VUONG: Toronto has greater priorities than a woke name change

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There is no better indication of a government’s true priorities than its budget and how it spends its money. Secondary to that are the issues it chooses to spend its time on.

This is why the agenda for the Toronto city council board for the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) is so concerning.

You’d think the TTC Board has already created the world’s greatest transit system, that our city’s public transit must be so great, so reliable, and so safe, that they can focus on superfluous matters like changing the name of Dundas Station.

Let us remember that this erasure of slavery abolitionist Henry Dundas is the result of a historically illiterate misinterpretation of his legacy. To Dundas’ great misfortune, he has become a priority target of some keyboard historians of the woke variety, and, unfortunately, they are on a revisionist mission to denigrate the man.

They accuse him of being an enabler of slavery despite the fact that it was Dundas who appointed John Graves Simcoe as Lieutenant Governor of then Upper Canada, who spearheaded legislation fighting slavery; and is the reason Canadians today can proudly claim credit as the first jurisdiction in the British Empire to pass the legislation to limit slavery in the British Empire.

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Fast forward to the present. What legacy can this TTC Board lay claim to other than radical and ideologically-driven excess? After all, there is an opportunity cost to everything that we do.

The time they waste deliberating this unnecessary subway station name change is time they won’t spend discussing issues that actually impact riders, like commute time.

Just months ago, a report from commuter app Moovit found that our city has one of the worst commutes in North America with Toronto clocking in at an average of 55 minutes to take transit through the city. It was further estimated that over the course of a Torontonian’s lifetime we will spend nineteen months of our life on transit.

Now, the TTC Board will tell you it’s not costing taxpayers anything because Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) will cover the cost of the name change, but that’s not true.

How much TTC staff time has been squandered on this woke fool’s errand? Time for legal to draft the confidential agreement that taxpayers won’t see, time for the marketing department to plan a new name communications plan, and, of course, the time completely wasted by staff to support this wasteful name change in the first place.

There are real costs associated with this change, including salary time, and, again, it’s time not spent on improving our transit system.

And while we’re on the topic of the confidential agreement to rename Dundas Station to “TMU Station,” what are we, the Toronto taxpayer, getting out of it?

Naming rights cost money. In the U.S., this tactic is used to net transit agencies some big dollars that they reinvest to improve service. For example, UC San Diego signed a 30-year deal with the San Diego Metropolitan Transit System to name a streetcar line after the university for US$30 million in 2015, which is $41.7 million at current exchange rates. How many buses could that purchase? How many more special constables could we deploy to keep riders safe?

If you head north to Silicon Valley, the owners of Caltrain have been selling station naming rights for close to $1 million (C$1.3 million) to as much as $4.5 million ($6.2 million) annually, which begs the question: What deal is the TTC inking with TMU and why is it being hidden from Torontonians? Is TMU getting a sweetheart deal from the City? In the absence of facts, we have no choice but to speculate.

The TTC Board is mandated to “serve the people of Toronto by ensuring your transit system is reliable, safe, and prepared for the future.” They should explain how renaming a station helps to advance their mandate, and why it is of a greater priority than the reliability, safety, and preparedness of our transit system.

— Kevin Vuong is a proud Torontonian, entrepreneur, and military reserve officer. He was the former Member of Parliament for Toronto’s Spadina-Fort York community.