“We’ve increased support for municipalities year after year because we know strong communities depend on reliable, stable and predictable funding increases,” Municipal and Northern Relations Minister Glen Simard said in an emailed statement to the Free Press Tuesday.
This in answer to City of Winnipeg chair of Public Works Janice Lukes plea for the province to cough up money for the needed upgrades.
Listen carefully because these are words I won't often say: I gotta agree with Lukes on this one. If the province is handing down new standards, given their higher capacity for raising revenues, they ought to help the city fund meeting said standards.
What Simard fails to acknowledge is that those "year after year" funding increases started at the bottom basement after Conservative cuts and likely have not yet found their way back to the level transit funding to municipalities was at prior to experiencing Brian Pallister's axe.
Check out the 50/50 funding campaign which argues exactly that.
https://climateactionmb.ca/next-stop-50-50-transit-campaign/
Simard goes on with the disingenuous statements:
”Our 2026 budget included making transit free for kids, which not only is an investment in transit across Manitoba, it helps families with the cost of living while encouraging more people to use public transit.”
No, mandating free transit for youths is not experienced by municipalities as an investment. Not when the mandate comes with a pre-determined flat disbursement to offset lost revenue. It's a deficit.
Those kids were *already* riding the bus. Those are *lost* fares in a system that disproportionately depends on fares to fund operations.
But if/when the free transit for youths increases ridership, Winnipeg Transit will not receive an increase in revenue as it would if they were receiving fares from the youths, nor as they would if the province's subsidy were to *match* the fares.
I am all for making transit free for youths. I am all for more people riding the bus.
But I'm not for disingenuous framings that present this unilateral decision as a gift when it completely ignores the large increase in annual operational funding municipalities have been demanding to have restored. (Note that the current government passionately believed in restoring this funding while they were in opposition and haven't mentioned it since they took power.)
To make matters worse, this white elephant is combined with fare policing. This creates a dangerous environment where youths run the risk of a negative and damaging altercation with law enforcement when they inevitably flub the necessary ID to access free transit and are hauled on the carpet because who can tell the difference between a 17 year old and a 19 year old just by looking!
And all this doesn't even get into the dearth of accessible transit which is the point of the article.
Public transit costs money, but in the end, done right, it serves the population really well and costs far less both to users and to society as a whole once you factor in health and equality than forcing everyone to buy, maintain and run their own car.
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