As I sat in a local Starbucks about 4:30 p.m., I did see streetcars heading eastward on Queen St. I took that to be tangible evidence that the great transit strike of 2008 was indeed over.
As public-sector strikes go, I'll take 10 transit strikes for every summer garbage strike. :)
However, I didn't get abandoned by the transit system at midnight on a Friday. My employer, CTV.ca News, was very generous.
And as this Toronto Star article noted, the people who get hurt the worst by a transit strike are those who can afford it the least -- students and the poor:
Joshua Lecker, a student at Seneca College, was forced to postpone a much-anticipated job interview at the last minute.
"They might reschedule me, but what appeared to be a sure shot now doesn't look so certain," he said.
"Especially because they now know that I don't drive."
It took him an hour to walk to the GO station from his home in North York to catch a train to Whitby for his current job at Blockbuster.
"They did it because a weekend strike cripples," said Lecker.
"It affects the people no one really cares about. The people who are most affected are shift workers and students who need the money, and can't afford to miss their shifts. They hurt the most vulnerable people with this strike."
The TTC's workers haven't been strike-happy. There was a one-day wildcat strike in 2006, and then a two-day general strike in 1998.
I guess the question for the public and the politicians is, how essential a service is transit to a huge city like Toronto? Personally, I live 25 kilometres from work. Walking home would easily take five hours. Cabbing it is about $50.
Howard Moscoe, the former TTC chair, told CTV Newsnet on Saturday that he didn't think declaring the TTC to be an essential service was a good idea, in part because if you take away the right to strike, settlements have to reflect that fact.
Do you want to pay TTC workers more in exchange for certainty of service? If Moscoe is correct, that's the trade-off.
The Star's Royson James has a different take.