The TTC Represents Everything Wrong with Toronto—and Capitalism

Commuters jostle against each other on a crowded platform at Union Station. Photo: Dave Sutherland, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Earlier this evening I tried to go see my friend’s band. To get to the venue, I needed to travel four subway stops west, then hop on a streetcar.

I walked to Sherbourne subway station and hopped on board the next train. We sat there for a couple minutes, until we heard the train go silent. Then the lights went out. Eventually a crackly voice came over the intercom and told us the train was holding at Sherbourne because there was a “trespasser at track level”. More minutes passed. Another announcement came on to say that trains had stopped because of a power outage, but shuttle buses were on the way (Toronto should really change its motto to “Shuttle buses are running”). At that point I said to hell with it, walked off the train, and out of the subway station. I calculated how long it would take to walk to the venue and/or find an alternate route. When I realized there was no way I was going to make it in time to see the band perform, I gave up and went home.

Should I have left earlier? Of course. If you rely on the TTC, it’s always a good idea to leave your home well in advance in case there’s some kind of delay, which there almost always is. But this sidesteps the larger point: You cannot rely on the TTC. Don’t take my word for it; check out TTC Service Alerts on Twitter/X. On any given day, the account will post dozens of times about delays, outages, and lack of service. There are several standard reasons: injury on the tracks (usually code for someone trying to commit suicide), trespasser at track level, construction, blocked tracks/roads, mechanical problems, operational problems, “security incidents”, collisions, medical emergencies, traffic congestion, police activity. The end result is that no matter where you’re going or how close your destination is, if you take the TTC, you’re unlikely not to experience some kind of disruption.

Every now and then I reach a breaking point where I can’t put up with the TTC’s bullshit anymore. Today was one of those days. I was fed up with the fact that a basic service 1.7 million people depend on each day to get around Canada’s largest city is so reliably unreliable, so consistently broken. The issue goes far beyond the TTC itself, which has been underfunded for decades. The TTC in many ways embodies everything wrong with Toronto, and capitalism in general.

Suffering and indifference

Let’s start with the cause of tonight’s delay: injury at track level. As I mentioned, that’s generally code for a suicide attempt. The fact that this happens so often is a testament to widespread misery and suffering, here in the richest city in one of the richest countries in the world. Suicide is the ultimate expression of intolerable pain. To state the obvious, someone’s life has to be pretty bad if death is a preferable option. In recent years, suicide attempts on the TTC have risen. The pandemic accelerated the trend; 2020 was the TTC’s second-deadliest year ever for suicides.

The number of suicides becomes less surprising when you consider the dire straits so many people find themselves in in Toronto. Poverty and homelessness are on the rise across Canada, and tent cities are expanding everywhere. Mental health continues to deteriorate. The housing crisis is most acute in Toronto and Vancouver. Since the legalization of medical assistance in dying (MAID), reports have proliferated of Canadians turning to MAID due to poverty. That is, they are choosing to die because they literally cannot afford to live. Whether someone tries to commit suicide by stepping in front of a subway train, or by having a doctor euthanize them, the end result is the same.

Common reactions to “injuries at track level” reflect another aspect of life in large cities: brutalization and indifference to human suffering. If you look at TTC Service Alerts posts where they announce “injuries at track level”, replies are predominantly expressions of frustration at service delays and the general unreliability of the TTC. I don’t blame anyone for reacting that way after they’ve experienced it so many times. Clearly by writing this post, I’m as guilty as anyone in that regard. Living in a big city slowly desensitizes one to such horrors.

Homelessness, poverty, violence, mental health problems

It’s similar to the way people react to people experiencing homelessness. Our response is often to ignore them or avert our eyes. It’s not necessarily that people don’t sympathize with the plight of the poor. Rather, they see no solution, so all they can do is avoid thinking about it. Under capitalism, where basic needs like housing are treated as a commodity, there is in fact no way to end homelessness. That’s why no politician in Canada can or will solve the housing crisis. Indeed, many of them are landlords who benefit from the status quo.

As Fightback noted of calls for government to “incentivize” purpose-built rental units with subsidies, which is really a justification for more corporate welfare:

[S]o long as these units are privately-owned, they will be rented out at the highest rate possible. No matter how many subsidies are poured into “affordable” developments, investment properties will be priced to maximize returns. This is why, for instance, landlords have increasingly converted their units into short-term rentals such as Airbnbs, further exacerbating the shortage of affordable housing.

This is the logic of capitalism. At bottom, landlords and property developers do not exist to provide housing. They exist to reap profits. Their profits come from their monopoly chiefly over the land which surrounds Canada’s major employment and social centres. 

Unlike other essential goods, the supply of land is fixed. Land is a natural monopoly, and that allows landowners, whether they are landlords, speculators or developers, to realize what Marx called “ground rent”—ever-steeper profits from their monopoly over a portion of the Earth, no matter how crowded, dangerous or dilapidated the housing units themselves may be. And when they sell those same units, they can often do so at an even greater profit, in anticipation of future price increases and future rent increases.

The rising cost of housing makes people poorer, in some cases leaving them homeless. Poverty is a primary cause of poor health, including mental health. If people can’t find proper housing, they will seek shelter wherever they can. Many of those suffering from homelessness do not feel safe in shelters, where violence, sexual assault, theft, and risk of disease are rampant. Meanwhile, police periodically destroy homeless encampments along with the few possessions their occupants have. Some people might not even be able to afford tents. In the absence of other options, where do unhoused people in Toronto often turn to for shelter?

A westbound train arrives at Sherbourne station. Photo: Secondarywaltz, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

You guessed it—the TTC. Take a trip on the subway, bus, or streetcar, and at some point you’ll almost certainly see someone begging for change, trying to sleep on a few chairs, or having a mental health episode. Of course, this is hardly restricted to Toronto, but is a feature of capitalist cities in general. Indifference or turning away isn’t the worst reaction people can have. A few months ago in New York City, we saw the public lynching of Jordan Neely on a subway train. When Neely, who was experiencing homelessness, erupted in frustration at his hunger and poverty, two other men held him down while a third strangled him to death. Commuters watched this happen, and many reactionary politicians and media outlets openly celebrated Neely’s murder. These are the kinds of “solutions” capitalism offers to poverty: repression and violence.

The problem of transit violence has become a growing problem on the TTC. 2022 saw a range of violent assaults on commuters. Fightback again:

This trend must be understood as a symptom of a society in decline. Life is becoming increasingly unaffordable for the average Canadian. The national inflation rate hit 6.8 per cent in November, and was even higher for basic necessities like food (11.4 per cent) and gasoline (13.7 per cent). Already, 17 per cent of households report eating less food in order to pay the bills. While prices are surging, wages have not kept up with the increased cost of living: after decades of stagnancy, the average base salary increase in 2022 was just four per cent. Workers are getting poorer. At the same time, interest rates have increased while Canadian households are drowning in debt, leaving many families struggling just to pay their interest.

Meanwhile, the homelessness crisis has deepened. According to Toronto Public Health, homelessness kills one person every two days. Given the difficulty in ascertaining these statistics, the real number is likely much higher. This is a result of speculative investment on the housing market, which artificially inflates prices and makes it impossible for many to afford a place to live. This same speculative investment keeps a sizable percentage of housing units empty for the sake of profit. Simultaneously, the opioid crisis, also a result of capitalist profiteering, has led to the present drug poisoning crisis in Toronto. All of these factors contribute to a general mental health crisis. And of course, the climate crisis weighs down on everyone’s mind, creating a general sense of pessimism and hopelessness for the future, especially among the youth.

When a given form of society is able to develop the economy productively, when it is able to provide people with good living standards and give them hope for the future, it is possible to maintain relative social stability. When it seems that life is getting better every year, people tend to look forward with optimism. But in a period of severe crisis, the stresses of “everyday life” become too much for many people to take. In such a situation, it should come as no surprise that we have seen an increase in violent attacks and crime.

Increased violence and brutalization is just one aspect of the capitalist crisis. The same trend can be seen on a larger scale: Canadian MPs are currently funding a proxy war and arming neo-Nazis in Ukraine, recently gave a standing ovation to a Waffen-SS veteran in Parliament, and are now endorsing Israel’s genocidal attacks on Palestinians that have killed hundreds of children in the last few days alone.

Underfunded services, insufficient infrastructure

Commuting in Toronto is widely agreed upon as a nightmare, regardless of one’s mode of transportation. At peak periods, it’s often difficult to squeeze onto a subway train, bus, or streetcar. That was bad enough pre-pandemic, but now people are packed together on these vehicles with few if any wearing masks. It’s all a recipe for a miserable travel experience.

The running joke is that TTC stands for “Take the car”. Frankly, people who drive to and from work might have it worse. It’s almost impossible to drive in or out of Toronto at any point of day without running into heavy traffic—usually on the Don Valley Parkway, which Torontonians have rightfully nicknamed “the Don Valley Parking Lot”. The other day on a bus going to Kingston, it took us 1 hour and 30 minutes to get from downtown Toronto to Scarborough. In addition to the usual traffic jams, there was an accident on every single route. Toronto has been ranked as the third most congested city in the world, to the point where even Tom Cruise took note of the horrible traffic.

Overcrowding on the TTC and the city’s notorious traffic ultimately have the same cause: infrastructure that simply does not have the capacity to meet demands of the current population. The number of people living in Toronto has exploded in recent decades, due in large part to immigration. But the city’s transit and road systems were not built to accommodate the number of people who now use them. Things don’t look like they’re going to get better anytime soon on that front.

Toronto is currently in the midst of a massive revenue crisis that will put public services on the chopping block. The TTC, like many social services, has long been underfunded. Now it is nearing collapse, while still having some of the most expensive transit fares in the world. The situation is bad enough that the federal government was compelled to invest billions of dollars in new transit infrastructure for the GTA. However, these projects are years away from completion, and mostly focus on the outlying areas rather than the downtown core, which is the real problem. Last year, a viral TikTok video compared Toronto’s paltry three subway lines to the intricate, complex subway systems in cities like Paris, London, and New York. You don’t even have to go that far: the Montreal Metro is far superior to the TTC in terms of getting where you need to go on the subway.

While mayoral candidates in the recent by-election made all kinds of claims about solving Toronto’s traffic woes, voices in the bourgeois press declared the problem unsolvable for any major city. In truth, the failures of the TTC, Toronto’s notorious traffic congestion, and the miserable experience of commuting around this city could be solved by providing free, fully funded public transit. Unfortunately, under capitalism things are going in the opposite direction.

Paying more for less

At the beginning of 2023, the TTC announced service cuts and fare hikes. That continued a longstanding trend of ever higher fees and worse service. After Olivia Chow’s election as mayor in August, she announced increases in transit service to pre-pandemic levels, which was already inadequate then. The advocacy group TTCRiders welcomed the announcement, but said the TTC’s lack of reliability, safety, and security remained an issue and more needed to be done. Given Toronto’s revenue crunch, I strongly doubt the necessary investments will be made in that direction. Instead, the TTC’s aging infrastructure will just get more dilapidated and unpredictable. Meanwhile, the broader crisis of capitalism will grow worse. The Bank of Canada’s declared goal in hiking interest rates was to spark a recession in order to get inflation under control, which will make people poorer and increase homelessness and mental health problems.

Paying more for less might be the aspect of the TTC most reflective of the general decline of Toronto. I first moved to this city in 2010, and aside from a couple years working in Saskatchewan from 2012 to 2014, have been here ever since. The drop in quality of life since 2015 has been notable. The biggest turning point was the pandemic; 2020 was also the year my landlord renovicted me from my old apartment in the Annex. I now live in a smaller apartment, in a worse neighbourhood, and pay hundreds of dollars more in rent each month. In the face of inflation and price-gouging, the cost of living and buying basic necessities such as groceries has become so high, it’s practically impossible to save money anymore.

That’s the case for a lot of people. The cost of rent jumped by 10% in Toronto in just the last year. As of August, the average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the city was a whopping $2,620. People are reaching a breaking point. More and more young workers are realizing they can’t afford to live in this city anymore. As the Toronto Star reports, “thousands of young people are fleeing Toronto” because of what the paper calls an “affordability crisis”. Toronto is a sinking ship, and those who can find a spot are scrambling for the lifeboats. Economists say the city will suffer as a result, the Star adds. This is a perfect example of capitalism’s internal contradictions, the same reason this system inevitably falls into crisis due to overproduction. Workers cannot afford to buy the goods they produce.

In Toronto, as everywhere else, capitalism offers no solutions. As Fightback said after Chow’s election, “The fight to ensure housing for all, to end poverty and homelessness, and to defend working class lives and livelihoods is a fight against the city’s bosses and landlords. The task of socialists, in this context, is to prepare for struggle.” I feel more prepared for that struggle all the time.