The Eglinton Story (Part 1)

Off the track

I do not know enough about Toronto’s Eglinton’s new LRT, to accurately comment on the project; only that portions of the system is definitely not LRT. That being said, this two part series from the Globe and Mail will help inform those on the other side of the mountains about this hugely expensive project.

Meddling politicians, a massive contract, multimillion-dollar lawsuits and a pandemic have turned the Eglinton Crosstown LRT into a 14-year project

Jeff GrayQueen’s Park Reporter

Toronto

The Globe and Mail

Published October 30, 2025

For months, they have glided along the middle of Toronto’s Eglinton Avenue: Sleek, empty streetcars on test runs, stopping at platforms blocked off to the public. No one gets on or off. And before the two-car vehicle pulls away, its electronic chimes sound their pointless warnings as the doors close.

Here in Scarborough, on a strip lined with mall parking lots, cars and buses full of people – relegated to the road’s remaining traffic lanes – just roll on by as though the weed-choked rail line occupying the median isn’t there.

This is the Eglinton Crosstown, a running joke in the city often invoked in the same resigned tone as Toronto’s perpetually frustrated hockey hopes: Will the Maple Leafs ever win another Stanley Cup? Will the Crosstown ever open?

The Eglinton LRT is widely regarded as the most delay-plagued major public transit project in Canadian history. First proposed in 2007, construction only finally began in 2011, with completion set for 2020 – five years ago and counting.

The project clogged this main artery through Canada’s largest city with lane closures, hoarding and construction dust for years. While the line itself is mostly complete, Metrolinx, the province’s public-transit agency responsible for the project, has given up predicting an opening date.

Although a previous Liberal provincial government launched the Crosstown, the Progressive Conservatives of Premier Doug Ford, now in their eighth year in office, have been unable to put the project on track. Toronto’s city council and Ontario’s Opposition NDP have demanded a public inquiry, to no avail.

The bill for this partially tunnelled, 19-kilometre light-rail line is currently pegged at $13.08-billion, including 30 years of maintenance – around $8-billion more than estimated back when construction began. Its 25 stations, still empty, are spread from Mount Dennis in the west end to Kennedy Station in the east. https://charts.theglobeandmail.com/LtnPq/4/

How can a light-rail line have taken 14 years, and counting? First, a revolving door of politicians rewrote and ripped up the plans for years before work began, as they often do. Then came design delays, the unforeseen complexity of moving gas and water pipes, mislaid tracks, leaky stations, buggy signalling software and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Experts and some involved in the project say many of the problems were a result of its structure as Canada’s largest ever “public-private partnership,” or P3, a type of contract that typically hands over an entire project – design, construction, some of its financing, future maintenance – to the private sector. Before the advent of the P3 model, governments or their agencies would more or less just design a project themselves, and then hire contractors to build it. And in this case, in order to turn the Crosstown into a P3, the province stripped the city’s Toronto Transit Commission of control of the project.

Some critics also blame the adversarial relationship that developed between Metrolinx and the private consortium of leading construction companies it hired to build the line, known as Crosslinx Transit Solutions. The two would battle over legal challenges that would cost Metrolinx hundreds of millions of dollars to settle.

The line’s progress, or lack thereof, has largely been cloaked in silence – even as governments profess a renewed focus on accelerating big infrastructure projects and maintain that public transit is key to housing and climate-change goals.

At an event in September to boast of progress on the Scarborough subway extension in Toronto’s east end, Ontario Transportation Minister Prabmeet Sarkaria and Metrolinx CEO Michael Lindsay insisted that the province has learned key lessons from the Eglinton mess – lessons they say are being applied as they charge ahead with their ambitious multi-billion-dollar list of other transit megaprojects in Toronto, including the $27-billion Ontario Line subway.

But a review of the tortured history of the Crosstown reveals that, more than a decade ago, the provincial government of the day failed to heed credible warnings from local politicians, public-transit leaders and voices in the province’s construction business who had all warned that the Crosstown P3 contract was just too big, too risky and too complex – and would end badly.

After months of testing, Eglinton finally is undergoing a kind of final dress rehearsal: a 30-day “revenue service demonstration” – with no passengers – meant to ensure it can handle the rigours of daily operation. (A collision between two vehicles in their storage yard forced Metrolinx to pause operation for a few days, the government acknowledged last week.) An eastbound test train crosses the bridge over the Don River. When first conceived, the LRT was to go from Kingston Road all the way to Pearson airport; its terminus is now Mount Dennis, but the construction of a western extension began in 2021, to be completed by 2031. Gabriel Hutchinson/The Globe and Mail

If the test ultimately succeeds, the earliest civilians could hop on the Crosstown would be sometime in November. But Mr. Lindsay has also warned to expect a gradual “ramp up,” not full service on Day 1. No one in Toronto is holding their breath.

Metrolinx’s overseeing the project ‘just made no sense’

Among those who warned that the province’s approach on Eglinton would end in disaster is David Miller, Toronto’s mayor from 2003 to 2010.

“It’s frankly not very nice to be vindicated,” he said in a recent interview with The Globe and Mail.

He was behind the original vision for the Crosstown, which he laid out as part of a broader network of light-rail lines in 2007 in a plan branded as “Transit City,” complete with slick maps and collectible buttons.

Mr. Miller’s Eglinton project had a lowballed early cost estimate of $2.2-billion, which had not been fully fleshed out and did not include things like vehicle-storage facilities. It was initially intended to be much longer, running more than 30 kilometres, from Kingston Road in the east to Pearson Airport in the west.

Just months after unveiling his plans, Mr. Miller stood beaming at an event at a Mississauga bus garage, with his Transit City vision apparently set to be realized.

Then-premier Dalton McGuinty hopped out of a bus for the TV cameras and pledged to cover at least two-thirds of the cost of the Transit City LRTs.

Mr. McGuinty’s aim was to have the rest of the bill covered by Ottawa, and to proceed without the typical cash contribution from the strapped city budget. However, a federal cheque never materialized, and the province would later assume the entire cost.

Mr. Miller says now it was a mistake for the city not to have some skin in the game, as its power over the project began to wane. By 2008, Metrolinx was already pushing behind the scenes for changes, including unsuccessfully gunning to put the whole line underground, or on stilts, or run an updated version of the Bombardier-made vehicles used on the now-defunct Scarborough RT line.

Indeed, the free ride for the city laid the groundwork for an eventual provincial takeover.

Initially, the project was to be run like all previous TTC major transit expansions. While the province, in this case, did make its Metrolinx agency the owner of the Eglinton and the other Transit City LRT lines it pledged to build – since it was paying the full cost – it had agreed that the TTC would still oversee the projects, and still mostly build them in its usual way.

The usual way, for the TTC and most other transit agencies in decades past, was to design a transit line first, either with in-house engineers or consultants, and then put out contracts for competitive bids and hire companies to build the line, its stations and any required vehicles.

But in April 2011, Metrolinx and its provincial masters told the TTC they had changed their minds, and wanted oversight of the plan. The TTC resisted the idea. But by 2012, it was official: Metrolinx would take over the project and bring in Infrastructure Ontario, a provincial agency created in 2005 that had championed P3s for hospitals and courthouses, to run the procurement.

When Metrolinx sidelined the TTC, Toronto’s transit agency had to toss out tens of millions of dollars of design and engineering work – putting the project back years even before it got under way.

Mr. Miller, long a critic of P3s, argues that if the TTC had been left to its own devices on the Crosstown and built it in the conventional way, Torontonians would have been riding it for five or even seven years by now.

He points to the Sheppard Subway, completed on time and on budget (for just under $1-billion) in 2002. Even the TTC’s troubled Spadina subway extension to Vaughan, which cost $400-million more than pledged and required the hiring of private-sector project managers to finish it two years past due in 2017, looks rosy when compared to the Crosstown.

Continued ……………………………