Source: Dec. 3, 2025 edition of the Toronto Star
Sonia Day is a freelance contributor to the Toronto Star.
“Please, can you help us?”
I’m standing on the platform at Guelph GO train station. The day is sunny, cold and windy. A young blond woman, hair blowing in golden clouds around her face, approaches. She’s accompanied by a tall silent man in a dark windbreaker who smiles and looks perplexed. They immediately strike me as East European, perhaps Ukrainian refugees, newly arrived in Canada.
“We want to take train to Toronto,” she explains politely, in hesitant heavily accented English. “Is this where train stops? Do you know where we buy ticket, please?
Their confusion is hardly surprising. The station building behind us, a sad relic of the past century, its brickwork crumbling, isn’t open. The windows are filthy, the once-elegant wooden doors have been firmly locked against would-be travellers. And there is no GO employee around to ask. Not one, even in the GO bus station next door. All that’s available to guide the uninitiated are two white machines standing on the platform, looking a bit battered by the elements, with instructions for obtaining tickets that I find hard to follow myself.
I tell the bewildered couple with a wry laugh that this is only the third or fourth time I’ve taken the GO into Toronto from Guelph, but I THINK a train will arrive in about 15 minutes. I’m not sure, though. Also, if they put a credit card into one of the machines, it will spit out tickets for them. But then another woman waiting on the platform interjects: “No, no, they have to get a Presto card or have an E-ticket.”
Presto? More confusion. She tries to help them at the machine. A crowd gathers. There’s much grumbling about how the station is never open, waiting on the platform is freezing in winter, the Presto machines often don’t work and you can’t even get into the toilets. Then the train roars in and we all hurriedly scramble aboard. The couple disappear up the stairs into the double-decker carriage. I don’t know if they managed to figure out the puzzling Presto in time. But I suspect that they didn’t and they travelled without paying. Not because they wanted to, but because they didn’t have any choice.
This, folks, is the state of public transit in the hinterland of Ontario. Hard-to-understand machines. No one around to ask. And as for calling GO to find out train schedules and how to buy tickets? Well, you can try. But you’ll wait ages for an operator to answer your call, and in the meantime, there’s a barrage of incomprehensible AI-generated information blasting in your ear. Getting the right information online is no easy feat either.
To be fair, GO trains are spotless (I’ve never travelled in such clean, litter-free carriages). So are the tracks and station platforms. And when, uncertain what to do or where to go, and I’ve managed to find a GO employee to ask, they have been uniformly pleasant and helpful. But why is the communication so bad? Why, when the GTA is clogged with cars and more and more of us want to stop driving into Toronto, do they make it so difficult for people who are unfamiliar with their procedures to get information?
The problem, no doubt, is insufficient funds to hire more people, a familiar cry everywhere. But instead of mouthing pie-in-the-sky nonsense about putting a tunnel under Toronto, it’s surely time that our car-loving Premier Doug Ford turned his attention to improving access to outlying locations like Guelph, so we can stop feeling that we have no choice but to drive into the city.
How about it, Premier? Pony up some more cash for GO. They undoubtedly need it. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you of the well-known fact that the world’s most livable cities have good public transit.
Right now, what we have in Toronto and the GTA is — sorry to say — pathetic.
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