We hear about aging fleets, huge pressure on property taxes, and cutting services to so-called non-productive suburban routes.
No transit driver or maintenance worker wants to see the public waiting an hour and a half for a bus that used to come every 30 minutes. That's just the fiscal pressure on municipalities. That is point number one.
Sometimes we're asked as a national union to take positions on big political decisions. Building the Canada Line from the airport in Richmond to downtown Vancouver was driven by a single event, the 2010 Olympics. It hopscotched ahead of other projects in the lower mainland, and we have two points of view on traffic in the Vancouver and lower mainland areas.
Number one, as workers we are stuck in that traffic every day. Number two, from a transportation point of view the GVRD, the greater Vancouver regional district, the collection of mayors from the lower mainland, had a 30-year plan. It was interrupted by the beautiful success of the Olympics. It was great for the Olympics, and it's great for me when I land in Vancouver and want to go downtown efficiently. It's much cheaper than a taxi. But it wasn't part of the overall plan for the lower mainland.
It may be a pipe dream and impossible in Canada to think of tri-government planning that we stick to, because different priorities pop up from different folks. But our folks who maintain public transit systems tell us we have an aging system and the investments are needed to keep the system going. A maintenance worker in Calgary told me we're throwing good money after bad sometimes, bandaging up something that should be replaced, like a bridge in your community that needs to be replaced.