Bruce Deachman: All aboard? The city needs to think hard before signing away our O-Train to Metrolinx.

The notion of handing Ottawa’s beleaguered LRT over to the province seems too good to be true, right?

I mean, we spent almost as much as NASA did to put a man on the moon, and for what? A transit system that can barely get a man from Orléans to Kanata.

OK, I’m exaggerating, but that’s how it feels some days. We spent billions building it, and god-knows-how-much fixing the things that have subsequently gone wrong with it.

And now Queen’s Park is offering to take it off our hands? Seriously, how soon can you pick it up?

According to Mayor Mark Sutcliffe, uploading the LRT to the province will relieve Ottawa of a $4-billion burden and save about $85 million a year, money that could instead be poured back into public transit.

It’s not difficult to understand the appeal.

But before we hand over the keys, it might be worth taking a closer look at the new landlord.

Because earlier this month, Metrolinx, the provincial Crown agency that would assume responsibility for Ottawa’s LRT, cut GO train service in Toronto on four lines — “service adjustments,” in Metrolinx’s parlance.

Service was reduced on Lakeshore East, Lakeshore West, Barrie and Stouffville lines. Rush-hour service wasn’t affected, but some off-peak and weekend trains disappeared or were replaced by buses.

Metrolinx said the changes were necessary in part because of train-crew availability and to allow its rail partner to train and certify staff. The cuts are expected to last until next spring.

For some GO riders, the announcement may have seemed like déjà vu. Metrolinx had already reduced weekend service — from 15-minute service to 30 — on the Lakeshore lines last November, citing “crewing constraints” and the need to “rebalance resources.” Fifteen-minute weekend service returned in May, only to be reduced again four months later.

None of this means that Metrolinx would necessarily cut Ottawa’s train service. But it does illustrate why Ottawa needs answers before signing on the dotted line.

Transit agencies decide which routes need more service and which can do with less, which expenditures are urgent and which can wait. They decide where employees and money are deployed.

If Ottawa no longer owns its LRT, who ultimately makes those choices here?

It’s a problem that city council has already identified. When it authorized negotiations with the province last October, it laid down seven principles for any deal, including requirements that Metrolinx have a significant presence and adequate resources in Ottawa, that its governance provide accountability and transparency to Ottawa residents, and that OC Transpo maintain local control over service delivery and personnel.

I can almost hear the head-butting already.

What does “local control” mean if somebody else owns the railway and pays the bills?

Suppose OC Transpo decides trains need to run more frequently, but that would require additional vehicles, maintenance or capital spending from Metrolinx? Who decides?

Suppose Metrolinx faces a provincewide shortage of rail employees? Does Ottawa get the people it needs?

Stittsville Coun. Glen Gower, who chairs Ottawa’s transit committee, agrees that those concerns are real. If Metrolinx owns the railway, he said, Ottawa may need guaranteed service levels written into the eventual agreement.

Gower also suggested having greater local representation on Metrolinx’s board of directors could provide another safeguard. Currently, the only one of Metrolinx’s 12 board members whose biography lists Ottawa is Douglas Jones, who served as the province’s Deputy Minister of Transportation from 2022 to 2025.

“There’s a lot of different ways that you might ensure that Ottawa still has some certainty around the level of service,” Gower said. “But yeah, it is a concern. It’s something that we’re going to need to work out through those negotiations.”

Gower is also concerned about accountability and transparency.

After LRT’s disastrous 2019 launch, the subsequent public inquiry and the changes that followed, he says that OC Transpo now provides council and residents with a high level of information about the rail system. He doesn’t want that to disappear in any deal with Metrolinx.

“It’s a risk,” he says, “and we need to be clear on how that’s being dealt with in any kind of agreement.”

No question about that. But I have a hard time contemplating an arrangement whereby the province — via Metrolinx — assumes ownership of and financial responsibility for Ottawa’s LRT, yet OC Transpo still gets to dictate service levels and personnel decisions.

Orléans Liberal MPP Stephen Blais, a former Ottawa councillor and transit commission chair, is also skeptical.

He supports an arrangement with the province that would relieve Ottawa taxpayers of the LRT’s financial burden, but he doesn’t think the province would simply pick up the tab while OC Transpo continues to make the calls.

I asked him about the hypothetical scenario in which OC Transpo decides Line 1 needs more service, but Metrolinx decides it would cost too much. What would happen then?

“Tough luck,” he replied.

Blais has an alternative suggestion: don’t give Metrolinx the railway.

If the argument is that Ottawa taxpayers paid a disproportionately large share of the LRT capital costs compared with transit projects elsewhere in the province, Blais says Queen’s Park could simply reimburse Ottawa for its share of those costs. The city could then use that money to pay off LRT debt or reinvest it in transit, while continuing to own and control its LRT.

Ottawa already has some experience with what happens when it depends on Metrolinx but doesn’t control it.

Recall a decade ago when then-mayor Jim Watson was sparring with the agency over Presto. Metrolinx was proposing to increase the fee the city paid for using the fare system, from two per cent to 10 — potentially increasing the city’s annual cost from $1.5 million to $7.5 million.

Watson complained that Ottawa, which was required to use Presto to receive provincial gas-tax funding, was stuck in a “monopoly situation.”

“We have no other choice,” he said. “We have to use Presto. So it’s unfair if the province comes in with a proposal that is really out of whack with what we and other municipalities can afford.”

This is not that, but the underlying lesson remains: when one level of government controls something that another depends on, the relationship can be decidedly unbalanced.

In April, the city and province signed a memorandum of understanding regarding the proposed upload of LRT and Highway 174. The details — wherein lies the devil — aren’t part of it, nor does it include a timetable. It’s essentially an agreement to work out an agreement.

“The province affirms that upload of the OLRT is an active area of commitment” it fuzzily states.

Blais argues that Ottawa residents aren’t being told enough about what’s happening behind the scenes. The mayor, he says, has been too quick to present the upload as a done deal when the eventual division of responsibility has yet to be negotiated.

I reached out to Metrolinx with a half-dozen questions, including what role it is playing in negotiations, what it expects to own and maintain once a deal is struck, and whether it would have authority over service levels in Ottawa.

I received a one-sentence reply, attributed simply to Metrolinx Media Relations: “We continue to work with the Ministry of Transportation and the City of Ottawa to explore options and complete due diligence on the upload of the Ottawa LRT.”

I asked both the City and the Ontario Ministry of Transportation for a copy of the MOU signed in April. The City sent me the document pretty quickly. The Ministry did not.

Transparency at its finest.

There’s no question that Ottawa deserves a better financial deal from Queen’s Park, and maybe transferring the LRT to Metrolinx is the best way to get it.

But we’ve spent seven years — almost as long as it took the Apollo program to get a man to the moon — demanding accountability for the LRT.

Now we’re contemplating a deal that could save Ottawa taxpayers a fortune, but could leave somebody else owning the tracks, paying the bills and making some of the decisions.

Before we hand over the keys, we need a clearer answer to the question: Who decides?

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