The eventual outcome on Eglinton, Mr. Miller charges, was predictable: The TTC had built and run all of the city’s subways and streetcar lines for a century; Metrolinx, which the province created in 2006 to draft a regional transit masterplan and run its GO Transit commuter bus and rail lines, had at the time barely built anything at all.

“To have an agency that was a planning agency oversee the largest [P3] proposal in the history of Canada, it’s madness,” he said of the Metrolinx takeover. “It just made no sense.”

Mr. Miller also says the Eglinton fiasco is the end result of what he says has been a growing provincial desire in recent decades – shared by both the previous Liberals, and Mr. Ford’s current PCs – to meddle in things the former mayor believes should be best left to the city government.

The premier’s pledge to fund all of Transit City would not last.

In 2010, amid the fallout of the global financial crisis, Mr. McGuinty would partially renege, chopping his pledged billions for the new LRTs in half and prompting the TTC to halt its imminent move to seek bidders to build the Eglinton line. Later that year, the TTC and Metrolinx would agree on today’s shortened, 19-kilometre Eglinton line, pledging to have it done by 2020.

Mr. Miller said that if the TTC had been able to get a Crosstown contract signed before the province cut its funding, it would have been harder for Mr. McGuinty, and Mr. Miller’s successors at City Hall, to keep redrawing the plans.

And redraw them they did.

After Mr. Miller chose not to run for a third term, he was replaced by Rob Ford, the current premier’s now-deceased brother.

Rob Ford had campaigned as a culture warrior against surface light-rail, blaming it for taking up traffic lanes, while intoning a mantra of “Subways! Subways! Subways!” He scrapped the Transit City plans on his first day in office in December 2010, and vowed to bury the entire Eglinton line, which would have added billions to the cost.

But his city council rebelled and reinstated the more affordable, partially tunnelled proposal for Eglinton in 2012.

It wasn’t only Mr. Miller who advocated against a Metrolinx takeover to install a P3. Behind the scenes, engineers and transit officials were also engaged in their own tug-of-war.

A TTC staff report from May 2012 is eerily prescient.

The TTC asked a panel of experts with the American Public Transit Association to look over the province’s plans. Prominent transit authority executives, who had overseen major subway and LRT projects in New York City, Los Angeles and Philadelphia, took part.

They concluded that Metrolinx’s promised 2020 completion date was “extremely challenging” and “unrealistic,” with 2022-23 being more likely. The report also warned of “uncertainty” around the purported advantages of the P3 model, which had rarely been used for large transit projects – although Vancouver’s Canada Line, completed on time in 2009, in time for the Winter Olympics the following year, was a P3.

(Later in 2012, the City of Ottawa would sign it’s own ill-fated LRT P3, which would be plagued by delays and shutdowns after opening day – shadows that account for Metrolinx’s reluctance to rush opening the Crosstown without extensive testing.)

The TTC report also predicted that the province’s Eglinton plan would cause “disproportionate disruption” to neighbourhoods along the route, and didn’t allow enough time for potential contract changes, the complexities of relocating water and gas pipes or the building of a massive interchange station at Yonge Street.

Plus, the panel said that such a large contract as the Crosstown’s may make true competitive bids unlikely as few companies are big enough to take it on. Just two consortiums would later bid on the project.

There were other warnings about P3s that the province ignored, including from its Auditor-General, who in 2014 reviewed 74 of Infrastructure Ontario’s P3 projects and concluded they would have collectively cost $8-billion less if they had been handled by the public sector in the conventional way.

Clive Thurston, head of the Ontario General Contractors Association at the time, was involved in the release of a 2013 report by an umbrella group called the Construction and Design Alliance of Ontario that warned that the mega-sized Eglinton tender would squeeze out smaller, local companies. The report said that bundling the contract together was dampening competition and could add an estimated $500-million to the cost of the project.

Mr. Thurston also says he made his case in meetings with ministers and officials, arguing that the contract should be chopped into smaller chunks, but got nowhere, and so went public and took his concerns in 2013 to the media.

He said the government’s clear shift towards P3s, and the powerful private-sector lobby for them – backed by Bay Street and big industry players – was just too strong.

The Canadian Council for Public-Private Partnerships, an industry association that has promoted P3s since the 1990s, even gave the Crosstown project a “gold” award for “project finance” at their annual gala dinner in 2015, an event usually attended by prominent businesspeople and politicians.

“‘We told you so’ just doesn’t seem to cut it,” Mr. Thurston said in a recent interview. “It’s kind of satisfactory to know we were right. But so what? Nobody listened.”

Metrolinx and Crosslinx lock into legal battles

In 2015, then-Ontario transportation minister Steven Del Duca, now the mayor of Vaughan, announced that the P3 Crosstown contract, worth (at the time) $9.1-billion, had been awarded to Crosslinx, for the line and all its systems and stations, and 30 years of maintenance. (The tunnels had been dug beforehand, with separate contracts.)

The consortium includes the former SNC-Lavalin – now known as AtkinsRéalis – as well as other major construction and infrastructure players Aecon, EllisDon and ACS-Dragados. The completion date was also pushed to 2021.

The problems started almost immediately. Crosslinx submitted its own designs for stations and sections of the line 12 to 18 months late.

There were also – unnecessary in hindsight – concerns and a court battle with delay-plagued Bombardier over whether it would be able to deliver the line’s fleet of vehicles in time for opening day.

(In recent testing, these same vehicles – some of which are now a decade old – have had problems with brake pad wear, and ventilation and communication systems, hampering Eglinton’s progress.)

It wasn’t long after the 2017 appointment of former ScotRail Alliance managing director Phil Verster to the top job at Metrolinx that relations between the agency and Crosslinx would become confrontational, and end up in court – with Mr. Verster responding with pointed, public criticism of the consortium.

He quit last December and was replaced by Mr. Lindsay, who had run Infrastructure Ontario since 2020. Mr. Verster, whose salary had risen to more than $880,000 a year by his departure, did not respond to LinkedIn messages requesting comment for this story.

A source familiar with the inner workings of the project said that Metrolinx under Mr. Verster had put itself on what amounted to a war footing, sending Crosslinx hundreds of formal notices alleging it had failed to adhere to parts of the contract instead of taking a more collaborative approach to fixing the various problems that emerged during construction. The Globe is not identifying the source as they were not authorized to speak publicly about the project.

Tensions boiled over in the summer of 2018 when Crosslinx hit back in a court filing alleging that the delays plaguing the project were due to utility work beyond its control and the sluggish pace of government permits and approvals.

Metrolinx would later have to hand over $237-million to settle the fight, as revealed in a report on the mess from the province’s Auditor-General that also said the agency had “limited remedies” under the terms of the contract.

In another legal battle in 2020, this time over Metrolinx’s decision to deny that the COVID-19 pandemic constituted an emergency under the contract, a judge sided with Crosslinx, saying the provincial agency’s approach was “neither a fair nor reasonable approach.” This time the settlement cost Metrolinx another $325-million, with the opening date pushed to 2023.

But in April of that year, then-transportation minister Caroline Mulroney announced that the consortium had “no credible schedule” for completion of the project. Mr. Verster said there were 260 “quality issues” that remained outstanding, including mislaid tracks, but did not release a public list.

Crosslinx would hit back with yet another legal filing that May, blaming “undue interference” from the TTC, which is to operate the line. In a public statement, Mr. Verster dismissed the lawsuit as a delay tactic.

The consortium, under fire but barred by its contract from speaking to the media to defend itself, decided to break those terms and give a Toronto Star reporter a tour of the nearly complete line in 2023.

EllisDon president CEO Geoff Smith, who is now the company’s executive chairman, told The Star that the relationship with Metrolinx was “broken.” He said both sides had underestimated the transit line’s vast complexity, and that this kind of project can “threaten companies.”

Susan Sperling, a spokesperson for Crosslinx, declined to comment for this story.

Dollars and delays: The Eglinton Crosstown timeline

End of the line?

Now, two years later, and with Mr. Verster gone and Mr. Lindsay in charge at Metrolinx, all involved appear to have hunkered down, trying to get the Crosstown across the finish line. Mr. Lindsay told reporters in September that he was meeting every other day with the CEOs of vehicle-maker Alstom (which bought Bombardier’s rail business in 2021) and the companies that make up Crosslinx.

Metrolinx did not make Mr. Lindsay available for an interview for this story, despite requests stretching over several months.

Metrolinx has long been criticized for its lack of independence from the government, and the control Queen’s Park exerts over its ability to communicate. In early October, Dakota Brasier, a spokesperson for the Transportation Minister, acknowledged to The Globe that to avoid yet more negative headlines, for several days she barred Metrolinx from responding to media inquiries about whether Eglinton’s final 30-day revenue test had actually started on time.

As for any lessons learned, Metrolinx and Infrastructure Ontario have both started to move away from the kind of bundled, lump-sum P3 contract that has caused some of Eglinton’s problems, as have private sector bidders – particularly for large, complex projects.

Many contracts now follow what the industry calls a “progressive” or “alliance” model, where the two sides work together on the design, and anticipate potential problems, before setting a price. Crosslinx’s own AtkinsRéalis said it was mostly swearing off bidding on future fixed-price construction deals, way back in 2019.

In an interview last year, Andrew Hope, Metrolinx’s chief capital officer for rapid transit, said that for the Ontario Line subway, now under construction, the agency broke the project up into several more manageable pieces, in some cases using the newer “progressive” model. However, parts of the $27-billion line, including its main operations and maintenance contracts, are still structured as P3s.

Metrolinx spokeswoman Andrea Ernesaks said in an e-mail that both the agency and the infrastructure sector at the time thought a single, integrated P3 would work on Eglinton – but that a “variety of contract models” are now considered for similar projects.

“Lessons learned on past projects have enabled us to collaborate with our contractors more effectively, improving the overall processes and timelines on other projects,” she said, citing the Finch West LRT and the Ontario Line.

The premier in charge when the Crosstown deal was signed in 2015 was Liberal Kathleen Wynne, who had also served as minister transportation from January 2010 to October 2011, and was in that role when tunnelling began.

She acknowledged that if the TTC had built the line using conventional methods, it could “maybe” be running by now. However, she puts some of the blame on the current PC government, which has had eight years to sort out the problems and failed.

Ms. Brasier, the spokeswoman for current Transportation Minister Prabmeet Sarkaria, said in an e-mail that it was Ms. Wynne who signed Eglinton’s “bad contract” and that the previous Liberal government “had no idea” how to build large infrastructure projects.

The former premier, asked why her government ignored the warnings about Eglinton, pointed to Infrastructure Ontario’s record of delivering P3s up to that time. And she said Queen’s Park had concerns about the TTC’s capacity to manage megaprojects.

“Look, there is nothing like 20/20 hindsight,” Ms. Wynne said. “... I’m not going to say that we got it perfect, obviously. But, you know, we tried at every juncture to make the right decision with the information that we had. Is there information that we should have considered more closely? Probably.”