City of Brampton redacts documents related to secretive $11M deal with private transit operator

Anushka Yadav, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter & Joel Wittnebel, The Pointer

In April, with the threat of a transit strike looming over City Hall, Mayor Patrick Brown and his fellow members of council had other priorities. 

Just as the head of the transit union was accusing the City and Brown of bargaining in bad faith, the mayor and his supporters on council, secretly approved a $10.9 million contract with a new start-up company to deliver a “fully electric Smart Routing transit system” in parts of the city that would allow Brampton residents to request rides “near their door” for a “standard fee”. 

The contract with Argo, which had launched about a year earlier and had never done anything like the project before, was approved by council during a special meeting on April 17 under a closed session item titled “Transit Innovation Pilot Project”. Less than two weeks later, the plan would be made public in a press release with City officials and Mayor Brown gushing about a deal that Brampton residents had been completely left in the dark about. 

Despite being forced to cover almost $11 million for a plan that raised dozens of questions, taxpayers were completely shut out of the process. 

There were no public staff reports on the matter. No accounting for how these millions of taxpayer dollars are being spent, or any detailed explanation of how the contract came to be. 

Typical pilot projects like the one Brown steamrolled through council, receive extensive review by municipal staff, and often involve public engagement to ensure community needs are addressed. Such information is then detailed in public reports that explain the specifics of the service being tested, how the City could benefit, what exactly the taxpayers’ money is being used for, and any potential risks that staff would have to address. 

None of this was done.

Despite the obvious issues and possible pitfalls of partnering with a transit start-up that had been operational for less than a year when the contract was inked, no information was provided to taxpayers. 

The City of Brampton refused to answer questions about the deal shortly after it was signed.

The Pointer then filed a freedom of information request to learn how a company with no history secured almost $11 million from Brampton taxpayers without their knowledge. 

So far the FOI investigation has been unable to get basic information about a multi-million-dollar deal, details that are usually made public long before contracts are signed and information that is typically provided to residents so they are fully aware of how and why their money might be used for their benefit.

A request for all emails, memos, reports, meeting notes, text messages, or any other communication related to the Argo deal returned 1,492 pages of documents. But 86 percent of them were fully redacted, a further six percent were redacted so heavily as to make them effectively unreadable. 

The information that was provided includes little more than logistical emails between Brampton staff and Argo setting up meetings in the spring of 2024; and emails between staff regarding the closed session report going to council ahead of the April 17 special meeting. The draft report is fully redacted. Mayor Brown is included in this email string discussing the draft closed session report. No other members of council are included. It’s unclear why Brown would be dealt with and engaged by staff, without the participation of all the other elected officials who are supposed to be privy to the same information, on behalf of their constituents. 

The Municipal Freedom of Information and Privacy Act includes exemptions which allow a municipality to withhold certain information if it falls under one of four categories, including legal advice, personal information about identifiable individuals, labour negotiations, or certain third-party information that might negatively impact the partner. 

In several instances, the City of Brampton appears to be stretching the use of these exemptions. 

For example, the final contract with Argo was part of the documents withheld in The Pointer’s request. The City of Brampton claimed it is exempt from disclosure as “it contains information relating to negotiations and financial, technical and commercial information that was supplied to the city in confidence” under Section 10 and 11 of the MFIPPA.

The Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario has made it clear that municipalities need to apply discretion when considering applying these exemptions. In a series of recommendations posted on its website, IPC officials explain that under Section 10 “the contents of a contract between an institution and a third party will not normally qualify”; and when applying Section 11 “the exemptions apply to ongoing negotiations, or to negotiations that will occur or are anticipated or intended to occur in the future.” With the contract already signed and the negotiations complete between the City of Brampton and Argo, this exemption would no longer apply. 

The Pointer has appealed the request to the IPC, which will review the City’s use of these exemptions and, following a mediation or arbitration process, will order the City to release the documents, order the information to be released under certain conditions, or agree that they can be withheld. 

The Argo pilot project launched in downtown Brampton on September 2. Their on-demand buses are currently operating in a small area around the city-centre and allow residents to request a ride through the Argo app. 

The new partnership is doing very little to assuage resident concerns about the lack of investment into Brampton’s public transit system under successive terms under Brown. 

“Brampton is growing fast,” Mayor Brown said during his address at the 2025 State of the City event hosted by the Brampton Board of Trade.

“We’re the third largest city in Ontario, seventh largest city in the country with 800,000 people, more than 140,000 businesses…we’re adding 45,000 new residents every year in Brampton, 3700 new people a month, 125 people a day.”

Every day, Brampton Transit helps those thousands of people get around the city, leading to consistently increased public transport ridership numbers.

Between 2022 and 2024 alone, ridership grew by nearly 40 percent despite cramped buses, delays, no-shows and long wait times, which Brampton Transit users have experienced since prior to the pandemic.

Instead of budgeting to keep up with the demand, Brown has instead routinely cut or delayed key transit and transit-related infrastructure investments. 

It started with Brown’s first budget as mayor in 2019, when a series of planned investments were pushed off so he could make good on campaign promises to freeze the City budget. Transportation, active-transportation and specific transit infrastructure spending was cut from a planned $113.9 million to $94.2 million.

The trend continued in 2020, with a planned $431 million in capital investments drastically scaled back to $223 million, so Brown could push another crippling budget freeze. 

At the beginning of that year, Brown removed $135 million from its capital budget earmarked for a third transit storage and maintenance hub, the Cadetta Johnston Transit Facility, a project vital for expanding Brampton’s bus fleet and transitioning to a greener system. It was approved in 2019 and initially slated to open by 2021.

In April 2021, the federal government stepped in to lend a hand and get the long-delayed project moving. Through the Investing in Canada Infrastructure Program (ICIP), the City received a $175 million grant for the facility’s first phase of construction, funded with $69.9 million from Ottawa, $58.2 million from Queen’s Park and $46.4 million from the City. 

Council later approved an additional $108.2 million in municipal funding to complete the design and construction of Phase One.

The groundbreaking for the facility did not happen until October 2024, when transit ridership was hitting record levels. 

“Tax freezes were done because they’re popular. Eventually, the finance department had to have a conversation with Patrick Brown, with the mayor, that if you continue doing this, the City budget is going to implode,” long-time Brampton community advocate Sylvia Roberts said, noting the long list of delayed projects that often have their funding revoked.

“There are large parts of the city that are underfunded. Capital repairs are also significantly underfunded.”

Roberts has criticized Brown for making “shortsighted decisions” that don’t serve well with his habit of “begging” higher levels of government to “fund basic city projects” and failing to put taxpayer money into those necessary improvements.

In the 2021 budget, $30 million was allocated for the Transit Hub Project, a new downtown bus terminal designed to expand capacity and improve connections between Brampton Transit, GO Transit, future LRT, and BRT services. So far, 96 percent of the funding remains unspent, with no further financial plans since its launch.

Last year, Brown reduced the projected transit operations budget by $44 million, from $135.9 million to $91.9 million.

In the 2025 budget, overall capital spending was slashed by 22.7 percent, with bus purchase funding dropped from $89.7 million to $55.3 million; refurbishments and new bus shelters were eliminated entirely.

In January 2024, the Canadian Urban Transit Research and Innovation Consortium (CUTRIC) laid out a roadmap to decarbonize Brampton Transit, a process CUTRIC President and CEO Josipa Petrunic recommended must begin within the next few years as diesel buses are phased out. 

“Diesel will no longer be an option,” Petrunic warned.

Brampton’s 476 dirty diesel buses would need to be replaced by a fleet of nearly 1,200 zero-emission vehicles by 2040. The total 18-year lifecycle cost of the plan is $8.94 billion, with $3.4 billion in capital expenses and $5.7 billion in operating costs.

She presented three options to transition the fleet to a mix of battery-electric and hydrogen fuel cell buses, ranging in cost from $8.94 billion to $9.85 billion through 2041. 

Petrunic told council that achieving a 60 percent reduction in transit emissions alone (transit-related greenhouse gas emissions currently account for 70 percent of the City’s corporate emissions) could bring Brampton close to its 2040 emissions target. This will only be reached if transit charging infrastructure, new facilities to support electric buses and a clear capital plan are prioritized. Brown, meanwhile, has been focused on freezing the municipality’s budget.

She highlighted that $132 million was required to upgrade the two existing transit facilities as part of the transition, “and then there’s a third and possibly fourth facility that will absolutely be required and they’re going to land in the hundreds of millions of dollar zone.”

Despite receiving a $400 million offer from the Canada Infrastructure Bank in 2022 to help finance up to 450 battery-electric buses, the City has yet to use the funding opportunity or sign an implementation agreement, as it would require financing commitments from City Hall that Brown refuses to make.

On October 31, the federal and provincial governments once again swooped in and provided the City with more than $183 million to purchase 136 new buses.

The vehicle mix ignores Petrunic’s decarbonization advice: the investment will fund a variety of models, including 60-foot diesel articulated buses, 40-foot diesel/hybrid buses, conventional diesel buses, and a limited number of zero-emission battery-electric and hydrogen fuel cell buses.

The purchase ties Brampton to mostly dirty diesel buses for decades, cementing the City’s future as a green transportation laggard. 

Meanwhile, Brown is trumpeting a secretive $11 million deal with a start-up company for a pilot project that will do almost nothing to increase badly needed capacity on Brampton’s major routes, as riders wonder how their tax dollars are being used.

Email: anushka.yadav@thepointer.com

Email: joel.wittnebel@thepointer.com

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