I fail to see how cancellation of the DB contract really had anything to do with this. Other than perhaps wasted time, effort & money on the futile endeavour. Metrolinx would still find themselves in this predicament even if they went ahead with DB.
The author points out the lost of DB's "European experience", yet DB's suggestions for GO implied they were completely out of their element in North America.
The sequence of events was
- Alstom was managing the work
- ML awarded the work to a consortium that did not include Alstom, and set an end date for Altsom's involvement
- Alstom made other plans for its talent who were about to be out of work
- The talent made other plans themselves, seeing as the Consortium indicated that they were bringing in their own experts (DB) and there wasn't much prospect of being retained
- The transition failed to happen, DB did not assume operation, and the talent that DB promised never arrived
- Alstom was then asked to continue managing the work, but the talent had already moved on
This sounds more like the government underestimated how much maintenance locomotives require.
Or somebody in the food chain (which begins at ML, extends through its Board, and over to QP) didn't want to hear what the working level was explaining about the reality of what it would take to restart ML after Covid, and carried on as if everything was fine.
Heck, no one could figure out how ML was going to implement the service increases it was promising before Covid, given availability of equipment and lag time to train sufficient crews.
I don't fault ML for cutting back during Covid. Their ridership fell dramaticallly. And, the nature of how the pandemic unfolded made it extremely hard to say with certainty when and how quickly service would resume, or if it ever would. No business could simply sustain readiness to resume for that length of time.
The DB caper definitely didn't help, as it was a "Hail Mary" for the food chain....., who assumed that DB would save them and they didn't need to know the details......the Achilles Heel of P3's.....until....DB revealed its intentions and they didn't fit somebody's bigger plan.
Oh,, and Phil Verster.
At the end of the day, we apparently have a draft recovery strategy and we have at least one whistleblower who gave a reporter something tangible to report on.
I hope ML will be mature enough to "rip the bandaid off" and deal with the problem openly and pragmatically. Given everything to date, that may be naive. I wonder if the strategy document will now be sanitised to something less on point.
- Paul
www.baytoday.ca
