When it comes to financing Subways – Karen Stintz is a Dinosaur
In fact, Dinosaurs can run faster than the streetcars Karen Stintz proposes as ‘rapid’ transportation! While everyone in Toronto including Stintz, now admits that subways are the right solution, Karen Stintz stubbornly refuses to consider using private funds to build subways, but she refuses to say why. Even communist countries we consider stubborn, are downright modern when it comes to build fast transportation. China raised money to build fast trains travelling at 400 km/h on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, while Karen Stintz is still proposing Fred Flintstone’s 17 km/h streetcars and calls them LRTs!
If you wanted to buy a house and didn’t have the money, you wouldn’t hesitate to get mortgage to buy it. Why can’t this city do the same with subways?
Our city council, hamstrung by the unions and the Liberal Government, refuses to even debate approaching the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board to invest some of their 158 billion into subways* by way of a bond or mortgage. Or to approach the various union pension boards who have invested in shopping malls in England, when they could invest the money right here where it could be put to good use benefitting Canadians who earned that money for them in the first place!
Madrid Spain built subways for $110 million per kilometre
Subways aren’t nearly as expensive to build as our city halls’ lefties would have us believe. Why can Spain build subways for $110 million per kilometre, when Joe Mihevc would like us to believe that it costs $250 million or more in Toronto? And why do they want to build a buried LRT when it is actually cheaper to build a subway and much cheaper to maintain it than LRTs?
Our City fathers should remind the Federal Government that they are now collecting an extra $1.2 billion per year for HST on our gasoline taxes. Surely, they should be willing to part with some of that on subways and roads to make us a world-class city.
Funds for Sheppard, Eglinton and the Downtown Relief line could easily be raised by way of a public offering or bond.
* CPPIB’s Wiseman focuses on Asia, Globe and Mail Dec 2, 2010