Commuters arrive at Union Station on a GO Train as a national rail shutdown causes delays, after employees were locked out by both major Canadian railways after a deadlock in contract negotiations, in Toronto on Aug. 22.Paige Taylor White/The Canadian Press
The impact of a now-ended lockout of freight rail workers rippled into Canada’s largest cities Thursday, as five commuter transit lines in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal stopped running.
All told, these lines carry about 32,000 people on a normal day, according to the agencies that operate them. Extra buses accommodated some of these passengers. In other cases, people were encouraged to use alternate routes.
The lockout shut down the West Coast Express into Vancouver; the Milton GO line into Toronto, as well as one of GO’s stations in Hamilton; and three Exo lines into Montreal.
Most commuter rail lines in those three cities operate on their own tracks. But the five affected lines and the Hamilton GO station use tracks owned by CPKC, one of the freight companies that locked out its workers.
On Thursday afternoon, the federal government ordered arbitration to end the impasse. Within hours, the lockout was ended, but Labour Minister Steve MacKinnon said it could take days before trains are running normally again.
A joint statement from transit advocacy groups in the three cities decried the disruptions.
“This situation once again illustrates the need to prioritize the movement of passengers on railway lines in Quebec and Canada,” argued TTCriders, in Toronto, Trajectoire Québec and Movement: Metro Vancouver Transit Riders. “Public transit users are, once again, paying for a situation out of their control. Public transit is essential.”
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The biggest impact was felt in Montreal. The three Exo lines carry about 21,000 people on a normal day. The transit agency said that if the disruptions persisted, it would begin running a substitute bus service but warned that it would not be enough to replace the train capacity and would not start immediately.
“Our service providers need to hire bus drivers from outside the Greater Montreal Area, with some coming from far away,” Exo spokesman Eric Edstrom said in an e-mail. “As well, there is a shortage of available bus drivers, especially during the back-to-school period. The drivers need time to get here, and to be trained on the routes they will drive.”
In Vancouver, where the transit agency TransLink said it was trying to manage a relatively small number of stranded passengers, extra buses began immediately on Thursday morning.
About 3,000 people ride the West Coast Express daily and the agency says it was able to handle demand using its own buses and workers. Agency staff said there were no reports of people unable to board the buses because of space.
Spokespeople for both the Hospital Employees’ Union in B.C. and Vancouver Coastal Health reported no known impacts on staff attendance levels owing to the suspension of the train service.
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In Toronto, GO Transit employees directed the approximately 8,100 passengers who normally use the Milton line and the station in Hamilton to alternative routes. In many cases, that involved a bus from a non-operational station to one on a route where trains were running.
However, the possibility of disruption did not reach all passengers before the trains stopped running Thursday.
“This is completely unacceptable, and we should have been informed earlier,” Om Sangekar said outside the Cooksville GO station. “I’ll definitely be late for work.”
Andrea Ernesaks, a spokeswoman for Metrolinx, which runs GO Transit, said Thursday that it was too early for ridership data that could indicate how many people used new transit options versus driving or working from home.
“Anecdotally, our operations centre said things are moving well and no crowding that we’ve seen,” she said in an e-mail.
With a report from The Canadian Press