New Minister of Transportation Steven Del Duca has something he'd like to say. Repeatedly. With emphasis: He's not looking to reopen any of the province's transit-building plans, because he hopes to be too busy actually building transit.

Del Duca, speaking with QP Briefing in his office Thursday afternoon, used some formulation of the "no more plans, I'm here to implement" seven times in 20 minutes.

He was elevated to the cabinet after the June 12 election, with the Vaughan MPP replacing Glen Murray, under whose somewhat rocky tenure the Liberals cemented their plans to build a Scarborough subway. Murray was also instrumental in shifting the province's focus to a regional express rail vision for GO Transit, with two-way, all-day service delivered by electric trains across the GTA.

But Del Duca's move to transit is in part an effort by the majority Liberals to signal they're uninterested in reopening any of those plans.

Del Duca, 41, has lived in Vaughan for 27 years (before that, growing up in Etobicoke) and says the daily commutes he and his wife have to work in downtown Toronto add to the sense of urgency he feels to build transit throughout the GTA.

"It's been difficult to keep up with the pace of growth," he says of fast-growing York Region. "I've seen first hand what that enormous, ongoing population growth means in terms of gridlock. I experience it on my commute, my wife does as well. We are fortunate to an extent in York Region, we've had some local leadership like [regional chair] Bill Fisch."

The Liberals may be hostile to the idea of reopening the GTA's transit plans, but they may not have a choice: If former NDP MP Olivia Chow wins the Toronto mayoral race (she has been leading in most polls), she has pledged to return to the light rail plan in Scarborough, and avoid the billion-dollar debt the city would incur to build the subway.

Liberals have said that they dearly hope Toronto City Council doesn't vote to reopen the plan, with or without Chow at the helm: MPPs have insisted repeatedly on the record they're proceeding with the plan as it exists, something Del Duca reiterated yesterday.

"I can only look at this from the perspective of the mandate that we have just been given from the people of Ontario, including the people of Scarborough, including the people of Toronto, and that mandate was pretty clear," he says of the Liberal insistence that the subway plan will continue.

(Given that the Liberals either changed the city's transit plants, or allowed them to change, four times in four years since 2010, municipal voters will have to judge these assertions on voting day along with their mayoral candidates.)

The Liberals also have a brewing municipal election issue in Hamilton, where the city council has proposed a light rail plan while the Mayor Bob Bratina has said all-day GO service should be the city's priority. Here, too, Del Duca says he's eager to put the debates to rest so that he can get to the implementation.

"Hopefully we'll land in a good spot," Del Duca says. He'll be working closely with Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing Ted McMeekin, the MPP for the Hamilton-area riding of Ancaster-Dundas-Flamborough-Westdale.

One issue that's been raised since the Ministries of Transportation and Infrastructure was split in the post-election cabinet shuffle is whether this will harm the province's ability to coordinate land-use and transit planning, an issue Murray was passionate about.

Del Duca says he's not worried about it.

"I don't think it matters so much who the personalities are, who has these responsibilities, so long as we're all working towards the same goal—which we absolutely are under the leadership of the Premier," Del Duca says. In particular, he notes that land use issues involve a number of other cabinet files beyond infrastructure and transportation: there's municipal affairs, environment, natural resources, and others.

For Del Duca, the time to act is now

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