Mayor Chow barely dodged a full TTC strike. Why did she play games with the union in the first place?
Mayor Chow barely dodged a full TTC strike. Why did she play games with the union in the first place?
What kind of NDP politician tries to hardball negotiate with labour unions?
With merely fifteen minutes left until the midnight deadline, on June 6th both the TTC leadership and Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 113 announced that a framework for a deal had been reached. In making this last-minute deal, TTC Chair Jamaal Myers and Mayor Olivia Chow narrowly averted what would have been a cataclysmic shutdown of the entire mainline TTC network.
In the resulting CBC News article describing what little is known on the deal framework, it was suggested by Brock University Labour Studies Professor Larry Savage that Mayor Chow had dodged a bullet. From any reasonable perspective, however, it’s clearly evident that Chow’s failure to commit to her own political agenda is what triggered this incident in the first place.
When I use the word cataclysmic to describe the shutdown that would have occurred yesterday, it is not an exaggeration. From the bus routes to the tram network to the three remaining metro lines, everything would have abruptly shuttered at 2:00 AM. Except for those lucky few who could take the entirety of their trip solely on GO’s regional buses and trains, the entire City of Toronto would have spontaneously collapsed into a transit black hole.
Thankfully, a side deal was brokered to maintain Wheel-Trans, which in the last pre-pandemic closure year of 2019 took disabled passengers on more than four million trips. TTC Chair Myers and Mayor Chow had the decency to make a straightforward deal with ATU Local 113 on Wheel-Trans, but it appears they did not possess much more decency than that.
ATU Local 113 President Marvin Alfred described evasiveness during negotiations, with certain items being agreed upon, and then later being told that various leadership figures at the TTC vetoed those despite the negotiators agreeing. There is a distinctly apparent lack of leadership at the TTC, where nobody takes responsibility for the disrepair, the delays, or the shutdowns.
In my discussions with urbanism advocates in Toronto, there is a common experience in their interactions with TTC leadership, that staff for TTC CEO Rick Leary and staff for TTC Chair Jamaal Myers will point the blame at each other’s offices for holding up every project. The bureaucrats blame the politicos, the politicos blame the bureaucrats, and nothing of value is ever accomplished.
Ultimately, I place the blame with the political side. The CEO only implements the policies that City Council and the Mayor direct them to implement. Under the leadership of Andy Byford, the bureaucracy may have been far more proactive in working within the Board’s proscriptions to improve the TTC, but ultimately the CEO serves at the pleasure of the politicians on the board.
Rick Leary is not a politician, and I can’t vote him out. But Jamaal Myers and Olivia Chow are politicians, and as the two politicians with leadership on this file, the responsibility firmly rests with them. If they do not rise to that responsibility, then they will pay an electoral price for it.
Mayor Chow described herself as constrained by the City of Toronto’s 2024 Budget, but this is a prison of her own design, as strong mayor powers explicitly gave her the ability to write the budget herself, and pass it with the support of only one-third of City Council. If she wanted to make the TTC a priority in the budget, she could have done so.
But instead, after capital investments and the Toronto Police service at the top of the list, the TTC was ranked a distant third in Mayor Chow’s 2024 Budget, and this short-term thinking is increasingly damaging to our city’s transit backbone. I would argue the most important capital investments that Toronto needs to make would actually be repairs to the TTC’s Line 1 and Line 2 metros, both of which are plagued with a smattering of slow zones grinding the speed of trains to a halt.
When it comes to whether the TTC or the Toronto Police provide a more positive impact to the City of Toronto, the TTC is clearly superior. After all, the TTC provides me affordable and convenient transportation around a massive city, while the Toronto Police gaslight the queer community by refusing to believe us when we told them about a serial killer in the Village, and then when he was finally caught telling us we didn’t try hard enough to help them.
Since Mayor Chow had no problem granting Toronto Police a blank cheque for everything they wanted, she should have no problem doing so for the TTC as well. Indeed, if she had simply done a larger property tax increase, she could have already brought the TTC back to 100% of pre-pandemic funding levels, and perhaps even better.
Arguably, Mayor Chow made a fatal error in only increasing property taxes 10.5%, as the massive political heat she took for the decision is far outsized compared to the small increase of a few hundred dollars that the average homeowner saw on their assessment this year. If she had risen it higher, the criticism would have been just as harsh, but she would have accomplished more for the City’s finances, and the criticism would fade with time.
But now, since she delayed doing the increase truly needed, she will have to do it again next year, and the public antagonism will be revived and taint her again. It is always better to get all the unpopular tax increases out of the way as close to the beginning of your electoral term. Stretching it out will make it feel like something she inflicts annually, and it will give ammunition to Mayor Chow’s electoral opponents in 2026.
But aside from that, playing these stupid games with ATU Local 113 at all, refusing until the last minute to negotiate in good faith, when ATU Local 113 literally endorsed Chow in the 2023 by-election to become Mayor, is just completely unbecoming of an NDP politician.
While Toronto municipal politics may be technically non-partisan, Mayor Chow made it clear last year that she will be keeping her NDP membership active, and that makes it fair game to judge her as to whether she’s maintaining solidarity with the labour movement that has supported her and the NDP through decades of political ambition.
For clarity, I have criticized ATU Local 113 in the past, most notably when I criticized them for forcing manual controls onto Scarborough’s Line 3 trains. That decision was obviously done to protect jobs, but when the automated system was used on the same trains in Vancouver, it didn’t just make service faster, and didn’t just reduce wear and tear on the trains, it also increased safety for passengers and reduced accidents.
In Montréal, where the REM uses similar full GoA4 automation without human operators, the system is able to run 20 hours a day, every single day of the week. All future metro lines should be built to GoA4 and should not have human operators. In literally every possible aspect, it is better for both the operator and the passengers.
But Line 1, Line 2, Line 4, and the ever-changing roster of tram and bus routes in Toronto will need human operators for decades to come, and I support ATU Local 113 in getting those operators the best deal possible. While they have drawn some criticism for blocking MiWay and York Region Transit from operating routes in Toronto in this new deal, allowing drivers to operate routes in Toronto that aren’t under the ATU Local 113 contract would effectively be allowing scabs.
If Mayor Chow wants to remain Mayor Chow, she needs to stop messing around with the unions that she’s supposed to be fighting for. The union had already worked well past the expiration of their contract in good faith that a deal would be accomplished, and this midnight deadline was truly one last straw that ATU Local 113 was forced to draw because Myers and Chow did not respect that good faith.
I was excited to see Olivia Chow win the Mayoral race, even though I worked on Josh Matlow’s campaign, because it was good to see a progressive take the reins again in Toronto. I remain optimistic that Mayor Chow is a far better choice than any of her predecessors in the amalgamated city. But ultimately, my political loyalty is not to any individual, or even to any party.
My loyalty rests with the labour movement, and if Chow and Myers are going to keep playing hardball with unions, then my support in the 2026 race can always shift to another faction. I’ll be proud to throw my weight behind the political candidates who chose to join the picket line and support labour, rather than the incumbents forcing workers to strike in the first place.
As Mayor Chow faces the prospect of more public-sector union negotiations going into the rest of 2024, she has to decide whether playing hardball with her own political base will be advantageous going into the next election. I doubt it.