I wish I had the time to cover other area municipalities, and their budget processes, along with our own, but I have noticed at least one trend. Despite the housing crunch and loss of fees, other municipalities have actually invested more in transit.
Up the road in Kitchener-Waterloo, plans to reduce frequency on the ION light rail turned into increased frequency after advocates spoke out. In Brampton meanwhile, they’re putting $78.4 million into network expansions and the introduction of 24-hour service. That’s amazing progress and a testament to community support for better transit.
But in Guelph there are no transit heroes, only butchers.
No one said it out loud, but it’s now a matter of City of Guelph policy that the only acceptable place to cut funding and save money is transit. There’s no reason anymore not to buy a car if that’s something you can afford to do because improving transit is just not a council priority.
There were 16 delegates for this year’s budget, and three of them delegated on transit exclusively. About one out of every five. I was among them, and my message was the same as theirs: Please don’t cut transit. This is a service that desperately needs support and investment.
We begged council to undo the proposed cuts and instead they found more, and when that wasn’t enough, they just kept trying to cut.
Councillor Dominique O’Rourke appointed herself chief executioner. She couched her proposed cuts to real and substantive improvements to service by saying that council is investing $500 million in transit over the next decade. Most of that is for electrification, but can I tell you a secret? I don’t care about electrification!
Whether it’s an EV or a diesel bus that pulls up to the stop, the result is the same: A 45-minute cross town trip using old, meandering and inefficient routes that require you to come downtown whether it’s on the way or not. Keep your electric buses. At this point it’s just pointless virtue signalling from people who will never, ever get on a Guelph Transit bus no matter how its powered.
O’Rourke was also the person who proposed the successful motion to cancel the implementation of digital signs beyond hubs and major stops. A “nice to have” as Mayor Cam Guthrie called it.
Let me tell you, it is nice to have a digital sign when you’re at a stop, in the dark, in the middle of nowhere, and the bus is five minutes late and you’re not sure if it’s one of those times where the bus broke down or if someone didn’t come to work so the bus isn’t coming.
Having data on your phone in this circumstance is pointless because updating Twitter about service interruptions is also a “nice to have”, especially after hours.
For the most part, everything else in the budget was a must-have, either made possible by phasing in the cost, or using reserve funds to cover the cost as a one-time expense. Even the library, another safe space to cut once upon a time, got a pass with this budget. I’m not saying that the choice to make cuts would have been easy, but if every cow is sacred no one’s eating hamburger.
None of this is to say that I don’t understand the challenges of this year’s budget, I fundamentally do, but to repeat Councillor Cathy Downer, who knows of what she speaks, there was a sense of déjà vu; council approved an ambitious plan to improve transit and then welched when the waiter brought the bill. Let’s call it a “no ride and dash.”
It’s part of a litany of unfinished business from this budget left over when the meeting was adjourned. There was an 80-minute discussion in-camera about upgrades to the Farmers’ Market building, but no information was presented in the open session. No one even made a motion to get the Sanguen health van more funding and Councillor Leanne Caron didn’t move to defer the Emma-Earl bridge like she had intended.
Also, did no one look at ways to further phase in the Parks and Rec Master Plan, the Culture Plan, the Natural Heritage Action Plan, the Transportation Master Plan, the Urban Forest Management Plan, the Public Art Policy, or the Service Simplified Customer Service Strategy? It would be one thing if council looked at all plans passed in the last few years and spread the pain, but they didn’t.
Why is that? Is it because council might make a “real” constituency angry? Who takes transit anyway? The poor? U of G students? High schoolers? No votes there. No one worth worrying about, right?
Why do I dedicate so much time and effort in this space to a full-throated defense of transit? Because no one else will. Is transit a city service or is it a “nice to have”? If it’s the former, then it’s incumbent on council to start acting like it, and if it’s not, stop teasing us with promises about improved service. It’s clear that our council doesn’t mean it, assuming they ever did.
I have to say that I don’t think there’s been a council more openly hostile to a fully functional and robust transit system in Guelph than the present one. Forget the D+ from the Toronto Region Board of Trade that gave the mayor so much heartburn earlier this year, we’re now officially in F territory. F for failure.
Being a transit user in Guelph is to wash in the hypocrisy of a city that wants to pat itself on the back for the mere awareness that we’ve got environmental issues, but we only want to do the easy things like plant trees and pick an official bird so that we can virtual signal instead of making a real commitment. Council proved in again.
Shaving the tax levy increase for 2024 from 10.32 per cent to 8.52 per cent isn’t the affordability windfall many were hoping for, but if you like paying lower taxes, and you drive past a bus stop where someone wet and freezing is waiting for an infrequent bus this weekend, at least stop and thank them for their sacrifice.
