The NDP government has no option but to rush into the breach left by Greyhound and start government-sponsored inter-city bus service around B.C.
They talked themselves into that commitment years ago, during the argument over the Highway of Tears.
There’s no backing out now.
Transportation Minister Claire Trevena might want to wait to see if any other private operators step up, or join the effort to drag the federal government into the picture.
But one way or the other, the NDP government will have to get into the bus business in a big way.
They demanded exactly that of the previous B.C. Liberal government on the Prince Rupert-to-Prince George Highway of Tears corridor for several years running. Everything they said then applies just as much to the rest of B.C. now.
Over its first year in office, the NDP has already established a precedent of government moving into the spaces Greyhound abandoned. There have been several B.C. Transit route upgrades along the Highway of Tears, providing $5 rides to and from smaller communities. Some were started by the Liberals, but the NDP can take credit for those, as well, because they harangued the reluctant Liberals into doing something.
In May, Premier John Horgan announced the government was going all-in on responding to Greyhound’s continued cuts.
He announced an “interim” long-haul inter-city B.C. Bus North service that covers the entire 700-kilometre route from Prince Rupert to Prince George twice a week ($45). It even extends east to Valemount and north to Dawson Creek and Fort Nelson.
It started six weeks ago, and was timed to take over just three days after Greyhound gave up that run. The promise is to fund it for a year while they evaluate demand and develop a long-term solution.
It’s hard to imagine them backing out of what they’ve started. Either by direct management or with a big subsidy to an operator, the government will pay for that service for a long time to come.
The single issue that locks the government into taking over bus service is the tragic history that prompted the naming of the Highway of Tears.
It’s all about missing and murdered women, mostly Indigenous. The idea of a bus service to reduce women’s exposure to danger flows directly from the inquiry into that horror story.
B.C. Liberals dragged their heels on that recommendation. It was over that period that the NDP explicitly demanded government-sponsored inter-city public transit.
Numerous critics made the case over years of sustained debate:
“If Aboriginal communities were important, we would have seen a bus service for the Highway of Tears long ago.”
“The most urgent recommendation [from the inquiry] was to put a transit system along that corridor. Will it take another death before they take action?”
“A shuttle bus or a series of buses serving rural and remote communities along the Highway of Tears is not a bad idea. As the mayor of Smithers recently said, it’s inexpensive, and it’s doable. …We should do it.”
Then-opposition critic Trevena joined the caucus campaign. “The shuttle bus recommendation would be well worth acting on,” she told the government.
“Just get a bus. We can get buses around the Lower Mainland, and we can get buses all over the place, but we can’t get the shuttle bus on Highway 16, on the Highway of Tears.”
Citing an earlier round of Greyhound cuts, she said they limited vulnerable women’s ability to move so they wound up hitchhiking, which put them at risk of going missing.
That’s precisely where we are again today. The only differences are that Greyhound is giving up completely, not just reducing service. And Trevena is the minister responsible for responding to that, not just a critic.
Greyhound made it abundantly clear in repeated filings with the Passenger Transportation Board that it was going under.
Trevena professed shock when the company said it was leaving Western Canada this fall. But that was just to buy some time to figure out a response.
It doesn’t take much figuring. The government has no choice but to step in, based on the NDP caucus’s passionate, insistent demands to do just that.
