Who gets what, where and how
The financial losses of STC weren’t new in 2017. The company had consistently required government subsidies beginning in the 1980s. According to the provincial government, between 1980 and the end of service, ridership had dropped by 77 per cent. But every year that it did, the minister in charge would insist that the STC was providing an important service and that its funding was secure. The perceived public fear of losing the bus company was strong enough that the opposition agreed.
“With STC, what we’ve said is we wouldn’t want to yank that service out of rural Saskatchewan until there is a replacement,” said Brad Wall in 2002, then Crown Investments Corporation critic.
In 2016, with the Saskatchewan Party in power and Brad Wall as premier, Minister of Crown Investments Corporation Jennifer Campeau also announced that the STC was shielded from any quick privatization by the Crown Corporation Protection Act.
“It’s safe – and it’s business as usual,” she told the Regina Leader-Post in July 2016.
But that year, the provincial government introduced Bill 40, The Interpretation Amendment Act, which changed the definition of “privatization” so it would not include winding down or dissolving a Crown Corporation.
This controversial legislation laid the ground work for the STC’s demise.
By Dec. 2016, according to briefing memos obtained through an access to information request, then-minister Joe Hargrave had received talking points on how to discuss the dissolution of the STC, and in early February 2017, behind closed doors, Hargrave advised STC executives of the cabinet decision.
“It’s safe – and it’s business as usual.”
– Jennifer Campeau
That month, Hargrave suggested publicly in Prince Albert that STC could be sold, and in March the provincial budget confirmed that the STC would be dissolved.
The union representing laid-off STC workers sought a court injunction, arguing that the move violated the province’s Crown Corporations Public Ownership Act. In May 2017, the Court of Queen’s Bench in Regina ruled that the government had the authority to wind down the STC, and that it properly interpreted the definition of “privatization” now on the books.
The shuttering of STC also sparked a labour dispute that ended in 2018 with an arbitrator awarding union members eight weeks of severance pay because STC officials did not follow the rules of the Canada Labour Code.
By then, it was already too late to resuscitate the company.
“When those court cases were happening, we were bleeding money. There was no way they would have started up again,” said Trina Lees, an accountant who worked for almost ten years at the STC. “All our shipping customers fell off right after the announcement – it would have been too hard to get those customers and riders back,” she said.
With the legal battle over, the war of public opinion began
On the grassroots level, disability rights group People First Saskatchewan protested at the provincial legislature in Regina, saying the STC decision had made them feel like prisoners in their own cities. Opposition NDP leader Ryan Meili quoted them as saying that “our quality of life and our dignity have been taken away by this government.” The group also filed a human rights complaint in an effort to pressure the province to create an alternative accessible transportation service in their communities. Connie Dieter, a Cree woman and safe house worker from Abernethy, a small community near Regina, also filed a human rights complaint against the government, arguing that the lack of service had already led to increased hitchhiking and amounted to racial discrimination. Both matters are still before the human rights commission.
Anti-austerity group Stop the Cuts – successful in reversing cuts to public libraries and education – also had a subgroup, Save the STC, dedicated to public transportation. The group organized everything from petitions, letter-writing campaigns and rallies, public speaking events, writing editorials in local newspapers, and staging sit-ins – acts of civil disobedience that saw passengers refusing to leave STC busses on their last stop.
“We’ve used our organizing skills as best we can to bring attention to the issue. It wouldn’t have gotten any attention except for the work we’ve done,” said Cindy Hanson, a professor of adult education and human resource development at the University of Regina and organizer of Stop the Cuts.
“And we’re going to keep it going,” said JoAnn Jaffe, a professor of sociology and social studies at the University of Regina and organizer. Both Jaffe and Hanson attended the hearings of the highway traffic board and presented objections to the applications being made by private companies, including Forward Coach Lines. They’ve encouraged members of Stop the Cuts’ social media groups to post their testimonials to a blog that documents the social costs of the lack of transportation.
As well as being a former STC rider, Hanson has been researching the social impact of its loss since 2017. She believes the decision was purely ideological and unfairly targets poor, elderly and First Nations people.
Stop the Cuts, along with unions and the provincial opposition NDP also called for the government to perform an audit of the offloaded expense of losing the STC, asking what it cost families, communities, the health-care system, social services, cities and the environment. Unless asked to do so by the Legislative assembly, the auditor’s office can’t investigate matters related to the administration of policy.
So, Stop the Cuts started a Go Fund Me campaign to fund graduate student researchers at the University of Saskatchewan to work on the project.
Calculating the costs of alternative transportation offloaded onto other government departments is difficult, because by and large there was no funding allocated to replace the service STC provided. In 2018, the City of Moose Jaw briefly entertained the idea of funding its own bus line to Regina for students and workers commuting to Saskatchewan Polytechnic in Moose Jaw, but the initiative didn’t make it into the budget.
In the legislature, minister Hargrave said that reliance on STC was not as high as critics suggest. The number of people in remote Northern communities who relied on the bus made up only one per cent of those who were assisted out of the North by health services for medical reasons, he said.
At the same time, documents obtained by the opposition NDP through an access to information request show that a high-level official in the health ministry had raised concerns about shutting down the provincial bus company two days after the budget announcement, asking in an email: “Does anyone know what the impact of the STC cut is?”
In the legislature, NDP MP Danielle Chartier called for a full accounting of the health programs and services that were hurt by the scrapping of the STC, but did not receive a specific response.
The Ministry of Social Services tracks expenditures for medical transportation for income assistance clients, but does not track the modes of transportation, whether clients are travelling by bus, taxi, or private vehicle, according to Leya Moore, a media relations consultant at the ministry. Those total expenditures, however, have remained relatively consistent over the past three years, between $1.3 and $1.4 million since 2016. On average, the number of people accessing medical travel benefits each month also remained the same, at approximately 1,500.
Many urban women’s shelters already had a budget for picking up clients in the city, depending on their funding arrangement with the Ministry of Justice, donations, or funding from Indigenous Services. But those budgets were never meant to accommodate any sort of intercity transportation.
“We are seeing that there is a burden on the shelters, because they are of course trying to provide service when they can. One of the biggest impacts that we’re seeing is that the urban shelters – which were already full – used to have the ability to move people out of the community. Now without that intercity bus service, the urban shelters are even more overwhelmed, and some of the shelters in smaller communities have seen a reduction in clients,” Dusel said.
For some government services, costs would remain the same. Inmates transferring from Pine Grove Correctional Centre near Prince Albert, for example, take a shuttle to Prince Albert, and can travel back to Saskatoon via Rider Express routes at roughly the same cost as STC’s service. In other respects, there is no way to measure how many people have reverted to hitchhiking, or how many forego government service appointments because they cannot travel.
Two years after the STC announcement, Stop the Cuts is working to keep the issue in the headlines. They’ve planned a series of public hearings, inviting the public to discuss what the closure of STC means to them and what their transportation needs are today – and are likely to be in the future. The first public hearing is scheduled to be held in Saskatoon on May 15, and more will follow in Regina and in the North. After these public hearings, Stop the Cuts will launch what it is calling STC 2020 to model what a new provincial service should look like.
At the federal level, NDP MPs representing Saskatchewan have regularly raised the issue. In the House of Commons on May 4, 2018, Georgina Jolibois, MP for Desnethe-Missinippi-Churchill River, said that in her northern Saskatchewan riding, “many women seniors and residents, including First Nations and Métis, cannot safely get to medical appointments or other critical services. Some can’t even get to the grocery store.”
The federal government stayed out of the fray at first, as public safety minister Ralph Goodale repeatedly said that the STC was a provincial responsibility.
The Liberals were, however, funding urban public transportation. In 2018, for example, Goodale announced $234 million would go to roads and transportation infrastructure in Saskatchewan, including public transit in cities – but none to rural public transit networks. Since 2002, Infrastructure Canada has invested roughly $38 million towards transit in Moose Jaw, Prince Albert, Saskatoon and Regina.
After Greyhound pulled out of Western Canada the federal government announced that it had formed a working committee that had been meeting weekly with its provincial counterparts to support transportation “on a cost-shared and transitional basis.”
The goal was not to fund a public bus company, but to support existing private companies that run bus services on “non-viable routes,” Garneau said at the press conference announcing the working group in October 2018.
“If businesses come forward, and there are probably tourism companies that are in the businesses of transportation that might be interested, we will then look at those Indigenous businesses or communities to come up with solutions,” said Sheilagh Murphy, assistant deputy minister of Indigenous and northern affairs, at a parliamentary transportation committee meeting in November.
Under that federal program, the NDP in Alberta did the opposite of the ruling Saskatchewan Party. Since mid-2018, that government invested in existing bus companies and partnered with the federal government to fill more than 80 per cent of the service gap left by Greyhound’s former network, Kate Toogood, a spokeswoman for the government of Alberta said in December 2018.
Although it doesn’t fund a public inter-city transit company comparable to the STC, the government of Alberta committed to a federal partnership that invested $1.4 million over two years, laying the foundation for future rural public transportation. Regional partnerships between the government and private companies are up and running or will be soon in six rural regions, according to Toogood.
However, Jason Kenney’s United Conservative Party took won a majority in April, 2019, unseating the NDP in Alberta. It remains to be seen whether the province will continue to support rural public transportation along with the federal government.
In Saskatchewan, no such deals have been struck.
In February 2019, the Saskatchewan government refused federal transport minister Marc Garneau’s $10 million cost-sharing offer to replace lost Greyhound bus routes in Saskatchewan. Activists were dismayed, but not shocked.
“I don’t think we were surprised by this because the SaskParty government knows how unpopular the decision to shut down STC was and they don’t want to do anything that would even hint that they may have been wrong in dismantling it,” Jaffe wrote in an email.
Crown corporations minister Joe Hargrave told reporters in Saskatoon in February that the federal government did not provide enough details of the cost-sharing program.
“That to me is extremely weak leadership. They’re leaving money on the table and leaving people stuck on the side of the road,” said provincial NDP leader Ryan Meili to reporters, shortly afterwards.
“The government has no plans to reinstate STC or return to a subsidized transportation model.”
– James Parker
“Saskatchewan has encouraged the federal government to provide this funding directly to private sector transportation providers to improve services for the people with disabilities, vulnerable people and northern communities. We encourage people to use the services offered by private sector operators where available,” Parker wrote.
“The government has no plans to reinstate STC or return to a subsidized transportation model,” James Parker, senior communications advisor to executive council of the provincial government wrote in a statement in April, 2019.
Some people see old fashioned politics at work in the move.
“Traditionally, provincial governments have provided very little support for public transportation in Canada – far lower than what I would argue would be fair or efficient. And part of it is because – for various reasons – a rural vote is worth twice as much as an urban vote,” said Todd Litman, director of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute, an independent research organization dedicated to transportation issues.
In the 2016 provincial election, the conservative Saskatchewan Party trounced the NDP, winning 51 seats to the NDP’s 10. The Saskatchewan Party took all but two of the province’s rural ridings, and most urban ridings – traditionally a stronghold of the NDP. Those rural votes are “inordinately powerful,” Litman said. There are more city-dwellers than rural or remote residents in Saskatchewan, but they are represented by a slim minority of 30 ridings compared to 31 rural ridings, leading one commentator to predict that in the next election, the average city representative will have more voters than the average rural seat.
While many political factors are at play, rural voters don’t generally support politicians who want to invest in public transportation, because they see it as a hand-out to city-dwellers, Litman said.
That political leaning isn’t new, and it isn’t unique to Saskatchewan. “That’s been going on for the last half-century,” he said.
And, despite high – and rising – rates of automobile ownership, the need for other transit options in rural areas has not decreased, according to Litman.
“[That] doesn’t mean that the trend will continue and will reach 100 per cent automobile travel and eliminate the need for public transportation – or mean that that trend is good,” he said.
And, there are many reasons why a person cannot or should not drive, he said. Non-drivers might be elderly, temporarily impaired, tourists, adolescents, or anybody who wants to take a trip without a car – and they shouldn’t be considered a special interest group. The political conversation has made it easy to collapse the issue: you’re either a bus rider, or not, and for those who are not, the trouble is easy to dismiss.
“A lot of people seemed to think that … people were taking the bus and had a choice between other modes of transportation. If you’re relatively affluent or live in the city, you don’t understand exactly how isolated people are in rural areas if they don’t have a vehicle. And if you’re relatively affluent you don’t understand why people don’t have a vehicle. And that is a privilege that is denied to many,” Dusel said.
“Even if you don’t use it, you’d still value having it around. Like a lifeboat you might not always use, but you’re glad it’s available if you need it,” Litman said.
“Even if you don’t use it, you’d still value having it around. Like a lifeboat you might not always use, but you’re glad it’s available if you need it.”
– Todd Litman
The issue is essential to premier Scott Moe’s opposition to the federal carbon tax – a popular if controversial position to take on the Prairies. If public transportation were invested in more, low-income voters might view the carbon tax in a different way, Litman said.
Critics of the carbon tax have pointed out that it will hurt low-income residents more than others, but lobbying for a stop-gap measure like public transportation for low-income people hardly figures in the discussion.
“I think this issue is really tied up in other stuff. Is greed good, or is the role of the government and state to build and support the public good? What is our future on this question? The future of the planet hinges on it,” Jaffe said.
While environmental concerns are often cited in favour of public transportation, oil and gas production, agriculture and electricity generation account for far more of Saskatchewan’s greenhouse gas emissions than personal transportation, according to the National Energy Board.
To Litman, the political discussion surrounding public transportation in general is still irrational and misses important trade-offs.
“The ironic thing is that in countries where fuel taxes are higher, people spend a smaller total of their budget on transportation than we do here in North America because especially poor people are doing a whole bunch less driving,” Litman said.
Revenue from the carbon tax could have been invested in public transit as well, the funding for which should be “doubled or quadrupled if the people who need them were taken seriously,” Litman said.
Largely though, they are overlooked. The divide between those affluent enough to drive and those desperate enough to hitchhike is wide.
Mininster Hargrave has said that residents in remote areas have always hitchhiked, but he advised people left without bus service to get rides from friends or family. He also addressed the opposition NDP’s concern in late 2017 that people were being forced to hitchhike. When NDP MLA Doyle Vermette claimed that three people had been hit by cars and killed hitchhiking in the Prince Albert area that year, Hargrave said that “any death on the highway is one too many.” But, when he mentioned having seen a hitchhiker on the highway at 1:30 in the morning, Hargrave made a joke: “I don’t know if he was on his way to a medical appointment or what, exactly it was, Mr. Speaker.” He later apologized in the legislature.
The political wedges separating voters by income, age, race, and physical ability that might be deepened by the loss of STC policy also made it possible in the first place.
“There’s a low political involvement of people who actually use this service, Dusel said. “The way they are living, survival is top of mind. They’re not thinking about which political party is going to support the things that matter to [them]. And it’s sad, because the numbers are probably there, so if those people were mobilized and educated, we might see a difference in how the province and country are run.”
There is public support for operations like the STC. A 2018 Angus Reid poll showed a slim majority of Western Canadian residents favour government funding for inter-city transit.
Middle-aged rural residents who vote in high rates believe that they are paying for the roads that they drive on, Litman said. In fact, everyone is paying for roads, but not everyone can take advantage of them.
“It is virtually invisible to them, the subsidies that go towards driving a car,” Litman said.
For example, the subsidies given to STC every year were a fraction of the government’s highway snow-clearing budget. In 2017-2018, it devoted $1.1 billion to highways and infrastructure – the second highest budget line for highways in the province’s history. Under that department, the province set aside $29 million specifically towards winter maintenance – essentially, snow removal. However, it ended up spending $39 million.
The STC service may have become a political target, but its bottom line wasn’t new. There is little room for profit or competition when you are serving 251 low-density routes.
Ceasing the STC
“There was no conspiracy in management to run it into the ground,” said Trina Lees, a former manager of financial reporting at STC.
Management spent a lot of time on route analysis, throwing around money-making ideas for the company that never took off, such as a charter bus for prison inmates, shopping tours to neighbouring American states or short-haul commuter bus routes connecting smaller communities to bigger hubs – like Warman to Saskatoon, she said.
Employees on the inside were just as surprised as everyone else by the government’s announcement. Lees remembers thinking, “where are we gonna get the mail?”
Lees had been at STC for almost ten years. She came back from a maternity leave on Mar. 20, 2017 – two days before the announcement. She would be laid off at the end of November that year.
“There weren’t too many non-disgruntled people,” Lees said. She also took the bus back and forth between Regina, where she lives, and Saskatoon for occasional work trips. She tears up when she remembers her core group of co-workers, who would meet for coffee every Wednesday.
The finance office was the last to shut its doors, operating well after buses stopped running. The company’s last remaining assets needed bookkeeping, and wouldn’t be sold until late 2018.
“Every month we would have a layoff, so the team would get smaller.”
Trina Lees, like the activists working to draw attention to the issue, doesn’t believe that the STC should be judged by its profits or losses. “No bus anywhere is funded by [user] fees,” she said. “It was never a mandate to make money.” [Photo © Lisa Johnson]
Compared to other public transit companies, the STC had an enviable financial position. In its annual report for the 2016/2017 year, the STC reported that its revenues from parcel delivery, passenger fares, locker rental and advertising sales recouped 43 per cent of its total expenses. In contrast, the City of Saskatoon’s public transit service brought in 33 per cent of its expenses from fares, according to its annual report from 2016.
According to STC’s annual reports, its promotions often increased ridership, but never enough to turn an overall profit.
“Ridership was crazy good for a couple of years,” Lees said.
Revenues fluctuated from year to year, depending on the cost of fuel, weather, and factors beyond its control.
In July 2008, when a man was tragically decapitated by another passenger on a Greyhound bus in Manitoba, the STC saw an overall decrease in ridership of one per cent for the year – despite it having gone up four per cent in the first half of the year.
“Some people couldn’t separate the two [companies],” Lees said.
And, the loss of STC probably precipitated Greyhound’s pull-out.
STC relied on Greyhound’s routes to make some of its own viable, so the more connections that were lost, the more riders bailed.
The provincial government projected in 2017 that, at $17 million per year, STC’s subsidy would be between $85 million and $100 million over five years, allowing for an extra $15 million in capital costs such as equipment or facilities, Parker said. Hanson and Jaffe dispute the government’s financial projections, arguing that it would have cost closer to $53 million to run over five years.