Even as city councillors meet Wednesday for an emergency debate whether to take the Eglinton LRT above or below ground, the bigger move tunnelling below the radar is a bid to emasculate the once venerable transit body.

For more than a year, senior officials at Queen’s Park, Metrolinx (the provincial agency tasked with GTA transit planning) and Mayor Rob Ford’s office have been scheming, plotting, figuring out a way to tame the TTC.

They want the head of TTC chief general manager Gary Webster. Transit chair Karen Stintz must go — not only because she betrayed Ford’s underground plan, but because she refused to lower the axe on Webster last year.

Some want to privatize as much of the public transit body as possible, starting with turning over the proposed Eglinton LRT line and Sheppard subway line to the corporate world.

While the officials play nice in public, in private the knives come out.

“The TTC is unpartnerly,” one Metrolinx official said, making up a word to show his displeasure that the TTC want to make public its analysis supporting the original Eglinton line, not the underground version Metrolinx has secretly preferred, until it went public Monday.

Releasing such a report — the mayor’s political allies on the TTC blocked it — would “throw sand in the gears” and amounts to “not getting with the program,” the official said.

He said the TTC “buggered up St. Clair . . . is way over budget for Spadina and doesn’t have a good track record” — all claims TTC staff vigorously reject.

And, if the official had his way, the province would take over the TTC, at least the rail operations, and let Metrolinx run it.

Alas, Queen’s Park, with its own massive deficits, is allergic to the cost of operating the TTC. And it has become clear that Metrolinx does not have the capacity to swallow the TTC, which provides some 80 per cent of transit in the Toronto region. In fact, in any merger, it is the TTC that would devour Metrolinx.

While commuters think the agencies and governments are working together for the common good, officials have been sniping and battling each other in private.

They don’t trust each other’s opinions, views, cost estimates and transit expertise. Just talk to them — these very officials who sit behind closed doors to determine Toronto’s transit future — and you get an earful.

For example:

While acknowledging the TTC’s near century of transit service, in private talks, one official dismissed it as “inflexible,” “out-of-touch,” incapable of running a 21st century system.

Ford’s administration is equally dismissive. “Everybody else builds cheaper stuff faster than us. The TTC is the most publicly respectable voice on transit in the GTA, but not internationally anymore,” a senior Ford operative said.

Gordon Chong, the ex-councillor Ford hired to do a study showing how the Sheppard subway could be built by the private sector, took time to blast the TTC as a “very isolated, insular institution that has a professional conceit that really is inappropriate and is not serving the city well.”

One senior TTC official says critics just want them to be “highly paid clerks” who sit back and don’t object to schemes the TTC knows won’t work.

And now that city council, led by Stintz, has staged a coup aimed at wresting transit control from Ford, the gloves are off.

The mayor’s brother, Doug Ford, says, inelegantly, the TTC needs “a complete enema.” And, picking up on the theme now gone public, Ford’s pitbull ally, Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti, said Webster and Stintz must be replaced.

Bubbling on the horizon is a motion to add a number of citizens to the transit commission, a move that would further cement the mayor’s hold on the commission because he would mastermind the appointments to ensure they match his vision.

With that in place, the newly constituted commission might even go rogue and ignore city council’s decision Wednesday should it sideline the mayor’s vision.

In fact, Councillor Norm Kelly, a member of the transit commission and a Ford ally, mused Tuesday that the province should not listen to city council, if council makes the “wrong” decision and reinstates the light rail plan Ford stopped unilaterally.

None of the above fixes transit, a growing concern for a growing city with growing congestion and growing angst and frustrations over growing gridlock.

What’s worse, the disagreements among the transit principals are so fundamental as to slow progress on the transit file.

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From interviews with senior transit brass, the very ones who sit and negotiate the deals and memorandums, the emerging picture is one of grave concern for the transit public.

Metrolinx owns all the proposed lines in the existing plan proposed by the David Miller regime. TTC is its partner, the transit brains that is to manage the construction projects and likely operate them when completed.

The private sector does the actual construction, through contracts signed with Metrolinx. The TTC provides the specs for the design and construction of the projects, and the oversight.

When the province provided $8.4 billion for transit in the city, all systems seemed primed to start construction. But Ford got elected, promising to build a subway stretching from the Downsview station, east along Sheppard to the Scarborough Town Centre and down the existing Scarborough RT to Kennedy.

The mayor said he’d do it without tax dollars because the private sector would. And it would be in operation by 2015 — an impossibility, considering that the subway extension from Downsview to York Region at Highway 7 will barely meet that target date, with years of a head start under its belt and complete funding.

When Ford ran to Premier Dalton McGuinty to halt the approved light rail plan, he wanted all the $8.4 billion diverted to his subway plan.

One official, negotiating for the province, said it took one of the best negotiating efforts of his life to move Ford off that intent and save Eglinton.

A Ford staffer agrees, adding it was Metrolinx that sold them on the Eglinton line. Metrolinx wants to build the Eglinton line underground as Ford wishes, and the evidence is that it quickly directed the TTC to stop work on the original plan even though all parties knew that directive was not legally binding until city council approved it.

“It’s their plan; they sold us on it,” the Ford adviser says.

Ford has yet to take the private agreement to council for approval. But Metrolinx “is executing it because they like it,” the Ford official says.

For its part, Metrolinx claims it is only facilitating the mayor’s wish to seek funding options for Sheppard before taking the deal, the non-binding memorandum of understanding, to council.

But Ford has proven a “massive failure” in demonstrating how he might pay for the Sheppard subway without using tax dollars, as promised.

When Ford demanded the province, Metrolinx and the TTC rip up the approved Transit City plan, the parties decided to let him have a go at his vision of landing private financing.

But one Metrolinx official says Ford couldn’t even deliver money to finance a proper study on financing the Sheppard subway. Instead of spending multi-millions to prepare a credible financing plan, Gordon Chong was given $100,000 and delivered a report the official called “hopeless” because of its lack of credibility.

Ford has proven to be “inadequate as a communicator and doesn’t believe in reason or facts,” one of his transit partners say.

Consequently, the transit file lands on the floor of council Wednesday — a political football, a matter of ridicule and a tale of a province, its transit agency, the TTC and the City of Toronto unable to “get its act together.”

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