NDP leader earning her TTC legs

By Jim Coyle, the Toronto Star:

To set out once on a tour of the TTC during morning rush-hour might have seemed like a play for publicity.

To do it a second time, and to do it with the Queen herself dominating news coverage at the Ontario legislature, and on the most sweltering day of the year, well, you have to think that shows a certain commitment.

Give her credit. Ontario NDP Leader Andrea Horwath is about as grassroots and down-to-earth as politicians come.

Just after 8 a.m. Tuesday, having already travelled to Toronto from her Hamilton riding, with fans of royalty already gathering on the Legislature lawns, Horwath was heading to the subway en route to Scarborough as part of her lobbying campaign to reverse provincial funding delays on the TransitCity plan.

Such excursions are brave exercises for a politician, one all should do a few times a year. The environment is close and sweaty; the encounters are unscripted. The jostling and flying knapsacks are a constant hazard.

To the image-obsessed, it’s a risky proposition. But Horwath is a Hamilton girl, happy to invest a morning far from the day’s glamour event, meeting people one bus or subway car at a time.

She laughed as she lost her balance and lurched a bit while gaining her “TTC legs.” There was also the passenger who asked: “What did you say your last name was?”

The advantage (in addition to the fact the passenger now knows) is that Horwath’s soon enough bustling up the stairs at Kennedy Station – keeping to the left – and exiting buses by the rear doors.

The payoff is that she gets to gather stories, out in Malvern and the Galloway in Scarborough, two of the city’s less advantaged areas, of how desperately improved transit is needed.

On the 131 bus along Nugget Ave., there are the women who travel two hours a day each way to work, the weariness palpable as the vehicle chugs through the urban wasteland of light industry and storage facilities.

“That’s like another half-shift a day!” Horwath says. For women especially, she says, that’s less time to care for their families, less time for leisure, a drain on quality of life.

Pagalavan Thavarajah, 21, a student union vice-president of the U of T’s Scarborough campus, said he grew up in a family without a car and even though the area has mushroomed in population the TTC service has hardly changed.

It wasn’t until he was older, and began travelling to other parts of Toronto, that he realized how poorly his own neighbourhood was served by comparison.

Yohan Tam has taken public transit all his life. In fact, he says he’s been “brutalized” by the TTC.

As a student at York University, it took him 90 minutes each way, “three hours a day of my time just to go to school in my own city.”

The lack of adequate transit is isolating for people who can’t get around their own areas or downtown efficiently.

“When you’re geographically isolated you’re culturally isolated,” says Tam, who volunteers with the Public Transit Coalition.

Then, there’s a man who is given a card with information on TransitCity and also bearing the leader’s photo.

He scans it, then does a double take when he realizes the woman sitting beside him is her. Then they chat, one on one, trading transit laments.

Yes, she says, “it’s frustrating when governments make choices to cut the transit system.”

For almost three hours, Horwath rides the TTC with the common folk before returning for an engagement at Queen’s Park.

Something, it seems, about a visiting monarch.