Ontario’s transportation minister says he remains confident in both Metrolinx and the company building the years-delayed Eglinton Crosstown LRT as the window for the project to open this year narrows.
Provincial transit agency Metrolinx has promised to announce the date the controversial line will open three months before it begins carrying passengers. That leaves just 12 days for the date to be announced before the lack of news means another calendar year will have passed without trains carrying passengers.
Asked on Wednesday if he could officially rule out a 2024 opening date for the Eglinton LRT and accept it wouldn’t be open to the public until 2025, Minister of Transportation Prabmeet Sarkaria was non-committal.
“As I said in the past, we’re making great progress on some of the milestones in the testing and commissioning phase of the Crosstown project,” he said. “And we’ll continue to update as that moves forward.”
Despite another year likely passing without light rail trains running on Eglinton Avenue, Sarkaria insisted he still backed the provincial transit agency managing the project and the consortium building it.
During a tense exchange at a Queen’s Park transportation committee hearing, NDP MPP Joel Harden asked Sarkaria whether he had confidence that the 260 deficiencies with the line would be rectified, and in the transit agency responsible for overseeing the construction project.
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“I have 100 per cent confidence in our team at Metrolinx and those who are building our transit,” Sarkaria said, adding that he also had complete confidence that the deficiencies would be fixed and that the transit line would open safely.
Harden fired backing saying the government is now responsible for a “three-year late, billion-dollar, over-budget boondoggle.”
“It’s the fault of this government,” Harden charged. “They knew this project was being built at risk, and the same management team involved then is involved now.”
“The minister now has full confidence in the people involved in building it,” Harden added.
The Eglinton Crosstown LRT has long been a controversial project for the Ford government, with the route officially now under construction for 13 years.
The project has been without an official opening date for more than a year and a recent Toronto Region Board of Trade report estimated it is set to cost roughly $674 million per kilometre — as much as three times the cost of some European projects.
It has also been more than a year since Metrolinx CEO Phil Verster admitted there were hundreds of technical problems with the line — including with how parts of the track were built and with some of the software used to run the trains.
In the background, over the 12 months since Metrolinx said it would no longer provide target completion dates for the LRT to the public, some construction goals have been met, while some are unfinished.
A year-to-year progress update between September 2023 and September 2024 shows lane closures on Eglinton Avenue have ended and permits to occupy much of the line have been finished. Checks are advancing in several categories, while system integration testing has jumped from six per cent to 84 per cent.
Permits to occupy many of the stations along the route have been granted by the City of Toronto but Metrolinx is still holding back on accepting work done by the contractor. As of September 2024, Metrolinx said just nine per cent of construction certificates provided by the company building the line have been reviewed and accepted.
“In July we completed our ‘Train the Trainer’ program, and at the end of July, we began a four-day 28-train test which represented the intended actual service pattern that costumers will experience after opening,” a Metrolinx spokesperson said in a statement to Global News.
“Following operator training, there will be two weeks of trial running and 30 days of revenue service demonstration.”
© 2024 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.