A Progressive Conservative government would tackle gridlock by ending the city hall transit “circus” with a takeover of TTC subway and LRT lines, the Gardiner Expressway and the Don Valley Parkway.

In a major pre-election policy announcement, Tory Leader Tim Hudak outlined a traffic-busting proposal to place the province’s Metrolinx regional transit agency in charge of most public transport in the GTA.

“I watched with much sadness the recent circus involving the City of Toronto, council, the mayor’s office, the premier and the minister of transportation,” Hudak said Thursday.

“If we ever want to see Toronto as a leading city again we’ve got to end that circus and have one group in charge that actually has a plan,” he told reporters, adding that his scheme, which he says would boost the economy, would end the political gridlock that has stalled transit improvements for years.

But Hudak said there’s no new money for transit until the province gets a handle on its $14.8 billion deficit.

“Where money’s available, we’ll build subways,” said the Tory leader.

Hudak was a backbencher when former PC premier Mike Harris scrapped the planned Eglinton subway line after taking power in 1995 and filled in the tunnel.

Premier Dalton McGuinty said his Liberal administration has spent billions boosting transit and charged that Hudak’s vision lacks a key ingredient — money.

“The real issue the PCs are going to face is: How are they going to fund it?” said McGuinty, whose government has earmarked $8 billion for transit improvements in Toronto, including an Eglinton LRT.

The Liberals were surprised Hudak didn’t address the long-desired downtown relief subway line to take pressure off the Yonge-University and Bloor lines. They criticized his echoes of Mayor Rob Ford’s call for subways, when LRTs cost two-thirds as much.

New Democrat transportation critic Rosario Marchese (Trinity-Spadina) said Hudak’s plan is “looking for a quick fix and one-size-fits-all solution, as if it will magically happen. It won’t work.”

“Having an unelected, unaccountable body like Metrolinx to make decisions around this important stuff is not good.”

Metrolinx CEO Bruce McCuaig said, “it would not be appropriate to comment on the platform of any of the parties.”

TTC chair Karen Stintz said the province couldn’t just take the profitable subway lines and leave the heavily subsidized bus service behind.

“If an Ontario PC government would consider uploading all the TTC, then it would be worth discussing. I believe any transfer of TTC to Metrolinx or any provincial body should be an “all-or-nothing” proposition; otherwise I believe Torontonians will have more operational costs downloaded onto them than ever before.”

But Hudak said recent experience shows the need for a bold new approach.

“The province is going to be in charge. We’re going to upload the TTC subways, the LRTs, and integrate that with GO under Metrolinx so a … commuter coming in from Oakville, from Whitby, from Scarborough, Etobicoke, will actually have seamless travel,” he told a news conference.

“I just do not want to see more city streets ripped up, like we saw in that disaster on St. Clair… . World-class cities build underground.”

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To kick-start the kind of growth needed to fund transit, Hudak pledged to chop a “significant” number of civil service jobs and make “courageous” tax cuts.

With 600,000 unemployed, Ontario needs “dramatic change” to chart a better future, Hudak said as he introduced a white paper seeking public input on whether cuts to the HST, corporate or personal income taxes would have the best impact.

He said tax reductions, such as the $3 billion cost of trimming the corporate tax rate to 8 per cent or as much as $5 billion to slash personal income taxes by 15 per cent, would boost the economy and allow the deficit to be eliminated sooner than McGuinty projects in 2017-18.

But Hudak wouldn’t say when that could happen, other than to promise a balanced budget “well before” 2017, or exactly how many of the province’s 68,000 civil servants he would axe to achieve “significant reductions in the size and cost of government.”

But he added: “If we don’t do it, we’re never going to get out of this hole.”

One way to start, he said, is to eliminate the $1 billion annual cost of the McGuinty government’s Ontario Clean Energy Benefit that gives residents a 10 per cent break on their electricity bills.

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To McGuinty, whose minority Liberal government marked its first year in power on Saturday, Hudak’s cost-cutting approach risks a repeat of problems like the deadly Walkerton tainted water scandal.

“It’s going to come from firing people…it’s going to come from cutting public services,” he warned in a scrum with reporters later.

NDP Leader Andrea Horwath said she’s launching a public consultation on economic growth because “things the Liberal government have been doing have not been working.”

Her move and Hudak’s come as they position themselves for an election that could come as early as next spring.

With files from Daniel Dale

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