for being in violation of its own rules. The AMT permitted the same consortium of the six firms that conducted the project’s feasibility studies to eventually construct the project.

AMT’s board of directors was accused of acting on incomplete information. Quebec’s auditor general believed that the AMT board should have exercised greater vigilance “to ensure the protection of public funds.”

The Metrolinx board appears no different from that of the AMT. Despite a business case analysis that was supportive of LRT, the Metrolinx board caved to political pressure and approved the two GO stations, which it had previously rejected.

Early diagnosis and treatment are preferred over identifying the disease at post-mortem. The Quebec auditor general’s report suggests that, eventually, the electorate will learn of the losses resulting from the politically motivated planned infrastructure spending in Ontario. Supporting the public’s interest, however, lies in preventing such losses rather than documenting these after the fact.

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Ontario’s auditor general should use the precedent from Quebec and act in the public’s interest to prevent wasteful spending. The time to audit is now.

Murtaza Haider is an associate professor at the Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University. He is the author of Getting Started with Data Science: Making Sense of Data with Analytics.

David Crowley is a Toronto-based planner with more than four decades of experience in transport planning.

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