Transport Committee on Feb. 16th, 2023

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

I call the meeting to order.

Welcome to meeting number 55 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2) and the motion adopted by the committee on Thursday, February 3, 2022, the committee is resuming its study of intercity transport by bus in Canada.

Today's meeting is taking place in a hybrid format, pursuant to the House order of Thursday, June 23, 2022. Members are attending in person in the room and remotely using the Zoom application

Colleagues, I wish to inform you that all the witnesses have been tested for today's meeting and have passed the sound test with the exception, unfortunately, of Ms. Adele Perry. We're hoping to get that worked out before we turn it over to her for her opening remarks.

Appearing before us as an individual, we have Dr. Sarah-Patricia Breen, regional innovation chair in rural economic development, Selkirk College, by video conference. Welcome.

We have, as an individual, Ms. Adele Perry, distinguished professor of history and women's and gender studies, by video conference. Welcome to you as well.

We have, as an individual, Dr. Josipa Petrunic, president and chief executive officer of the Canadian Urban Transit Research and Innovation Consortium, by video conference. Welcome to you as well.

We will begin today by turning to Dr. Breen for her opening remarks.

The floor is yours. You have five minutes.

[Dr. Sarah-Patricia Breen, Regional Innovation Chair, Rural Economic Development, Selkirk College, As an Individual]

Thank you and good morning.

I really appreciate the opportunity to speak today. I'm honoured to join you from the traditional territories of Sinixt, Syilx, Ktunaxa and Secwépemc peoples.

I'm hoping to summarize some of the key rural considerations for the committee.

When we talk about rural transit, we often focus on prominent examples like the loss of Greyhound Canada, but what's important to note is that this type of example isn't necessarily representative of the range of services that exist. Transportation between communities includes both long and short trips, those that are occasional and those that are regular. I want to pay particular attention to the need for intercommunity transit that serves these shorter regular trips.

As we know, it's a mistake to assume that people living in rural areas have access to personal vehicles. It's equally a mistake to assume that these regular shorter trips happen in the same community. It's much more common for people today to have the services they regularly use, their places of employment and their homes all in different communities. This highlights a need, particularly in those communities where there's a shortage of affordable housing and workforce shortages. The people needed to fill these workforce shortages end up living in outlying areas or neighbouring communities. The lack of intercommunity transit can really impact the ability of people to go to school, to see a doctor or to hold a job. This situation disproportionately impacts certain parts of our society, including youth, seniors, indigenous peoples and newcomers.

I want to offer a few highlights about what my research tells us about rural transit in Canada today.

We often treat rural as if it's a single homogenous group for which rural solutions or strategies are discussed very generally and do not recognize differences across different types of rural places. We found several barriers to sustainable rural transit between communities, and those included general challenges like the cost of operation, and very place-specific challenges like local travel patterns or economic structure. When we looked at related funding and support programs, we identified two substantial barriers: the lack of rural-specific funding and the lack of funding for operational costs.

It is important to note that the current state of knowledge around transit and rural places is very geographically uneven. What we know is dominated by the experiences of larger urban-adjacent communities, particularly those in southern Ontario, southern Quebec and British Columbia. Through our work, we identified over 100 examples of rural transit systems, most of which were actually intercommunity services. This highlights both a need and the growing number of available solutions, not just fixed-route bus systems but also more innovative approaches like on-demand services.

I want to spend my remaining time on three key considerations for the committee.

The first is that there is a need for us to address knowledge gaps, particularly when it comes to under-represented communities and regions. These knowledge gaps limit our ability to make evidence-based decisions. The federal government should continue to support efforts to address these gaps, not only through academic research but also through funding communities and regions to assess their needs and evaluate potential solutions. In the interim, we should be conscious of gaps and biases in the information we have.

The second consideration is that differences across places, particularly in rural, mean that there is no single solution. There is a key need to include rural considerations in the development of policy, programs and solutions so that we avoid unintentionally leaving out or otherwise negatively impacting rural places. The recent federal rural transit solutions fund is a great example of a rural-specific program.

Solutions for intercommunity transportation need to be flexible. While those solutions could look different across the country, there is a need for connection and collaboration between them. The federal government has an important role to play in ensuring continuity across Canada.

Last, I'll leave you with the fact that we really need to acknowledge and account for the differences between where the benefits of transit accrue versus where the costs are borne. We know that transit services have a range of social, environmental and economic benefits. A fundamental challenge is that where those challenges accrue is dispersed among individuals, businesses, communities and society, whereas the costs are all borne by the service provider. This situation is exacerbated in rural areas because of long distances and small populations.

The federal government has an important role to play in addressing this challenge not only by, say, publicly funding a transit system but also by deeming what is eligible for funding. The federal rural transit solutions fund I mentioned could be greatly improved if it allowed for operational funding.

I think I'm probably pushing five minutes, so I will leave it there. Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Thank you very much, Dr. Breen.

Next we have Dr. Petrunic.

The floor is yours. You have five minutes.

[Dr. Josipa Petrunic, President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Urban Transit Research and Innovation Consortium]

Thank you very much to the committee. I appreciate the opportunity to be here.

To start with, I'd like to recognize the missing and murdered indigenous women that CUTRIC recognizes as part of its innovation strategy nationally. That is especially important here as we talk about access. I'm going to come back to that, as well as the Highway of Tears and the pilot experimentation occurring in British Columbia.

The general message and what I'm going to share here today is that public transit and inter-regional transit can't solve all problems, but they can solve a lot of them. They've been under-leveraged historically in Canada.

So far, in the context of today's discussion, the federal government has made great moves with the zero emission transit fund and the rural transit fund. These are great starts and critical, but it is the promise of permanent transit funding in the future that we're looking towards. Beyond that, however, to ensure those dollars are best spent and future-proofed, there are at least four areas we need to consider: pandemic recovery; recent safety issues and transit immobility; inter-regional coaching and bus connections with the rail network; and decarbonization of the entire system. I'm going to spend my next four minutes talking about those four points.

The first is pandemic recovery. Just to the set the scene, I'm sure a lot of folks are wondering what the state of ridership is across the country. As we all know, during the pandemic ridership dropped off about 80%, 90% or 100% in some communities. It was catastrophic. The good news is that ridership is right back up; it's trending upwards. In some cities, such as Brampton, Charlottetown and Cornwall, there are prepandemic levels of ridership, which is both good and bad. The good is that ridership is coming back; the bad is there's crush capacity in those urban centres. That means the bus is passing you by because there's no room for you on the bus. That just points to the fact that transit was underfunded to start with across the country prior to the pandemic, and we're coming back to that scenario.

As for other locations, TransLink is back up to 80% in Vancouver, and Calgary Transit and a few others are still down around 60%, although this is in line with global experiences. We have cities like Vienna back at 100% and cities like Sydney at 60%, so the trend line is upward. That doesn't take away from the fact that nurses, teachers, public sector employees and especially frontline workers on minimum wage have no other option. It's their critical economic pipeline to get to their income-generating opportunity.

The first point to raise here is that, as part of pandemic recovery, ridership is coming back. It will go through the roof, especially as we start opening the doors, as we must, to hundreds of thousands of immigrants. They will need a means of getting around, but that system of getting around across our cities in Canada has historically been underfunded and insufficient. Now layer on top of that the fact that heading into the pandemic, almost no transit system in this country—urban, inter-regional or rural—was prepared to deal with the issues of viral load, ventilation or having materials on board that could reduce unsafe conditions.

The first recommendation we'd put forward to this committee is to consider the fact that transit needs to be a place of innovation. Although we have funding programs now for capital, there absolutely has to be a transit innovation supercluster-style strategic innovation fund focus. We have typically thought about transit immobility as the place that Infrastructure Canada and ministries of transportation have gone to when giving out capital, but in reality we need to really leverage the tools of ISED, the Ministry of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, for our postpandemic return to safe transit. Zoonotic illnesses are clearly here to stay. Whether there's a pandemic or an epidemic, transit cannot be brought back to a grinding halt. At CUTRIC we know there are potentially dozens of studies across the country that could help to make for safer systems, both at the station and on board the bus, in terms of preparedness for the future.

The second issue I'd like to raise has just come up and is top of mind for a lot of people. It's a recent safety issue beyond viral load and pandemic anxiety: the issue of physical safety of people on public transit. Whether, again, that's urban, inter-regional or rural, the spate of violence we've all heard about in the news does take over our thoughts about returning to transit and exacerbates the reluctance to return to riding public mobility systems.

We in the research world know very well that almost nothing in life is random, so although we want to say these are random attacks occurring, almost nothing in life is random. If you've done a course in statistics, you know that. In the words of the head of the TTC, Rick Leary, we really need better data analytics to start to identify why and where a lot of physical attacks are occurring.

It is true that transit alone cannot solve the social ills of society—housing is an issue and mental health is an issue—but it is also true that transit is a space where innovation can be implemented tomorrow to create greater levels of safety for Canadian riders in order to encourage people to return to transit in the way we need: in the interests of climate action and addressing congestion, and for all the reasons that public mobility helps people live a better life.

Some of those innovations already exist in our universities and pilots around the world, and we can start to implement them in Canada. They include everything from the basics, such as safety buttons, loud and piercing noise machines and signage around advertising for mental health supports throughout stations, to artificial intelligence, which is not that complicated. It can track in real time the geographic and demographic patterns of an unease attack or feelings of unease on the system. Big data analytics can demonstrate patterns in seemingly randomized attacks. There is CCTV, musical interventions at stations, the classical musical effect to disperse crowding and of course on-track glass panelling for subways.

These are all things that exist in transit systems and mobility systems around the world. We have cities like Mexico City that are trying to figure out how to help women be safe because they know when they get on transit, there's a good chance of being raped. We are not operating on our own as Canadian mobility. It's not as though we're starting from scratch.

The second recommendation we'd make to this committee—which goes back to the first issue—is to invest in something like a supercluster or a strategic innovation fund stream focused on innovation in transit and mobility across Canada, both for postpandemic recovery and for safety innovation. Technological and social—

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Unfortunately, Dr. Petrunic, I have to ask you to wrap it up. Could you conclude in 15 seconds, please?

[Dr. Josipa Petrunic]

Absolutely.

Those are the first two recommendations. The third recommendation around inter-regional coaching and bus systems is to focus on investing in a national strategy that will ensure Via Rail coach systems, in provinces and public transit systems that back onto that skeleton, optimize and integrate with each other, which doesn't exist today for point-to-point mobility.

Those are the three recommendations we'd put forward to the committee to consider today.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Thank you very much, Dr. Petrunic.

Next we have Ms. Perry.

Ms. Perry, the floor is yours. You have five minutes.

[Dr. Adele Perry, Distinguished Professor, History and Women’s and Gender Studies, As an Individual]

Thank you for this opportunity to speak to you today. I have had some issues with being heard, but it sounds as though you can hear me.

I'm grateful to have this opportunity to speak to you from the traditional territories of the Anishinabe, the Ininew and the Métis people governed by the promises of Treaty 1.

It's fair to say that this territory, where I've lived as a settler for a little over two decades, is currently in a crisis of accessible, meaningful and appropriate long-distance or intercity public transit. In many respects, it has not always been this way. Manitoba did not develop the provincial system of bus transit that our provincial neighbours to the west did, but Manitoba did develop a network of overlapping bus and rail transportation that connected people to different communities and to leisure options. The shift toward automobility that occurred throughout the continent made its mark here too, and many of the smaller bus lines and passenger train routes closed in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.

However, the near collapse of intercity bus transit that occurred in Manitoba in the 2010s is particular. Of course, Greyhound withdrew from its western Canadian routes in 2018. In the same year, though, Jefferson Lines cancelled its bus running between Winnipeg and North Dakota. A year later, the third company to try running a Winnipeg-Selkirk bus route ceased operation. Five years later, it is clear that the mixture of market subsidies and programs that are currently available is not sufficient to maintain reliable fixed-service bus routes within the province. There is a shifting patchwork of operators covering some routes at some times. Only two offer daily service: a van shuttle running between Brandon and Winnipeg's airport, and NCN Thompson Bus Lines, owned by Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation, covering the Winnipeg-Thompson route.

You can take Maple Bus Lines from Winnipeg to Thompson five days a week, Mahihkan from Winnipeg to Flin Flon five days a week and Ontario Northland eastward six days a week. There is only one bus currently travelling from Winnipeg to Regina, which leaves weekly at 11 p.m. on Saturdays. A few weeks ago, you could book a trip to Vancouver, though it would take three transfers, cost $419 and take about 37 hours. When I checked last night, that route was no longer available.

The highly limited and confusing possibilities of intercity bus travel in Manitoba affect some communities and people more than others. As previous speakers here have said, we have too little data on who exactly depends on the bus in the age of automobility and air travel. We know that women have greater reliance on public transit in urban centres. The reduction in intercity transit options has particular implications for indigenous women and girls and two-spirit people, a point that was made very powerfully in the wake of Greyhound's shuttering. The Native Women's Association of Canada explained that it was “deeply concerned for the safety of Indigenous women, girls and gender-diverse people”. Policy analyst Emily Riddle argued that indigenous women “deserve to travel our homelands free from violence, and while transportation is only a small component of the changes needed for that to happen, it is an important one.”

“Reclaiming Power and Place: the Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls”, which was completed in 2019, offered an important analysis of public intercity and urban transit, one that I think deserves more attention than it has received. Chapter 7 explains, “A lack of safe and affordable transportation can mean that people may be forced to rely on other methods, such as walking or hitchhiking, not only to escape dangerous situations but simply to travel for education or employment.” In this way, “Inadequate infrastructure and transportation, or transportation that itself becomes a site for violence, punish Indigenous women trying to ‘make a better life’”.

Two of the calls for justice in the national inquiry's final report directly concern transportation. In particular, 4.8 says:

We call upon all governments to ensure that adequate plans and funding are put into place for safe and affordable transit and transportation services and infrastructure for Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people living in remote or rural communities. Transportation should be sufficient and readily available to Indigenous communities, and in towns and cities located in all of the provinces and territories in Canada.

Effective transit policy of the kind that this committee is considering must consider at its core the needs and lived experiences of its users, who are not undifferentiated black boxes of human beings, but people whose lives are shaped by gender, by indigeneity, by race and by socio-economic class.

At a moment when Canada is again being forced to reckon with the ongoing crisis of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls and two-spirit plus people, I urge the committee to consider the impact that the real crisis in intercity bus transit in the prairie provinces—and more particularly Manitoba—may have played in this, and how better transit policy that puts its users at the centre might make meaningful change.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Thank you very much, Professor Perry.

We have a situation, Professor Perry, where we unfortunately will not be able to hear your testimony today with regard to questions and answers. The sound quality is inadequate to ensure the safety of our interpreters.

If it's okay, Professor Perry, I'll ask members to submit questions to the clerk, which will be passed along to you by email. We would very much welcome your responses by email as well. We apologize for the inconvenience. We would have very much liked to hear from you today in answer to our questions.

That will leave Dr. Breen and Dr. Petrunic for testimony. We are hoping to get Mr. Joel McKay from the Northern Development Initiative Trust, who is trying to log on but is having difficulties. I guess it's going around.

We will begin the lines of questioning today with Mr. Muys.

Mr. Muys, the floor is yours. You have six minutes.

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

Thank you, Chair, and thank you to the witnesses, including Ms. Perry, who we won't have for the question period.

Thank you for your testimony at the outset, Ms. Perry.

The focus of this study is intercity buses, of course, and I'm thinking back to my university days, only a couple of years ago.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

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

A great bus line that I used operated from Hamilton to Kitchener-Waterloo. It followed Highway 8 along all the rural communities in my constituency, from Greensville to Peters Corners, where I usually caught it. If I missed that, I'd get it in Rockton or Sheffield. It went on into Cambridge, Kitchener and Waterloo, and it was very popular. It ran a few times a day because it was often full. It was profitable, and it connected all of those communities.

Dr. Breen, you talked about this in your testimony. Given your expertise, is it possible to quantify—even if it's a range—the number of these types of intercity routes that might exist in Canada?

[Dr. Sarah-Patricia Breen]

I'll try to answer that as best I can.

It's a hard thing to quantify because of what Professor Perry mentioned: There's a lot of instability in the existing transit systems, particularly those smaller ones. They pop up and they disappear, particularly in rural areas. They lack profitability, so we see the start-ups and the disappearances. As I mentioned, we looked for, found and mapped over 100 examples of rural transit systems, including intercommunity transit systems, and what we found shows there are really distinct patterns.

In southern Ontario, in your riding, we see a larger number of these systems, and that's in large part because of what I would call the urban-adjacent more commuter-type economy. Through the collaboration, if you will, of many communities, you get economies of scale that you might not have in other rural places, so we tend to see more longer-term successful systems.

In B.C., there's a large number of rural regional systems, owing in large part to B.C. Transit. We don't see that prominence in other parts of the country. In the Prairies, we largely see a vacuum. There isn't anything, in part because of the absence of the Saskatchewan Transportation Company, which was shuttered. Or we see clusters like those in the Atlantic provinces that are volunteer driven. They obviously took a huge hit during COVID, with volunteers fearing for their safety.

I apologize for not being able to provide a specific figure, but what I will say is that there's a large number of them. They ebb and flow, but the stability we see in southern Ontario and British Columbia is due to, one, population, and two, this stable B.C. Transit system that we have in British Columbia.

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

Thank you. I appreciate that, because obviously this is a model we would want to replicate.

We heard in November from a privately operated Saskatchewan bus company that, similarly, was a success story, and we obviously want to encourage private operators that can offer this service. They were expanding throughout the province of Saskatchewan, but they talked about the myriad costs they had to deal with in terms of licensing, insurance, fuel and capital. Some of those things, of course, are provincial in nature.

Are there any federal barriers we can cut, whether it be red tape, regulation or taxes, that could help encourage the development of these sorts of bus lines?

[Dr. Sarah-Patricia Breen]

Yes, certainly. As I mentioned in my presentation, it was great to see the rural-specific federal funding that offers opportunities for rural transit systems. That's much appreciated. There's opportunity for improvement there, and one example of the potential red tape that can be taken away is with regard to the funding for operations.

I'm in the middle of penning an article called “Who's Driving this Bus?”, because while we can get finances to purchase a bus or a van, there's no funding available to help with operators, the distances and the number of people for ridership. It makes it so that riders are paying so much that it becomes unusable or it's not financially viable, from a traditional perspective.

That's one piece, and then—

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

If I could interrupt there for a second—sorry, I only have a couple of minutes left—I want to ask, on that point, about operational costs versus capital costs. My view is that there are successful models. Should this not be a user-pay system? Why should the federal government be responsible to help with operational costs?

In the time remaining—because in your testimony you talked about on-demand services—I'll ask how that would compare to on-demand services. I could take an Uber instead of a bus and obviously that's more pricey, so where's the sweet spot there?

[Dr. Sarah-Patricia Breen]

The sweet spot would be place-dependent. It's 100% dependent on the locale. In the examples that are successful, we see they cater very specifically to the local travel patterns and the regional travel patterns. There is no single answer to that.

In terms of the user-pay private model, the basic answer is that in rural places, the distances and dispersed population mean that a traditional return-on-investment model is very unlikely to be profitable. If they are profitable, they're going to be profitable because they are catering to people who can afford to pay, which completely excludes people who are low income or face disabilities or other barriers to access.

As I mentioned, there's a need to consider the very real benefits that those transit systems bring but that aren't easily calculated into return on investment.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Thank you very much, Dr. Breen and Mr. Muys.

Go ahead, Mr. Iacono. You have six minutes.

[Angelo Iacono, Liberal, Alfred-Pellan, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses for being here.

My first questions are for Ms. Petrunic and Ms. Breen.

Intercity bus transport has been in decline for years. How can we replace that means of transportation? What is the impact of that change?

[Dr. Sarah-Patricia Breen]

In terms of what could replace it, innovations that we're seeing in transit include the on-demand systems. That isn't like an Uber; it's more of a bus or a van system that people book in advance the night before. However, instead of operating like an expensive shuttle, it operates like a regular bus, so it's considerably cheaper.

We also see really innovative examples—some from Quebec—that include combinations of municipal fleets with local car shares. There are great examples of small communities in Quebec that have fleets of cars for the local municipality and that also use those as a line of revenue for the communities in offering them as car shares for individuals. We have regional car shares and ride-share operations popping up all over the place, so there's a really wide range of potential options that exist out there.

In terms of the implications, could I ask you to clarify for me what you mean by “implications”?

[Angelo Iacono, Liberal, Alfred-Pellan, QC]

I'm referring to the changes that go along that.

You talked about different types of transportation, and you explained well what the impacts were.

For example, do you know what the impacts would be for cities that have transport fleets?

[Dr. Sarah-Patricia Breen]

I see. I most often work in places where there are no existing transit systems, so there's no fallout, I would say, for an existing operator. That's not something I have a lot of experience with. The types of implications I see are mostly on the benefits side, with increased access for people, greenhouse gas reductions—it's a very positive news story—and increased access to services and education.

I can see where you're coming from in terms of potential implications for existing operators, but it's not something I run into very often in my line of work.

[Angelo Iacono, Liberal, Alfred-Pellan, QC]

Thank you, Ms. Breen.

Ms. Petrunic, do you see the same trends in intercity bus transport in Canada as you do in the U.S.? Can you talk about that?

[Dr. Josipa Petrunic]

Thank you very much for the question. I appreciate it.

Some of the trends we're seeing in the United States are starting to crop up in Canada.

For coaching systems, it is about identifying the fact that the middle class will happily take a coach bus if it is a luxury service and it serves their needs. Some luxury services—Red Arrow is a great example, between Calgary and Edmonton—are now expanding. It goes from having wider seats and cookies on board to Wi-Fi that functions. It's a moving office.

This is a niche area, but it has taken off in Europe. It started during the prepandemic period and became more popular in the United States. It targets the middle class person who can afford a bit more than a typical, old-style Greyhound ride, but who doesn't want to pay for a rail ride or flight. That is a trend.

The second trend we are seeing is on-demand shuttle service. This speaks to your previous question. Current public operators, whether it's B.C. Transit, St. Catharines Transit—now Niagara Region Transit—or Toronto Transit.... These existing public urban transit providers are also integrating on-demand shuttle services. There's absolutely no reason why, through provincial-federal alignment with municipalities, these services cannot extend beyond the jurisdiction where they typically operate. It is entirely reasonable that there could be a TTC-level or GTHA-level of on-demand shuttle service that is centrally controlled by public transit in the interest of transit. It's not a 40-foot or 60-foot bus. It's not a big coach. It's an on-demand shuttle.

Everywhere on-demand shuttles are deployed by centralized public transit, they reduce emissions, increase ridership, reduce ridership times and save operational dollars, including in Quebec, where Exo has one of the best operational pilots.

Those are two of the models. The first is the on-demand shuttle model. The solution is there. It would have to be centrally managed; otherwise it becomes a clustered, congested, inefficient, Uber-style system. It has to be centrally managed by the transit or public authority. The second is the luxury coach service.

If I may, I will add a third point to your previous question.

What are some of the possibilities for increasing inter-regional transit and rural mobility? An immediate one is leveraging Via Rail. We do not leverage Via Rail's data and clientele. Via will stop at a station, but there's no data going to the local, regional and rural transit providers saying when these customers are getting off. It's a simple data solution. This technology existed 20 years ago. Being able to leverage the existing clientele that already feeds into Via would support the growth of rural transit—including by private operators, as it should—into some of the communities that are poorly served today.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Thank you very much, Dr. Petrunic.

We now go to Mr. Barsalou‑Duval for six minutes.