In early January, Maritime Bus announced cuts to its routes in New Brunswick, saying it could no longer afford to run service between Campbellton and Moncton, and Fredericton and Edmundston. The company also announced service reductions from Fredericton to Saint John and to Moncton, initially set to happen on January 15th.
In the company’s announcement, Maritime Bus president Mike Cassidy blamed the service cuts on the refusal of the New Brunswick government to join Nova Scotia and PEI in providing financial support for the regional passenger bus network.
When asked about it at the time, Premier Blaine Higgs said that Maritime Bus’s financial troubles pre-dated the pandemic, and were not COVID-related.
But Higgs seems to have changed his mind more recently.
Last week, Maritime Bus announced a two-week reprieve to its service cuts, now scheduled for January 31. The reason is that a group of northern New Brunswick municipalities—among those who will be hardest hit by the cuts—are working at getting access to federal Safe Restart funding earmarked for municipalities.
When reporters asked Higgs about the proposal, he told them funding to support Maritime Bus service is “confirmed as a COVID related expense,” a full reversal from his opinion the previous week.
So it appears the New Brunswick government is not open to providing provincial funding, but will consider allotting federal funding meant for municipalities to help see Maritime Bus through the pandemic without cuts to service.
Unfortunately, New Brunswick missed the boat on Safe Restart funding specifically allotted for public transit, when the government famously failed to apply for it in 2020.
CHMA spoke to Ted Bartlett of Transport Action Atlantic, to talk about the possible cuts, and the hit that regional transportation has taken in the Maritimes over the course of the pandemic. The conversation took place just shortly before Maritime Bus announced they would extend the deadline for the service cuts to January 31, 2021.
We started off asking Bartlett about the impact of the potential Maritime Bus cuts:
“Where it’s going to really hurt is in northern New Brunswick,” says Bartlett. “They will lose their only public transportation links with the rest of the province.”
Bartlett says that’s a serious issue, because it’s affecting essential travel to services that are only available in centres like Fredericton or Moncton. “We’re not talking leisure travel trips,” says Bartlett. “These are trips that have to be made, pandemic or no pandemic.”
Passenger rail service through northern New Brunswick was cut off last March when VIA Rail suspended the Ocean due to the pandemic. Maritime Bus stopped their connection into Quebec at the time, but maintained their routes in New Brunswick.
“They continued to provide the important service within New Brunswick,” says Bartlett. “They’re doing their best to maintain some limited service to the people of the province, or to the people of the Maritimes. And they are to be commended for that.”
Bartlett says that’s why Transport Action Atlantic believes the province should extend a helping hand to what he admits is a for-profit company.
“They certainly have not been making any profit since the pandemic hit,” says Bartlett. Maritime Bus reported significant losses in 2020, with a drop in ridership from 191,000 patrons in 2019 to 69,000 in 2020. “Now they’re somewhere between $3 million and $4 million in the hole as as a result of lost revenues,” says Bartlett.
Bartlett says that New Brunswick’s refusal to support Maritime Bus through the pandemic betrays a “let them eat cake” philosophy when it comes to public transportation.
“It’s a bit of a cavalier attitude that the government seems to be taking in this case, and towards public transportation in general,” says Bartlett. “The poor people have no buses to ride? Let them drive cars,” he says, ironically. “Well, they don’t have cars.”
BUILDING BACK BETTER
“We need to start thinking now of building back better, post-pandemic,” says Bartlett. “We’re talking public transit, we’re talking inter-city motorcoach, we’re talking passenger rail.” Bartlett even acknowledges a need to consider air travel, though he points out that as, “the most climate unfriendly of all means of passenger transportation,” the need for air travel is probably not as great as some think. “When we talk building back better, we should be casting our eyes towards more environmentally friendly means of transportation as well,” says Bartlett.
Take the well travelled road between Sackville and Moncton, says Bartlett. There should be bus service several times a day between the two towns (currently service runs four times a week.) “In any other progressive country, there would be,” he says.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the necessity of travelling to Moncton is even more pronounced, as it is the closest place to get tested for COVID-19. Not only does Sackville not have a testing site, but there are no local health clinics, where people without family doctors can get access to non-emergency health care. The closest of these are in, you guessed it, Moncton.
“We’re not going to have GO trains running between Sackville and Moncton,” says Bartlett. “But we can have some sort of public transportation. We certainly should have a VIA train, at least once a day in each direction.”
Before the service was suspended due to COVID-19, VIA’s ‘The Ocean’ was running three times a week through Sackville, between Halifax and Montreal.
While he looks to the provincial government to provide support for regional bus service, Bartlett looks to the federal government to help with passenger rail.
Bartlett says that it will take political will, and financial commitments to new rolling stock and refurbished rail lines, to revive The Ocean to a functional version of its previous self.
In the meantime, Bartlett and Transport Action Atlantic are asking the Higgs government to, “give serious consideration to helping Maritime Bus through this rough passage.”
“It’s very important to the people who have no other transportation options,” says Bartlett, pointing out that Maritime Bus is a regionally owned company, unlike the multinational that ran bus service previously. “It’s important that Maritime Bus survives,” says Bartlett, because the company “has some commitment to the community, and believes in the need for motorcoach.”
