Public transit is at the nexus of solving Canada’s most pressing challenges. It is a solution to the rising cost of living. It helps reduce carbon emissions. It is the most powerful method of tackling traffic congestion. It is the lifeblood of economic growth in our towns and cities. It enables building the kind of dense, sustainable and cost-efficient housing supply we need to tackle the housing crisis.
However, we have a big problem. Public transit systems across the country are in a financial crisis. If this historic challenge isn’t overcome, we risk a future that is costlier, more polluting, and where gridlock holds people and goods back from their full potential.
In Metro Vancouver, TransLink is warning that if their looming budget crunch isn’t overcome, they will have to cut Skytrain service by a third and cut bus service in half — making more than 145 bus routes disappear and resulting in more than half a million people losing service within walking distance of their homes.
In Ottawa, service cuts are already being felt across the bus network and O-Train frequencies are being cut in half.
In Montreal, the regional transport authority is warning they may be forced to shutter three entire commuter rail lines.
Communities across the country face the threat of a “public transit downward spiral,” where cuts to service only drive further losses in ridership and revenues. This creates a vicious cycle that only serves to increase carbon emissions, hurt the most vulnerable in our society and discourage the transit-oriented development projects we need to solve the housing crisis.
At the root of the problem is a broken funding model. Canadian municipalities are legislated into a fiscal straightjacket. They can’t run deficits, and they don’t have revenue tools that cities in other countries do, like access to income, sales or payroll taxes. This has created public transit systems disproportionately reliant on the fares paid by riders to fund their day-to-day operating budgets.
This precarious funding model was completely shattered by the pandemic’s effect on transit ridership, a situation that has only been exacerbated since by rising inflationary costs. Meanwhile, temporary operating funding support from federal and provincial governments has been cancelled.
It is in this context that Environmental Defence is hosting the Transit for Tomorrow Summit in Ottawa on October 28. We’re bringing together civil society such as environmental and transit rider groups, along with municipalities, government officials, members of the business community and the transit industry to discuss how we can collectively chart a path forward and build a new deal for public transit. The survival and growth of public transit service is essential to achieving results on the priorities that all Canadians share.
Our summit is bringing people together at a crucial moment.
The federal government is poised to release their next-generation transit investment program, the Canada Public Transit Fund. It may surprise you to learn that not a single penny of this $30-billion program is allowed to go toward stopping transit service cuts. Since 2016, it has been the federal government’s policy to limit the public transit funding it provides to building new subway or light rail infrastructure or buying new buses. It cannot be used to make existing transit more reliable by increasing service hours and the frequency of trains or buses. This is despite studies showing that these measures are the most important drivers of key outcomes like ridership growth and emissions reductions.
While important projects, including Toronto’s Ontario Line and Vancouver's Broadway Subway Extension, are getting built, the service reliability of existing infrastructure is worsening. According to the most recent statistics, transit service levels are actually down seven per cent on average across the country, and there are fewer buses in service now than there were a decade ago.
Canada has a chance to turn this around. There doesn’t have to be a trade-off between better infrastructure and better service. We can build the transformative transit projects that future generations will enjoy while also improving the service current transit riders experience right now. Our most recent report demonstrated just how important doing both is, with the right investments having the capability of reducing carbon emissions by 65 million tonnes.
To unlock the power of public transit to reduce carbon emissions, we need federal leadership to bring provinces and municipalities together to broker a new transit funding model fit for today’s challenges. As we approach a potential early federal election, Environmental Defence and our allies will be asking every political party to put forward an ambitious agenda for public transit that aims to provide this kind of leadership and charts a path toward doubling transit ridership by 2035.
Nate Wallace is program manager, clean transportation at Environmental Defence.
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