Ontario’s public service employees are back in the office this month, a change from a pandemic-era policy that offered flexible workday structures. That could have big impacts on commuters, especially around Toronto. And where do the Ford government’s highway plans fit in? What about emissions from all these extra cars on the roads? I spoke with The Narwhal’s Ontario reporter Fatima Syed about what it all means for our latest explainer video.

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For 15 years and counting, my commute from Mississauga to Toronto has been mired by everything imaginable — construction, cancelled buses, traffic jams, frozen tracks and train delays with no explanation at all. It’s likely about to get worse, or at least more crowded. 

There are more than 60,000 public servants working in the Ontario government. Starting next week, they’ll head back to the office five days a week, even as provincial politicians take an extended break from the legislature until March. 

The province issued that directive last August, changing the pandemic-era policy that first ordered everyone to work from home, then continued to allow for flexible work schedules. The directive was a far cry from Premier Ford’s thinking only five years ago, when he said working from home was “the way of the future.” 

On social media, people who said they were public servants were upset at the change. 

“Hope every single driver knows that I am clogging up traffic unnecessarily because of Ford,” said one person on Reddit. 

“I am reminded I am now paid not to be at my most productive. But instead, it is now also my job to use more gas, contribute to ridiculously congested traffic and emit more pollution,” said another on the same platform. 

The greatest concentration of provincial government offices is in Toronto, including the legislature. But not all government workers live in the city, so bringing them all back five days a week is going to strain southern Ontario’s already stressed and overpacked roads and transit system — and its air.

Transportation is already the single greatest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in Ontario, a province where the quality and quantity of transit leaves much to be desired. As provincial workers join the employees of big banks and other companies that have ordered everyone back downtown, there will inevitably be more people in cars, increasing traffic pollution. 

It already happened in Ottawa when federal workers returned to the office for just three days a week in 2024. A Carleton University study, conducted on 1,500 federal bureaucrats, found remote workers produced a quarter less emissions than those who went into the office. The researchers found the difference was even more drastic in Quebec, where remote workers with the federal government produced 64 per cent less emissions. 

The report’s conclusion was that working from home — even just part of the time — does cut emissions, as well as easing congestion. 

This would all look a lot different if our transportation infrastructure could handle tens of thousands more people. But it can’t, and little has changed in that regard over the Ford government’s seven and a half years in power, for either drivers or transit users. 

The long-promised Highway 413, which would cut through the Greenbelt and connect the suburbs north and west of Toronto, and the Bradford Bypass farther north, have yet to be built, even though the government has passed legislation after legislation to enable construction. 

And even if they were built, they almost certainly wouldn’t ease traffic congestion — even the province’s own modelling says so. 

More lanes simply means more cars on the road — a concept known as induced demand that is best illustrated by the fact that when the Ford government lifted provincial tolls off sections of the usually quiet Highway 407 last June, those stretches soon became busy. Meanwhile, there’s still no shortage of traffic on the 401.

But lifting those tolls was moving in the opposite direction of a proven solution for crowded streets: charging drivers through tolls and congestion pricing has worked in New York, reducing traffic congestion by 11 per cent since 2024. Instead, Ontario has killed several tolls and outlawed congestion pricing in its most recent budget. 

Transit-wise, if you’ve taken a GO train or TTC streetcar at rush hour you know there’s often no room for even one more person to make their way back to the office in January. 

The government says it’s investing in “the largest transit expansion in North America” and the “largest subway expansion in Canadian history.” Cool, but how long is it going to take? 

Toronto and its neighbouring communities remain trapped in decades-long construction mazes for light-rail transit and subways whose end dates are aspirational at best, as is their effectiveness. The city’s newest line since 2002 is Finch West, a $3.7-billion, 10.3 kilometre light-rail transitway that runners can outpace, as several people have demonstrated. 

If nothing else, maybe Ontario’s lagging transit upgrades and lack of real solutions for congestion will make walking to work the commute of choice — even if it means marathon distances. Otherwise, and more likely, we’ll continue down this road, which may involve paying another $120 billion in health costs associated with air pollution across the country, particularly in the most densely populated regions like the Greater Toronto Area. And more air pollution means more global warming and more extreme weather events like flooding and wildfires. 

But that shouldn’t be the cost of going to work — nor should the void of human interaction from working at home be a better solution.

Here’s to hoping the ever-elusive Goldilocks option of better transit and less traffic is on the table one day, for public servants and the rest of us.

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Sometimes one awards nomination just isn’t enough. So in the U.S.-based Institute for Nonprofit News awards, our Manitoba reporter, Julia-Simone Rutgers snagged two, making her a double-finalist. The first was for explanatory journalism for her explainer in the early days of U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff threats. Julia-Simone reached across the border to hear how a trade war could hurt farmers — in both countries. And she scored another in the community champion award category for this investigation, along with Malak Abas, into changes to bus routes in Winnipeg, and who they impact most. Both stories were produced as part of our years-long partnership with the Winnipeg Free Press.— Sharon J. Riley, managing editor

When transit flows, a neighbourhood thrives.

When buses are frequent, arrive on time and run into the night, it means more kids make it to after-school activities, more students can get to class on time, more shift workers can get home safely late at night and more commuters can leave their vehicles at home. The end result is robust movement throughout a community, according to Orly Linovski, an urban planning professor at the University of Manitoba.

That was the vision Winnipeg Transit promised as it rolled out its all-new Primary Transit Network earlier this summer. The new routes and redistribution of bus stops as part of the overhaul were intended to deliver faster and more reliable service that would better serve all corners of a growing city.

A Free Press/Narwhal analysis of the city’s transit system before and after the June 29 transition date reveals a different story.

The old system’s 87 routes and 5,100 bus stops have been stripped down to 71 routes and about 3,800 stops. Despite adding a few hundred new stop locations, particularly in fast-growing neighbourhoods along the city’s edges, Winnipeg ultimately cut a quarter of locations where passengers can board a bus. And the impacts are most stark in the neighbourhoods that need transit most.

The analysis shows historically underserved communities in the downtown, North End and West End have lost up to three times as many bus stops as the rest of the city and seen significant reductions in late-night bus service.

Bjorn Radstrom, Winnipeg Transit’s manager of service development, said the cuts are part of a “balancing act” needed to modernize the transit system.

The new network is the first stage of the city’s transit master plan — a 25-year roadmap toward a more efficient system, modeled after big-city subway networks, that will encourage more riders out of their cars and onto the bus.

“It was all done for a reason,” Radstrom said in an interview earlier this week.

“There was definitely a decrease in the number of bus stops, but that doesn’t translate into worse service. The thing that makes a difference to people is, how frequently does the bus come and how reliable is it?”

Modal shift — getting a driver to take the bus, walk or bike — has a clear environmental benefit: reducing emissions and air pollution and improving public health. Kyle Owens, president of advocacy group Functional Transit Winnipeg, calls transit a “solved problem,” but only on paper, not in practice.

“Great transit does not solve climate change, great transit does not eliminate poverty, great transit does not transform your city into an affordable, fun place to live. But if you want to make progress on any of those things, any amount, you need great transit first,” he said.

Where have all the bus stops gone?

Two-and-a-half months into the changeover, some Winnipeggers are reporting the frequency of bus service has improved and they are now able to access a nearby bus stop for the first time.

But they are in the minority. Complaints, Radstrom said, far outweigh the compliments. Many users have described longer travel times, more transfers and the loss of their usual route home from an evening shift as late-night stops have disappeared. All this was before the start of the new school year where thousands more users are testing out the new system for the first time.

University of Manitoba Students’ Union president Prabhnoor Singh has three words to describe the transit transformation: “a complete disaster.”

His own commute from his home in north Winnipeg to the university has jumped from one bus and 60 minutes to a nearly two-hour journey with three transfers.

Now, he chooses instead to drive 40 minutes to get to campus.

“It just shows you how much of a difference this has created, and overall, we haven’t heard much positive responses from our students,” he said.

Which neighbourhoods have experienced the most significant loss in stops?

Liberal MP Kevin Lamoureux (Winnipeg North) said he’s been fielding phone calls, e-mails and questions from stressed constituents since the overhaul.

“One of my constituents actually got his driver’s licence and got a truck because of the bus changes,” Lamoureux said in an interview following a riding town hall last month, adding residents have expressed a “very real … anxiety” about the new system.

Lamoureux describes his riding as largely working class, filled with students and an above-average concentration of young people. It also houses some of the neighbourhoods found to have above-average stop losses.

Before the overhaul, Winnipeg had about 11 bus stops per square kilometre. That’s dropped to about seven stops per square kilometre city-wide, according to the Free Press/Narwhal analysis.

The city cut about 2.5 stops for every square kilometre, but those changes weren’t made evenly.

Downtown and north end neighbourhoods — especially Point Douglas and Inkster — lost between two and three times as many stops as the city-wide average, while suburbs like Transcona and Fort Garry South, which have grown rapidly in recent years, saw the fewest stops removed.

Where is transit relied on the most?

Linovski, the urban planning professor, finds it “especially problematic” that the areas with disproportionate stop cuts seem to overlap with the neighbourhoods where transit is needed most — namely communities with more low-income families and higher rates of transit use.

Families in Downtown East, Point Douglas South, Inkster East and River East South (Elmwood) are more likely to rely on transit for daily commuting and more likely to fall below low-income thresholds. All four of those neighbourhoods saw above-average stop losses.

While Linovski recognizes Winnipeg Transit had two distinct goals — to better serve people taking transit, and to encourage people with other commuting options to hop on the bus — she notes those two goals “can be in conflict.”

Encouraging drivers to try other transportation would require a “major investment in funding,” she said. The full transit master plan upgrades are expected to cost between $540 million and $1.1 billion over 25 years, and will receive contributions from all levels of government.

The city is hesitant to restore stops, noting the annual cost to replace one bus stop on the new, rapid transit routes is nearly $22,000. Replacing all of the stops removed from the high-frequency routes would cost close to $4 million.

But, as the cost of living continues to rise, improved transit service will become more necessary in neighbourhoods currently feeling left behind, Linovski said.

“We have a duty in terms of human rights to make sure that people have access to their daily needs, health care, education, employment,” she said. “That is part of the values of Canada.”

“I often don’t see transportation linked to that. … People have a right to be able to get to the places they need. And for many people in our city, increasingly, that is not going to be by driving.”

Have the changes made it easier to catch a bus on a high-frequency route?

While Radstrom acknowledges many of the most affected neighbourhoods are among the city’s oldest and, in some cases, the poorest, they were also areas where there hadn’t been a thorough review of the “legacy” of accumulated stops requested by councillors and businesses.

“If that’s been ongoing since the 1940s [or] the 1950s with more and more stops being added for various reasons that nobody ever documented … you end up with much more closely spaced stops in some of the older areas.”

Radstrom said the cuts in those neighbourhoods were designed to emulate the light-rail transit and subway systems that inspired Winnipeg’s new route layouts. Better spacing creates smoother, faster service, he explained.

“When people are more reliant on transit, they value much more the frequency and reliability of a service that has bus stops that are spaced properly,” he said.

The new system has, for the most part, improved access to frequent routes where buses arrive every 15 minutes or less; analysis shows the proportion of stops served by these routes increased from 13 to 17 per cent.

How has access to late-night bus service changed?

Frequency isn’t the only measure of accessibility that matters to transit users.

More than half of all bus stops were still accessible after 11 p.m. under the old system; now only one-third are.

The city’s north side has been hit the hardest, where as many as 15 stops with late-night service have been removed per square kilometre compared to a city-wide average of 5.5.

Singh, the students’ union president, said he’s heard students are forced to leave class early because there isn’t a late-night bus available. The students’ union, which represents 27,000 members, is planning to meet with city representatives to raise its concerns.

“It’s unfortunate that most of them won’t get good bus service,” he said of the union’s members.

Coun. Ross Eadie (Mynarski) has fielded calls from constituents — notably seniors — who say the removal of bus stops in his North End-area ward has made accessing transit more dangerous. Fewer stops means longer walks to bus stops through one of the city’s most notorious neighbourhoods.

“If you have to get a bus after 10:30 [p.m.], you’re not walking down Selkirk Avenue, or any street around there, all the way up Mountain [several blocks to the north],” he said. “It’s very dangerous. I’m really angry about that.”

While the city’s on-demand bus service is available to bridge those gaps, Eadie questions whether it will be able to keep up.

Winnipeg Transit’s on-request bus service — which allows riders to request a bus pickup online, via an app or by calling 311 — began as a pilot project in 2021, but was expanded with the Transit overhaul to 12 zones around the city where riders can request a bus to take them from where they are to a bus stop on the primary network.

(Transit Plus continues to provide door-to-door service for registered riders with accessibility needs.)

“Is [Winnipeg Transit] ready for all the seniors who are going to be applying for [on-demand] trips?” Eadie said. “I think it’s going to be overwhelming this winter.”

Radstrom acknowledges there have been “challenges” with the new system’s implementation. A “minor rewrite” of some routes to improve arrival times has already happened and a more thorough review will occur in December.

“The service that’s in place now is going to be a bit better than we saw during the summer, but right now we’re undergoing a complete comprehensive rewrite of those schedules, because it’s not good,” he said.

“The buses are consistently late and we have to address that. We also have the reverse problem, where through this bus stop balancing, some routes are operating faster than we expected … which is also not a good thing.”

It’s not yet clear whether the changes are having the desired effect. Ongoing problems with GPS tracking on buses, notably involving downtown routes, is impacting the city’s ability to assess ridership data. The issue surfaced within two weeks after the launch.

“Until we fix that, which is hopefully coming soon, I can’t really say exactly how ridership is doing,” Radstrom said.

There will be alterations, additions and other shifts in service every year, he added, in pursuit of a transit system that is frequent and accessible to as many people as possible.

“By no means do we think we got everything right, right out of the gate. We know that changes are going to be needed.”

Owens, the transit advocate, is hopeful. The new system makes adding routes and stops easier than before, and further expansion possible so long as the political will and willingness to increase the transit budget is there.

“The basis of the transit master plan, to triple the number of Winnipeggers with access to frequent service, lay the foundation of a new structure for transit, for expansion in the future, has happened,” he said.

“What happens next is really something that we have to decide together.”

How we conducted the analysis:

The Narwhal and Free Press used schedule and route data from the General Transit Feed Specification, a standardized and open-source transit database, along with stop locations provided by the City of Winnipeg to analyze how bus stop spacing and service access has changed within city neighbourhood boundaries. Net changes in bus stop density were calculated using mapping software QGIS’s spatial analysis functions. Demographic data for each neighbourhood comes from the 2021 Canadian census and is made available by the city.

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The rail line between Milton and Toronto is one of the fastest-growing public transit corridors in Ontario — and seemingly among the most neglected. 

This is the fourth-busiest line in the GO Transit network — used by 7,500 people daily to get to and from work, and projected to have 94,000 daily riders by 2041. But despite repeated promises over the past decade from politicians across all levels of government to deliver all-day service connecting Toronto to the fast-growing cities directly west of it, including Mississauga and Milton, Metrolinx GO trains run for just three hours every morning and afternoon, and only on weekdays. 

If you’re lucky these journeys will be smooth. But in Ontario, commuting on public transit rarely is. 

In the decade that I’ve used it, my commute on the Milton Line has been disrupted by track and train malfunctions due to weather, random technical glitches or for reasons unknown. And then there are the countless times the trains stop for however long is needed to let the big freight trains pass first.

While Metrolinx owns 80 per cent of the GO rail tracks it operates on, 20 per cent are still owned and operated by Canadian National Railway and Canadian Pacific Kansas City. On these lines, moving goods is prioritized over moving people. 

Compare this to European rail systems where 80 per cent of rail transportation serves passengers and 20 per cent carries freight. 

The consequences of the Canadian rail hierarchy were frustratingly evident this past week when all trains on the Milton and Hamilton lines were cancelled for four days because 9,300 unionized rail workers across the country were locked out over bitter contract negotiations. Canadian Pacific workers responded immediately by striking, and Canadian National employees planned to follow suit. In total, around 50,000 commuters were unable to get to work across Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia.

When I can’t take the Milton line, I have three options. I can drive much farther away to take the Lakeshore line. I can’t take a GO bus at all hours of the day because the post-pandemic offerings have been reduced drastically at the transit hubs closest to me. I could take local transit, but that would require two buses and a long subway ride. Or I could drive. 

My alternative travel options are deeply imperfect. They also cost more (gas prices, sigh) and are less environmentally friendly. Taking a bus or driving means doubling the amount of time the trip takes, suffering in congestion.

A 2014 University of California study estimated transit strikes increase highway traffic and congestion by 47 per cent. At a time when we need to get cars off the road and prioritize a reduction in pollution, such disruptions take us backwards.

Plus, driving and sitting in congestion creates harmful pollution that warms the planet. 

But what choices are we left with when governments consistently fail to invest and strengthen public transit in this country? Rail service hasn’t kept pace with a growing population that needs cheap, efficient, sustainable ways to get to work at a time when owning a car and affording fuel is getting more and more challenging.

“The labour dispute is yet another example of how transit is not a priority for governments,” Josipa Petrunic, president and CEO of the non-profit Canadian Urban Transit Research and Innovation Consortium, told me. 

There are “low-hanging fruit” solutions that have been on the table for years, she said. For a decade, Oxford County, Ont., has been pushing for track diversions that allow passenger trains to bypass freight traffic and consistent bottleneck points. Advocates have been arguing for years for rapid bus transit that allows commuters to bypass congestion and travel at greater speeds, perhaps on less-used toll roads like Highway 407. 

“Two hundred years ago, the railway lines were built on the taxpayers’ dime. Unfortunately it is privately owned and has no public obligation.”

Josipa Petrunic, president and CEO, Canadian Urban Transit Research and Innovation Consortium 

And then there’s a solution that has been in place in the United States for 50 years. By law, the federally owned passenger rail service, Amtrak, has a right of way on rail lines owned by private rail companies. Freight companies can be fined if they disrupt the movement of Amtrak trains — a rule that applies to Canadian National Railway and Canadian Pacific Kansas City in the U.S. But while the law prioritizes public transit on paper, in practice, Amtrak says freight companies ignore the law and the federal government has only enforced it once. 

In Canada, no such law exists. NDP MP Taylor Bachrach tabled one earlier this year but it hasn’t progressed through the parliamentary process. VIA Rail asked the federal government for right-of-way over freight trains last fall. Then-transportation minister Omar Alghabra told the Toronto Star he wants to “really dig deeper” on the idea, but not much more has been done.

A law like this could incentivize private companies to keep the tracks open. And in the event of a labour dispute, the companies would be obligated to make sure passenger trains can run while negotiations continue, or pay up. 

“We can’t undo the fact that there is no other track. And there’s no magic wand to build new tracks across the country tomorrow,” Petrunic said. “There’s just a complete lack of strategic thinking.”

If Canada implemented a passenger-centric right of way, it would create a system where private rail companies’ ability to profit would be codependent on our ability to move people. And commuters wouldn’t be forced to take a side in a private sector labour dispute: workers rights shouldn’t conflict with your own ability to get to work. But that’s where we’re at. 

To get people back on trains, the federal government used the economic plight of holding back goods to force the rail lines to open.

But if moving freight is good for Canadians, so is moving people. 

“We’re in a population and congestion crisis in this province,” Petrunic said. “Two hundred years ago, the railway lines were built on the taxpayers’ dime. Unfortunately it is privately owned and has no public obligation.” 

On Monday, when the strike ended, a friend took the Milton line again. And of course, their train was delayed by eight minutes, waiting for a freight train to pass.

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Ask nearly any Winnipegger and they’ll tell you: the worst time to wait for public transit is a dark and frigid January night. This was just as much the case more than a century ago, when a crowd of eager transit riders gathered in “the bush of Fort Rouge” — an undeveloped plot of forest nestled south of the Assiniboine River — to await the result of an unprecedented experiment in Winnipeg’s still-early history.

Huddled against the cold on Jan. 27, 1891, the crowd gathered around the warm glow of oil lamps strung from a wooden streetcar perched on a stretch of rail that ran from Osborne Street to Main Street along River Avenue.

At precisely 7:30 p.m., Winnipeg’s acting mayor, T. W. Taylor, gingerly raised the trolley arm to connect with an overhead wire.

The streetcar beamed with life, its five dazzling electric lights eclipsing the flickering glow of the lamps. The crowd lingered until midnight, as each passenger waited in the cold for their chance to ride the little streetcar from one end of River Avenue to the other. The electric streetcar was a success — a new era in public transportation had arrived.

Today, Winnipeg is among the legions of cities hoping to revolutionize its transit network with low-emission technologies like battery-electric and fuel-cell buses. The electric shift will require cities to reimagine their transit infrastructure and service delivery, incorporating new innovations still making their way to the market.

It’s not been a painless transition: Prairie cities like Winnipeg are renowned for decades of urban sprawl and car-centric development that have hamstrung the efficiency of transit networks. Winnipeg Transit today has a reputation for long waits, unreliable schedules and inefficient routes.

But at the turn of the 20th century, Winnipeg’s transit system was in a class of its own. The electric streetcar proved instrumental to shaping the city as its suburbs grew around the ever-expanding web of cheap, fast and emissions-free public transportation.

Every now and then, when construction or potholes peel away the asphalt on Winnipeg’s busiest streets, a glimmer of forgotten steel rail lines serve as a reminder electric transit has always been part of the city’s fabric. Winnipeg’s public transit history was electric. Now, as countries around the world seek a lower carbon economy, it’s increasingly looking like the city’s public transit future will be electric, too.

An age of innovation: the first electric streetcar

Towards the end of the 1800s, Winnipeg was “the fastest growing city in North America,” Heritage Winnipeg president Greg Agnew says.

The trans-continental Canadian National Railway had been laid through the centre of town on its way to the Pacific shoreline, and Winnipeg was slated to become “the Gateway to the West.” Rail workers, real estate moguls and all manner of entrepreneurs made quick work of settling the muddy riverbanks. Money poured in at a rate the city has never seen since.

“Just from Graham to William Avenue we had 32 banks and financial institutions, which kind of gives you an idea of how wealthy we were,” Agnew says.

Winnipeg lore is rich with tales of the city’s early successes: there were more millionaires per capita than in New York. It was the third largest city in the country — and soon among the fastest growing, both in population and physical space.

At the time, a young entrepreneur named Albert Austin had begun operating a small network of horse-drawn streetcars on rail lines through downtown. The streetcars were a hit with residents, Agnew says, offering an accessible alternative to walking or cycling — especially during the wetter seasons, when the quagmire of silt and clay from the riverbanks sloshed through the metropolitan centre.

Seeing a rise in ridership, Austin realized the city would soon need faster, cheaper and more reliable transit options.

“He was aware in his industry that electricity was coming. It was a new way to move streetcars and they moved faster and cost less to move. It was an ideal business opportunity,” David Wyatt, historian with the Manitoba Transit Heritage Association, explains.

Bankrolled by his father, who had founded the Dominion Bank, Austin had travelled through the United States looking for a way to bring his streetcar system into the future, and found answers in Richmond, Va., where the first successful electric streetcar was adopted in 1888.

For nearly two years, he “begged, pleaded, cajoled, ridiculed and demanded” a reluctant Winnipeg City Council to let him try the electric rail at home, according to transit historian John Baker’s 1982 book Winnipeg’s Electric Transit.

“They were afraid of electricity,” Wyatt says of the city’s leadership at the time. “They expected people to die and horses to be killed.”

Council relented in 1891, but relegated the electric experiment to Fort Rouge, where it was less likely to cause serious damage if it failed. Austin built the River Avenue tracks in a matter of months, followed quickly by a much longer stretch of rail south on Osborne that led to two tracts of land he purchased and built up as public parks.

The single, Edison-style streetcar he bought was manufactured in St. Catharine’s, Ont., making it the first of its kind to be built — and operated — in Canada.

“He was really on the forefront of transit technology,” Wyatt says.

After the test run that cold January night, the electric streetcar became a staple on Winnipeg’s streets. The electric cars were faster than their horse-drawn alternatives and cost less to maintain. Once they’d been proven safe, the city allowed them to be installed on Main Street, Broadway and Portage Avenue.

“The electric streetcar in Winnipeg — and almost anywhere else — was the way to travel before automobiles,” Wyatt says.

They weren’t all glamour: the ride was bumpy and loud, most cars were open to the elements, and slipping off the overhead wires was a regular occurrence.

In the winter, snow caked on the rails and conductors came equipped with shovels and brooms in case the cars needed to be dug out of heavy drifts.

Still — the streetcar was a resounding success.

An age of expansion: how suburbs grew on railway lines

In the end, Austin wouldn’t reap the rewards of his innovation. In a dramatic political showdown, he was pushed out of the railway business in 1894, clearing the way for the Winnipeg Electric Street Railway Company, which operated transit until the 1960s.

But Austin’s legacy had been cemented in Fort Rouge, where the arrival of the streetcar and the popularity of River Park — one of the parks he had built near today’s St. Vital bridge — prompted a small boom in housing and business development. Osborne Village, as it’s called today, became Winnipeg’s first suburb, setting a precedent for the development pattern that outlined the contours of a growing city.

“The demand for development built the streetcar lines and the streetcar lines drew the development to particular locations,” Wyatt explains.

“They often built out into undeveloped spaces, but then the houses came and the riders came from the houses.”

City bylaws allowed council to demand a line be built anywhere within city limits so long as there were at least 400 people over the age of five living within a quarter mile of the route.

New manufacturing hubs saw lines stretch to the flour mills on Sutherland Avenue, the cattle Stockyards east of the then-municipality of St. Boniface, the Weston Shops industrial hub in the west end of the city and the new university deep in the city’s south.

By 1914, the population had exploded and the streetcar network had extended to the burgeoning neighbourhoods of Kildonan, Tuxedo, Charleswood, St. Vital and St. Norbert. The western line on Portage Avenue ran as far as the market town of Headingley, beyond city limits. One northern line ran all the way to the nearby municipalities of Selkirk and Stonewall.

“If you look at a map of Winnipeg today … those [neighbourhoods] were mapping the streetcar lines,” Wyatt says.

But the streetcar’s dominance was not to last forever.

An age of change: the trolley-bus, the gas-bus and the automobile

The first automobiles — mostly a type of taxi called jitneys — began sharing the streets with the electric streetcars during the First World War. There were just 663 vehicles registered in 1915, but they eventually caused such a dip in transit ridership that council opted to temporarily ban them.

More foreboding still: gasoline-powered buses had made their first appearance in Winnipeg in 1918 to serve as a feeder route from the growing Wolseley neighbourhood to the streetcars.

To make matters more complicated, the 1919 General Strike saw streetcar expansion grind to a halt. The strike culminated with the infamous “Bloody Saturday” clash, where strikers attempted to topple a streetcar in front of City Hall, prompting a violent and deadly encounter with police.

Transit ridership was expected to rebound through the 1920s; that year a peak 65.2 million passengers rode the streetcar lines — double the the 32.8 million trips logged on Winnipeg Transit buses in 2022. But three years later ridership dipped as vehicle registrations climbed rapidly to nearly 17,000 by 1923.

“The depression and the rise of the automobile changed the economics for public transit,” Wyatt explains, referring to the vicious drought cycle and 1929 stock market crash that hobbled the economy in the 1930s. “If it was profitable before, it was certainly losing its profitability — cost-cutting was the order of the day.”

Maintaining the infrastructure of an electric rail system was costly: the company was responsible for maintaining its rail cars, overhead wire system, tracks and the sidewalks and roadways they ran down.

Buses, which had no need for rail infrastructure, were thought to be cheaper and more efficient on low-density routes. As traffic slowed on the electric rails, “bustitution,” as Baker calls it, began. Austin’s inaugural River Avenue route was the first to be scrapped and replaced by gas motors. Mass layoffs at the flour mills and factories shuttered the Sutherland line. Other lightly used routes soon followed.

But gasoline buses hadn’t earned the same reputation for reliability as the streetcars just yet, and Winnipeg wasn’t ready to do away with electric-powered transport.

“Winnipeg was again innovative with trolley buses,” Wyatt says.

Trolley buses had begun popping up across the United States in the 1930s as an alternative to the streetcar. While they still relied on overhead power lines to run the motors, they weren’t hindered by the need for tracks, making them a flexible — and significantly cheaper — public transit system. Montreal introduced the electric trolley in 1937. Winnipeg followed suit in 1938.

Use soared on trolley buses as the Second World War prompted restrictions on car manufacturing and drove residents back into the welcoming arms of public transit. As each streetcar line reached the end of its life, it was replaced by a smaller, cheaper and more efficient trolley.

Winnipeg reached its all-time peak transit ridership in 1946 with 105 million passenger trips.

An age of endings: the diesel engine

The last streetcars — as the first — were paraded through a crowd of eager onlookers in September 1955. The brightly painted cars were decorated with mournful faces and banners decrying the rise of the bus as they made their funeral march down Portage Avenue.

The trolley buses lasted another 15 years, but the rise of the diesel bus in the 1960s brought an eventual death knell for the overhead-electric transit system.

Agnew says the shift was driven by engine manufacturers who discovered diesel as a cheap alternative to gasoline, and began promoting their engines as a new source of power for public transit.

“I don’t want to say they sold a bill of goods,” Agnew says. “But they went out and promoted their engine, and someone said OK to it, and someone else said OK, and then the trend starts.”

At the same time, the personal automobile had taken off in Winnipeg with an estimated 92,000 vehicles by 1957. Transit ridership was down, roads were crowded with cars and people wanted space to drive and places to park.

The diesel bus emerged as a more reliable and flexible way to navigate the busy streets.

“Not only had they eliminated the railway tracks in the street, but they’d also eliminated the electric infrastructure of overhead lines and electric substations,” Wyatt says. “It came down to cost, as it always seemed to, because they were cheaper to run.”

Looking to the future of electric transit

Agnew has fond memories of riding the trolley buses as a child. They weren’t perfect — the arms still slipped off the wires, stalling buses in intersections while conductors fiddled with the connection. He remembers the electric trolley buses as quiet, and fundamentally “an improvement on the streetcar,” he says.

When the trolleys faded, replaced by their diesel counterparts, “it was just another bus.”

The streetcars and trolleys were stripped for parts and left to rot in “boneyards,” he says. Only one — Streetcar 356, which Agnew has been helping restore — survives today. Some of the old tracks were pulled up, but most were simply buried under new asphalt.

The streetcar, fundamental to Winnipeg’s history, was all but erased from its collective memory.

And though it wasn’t a priority, Winnipeg was an early adopter of emissions-free transit. “You didn’t think of the environment or anything like that back then,” Agnew says. Today, of course, things have changed. Winnipeg is just one of many cities planning a cleaner, lower emissions transportation network.

In a twist of fate, local company New Flyer Industries — which manufactured Winnipeg’s first diesel buses under the name Western Flyer in 1967 — secured a contract in 2022 to produce up to 166 battery-electric and hydrogen fuel cell buses for the city over the next four years. With electric bus technology will come a new era of electric transit infrastructure, including charging stations, hydrogen production capacity and a re-configuration of the transit network.

“I think it’s ironic that we had streetcars for so many years, and then we dumped them because diesel was the ideal thing to do. And what are we looking at now? Electric buses,” Agnew says, chuckling.

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Nithursan Elamuhilan’s daily commute begins at his family home in Highland Creek, at the easternmost edge of Scarborough. He starts on the 905 Eglinton East Express bus and takes it to Kennedy Station, before hopping on an eastbound Line 2 subway towards the downtown offices of the Ministry of Labour, where he works as a data analyst.

On a good day, the trip takes him about an hour and a half. On a bad day — when Line 2 is shut down, or when Elamuhilan misses a connection — it’s more like two hours. Thanks to the latest service adjustments by the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC), Elamuhilan’s daily commute will soon be even slower. Starting March 26, riders on 35 different routes will need to wait longer thanks to TTC service cuts in Toronto’s latest city budget.

Those service cuts are not evenly distributed. Ten of the 13 most drastic schedule changes are on Scarborough routes, where some of Toronto’s worst transit overcrowding already occurs. One of the routes facing cuts is the 905 Eglinton East Express that Elamuhilan relies on, which will see wait times increase from nine minutes to 16 minutes during both morning and afternoon rush hour on weekdays.

“It’s extremely disappointing,” says Elamuhilan. Now he’ll need to plan out his travel schedule, rather than simply wait a few minutes for the next bus to show up. And as all Toronto transit riders know, the more complex the trip, the more likely a single delay can throw it off.

The 905 Eglinton East Express is a linchpin of Scarborough’s network. In fact, the City of Toronto considered it so critical that they recently invested $4 million into dedicated bus lanes for 8.5 kilometres along Eglinton Avenue, Kingston Road and Morningside Avenue. “The bus routes on Eglinton Avenue East are among the TTC’s most heavily used and, during the COVID-19 pandemic, continue to play a significant role in moving people more efficiently around Toronto,” the city explained on a webpage justifying the bus lanes project.

The other affected Scarborough-serving bus routes include the 9 Bellamy on some weekend times and the 133 Neilson on late evenings throughout the week and on Sundays. Both will see delays of six minutes each. And while that may not seem like a lot of time to wait for a bus, overcrowding and already-frequent service delays means the average Scarborough bus rider on these routes may wait even longer.

Data gathered by The Local shows that a majority of the routes facing cuts to service have already been experiencing high rates of delay for the last decade, averaging twice as many delays as the system overall. Even excluding uncontrollable events like weather and collisions, or minor delays of under five minutes, the 37 Islington — slated for a six-minute increase in wait times — faces delays 3.4 times the average route. The 113 Nielson experiences delays at more than 2.5 times the rate of other routes. For the 9 Bellamy, it’s around 1.4 times, and 1.3 times for the 905.

For the people who depend on transit in Scarborough, the added service reductions mean longer waits and more crowded vehicles. While waiting for a bus at Kennedy Station on a chilly Wednesday afternoon, Manju George, a regular Scarborough bus rider, says the buses she takes, including the 905, are often delayed for far longer than their schedules suggest. “Some days, it’s 27 minutes late, 30 minutes late,” she says. And it’s not just the 905. All the other buses sitting at Kennedy Station are prone to running behind.

Dan Weaver, a physics professor at the University of Toronto’s Scarborough Campus and another 905 rider, says that even with their own dedicated bus lanes, buses get bunched up and all arrive at once, meaning there are long gaps in service. When a 905 bus does arrive, it fills up fast.

“There are certainly times when I’m waiting at [University of Toronto Scarborough Campus], it’s been a 15-minute wait or more, and I choose not to get on it because I don’t want to stand in that intensely packed bus for 30 minutes,” Weaver says.

Weaver says the city already knows just how packed the 905 is — it studied the route in preparation for the long-delayed Eglinton East Light Rapid Transit line meant to serve the area. There are a multitude of neighbourhoods along the route that depend on the 905, not only to head to Kennedy Station or other major transit hubs, but also as a quick, convenient and affordable local transit option.

In a statement, the TTC told The Local that the service adjustments to its routes are based on ridership and ensuring the service is “equitably matching capacity to demand.” It said it was making morning service improvements on Line 2, as well as 9 Bellamy, 24 Victoria Park, 86 Scarborough and the 133 Nielson. “As well,” the statement said, “a huge number of routes serving Scarborough remain untouched.”

As for the 905, the TTC said its service cuts would make the service more reliable and predictable. “It’s a modification to running time to reflect real-world operating conditions,” wrote Stuart Green, a TTC senior communications specialist. “That means better adherence to the schedule, and that means more reliable and predictable [service].”

Visit Kennedy Station at rush hour, and the story seems markedly different. On a Wednesday afternoon just after around 4:45 p.m., a 905A Eglinton East Express fills to cattle-car capacity in seconds. The few passengers left on the platform climb onto the 86B, a bus slated for a one minute service delay during afternoon peak time.

For many Scarborough riders, the frequent delays are a pain, but there aren’t always other options. George sometimes has to take an Uber to work rather than show up late. If service declined badly enough, Weaver says, he’d be forced to consider buying a car, a purchase he doesn’t want to make.

Elamuhilan says he’s lucky. If the service is inadequate on the express bus route with the dedicated lane that runs right past his house, he has another option. He can bike to a nearby GO station and, from there, head downtown.

With files from Inori Roy

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As Doug Ford looks to break ground on new highways, Ontario’s financial watchdog is warning that extreme climate events will drive basic maintenance costs on transportation infrastructure drastically higher. 

In a new report out today, the Financial Accountability Office projects that extreme rainfall, heat and freeze-thaw cycles caused by the warming of the planet will increase the costs of maintaining roads, highways, bridges, sidewalks, transit and rail by an average of $1.5 billion per year in this decade. 

By 2030, Ontario’s provincial and municipal governments could be spending an average of $13.3 billion every year on infrastructure upkeep, let alone new projects. This is a 13 per cent increase in provincial and municipal transportation costs even if climate was stable — and that rise could be much more in a future of higher emissions, as much as 32 per cent.

The Financial Accountability Office’s role is to inform elected officials about present and future trends that could affect government spending. It doesn’t offer advice or instruction. Since 2019, the office has focused its calculations on one thing: the cost of climate change impacts on public infrastructure. 

The office’s analysis is unprecedented, the first in the world to study climate change impacts on infrastructure in granular financial detail. It has already put out six reports on the issue — on the potential impacts to essential services and buildings such as hospitals, schools, fire stations and more — with a final one coming towards the end of the year.

“The infrastructure that we’re building today will be around till 2080 or longer, so the infrastructure we design today needs to be able to withstand everything,” Peter Weltman, the financial accountability officer, told The Narwhal.

The takeaway of this report is that if you’re going to build 413, build it smart

Peter Weltman, Ontario Financial Accountability Officer

The provincial office is releasing its stunning numbers at a time when Canadians are already struggling to keep up with inflation on day-to-day expenses — driven by a variety of worldwide events, including global heating, economic slowdowns linked to the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

But the projected increases in costs are still modest when compared to a 2017 study published in Global Environmental Change, which found that the cost of repairing damage from heatwaves, floods and droughts on critical infrastructure in Europe could triple in the 2020s and multiply by 10 times by the end of the century.

The new Ontario report assesses the costs related to maintaining existing infrastructure as of 2020. Doug Ford’s proposed highway projects, like the Bradford Bypass or Highway 413, aren’t included. 

“The takeaway of this report is that if you’re going to build 413, build it smart,” Weltman said. “Build it while being mindful that it will become subjected to climate damage and build it to withstand that damage.” 

Ontario’s 444 cities, towns and other municipalities own 82 per cent of roads, bridges, transit lines and other transportation infrastructure, with the remainder owned by the province, says the report. Right now, Ontario’s entire transportation infrastructure is valued at $330 billion. If the climate remains stable, the province would spend an average of $12.9 billion every year to maintain it by 2030, the target year for climate commitments set by the Paris Agreement.

But the climate won’t remain stable — even if we were to drastically reduce emissions now, about 1.5 degrees of warming is almost certainly baked over the next two decades before any potential plateau or drop, according to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 

The financial watchdog is projecting an increase in Ontario’s annual number of hot days as well as its annual rainfall intensity. In recent months and years, Ontario has borne the impacts of several severe climate events, such as this summer’s derecho storm and subsequent flooding and heat waves. These events have put trains out of service and closed down major arterials. 

The financial watchdog’s report focuses largely on extreme heat and extreme rainfall, as those weather events are tracked closely and directly impact public infrastructure.

The report finds extreme rainfall can overwhelm drainage functions on roadways, erode and break arterials and bridges, and destroy pavement. 

Extreme heat can soften asphalt and create cracks that turn into potholes. Heat can also cause stress on steel rail tracks that prevent trains from running. Freeze-thaw cycles, or quick fluctuations between freezing and non-freezing temperatures that alternately melt and solidify water, can also damage road surfaces.

The costs of repairing all this infrastructure could be lowered if the government spends now on preventative tactics. The report outlines what this adaptation would require. For roads, it means using temperature-resistant asphalt. Increased water levels will require roads to have larger drainpipes and for waterways to be reinforced with large rocks. Buildings will need deeper foundations, while railways need more supports to keep them stable. 

The report finds that emissions will drastically increase how much provincial and municipal governments spend on infrastructure repair — but the sooner we act, the more affordable it will be. Weltman was struck by “the sheer size of the dollars” in the latest cost analysis, but also by the return on investment the government could get with a strong infrastructure adaptation strategy. 

“We have examples of what happens when transportation fails,” Weltman told The Narwhal. “B.C. flooding last year, we saw what happened…that’s the big risk that makes a strong business case for adapting now.”

“Governments and everyone else should use [this report] as a starting point to figure out how to build smarter going forward in a climate crisis,” Weltman said. 

Notably, according to the report, the amount of emissions Ontario produces will have a significant impact on the money spent on public infrastructure upkeep. In a medium-emissions scenario — which sees Ontario reduce some greenhouse gas emissions — the financial watchdog finds an adaptation strategy will increase costs by 13 per cent, or $1.7 billion, every year. In a high-emissions scenario — which sees Ontario take little to no emissions-reduction measures — the same costs increase by 23 per cent, or $2.9 billion, every year. Those costs decrease by a few billion dollars if the government acts proactively sooner to adapt all infrastructure. 

 “It’s important that as we renovate and build new things that we keep the climate in mind and spend the money we need to spend to make sure everything is resilient going forward,” Weltman said. “If you’re going to build, build it out so it’s going to do the job you intend it to do between now and 2100.”

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On a cloudy late summer day, the only users of a railway track in the downtown core of Brampton, Ont., are a few squirrels and the occasional pedestrian taking the path untrodden.

The 51 kilometres of dark steel track seem stuck permanently in the unkept wild ground. They cut through one road after another, past a handful of high-rise buildings, past city hall, schools, churches and a youth correctional facility, then into overgrown woods that meander through the city. The railway crossing bells don’t ring anymore, the red-and-white Xs now serving only as signposts for people travelling by other means, usually cars.

It’s hard to imagine that these overgrown tracks once carried bustling passenger rail cars, taking people through the three communities now known as Peel Region: from the historic town of Streetsville, now part of Mississauga, through the industrial outskirts of Brampton and then its downtown, then northwest past the lush agricultural fields of the town of Caledon. The final stop was the picturesque town of Orangeville. 

For the past 21 years, the tracks have been used infrequently and only for freight. Orangeville owned the rail bed and, according to Mayor Sandy Brown, the town was “hemorrhaging” $450,000 a year in property taxes to the three Peel Region governments in order to preserve rail service. Orangeville city council estimates it has lost close to $10 million across the over 20 years it ran the railway line.

But that deficit is now less of a worry: in July, Peel Region purchased the railway lands for $5.8 million, officially ending 140 years of rail in Orangeville. The City of Brampton also bought the rail yard where trains were parked for $24.25 million. 

The plan for the land, at least for now, is to convert the corridor into a recreational trail connecting all four communities. It would be a first for Ontario: a significant nature trail that cuts right through a busy city’s downtown core, planting a permanent green space in some of southern Ontario’s most populated suburbs.

“Land that traverses across cities like this doesn’t often become available,” Jake Mete, a senior manager with Brampton’s park planning department. “And a trail that runs through an urban area? There’s none in Ontario.”

If it gets built, the trail could offer residents of the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA) a car-free way to explore a long route through the region. 

Rail trails are exactly what they sound like: former rail beds that have been turned into pathways for active recreation like biking, hiking and more. There’s a decades-long movement in the United States that seeks to create “a nation connected by trails” and in Vancouver, city council bought 42 acres from Canadian Pacific Railway to convert into a “greenway.” There are already close to 100 rail trails in Ontario, but most are in either protected areas, like the Niagara Escarpment, or in rural places like the Bruce Peninsula, where land is much less developed than in the south.

Peel Region needs greenspace, but as southern Ontario grows rapidly and Doug Ford’s provincial government bets on highways to connect the suburbs, some residents worry about willfully ignoring an easy public transit solution. While the route curves through farmland, industrial ground and some hilly landscape, a big section in northern Brampton is straight and, some say, could be used to create a light rail transit line connecting to Ford’s planned Highway 413 or proposed new GO Transit hubs. 

“Peel Region not thinking about turning parts of this railway into transit corridors is concerning,” said Moaz Ahmad, a longtime transportation consultant and Mississauga resident. “The infrastructure is there and it wouldn’t cost a lot of money and would encourage climate-friendly movement in these cities.”

The advocacy organization Transport Action Ontario agrees — in November 2020, the group wrote a letter to Transportation Minister Caroline Mulroney arguing the rail route “will be critical to road congestion and vehicle emissions mitigation.” 

“The Orangeville, Caledon and Brampton areas to the northwest of the GTHA are experiencing relentless population growth,” the letter read. “Even in a post pandemic environment this will put additional stress on area roads including highways 10 and 410 used for commutes into the GTHA and the burgeoning commercial centre surrounding Pearson airport. The Orangeville-Brampton rail route will be critical to road congestion and vehicle emissions mitigation. It is potentially an existing low-cost solution to an otherwise expensive future mobility problem …”

Orangeville Mayor Sandy Brown told The Narwhal the town spoke to Metrolinx about transit uses before approving the trail plan but the provincial transit agency replied that the region doesn’t have the population to sustain a commuter train service. Metrolinx didn’t confirm this to The Narwhal, but said that ridership on its weekday Orangeville buses is low, at barely 50 per cent capacity. 

The region hasn’t closed the door on possibly using the site for transit: a staff report from May endorsed the rail trail, but also mentioned the land’s potential future use as a “utility corridor to help meet the needs of a growing region.” Without offering specifics, the city’s official plan states that it will protect the decommissioned rail infrastructure and continue to advocate for the line to be incorporated into Metrolinx’s commuter rail network, but that the city is open to alternative uses for the old railway in the meantime. Another potential use is as a corridor for broadband internet service.

The first train on the Orangeville Brampton Railway rolled into town in April 1867, eventually becoming part of the Canadian Pacific Railway’s route through the regions northwest of Toronto. As the manufacturing industry dwindled in the last half of the 20th century, ridership decreased and industries shifted to using ships and trucks. 

Orangeville bought the line, and a conglomerate of local businesses formed, determined to use the railway for freight. The group employed 422 people and, for the last two decades, kept an estimated 1,300 trucks off the town’s roads every year. But by 2021, only five manufacturers between Orangeville and Brampton relied on the line. 

“It wasn’t financially viable for a small town in Ontario to keep it in service,” Mayor Brown told The Narwhal. “We were struggling to support it and incentivize the rail to continue.

And so in March — three months after the last train rode the line on December 17, 2021 — Orangeville sold the land, and began ripping out the tracks.

There are no official timelines or costs yet for the proposed rail trail. The railway group estimates the cost to decommission the rail line could range between $1 million and $4 million, which accounts for the money the region would get from the disposed steel. 

The estimate doesn’t factor in the costs to convert the rail line into a multipurpose trail, and a lot has to happen to make it a reality. There would be cleanup along the whole route to turn it into a green corridor. All 47 rail crossings also have to be decommissioned and traffic redirected or reorganized. The provincial government will also have to conduct an environmental assessment, which could take months to years. The public will be given a chance to comment.

Then comes the planning involved in connecting all the parcels of land as seamlessly as possible. Right now, major Peel Region arteries, from Highway 401 to Hurontario Street, are heavily congested due to rapid population growth. This will only get worse as the cities start building new housing, campuses and hospitals. 

For Brampton, one of Canada’s fastest-growing urban centres, creating a green corridor that cuts through downtown — literally steps from city hall — will be “a unique challenge,” Mete said. “It’s going to take a few years. But the beautiful thing is, when it’s done, this will expand the network across the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area.”

After this fall’s municipal elections, Brown would like to see the creation of a “trail summit” that brings together staff and politicians from all four municipalities along the trail route. Also involved would be the Credit Valley Conservation Authority, which already has plans in place to build a 100-kilometre pathway through the Credit River Valley — from the hills of the headwaters in Orangeville to Lake Ontario in Port Credit. Parts of the rail trail overlap with this pathway, and the conservation authority told The Narwhal it “looks forward to working with the municipalities to discuss how the Credit Valley Trail route could be achieved through this acquisition.”

“I think we need to have a collaborative effort to make sure that we provide a great customer experience for those using the trial,” Brown said. 

Mete added that integrating a rail trail into both Mississauga and Brampton’s long-term planning goals is an opportunity the cities have never had before, to increase access to much-needed green space for its suburban residents. Along with the under-construction Hurontario Light Rapid Transit (LRT) line, he thinks the trail could change the way residents get around in cities long planned to prioritize cars. 

“We’re imagining a future where a resident of Mississauga could take their scooter or their bike and jump on the LRT, go to Brampton, jump onto the trail and go wherever they want to,” Mete said. “Having a safe green space for big suburbs, well the sky’s the limit.” 

But Ahmad remains wary. “I think it’s a great corridor to connect people,” he said. “There are a lot of opportunities to make it useful for commuting and regular cycling and I hope whoever ends up in city council this fall looks into that.”

“Just having a trail isn’t enough,” he added. “You need to provide the equipment and support to encourage better behaviour by everyone, not just leisure cyclists on a Saturday morning.”

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There’s a potential new customer for electric buses that has some clean tech workers in Winnipeg feeling excited: Winnipeg Transit. Local manufacturer NFI Group has its eyes on the transit agency’s recent promise to electrify 20 per cent of its 600-bus fleet by 2027. Winnipeg has secured funds to purchase 100 electric buses — and make the country’s first major investment in transit powered by hydrogen fuel cells.

The money comes as part of a $500-million investment from all three levels of government that will see Winnipeg purchase new buses and charging infrastructure, upgrade its North End garage to accommodate zero-emission vehicles, and re-design its transit master plan. 

Winnipeg’s mid-sized fleet and flat topography make the city a good candidate for electrification, Josipa Petrunic at the Canadian Urban Transit Research and Innovation Consortium explains. But there’s a uniquely Winnipeg catch, too: extreme weather conditions and long bus routes. 

Current battery packs for electric buses aren’t powerful enough to carry a bus through a day on just one charge, meaning Winnipeg will need to invest in overhead charging stations and hydrogen fuel cell technology — which has a longer battery range.

Winnipeg has committed to purchasing a few dozen hydrogen fuel cell buses — the first major investment in that technology in Canada. As of now, there are just two hydrogen buses running in Canada, both on a trial basis in Edmonton. 

In order to produce enough hydrogen to power its new fleet, Winnipeg is also going to have to install an on-site electrolyzer, making Winnipeg Transit Manitoba’s newest energy producer, says Petrunic. 

Though the procurement process for Winnipeg’s new buses has only just begun, Premier Heather Stefanson and Mayor Brian Bowman both suggested they hope the funding will be able to support economic growth — and job retention — at home in Winnipeg.

New Flyer Industries went public on the Toronto Stock Exchange as NFI Group in 2005.

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In a sprawling, 350,000 square-foot factory on the eastern edge of Winnipeg, hundreds of workers are leading the public transit revolution. Production in the long, narrow New Flyer Industries plant is moving like clockwork, as employees transform piles of steel frame parts into massive, colourful transit bus shells for cities all across Canada and the United States. It starts in the weld shop, where it takes about 20,000 welds to transform slabs of steel into massive bus frames. A long track runs the length of the factory floor, allowing one frame at a time to be carted through a series of workstations, where employees apply corrosion protection, fit fibreglass panels, caulk joints, install electrical parts, paint and attach finishing touches like windows and lights. At the end of the line, finished bus shells are lifted — without doors, wheels, batteries or engines — onto flatbed trailers, and trucked out to a facility in Minnesota for the final assembly.

Many of the buses will later be fitted with battery-powered propulsion systems, helping fill a growing share of orders for new, zero-emission transit technology. With nearly 100 years of history in the bus-making industry, electric buses are now what New Flyer does best. 

But over the pandemic, New Flyer has struggled, losing millions of dollars and shedding hundreds of jobs. The company has also temporarily shut down operations at times due to supply chain disruptions — including a temporary factory shut down this month — and is delivering far fewer buses than it did in years past. In addition, American legislation has hampered the company’s ability to set up full-scale production facilities at home in Canada and, like the buses themselves, many of the company’s green jobs have been sent south of the border. 

With Canada making major investments to speed up electric transit adoption from coast to coast, the opportunity for a made-in-Canada green transit industry looks bright. But the company is unsure Canada’s workforce will be able to keep up.

This uncertainty highlights how the Trudeau government has failed to introduce a plan to protect clean tech jobs for bus manufacturing in Canada, even as it seeks to tackle carbon pollution from the transportation industry — which is responsible for almost a quarter of the country’s annual greenhouse gas emissions.

Industry experts warn the federal government will need to focus efforts on developing strong policy incentives to build and retain a robust electric transit workforce — or risk shuttling its transit investments outside its borders.

Leading the electric bus revolution, from Manitoba

Long before New Flyer began making a name for itself as the go-to shop for electric buses, a Winnipeg man named Jon Coval founded Western Auto and Truck Body Works Ltd. With a team of five staff, Coval built truck and bus shells in the early 1930s, selling their first full bus builds to Grey Goose Bus Lines in 1937. By the 1940s, Western Auto had designed the Western Flyer — a coach-style bus set to take over inter-city transportation in Western Canada. The Western Flyer quickly became the company’s star offering, prompting the company to change its name to Western Flyer Coach. The company hit bumpy financial roads through the 1950s and ’60s, prompting the provincial government to step in and take over operations under the name Flyer Industries Ltd. in 1971. During those early decades, the company tried its hand at transit buses and trolleys, slowly building a customer base across Canada and the United States.

“It’s a Manitoba success story,” Stephen King, New Flyer’s vice president of strategy and investor relations, tells The Narwhal and the Free Press in an interview. “Winnipeg is at the centre of the country and really closely located to the United States. Solid manufacturing history, rail-line access and all those types of things made it an attractive place to start the business.”

In 1986, the company’s vision changed. Jan Den Oudsten, a descendant of coachbuilders from the Netherlands, bought the company and ushered in an era of technological innovation. Under the name New Flyer, Den Oudsten’s vision saw the company develop a host of ‘firsts’ in North American public transit. There was the first low-floor bus, already a hit in Europe, which eliminated the need for stairs at the bus entrance, then the first low-floor articulated bus, which could seat extra passengers thanks to a flexible extender in the middle of the bus. In the 1990s, New Flyer took bus technology to new heights as it worked to develop the world’s first hydrogen fuel cell powered buses, and in 1998 the company delivered the first ever diesel-electric hybrid bus, making an indelible mark on the future of public transit. 

“I think we saw the writing on the wall, that the future was going to be electric,” King says. 

New Flyer Industries went public on the Toronto Stock Exchange as NFI Group in 2005, and in the years since has collected a host of accolades as a North American leader in zero-emission bus technology. They supplied the first fleet of hydrogen fuel cell electric buses to B.C. transit for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics; they unveiled the first all-electric bus prototype in 2012, with orders secured for Chicago’s transit fleet the same year; and announced both a zero-emission Xcelsior model and plans to develop the first North American-built 60-foot fuel cell bus in 2014. Along the way they’ve acquired a host of competitors and parts manufacturers, established international offices and developed a wing specifically aimed at helping cities plan the infrastructure needed to implement electric-transit technologies.

“I don’t know if I’d call us the ‘Tesla’ of buses,” King laughs, reflecting on the company’s history in the industry. “But our view is that we are the leader of electrification in the transit space.”

Today, New Flyer Industries offers what King estimates is the widest range of transit buses in North America. The company is “propulsion-agnostic,” he explains, selling everything from old-school diesel buses, to hybrids, to battery and hydrogen fuel cell-powered buses. 

The “secret sauce,” King says, is that the company is able to customize each bus to its customers needs — from engine to paint colours — bringing a host of technologies together in one machine. 

“We call ourselves ‘mobility solutions providers,’ ” King says. On top of bus manufacturing, the company makes several of its own parts, and offers maintenance, training and service for its buses. 

“If you need anything bus-related, outside of operating the vehicles, we do everything else.”

The now-international NFI Group employs more than 7,500 people at dozens of facilities across the globe. About 2,500 staff members are employed at the company’s “flagship” facility — the global headquarters in Winnipeg. King says about half of those employees work in bus production and manufacturing, while the other half help steer the corporation. 

Despite touting itself as a leader in Canada’s zero-emission bus market, New Flyer only gets a fraction of its business from Canadian transit agencies. About 90 percent of the company’s business is driven by customers in the United States. 

A Canadian zero-emission legacy, an American market

Since 2020, the company has been reporting significant declines in revenue, deliveries and profits, owing largely to supply chain disruptions, the company says, and this quarter was no exception. Revenue reportedly dropped 32 per cent compared to 2021, bus deliveries were down 43 per cent and the company reported net losses of US$57 million — but the executive team said it remains optimistic.

Paul Soubry, president and CEO of NFI Group, told analysts on a quarterly results call in early August “there have been some positive signs that the worst is now over,” citing “record demand” and a backlog of bus orders that would help fill the company’s coffers in the coming quarters. Most of that demand, Soubry highlighted, is for zero-emission buses, which make up a growing percentage of current orders and backlog, as well as more than 50 per cent of the company’s potential bids for the next five years. In the second quarter, zero-emission buses made up 11 per cent of the more than 500 units the company delivered. Articulated buses — longer models connected by a central accordion piece — are counted as two units. 

Some of New Flyer’s competitors also appear to be announcing a flurry of new deals.

In June, NOVA bus, a Quebec manufacturer owned by Volvo, announced separate deals to supply electric and clean diesel buses to transit agencies in Halifax and Huntsville, Alabama. Quebec-based Lion Electric, which has cornered the market for electric school buses in Canada, reported a 72 per cent uptick in bus deliveries compared to 2021 and a subsequent 76 per cent bump in revenue in its second quarter results.

In Canada and the United States, Soubry said the “primary driver” of bus orders is government funding. Though funding programs for transit buses vary widely from market to market, the United States leads with “well-established federal funding programs for transit fleet replacements,” according to NFI Group’s annual filings. In the U.S., federal funds typically cover about 80 per cent of the bus costs, while the remaining 20 per cent come from local funding. 

Since 2016, New Flyer has benefited from a dedicated funding program for low or zero-emission transit in the United States. The Low-No grant program, as it’s called, offers competitive grants to transit agencies to support a transition to clean tech. In June 2020, New Flyer was named a “partner of choice” by 12 major U.S. transit agencies, giving them preference for projects awarded under the grant program. Nine transit agencies named New Flyer as a partner of choice again in 2021, and that year, the company received over US$40 million in Low-No grants. In 2022, the U.S. government made more than US$1.6 billion available to transit agencies through the Low-No program, and New Flyer expects to continue benefitting from the fund as projects are announced in the coming weeks.

NFI Group is quick to point out that zero-emission buses — which cost twice as much as diesel buses — bring in better profit margins for the company. 

As a result, the company’s business has been focused south of the border. Of its 25 North American facilities, just a handful are sprinkled throughout Manitoba and Ontario. Outside of the Winnipeg headquarters, most manufacturing takes place at facilities in Minnesota and Alabama. Even the company’s “Vehicle Innovation Centre,” where customers can get a feel for the company’s offerings, is located at New Flyer’s Alabama plant.

In Canada, by contrast, NFI Group notes there has historically not been a dedicated source of funding for transit buses. Instead, funding typically came from “a patchwork of provincial funding, municipal funding, fare box revenue, various federal programs, and other smaller sources,” meaning funding levels could vary widely from province to province, and even city to city. Until recently, zero-emission bus adoption in Canada has moved at a trickle, with cities hesitant to invest in big-ticket purchases without federal funds. 

But there’s good news. In February 2021, the Canadian government announced a $14.9 billion-investment in public transit, with $2.75 billion set aside for zero-emission transit and school bus planning and procurement. That zero-emission transit fund, paired with a direct loan financing program through the Canadian Infrastructure Bank, has both New Flyer and industry experts feeling hopeful for Canada’s future.

“The Canadian market actually has quite an encouraging outlook over the next little while in terms of the fleet rejuvenation in Canada with a serious commitment by the federal government on helping the provinces in the cities to make that happen,” Soubry said during the quarterly results meeting.

King says the “really big steps” the Canadian government has taken over the last couple years are expected to drive “big orders and big demand” in the Canadian market — and that demand is already underway. In April, New Flyer inked a contract with the Toronto Transit Commission to provide more than 200 hybrid-electric buses in the next four years, with the option to produce another 360 buses in the years to come. 

It’s NFI Group’s “first major win in that market in over a decade,” Brian Dewsnup, president of subsidiary NFI Parts said during the quarterly results call. And the company hopes that’s just the beginning. 

Consortium: ‘Kill cars’ and ‘put steroids’ into transit

The federal government has set an ambitious target of 5,000 zero-emission buses running on Canadian streets by 2026 as part of a plan to address greenhouse gas emissions in the transportation sector. Since the transportation sector produced 24 per cent of the country’s annual emissions in 2020, the federal government has noted zero-emission vehicles can help the country meet its international commitments under the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, and reach net-zero emissions by 2050.  But as of now, there are just 208 electric buses on the road, most of which hit the streets in the last 16 months, and are concentrated in larger urban centres like Toronto, Edmonton, Montreal and Vancouver, says Josipa Petrunic, president of the Canadian Urban Transit Research and Innovation Consortium (CUTRIC).

“My only job is really to get rid of cars by making transit faster, sexier, cooler, greener, cheaper,” Petrunic says in an interview. 

Since 2015, the consortium has been operating as a technology innovation non-profit, offering demonstrations, market research and other project support for the transit industry across Canada. Over the last seven years, the consortium has spent significant time lobbying the federal government to financially support the research and development needed to bring electric buses online.

“There is no doubt that if we want to get to our climate action goals for Paris, we’re going to have to kill cars and really ramp up and put steroids into the transit industry,” Petrunic says.

So far, a handful of mid-to-large cities have pledged to bring electric vehicles into their fleet by 2026, but those promises only represent about 2,000 buses in total, Petrunic says. Since procuring an electric bus can take about three years from order to delivery, Petrunic estimates it will take until 2030 to meet the national target of 5,000 at the current pace.

There are two major hurdles between cities and electric transit fleets: infrastructure and cost. While a standard diesel bus can be bought for about $600,000, a battery-electric bus costs around $1.1 million, and hydrogen fuel cell bus can run upwards of $1.4 million — and that’s not counting the cost of charging infrastructure. 

Transit agencies need one charger for every 12 buses and those chargers can easily cost $1 million each, Petrunic explains. For a fleet like Toronto’s, which boasts more than 2,000 buses, that means hundreds of chargers, and hundreds of millions of dollars on top of the price of the bus. Those chargers also need to be housed in new garages that can accommodate the buses’ new tech, adding significantly to the cost of adoption.

But Canada’s new funding package has eased some of the financial burden, prompting cities to beef up their fleet-replacement promises. Marco D’Angelo, president of the Canadian Urban Transit Association, says cities like Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton and even Winnipeg have started to lead the charge toward fully-electric fleets. 

Winnipeg has promised to have about 15 per cent of its fleet electric by 2027; Edmonton already operates 40 electric buses, with 20 more expected this year; Toronto, which already has dozens of electric buses on the road, plans to be fully electric by 2040; Ottawa has promised a zero-emission fleet by 2036; Vancouver, which already operates a robust trolley bus system, plans to be fully electric as soon as it can, D’Angelo explains. 

The boon in demand for electric vehicles is good news for Canadian companies invested in zero-emission bus manufacturing. New Flyer and its competitors, including Volvo-owned Nova Bus and school bus maker Lion Electric, both headquartered in Quebec, have started to see an opportunity to ramp up production in the local market. 

But there’s a hitch, one that could see Canadian taxpayers supporting green jobs south of the border instead of closer to home: the Buy America rules.

Manitoba factory lost hundreds of jobs, says Unifor

Once upon a time, buses built at the Winnipeg facility could drive right out of the plant — in fact NFI Group still makes a handful of coach-style buses entirely in Winnipeg — but the growing pressure of American content regulations have put a stop to the company’s all-Canadian transit manufacturing.

Since 1982, the United States has required publicly funded transportation infrastructure like highways, bridges and public transit must be made in America, with American materials. Over the years, details of this ‘Buy America’ legislation have changed, but the end result has handcuffed Canada’s transit manufacturing industry. Right now, Buy America rules for transit mandate that any project receiving more than $150,000 in federal funding must contain at least 70 per cent American-made parts (calculated by cost), and complete final assembly in the United States. 

Those rules have had a major impact on New Flyer’s operations, says Clint Seys, president of Unifor local 3003, the union representing New Flyer’s Winnipeg employees.

Seys, who’s been at the plant for nearly 30 years, says his union once represented more than 1,600 Winnipeg employees, but the 2008 financial crisis set off a chain reaction that saw U.S. content rules get more stringent and the Winnipeg workforce whittle away.

“They just keep increasing the amount of the coach that has to be done in the U.S. for American jobs,” Seys explains. “It’s really just chipping away at the amount of work that’s being done here in Canada.”

In late 2018, for example, New Flyer announced it would be transferring about 90 jobs from its Winnipeg plant to a facility in Shepherdsville, Kentucky, in order to stay in line with U.S. content requirements — which jumped to the 70 per cent mark in 2019. Those job transfers, Seys says, cut an entire department manufacturing electrical components. The electrical component workstation was replaced with a socially distant cafeteria during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Seys now represents just 600 members in the Winnipeg plant, as well as a few hundred at an NFI Group-owned fiberglass manufacturer in the city. The Winnipeg plant has stopped completing full builds and now sends all its buses — even the ones slated for Canadian transit agencies — to the United States for completion. The content rules have had “grievous effects” on New Flyer’s jobs, he says.

“It’s a shame because if Canadian taxpayer dollars are being spent to buy buses and infrastructure here, they should have a positive impact on employment here,” says Seys. “We have good-paying jobs, hard-working people, we have the skills, we have the ability and we have the space to do it.”

Seys doesn’t blame the company for the losses — their hands are tied, he says — it’s the federal government that has dropped the ball for Canadian workers. 

“It hurts me to a core because New Flyer has always touted the Winnipeg plant as the flagship in terms of quality, in terms of safety, in terms of productivity,” he says. “They wish they could bring more [jobs] back here. It’s the American laws that are causing this problem.”

Seys has been working with Unifor members across the industry to reach out to “anyone that will listen” and lobby for “a firm commitment to bring jobs back to Canada.” The government, he says, has a responsibility to either enact content rules of its own, or pressure the U.S. to level the playing field.

“I want to see the transit industry taken care of,” Seys says. “I want to see rules around keeping job retention here and keeping offshore products out of here; I would also like to see them put pressure on the U.S. to maybe level this off and share in the sandbox, so to speak.”

So far, only the Ontario and Quebec provincial governments have tried their hand at local content rules. Any transit bus procured with public funds for an Ontario or Quebec city — including the hundreds of hybrid buses New Flyer has been contracted to build for the TTC — must contain at least 25 per cent Canadian content. 

“I don’t think at our government levels federally or provincially, that we’ve pushed the Can-Con issue,” says Petrunic. “But in transit, we have a lot of jobs to lose if we don’t.”

In recent months, Canada has locked horns with the United States over content rules for electric passenger vehicles — and won. An early draft of America’s Inflation Reduction Act would have mandated any electric vehicles eligible for U.S. consumer tax credits be made with predominantly U.S. content, but Canadian Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland and trade minister Mary Ng fought back, arguing such rules would violate the Canada-U.S. Mexico Agreement (CUSMA), and ultimately decimate the auto manufacturing industry in Canada. After more than 1,000 interactions with American officials, the bill was amended to widen the eligibility to North American-made vehicles. 

While Canada has celebrated the advocacy for auto-sector jobs, the transit industry has felt sorely left behind. 

“It’s a big problem right now,” Petrunic says. “Nobody is advocating for the transit manufacturing sector to be included.”

The auto industry in Canada boasts between 400,000 and 500,000 manufacturing jobs, primarily in Ontario. But in 2020, Petrunic and the team at the consortium assessed the number of jobs produced by the transit manufacturing and electrification sector — from manufacturing to power generation — and found about 300,000 jobs in the industry, including 100,000 manufacturing jobs.

“Industrial policy in Canada has just missed looking at transit manufacturing as a sexy big job employer, but it is, and it needs to be respected as such,” Petrunic says. “Us not respecting it means that it’s stagnated and hasn’t grown to employ people at the level it could — these are good paying jobs, and they’re highly skilled jobs.”

How to protect Canada’s green jobs

Sitting outside at The Forks Market in Winnipeg earlier this week following a funding announcement to grow women entrepreneurship in Canada, trade minister Ng makes one point clear: “I do not like American protectionism.”

But countering with Canadian protectionism — in the form of stringent Canadian content regulations — isn’t as simple as it seems. Canada is bound by trade agreements with several major markets, and enforcing more aggressive content rules could put Canada in violation of those agreements. In other words, the same argument that won protection for Canadian players in the auto industry could also be used to argue against Canadian content rules.  

In the latest federal budget, Ng and Freeland instead put forward the idea of consulting with Canadian industries about a reciprocal procurement program. 

“Reciprocal procurement means that we will buy from you as much as you buy from us,” Ng says. 

What exactly such a reciprocity agreement could look like is still to be determined. Ng says the government is in the process of speaking to business leaders about how such a program could work, but stressed such a deal could put Canada — which is the largest customer to industries in over 30 U.S. states — “in a good position.”

Back at New Flyer, King says Canadian content rules like Ontario’s wouldn’t get in the way of the company’s workflow. In fact, he says, more Canadian content rules could help stimulate work on this side of the border. 

“To drive more Canadian activity, there’s always content rules, which will just naturally drive some of those decisions because manufacturers and transit agencies will have to ensure that procurements meet those rules,” King says. 

During the quarterly results call, CEO Paul Soubry even teased the possibility of all-Canadian builds in the coming years.

“Without letting too many cats out of the bag,” Soubry said. “(The company) is looking at scenarios of all-Canadian builds going forward — and those kinds of things to allow us to satisfy what we think to be a pretty encouraging Canadian market.”

But before New Flyer can take on the workload of all-Canadian bus manufacturing, King says the country needs to bolster its workforce. Most transit agencies have been working on diesel and natural gas buses for decades, he explains, so shifting those jobs to the clean energy sector, with all new infrastructure and parts, can be complicated. The solution, he says, is a dedicated federal investment in workforce development. 

“Anything around that focus on workforce development — investing in people, investing in training — is really going to go a long way,” King says.

But creating more job availability on this side of the border goes beyond university training programs. Petrunic suggests incentive programs, such as grants or scholarships tied to staying in Canada to work, could help with talent retention, as could dedicated advertising and marketing for the sector’s clean energy jobs. King adds that grants for companies looking to offer on-the-job reskilling programs could also support job security in a changing economy.

Speaking for the Unifor members, Seys adds the workplace is a great place for trade workers to learn new, transferable skills, but that kind of training requires an influx of cash.

“They’re always trying to get more people into the trades. Well put your money where your mouth is,” he says. “We need to have funding and education and places to go.”

So far, the federal government has made no promises around workforce development. Ng says she recognizes there’s “more work to do” in levelling the playing field between Canada and the United States, but stopped short of hinting at any specific federal efforts aimed at strengthening the transit sector. 

Asked about the job losses at New Flyer thanks to American content rules, Ng only offered general comments, saying the government “​​will keep working with Canadian industries … in particular those that are building a green economy” in order to “support their growth.” 

Ng pointed to the federal government’s recent investments in transit infrastructure — including the zero-emission transit fund — as evidence of a new federal commitment to meeting climate goals and creating liveable cities, while noting the government plans to work with provinces and the private sector to “make sure that the skills of the future … encourages and enables more workers in what is going to be the green economy.”

But on the floor in Winnipeg’s bus plant, New Flyer is taking things one step at a time. The company is still struggling to work its way through the supply chain disruptions that have marked the last two years, but there’s light at the end of the tunnel. 

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A line of buses makes its way through the Brantford Bus Terminal on a Friday afternoon, filling one empty bay after another. As the doors open, swarms of people eagerly waiting to board switch places with those waiting to get off.

After a few minutes, the terminal is empty, visible from end to end as the buses line up again to drive away. Soon, new passengers begin to arrive, waiting on another row of buses to repeat the process again.

Between 6 a.m. and 9 a.m., this routine plays out every half hour. But after the morning rush hour, riders who miss their bus must wait for an hour to see another one. At the end of June, Brantford Transit temporarily reduced its service frequency from every half hour to every hour from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m., saying the move was necessary because there are not enough drivers to operate buses. 

Regular service is supposed to resume here on Sept. 4, but the driver shortage is not a problem exclusive to this small southern Ontario city — it’s affecting transit services around the province. This summer, Timmins reduced the frequency on some bus routes from every half hour to every 45 minutes. At the end of July, the city of Kingston cut frequency to every hour on some routes, indefinitely   until more drivers are hired.

In 2019, Brantford declared a climate emergency, pledging to become carbon neutral by 2050. To encourage residents to reduce their carbon emissions, the city created a Climate Action Plan, which encourages active transportation and public transit use. But riders say these reductions in service makes transit too unreliable, forcing them to turn to taxis or rideshare instead. 

“I’ve tried to minimize the amount I use the bus,” Justine Roche says. An English student at Wilfrid Laurier University’s Brantford campus, Roche relies on the bus heavily, taking it up to 20 times a week to do errands and take care of her mother. 

While Roche still tries to bike or walk wherever she can, she now has to rely on cabs for some longer trips. This not only adds to her carbon footprint, but creates a financial strain. While an adult bus fare is $3 for travel anywhere in the city of about 100,000 people, a taxi across Brantford is about $25.  

“There are just certain times when I have to take a cab, and I can’t change that now,” Roche says. “I’ve had to just calculate that in for my expenses. It’s not sustainable. I can’t afford it on a regular basis.”

Maria Visocchi, director of communications for the City of Brantford, says bus operators require six weeks of training, which is what’s causing driver shortages. “The issue is just not having experienced, qualified drivers available to us to be able to run the service at full capacity,” she says. “It’s not the kind of thing that just anybody with a licence can do.” 

Visocchi says Brantford will be prepared to return to full service in the fall, in part thanks to  hiring five new drivers who are currently being trained. But, she admits, the city cannot guarantee a shortage like this will never happen again.

“While we do think that we’ll be in a much better position in September, we don’t know what will happen with the job market going forward.”

A quality control checker at Ferrero Rocher’s Brantford factory, Sona Sethi works a 12-hour overnight shift. And, at 6 p.m. on a recent evening, she had just missed her bus. “I’ll be moving back to Kitchener next month, thank God!” says Sethi, who is also a student at Conestoga College’s Kitchener campus. She’s counting down the days until she returns to school, where transit is much more frequent. 

“In Kitchener, every bus used to come after the interval of 15 minutes. So even if you would miss one bus, there would be another bus,” she says. “But here there’s a one-hour gap, and it’s really hard. If you miss one bus, you stand for one hour or call an Uber.” Rideshare from the Brantford Bus Terminal to the factory is about $18 using the service’s cheapest option, and that doesn’t account for surge pricing, when the company charges riders more during peak hours.

Clarence Woudsma, a planning professor at the University of Waterloo, says it’s possible for municipalities to provide better transit while limiting the number of drivers needed through hyperlocal, on-demand transit that connects riders in low-density areas to existing schedule-based systems in high-density areas. 

Woudsma points to Belleville as an example of on-demand transit. From 9:30 p.m. to midnight, instead of running scheduled bus routes, the city allows customers to request to be picked-up at fixed stops. There’s also Guelph, which uses smaller fleets of buses and also carries passengers between fixed stops, not to their final destinations. In both cities, the service costs just a regular transit fare. 

Woudsma believes that on-demand transit could act as a service enhancer for people relying on public transit in low density areas. He compares it to how people use ride-sharing companies to get to transportation hubs, such as a GO station, to make a longer trip.

“It’s very expensive to send up a full-sized city bus through a suburban neighbourhood,” Woudsma says. “There was much consternation around the introduction of rideshare services like Uber and Lyft. It was like they would spell the end of public transit. Research has shown that it actually is a good complement.”

Last March, Brantford cab driver Matthew Ruiss decided to become a bus operator. He saw the need for more drivers as ridership increased, and was attracted by the job’s pension and the opportunity for long-term career advancement. 

Even though Ruiss is confident full service will return in September, he is worried about the long-term sustainability of the transit agency’s workforce and thinks the provincial government should step in to help. 

“Full-time drivers are going on vacation, are taking sick days, we have full-time drivers that are just maxed out on their hours — how do you handle that challenge?” Ruiss says. “It would certainly help our chances if the local MPP or the Ontario government looked at smaller communities the same way they do Toronto, Hamilton, Ottawa.”

In statements to The Narwhal, spokespeople for both the Ontario ministries of Labour and Transportation pointed to existing programs municipalities can use for extra funding: a $2.15 billion allocation through the Safe Restart Agreement to address the impact of COVID-19 on municipalities, for example, includes money to hire new employees. The province has also earmarked $200 million through its Skills Development Fund to help organizations and municipalities provide training to fill labour shortages  

The Ministry of Labour added that it has asked the federal government to raise the number of temporary foreign workers eligible for permanent residency under the Ontario Immigrant Nominee Program and that “beginning this fall, there will be new immigration pathways available for bus drivers, subway operators and other transit personnel.”

Once Brantford hires new drivers, Ruiss wants the city to focus on retention and customer satisfaction to ensure it not only has the capacity to transport people, but also that it has the ridership to maintain bus service.

“I would hope that the city’s decision would be to locate drivers, to maintain wages and to maintain the cost of fares for riders,” he says, adding the transit system won’t go anywhere if riders think they’re being gouged.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.