By Maria Babbage, The Canadian Press
June 14, 2011
MARKHAM — Commuters in the Greater Toronto Area could get their money back if their GO Transit train is more than 20 minutes late, Premier Dalton McGuinty suggested Tuesday.
McGuinty is floating the $7-million trial balloon just a few months before the Oct. 6 election, saying he wants to hear from riders first.
Commuters will be able to provide feedback about the proposed service guarantee on the GO Transit website before the government decides whether or not to go ahead with it, he said.
It’s similar to other money-back guarantees that the province has in place for other services, such as delivering important documents like birth certificates, McGuinty added.
“What we discovered with other service guarantees that we put in place, is that as soon as you put a service guarantee in there, all the people who are responsible for delivering — they find a way to deliver,” he said after a speech at a United Way fundraiser in Markham, north of Toronto.
The proposed refund system would likely cost between $6 million to $7 million, he said.
Only 362 of the 53,000 train trips GO Transit runs each year were more than 20 minutes late, said Bruce McCuiag, president and CEO of Metrolinx, the provincial-funded agency that runs GO Transit.
Metrolinx has been considering a service guarantee for some time, McCuaig said. While it’s not yet clear what kind of system would be set up, one possibility would be to use the electronic Presto card system to administer the refunds.
“One of our objectives with the implementation of something like this service guarantee is we don’t want to force our customers to go stand in line, for example, at one of our train stations to collect the refund,” he said.
“That would, I think, almost defeat the purpose of it in the first place.”
The website, which will allow riders to answer survey questions, will be up Wednesday and run until the end of the summer, he said.
McGuinty said he’s also open to the idea of expanding the service guarantee to GO buses or even shortening the time limit, for example.
“It may be that people say, ‘You know what? 20 minutes? We think we can do better, and we think the government ought to do better than that, and GO Transit ought to do better,’” he said.
“Maybe we should do 15 minutes, I don’t know. We’ll have to take into account the costs associated with that, and take a look at just how powerful a driver this can be for us to do even better in terms of delivering service.”
But opposition parties say McGuinty is running late himself: he had nearly eight years to do something about tardy trains.
Perhaps the Liberal leader is making a belated attempt to shed his “Premier Dad” image, said Conservative Peter Shurman.
Unlike the Tories, who sought out public discussion before launching their election platform, McGuinty doesn’t usually ask voters for their views, he said.
“He’s never had public discussion, he simply imposes what he thinks is right — or his cabinet thinks is right — and away we go,” Shurman said. “So I’ll believe it when I see it.”
The New Democrats say the premier is hoping to distract voters from his failures by dragging out the refund proposal for the next few months.
“Here’s the premier, months before an election, making promises, trying to find inexpensive, cheap things to say prior to a campaign that might excite the voter,” said NDP critic Gilles Bisson.
“But at the end of the day, I think most people remember him for the broken promises that he’s delivered over the last eight years.”