Nov 14, 2017
Bombardier needs to 'pick up their socks': Toronto Mayor John Tory
, BNN Bloomberg
Toronto’s mayor says Bombardier needs to ‘pick up their socks’ if it ever wants to do business with the city again.
“You have to hope maybe that what they focus on is, if they want to do business with Toronto ever in the future, they better pick up their socks because otherwise anybody in their right mind would just say ‘forget it’… You don’t want to do that and count them out when they are a Canadian company,” Toronto Mayor John Tory told BNN in an interview on Tuesday.
“They’re doing slightly better but still nowhere near good enough and we’re still in a hole as a result of their – I guess – poor performance. That’s the least I could put it,” he added.
Bombardier told the city on Oct. 12 that it would once again fall short of its expected streetcar deliveries, sending Toronto only 65 of its promised 70 streetcars by year’s end. Tory told BNN on that there’s little the city can do about it.
“We’re really between a rock and a hard place on that, and so all we can do is really lean on them, as we’re doing, to do better at meeting their targets,” Tory said.
Tory slammed the company at the end of 2016 for its inability to meet delivery deadlines established in 2012. At the time he told BNN that the city would have to look very carefully at considering Bombardier for any future transit projects.
“Would we even ask those people to bid based on the fact that they just haven’t delivered streetcars to us on anywhere near the schedule?” he told BNN last December.
While he bemoaned Bombardier’s performance on its contract, Tory admitted that finding an alternative provider is not an option for the city.
“If we said tomorrow: ‘Okay we’re just treating this contract as [if it were] at an end’, it’s not as if we could just go down the street and knock on somebody’s door two doors down and say ‘could you please produce streetcars for us and deliver them next week?’ They would have years of work to do on getting up to speed on exactly the streetcars we need and doing their own drawings and designs and tooling and this and that.”
