It would be an interesting exercise to amass all the pr releases, sound bites, media scrums, social media inputs, and documents released by ML and the government since the start of Crosstown, and take that before the courts - to argue that the Province and ML in particular have failed to meet their fiduciary duty to the taxpayer by failing to provide an accurate picture of the progress of the project (the point being that the provable progress objectively deviates from the narratives provided) and the sum of all that superficial spin doctoring does not fulfil what government is obliged to provide publicly to account for a project that runs into the billions of dollars.
I am not a lawyer, but I suspect that such an argument would fail. But - one could hope for a landmark and precedent setting ruling. There are lots of these, indeed many of the pillars of our concept of "good government" have originated in court rulings around matters such as environmental assessments, freedom of information, and public consultation generally. In those areas, laws were only passed in reaction to precedent setting rulings.
Unfortunately, I am not a lawyer and don't have the time or the millions of dollars that it would take to accomplish this.
It's certainly unfortunate that our opposing political parties don't have the competence to articulate more of this in a way that would be compelling to the "average citizen".... the real root cause here is that while people complain, they basically tolerate this behaviour from their elected officials, and don't weigh this kind of failure into their vote-casting decision. The opposition parties are complicit because they intend to do the same thing if they were elected - the status quo is their friend.
It sucks that transit specifically, and infrastructure generally, is executed in a way that clearly fails the test of "good government", but I don't see a way to force the issue.
But hey, if you are a lawyer willing to work pro bono on this, I'd love to have coffee. Public transit is not a matter of national defense and should not have more secrecy than the plans for nuclear weaponry. Especially, when Metrolinx is not performing.
- Paul
