That is a very important question, because the STC was, I think, a very good example of what a provincial bus service could look like, and did look like, and it begins to show us what happens when you shut these services down. Of course, we don't have as much information as we need at this point, but there have been some studies that have been done, including at least one that I have participated in.
The stated rationale by the provincial government was quite simply that they felt that ridership was declining and that the per-passenger subsidy.... In particular, what they were talking about was that the per-passenger cost for the province was continuing to increase.
This was in light of the fact that the provincial government was actually starting to make it more difficult for people to ride the bus, I will say. This was in the face of rising prices. As ridership was going up, the province ceased advertising for the bus. They put some straitjackets on the way the bus was operating in terms of its ability to offer charters and under what conditions and what those costs would be, and so on. They actually set up a situation in which the costs per rider would be higher than they might be otherwise.
The impact has been quite interesting, and that is to say that although the ridership was supposedly low, the riders who were using the bus were very dependent upon it, and I also might add—before I elaborate on that, because I don't want to forget this point—that this bus was not just used for riders; it was also used to move goods around the province. It was used to move lab tests for soils. For medical services, it was used to move blood. It was used to take prisoners back to their home communities when they were released from prison. There were so many things that people were depending on that bus for. Also, of course, it had a low-cost service for people to be able to get to their health services.
When the bus service shut down, it had a tremendous impact on many people. Besides the fact that we can talk about the inequalities, which Dr. Perry referred to, which were quite significant here, we know that most of the people who used the bus were women, they were elderly, they were first nations, they were overwhelmingly young, and they tended to be lower income. Those folks were often left without any options. In some cases, people have moved to cities to get closer to their health services; in some cases, they're going without. We're hearing about people going without. We're hearing about people who are having difficulty getting out of problems of domestic violence. We're seeing more people hitchhiking.
We're also hearing, in rural areas, about businesses that are beginning to shut down because the small subsidies that they were receiving to be the depots in rural places made the difference for them in terms of their sustainability. Farmers are having more trouble getting parts, particularly small farmers and medium-sized farmers who were depending on the bus in order to access parts from the city.
The impacts are so large and so interesting. You have the first-order impacts and the second-order impacts on people. It really is something that I think in many ways was not predicted by the folks who ended up taking that decision, and it is a decision that refuses to die.
I was out in a rural area last weekend, talking to some folks who normally vote Saskatchewan Party, and they said to me that this is the one decision that would make them leave the party. It was very interesting, because they felt that it affected so many people across the board and was such an ill-considered decision that it makes them question the capability of the party to govern the province.