Mississauga mayor who endorsed Liberals unhappy about PC transit plan
Mississauga mayor Hazel McCallion is stirring the pot in the Ontario election with a detailed letter condemning PC leader Tim Hudak’s plan to kill her city’s light-rail transit.
“We have spent years developing this project with technical studies and a business case that supports LRT as the best rapid transit solution for us,” she wrote in a letter released Wednesday evening.
“Would people like a subway? Perhaps, but that’s not practical everywhere and we recognize that you have to use the right tool for the right job.”
Mr. Hudak recently announced that, if elected, his party would scrap plans for LRT projects in Mississauga, Brampton, Hamilton and Toronto. The PCs would instead opt to introduce all-day, two-way service on existing GO train lines and prioritize an “east-west express subway” in Toronto to ease congestion on the city’s bursting Yonge subway line.
“I think it’s time that we were honest with commuters and said ‘you’ve got to set priorities, you can’t be all things to all people.’ So we’ve set ours,” Mr. Hudak said last week.
But Mr. Hudak’s plan would mean cancelling Mississauga’s much-anticipated project connecting the Port Credit GO station to Brampton’s GO station.
Ms. McCallion, who has already thrown her support behind the Liberal party, expressed her disappointment with the PC’s proposal and questioned whether it would even be better in the long run.
“How many more GO Stations can be built? How will people get to them and how many parking garages will we need if the only way to get to a GO station is in your car? Again all adding to the gridlock,” she wrote.
Ms. McCallion, 93, has served as the city’s mayor for 35 years and was once voted the second-most popular mayor in the world.
With files from Adrian Morrow