Transport Committee on Nov. 23rd, 2022

[Terence Johnson]

Thank you for that.

I think part of the problem at the moment is that the average wannabe passenger can't see that there are services where they want to go. A lot of people don't know that there's any bus service to replace Greyhound. Closing that information gap will help to make the whole thing a lot more sustainable. Knowing that you'll be able to connect into the ecosystem will make it more sustainable to create new routes.

The federal government can address, as we've said, the vehicle affordability question and the safe terminal and connection question. These are things the federal government can do that do not create a large subsidy to any one player but do help the industry to function really well.

Then you can see that there's a gap and think about how we can solve this gap. This an appropriate thing to work on with the municipalities and the province to make that a public service like BC Transit and all of those, but at the moment, I don't know that Transport Canada even knows where the gaps are.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Thank you very much, Mr. Johnson.

Thank you, Mr. Bachrach.

Next we have Mr. Muys. Mr. Muys, the floor is yours. You have five minutes.

[Dan Muys, Conservative, Flamborough—Glanbrook, ON]

My question is for you, Mr. Kanca.

You started to talk about some of the fees, but then of course the time ran out. Here we have a private sector success story in filling a gap in transit, and you're being choked by various fees, and by red tape, no doubt, from the government. Maybe you can continue your answer in terms of some of those challenges that you're facing.

[Omer Kanca]

Yes, certainly. Thank you for the opportunity.

To start with, there are many of them. There is no time to list all of them here. One of them certainly would be the local municipalities' licensing fees. As you know, you need to have a business licence to do service in their city, but we are only there to pick up and drop off, which is not really a service for a full day.

Then there's the IRP, which I started talking about, which is a huge cost, as well as an IFTA, which is a special plate that you need to do the cross-border intercity bus service. It was set up with truckers in mind. Trucking companies travel across many cities and states across the U.S. and Canada. With us, that's not the case, but we still have the burden to pay that kind of cost.

[Dan Muys, Conservative, Flamborough—Glanbrook, ON]

Do you have an estimate of what those costs would be on a monthly basis as a percentage of your cost structure, or maybe even how many passengers in an average month would be required, just to pay the fees alone?

[Firat Uray]

I will answer that question. It depends on how many buses are in your fleet and and how many buses pass the different provinces. It changes monthly. It's up to $50,000 or up to $100,000 in cost.

[Omer Kanca]

To give another figure here, we know from experience that there are some private operators that stayed away because of those costs involved to provide services across provinces.

[Dan Muys, Conservative, Flamborough—Glanbrook, ON]

Government fees are a disincentive to private sector solutions to the gap.

[Omer Kanca]

Certainly, yes.

[Dan Muys, Conservative, Flamborough—Glanbrook, ON]

If I have time, I'll ask one more question.

We talked a little bit about this earlier and we had some examples from the United States. Are there examples or are there lessons we can learn from places like Australia? Canada is a big country with a big land mass and a sparse population, and maybe there are other countries that are similar. Obviously, we're not Europe. We're not even parts of the United States that are more densely populated.

Are there examples? No?

All right; no one's been to Australia.

My next question is for Rider Express. You talked about the fact that you filled in 50% of the gap left by Greyhound and STC. What has contributed to that success? Do you have different-sized buses? You're probably not running 50-passenger buses.

Is there on-demand service? Is it scheduling? What are the things that are contributing to making that successful?

[Firat Uray]

In 2017, we started with 15 passenger vans in Saskatchewan. Once Greyhound left western Canada, we started adding buses on our services.

Our success comes from the connections. We do connect the five provinces together. Partially, we are working with Ontario Northland. Passengers can travel from Vancouver to Toronto. We are connecting them in Winnipeg with the same location. Our success, I think, comes with the connections. In a short time, we expanded our service to many cities, and that brings us success in the area.

[Dan Muys, Conservative, Flamborough—Glanbrook, ON]

Ms. MacPhee, is that similar with what's happening with Ontario Northland, in that you have been able to expand that over time or hope to continue to do so?

[Tracy MacPhee]

We're working really hard to create the relationships at each end of our service, wherever we connect.

Part of the challenge with this is that if you're operating one service a day over the distances that we're travelling, each carrier has their own approach and business model for what they are trying to solve in their region and in their area.

When you're travelling over 2,000 kilometres and you're trying to do that in a one-day period, there are going to be some areas that you connect with that are in the middle of the night. If you're connecting with a carrier in the middle of the night, they may have a different operating schedule that completely disconnects. When you don't have that safe location to wait or you don't have that same terminal to go to, that's when problems are created. On either end of the province of Ontario and for us connecting in Winnipeg or in Ottawa, those are the issues that we're running into.

We're trying to make sure that all of services are at the same time, but that's very difficult to do because of the vast distance that we're covering.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Thank you, Ms. MacPhee. Thank you very much, Mr. Muys.

Finally for today, we have Ms. Koutrakis. Ms. Koutrakis, you have five minutes. The floor is yours.

[Annie Koutrakis, Liberal, Vimy, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Over this past summer I was holding a series of round tables on supply chains. One of the themes that kept coming up whether it was thematic or regional in nature, was the importance of collecting data. To Mr. Johnson and Ms. MacPhee or any other witness who may have this information, are we doing enough on collecting data?

Before we can recommend, we need to have data and try to find out where the gaps are and how we can do better when we're designing programs. Do we know whether Statistics Canada is collecting data on intercity transportation, including bus service?

[Tracy MacPhee]

I am not aware of Statistics Canada. What I do know is that as a provincial agency, we have to have all of our information together in terms of our ridership. We do submit that. I know that the Province of Ontario does ask the other carriers that operate within the province to share that information on ridership and have that data available on where there is bus service and where there is none.

[Annie Koutrakis, Liberal, Vimy, QC]

Do you feel that there's a need for a survey to assess the transportation needs of intercity travellers, especially postpandemic?

[Tracy MacPhee]

I think it would certainly help. I think that the more we know, the better we can respond. I think one of the big things we're missing that we need to talk about in this conversation as well is that there are a lot of first nation communities that don't have access to bus service. A lot of first nation communities are located off the main highways. It's really important for us in terms of population and trying to get them into our service to consider what we can do to make sure that we're providing safe transportation for them as well.

[Annie Koutrakis, Liberal, Vimy, QC]

It's as if you read my mind. I was just thinking in solution mode.

My final question is this: Could a solution be to offer transportation subsidies to less fortunate individuals or communities who might effectively be stranded without intercity bus transportation? Do you recommend this? How would you see those forms of subsidy, if that's a solution?

[Tracy MacPhee]

I absolutely see something like that. A lot of the first nations communities I have spoken with and communicated with wish they could have some type of funding to allow them to provide transportation out to a main highway or to a location where they can connect with our service.

We started a new service with the City of Elliot Lake. We don't provide the service. It's located off the highway, but they receive that community transportation fund grant from the Province of Ontario that was mentioned previously. They use that funding. They have a school bus that connects with our service. As the carrier, we provide the back-end support to do the ticketing. All the City of Elliot Lake has to do is make sure that they have transportation coming in and out of their community. They're on our ticketing system. They know when passengers are arriving.

That model has worked really well. If the federal government can support models like that, especially with first nations communities, it would be a really good thing.

[Annie Koutrakis, Liberal, Vimy, QC]

Mr. Chair, I don't know if I have any more time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

You have a minute and a half left.

[Annie Koutrakis, Liberal, Vimy, QC]

It's Christmastime, and you're here with your asks. What would be your number one ask that we should be including in this study as a recommendation to tackle this very important issue and find solutions?

That's open to anyone.

[Terence Johnson]

If I could go first, it is that clearing house. As I said, a lot of the operators don't even have general transit specification feed data on their websites that people can access to find out what the services are. We've tried. I've spent hours and hours trying to work out who's running what and where. In some cases, it's really hard.

I don't know whether Northern Express's website is up to date for services up to northern Alberta. I can't even tell whether Frontier Bus Lines is still running to Yellowknife. I don't know. I've tried to figure it out.

It's getting the data, as you were asking earlier. Does anybody collect the data? It's been very hard.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

That is it, Ms. Koutrakis. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr. Johnson.

On behalf of the entire committee, I want to express our gratitude to all of our witnesses for appearing today and for sharing their testimony with us.

For those appearing and joining us online, I would ask you to kindly log off now.

I turn to colleagues for some housekeeping that shouldn't take more than two minutes.

As you know, we have to approve the budget for this study on intercity bus transportation, as well as the proposed draft budgets for the possibility of us visiting the ports, which we were not able to do in the fall. Obviously whatever is approved here still needs to be approved by the liaison committee and the House, but this is at least getting the first step under way.

Do I have any objections to approving these two budgets?