She’s a “career high flyer,” who is “brought down to Earth not just undercover but underground.”

However, TTC chair Karen Stintz doesn’t actually crash in this week’s episode of Undercover Boss Canada until she’s learned to drive a subway, spent hours repairing seat cushions, swept the floors at Victoria Park Station and hauled garbage on the overnight bus-cleaning shift.

That’s when the exhaustion kicked in for the Eglinton-Lawrence city councillor, who lived in a cheap motel for the week and wore a disguise to work on the front lines of the system she oversees.

Stintz posed as trainee Ruth Bear and donned a dark wig, nose ring and glasses in the episode airing on W Network at 9 p.m. Thursday.

When the show was filmed in July, the TTC was looking at contracting-out jobs and cutting service. Stintz said she agreed to go undercover to help discover “what kind of cuts we can make and what cuts would be detrimental to the service.”

The stunt rewarded her with a personal appreciation of the people who keep the TTC moving 365 days a year, she said later.

In the program, Stintz gets a firsthand look at the impact of suicide from subway operator Emilia Livrizzi; gleans an idea for a public service campaign from Tony Costa, her boss in the upholstery shop, and learns to step aside for customers from cleaner Sylvia Butt.

There are comic moments as well, when Stintz tries to steer an industrial floor polisher that “has a mind of its own.”

But it’s bus cleaner Carmen that really wipes the floor with Stintz, teaching her to check the fluid levels, fill the tanks and haul the garbage off buses. The physically demanding work is clearly a struggle for the TTC chair, who typically spends her days behind a desk.

There’s a reward for each of the unsuspecting mentors at the end of the show. Stintz has said that each of the employees who helped her exemplify the kind of customer service culture the TTC is trying to build.

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