The federal government is poised to release their next-generation transit investment program, the Canada Public Transit Fund. It may surprise you to learn that not a single penny of this $30-billion program is allowed to go toward stopping transit service cuts. Since 2016, it has been the federal government’s policy to limit the public transit funding it provides to building new subway or light rail infrastructure or buying new buses. It cannot be used to make existing transit more reliable by increasing service hours and the frequency of trains or buses. This is despite studies showing that these measures are the most important drivers of key outcomes like ridership growth and emissions reductions.
Yeah, these crown-corp/government owned corp systems are run like a for profit business because they aren’t funded enough to run like a true public service. On the flip side this is exactly why governments do it, they can say, “hey we gave them $x. It’s their problem if they can’t make it work, not ours.”