Bankrolling subway expansion

Last week I made an outrageous comment in a posting 'Essentially a disservice,' where I suggested how a government transit monopoly might be broken up in stages. It probably wasn't the best suggestion, I know there are many other ideas that are better. The truth is, if I knew all or even some of the answers to problems like this, I would not be blogging. What I do know is that there are problems of governance that can be approached from other directions different from the prevailing spend and tax paradigm. That is the beauty of a free market and a competition of ideas.

So I was pleased to read a story in one of Toronto's newspapers that a member of the Ontario legislature, MPP David Caplan, suggested that subway expansion in Toronto  could involve private sector money to help finance this very expensive project. I'm not saying that this will break up this particular government monopoly, but that kind of thinking needs to be encouraged. The other good news about this idea is that the newly elected administration  and mayor of Toronto, might be amenable to Caplan's suggestion unlike the socialist mob that ran the city for the past 8 years.