Liam Casey and Allison Jones
Canadian Press
Two of Ontario’s main party leaders focused their attention south of the border Friday with American tariffs possibly hours away, while a third set her sights on shoring up local votes with transit pledges.
Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie pledged to install platform barriers at all Toronto subway stations, increase crisis intervention teams and hire more constables for transit services across the province.
Meanwhile, Progressive Conservative Leader Doug Ford said if re-elected, he will spend $22 billion to build infrastructure as part of a stimulus package in the face of a possible trade war with the United States.
Outside a busy subway station in Toronto’s east end on Friday, Crombie detailed part of her plan to get more people on transit with the confidence they’ll be safe.
“We want people to ride public transit and I want to make it as accessible and safe as possible,” Crombie said.
If her party wins the snap election Ford called earlier this week, Crombie said she will hire 300 special constables for transit operations in Ottawa and the Greater Toronto Area. A Crombie government would also invest in more security cameras and safety equipment.
Crombie did not release the cost of the proposed plan she would enact should she become premier, but said it will come during the campaign.
It will not be cheap. Subway platform barriers at all stations in Toronto would cost $4.1 billion, the Toronto Transit Commission’s latest capital budget plan said.
Experts say platform barriers in cities around the world have reduced the vast majority of injuries and death on the tracks. They are particularly helpful for reducing suicides.
There have been 816 suicides on Toronto’s subway system since 1954, the TTC said, and another 915 people have attempted suicide over that time. In 2023, the last full year of data available, 11 people died by suicide and another 33 people attempted suicide, the TTC said.
Toronto Public Health recommended the platform barrier system in 2014 in a larger report on suicide prevention. The TTC has also said it would save lives.
The issue became prominent in 2018 after a 56-year-old man pushed a 73-year-old man onto the tracks in front of a moving train at Toronto’s busy Bloor-Yonge Station. The man pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison.
Then-mayor John Tory agreed that barriers would save lives, but did not know where the money would come from to install them. At the time, the TTC estimated it would cost over $1 billion to install barriers on every platform.
When asked by a reporter Friday about the billions that system would now cost, Crombie seemed surprised.
“If that is the cost of safety, then so be it,” she said.
Ford did not commit to building platform barriers, but defended his government’s transit investments over his past two terms.
“We’re going to continue spending money on building transit, getting people out of the cars, getting them into transit,” Ford said at a campaign stop in Niagara Falls, Ont.
“We’re spending over $70 billion on expanding transit around our province.”
On a possible trade war with the U.S. that could hit full force Saturday, Ford outlined part of his “economic action plan.”
The package contains $15 billion for capital projects, including a widening of the Queen Elizabeth Way in southwestern Ontario, and $5 billion for the province’s infrastructure bank to invest in housing and other projects.
